RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week January 31 to February 6, 2021 As the Senate prepares next week to take up a second impeachment of Donald Trump, Republican objections to the Democrats' handling of the first go-round loom large. In retrospect, Mark Hemingway writes for RealClearInvestigations, it seems clear those highly unusual proceedings were designed not just to target Trump but to protect Biden -- and that turns out to have helped the latter win the White House. Hemingway reports: The first impeachment failed in its primary aim, ousting Trump - for supposedly strong-arming Ukraine to investigate Biden's son, Hunter. But Democrat impeachment managers successfully suppressed witnesses and used other tactics to protect Biden, allowing him and his media supporters to later cast allegations about Biden family business ties as rehashed partisan conspiracy theories. Biden's razor-thin swing state victories might not have materialized if the Trump campaign had been able to gain traction from its October Surprise - articles in the New York Post about Hunter's incriminating laptop. But Democrats and major news outlets, hewing to practice set in the first impeachment, discredited or did not report the accusations in the final weeks of the campaign. Social media suppressed the news too. Instead, a familiar narrative was deployed against Trump: foreign interference. That is, the laptop was "Russian disinformation." Yet after the election even Hunter Biden admitted the feds have been investigating him since 2018. Republicans say the Democrats' handling of the first impeachment has poisoned the well for the second. The bad news: Rampant identity theft is America's new pandemic, turbocharged by the year-old coronavirus pandemic. The even worse news, as John F. Wasik reports for RealClearInvestigations, is that there's no vaccine for the online scourge. Wasik, a savvy and cautious financial writer and yet a three-time victim of ID theft, finally got so frustrated he went to find his tormentors on the dark web -- only to find he couldn't lay a glove in this shadow-boxing bout with phantoms. In this first-person account, Wasik writes: He found out his identity had been stolen when he learned he'd been put on the government dole - even though he hadn't lost his job. With this ploy, rampant during the pandemic as unemployment benefits have increased, thieves steal and monetize personal data to the tune of billions. Wasik's month-long quest took him to the dark web -- a sub-basement of the Internet featuring the ".onion" suffix that's not accessible through conventional search engines. You have to know exactly where you're going, so often the uninitiated turn to places on the surface web like Reddit's darknet subforum. But even if you know where you're going, a dark web address only gets you to the front door; you need to be invited to a dark web site. That's accessible by specialized software such as the TOR browser. People "use the TOR browser together with a virtual private network (VPN) service, which makes them completely untraceable," an expert says. On top of that, dark web crooks are often paid in bitcoin - "a terrorist, blackmailer or crook's dream" that "can't be traced." Wasik: It was "a dispiriting trek as I was reminded how helpless we can be in the face of global technology that makes life easier for both the law abiding and the criminal." Biden, Trump and the Beltway 77 Days: Trump's Campaign to Subvert the Election New York Times FBI Finds Evidence of Coordinated Capitol Assault Washington Post 21 Men: Top Trump Foe Propositioned Us Online New York Times FBI Pretext to Keep Spying: Carter Page Might Write a Book Just the News The Craziest Meeting of Trump's Presidency Axios Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Suspected Chinese Group Hacked Into U.S. Payroll Agency Reuters Suspected Chinese hackers exploited a flaw in software made by SolarWinds Corp. to help break into U.S. government computers last year. The software flaw exploited by the suspected Chinese group is separate from the one the United States has accused Russian government operatives of using to compromise up to 18,000 SolarWinds customers, including sensitive federal agencies. Reuters reports that the side-by-side missions show how hackers are focusing on weaknesses in obscure but essential software products that are widely used by major corporations and government agencies. In a separate report, "60 Minutes" details how China is trying to collect Americans' DNA through deals with health care providers. It says the quest to control biodata - and, in turn, control health care's future - has become the new space race, with more than national pride in the balance. People Chauvin Choked Before George Floyd Marshall Project/New York Times George Floyd wasn't the first person Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin subdued with excessive force. This article reports that he restrained at least six other people by their necks or by kneeling on top of them during arrests dating back to 2015. Two of those arrested were black, one was Latino and one was native american. The race of two others was not included in the arrest reports. This article includes interviews with three of them. The Minnesota attorney general's office is seeking to introduce the cases in its prosecution of Chauvin for Floyd's death last May, which sparked Black Lives Matter protests around the country last summer. Police records show that Chauvin was never formally reprimanded for any of these incidents, even though at least two of those arrested said they had filed formal complaints. Montreal's Snow Removal Racket Maisonneuve Montreal is a hotbed of corruption, this article says. Every year, Quebec companies secretly and illegally divvy up construction contracts worth millions of dollars, according to a number of whistleblowers, government probes and recent press investigations. Instead of submitting their bids independently, the biggest firms allegedly conspire to determine who will win which government contract and how much they'll charge. Politicians are bribed in exchange for doling out the most lucrative jobs, and organized crime is frequently involved. Most public scrutiny has focused on the construction industry, but sources say that illegal bid-rigging extends into the hardscrabble, wintry sphere of snow removal. Over the course of a year-long investigation, Maisonneuve analyzed about 250 snow-removal contracts and interviewed more than a dozen private contractors, their employees and the municipal bureaucrats who administer their work. These sources described bid-rigging as a fact of life in the industry. More crucially, they said, Montrealers don't understand how fiercely the system is maintained through violence and coercion. Those who obey are rewarded with extra, ill-gotten profits. Those who don't play along are punished. A former employee of one of Montreal's snowplow giants put it succinctly. "Snow removal," he said, "is one of the biggest rackets there is." A Victim Tracks Down an Online Vengeance Super-Spreader New York Times Guy Babcock is not a thief, a fraudster or a pedophile. But that's what a Google search turned up about the 59-year-old Englishman. Google returned similar smears when he searched the names of other family members, including his wife, sister and cousin. Many of the slanderous posts appeared on a website called Ripoff Report, one of hundreds of "complaint sites" - others include She's a Homewrecker, Cheaterbot and Deadbeats Exposed - that let people anonymously expose an unreliable handyman, a cheating ex, a sexual predator. But there is no fact-checking. The sites often charge money to take down posts, even defamatory ones. And there is limited accountability because the Communications Decency Act, prohibits injured parties from holding the sites liable because they are providing a forum for free speech. The authors of libelous posts are fair game, and this article documents Babcock's effort to find the person. The article then offers a detailed profile of that woman, an aggrieved former employee who, it reports, has become a cyber super-spreader - that is, someone who routinely launches vicious attacks online against people she doesn't like. Nextdoor Is Quietly Replacing the Small-Town Paper OneZero At its core, Nextdoor is an evolution of the neighborhood listserv for the social media age, a place to trade composting tips, offer babysitting services, or complain about the guy down the street who doesn't clean up his dog's poop. But the decline of America's newspapers is creating a new role for Nextdoor - which now operates in some 268,000 neighborhoods globally: It has gradually become an important platform for citizens to share and shape the news. This article reports that several design features favor the squeakiest wheels - sometimes at the expense of the most vulnerable, and sometimes at the expense of the truth. Coronavirus Investigations Governments Sign Secret Vaccine Deals New York Times Europe and the United States have poured billions of taxpayer dollars into helping drug companies develop vaccines and are spending billions more to buy doses. But, this article reports, the details of those deals largely remain secret, with governments and public health organizations acquiescing to drug company demands for secrecy. Just weeks into the vaccination campaign, that secrecy is already making accountability difficult. The drug companies Pfizer and AstraZeneca recently announced that they would miss their European delivery targets, causing widespread concerns as dangerous virus variants spread. But the terms of their contracts remain closely guarded secrets, making it difficult to question company or government officials about either blame or recourse. Sitting on Billions, Catholic Dioceses Amassed Pandemic Aid Associated Press When the coronavirus forced churches to close their doors and give up Sunday collections, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charlotte, North Carolina, turned to the federal government's signature small business relief program for more than $8 million. The diocese's headquarters, churches and schools landed the help even though they had roughly $100 million of their own cash and short-term investments available last spring, financial records show. This was not an isolated case. As the pandemic began to unfold, scores of Catholic dioceses across the U.S. received aid through the Paycheck Protection Program while sitting on well over $10 billion in cash, short-term investments or other available funds, an Associated Press investigation has found. All told, the nation's nearly 200 dioceses, where bishops and cardinals govern, and other Catholic institutions received at least $3 billion. Other Coronavirus Investigations Why Did Philadelphia Give Vaccines to a Startup? WHYY/ NPR Many Health-Care Workers Are Resisting the Virus Vaccine New Yorker Many Chinese COVID Conspiracies Blame U.S. for the Virus Fast Company Pandemic Is Teaching Us About the Mysteries of Smell NY Times Magazinw |