RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
October 2 to October 8, 2022 In RealClearInvestigations, Mark Hemingway reports on statistics showing that more than 200,000 federal bureaucrats – ranging from the IRS to the Railroad Retirement Bureau -- have been granted authority to carry guns and make arrests. That’s more than the 186,000 Americans serving in the U.S. Marine Corps. Hemingway reports: - Over 100 agencies “spent $2.7 billion on guns, ammunition, and military-style equipment between fiscal years 2006 and 2019,” according to the watchdog group Open the Books. Nearly $1 billion was spent between fiscal years 2015 and 2019 alone.
- Only 74,500 federal agents had firearm authority in 1996, a number that has nearly tripled since then.
- After a 1997 federal program to arm local police with surplus military equipment, about 90 percent of small-town police departments got their own SWAT teams – up from 20% beforehand. Current estimates suggest those SWAT teams are deployed as many as 80,000 times a year.
- Critics say allowing federal agencies to perform their own law enforcement removes an important layer of accountability that existed when unarmed feds were forced to cooperate with local authorities.
- Watchdog Peter Schweizer: “With the sheriff you have an independent person if something goes wrong. Otherwise, you're taking the word of this government agency, where the law enforcement mechanism is the same as the bureaucracy that's alleging the violations. It's a real opportunity for damaging people's rights in a major way.”
Biden, Trump and the Beltway New evidence emerged this week suggesting that the Justic Department and its FBI have covered up allegations of corruption involving the Biden family. Tony Bobulinski, the former business partner of Hunter Biden who detailed the family’s questionable business dealings before the 2020 election, said he hasn't heard a peep from the FBI since then, though agents told him the bureau would follow up shortly.
In an interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News, Bobulinski said he decided to come forward again after reading about whistleblower claims that the FBI agent designated as point man for his information, Timothy Thibault, had allegedly interfered in other investigations regarding Hunter Biden. A decorated former US Navy officer with top-secret security clearances, Bobulinski shared documents indicating that the Bidens had defrauded him of millions of dollars. He told Carlson: When I … found out that Tim Thibault, the FBI agent that was assigned to run point on all the information I and my lawyers provided the FBI, had walked out of the building, I was sort of flabbergasted. You know, like what? This is crazy. Like when are the American people going to get the facts on all this? … The fact pattern is the FBI alone altered history in that election. In a separate article, the Washington Post reports that federal agents have gathered what they believe is sufficient evidence to charge Hunter with tax crimes and a false statement related to a gun purchase. Agents determined months ago they had assembled a viable criminal case against the younger Biden. But it is ultimately up to prosecutors at the Justice Department [including Attorney General Merrick Garland], not agents, to decide whether to file charges in cases where prosecutors believe the evidence is strong enough to lead to a likely conviction at trial. In a separate article, Miranda Devine of the New York Post reports the Washington Post scoop may represent an effort by prosecutors to prevent Garland from sweeping the case under the rug. Devine also reports that the possible tax and gun charges may be relatively good news for the Bidens: They suggest the government is not interested pursuing charges of money laundering and violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, “both of which could lead prosecutors to inspect the president’s involvement in an influence-peddling scheme run by Hunter and the president’s brother Jim Biden during Joe’s time as vice president.” Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway Anti-GOP Violence Follows Biden's 'MAGA's a Threat' Speech Fox News
Biden Vowed to End Solitary. Federal Prisons Do Opposite. NBC News
Biden White House Fuels Gender Pay Gap Washington Free Beacon
Heads of Soros Nonprofits on Biden Racial Equity Team Daily Caller
RNC: 22 Million Gmails Dumped to Spam in September Fox News
Democrat-Linked Group, Feds Got the Right Censored in '20 Breitbart Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Drug abuse is no longer a barrier for homeless people seeking housing and welfare. In fact, this article reports, many policies make drug abuse a prerequisite for services. Federal, state, and local programs give addicts more funds and assistance than nonaddicts. And other favors go to homeless individuals who can prove that they’re engaging in criminal activity. One way that addicts have secured benefits is through new homelessness programs. The HEARTH Act, signed by President Obama in 2009 … told local governments to devise a single ranking to determine which homeless people get free or subsidized housing. … Under the Massachusetts “Vulnerability Assessment Tool,” a homeless individual gets four points for agreeing that “I am currently using alcohol or drugs and not in recovery” but only one point if he has “been in recovery for more than one year.” The individual gets an extra two points if he has had an overdose or alcohol poisoning in the past 12 months. In Tacoma, Washington, the government says that the scoring system should focus on getting housing for those with “active substance use,” “frequent criminal justice interactions,” and, ideally, a “felony.” San Francisco asks if applicants have “ever had to use violence to keep yourself safe”; answering affirmatively yields bonus points for a new house. In all these places, getting into recovery or refraining from violence is almost fatal for an applicant’s chances for housing and benefits. The homeless can accelerate their benefits by committing new crimes. This week's Annals of Broken Government, Part I: Nearly 40% of law enforcement agencies around the country did not submit any data in 2021 to a newly revised FBI crime statistics collection program – including the nation’s two largest cities by population, New York City and Los Angeles, as well as most agencies in five of the six most populous states: California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Florida. This article reports: Even though the FBI announced the transition years ago and the federal government spent hundreds of millions of dollars to help local police make the switch, about 7,000 of the nation’s 18,000 law enforcement agencies did not successfully send crime data to the voluntary program last year. … The data gap will make it harder to analyze crime trends and fact-check claims politicians make about crime, and we’ll likely have to live with greater uncertainty for at least a couple of years, criminologists say. Jacob Kaplan, criminologist at Princeton University, said because many big cities and populous states stopped reporting, it’s especially difficult to draw conclusions from the 2021 data. In a separate article, the Associated Press reports that a whistleblower alleges that an internal review found 665 FBI personnel have resigned or retired to avoid accountability in misconduct probes over the past two decades. They include 45 senior officials, who resigned or retired between 2004 and 2020 following a misconduct probe but before a final disciplinary letter could be issued. This week's Annals of Broken Government, Part II: Ever since Ukraine launched a successful counteroffensive against Russian forces in late August, American officials have tried to claim credit, insisting that U.S. intelligence has been key to Ukraine’s battlefield victories. But, this article reports, U.S. officials have simultaneously downplayed their intelligence failures in Ukraine – especially their glaring mistakes at the outset of the war: When Putin invaded in February, U.S. intelligence officials told the White House that Russia would win in a matter of days by quickly overwhelming the Ukrainian army, according to current and former U.S. intelligence officials, who asked not to be named to discuss sensitive information. The Central Intelligence Agency was so pessimistic about Ukraine’s chances that officials told President Joe Biden and other policymakers that the best they could expect was that the remnants of Ukraine’s defeated forces would mount an insurgency, a guerrilla war against the Russian occupiers. By the time of the February invasion, the CIA was already planning how to provide covert support for a Ukrainian insurgency following a Russian military victory, the officials said. This article also reports that the U.S. intelligence community’s failure to recognize the fundamental weaknesses in the Russian system mirrors its blindness to the military and economic weaknesses of the Soviet Union in the 1980s, when Washington failed to predict the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. The community’s missteps in Ukraine came just months after American intelligence gravely underestimated how fast the U.S.-backed government in Afghanistan would collapse in 2021, leading to a rapid takeover by the Taliban. |
