RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
April 5 to April 11

Featured Investigation:
Westward No: A Land-Office Business
in Taming DC Bureaucrats

Top staff at the Bureau of Land Management have been told by the Trump administration to pack up and head west -- but most aren't climbing aboard the wagon train, Vince Bielski reports for RealClearInvestigations. Bielski reports:

• The relocation to new headquarters in Grand Junction, Colo., and other western offices is the Trump administration's big strike against the federal bureaucracy.
• It's meant to make bureaucrats more accountable to the drillers, cattle ranchers, hunters and hikers who use America's public lands.
• But only 80 of 174 senior managers and scientific staff have agreed to move west.
• "We view it as a dismantling of the organization and turning major decisions on public lands over to political people who have agendas," says a retired senior manager.
• Republican Colorado Senator Cory Gardner: "I find it offensive and elitist that somebody would refuse to live on the land they regulate."
• A new oil gusher from deregulation is raising concerns about the impact on some of the country's spectacular landscapes and wildlife.
• William Perry Pendley, BLM's acting chief, calls himself a "Sagebrush Rebel" after the 1970's challenging the government's tightening grip on public lands.
• Americans have a lot riding on the outcome. BLM manages 245 million acres - 10% of the U.S. land mass -- primarily in 12 Western states.

Coronavirus Investigations: Top Articles
How Woodrow Wilson Let Flu Deaths
Run Viral in the War

Woodrow Wilson, viewed by many as among the most capable American leaders for his forceful use of federal power, did worse than nothing to fight the 1918 flu pandemic, leading scholars of the progressive President say: He rushed infected troops on virulent overseas transports in a push to finish World War I -- only to spread disease and death among the ranks in Europe and undermine the Allied war effort.

Eric Felten reports the historians' consensus for RealClearInvestigations:

• "Frankly, I don't think Wilson gave much attention to the flu," says the dean of Wilson scholars, John M. Cooper of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
• With the Germans back on their heels, Wilson's focus was keeping the pressure on by racing American soldiers to the battlefields of Europe - even if it killed them.
• Cooper: "Those troop ships were even worse than today's cruise ships ..."
• There's no doubt Wilson was aware of what was happening. But he sided with his army chief of staff, who told him every soldier who died of flu "just as surely played his part as his comrade who died in France."
• Yet for every flu-stricken doughboy who showed up in France, others had to care for him. That sapped the strength of American forces.
• Some 16,000 Americans in uniform died of disease in Europe, on top of the 30,000 who succumbed in stateside training camps.
• Back home, the president didn't do any better by civilians than he did by the troops. Some 600,000 American civilians died in the pandemic.
• The great advocate for public rhetoric in leadership said not a word about the rampant deaths in major American cities.

Stuck Home? How to Handle
Dialing for Dollars With Swindlers

The IRS's pandemic-forced filing extension not only gives taxpayers until mid-July to pay Uncle Sam; it also gives scammers an extra three months of prime-time flimflammery, John F. Wasik warns in RealClearInvestigations.

Wasik reports that thieves are not taking a break even if, given the coronavirus, tax preparation is probably the least of most people's worries now:

• Stay-at-home orders provide a perfect opportunity for crooks: The heightened anxiety surrounding the crisis softens up potential victims.
• In a common scenario, robocallers claim they are with the IRS and threaten to sue or arrest the target over unpaid tax bills.
• Fraudsters are looking for quick cash or vital personal financial information.
• Scammers are already targeting recipients of coronavirus stimulus checks.

More Coronavirus Investigations

Haywire Immune Response Eyed in Virus Deaths, Wall Street Journal
Ventilators Overused and May Harm Some, Doctors Say, STAT
How NYC's Ventilator Stockpile Ended Up on the Auction Block, ProPublica
Coronavirus Was Slow to Spread to Rural America. Not Anymore. NY Times
As Virus Fears Grow, Doctors and Nurses Face Abuse Abroad, Washington Post
Cancer Surgeries, Organ Transplants Delayed Over COVID, ProPubica
Coronavirus Infects, Kills Blacks at a High Rate, Washington Post
430,000 Traveled From China to U.S. Since Virus Emerged, New York Times
U.S. Eyes Second Coronavirus Outbreak in China, Daily Beast
Want a Virus Disaster Loan Fast? Easy, If You're in California, Bloomberg
The Quest for a Pandemic Pill, New Yorker

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

Russia Case Footnotes to Be Declassified
Just the News
U.S. intelligence has decided to declassify several redacted footnotes from a recent Justice Department report that will expose more problems with the FBI's investigation into President Trump's campaign -- including that agents had evidence their main informant may have been the victim of Russian disinformation. The footnotes are likely to raise new concerns that the FBI ignored flashing red warning signals about the informant Christopher Steele and gave a false picture in briefing materials supplied to Congress. In a separate article, CBS News reports that in late October 2016, less than two weeks before the presidential election, junior Trujmp adviser George Papadopoulos denied to an FBI confidential source that the campaign - or Russia on its own - was involved the hack of the Democratic National Committee's email system, calling the idea "illegal." The FBI failed to include his denial in subsequent requests for warrants to spy on Americans.

Navy Secretary's Guam Trip to Blast Carrier Captain Cost $243K
USA Today
Speak loudly and carry a big bill, to the taxpayers. Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly's trip last weekend to address sailors aboard the coronavirus-stricken carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt cost more than $243,000 for the 35-hour round trip on a Gulfstream 550. That helped underwrite the Navy boss's tone-deaf, profanity-laced speech to the sailors blasting their captain, Brett Crozier. The captain got himself fired by Modly, but endeared himself to his crew, by flouting operational security in a wide public appeal for aid on his ship's behalf. Besides the cost of the Gulfstream at $6,946.19 per hour, the trip came at the cost of a coronavirus quarantine for Modly -- and his job.

Hate Store: Amazon's Haven for White Supremacists
ProPublica/Atlantic
Free speech is not cost-free. Our ability to say and think what we please means others can do the same, even when their ideas are considered repugnant by the vast majority of citizens. That basic American principle has come under strong attack in recent years as forces try to impose censorship on social media and other high-tech platforms. This article appears to target Kindle Direct Publishing, Amazon's self-publishing arm. Since its founding a decade ago, KDP has helped authors reach audiences that would have been previously unimaginable. Some of those authors are white supremacists and neo-Nazis, whose books include "Anschluss: The Politics of Vesica Piscis," a polemic that praises the "grossly underappreciated" massacre of 77 people by the Norwegian neo-Nazi Anders Breivik in 2011; and "The White Rabbit Handbook," a manifesto linked to an Illinois-based militia group facing federal hate-crime charges for firebombing a mosque. So far Amazon is embracing traditional views of free speech. "As a bookseller, we believe that providing access to the written word is important," an Amazon spokesperson said. "That includes books that some may find objectionable."

Inside Kim Kardashian's Prison-Reform Machine
New York Times
America is full of second acts - but this one is a doozy. Over the past two years, reality TV star Kim Kardashian West has become a force in the world of criminal justice reform. She has successfully lobbied President Trump, spent time on the phone with governors and legislators, written letters in support of clemency petitions and paid legal bills for people trying to get out of prison. She has a documentary coming out Sunday on Oxygen, "Kim Kardashian West: The Justice Project," in which she supports the early release of four people who were convicted on charges including murder. The 39-year-old is even studying to become a lawyer, taking part in an apprenticeship program that requires 18 hours of legal work each week. She writes memos or motions, reads transcripts and does legal research for a criminal justice reform group called #Cut50. She plans to take the first-year law students' examination — the "baby bar" — this year.

The Russian Plot to Take Over Hollywood
Medium
During World War II the Soviet Union's top spy in America hatched a plan to use America's entertainment industry as a cover for communist spying. The plan would start with a record company owned by a Russian-American music named Boris Morros and money from two American reds, Martha Dodd and Alfred Stern. But, this long article recounts, Morros had other ideas, and capitalist dreams: "With his corporate coffers overflowing, his original business plan suddenly seemed too modest. The Sterns' investment valued the Boris Morros Music Company at north of a half million dollars — this for a firm he'd started with no more than six grand! With that kind of capital, he could do more than issue sheet music. He could take on Columbia, Decca, RCA Victor. He could build a record label. … American Recording Artists, or ARA Records, was born."

13 Homes: Divorce Styles of the Rich and Acrimonious
Wall Street Journal
Marie Borsage's divorce from her billionaire husband is not going as well as she had hoped. Her 80-year-old husband, Ed, who left her for his 20-something Russian mistress, is blocking her access to their $45 million flat in London as well as roughly a dozen other luxury homes the couple acquired during their marriage, including a private island in the Bahamas and mansions in Aspen and Houston. This article reports that the trusts and overseas accounts wealthy people have long used to reduce their tax burden and to buy homes anonymously are sometimes used by one spouse in a divorce to improperly keep assets out of the other's grasp. Another high-profile example is the divorce of Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev and his then-wife Elena Rybolovleva. In 2013, Ms. Rybolovleva filed a lawsuit alleging that her husband used trusts to purchase real estate, including an $88 million Manhattan condo and $23 million of real estate in Hawaii, to protect money that she could potentially win in their divorce. In 2014, he was ordered to pay his wife roughly $4.5 billion in what was then billed as the world's most expensive divorce, though the amount was later reduced to roughly $600 million.