RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
Feb. 9 to Feb. 15, 2020 A month before the 2016 presidential election, the FBI met Christopher Steele in Rome and apparently unlawfully shared with the foreign opposition researcher some of the bureau's most closely held secrets, Eric Felten reports for RealClearInvestigations. This unpublicized news is found deep in the recent Justice Department Inspector General's report on abuses of federal surveillance powers. Felten reports: - Steele, the ex-British spy who compiled the Clinton-commissioned Trump-Russia dossier, was promised $15,000 to attend the meeting so the FBI could lock up his cooperation in its Crossfire Hurricane probe.
- The top-secret intel-sharing with Steele occurred Oct. 3, 2016, just weeks before the bureau cut off ties with him for leaking his own research to the media.
- The IG report discloses that FBI agents knew Steele worked for Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, which was paying Steele to dig up dirt on Donald Trump for the Hillary Clinton campaign.
- Steele told the FBI that the "candidate" - Clinton herself - knew about Steele's work.
- Shortly after the Rome meeting, Steele shared with Simpson what he learned.
- Details included Australia's tip about Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos, the FBI's stated predicate for Crossfire Hurricane.
- Yet still today, the FBI won't identify this "Friendly Foreign Government" by name - a reflection of the high secrecy cloaking such information freely given to Steele.
- Previous reports about the meeting have focused on what Steele gave the FBI, not what the FBI gave the non-American private citizen.
- The FBI's disclosures to Steele - found in passages and footnotes deep in Horowitz's report - were violations of laws governing the handling of classified material, both the Inspector General and outside experts agree.
- "Sharing classified information with anyone not authorized to receive it is a crime," says an attorney specializing in national security law. "But sharing classified information with a non-U.S. citizen not authorized to receive it is also the very definition of harm to national security."
Read Full Article Guess who's coming to interrupt dinner? Increasingly, it's a robocaller from a world away, looking to eat your lunch, financial writer John F. Wasik reports for RealClearInvestigations. Robocalls are up a whopping 92% since 2017, driven by a low-cost technology arms race that fraudsters are winning hands down. Wasik reports: - About 44% of the estimated 59 billion robocalls made last year - about 26 billion - were placed by scammers, according to the Robocall Index, a national database.
- Behind the explosion of robocalls is the advance of ever-cheaper Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP ) technology and super-fast computers.
- Increasingly common is "spoofing," the ruse of displaying caller IDs that appear to be local to trick people into answering calls -- even if they come from another continent.
- What's old is new again: Many robocalls use timeworn get-rich teases or scare tactics to get people to volunteer personal financial info, and open the door to a swindle.
- While the dialing and initial contact are usually executed by a computer, real people do the actual pitching and "hooking."
- Official estimates peg the cost of these scams at more than $400 million in 2018 - though the real number is certainly much higher.
- Consumers can report the calls, but good luck with that. It's unlikely there will be much enforcement due to the sheer number of them.
Anyone can set up an Internet-based autodialing system with relatively cheap autodialing software and services, ranging from $30 to $170 a month. You too can become a robocaller! Read Full Article The impeachment of President Trump failed because it was based on assumptions without proof that Trump had a corrupt personal motive in pressuring Ukraine "to take actions to help the president's 2020 reelection bid," Paul Sperry writes in RealClearInvestigations. In a post-mortem on Trump's Senate acquittal last week, the RCI reporter writes in his latest Paul Sperry's Notebook that: - The core "abuse of power" charge against Trump resulted from a cascade of speculation about the July 25 Trump-Ukraine phone call.
- Democrats' speculation about a Trump 2020 motive to investigate the Bidens was built on the so-called NSC whistleblower's unfounded presumption of the same; and that was built on phone-call witness Alexander Vindman's unfounded presumption of the same.
- Yet the record of the call between Trump and Ukraine's president shows the two leaders never talked about 2020.
- And no corroboration for this core whistleblower allegation emerged in more than 100 hours of deposition testimony from 17 witnesses and dozens of subpoenas for documents.
- Even House witnesses openly hostile to Trump, like envoy Fiona Hill and Vindman himself, conceded that the president may have had solid grounds for asking Ukraine to look into the Bidens in probing corruption.
- But Democrat prosecutors buried those inconvenient parts of their testimony, and major Washington media overlooked them.
Read Full Article The Election Investigations: Top Articles Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Intel 'Coup of Century': CIA Rigged Gear to Spy on Allies, Foes
Washington Post
At a time when stories about foreign governments hacking U.S. governments and corporations are common, here's a little good news: A Swiss company long trusted by countries around the world to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret was owned by the CIA. The firm, Crypto AG -- which got its first break with a contract to build code-making machines for U.S. troops during World War II -- made millions selling equipment to more than 120 countries well into the 21st century. Its clients included Iran, military juntas in Latin America, nuclear rivals India and Pakistan, and even the Vatican. Working with West German intelligence, the CIA rigged the company's devices so they could easily break the codes that countries used to send encrypted messages. "It was the intelligence coup of the century," the CIA report concludes. "Foreign governments were paying good money to the U.S. and West Germany for the privilege of having their most secret communications read by at least two (and possibly as many as five or six) foreign countries." Zimbabwe: Over Half of Women Allege Sextortion
The Guardian
More than 57% of Zimbabwean women say they were forced to offer sexual favors in exchange for jobs, medical care and even placements at schools for their children. The study also found that about 45% of women reported requests for sexual favors to access a service and 15% had used sex to get employment. The report, entitled "Gender and Corruption," found women were increasingly vulnerable to sexual abuse in the deteriorating Zimbabwean economy. The Kids Armed to Defend a Mexican Village From Drug Cartels
Vice
A self-defense group in Mexico's southwestern state of Guerrero, which sits at the heart of Mexico's heroin trade, is increasingly turning to an unlikely group for protection: children. The militia, known as CRAC-PF, which emerged in 2014 in place of local police who were considered corrupt, is training boys, some as young as 6, to serve as the last line of defense should a cartel strike the community, as it has others. Government officials and human rights groups accuse the militia of exploitation. But Bernardino Sánchez Luna, who founded the group, says: "We are preparing the children because if they lose their parents, who is going to defend them? What's clear is that the government is not going to defend us and much less the human rights advocates who criticize us." The Hidden Trauma of Short Stays in Foster Care
Marshall Project
When most Americans think of foster care, they think of children waiting years in homes or institutions to return to their families or to be placed for adoption. But every year, an average of nearly 17,000 children are removed from their families' custody and placed in foster care only briefly; they are reunited with their families within 10 days, according to a Marshall Project analysis of federal Department of Health and Human Services records dating back a decade. Although short stays in foster care may seem too fleeting to matter, they often inflict lasting damage, much like that experienced by children separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. Experts and studies on child development say that the moment when a child is taken from parents is the source of lifelong trauma, regardless of how long the separation lasts. "Short stays," as they are called by child-welfare experts, appear to happen most often in high-poverty areas where law enforcement officials are the only group authorized by state law to remove children without a court order. Tenants Face Eviction for Smoking
Washington Post
Smoking bans have become more widespread in recent years, largely because they are considered a boon to public health. In January, for example, U-Haul announced that it would no longer hire smokers, joining a growing list of companies. Communities, including Montgomery County, Maryland, have passed bills prohibiting smoking at all outdoor areas where food is served, including patios, decks and porches. This article focuses on the nationwide smoking ban at all government-subsidized housing, implemented by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2018. It allows authorities to evict tenants after three smoking violations. Advocates warn that enforcing these bans too aggressively - such as with the threat of eviction - could add to the hardship of vulnerable communities that have disproportionately higher rates of nicotine addiction, including people who live under the poverty line, people with mental illnesses and the elderly. Disrepair and Death in a Southern California Rental Empire
LAist
Mike Nijjar's 12,000-square-foot hillside mansion, dubbed "Villa Bellefontaine," sits in a gated community outside of Los Angeles. It boasts six bedrooms, nine bathrooms, a waterfall, a tennis court, a reflecting pool, a screening room and a vineyard. This article reports that he bought the place through money he's earned as one of California's biggest slumlords, controlling an estimated 16,000 units, many of which are plagued by roaches, maggots and mold and other problems tenants say he won't fix. "Tens of thousands of California's poorest tenants - many just a step away from homelessness - have endured conditions in housing run by PAMA Management, which can be dirty, dilapidated and even deadly. That's according to code enforcement documents, lawsuits and public data, as well as interviews with plaintiffs' attorneys, fair-housing advocates, tenants and ex-employees." The Secret Database of Jehovah's Witness Child Abusers
Daily Beast
The Jehovah's Witnesses, a religious group comprising nearly 11,000 congregations in the U.S. alone, is famous for keeping very close tabs on its members - including information regarding sexual abuse. Since 1997, this article reports, church elders have been required to inform leadership about the type and frequency of abuse, the personal information of the perpetrator, and how both victim and accused were perceived within the congregation. The elders were told not to report the incidents to law enforcement or their congregations. The group has resisted efforts of the court to hand over an archive of documents believed to include the names and locations of every known child abuser within their American membership. Astros' Cheating Was an Open Secret Inside Baseball
Washington Post
The public may have been shocked to learn in November that the Houston Astros had used high-tech gizmos and trash can lids to steal and relay the opposing team's pitches to their hitters - but it was in an open secret in baseball. This article reports that people at all levels throughout the sport — players, clubhouse staff, scouts and executives — knew the Astros had an extra edge, including when they won the World Series in 2017. "The whole industry knows they've been cheating their a---- off for three or four years," said an executive from a team that faced the Astros in the playoffs during that span. "Everybody knew it." The question now is why Major League Baseball didn't address the issue until a whistleblower revealed the scheme. |
