RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
October 29 to November 4, 2023 In RealClearInvestigations, Julie Kelly explores how prosecutors are reimagining the law in novel and disputed ways to pursue Donald Trump and others accused in the Jan. 6 Capitol breach. In particular, they are broadly applying an Enron-era financial crimes statute against evidence-tampering to now prosecute political activity. Kelly reports: -
To advance the Trump-Russia hoax, the Department of Justice seized on the little-used Foreign Agents Registration Act to justify spying on Trump allies. -
In Trump’s Georgia election fraud case, District Attorney Fani Willis is applying the RICO law used to nail mobsters like John Gotti – in what even her supporters describe as new and untested ways. -
Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigated Trump for an obstruction offense – shorthanded as 1512(c)(2) -- as part of his Russiagate probe. It’s a charge the Justice Department declined to bring. -
Now Special Counsel Jack Smith has charged Trump with the same offense. It has also been used against hundreds of other Jan. 6 defendants – but has exposed sharp divisions among judges on appeal. -
Judge Gregory Katsas, Trump appointee: The statute has covered “document-shredding and other ways to conceal or destroy evidence” – not advocacy, lobbying and protest. -
Washington Post legal columnist: The country does not need “a new, open-ended grant of power to prosecutors.” -
The dispute looks headed for the Supreme Court. And it could throw a monkey wrench into Smith’s plans during the 2024 campaign to try and convict Trump over Jan. 6.
In RealClearInvestigations, James Varney draws on assessments of immigration and security experts to report that hundreds of people on the FBI’s terrorist watchlist have almost certainly slipped into the United States amid millions of other illegal immigrants over the last three years: -
The “known unknowns” are alarming: In fiscal 2023, which ends this month, the feds logged 736 apprehensions of people listed in the U.S. Terror Screening Dataset – the “terrorist watchlist” – including 172 caught by the Border Patrol plus others trying to get in by land, air or sea. -
The numbers compare with just 11 people on the terrorist watchlist nabbed between fiscal 2017 and 2019. -
The actual situation could be even worse, since overall U.S. migrant totals don’t include “known gotaways” – 1.7 million people at a minimum. -
Plus criminals and terrorists like to recruit people not on the watchlist -- what they call “clean skins.” Expert: “The fact someone isn’t on that list could just mean they haven’t dipped their toe in the pond yet.” -
Another expert: “There have been thousands and thousands – tens of thousands – of people from the Middle East who have entered and it’s completely reasonable, even the president has acknowledged it, to worry that some of those could be, or could become, terrorist threats.” -
The day RCI's article appeared, FBI Dirctor Christopher Wray warned that the Israel-Hamas conflict could inspire attacks in the U.S.
Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books Here Comes the $95B Hazardous Sludge, RCI
Virginia Is for Lovers of Tax-Paid Junkets, RCI
$800K to Distribute Crack Pipes in Texas, RCI
The Big Staff and Office Blowout of 1975, RCI
Pricey Baltimore Cop Training, RCI Biden, Trump and the Beltway Anatomy of a Biden Family ‘Cover-Up’ by FBI and DOJ, New York Post
Hunter Biden Got $250K Chinese Loan During '20 Campaign, Just the News
Comer: Bank Files Show Bidens 'Laundered' Chinese $40K for Joe, Daily Caller
Joe Biden's Overseas Calls on Phone Line Paid by Hunter, Daily Mail
California Senate Hopeful Schiff's Maryland Residency, CNN
Taxpayers Fund Millionaire Dems' Swanky DC Digs, Washington Free Beacon
House Probes Democrats' ActBlue Over Illicit Donors, Fox News Other Noteworthy Articles and Series In a series of recent articles, RealClearInvestigations has detailed how the Biden administration’s ambitious goals to make America carbon neutral by 2050 are bumping up against reality. From the challenges of acquiring the vast swaths of land required fofr solar and wind projects – especially given state and local resistance to such massive projects – to the problem of building charging stations to power electric vehicles, the transition to a green economy will not be as smooth and easy as advertised. This article focuses on another problem flagged by an RCI article last year focusing on California: the need to build huge power lines to carry clean energy from solar and wind farms to consumers. The Energy Department on Monday announced $1.3 billion to help build three large power lines across six states, part of a new gusher of money from Washington to upgrade America’s electric grids so they can handle more wind and solar power and better tolerate extreme weather. But officials warned that money won’t be enough. In a major report published the same day, the Energy Department said that the nation’s vast network of transmission lines may need to expand by two-thirds or more by 2035 to meet President Biden’s goals to power the country with clean energy. … But there are major barriers to grid expansion. While the study found that new transmission capacity between different regional grids would have large benefits, hardly any such projects have been built in recent decades, since they can require approval from more than one state or jurisdiction, leading to disagreements over who should pay. Home schooling has become – by a wide margin – America’s fastest-growing form of education. Echoing and amplifying a 2022 article on homeschooling in RealClearInvestigations, a Washington Post analysis of data from thousands of school districts across the country shows that the dramatic rise in home schooling that began with the onset of the pandemic has largely sustained itself through the 2022-23 academic year, defying predictions that most families would return to schools that have dispensed with mask mandates and other covid-19 restrictions. The Post found: -
In states with comparable enrollment figures, the number of home-schooled students increased 51 percent over the past six school years, far outpacing the 7 percent growth in private school enrollment. Public school enrollment dropped 4 percent in those states over the same period, a decline partly attributable to home schooling. -
Home schooling’s surging popularity crosses every measurable line of politics, geography and demographics. The number of home-schooled kids has increased 373 percent over the past six years in the small city of Anderson, S.C.; it also increased 358 percent in a school district in the Bronx. -
In 390 districts included in The Post’s analysis, there was at least one home-schooled child for every 10 in public schools during the 2021-2022 academic year, the most recent for which district-level federal enrollment data are available. That’s roughly quadruple the number of districts that had rates that high in 2017-2018, signifying a sea change in how many communities educate their children and an urgent challenge for a public education system that faced dwindling enrollment even before the pandemic. -
Despite claims that the home-schooling boom is a result of failing public schools, The Post found no correlation between school district quality, as measured by standardized test scores, and home-schooling growth. In fact, high-scoring districts had some of the biggest spikes in home schooling early in the pandemic, though by the fall of 2022 increases were similar regardless of school performance.
Hackers appear to have broken into the databases of the genetic testing service 23andMe and published detailed information of what appears to be a list of Jews. A database that has been shared on dark web forums and viewed by NBC News has a list of 999,999 people who allegedly have used the service. It includes their first and last name, sex, and 23andMe’s evaluation of where their ancestors came from. The database is titled “ashkenazi DNA Data of Celebrities,” though most of the people on it aren’t famous, and it appears to have been sorted to only include people with Ashkenazi heritage. NBC News was able to verify the data of two 23andMe users in the breach as authentic. “Crazy, this could be used by Nazis,” one person who appears in the database said. The Biden administration has a habit of giving good money to bad people. A few weeks before Iran-backed Hamas terrorists slaughtered some 1,400 people in Israel, the administration released $6 billion in frozen Iranian funds on the promise that it would only be used for humanitarian purposes. Money, of course, is fungible; $6 billion thrown into the food and medicine kitty frees up $6 billion to be spent on terror. This article reports that the U.S. is among the international donors pumping around $80 million in aid to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan every two weeks: While the State Department has provided assurances this aid is not enriching the Taliban, [the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction] SIGAR reports that the terror group's "interference into UN and NGO activities has continued to rise throughout 2023." This interference includes arresting aid workers and demanding that "sensitive data" about various projects be turned over to Taliban officials. The terror group also "indirectly benefit[s] from U.S. education funding through the establishment of fraudulent NGOs to receive donor assistance, and by infiltrating and extorting existing Afghan NGOs delivering educational assistance," according to SIGAR's summary of its report. … Programs also have been hindered by the Taliban's insistence that women not be placed in a supervisory role, or any other prominent position. International charities reported throughout the year on Taliban efforts to siphon aid, bolstering SIGAR's most recent findings and posing a challenge for American aid efforts. Boston Children’s Hospital was reimbursed $1.4 million by the state of Massachusetts for its “gender transition services” from January 2015 to May 2023, according to documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation through a public records request: Boston Children’s Hospital, which claims to have created the first pediatric and adolescent transgender health program in the country, was hit with heavy backlash in 2022 for performing gender transition surgeries on minors, including vaginoplasty, phalloplasty, chest reconstruction and breast augmentation, according to a since-deleted website. The Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS) of Massachusetts told the DCNF on July 25 that it paid the hospital over $1.4 million for “Gender transition services (i.e., physician’s services, inpatient and outpatient, hospital services, surgical services, prescribed drugs, therapies, etc.)” from January 1, 2015, to May 1, 2023. The hospital performed 204 “gender affirmation” surgeries from 2017 to 2020, the same time as the EOHHS funding, according to a study published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine. 177 were chest reconstruction surgeries, and 65 of those surgeries were for patients under 18 years old. |
