RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
May 29 to June 4, 2022 Featured Investigation: It is far from clear what Republicans might do to raise up the people, but should they regain control of Congress this fall there is no doubt they will make every effort to bring down the Democrats. This article reports that top Republican congressional aides huddled last month with conservative think-tank leaders to plan a series of high-profile investigations of the Biden administration. With unified Democratic control in D.C., Republicans have been limited in their efforts to wield Congress' probative powers to score political points. If they win congressional majorities, Republicans will use that power to dig into the Biden administration’s policies and spending. It will also bring stepped-up GOP scrutiny of private sector actors such as tech companies that Republicans see as politically adversarial. Potentially fruitful oversight avenues discussed at the May event include: -
Scrutiny of Biden's immigration policies, his son Hunter’s business dealings abroad and tech companies' ostensible political bias. -
An examination of the fiscal stewardship and effective oversight of the recently passed infrastructure bill. -
A look at the tax and financial policies at the center of a national furor over inflation.
Such hearings may have some value, but they also remind us that is far easier to attack one’s enemies than to advance bold plans (that can be fodder for future attacks). In a separate article, Politico reports that the GOP is not taking victory in the fall midterms for granted. Using loaded language suggesting nefarious intent, it reports that Video recordings of Republican Party operatives meeting with grassroots activists [in Michigan] provide an inside look at a multi-pronged strategy to target and potentially overturn votes in Democratic precincts: Install trained recruits as regular poll workers and put them in direct contact with party attorneys. Of course, one person’s effort to “overturn votes” is another person’s effort to ensure ballot integrity. An RNC spokesperson said the party is attempting to rectify an imbalance in favor of Democratic election workers in large urban areas, particularly Detroit, a city that votes reliably Democratic by more than 90 percent. Just 170 of more than 5,400 Detroit election officials were Republicans in 2020, according to the RNC. Biden, Trump and the Beltway How many guardian angels can one man have? For Hunter Biden, the answer is plenty. First there were the many millions he made from foreign benfactors who, he readily admitted, only wanted to do business with him because of his powerful father. Now that those dealings have gotten him into hot water – reflected in a Justice Department probe of his taxes and a laptop suggesting corruption involving President Biden – another friend has come to his rescue, Miranda Devine reports: Kevin Morris, the generous Los Angeles entertainment lawyer who loaned Hunter more than $2 million to pay off his tax debts, has launched a sensational public-relations campaign to discredit the laptop and divert attention from its damning revelations of the Biden family’s international influence-peddling scheme. Morris, 58, has assembled a team of 30 lawyers and investigators to help his friend Hunter, 52, “blunt the impact” of the Delaware probe, according to CBS News. … The counternarrative Morris is mounting on Hunter’s behalf has nothing to do with the damning contents of the laptop, which have been repeatedly verified as authentic by multiple media organizations since The Post broke the story in October 2020. Instead, Hunter’s team is attempting to sow confusion about how the laptop became public, by denying that he abandoned his laptop in John Paul Mac Isaac’s Delaware repair shop on April 12, 2019, and claiming his private information was somehow stolen, “hacked” or “cloned.” Given that even liberal news outlets, including the New York Times and Washington Post, have accepted the laptop’s authenticity, this effort should go nowhere. Perhaps the most interesting part of Devine’s article is the fact that conservative provocateur Roger Stone wrote the foreword to the 2020 book written by Hunter Biden’s psychiatrist, Keith Ablow. It is a small world after all! A separate article in the Daily Mail mines Hunter’s laptop to report on the people in his life – apparently prostitutes and webcam strippers – during what appears to be a drug-fueled week in March 2019. Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway Justice Dept. Probes Cop Response to Uvalde Carnage Wall Street Journal
Feds: Dominion Voting Had Unexploited Flaws Washington Post
DoJ Probe Clears Flynn Unmasking BuzzFeed
Black Staffers Fleeing Biden's 'Equity' White House Politico Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Officials claimed that the new penitentiary in Thomson, Illinois – with a unit designed for some of the most violent prisoners in the entire federal system – would make federal prisons safer by relieving dangerous overcrowding. But an investigation by the Marshall Project and NPR found that the newest U.S. prison has quickly become one of the deadliest, with five suspected homicides and two alleged suicides since 2019. Most people in the Special Management Unit are housed in double-celled solitary confinement – almost constant lockdown with another person. The Bureau of Prisons has said double-celling “mitigates suicide risks.” But psychologists and prisoners say living in such claustrophobic conditions with another person can be even worse than being alone, and often leads to violent outbursts. The article also reports claims that prison staff exacerbate tensions: In stories that echoed with the same visceral details, dozens of men said they lived under the pressing threat of violence from cellmates as well as brutality at the hands of staff. Specifically, many men reported being shackled in cuffs so tight they left scars, or being “four-pointed” and chained by each limb to a bed for hours, far beyond what happens at other prisons and in violation of bureau policy and federal regulations. … Multiple people claimed in federal court filings that officers stoked tensions between cellmates and intentionally paired men who they knew would attack each other. One person formerly incarcerated at Thomson said in a lawsuit that officers spread the false information that he was a sex offender, inciting physical and sexual assault from multiple cellmates. From the Annals of Robbing Peter to Pay Paul: Seattle’s decision to shift law enforcement resources to help clear its numerous homeless encampments has created such severe manpower problems that it’s stopped assigning detectives to investigate new sexual assault cases with adult victims, this article reports. This is threatening the viability of cases, as delayed investigations and evidence collection possibly hinder their outcomes: Currently, the sexual assault unit has five detectives to respond to sexual assault and child abuse reports for the entire city, which has had 225 sex offenses reported so far this year, according to the department’s crime data. Yet other units that don’t investigate violent crime have more staff. The department’s Alternative Response Team — the unit that responds to homeless encampment removals — is now staffed by twice the number of officers on the sexual assault unit after an additional seven patrol officers were added to the unit this year. The department’s general investigations unit, which investigates property crime, has 12 detectives. Far more property crimes are reported to Seattle police each year than sexual assault, but they are simpler to investigate. Here’s more evidence that racism is not simply a black-and-white issue. This article reports that a scheduled discussion between employees of Google News and the leader of an organization that advocates for Dalits, or members of the lowest-ranked caste in India, was cancelled after Google employees – many of whom are of Indian descent - began spreading disinformation, calling her “Hindu-phobic” and “anti-Hindu” in emails to the company’s leaders. The speaker, Thenmozhi Soundararajan ... ... appealed directly to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who comes from an upper-caste family in India, to allow her presentation to go forward. But the talk was canceled, leading some employees to conclude that Google was willfully ignoring caste bias. Tanuja Gupta, a senior manager at Google News who invited Soundararajan to speak, resigned over the incident, according to a copy of her goodbye email posted internally Wednesday and viewed by The Washington Post. … Two days before Soundararajan’s presentation, seven Google employees sent emails to company leaders and Gupta “with inflammatory language about how they felt harmed and how they felt their lives were at risk by the discussion of caste equity,” according to emails sent by Gupta. Russian-allied mercenaries tied to the Wagner Group – a nebulous network that combines military force with commercial and strategic interests – have been busy in Africa, fighting in conflicts Mali, Central African Republic, Mozambique and Libya. This article reports that Wagner fighters ally with embattled leaders and militia commanders who can pay for their services in cash, or with lucrative mining concessions for precious minerals like gold, diamonds and uranium: But Wagner is far more than a simple guns-for-gold scheme. Operating through a sprawling web of shell companies, it has become a byword for a broad spectrum of Kremlin-backed operations in over a dozen African countries. Wagner meddles in politics, props up autocrats and orchestrates digital propaganda campaigns. It donates food to the poor and produces action movies set in Africa. It has even organized a beauty pageant. Coronavirus Investigations Despite high levels of vaccination among older people, this article reports, COVID killed them at rates vastly higher during this winter’s Omicron wave than it did last year, preying on long delays since their last shots and the variant’s ability to skirt immune defenses. COVID deaths, though always concentrated in older people, in 2022 have skewed toward older people more than they did at any point since vaccines became widely available: Almost as many Americans 65 and older died in four months of the Omicron surge as did in six months of the Delta wave, even though the Delta variant, for any one person, tended to cause more severe illness. While overall per capita COVID death rates have fallen, older people still account for an overwhelming share of them. “This is not simply a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” said Andrew Stokes, an assistant professor in global health at Boston University who studies age patterns of COVID deaths. “There’s still exceptionally high risk among older adults, even those with primary vaccine series.” | 
