RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
December 10 to December 16, 2023 In RealClearInvestigations, Paul Sperry examines the checkered past and likely troubled future of Sara Jones Biden, the presidential sister-in-law who has emerged as a key figure in the mushrooming Biden family foreign influence-peddling scandal: -
GOP lawmakers leading the Biden impeachment inquiry want to question her about bank records that include almost a quarter million dollars in checks she wrote to brother-in-law Joe, conspicuously marking them as “loan repayment.” -
Republicans suspect those checks "were funded by Biden influence-peddling schemes with China.” -
The $40,000 amount of one of the checks matches the formula for Joe’s cut described on first son Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop: “10 held by H for the big guy” – meaning 10% of $400,000 from the Chinese. -
Sara and husband Jim’s main business shows up in more than 3,735 emails generated by Joe Biden’s vice-presidential office. -
Like Hunter, Sara and Jim Biden have reportedly sold to companies the promise of access to their powerful relative. Some of the companies are tied to unsavory foreign regimes, and deals have ended in lawsuits and investigations. -
After wedding Jim in 1995, Sara took a job with one of his brother Joe’s Senate donors, who later accused her of “fraud” and “unjust enrichment.” -
In the years since, she and her husband have lived beyond their means and been accused of reneging on debts and failing to pay their taxes.
In RealClearInvestigations, Steve Miller reports on ways progressives have surpassed Republicans in harnessing the power of putatively nonpartisan nonprofits that push legal boundaries to win elections: -
More than 150 progressive nonprofits spent $1.35 billion on political activities in 2021 and 2022, according to data compiled by Restoration of America, a conservative political action committee. -
Although there are no readily available estimates of comparable conservative efforts, observers say they are overmatched. -
The progressive nonprofits perform a lot of the voter mobilization work the Democratic Party once did itself. -
The groups work around legal restrictions on nonprofits by selectively engaging in “nonpartisan” efforts in areas with reliably Democratic constituencies, including boosting voter education and participation. -
Important players this cycle are the Voter Participation Center and its partner group, the Center for Voter Information. -
Both have the stated mission of encouraging people in specified demographics to vote: “young people, people of color and unmarried women.” All three groups are part of the Democratic Party’s base. -
Vote.org describes itself as the largest “nonpartisan voting registration and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) technology platform in America,” while its correspondence often echoes statements made by top Democrats. -
For-profit progressive giant Arabella Advisors handles strategy and management for a host of nonprofits, including the New Venture Fund. -
Precursor: The estimated $332 million donated in 2020 to public elections offices by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, much of which wound up with groups in liberal strongholds.
Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books Feds' Excess Real Estate Squandered, RCI
Maryland Misplaces $1.4 Billion, RCI
Pa. Schools' Devil to Pay Over Satan Club, RCI
Minority Training in Resort Luxury, RCI
Nevada Inmates Burned. Taxpayers Too. RCI Biden, Trump and the Beltway House Approves Biden Impeachment Inquiry, The Hill
Supreme Court Could Undo Trump's and Many Other J6 Cases, AP
Biden Admin Pays Anti-Israel Group That Spreads Lies, Free Beacon
Federal Largesse Swells Harvard and Other Ivies' Ledgers, Tablet
Poll: 20% of Mail Voters Admit Fraud, Chicanery in 2020, Daily Signal Other Noteworthy Articles and Series When Flint, Mich., announced in September that 68 assault weapons collected in a gun buyback would be incinerated, the city cited its policy of never reselling firearms. But, this article reports, Flint’s guns were not melted down. Instead, they made their way to a private company – a Missouri outfit named Gunbusters – that has collected millions of dollars taking firearms from police agencies, destroying a single piece of each weapon stamped with the serial number and then selling the rest as nearly complete gun kits. From the article: To be able to say a gun is destroyed, disposal companies crush or cut up a single piece that federal law classifies as a firearm: the receiver or frame that anchors the other components and contains the required serial number. The businesses can then sell the remaining parts as a kit: barrel, trigger, grip, slide, stock, springs – essentially the entire gun, minus the regulated piece. Police agencies and disposal companies say they are following guidelines set by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. While the guidelines, posted on the A.T.F. website, show illustrations of whole guns being cut into pieces with an acetylene torch, they also say that an “acceptable method” is to destroy just the receiver or frame. The companies, for their part, say that if public officials want the whole gun destroyed, they must pay for it. “Our services are free for law enforcement agencies,” said Scott Reed, president of Gunbusters. “If we can’t cover our costs by selling parts, then we charge them.” As a result, this article reports, hundreds of communities such as Flint are fueling a secondary arms market, where weapons slated for destruction are recycled into civilian hands, often with no background check required. One of Mexico’s top fentanyl-trafficking gangs, the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generacion (CJNG), enlisted friends and relatives to buy $600,000 worth of high-end military-style firearms in under a year from a manufacturer in Racine, Wisconsin, U.S. federal arms-trafficking investigators allege. This article reports that the cartel exploited permissive federal and state-level gun control rules to buy some of the most powerful weapons available to American civilians, not just in Racine but from other companies across the nation. From North Carolina to Oregon, the CJNG network reached deep into the United States to find and buy heavier, rarer firearms said [former ATF investigators Tim] Sloan and [Chris] Demlein. Far from the border cities that are the usual sources of weapons for Mexico’s criminal groups, relaxed surveillance can make such weapons easier to buy in quantity, they said. Overseeing much of the network was Mexican citizen Jesus Cisneros, according to ATF internal presentations that cited his intercepted communications with other suspects about moving .50-caliber and other firearms to Mexico. The Wisconsin indictment charged Cisneros and a local accomplice named Victor Cobian on multiple counts related to gun trafficking. In a separate article, ProPublica reports that the first line of defense against illegal gun sales, the 60,000 retail stores and pawn shops that sell firearms in the United States, have “little financial incentive to forgo transactions and limited administrative penalties for failing to prevent illegal ones.” As a result, “some retailers have proven incapable or simply unwilling to play gatekeeper.” Sometime around 2009, American roads started to become deadlier for pedestrians, particularly at night. Fatalities have risen ever since, reversing the effects of decades of safety improvements, this article reports. In 2021, more than 7,300 pedestrians died in America – three in four of them during the hours between sunset and sunrise. Researchers are not exactly sure why this is happening. Comparable wealthy countries like Canada and Australia have a much lower share of pedestrian fatalities at night, and those fatalities have generally been declining, not rising. But two trends, the rise of smartphones and more complex console display panels in vehicles, are heavily implicated. From the article: Americans spend nearly three times as much time interacting with their phones while driving as drivers in Britain, according to smartphone data collected by Cambridge Mobile Telematics, which helps auto insurers, carmakers and local governments track and reduce dangerous driving. In the U.S., that distracted driving – detected when phones are tapped or in motion in vehicles traveling faster than 9 miles per hour – also typically peaks in the evening hours, according to the company’s data. Another factor is the migration toward the Sun Belt which, this article reports, has relatively poor pedestrian and transit infrastructure. Many areas that have had poor pedestrian safety records going back decades – especially metro areas in Florida, Texas, and Arizona – have also seen the greatest recent population growth. Research has also found that pedestrian deaths over the last 20 years have declines in downtown areas and increased in the suburbs, often in places where lower-income residents live. Such suburban arterial roads are also where many communities have allowed multifamily and affordable housing construction that has been less welcome in neighborhoods with inherently safer streets. Four separate plaintiffs have filed civil lawsuits against the rap mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs in the last month accusing him of rape, sex-trafficking a minor, assault and a litany of other alleged abuses, imperiling his empire and sending shock waves through the music industry. Although Combs has denied these “sickening allegations … made against me by individuals looking for a quick payday,” this article reports that some former colleagues say they are not surprising: Those who've worked with Combs over the years, including former Bad Boy executives and members of his inner circle, told The Times that the lawsuits reflect a pattern of mistreatment of women dating back decades. "He had that propensity for violence way back then," said Kirk Burrowes, who co-founded Bad Boy Entertainment with Combs in 1992 and served as its president until Combs fired him in 1997. "It just wasn't as well known. It's almost like it was part of his operating manual. He was so traumatizing to women." The article reports that while Combs has “carefully cultivated an image of an outlaw made good, a CEO with an ear to the streets, violence trailed his personal life.” In 1999, for example, he was charged with assaulting Interscope Records executive Steve Stoute, and pleaded guilty to harassment. Later that same year, he faced weapons charges after a shooting erupted in a Manhattan nightclub. In 2003, a former business partner sued Combs, “alleging that in 1996 his former partner threatened him – with a baseball bat in hand – into signing over his shares of Bad Boy Entertainment." James Bennet – who was forced to resign as editor of the New York Times editorial page in 2020 after running Sen. Tom Cotton's op-ed calling for troops in response to that year's George Floyd riots – has written a scathing, 17,000-word take-down of his former employer. Bennet writes that the paper’s publisher, A.G. Sulzberger, supported his decision to run the piece before demanding his resignation in a cave-in to protesting Times employees. He goes on to describe larger problems with the paper that will be familiar to conservatives. He writes: -
The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether. -
The Times was slow to break it to its readers that there was less to Trump's ties to Russia than they were hoping, and more to Hunter Biden's laptop, that Trump might be right that covid came from a Chinese lab. -
I think many Times staff have little idea how closed their world has become, or how far they are from fulfilling their compact with readers to show the world 'without fear or favor.' And sometimes the bias was explicit: one newsroom editor told me that, because I was publishing more conservatives, he felt he needed to push his own department further to the left.
Bennet concludes that the deeper problem is that the Times appears to have lost faith in the country. “Maybe if the Times would put more trust again in the intelligence and decency of Americans, more Americans would again trust the Times. Journalism, like democracy, works best when people refuse to surrender to fear.” |
