RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week May 28 to June 3, 2023 In RealClearInvestigations, Paul Sperry reports a hard-to-believe new embarrassment for the FBI in its Russiagate debacle: An FBI counterintelligence agent lost track of a suspected Russian spy right under the bureau’s nose in the D.C. suburbs only to find him years later and then deceptively enlist him as the highly paid primary source for the spurious Steele dossier cooked up by the Hillary Clinton campaign to smear Donald Trump. The upshot: Absent this convoluted episode – using a suspected American enemy to tar a prospective President and then actual President as an American enemy -- there might never have been spying on the Trump campaign or a Russiagate at all. Sperry reports: Twelve years ago, FBI agents in Baltimore sought to wiretap former Brookings Institution analyst Igor Danchenko for allegedly spying for Russia. But FBI analyst Brian Auten said he could not find their target and assumed the Russian national had fled back to Moscow. Only, Danchenko never left the D.C area. The bureau could have learned this from his rap sheet for drunk and disorderly conduct from the federal Park Police. The FBI closed its espionage case on Danchenko. Years later, Danchenko comes back on Auten’s radar and, instead of advising Baltimore to reopen the case against him, Auten secretly grooms him as a highly paid purveyor of scurrilous and bogus dossier details that prove crucial to securing spy warrants on Trumpworld. Auten’s earlier and deeper connections to Danchenko have only recently been revealed in the new report issued by Special Counsel John Durham. In a collaboration between RealClearInvestigations and Soldier of Fortune magazine, James Varney and Heath Hansen describe firsthand the Sinaloa drug cartel’s sway over U.S. territory on the Arizona-Mexico border, as smugglers move both illegal immigrants and deadly fentanyl northward. In the Coronado National Forest, SOF’s Hansen camps with members of Arizona Border Recon, a private group of military veterans and others armed for self-defense who patrol the area, sharing intelligence and photos with U.S. officials: The AZBR members run trail cameras in areas where migrants and smugglers regularly traverse the treacherous desert. The group calls one area Baby’s Head Gap -- for a Mexican doll’s head atop a spike in the desert, an apparent warning that passage happens only with cartel permission. The presence of U.S. authorities in the gashed wasteland was light -- only an occasional Blackhawk helicopter overhead. AK-47-toting cartel members and the AZBR patrols peer through field glasses across the border toward each other. At times, a solo shot on the Mexican side signals people to start moving north. AZBR encountered two young women who paid nothing to smugglers and were simply told to meet up with a man in Tucson -- a possible tipoff that they were in debt to sex traffickers. The private group was founded in 2011 by Tim Foley, 64, a former 82nd Airborne paratrooper and recovering addict: “I live almost solely on caffeine, nicotine and an occasional Pop-Tart.” Foley says the price on his head rose from $100,000 to $250,000 after he spurned successive Sinaloa bribes ‒ conveyed by a Mexican federale. In RealClearInvestigations, Ben Weingarten reports that the Biden White House's boast of a “nearly 20%” increase in unionized federal workers doesn't hold up to scrutiny very well: Publicly available data on federal union growth is far less impressive than the Biden administration’s figures. In legally mandated LM-2 disclosures, the two largest federal unions reported barely any increase in the period in question. Trump labor economist: “Unless you’ve got some minor unions doubling or more their membership while nothing similar is happening with the largest unions, there’s just no way to make the math work.” RCI asked the Office of Personnel Management numerous times to provide a breakdown of membership gains by union to help reconcile the seeming discrepancy. It didn't. Also unforthcoming was the office of Vice President Kamala Harris, chair of the White House task force making the boast. The adamantly pro-union White House would like some good news at a time when the U.S. unionization rate has fallen to an all-time low -- 10.1 percent in 2022 -- with private sector rates remaining particularly depressed. This was despite widely covered unionization efforts at Apple, Amazon and Starbucks, and the organizing efforts of journalists providing such coverage. Waste of the Day by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books Budget Gap $928B, but Year's Young Yet RCI Back to Funding Risky Bat Virus Research RCI Kerry's Soupy Green $16.5M Budget RCI Timber! $51 Million! RCI California Busts Budget by $10 Billion RCI Biden, Trump and the Beltway ‘Safe Harbor’: Jim Biden Reassured Panicked Hunter in 2018, New York Post Judge Revives Clinton Foundation Whistleblower Case, Just the News Biden Admin Tells How to Talk Sex Behind Parents’ Backs, Daily Signal Biden Accuser Tara Reade: I Defected to Russia for Safety, Daily Beast Other Noteworthy Articles and Series The influx of millions of migrants across the southern border is only part of the immigration story. Roughly half of all illegal immigrants come to the U.S. legally on various non-immigrant visas (NIV) ‒ typically tourist visas (B1/B2) ‒ and overstay them. And the flow is constant, this article reports, because American embassies approve most applications. Last year consular officers approved 80 percent of tourist visa applicants worldwide. That includes, for example, 70 percent of applicants from China, 85 percent from Brazil, 46 percent from Iran, 74 percent from Russia, and an astonishing 94 percent from India. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers authorize most foreign tourists who arrive with B1/B2 visas for a six-month stay, and some can legally extend their stays for up to 18 months. They can’t work legally, but many work anyway. (Ironically, CBP officers typically give travelers from rich visa-waiver countries only 90 days, while those from less well-off countries that require visas get twice as much time.) Foreigners can arrive here on tourist visas and then legally adjust their visa status if they marry an American. It’s also legal for foreign “tourists” to come here and interview for jobs. If they find one, their employer can file an adjustment-of-visa-status request for them. The bottom line is that the U.S. is likely the only Western country where one can arrive as a tourist and never go home—all legally. Climate change activists have long argued that polluters should pay reparations for the damage they allegedly done to the environment. That once marginal effort, this article reports is now gaining steam because of the increased sophistication of diagnostic techniques such as attribution science, which claims it can attribute how much of a natural disaster is due to human-made climate change. Last week, an analysis published in OneEarth concluded that fossil fuel companies including BP, Shell, ExxonMobil and Chevron collectively owe $209 billion a year in restitution for the cumulative climate disasters expected to take place by midcentury. Co-author Richard Heede of the Climate Accountability Institute told The Hill the calculations used data reported by the companies to project their emissions. … The paper identifies the state-owned Saudi Aramco as owing the most to affected parties, at $42.7 billion a year, followed by Russia’s GazProm with $20.1 billion, ExxonMobil with $18.4 billion, Shell with $16.3 billion, BP with $14.5 billion and Chevron with $12.8 billion. The Hill has reached out to the companies for comment. There is, however, a fairly significant caveat. “Ultimately, Heede said, the numbers are only the authors’ best guess, and can’t predict the exact costs of the individual disasters climate change will cause or intensify over the decades ahead, nor of hazards such as extreme heat and smoke inhalation.” In a separate article, Reuters reports on problems in the nearly $100 billion developed nations have pledged to help developing nations reduce emissions and adapt to a warming world. Because the pledge came with no official guidelines for what activities count as climate finance, money has been used for surprising items, including: Italy helped a retailer open chocolate and gelato stores across Asia. The United States offered a loan for a coastal hotel expansion in Haiti. Belgium backed the film “La Tierra Roja,” a love story set in the Argentine rainforest. And Japan is financing a new coal plant in Bangladesh and an airport expansion in Egypt. The raging fire – which took 17 hours and 200 firefighters to douse ‒ occurred after a massive explosion in a suburb south of Los Angeles. Five days later, people were complaining on social media about an overwhelming odor, which some compared to sewage, paint and death itself. This article reports that the fire and smell had an unexpected source: thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer made during the pandemic when the government relaxed rules for its manufacture: Without the threat of an FDA inspection, thousands of companies that had never made or sold hand sanitizer before, let alone any other over-the-counter drug, immediately began distribution. From whiskey and vodka distillers to manufacturers of CBD oils, beauty products, and drilling fluids, anyone with access to ethanol seemed to rebrand, overnight, as a sanitizer maker. … Poison Control Centers across the country [have] received thousands of reports of people seeking treatment for exposure to hand sanitizer that contained methanol, a highly toxic form of alcohol used in antifreeze that can cause skin and lung irritation, nausea, vomiting, headache, or worse. In a dimly lit conference room on an upper floor of a Chicago mid-rise, reports from around the country ‒ of gunshots, bomb threats, menacing antisemitic posts ‒ flash across more than a dozen screens that are monitored by a half-dozen analysts with backgrounds in the military or private intelligence. This article reports: This is the headquarters of the Secure Community Network, the closest thing to an official security agency for American Jewish institutions. There are other organizations that specialize in security for Jewish facilities, but none as broad as this group, which was created by the Jewish Federations of North America after 9/11. It has grown exponentially over the past five years, from a small office with a staff of five to a national organization with 75 employees stationed around the country. What prompted its rapid expansion was the murder of 11 worshipers from three congregations by a hate-spouting gunman at the Tree of Life synagogue on Oct. 27, 2018, the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history. … But if Jews in America are less surprised by such incidents now, they have become, by grim necessity, far more vigilant. As the decriminalization and legalization of drug possession becomes more widespread, and as drug use becomes more culturally acceptable, authorities are less sure how to handle cases of parents using drugs around small children. And because police are less likely to investigate reports of illegal drug use, Naomi Schaefer Riley reports, they are less likely to encounter situations where children are living with addicted parents, which allows problems to fester. Whether it’s from exposure to drugs in the womb, children finding drugs or paraphernalia in the home, or parents neglecting infants and toddlers because they are high, substance abuse is driving our country’s child-welfare crisis. At least 40 percent of kids in foster care are removed from their homes because of parental substance abuse, but most experts say that the true proportion is closer to 80 percent. Riley also reports that problem is not being addressed: States have faced growing pressure to stop testing mothers and infants for drugs at the time of birth. Even when drug testing does occur, authorities often do not use that information effectively. Connecticut reports substance-exposed babies “blindly” ‒ that is, without any identifying information. This allows the state to keep a tally of how many children are affected, but authorities have no way of following up to make sure that the child is actually safe. |