RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
December 18 to December 24, 2022 In RealClearInvestigations, Paul Sperry shows that new revelations about the FBI aren't emerging just from Twitter: He presents source documents illustrating ways the bureau repeatedly parroted the discredited Steele dossier verbatim in its efforts to win court approval to spy on the Trump campaign. Sperry reports: -
They did so without putting key phrases like “a well-developed conspiracy” in quotations or even attributing them to the dossier, which they knew was political opposition research underwritten by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. -
The FBI portrayed all of the unverified dossier rumors cited in the affidavits as sound “intelligence.” -
It swore that “the FBI has learned” that Trump campaign adviser Carter Page had secretly met with sanctioned Kremlin officials in Moscow, even though the allegation came from Steele’s D.C.-based collector, Igor Danchenko. -
Danchenko admitted to the FBI in January 2017 that his input was just “hearsay” gathered from “conversation with friends over beer.” -
Because all the underlying information was false, what the FBI told the court that it “assesses” to be true about a Trump-Russia conspiracy turned out to be outrageously false as well.
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In short, the FBI fabricated conclusions from fabrications and turned them into sworn oaths before the powerful Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. -
“Heads should roll,” said an FBI veteran.
Biden, Trump and the Beltway Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is helping fund the salaries of more than two dozen officials in the Biden administration under the auspices of an outside group, the Federation of American Scientists. Schmidt has become one of the United States’ most influential advocates for federal research and investment in artificial intelligence, even as privacy advocates call for greater regulation. While the Biden administration denies that Schmidt or the FAS fellows program he helps fund exert any influence on policy ... ... a Politico investigation found that members of the administration are well aware that a significant amount of the money for the salaries of FAS’s fellows comes from Schmidt’s research and investment firm, Schmidt Futures, and that the organization was critical to the program to fund administration jobs. In fact, the influence of Schmidt Futures at FAS is such that they are sometimes conflated. … “Schmidt is clearly trying to influence AI policy to a disproportionate degree of any person I can think of,” said Alex Engler, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in AI policy. “We’ve seen a dramatic increase in investment toward advancing AI capacity in government and not much in limiting its harmful use.” The Chinese are exacting a high price for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan in August: They have cut off all talks over limiting the flow of the chemicals made to use the deadly synthetic opioid fentanyl. China is the prime source of the building-block chemicals Mexican cartels use to manufacture the drug, which has led to record numbers of overdose deaths in the United States. In 2018, the Trump administration’s efforts to limit the flow of illicit fentanyl was a successful point of collaboration in a tense U.S.-China relationship. The Wall Street Journal reports: Since then, the U.S. has adopted a tougher posture toward China, while China has also grown more assertive about defending its interests. As a consequence … conversations about fentanyl between China and officials from the Drug Enforcement Administration and State Department have ceased, according to Biden administration officials and Rep. David Trone, a Maryland Democrat who was recently co-chair of a federal commission on opioid trafficking. Mr. Trone said he discussed the fentanyl trade with China’s ambassador to the U.S. in March and May, and with Chinese security officials in a virtual meeting in July. U.S. officials said China cut off all talks over fentanyl after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s August visit to the contested island of Taiwan, which angered China. Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway Russian invasion plans obtained by The New York Times show that the military expected to sprint hundreds of miles across Ukraine and triumph within days. Officers were told to pack their dress uniforms and medals in anticipation of military parades in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. But instead of that resounding victory, with tens of thousands of his troops killed and parts of his army in shambles after nearly 10 months of war, Vladimir Putin faces something else entirely: his nation’s greatest human and strategic calamity since the collapse of the Soviet Union. This article asks: How could one of the world’s most powerful militaries have faltered so badly against its much smaller, weaker rival? To find answers, the Times says it drew on hundreds of Russian government emails, documents, invasion plans, military ledgers and propaganda directives, as well as Russian phone calls from the battlefield, and interviews with dozens of soldiers, senior officials and Putin confidants who have known him for decades. The newspaper reports: -
Putin spiraled into self-aggrandizement and anti-Western zeal, associates say, leading him to make the fateful decision to invade Ukraine in near total isolation, without consulting experts who saw the war as pure folly. -
The Russian military, despite Western assumptions about its prowess, was severely compromised, gutted by years of theft. -
Once the invasion began, Russia squandered its dominance over Ukraine through a parade of blunders. It relied on old maps and bad intelligence to fire its missiles, leaving Ukrainian air defenses surprisingly intact, ready to defend the country. Russian soldiers, many shocked they were going to war, used their cellphones to call home, allowing the Ukrainians to track them and pick them off in large numbers. -
Stretched thin by its grand ambitions, Russia seized more territory than it could defend, leaving thousands of square miles in the hands of skeleton crews of underfed, undertrained and poorly equipped fighters.
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Putin divided his war into fiefs, leaving no one powerful enough to challenge him. Many of his fighters are commanded by people who are not even part of the military, like his former bodyguard, the leader of Chechnya and a mercenary boss who has provided catering for Kremlin events.
This Christmas, the spirit of the unreformed Scrooge lives on in Alabama where, this article reports, at least four least four major suppliers of Hyundai Motor Co and sister Kia Corp have employed the labor of undocumented children at their factories in recent years. This Reuters investigation found that: At a plant owned by Hwashin America Corp, a supplier to the two car brands in the south Alabama town of Greenville, a 14-year-old Guatemalan girl worked this May assembling auto body components, according to interviews with her father and law enforcement officials. At plants owned by Korean auto-parts maker Ajin Industrial Co, in the east Alabama town of Cusseta, a former production engineer told Reuters he worked with at least 10 minors. And six other ex-employees of Ajin said they, too, worked alongside multiple underage laborers. Alabama and U.S. law restrict factory work for people under age 16, and all workers under 18 are forbidden from many hazardous jobs in auto plants, where metal presses, cutting machines and speeding forklifts can endanger life and limb. This article reports that state and federal agencies are probing whether kids have worked at as many as a half dozen additional manufacturers throughout the automakers’ supply chain in the state. In a separate article, the Washington Free Beacon reports that the Biden administration is handing over many unaccompanied children who cross the border to adults in the United States without any vetting. “Those background checks would verify, among other things, that alien children are not given to guardians who are on the sex offender registry.” A decades-old federal program that offered big drug discounts to a small number of hospitals to help low-income patients now benefits some of the most successful nonprofit health systems in the U.S. The Journal reports: One participant is the Cleveland Clinic’s flagship hospital, which reported $1.35 billion in net income last year. The hospital doesn’t admit enough Medicaid and low-income Medicare patients to qualify for low-cost drugs under the program’s original requirements. But a quirk in federal law allowed the hospital to qualify as a “rural referral center,” despite its location near the center of Cleveland. Despite the benefits, the program hasn’t resulted in new drug discounts for low-income Cleveland Clinic patients, nor has it caused the hospital to increase the financial assistance it offers to those who can’t afford care. The charity care the main hospital writes off represents less than 2% of its patient revenue, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of hospital Medicare filings. In the nearly half-trillion-dollar digital ad industry, Google sets the rules of the road. More than any other company, Google determines the online ads we see, what they cost and who gets paid for them. Google is also, this article reports, the only major ad platform that hides the vast majority of its ad-selling partners, which means it does not disclose all the websites and apps where it places ads or the people and companies behind them. Quote: ProPublica spent months trying to crack open Google’s black box ad business. We wrote thousands of lines of code to scan more than 7 million website domains looking for Google ad activity, sourced and analyzed data on millions more domains from half a dozen data partners, and spoke to some of the most knowledgeable experts about Google’s display ad business. … Alongside reputable publishers and popular games and online tools, we uncovered scores of previously unreported peddlers of pirated content, porn and fake audiences that take advantage of Google’s lax oversight to rake in revenue. … After the U.S . sanctioned several Russian websites following the invasion of Ukraine, ad tech researcher Krzysztof Franaszek showed that two months later, Google continued to allow many of them to earn money from ads. Coronavirus Investigations From the Annals of Is Anyone Surprised? comes this: During the pandemic’s bewildering early days, millions worldwide trusted government officials who said they needed confidential data for new tech tools that could help stop the spread of the coronavirus. In return, governments got a firehose of individuals’ private health details, photographs that captured their facial measurements, and their home addresses. Quote: Now, from Beijing to Jerusalem to Hyderabad, India, and Perth, Australia, The Associated Press has found that authorities used these technologies and data to halt travel for activists and ordinary people, harass marginalized communities and link people’s health information to other surveillance and law enforcement tools. In some cases, data was shared with spy agencies. The issue has taken on fresh urgency almost three years into the pandemic as China’s ultra-strict zero-COVID policies recently ignited the sharpest public rebuke of the country’s authoritarian leadership since the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. |
