RealClearInvestigations'
Picks of the Week
April 14 to April 20, 2024 In RealClearInvestigations, Paul Sperry reports that the “whistleblower” who sparked Donald Trump’s first impeachment was deeply involved in the political maneuverings over Biden-family business schemes in Ukraine that Trump wanted investigated: -
In 2019, then-intelligence analyst Eric Ciaramella touched off the impeachment when, relying on a colleague’s account of a presidential phone call, he anonymously accused Trump of making military aid for Ukraine contingent on an investigation into alleged Biden corruption in that country. -
Emails from former Vice President Joe Biden's office reveal that Ciaramella had a conflict of interest: As key adviser to Biden on Ukraine, he was quite involved in the matters at issue. -
Ciaramella knew that the Veep had threatened to cut off U.S. aid to Ukraine unless it fired its top prosecutor – as it soon did. The prosecutor was investigating the corrupt energy firm paying Biden’s son Hunter millions. -
The emails show Ciaramella expressed shock at Biden’s threat: “Yikes.” They also show he was drawn into White House communications over how to handle negative publicity over Hunter’s taking the lucrative, no-show post. -
There is no public evidence Ciaramella raised alarms about the shady Biden activities he witnessed firsthand – a contrast with the hearsay evidence he relied upon to accuse Trump. -
These matters are now part of the House impeachment inquiry into President Biden, and probers want Ciaramella to testify. -
In 2019, RealClearInvestigations was the first to identify Ciaramella as the anonymous “whistleblower,” something major media haven’t done to this day.
In RealClearInvestigations, James Varney and Abigail Degnan explore why fatal police shooting totals have steadily creeped up since the 2014 killing of Michael Brown -- despite a glaring spotlight on police behavior and reforms such as body cameras augmented by bystanders’ smartphone cameras. Don’t blame racist or trigger-happy cops, criminologists say. Rather, a handful of intertwined factors are at work: -
The almost immutable math of crime and demographics: There are some 18,000 police departments in the United States with a population of more than 335 million people, leading to some 50 and 60 million annual encounters between police and civilians. Under present circumstances, a ballpark figure of 1,000 fatal police shootings annually is “baked into the cake.” -
Media sensationalism: The media and its audience tend to focus on deaths where there is no clear justification, and the split second a trigger is pulled and a bullet fired, rather than the events that led up to that fateful moment. -
Distorted public perceptions about race and guns: Blacks are more likely to commit crimes, study after study shows. And while legal gun sales have risen markedly, they have little bearing on police killings because the guns police encounter are so frequently illegally acquired. -
Inertia-bound police departments failing to adapt in ways to make a difference: Criminologists say there has been more reform talk than action since 2015 – even after high-profile unrest and impassioned “defund the police” campaigns. -
Ray of hope: An emerging “sanctity of life” paradigm shift in policing philosophy – from “get home safe” to “everyone gets home alive.”
Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books Biden, Trump and the Beltway Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Kali and Joshua Fontanilla, both people of color who long had left-leaning politics, quit their jobs teaching middle- and high school English in California’s deep-blue Salinas district’s a year after the coronavirus pandemic began. This article reports that they were disillusioned by school shutdowns and displeased by some colleagues’ embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement, which both thought was wrongheaded and hateful for what they saw as its anti-police stance. In 2021, they moved to Florida and opened an online Christian K-12 school, the Exodus Institute. In the years since, they have grown their school to nearly 200 students, this article reports: Kali, 41, [who has a white mother and black father], and Joshua, who is 42 and of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent, had also grown convinced their school was teaching harmful ideas about race and history, including what they believe is the false theory America is systemically racist. Across the nation, mostly conservative mothers and fathers were raising similar alarms – anxiety that soon fueled an explosion of legislation restricting how educators can teach about race, sex and gender. By April 2024, such laws had spread to affect half the nation’s students. The claim that public schools teach left-wing “indoctrination, not education” had become a commonplace on the right, repeated by parents, politicians and pundits. But not, usually, by teachers. And that’s why the Fontanillas felt compelled to act: They came direct from the classroom. They had seen firsthand what was happening. Now, they wanted to expose the propaganda they felt had infiltrated public schools – and offer families an alternative. In January, TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew faced intense grilling by skeptical U.S. lawmakers about his company’s ties to Beijing. He repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and reiterated that the social media service had cut most of its connections to ByteDance, its Chinese parent. But this article reports that 11 former employees interviewed by Fortune tell a vastly different story: Many of those ex-workers, four of whom were employed as recently as last year, say at least some of TikTok’s operations were intertwined with its parent during their tenures, and that the company’s independence from China was largely cosmetic. … Evan Turner, who worked at TikTok as a senior data scientist from April to September in 2022, said TikTok concealed the involvement of its Chinese owner during his employment. When hired, Turner initially reported to a ByteDance executive in Beijing. But later that year, after the company announced a major initiative to store TikTok’s U.S. user data only in the U.S., Turner was reassigned—on paper, at least – to an American manager in Seattle, he says. But Turner says a human resources representative revealed during a video conference call that he would, in reality, continue to work with the ByteDance executive. The stealth chain of command contradicted what TikTok’s executives had said about the company’s independence from ByteDance, Turner says. This article reports that Turner says he never met with the Seattle-based manager. Instead, he had weekly check-ins lasting less than seven minutes with the Beijing-based ByteDance executive. In these meetings, Turner says he merely told the executive how far along he was in completing assigned tasks – and nothing else. Russia has built a new archipelago of gulags in Crimea. This article reports that the Putin regime to channels suspected anti-Russian or anti-government Ukrainian and Crimean civilians through a labyrinth of Russian-run filtration camps, detention centers, and torture chambers. Many of them are later fed to Russia’s main prison system: Human rights organizations believe that some 4,000 Crimean residents have gone through interrogations, arrests, torture, and/or prolonged imprisonment over the last decade. Of this number, according to Crimean human rights sources, more than 200 Crimean opponents of Putin’s government have been convicted, a fifth of them sentenced to 15 years or more in a Russian penal colony. For the past two years, Crimean prisons have housed not only residents of the peninsula, but also more than 100 citizens from other regions of Ukraine. … Observers of Russia’s human rights violations say a pattern has emerged. In the occupied precincts of Ukraine, Russian forces—which had been torturing local citizens since 2014 in occupied Lugansk and Donetsk—detained Ukrainian civilians …subjecting them to an initial round of torture and inhumane treatment. From there, many Ukrainian captives would then be transported to Crimea, where the torture, orchestrated by Russian security service agents known as the FSB (Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB), would intensify with the aim of coercing confessions or constructing mostly fabricated criminal cases against them, according to witness testimonies and human rights groups. Russians appears to have used technology to attack the United States on the mainland, this article reports. Since the beginning of this year, a hacktivist group known as the Cyber Army of Russia, or sometimes Cyber Army of Russia Reborn, has taken credit on at least three occasions for hacking operations that multiple water utilities in Texas: The group appears to be connected to a Russian military intelligence unit known as Sandworm that has, for the past decade, served as the Kremlin’s most aggressive cyberattack force, triggering blackouts in Ukraine and releasing self-spreading, destructive code in incidents that remain some of the most disruptive hacking events in history. In recent months … [Cyber Army has] claimed responsibility for directly targeting the digital systems of water utilities in the United States and Poland as well as a water mill in France, flipping switches and changing software settings in an apparent effort to sabotage those countries’ critical infrastructure. This article reports that Cyber Army’s hacking has become even brazen than Sandworm itself. Sandworm has never directly targeted a U.S. network with a disruptive cyberattack – only planted malware on U.S. networks in preparation for one or, in the case of its 2017 NotPetya ransomware attack, infected victims indirectly with self-spreading code. Cyber Army, by contrast, hasn’t hesitated to cross that line. Big River Services International sells around $1 million a year worth of shoes, beach chairs, Marvel T-shirts and other items to online retail customers across the U.S. through e-commerce marketplaces including eBay, Shopify, Walmart, ands Amazon. But that’s not its main business, this article reports: Big River is an arm of Amazon that surreptitiously gathers intelligence on the tech giant’s competitors. Born out of a 2015 plan code named “Project Curiosity,” Big River uses its sales across multiple countries to obtain pricing data, logistics information and other details about rival e-commerce marketplaces, logistics operations and payments services, according to people familiar with Big River and corporate documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. The team then shared that information with Amazon to incorporate into decisions about its own business. … The story of Big River offers new insight into Amazon’s elaborate efforts to stay ahead of rivals. Team members attended their rivals’ seller conferences and met with competitors identifying themselves only as employees of Big River Services, instead of disclosing that they worked for Amazon. This article reports that “virtually all companies research their competitors, reading public documents for information, buying their products or shopping their stores. Lawyers say there is a difference between such corporate intelligence gathering of publicly available information, and what is known as corporate or industrial espionage.” In early 2022 analysts at the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) noticed a frightening new pattern. Hundreds of tips began flooding in from across the country about teen boys being catfished by individuals pretending to be teen girls. A successful request for nude photos was soon followed by threats of exposure and a demand for ransom: In January 2022 the center received 100 reports of financially motivated sexual extortion. In February it was 173. By March, 259. … Last year, after the center asked social media platforms to start tracking the crime, NCMEC received more than 20,000 such reports. … The scam, which the FBI calls sextortion, has become one of the fastest-growing crimes targeting children in the US, according to the agency. In an 18-month period ending in March 2023, the FBI says, at least 20 minors, primarily boys, killed themselves after falling victim to the scam. (Seven more sextortion-related suicides have been reported since then, the latest in January.) The crime is “just out of control,” says Mark Civiletto, a supervisory special agent in the FBI’s Lansing, Michigan, office. “This is something that’s touching every neighborhood across the country.” The article details the story of a popular 17-year-old boy from Michigan, who killed himself after being blackmailed regarding a nude photo he thought he had texted to a teenage girl. Instead, it went to two brothers in Lagos, Nigeria, both in their early 20s, who were arrested in 2023. “Court records show they come from a middle-class family. Their father is a retired member of the military, and their mother runs a small business selling soft drinks in their apartment complex. The boys grew up attending church, singing in the choir and playing soccer with neighborhood friends.” |
