RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
Feb. 24 to March 2 Featured Investigation: Everything's bigger in Texas - including voter fraud investigations. The Lone Star State has convicted dozens of people in the last year for breaking election laws, typically by vote harvesting, a newly popular practice now being hotly debated from North Carolina to California. Texas holds a cautionary tale. As Steve Miller reports for RealClearInvestigations, harvesting creates numerous opportunities for mischief. He goes to the southern part of the state to explore the questionable work of offending harvesters, and finds that: - Although national attention focuses on whether fraud could alter the outcome of major races, much of the fraud in Texas happens at the grass roots, in down-ballot contests that can be decided by a couple dozen votes or less. These races are building blocks of local political organization.
- Harvesters are often poor women who are well-known in their largely Hispanic communities.
- They focus on the people allowed to vote by mail - especially the elderly and the infirm.
- In some cases they request ballots for unwitting voters and then stop by their houses when the mail arrives, offering help. In other cases they tell voters how to vote, or fill out ballots themselves.
- Despite dozens of prosecutions, the system seems to offer them some protection. When caught, they rarely get much of a sentence beyond probation and a fine.
- The system also seems to offer even more protection to candidates and party bosses, via plausible deniability. As they keep a distance from the harvesters, big fish are almost never indicted for fraud.
Miller's reporting on the vulnerability of mail-in ballots comes as states increasingly embrace the practice. Mail-in voting nationally tripled from 2.4 million voters in 2008 to 8.2 million in 2016. Three states vote exclusively by mail - Oregon, Washington and Colorado. But mailed voting's natural consequence, vote harvesting, is still illegal in most states. North Carolina suggests why: Shenanigans there led the Board of Election last week to order a new congressional election. Yet the tide is turning: Harvesting was quietly made legal in Democrat-dominated California, where Republicans claim that explains their shellacking in the 2016 midterms. Battle lines are being drawn and electoral strategies reassessed. Read Full Article The Trump Investigations: Top Articles Cohen Testifies and Opens Trump to Legal Risks With New Charges, Bloomberg
GOP Lawmakers Seek New Perjury Probe vs. Cohen, Perjurer, Fox News
Cohen Pitched Book Pro-Trump Before He Was Against Him, Daily Mail
Mueller Probe Spurs Death Threats, Ruin Even for the Uncharged,WashingtonTimes
The ManBehindMueller Probing Obstruction, New York Times
Enigmatic Russian at Heart of Mueller's Inquiry, New York Times
Unwelcome Kiss?Campaign Worker's Bias Suit and Trump, New Yorker Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Leaked Facebook Documents Show How Political Speech Is Policed
Project Veritas
The latest investigation from Project Veritas features documents and presentation materials it says are from a former Facebook insider to show how the social media giant polices political speech. According to the insider, who now works for Veritas, the documents reveal routine suppression of the distribution of conservative Facebook pages. Veritas spoke to a current Facebook employee off the record who said that the"deboost"codeadded to specific contentcould limit a video's visibility in news feeds, remove sharing features, and disable interactive notifications. For other recent investigative approaches to Facebook, read this in The Verge and this in Vanity Fair. The Jail Health-Care Crisis
New Yorker
Prisons are not just warehouses for criminals; now they are also filled with peoplesuffering from mental illness, addiction and other chronic medical conditions.According to a study released in 2017 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, nearly half the people held in jails suffer from some kindof mental illness, and more than a quarter have a severe condition, such as bipolar disorder. The same year, the bureau reported that about two-thirds of sentenced jail inmates suffer from drug addiction or dependency; that number was based on data from 2007-09, so it does not take into account the recent catastrophic rise of opioid addiction.This story focuses on one response to this crisis: how overwhelmed jails are turning to for-profit companies operating in the field known as "correctional health care," which pledge to deliver quality care while containing costs. FBI Officials Testify to Lynch DOJ's Influence in Clearing Hillary
Epoch Times
Attorney General Loretta Lynch set an unusually high threshold for prosecuting Hillary Clinton, effectively ensuring from the outset that the FBI would not charge Clinton for sending and receiving classified material over an insecure private server while she served as Secretary of State. Drawing on previously undisclosed testimony before Congress, this article reports that in order for Clinton to be prosecuted, the DOJ required the FBI to establish evidence of intent—even though the gross negligence statute explicitly does not require this. This meant that the FBI would have needed to find a smoking gun, such as an email or an admission made during FBI questioning, revealing Clinton or her aides knowingly set up the private email server to send classified information. FBI Scientist Tied Them to Crimes. His Evidence Didn't
ProPublica
Its name sounds daunting: The Forensic Audio, Video and Image Analysis Unit at the FBI Lab in Quantico, Virginia. Its claims sound authoritative: The unit can sharpen often blurry crime scene images to narrow the list of suspects. But, this article reports, the image examiners' lab work has no scientific basis proving their methods are reliable and findings are correct.The article focuses on the work on the unit's most prominent image examiners, RichardVorderBruegge, who, it reports, "single-handedly built a body of case law that has kept the FBI unit's testimony admissible in the courts." Reid Hoffman, Reputed Alabama Vote Meddler, Funded 'Deepfake' Text Software
Daily Caller
While Democrats continue to focus on Russian efforts to corrupt U.S. elections, they may have a high-tech fraudster of their own. LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman, who was allegedly involved in a campaign to use social media to spread false information in Alabama's 2016 Senate race, reportedly also played a key role infunding software capable of creating "deepfake" news articles. Another backed of the venture, called OpenAI: Tesla tech visionary Elon Musk. A separate article in theGuardian reportsthat the creators of the "deepfakesfor text" capability "are not releasing their research publicly, for fear of potential misuse." How Patriots Owner Kraft Could Skate in Prostitution Case
New York Post
The prostitution case against Patriots owner Robert Kraft linked to a Florida sex-trafficking ring could be a tough sell to a jury, this article reports. Problems: One, the women Kraft was caught on video with are the 45-year-old spa manager and a 58-year-old licensed masseuse, apparently not trafficking victims. Two, there is no audio to confirm Kraft's alleged illicit transactions. Three, a traffic stop after one visit, of a white Bentley in which Kraft was a passenger, looks like an illegal ruse that — as the affidavit states — was in fact carried out to identify Kraft. And four, as one ex-prosecutor put it, "When the police allege that vulnerable women are effectively being held as sex slaves, I would ask why the police didn't move faster to get these women out of danger?" Brazil: Behind Deadly Dam Collapse, Unheeded Warnings
Wall Street Journal
Employees at Brazil's mining giant Vale SA and its German contract safety inspectors could not have been surprised last month when a mine waste dam collapsed- unleashing a tsunami of thick, reddish mud that killed at least 179 people; an additional 131 people are missing and presumed dead. This story draws on a range of sourcs to report that inspectors knew the dam was dangerous but certified it as safe, for fear of losing contracts with Vale, the dam owner. 52% of Reviews on Walmart.com Found Fake and Unreliable
CBS
Fake reviews are increasingly prevalent across many top retailer websites, according to a study fromFakespot, which analyzes online customer reviews for fake or unreliable reviews. It found that: an estimated 52 percent of reviews posted on Walmart.com are "inauthentic and unreliable"; 30 percent of Amazon reviews are fake or unreliable; and about a third of reviews on makeup retailer Sephora and video-game service Steam are also unreliable or fake. Inequality Runs Wild at Posh Dog Parks
CityLab
Woofers of the world, unite; you have nothing to lose but your leash! Yes, the fight over inequality has gone to the dogs. The latest battlefield is dog parks, whose number has grown an estimated 40 percent during the last decade. This story looks at Chicago, where fancy dog parks cluster in wealthier neighborhoods - including a new one on the boards with splash pool and pug-mug video installation. The unequal distribution of dog parks is more than a problem for cooped-up pooches. A city ordinance imposes a $300 fine for off-leash dogs,whoare legally welcome only in the city's dog-friendly areas. Police disproportionately assign tickets for off-leash violations in the city's predominantly African-American South Side, most of which is a dog park desert. |
