RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
October 9 to October 15, 2022 From the Annals of The Rules Don’t Apply to the Rulemakers: More than one in five employees of the executive branch have flaunted conflict-of-interest norms by owning or trading stocks that stood to rise or fall with decisions their agencies. A Wall Street Journal analysis of financial disclosures filed by 12,000 senior career employees, political staff and presidential appointees from 2016 to 2021 found that about 2,600 of them disclosed stock investments in companies which were lobbying their agencies for favorable policies. The Journal reports: - More than five dozen officials at five agencies, including the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department, reported trading stock in companies shortly before their departments announced enforcement actions, such as charges and settlements, against those companies.
- More than 200 senior EPA officials, nearly one in three, reported investments in companies that were lobbying the agency. EPA employees and their family members collectively owned between $400,000 and nearly $2 million in shares of oil and gas companies on average each year between 2016 and 2021.
- At the Defense Department, officials in the office of the secretary reported collectively owning between $1.2 million and $3.4 million of stock in aerospace and defense companies on average each year examined by the Journal. Some held stock in Chinese companies while the U.S. was considering blacklisting the companies.
Investing by federal agency officials has drawn far less public attention than that of lawmakers. Congress has long faced criticism for not prohibiting lawmakers from working on matters in which they have a financial interest. The rules were tightened in 2012 by the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, passed following a series of Journal articles on congressional trading abuses. Journal reporting last year on federal judges, revealing that more than 130 jurists heard cases in which they had a financial interest, led to a law passed this May requiring judges to promptly post online any stock trades they make. Biden, Trump and the Beltway From the Annals of You Can’t Make This Up: The FBI offered ex-British intelligence agent Christopher Steele $1 million to corroborate salacious allegations he made in his dossier against former President Trump and members of his 2016 campaign. Steele couldn’t cash in because his dossier – financed by Democrats and the Hillary Clinton campaign – was false. FBI supervisory counterintelligence analyst Brian Auten made these admissions as the first witness in the trial of Igor Danchenko, the Russian national who served as the "primary sub-source" for Steele's anti-Trump dossier and has been charged with five counts of making false statements to the bureau. Fox News reported: Auten also said that the FBI had no corroboration of allegations in the dossier but nevertheless took that information and inserted it into the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to surveil former Trump campaign aide Carter Page. "On October 21, 2016 [the date of the Carter Page FISA application], did you have any information to corroborate that information?" Durham asked. "No," Auten said, confirming that the FBI began receiving Steele’s reports, later known as the dossier, on Sept. 19, 2016, and submitted its first FISA application on Page on Oct. 21, 2016. Double standard time? Recall that President Trump was impeached for abuse of power because he allegedly pressured Ukraine’s president to help his 2020 re-election prospects. Now comes news that the Biden administration pressured the Saudis to delay inevitable oil production cuts only for a little while -- a month -- which might be just long enough to benefit Democrats at the polls: Saudi officials dismissed the requests, which they viewed as a political gambit by the Biden administration to avoid bad news ahead of the U.S. midterm elections, on which control of Congress hangs. High gas prices and inflation have been central issues in the campaign. Instead, the people said, the kingdom leaned on its OPEC allies to approve the cut, which is aimed at reducing production by 2 million barrels a day. In a separate article, the Washington Free Beacon reports one of the reasons the Saudis have little interest in appeasing the Biden administration – its lax enforcement of sanctions on the illicit oil trade by its sworn enemy, Iran. That has given the hardline regime in Tehran more than $15 billion to finance its military and terrorist proxies in the Middle East over the past two years. Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway Dems' Deceptive Swing State 'News' Sites Axios
Pa.: Records Show Fetterman an Absentee Lt. Gov. Associated Press
Dem Donors at FBI Behind Facebook's Stifling of Biden Laptop Free Beacon
Colorado: 30,000 Noncitizens Got Vote Registration Mailer AP
Washington Post: Biden’s 'Rescue Plan' Fueled Inflation Washington Post
Told Illegals Not Whipped, Mayorkas Stuck to Tale Fox News Other Noteworthy Articles and Series After the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, in May, a simple account of the police response took hold: A school police chief misread the threat and scores of officers from over a dozen federal, state and local agencies, following his command, idly stood by, waiting for equipment and SWAT teams while children trapped in classrooms with the gunman called 911 for help. But an analysis of footage by The New York Times found major gaps and contradictions in the D.P.S. findings. Visual evidence from the scene, while limited, indicates the problem was not simply one incompetent school police chief, or officers who knew better, but failed to take action. The available footage shows high-ranking officers, experienced state troopers, police academy instructors – even federal SWAT specialists – came to the same conclusions and were detoured by the same delays the school police chief has been condemned for causing. … Footage shows BORTAC, the Border Patrol’s elite tactical agents, took charge about halfway into the response, and learned right away that children were trapped inside with the gunman. But it took 37 minutes of planning, testing keys and readying equipment before BORTAC breached the classrooms. Families who seek medical interventions to help their children diagnosed with gender dysphoria are venturing “onto uncertain ground, where science has yet to catch up with practice,” this article reports. While the number of gender clinics treating children in the United States has grown from zero to more than 100 in the past 15 years – and waiting lists are long – strong evidence of the efficacy and possible long-term consequences of that treatment remains scant. Puberty blockers and sex hormones do not have U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for children’s gender care. No clinical trials have established their safety for such off-label use. The drugs’ long-term effects on fertility and sexual function remain unclear. And in 2016, the FDA ordered makers of puberty blockers to add a warning about psychiatric problems to the drugs’ label after the agency received several reports of suicidal thoughts in children who were taking them. More broadly, no large-scale studies have tracked people who received gender-related medical care as children to determine how many remained satisfied with their treatment as they aged and how many eventually regretted transitioning. The same lack of clarity holds true for the contentious issue of detransitioning, when a patient stops or reverses the transition process. How is tiny Ukraine holding its own (at the very least) against the Russian bear? This article reports that eight months into the war Ukraine is combining classic military operations with opportunism on the battlefield to exploit the incompetence of Russian forces. Ukraine’s command structure encourages junior officers to make in-the-moment battlefield decisions, an authority that they have used to seize opportunities and quickly take advantage of enemy weaknesses. … Rather than directly engaging with the grinding artillery exchanges and tank battles that Russia favors, Ukraine has sought instead to surround Russian forces and cut off supply lines. It has effectively integrated Soviet-era equipment with long-range precision Western artillery and rocket systems to starve its enemy of fuel, ammunition and other supplies. This article also reports that the Russians, by contrast, have been slowed by a Soviet-era decision-making structure, in which orders trickle down the chain of command from Moscow, and troops at the front lines take little initiative. “Russians want attrition, they want formations clashing en masse – that’s where they’re used to having the advantage,” said John Spencer, chair of urban warfare studies at the Madison Policy Forum. “But the Ukrainians won’t give them that.” Building the nation’s first bullet train, which would connect Los Angeles and San Francisco, has been an infrastructure Holy Grail for many progressives. But now, this article reports, as the nation embarks on a historic, $1 trillion infrastructure building spree, the tortured effort to build the country’s first high-speed rail system is a case study in how ambitious public works projects can become perilously encumbered by political compromise, unrealistic cost estimates, flawed engineering and a determination to persist on projects that have become, like the crippled financial institutions of 2008, too big to fail. The design for the nation’s most ambitious infrastructure project was never based on the easiest or most direct route. Instead, the train’s path out of Los Angeles was diverted across a second mountain range to the rapidly growing suburbs of the Mojave Desert – a route whose most salient advantage appeared to be that it ran through the district of a powerful Los Angeles county supervisor. … The pros and cons of these routing choices have been debated for years. Only now, though, is it becoming apparent how costly the political choices have been. Collectively, they turned a project that might have been built more quickly and cheaply into a behemoth so expensive that, without a major new source of funding, there is little chance it can ever reach its original goal of connecting California’s two biggest metropolitan areas in two hours and 40 minutes. The article also reports that when California voters first approved a bond issue for the project in 2008, the rail line was to be completed by 2020, and its cost seemed astronomical at the time – $33 billion – but it was still considered worthwhile as an alternative to the state’s endless web of freeways and the carbon emissions generated in one of the nation’s busiest air corridors. Fourteen years later, construction is now underway on part of a 171-mile “starter” line connecting a few cities in the middle of California, which has been promised for 2030. But few expect it to make that goal. The current cost is now estimated at $113 billion. Coronavirus Investigations Why Did Pregnancy Problems Spike With COVID? Washington Post
Rand Paul's Lonely Fight Against Official COVID Policies City Journal
The Right’s Anti-Vaxxers Are Killing Republicans The Intercept |
