RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
September 11 to September 17, 2022 In RealClearInvestigations, Paul Sperry details the evident legal double standard regarding Hillary Clinton’s emails and the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home: Prosecutors declined to pursue obstruction charges against her despite finding evidence that, under her team’s direction, a computer contractor destroyed and then lied about subpoenaed records she stored on a private server. Sperry reports: - The FBI's treatment of the ex-Secretary of State included a deal with her defense team that required the FBI to, in effect, obstruct its own investigation.
- In 2016, the bureau agreed with Clinton lawyers' demands to destroy two laptop hard drives after searching for files on them. They did so even though the lawyers had served under Clinton at the State Department and were subjects of the FBI’s investigation.
- Clinton lawyers David Kendall and Cheryl Mills consulted with the computer contractor, Paul Combetta, who then deleted the entire email archive from Clinton's server.
- According to FBI records, Combetta knew the documents he destroyed were under subpoena.
- In an email, Combetta told a colleague he was part of a “Hilary [sic] coverup operation” and said he would elaborate later at a "party." Asked about it, Combetta claimed he was just joking; the FBI let the matter drop.
- The leniency for Clinton and company contrasts with recent moves by Biden prosecutors to aggressively investigate former President Trump and his lawyers for alleged obstruction.
- With Clinton, probers sought evidence by consent whenever possible. With Trump, a grand jury issued subpoenas, and agents confiscated some 1,800 personal items, including clothing, passports and medical and tax records.
Long considered the gold standard of retirement plans, private pensions promising fixed payments for life are burning more Baby Boomers as they head off into the sunset, and often taxpayers along with them, John F. Wasik reports for RealClearInvestigations. Wasik reports: - Only about 10% of private-sector workers have such defined-benefit pensions today. But prior to the 1980s, most did. Now these older people number 33 million in more than 25,000 federally protected plans.
- Many of these pensions have disappeared or gone bust due to corporate churn, financial pressures and outright fiscal malfeasance. Many of the rest are less secure than 401(k) stock investment plans that many companies now offer in their stead.
- Taxpayers often have to bail them out.
- Multi-employer pensions, generally offered to union members, typically saw the biggest funding shortfalls with some funded at only 30% to 40% of their obligations.
- These are the pensions thrown a stopgap, multi-billion-dollar lifeline by pro-union President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, passed last year by the Democrat-run Congress.
- In the article, Wasik lays out strategies for retirees seeking lost pensions and otherwise looking to get the money due them.
- The federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation is being kept busy dealing with troubled plans, about 1,600 terminations annually in recent years. All told, more than 145,000 plans shuttered from 1975 to 2019.
Biden, Trump and the Beltway Special Counsel John Durham filed a motion in the false statements case against Igor Danchenko, set for trial in October, containing major new revelations. Among them was that Danchenko – the key "subsource" behind the Steele dossier central to the FBI’s Trump-Russia collusion case – was a paid informant for the FBI from March 2017 through October 2020. The FBI put Danchenko on the payroll even though his claims in interviews with bureau officials were found wanting, and that he allegedly lacked candor on a number of points – therefore undermining his credibility and the government’s case. As we would later learn, the Steele dossier reflected these deficiencies. RealClearInvestigations reported that U.S. intelligence analysts could not corroborate any of the allegations in the document. So why did the FBI make Danchenko a confidential human source, or CHS? Quote: Realizing its own misconduct, the FBI made Danchenko a paid CHS in March 2017 - just before the third [Page] FISA warrant was submitted in April 2017…[to] allow Comey’s FBI to work directly with Danchenko in support of its counter-intelligence investigation against President Trump. Danchenko being a CHS also served another purpose: it protected the Bureau and the Mueller Special Counsel from revealing their “sources and methods.” How do you hide misconduct? Bury the witness. A separate but related article reports that a top Russiagate investigator, Charles McGonigal, the former head of counterintelligence at the FBI field office in New York City, has come under federal scrutiny over “business dealings with a top aide to Oleg Deripaska, the billionaire Russian oligarch who was at the center of allegations that Russia colluded with the Trump campaign to interfere in the 2016 election.” Of all the angles to the Hunter Biden laptop story – among them its often depraved and disturbing contents, the revelations about Hunter and his family’s dealings with corrupt and often adversarial regimes, and the efforts by the government, Big Tech, and much of the media to cover such stories up – this article pursues a novel one: Hunter Biden as victim. …Whether or not he turns out to be the perpetrator of a crime, he is certainly the victim of a violation — an invasion of privacy that is staggering in its totality. Even the people who are responsible for disseminating the laptop admit that, on a human level, what happened to Hunter is horrifying. “A lot of stuff I do, I don’t feel great about,” says one of them, Steve Bannon. “But we’re in a war.” The act of investigation, once the discrete province of professionals, has been crowdsourced. The article chronicles the laptop’s origin, what those who came to possess it did with its contents, and how the legacy media suppressed the story while conservative and tabloid sources pressed onward in pursuing it. Such reporting is revealing insofar as it delves into the motivations of the colorful characters in the saga and lets them speak for themselves. But the article’s underlying thrust is that Hunter Biden faces conniving grifters “foment[ing] and fundrais[ing] off” the laptop story, and that consequently Hunter – his drug abuse and cavorting with prostitutes while a husband and father, and dubious dealings notwithstanding – is a sympathetic object. At one point, the journalists speak for the man himself, writing: Hunter Biden might reply here, if he were interested in offering a comment for the record, that it’s pretty rich for the people who are sifting through his text messages with his family and prying into his most private moments, down to the dying breaths of his beloved brother, to suggest that he is the one who is dark and amoral. The story concludes: … [T]he oldest living child of the president now resides in Malibu, at the top of a hill, in a place of sublime beauty. … He spends his days making art in his garage. … He follows the work of the researchers closely. At first he thought Trump’s defeat might provide a definite end point to his troubles, that his father’s adversaries might move on to other obsessions. Like so many Americans, he has since learned his hopes were misguided. He deals with his violation in his own way. He paints still lifes of flowers; portraits of Catholic martyrs; paintings of birds done in alcohol ink, which creates a ghostly effect. In one series … Biden has made a number of self-portraits, based on the photos in the tabloids, the ones that show him in the depths of his despair. … Hunter’s pursuers say he has only himself to blame for his loss of privacy — that it was the same carelessness and disregard for the rules of conduct that regular people follow that caused him to lose control of his digital life. Maybe it was the drugs. Maybe he was addicted to danger itself, forever in an autoerotic dance with disaster. So many of the people who have peered into the laptop seem to think that it allows them to know Hunter Biden’s mind and motivations. But maybe that level of understanding is not possible, even for the man himself. He has been doing the same thing, looking at that face in the photographs, trying to turn it into art. He still doesn’t know where that Hunter was. Like the rest of the world, he has all the data, but there are so many holes in his memory. Perhaps it goes without saying, but it’s hard to imagine Donald Trump’s children being treated as tragic figures were they to have found themselves in analogous circumstances. A separate article on Hunter Biden’s trials and tribulations notes that – notwithstanding that the president’s son resides in the aforementioned Malibu mansion, painting art selling for as much as $75,000 a pop – he “is trying to get his child support payments for his 4-year-old love child lowered by claiming a substantial change to his ‘financial circumstances,’ according to court documents.” This is not the first time Biden has sought to limit payments to support the child he daughtered out of wedlock, and whom he has reportedly never met, with former stripper Lunden Roberts. According to the article: After Roberts filed a paternity suit in 2019, Hunter argued in an affidavit that he couldn’t make child support payments because he was broke, insisting that he was in “significant debt” from his divorce with ex-wife Kathleen, with whom he shares three children. “I attest that I am unemployed and have had no monthly income since May 2019,” Hunter wrote. Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway 9/11 Jihadis, Including Mastermind, Head to Plea Deals CBS
Whistleblower: China, India Had Spies Inside Twitter AP
Twitter Whistleblower Handlers' Role vs. Trump Dossier
Facebook Spied on Conservatives, Reported Them to FBI NY Post
Biden Voting Rights Order Remains Secret Washington Examiner
Feds: Taxes Exceed Food, Clothing, Health Care Combined CNS
Arabella: DC For-Profit Astroturfing 'Grassroots' Causes Tablet
Former NSA Chief Accused of Pump-and-Dump Scheme Intercept
Defense Dept. Equity Chief's Anti-White Tweets New York Post
How Cosmetics Heir Gave Trump the Idea of Buying Greenland NY Times
Liberal Brookings Offers Monitoring of Podcasts Brookings Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Young adult males are struggling to find a partner or merely opting out of pursuing relationships, and turning instead to “quality simulation[s] of what a fulfilling life would be,” as one subject puts it in this article. Quote: Never before have young people been having so little sex—at least not since we began counting such things. Never before have young people been lonelier. Never before have we been stalked so thoroughly by our past selves, every blunder cataloged in perpetuity. … [I]t seems all the would-be husbands have been left functionally castrated by porn addictions, or slaving away at a 9-to-5 trying to pay for a tiny apartment, or too distracted by bio-hacking and Reddit boards to go on a date. This despite the fact that dating apps were supposed to help facilitate relationships. Instead, according to this article, apps have had the effect of weakening the dating pool by preventing participants both from interacting in real life, and facing rejection. … [M]any of my generation describe being single as “safer.” For women, that might mean curbing the risk of being assaulted or harassed. For men, that might mean worries about being falsely accused of those things, or just accused of being a creep. And there’s always the risk of being disappointed or having your heart broken. Dating apps give users a sense of protection from such risks. They’re portals to people you can tailor to your exact specifications, down to height and horoscope. OKCupid has twenty options in addition to “man” and “woman” when it comes to self-selecting your gender—and that’s well before you’ve spelled out your TV preferences or sexual kinks. But the fruits of this new technology and the freedom it promised don’t taste so sweet. Things have gotten so bad in New York City’s Greenwich Village that a community group contracted armed guards to patrol their street and stop chronic drug dealing, crack smoking and public defecation. The guards surveilled West Fourth Street between MacDougal Street and Sixth Avenue during various hours throughout August. Resident Brian Maloney said his neighborhood of 16 years is suffering from an influx of emotionally disturbed drug addicts and an exodus of cops, made all the worse by bail reform and soft-on-crime Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. Private guards are the only logical way to combat the chaos of a revolving-door justice system, he said. “We have residents saying, ‘We’re a liberal city. The Village is a very liberal area.’ Well, I’ve lost my liberal-ness on this. It baffles me,” Maloney told The Post. “The security certainly gave me peace of mind.” A related article covers the mysterious case of the mass of crimes called in to police over the years from a single New York City address – 312 Riverside Drive – that does not actually exist. Moving to the crime issues of New York’s West Coast counterpart, this article details the transformation of Los Angeles’s George Gascón from a tough-on-crime cop to woke district attorney. Described as the “right arm” of former LAPD Chief William Bratton during the city’s broken-windows policing heyday, the article reports that: Gascón’s shift to the left has landed him in hot water. He now faces a recall over his handling of crime in Los Angeles. Since his election in 2020, Gascón has drastically reduced prosecutions, often at the expense of public safety. Homicides reached a 15-year high in Los Angeles in 2022. For his part, Bratton is "perplexed" by Gascón’s shift to radical prosecutor but maintains he "was an outstanding police leader." He says Gascón, like many Soros prosecutors, may be well intentioned but is "creating a system that is incredibly unfair to minorities" and "increasing the victimization rate." Progressive megadonor George Soros has contributed nearly $5 million to Gascón. Coronavirus Investigations When Covid-19 struck, the governments of the world weren’t prepared. From America to Europe to Asia, they veered from minimizing the threat to closing their borders in ill-fated attempts to quell a viral spread that soon enveloped the world. Who stepped in? Quote: … [F]our non-governmental global health organizations began making plans for a life-or-death struggle against a virus that would know no boundaries. ... Armed with expertise, bolstered by contacts at the highest levels of Western nations and empowered by well-grooved relationships with drug makers, the four organizations took on roles often played by governments — but without the accountability of governments. While nations were still debating the seriousness of the pandemic, the groups identified potential vaccine makers and targeted investments in the development of tests, treatments and shots. And they used their clout with the World Health Organization to help create an ambitious worldwide distribution plan for the dissemination of those Covid tools to needy nations, though it would ultimately fail to live up to its original promises. Which organizations were responsible for this mobilization? The largest and most powerful was the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the largest philanthropies in the world. Then there was Gavi, the global vaccine organization that Gates helped to found to inoculate people in low-income nations, and the Wellcome Trust, a British research foundation with a multibillion dollar endowment that had worked with the Gates Foundation in previous years. Finally, there was the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, or CEPI, the international vaccine research and development group that Gates and Wellcome both helped to create in 2017. Now, according to the article, the four groups are spending millions to lobby the U.S. and EU to play a seminal role in the next major pandemic response. Critics, meanwhile “are raising significant questions about the equity and effectiveness of the group’s response to the [Covid-19] pandemic — and the serious limitations of outsourcing the pandemic response to unelected, privately-funded groups.” Other Coronavirus Investigations COVID Still Kills Hundreds Daily, on Pace for No. 3 Death Cause Wall St Journal
$1.3B in COVID Relief Funds Ended Up Overseas Free Beacon | 
