RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
June 14 to June 20, 2020

Featured Investigations:
No Evidence Needed for Collusion Probe,
Just the FARA Pretext

The FBI never had even preliminary evidence of a Trump campaign conspiracy with Russia, and instead used a rarely enforced statutory relic - the Foreign Agents Registration Act - as the legal rationale for opening investigations and surveilling Trump campaign aides. Drawing on newly released documents and congressional sources, Paul Sperry has the story in RealClearInvestigations:

• The documents reveal that the initial target of the probe - then-Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos -- was suspected of working for Israel, not Russia.
• Other FARA cases involved alleged ties to Turkey (Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn), the Ukraine (campaign manager Paul Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates) and Egypt (Mideast adviser Walid Phares).
• Only one case involved ties to Russia: that of Carter Page.
• Only one of the six above was indicted for FARA-related violations, and none was charged with any espionage or conspiracy crimes related to Russia.
• Special Counsel Robert Mueller followed the FBI in using FARA as a pretext for investigations of people against whom there was no other significant evidence.
• Justice official David Laufman, a Hillary Clinton supporter, was the "mastermind" behind the strategy to dust off and "weaponize" FARA, one Senate investigator told RealClearInvestigations.
• Laufman worked closely with later-fired FBI official Peter Strzok, an inspector general's report revealed.
• Investigators for at least one congressional committee seek to question Laufman under oath.

Featured Investigation:
How California Killed the 'Racist' SAT
by Opposing Its Own Liberal Faculty

In a little-noticed reflection of the nation's raw mood of racial grievance, California's left-leaning university system overruled liberal faculty who found the Scholastic Aptitude Test neither racially biased nor an obstacle to minorities in any way. Instead, its politically appointed Board of Regents scrapped the admissions test as "racist."

Richard Bernstein reports for RealClearInvestigations:

• A 228-page faculty report, loaded with hundreds of displays of data from University of California admissions departments, found that the SAT and a commonly used alternative test, ACT - also eliminated - actually helped increase minority enrollment at the system's 10 campuses. And it recommended that their use be continued.
• But according to interviews with people concerned, political momentum against the tests proved irresistible and swept away the research and data in a unanimous regents' vote last month.
• Regents said the tests favor affluent families, most of them white, who are able to pay for things like private tutoring.
• But a member of the faculty study task force said the problem isn't the standardized tests. It's the fact that "UC doesn't cut anybody any slack on his grades."
• The faculty report found that 24% of Hispanics, 40% of blacks, and 47% of Native Americans who gained admission to UC did so because of their SAT scores, not despite them.
• Now the university system faces the challenge of coming up with a new test or no test at all.
• In other words, it needs a solution that isn't worse than the perceived problem, much in the way Black Lives Matters-inspired moves to "defund the police" raise obvious challenges of ensuring public safety.

Featured Investigation:
The 'Motte & Bailey':
Politics' Deceptive New Medieval Weapon

Welcome to the modern era of political jousting -- harking back to the nasty, brutish and short days of knights in armor with lances and mailed fists. As John Murawski reports for RealClearInvestigations, social media are evoking the age of moats and castles with a new term for deceptive argumentation in the digital age: the "Motte and Bailey." Serfs up, Twitter fans!

Murawski explains:

• The phrase Motte and Bailey derives from the Norman French words for a high mound and an enclosed area -- features in hundreds of medieval English castles.
• The Motte is a steep mound topped with an impregnable tower, or a keep. The Bailey is the stables and planting fields down below exposed to enemy attack.
• Today the Motte is a seemingly unassailable notion and the Bailey the controversial and vulnerable doctrine that lies beneath.
• A much-noted example is "black lives matter" (the Motte) and "Black Lives Matter" (the Bailey). The lowercase form is hard to dispute and easily defended. The capitalized version is a political movement with an agenda that includes slavery reparations and other causes - struggles with which not all Americans are down.
• Another example is "Make America Great Again," the Motte slogan whose Bailey ("build the wall," "lock her up," etc.) many dispute.
• Advocates often switch from Motte to Bailey and back again to foil critics.
• Nicholas Shackel, a Cardiff University philosopher, first identified this trick of "sophistry" and coined the term in 2005.
• The Motte and Bailey is so new that it hasn't worked its way into general parlance. But it's mentioned almost daily on Twitter lately, so a vogue-ish new term seems only a matter of time.

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

Favors for Dictators and 7 Other Bolton Book Claims
Guardian
Et tu, John? Ten months after he was ousted over policy differences, Donald Trump's former national security adviser John Bolton is set to publish a book next week that includes explosive allegations about the president. In "The Room Where It Happened," Bolton claims Trump asked China to use its economic power to help him in the 2020 election, and tried to kill criminal investigations as "favors" for dictators whom he liked. The Trump administration has tried to block publication of the book, not over its accuracy but because, it says, it reveals classified material. Read an excerpt here. A separate article in the Daily Beast reports that Mary Trump, the daughter of President Trump's deceased brother Fred Jr., is set to publish a tell-all book this fall in which she says she was a primary source of the New York Times's Pulitzer Prize-winning series detailing the Trump family's finances. This article reports that she supplied the newspaper with the tax returns of Trump's father, Fred Trump Sr., and other highly confidential family financial documentation. It also reports that Mary plans to include conversations with Trump's sister, retired federal judge Maryanne Trump Barry, that contain intimate and damning thoughts about the president.

Elite CIA Hack Unit Left Open to Huge Hack
Washington Post
This article reports that the theft of top-secret computer hacking tools from the CIA in 2016 was the result of a workplace culture in which the agency's elite computer hackers "prioritized building cyber weapons at the expense of securing their own systems," according to an internal report. The breach — allegedly by a CIA employee — was discovered a year after it happened, when the information was published by WikiLeaks in March 2017. The anti-secrecy group dubbed the release "Vault 7," and U.S. officials have said it was the biggest unauthorized disclosure of classified information in the CIA's history. It alerted foreign adversaries to the spy agency's techniques and forced it to shut down some intelligence operations.

Millions of Abandoned Oil Wells Are Leaking Methane
Reuters
More than a century of oil and gas drilling has left behind millions of abandoned wells, many of which are leaching pollutants into the air and water. And drilling companies are likely to abandon many more wells due to bankruptcies, this article reports, as oil prices struggle to recover from historic lows after the coronavirus pandemic crushed global fuel demand. State and federal regulations normally require drillers to pay an up-front bond to cover future cleanups if they go belly-up. But the rules are a patchwork and seldom leave governments adequately funded. In Pennsylvania, it would take several thousand years to plug its estimated backlog of 200,000 abandoned oil wells at the current rate of spending, according to data from the state regulator.

Elite NYC Girls Schools Accused of Being Racist
New York Times
The reckoning over racism in many aspects of American life has reached the front doors of New York's exclusive private schools for girls, which typically charge over $50,000 a year in tuition and are known for catapulting their graduates into top colleges and impressive careers. One black student atChapin said she was falsely accused of stealing money within her first few weeks at the girls school in New York City. A recent Brearley graduate said she was ostracized after calling out her white friends for repeating a racial slur in a song. And a woman who graduated from Brearley nearly 50 years ago still remembers being told that Europeans "invented history." The heads of school and boards of trustees at the city's top three all-girls schools -- Chapin, Brearley and Spence -- have vowed to enact change. In a separate article, the New York Times reports on the "racial reckoning" creating tumult at Condé Nast, a company built partly on selling a glossy brand of elitism to the masses, at a time when its financial outlook is grim.

BLM Foundation Not Tied to BLM, Still Gets Millions
BuzzFeed
What's in name? Sometimes a lot of money. Consider the Black Lives Matter Foundation, which has received millions in donations from people who think it is connected to the vast organization that says it is fighting for social justice. It does not. Instead, the Santa Clarita, California-based charitable organization has just one paid employee - a 67-year-old African-American record producer from Los Angeles named Robert Ray Barnes - and lists a UPS store as its address. Although their names are similar, the organizations have very different stances on police relations. While the Black Lives Matter movement has advocated for the "national defunding of the police" and reinvestment of money into black community resources, Barnes' foundation wants to "help bring the police and the community closer together in an effort to save lives." Barnes said: "We don't want to be enemies of the police. We will let the movement do that."

Coronavirus Investigations

Snooping Tech Firms Join Government in Pandemic Fight
Wall Street Journal
Government has a new ally in the battle against COVID-19: creepy apps, location-tracking firms, data brokers and other information middlemen that have come under increasing fire in recent years for building what critics call a surveillance economy. This article reports that in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom's office used data from Foursquare Labs Inc. to figure out if beaches were getting too crowded; when the state discovered they were, it tightened its rules. In Denver, the Tri-County Health Department is monitoring counties where the population on average tends to stray more than 330 feet from home, using data from Cuebiq Inc. Researchers at the University of Texas in San Antonio are using movement data from a variety of companies, including the geolocation firm SafeGraph, to guide city officials there on the best strategies for getting residents back to work. This is giving data-collection companies a chance to revive their battered public image. "When you're sharing your location data, you're sharing it to potentially be part of an overall bigger solution that could potentially save someone's life," said a man whose company collects location information from about 30 million devices a month in the U.S. "I believe there will be a wide swath of the population that will consent to that."

Pandemic's New Victims: Top Medical Journals
New York Times
The world's two greatest medical journals have retracted coronavirus-related papers in recent weeks, suggesting a breakdown in the peer-review process. The New England Journal Medicine retracted a study reporting that popular blood-pressure drugs were safe for people infected with the coronavirus. The Lancet pulled a paper stating that anti-malaria drugs endorsed by President Trump actually were dangerous to these patients. This article reports that the hasty retractions, on the same day this month, have alarmed scientists worldwide. Peer review is supposed to safeguard the quality of scientific research. When a journal receives a manuscript, the editors ask three or more experts in the field for comments. The reviewers' written assessments may force revisions in a paper or prompt the journal to reject the work altogether. The system, widely adopted by medical journals in the middle of the 20th century, undergirds scientific discourse around the world.

Also Coronavirus-Related

How Exactly Do You Catch Covid? Consensus Is Growing Wall Street Journal
How Virus Spread Is Following America's Highways Daily Beast
How Humanity Has Unleashed a Plague of Zoonotic Diseases New York Times
Federal Covid Contractor Accused of Dirty Test Tubes Wall Street Journal
Despite Warnings, U.S. Never Risked Meat Shortage USA Today
Man's Virus Survival Has 181-Page, $1.1 Million Tab Seattle Times