RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
May 3 to May 9

Featured Investigation:
New Red Flags Emerging From
FBI's Handling of Flynn Case

The Justice Department's closing of its criminal case against President Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn this week came as new red flags emerged from recently released documents revealing the FBI's behavior in the matter, Mark Hemingway reports for RealClearInvestigations.

Former FBI agents and federal prosecutors tell Hemingway that the documents show suspiciously irregular handling and editing of Flynn's FD-302 form, the official record used as evidence against Flynn.

Hemingway reports:

• The FBI took three weeks, not the requisite five days, to deliberate on and compose Flynn's 302 form.
• Peter Strzok, the senior agent who interviewed Flynn, took an unusual role in producing the 302, which would normally be the job of the subordinate agent present, Joe Pientka.
• In one text to his FBI lover Lisa Page, Strzok tells her he is heavily editing Pientka's 302 form to the point he's "trying not to completely re-write" it.
• Page, who did not attend the interview, reviewed the 302 form and made editing suggestions. FBI personnel not present at interviews aren't supposed to edit 302s.
• During the process, Page texted Strzok, "Is Andy good with the 302?" - presumably referring to FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe.
• Former FBI special agent Thomas Baker said it was "not normal" and "suspicious" that it took three weeks for Pientka's 302 form to be filed.
• Baker: "We never changed an agent's 302. ... So for us to read ... that Peter Strzok said he virtually rewrote the whole thing - it damned them with their own words."
• James Gagliano, retired 25-year veteran of the FBI: "For [Strzok] to send that 302 to Lisa Page, a non-badge wearing, non-credential-having FBI agent, is unconscionable."
• Hovering over all the questions about what happened with Flynn's 302 is the silence of Pientka, the other agent.

Since the documents were declassified last week, much attention has focused on a handwritten note by FBI counterintelligence head Bill Priestap in advance of the January 2017 interview with Flynn. "What is our goal?" Priestap asked, "Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?"

Related: Unredacted Mueller 'Scope Memo'
Reveals He Had Wider Mandate
Fox News

Developments in the Flynn case are only part of Trump-Russia disclosures pouring forth at a quickening pace now, presumably in advance of prosecutor John H. Durham's findings in his criminal probe of the affair's origins -- which, it's reasonable to further assume, will wrap up before the 2020 elections.

Another Justice Department declassification shows that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had far more authority to probe the activities of people connected to the Trump campaign and administration than was previously known. A newly released version of the August 2017 "scope memo" defining the special counsel's authority didn't just authorize Mueller to look into Lt. Gen. Flynn's contacts with Russia, but also his dealings with Turkey. This article reports that in the case of George Papadopoulos, a low-level former Trump foreign policy aide, the memo authorized Mueller to probe whether there had been a "crime or crimes" committed when he allegedly acted "as an unregistered agent of the government of Israel." A separate release of documents allows the public to see lightly redacted interviews with 53 key figures in the Trump-Russia probe - including James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, John Podesta, Samantha Power, Susan Rice and Donald Trump Jr. At Just the News, John Solomon details how the flood of documents is likely to undermine past statements by Rep. Adam Schiff, the Democratic House Intelligence Committee chairman.

Featured Investigation:
The Growing Backlash Against
Female-Only School Programs

The annals of things that backfired might warrant a new entry -- under "gender wars." The 1972 federal anti-bias law meant to give women a fair shake in education is increasingly being deployed against their programs nationwide in the name of male equality.

In a two-story report for RealClearInvestigations (here and here), John Murawski finds that hundreds of so-called Title IX complaints have been filed against female-only perks in higher education -- including special classes, coding camps, scholarships and mentorships exclusively for women:

• The Trump Education Department's Office for Civil Rights has opened more than 90 investigations of such programs to date, in all 12 of the office's regional branches nationwide. And the total grows nearly every week.
• Nearly 300 complaints now await resolution.
• Charges of anti-male bias may soon balloon as advocates expand their fight into K-12 schools, including New York City's.
• "It's now a new era of civil rights for all, and not the past practice of civil rights for some," says Mark Perry, a University of Michigan professor who has filed 129 complaints against universities since 2016.
• Female success in academia is so "overwhelming" that the notion that women face disadvantages is "outdated," Perry says.
• But defenders of the programs, including "coding for girls" camps, say inequities persist, especially in the STEM fields -- science, technology, engineering and math.
• But those differences raise the question: To what extent are disparities between men and women shaped by society and to what extent by genetics?

Featured Investigation:
How Paper Tigers Are Made at the U.N.,
Chinese-Style

The coronavirus crisis has brought China's co-opting of global governance into sharp focus, Richard Bernstein writes for RealClearInvestigations. Case in point: the United Nations.

He writes:

• The World Health Organization -- which praised Beijing's "transparency" in handling the epidemic, against much evidence to the contrary -- is only the tip of the iceberg.
• China is now is the second-largest contributor to U.N. operations -- providing about 12% of the organization's total budget of $50 billion, compared with America's 22%.
• It has more troops in U.N. peacekeeping operations -- about 2,500 -- than any other country.
• Its bureaucrats now head four of the main U.N. organizations, as it has shifted from largely passive observer of the U.N. scene to very active participant.
• No U.N. body has felt the effects of China's effort to advance its authoritarian ideology more than the Human Rights Council. A newly appointed Chinese diplomat there will hold sway over the monitoring of abuses of which China is routinely accused.
• Further, China in recent years it has devoted itself to crafting new definitions of human rights aimed at undermining the organization's very purpose.
• Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power: "By watering down the standards, [China] believes it can more easily justify its behavior, not just to the rest of the world but, more important, to its own citizens."

Other Coronavirus Investigations

'Fake Patients' in Staged COVID-19 Testing Line for CBS News
Project Veritas
Medical professionals were pulled off the floor at the Cherry Medical Center in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to line up in their vehicles so a CBS News crew could film a long line of people waiting to be tested for COVID-19. In the undercover video footage shot by a man who says he works for the medical center, a person identified as a Cherry Hill supervisor says, "Apparently, the news crew wanted more people in the line." A woman identified as a registered nurse said: "We pretended. There were a couple of real patients, which made it worse." CBS News issued a statement blaming Cherry Hill for the deception.

Rise in Deaths From Opioids, America's Other Pandemic
Daily Beast
Amid social distancing, authorities nationwide are reporting a surge in fatal opioid overdoses. Addiction and recovery advocates say the U.S. is now battling two epidemics at once. In Franklin County, Ohio, for example, the coroner is warning residents of a continued spike in drug deaths, including six on April 24. One week before, the coroner announced that five people died in a span of 12 hours. In February, overdoses were so prevalent the coroner said she might need a temporary morgue to handle the deluge. Montgomery County, Ohio—which is home to Dayton and was considered the country's overdose capital in 2017 - is reporting a 50 percent jump in overdoses over last year. Indeed, authorities in counties across Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania and New York are also reporting rises in overdoses during the COVID-19 crisis.

The Record Undercuts Biden Claims on 2009 H1N1 Response
Politico
Joe Biden is arguing that he would have handled the COVID-19 crisis better than President Trump. This article suggests otherwise. Take the Obama administration's handling of the H1N1 pandemic in 2009. Interviews with almost two dozen people, including administration officials, members of Congress and outsiders who contended with the administration's response, describe a litany of sadly familiar obstacles: vaccine shortfalls, fights over funding and sometimes-contradictory messaging. "It is purely a fortuity that this isn't one of the great mass casualty events in American history," Ron Klain, who was Biden's chief of staff at the time, said of H1N1 in 2019. "It had nothing to do with us doing anything right. It just had to do with luck. If anyone thinks that this can't happen again, they don't have to go back to 1918, they just have to go back to 2009, 2010 and imagine a virus with a different lethality and you can just do the math on that."

Neil ‘Lockdown' Ferguson Caught With His Pants, and Credibility, Down
Issues & Insights
Neil Ferguson, the British disease expert whose staggeringly high projections of COVID-19 deaths led to lockdowns around the world, is getting a lot of criticism for violating his country's stay-at-home order so he could canoodle with a married woman. But the real scandal may be Ferguson's rotten track record predicting the impact of diseases. This editorial reports:

In 2001, Ferguson helped spark a panic over U.K. beef when he predicted that 136,000 people could die from "mad cow" disease in coming decades. His forecast was multiples higher than what other scientists had been predicting. Ferguson dismissed them as "naïve." A report from theEuropean Center for Disease Prevention and Controlfound that as of 2013, there'd been a total of … wait for it … 174 cases in the U.K., and 226 worldwide. In 2005, Ferguson predicted the bird flu pandemic could kill 200 million people. "Around 40 million people died in the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak," he told theGuardian. "There are six times more people on the planet now so you could scale it up to around 200 million people probably." The total number of deaths, according to theWorld Health Organization: 440. His 2.2 million deaths prediction is just as fatuous. That report claimed that more than a million could die in the U.S. even with extreme control measures. If 134,000 die from the disease - which is the current prediction by the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation - that's still off by a factor of eight.

More Coronavirus Investigations

Administration Shelves CDC Guide to Reopening Country, Associated Press
ICE Partners With Amazon, 3M to Fight Fake Virus Gear, Wall Street Journal
U.S. Intel Report: China Hid Virus Severity to Hoard Supplies, Associated Press
Coronavirus Upends the U.S. Food System, Los Angeles Times
Small Physician Practices Are Struggling, New York Times
Why Home Prices Are Rising During the PandemicWall Street Journal
Search for America's Earliest Virus Deaths (November?)Wall St Journal
The Lure of Mafia Money During the Crisis, BBC

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

The #MeToo Baggage of Biden's Veep-Hunter Chris Dodd
Slate
As he is (sorta) being forced to address allegations the decades old sexual assault lodged by a former staffer, Joe Biden made what some see as a strange choice by naming former Senator Chris Dodd to his vice-presidential search committee. This article reports that Dodd had a reputation back in the day. A writer at the D.C. paper Roll Call described Dodd and his good friend Senator Ted Kennedy as "two guys in a fraternity who have been loosed upon the world." In 1985, a D.C. waitress named Carla Gaviglio accused Dodd and Kennedy of sexually assaulting her at the restaurant where she worked. According to Gaviglio, Kennedy and Dodd were both drunk in a private room when Kennedy threw her into a seated Dodd's lap and rubbed his genitals against her until other staffers intervened. The article also reports that Dodd was a leading Democratic recipient of donations by Harvey Weinstein, whom he referred to as his "good friend" in a 2011 New York Times interview. After he left the Senate in 2011, Dodd became the chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America. "I've known Harvey for 25, 30 years, and we've been friends," Dodd told the Hollywood Reporter in 2012. "He was very helpful to me as a candidate for Congress and as a senator over the years." On Thursday, a 1996 court document surfaced that provides further indirect corroboration of Tara Reade's accusations against Biden. The document, filed by her then-husband to contest a restraining order Reade filed against him, states that Reade had told him about "a problem she was having at work regarding sexual harassment, in U.S. Senator Joe Biden's office."

Washington: Invasion of the 'Murder Hornets'
New York Times
It's not easy being a human during the pandemic - but it's better than being a bee. Every year a new predator or plague seems to emerge that promises to wipe ‘em out. The latest menace to come to the U.S. is Asian giant hornets. With queens that can grow to 2 inches long, they can use mandibles shaped like spiked shark fins to wipe out a honeybee hive in a matter of hours, decapitating the bees and flying away with the thoraxes to feed their young. For larger targets, the hornet's potent venom and stinger — long enough to puncture a beekeeping suit — make for an excruciating combination that victims have likened to hot metal driving into their skin. The hornets - which sport "a cartoonishly fierce face featuring teardrop eyes like Spider-Man, orange and black stripes that extend down its body like a tiger, and broad, wispy wings like a small dragonfly" - have been spotted only in Washington state. Scientists have since embarked on a full-scale hunt for the hornets, worried that the invaders could decimate bee populations in the United States and establish such a deep presence that all hope for eradication could be lost. In Japan, the hornets kill up to 50 people a year.