RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
Jan. 19 to Jan. 25, 2020

Featured Investigation
Whistleblower and Ally Were Overheard
In 2017 Discussing Trump's Removal

Barely two weeks after Donald Trump took office, Eric Ciaramella - the CIA analyst described as the "whistleblower" behind the President's current impeachment - was overheard in the White House discussing with another staffer how to "take out," or remove, Trump from office, Paul Sperry reports for RealClearInvestigations.

• Sources tell Sperry the staffer Ciaramella was overheard speaking to was Sean Misko. He left the White House last summer to join House impeachment manager Adam Schiff's committee, where he offered "guidance" to the whistleblower.
• Former co-workers said they overheard Ciaramella and Misko, friends held over from the Obama administration, quietly discussing how to "take out" the new president - using that phrase.
• The conversation occurred as the two sat together while attending a staff-wide National Security Council meeting called by then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
• Accustomed to President Obama's globalist approach, the 30-something pair opposed Trump and Flynn's "America First" vision.
• The dissing episode starts the Trump-Ukraine timeline years earlier than previously known, overlapping the Trump-Russia probe.
• Also, some of the same intelligence community figures surface in both the Russia and Ukraine affairs - Flynn for one, but also anti-Trump CIA figures.
• More than two years later, Ciaramella was tipped off about Trump's infamous July 25 conversation with Ukraine's president by Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, who openly expressed disdain for the president.
• The whistleblower could face a perjury rap for failing to report his prior contacts with Schiff's office to the inspector general who fielded his complaint.
• GOP leaders also are investigating that inspector general, Michael Atkinson, who they suspect was in on a scheme by Schiff and his staff to orchestrate impeachment.

Read Full Article

No Slam 'Debunk': Analyzing the Dems'
Repetitive Impeachment Text

A careful reading of the Democratic House majority's impeachment report illustrates the ways its authors - not unlike those who wrote the Mueller report - looked to bulk up thin allegations by repeating them over and over again. Eric Felten marshals the evidence in a textual analysis for RCI:

• "Debunked" appears 22 times in the report; "discredited" 15 times; "baseless" 16 times and "conspiracy" 56 times. Almost all the usages are by Democrats looking to dismiss President Trump's claims.
• The report says Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani was hoping to chase down not just claims about the Bidens but "discredited claims about the Bidens."
• Yet the report provides no evidence that debunks or discredits the Politico reporting cited by Trump defenders as evidence for their claims.
• The impeachment report's only support for "discredited allegations" against former Vice President Joe Biden amounts to an American envoy's view that Biden couldn't have acted corruptly because he's "a man of integrity" - i.e., a good guy.
• Ukrainian ex-prosecutor Yuri Lutsenko is cited as a truth-teller about the Bidens because he "has since recanted and stated that there is no evidence of wrongdoing by Vice President Biden or his son."
• Yet elsewhere in the impeachment report, Lutsenko is declared unreliable.

The Trump Investigations: Top Articles

Justice Dept. Admits 2 Carter Page Spy Warrants Were Not Valid, Associated Press
Lev Parnas Paid His Way Into Donald Trump's Orbit, Wall Street Journal
The #MAGA Lawyer Behind Flynn's Legal Strategy, Politico Magazine
More Devious Hackers Are Coming for the 2020 Election, Rolling Stone

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

A Tale of Two Whistleblowers One Protected, One Not
Susan Crabtree, RealClearPolitics
A Trump political appointee who reported allegations of rampant government waste, fraud and abuse has experienced none of the protections granted the whistleblower who filed the Ukrainian aid complaint against President Trump, which has culminated in Trump's Senate impeachment trial. As Susan Crabtree reports for RealClearPolitics:

Last summer and into the fall, the whistleblower who reported, second-hand, Trump's phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was shrouded in protections from the intelligence community's inspector general - protections touted by Democrats on Capitol Hill as sacrosanct. During those same months, Mark Moyar, who, over the course of several months had reported multiple instances of wrongdoing at the U.S. Agency for International Development, had the opposite experience with his inspector general, who was appointed by President Obama and confirmed in 2015. In fact, the USAID inspector general, Ann Calvaresi Barr, and top deputies in the office denied Moyar's due process rights after USAID officials suspended (and threatened to revoke) his security clearance, and he was forced to resign, according to several government officials familiar with the case and several government documents.

Some Texas Prisoners Spend Decades in Solitary
Texas Observer
Robert Uvalle went into solitary confinement in 1993, when he was 21 years old. Now, at 47, he's been in solitary for 26 years - more than half his life. About five years in, Uvalle says, he stopped getting medication for his mental illness, started hallucinating, and then struggled to keep himself and his cell clean. He is not alone. Texas holds more prisoners in long-term solitary confinement than every other state and the federal prison system combined - at last count 4,400 of its 145,000 prisoners live isolated in a small cell for at least 22 hours every day. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice reports that about 1,300 Texas prisoners had been in isolation for six years or longer. More than 680 had been in solitary between six and 10 years, 450 between 10 and 20 years, and 129 between 20 and 30 years. Eighteen Texas prisoners have been in solitary for more than 30 years - living in isolation since at least 1990, when George H. W. Bush was still president.

Secret History of the 9/11 Investigation
ProPublica/New York Times
The families of some killed on 9/11 need government documents to pursue lawsuits against Saudi Arabia for alleged complicity in the attacks. Last year, President Trump became the first American leader to hand over some classified information to the families - specifically the name of a Saudi diplomat who was linked to the 9/11 plot in an FBI report years earlier. But the Justice Department has resisted efforts to provide more information that might damage an American ally. This article documents the FBI's investigation into Saudi links - beginning with the discovery that two of the hijackers were renting a room in San Diego from an FBI informant - as well as government efforts to suppress its findings.

Hospitals Give Tech Giants Access to Detailed Medical Records
Wall Street Journal
Hospitals have granted Microsoft, IBM and Amazon the ability to access identifiable patient information under deals to crunch millions of health records, the latest examples of hospitals' growing influence in the data economy. This breadth of access wasn't always spelled out by hospitals and tech giants when the deals were struck. The scope of data sharing in these and other recently reported agreements reveals a powerful new role that hospitals play -- as brokers to technology companies racing into the $3 trillion health-care sector. Rapid digitization of health records in recent years and privacy laws enabling companies to swap patient data have positioned hospitals as a primary arbiter of how such sensitive data is shared.

Secretive Facial ID Tool Spreads to 600+ Police Agencies
New York Times
Until now, technology that readily identifies everyone based on his or her face has been taboo because of the radical erosion of privacy it represents. Tech companies capable of releasing such a tool have refrained from doing so. But a tiny company, Clearview AI, has done just that with its groundbreaking facial recognition app that allows users to take a picture of a person, upload it and then get to see public photos of that person, along with links to where those photos appeared. The system - whose backbone is a database of more than three billion images that Clearview claims to have scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo and millions of other websites - goes far beyond anything ever constructed by the United States government or Silicon Valley giants. Without public scrutiny, more than 600 federal and state law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year, according to the company. A separate article from Wired tells the story of Woodrow Wilson Bledsoe , one of the pioneers of facial recognition software during the 1950s and 60s.

Bezos Phone 'Hacked by Saudi Crown Prince'
Guardian
Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com billionaire who also owns the Washington Post, had his mobile phone "hacked" in 2018 after receiving a WhatsApp message that had apparently been sent from the personal account of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, sources have told the Guardian. The encrypted message from the number used by Mohammed bin Salman is believed to have included a malicious file that infiltrated the phone of the world's richest man. Large amounts of data were exfiltrated from Bezos's phone within hours. The disclosure is likely to raise difficult questions for the kingdom about the circumstances around how the National Enquirer came to publish intimate details about Bezos's private life - including text messages - nine months later. It may also lead to renewed scrutiny about what the crown prince and his inner circle were doing in the months prior to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post contributor who was killed in October 2018 - five months after the alleged "hack" of the newspaper's owner.

The New Generation of Self-Created Utopias
New York Times
There have always been two mirror-image versions of the American dream - the famous one where people pursue happiness in mainstream society and another where they retreat into communes and utopian communities. This article reports that the number of "intentional communities" nearly doubled between 2010 and 2016 to roughly 1,200. Although the number of people living in these communities is hard to pin down - the demographic is often deliberately off the grid - the Foundation for Intentional Community estimates that there are currently around 100,000 individuals residing in them. While these communities are not all identical - some are self-sustaining communes, others include people who have jobs outside the community - almost all their members aim to live simpler, more sustainable lives reflecting concerns about climate change and capitalism. They seem distinct from the Christians described in a recent Atlantic article who are also withdrawing from modern life.

Accused in #MeToo, Dancer Leaps to 'West Side' Glory
Guardian
In 2018 Alexandra Waterbury was looking at her boyfriend's phone and found that he had sent nude photos of her to his friend, Amar Ramasar, then a principal dancer with the City Ballet in New York. She also says Ramasar had shared with her boyfriend intimate pictures of a female City Ballet corps member along with texts that disparaged women. Ramasar publicly claimed that the messages "were private and sent on personal time outside of work" and that the photos he possessed of a female City Ballet dancer were of a "consenting adult." Nevertheless, the City Ballet fired him. Ramasar is now one of the stars of a revival of "West Side Story" on Broadway, and this article quotes Waterbury and others who feel he should never be able to work again. Waterbury: "The longer he's there, the longer he's getting paid. The longer he's getting a good reputation. The longer he's kind of just, like, making all of this disappear."

98.6 Degrees Isn't Body-Temp Average Any More
Wall Street Journal
People can sure be cold, can't they? Actually they're even colder now, science says. About 150 years ago a German physician analyzed a million body temperatures from 25,000 patients to conclude that the normal human temperature is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. A new Stanford study argues that the number was correct at the time but is no longer accurate because the human body has changed. Today, the reserachers say, the average normal human-body temperature is closer to 97.5 degrees Fahrenheit. Body temperature is a crude proxy for metabolic rate, and if it has fallen, it could offer a clue about other physiological changes that have occurred over time. "People are taller, fatter and live longer, and we don't really understand why all those things have happened," said Julie Parsonnet, who specializes in infectious diseases at Stanford and is senior author of the paper. "Temperature is linked to all those things. The question is which is driving the others."