RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
May 19 to May 25 Now that the Russia collusion allegations have evaporated, the long knives are out and the president's antagonists are watching their backs, Eric Felten reports for RealClearInvestigations. They have moved from accusing President Trump of treason to pushing revisionist narratives that try to shift the blame for the debunked probe onto others. Felten takes stock of a range of recent developments. Highlights: - Two of Donald Trump's most high profile accusers - former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former Director of the CIA John Brennan - are evidently putting out the story that they didn't want anything to do with the infamous Steele dossier. As this account goes, it was former FBI Director James Comey pushing the dossier.
- Thrown under the proverbial bus by Comey, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch is showing she can climb out from under that motor coach and dust herself off. In newly disclosed testimony, she deploys lawyerly language to rebut Comey's claim she ordered him to refer to the Hillary Clinton email probe as a "matter" and not a criminal investigation.
- The press is abetting the revisionism. Case in point: The New York Times's third origin story for the Trump-Russia investigation, this time featuring a woman widely referred to as an FBI "honeypot" sent undercover in 2016 to flirt with a young Team Trumper, George Papadopoulos, and pump him for information about the future president and the Russians.
- Felten describes that article as a classic example of a fundamental Washington PR technique: "getting ahead of the story." Knowing the honeypot business is being scrutinized by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz, sources in, or formerly of, the bureau went to friendly reporters and fed them information that could put the events in the least unflattering light.
Felten also unpacks bitter institutional rivalries between the FBI and Department of Justice -- and how they play out in the media: "The Department of Justice has good relations with, and tends to leak to, the Washington Post," says a longtime Capitol Hill staffer. "The FBI leaks to the New York Times." Read Full Article Eric Felten also reports that for all the denials that the FBI uses spies, the truth seems to be that bureau officials not only ran secret agents in the Trump-Russia affair but are now playing word games to obscure its spy games. To explore the dances with spy euphemisms, Felten points to a range of comments and testimony by former top FBI figures prominent in Russiagate: - Defenders of the Trump-Russia probe have come to rely heavily on variations of the "not for inappropriate reasons" clause, and have given the qualification spying "for political purposes" quite the workout ever since President Trump used those three words in tweet a year ago.
- A range of FBI figures from James Comey to James Baker to Peter Strzok have fallen back on the "for political purposes" hedge when asked about spying. Comey testified a year ago: "I know that we never investigated the Trump campaign for political purposes."
- In unreleased testimony from last year, the FBI's former No. 2 lawyer, Trisha Anderson, explained that confidential human sources were not spies.
- In an apparent effort to euphemize her way out of the possibility she had been caught in erroneous testimony, Anderson revealed that the FBI used not just a few confidential sources against the Trump campaign, but a "network of sources" -- only it had not "placed" them.
- Anderson also appeared to confirm that the bureau not only runs secret agents, but double agents.
Given the difficulties of such secret operations, Felten writes, success with them should be a source of pride, not shame. As long, that is, as they are not done for political purposes. Read Full Article The Trump Investigations: Top Articles Trump Empowers Barr to Declassify Russia-Probe Secrets, RealClearPolitics
Barr's Investigation Could Prompt Clash Between DoJ, CIA, New York Times
Female Russian-Brit Academic Sues FBI Source for Honeypot Slur, Daily Caller
UK Spies Briefed Before Trump on Dossier, Telegraph
Emails Show State Department, DoJ, Steele Connections, Powerline
Special Counsel Team Reluctant to Have Mueller Testify Publicly, CNN
Carter Page FISA Application Approved in 'Unusual' Way, Examiner Other Noteworthy Articles and Series New Peter Schweizer Video Series Looks at Biden and Son
Government Accountability Institute
"The Drill Down with Peter Schweizer" is a new investigative video series produced by the Government Accountability Institute. The inaugural episode examines former Vice President and current presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter's business dealings, including how the Chinese government and Ukrainian oligarchs made his family very wealthy while he was Vice President - during which time he was the point person on U.S. policy toward China. How China Uses Tech Surveillance to Subdue Millions
New York Times
China is investing billions every year to develop the next generation of high-tech surveillance — precise, all-seeing, infallible. Treating a city like a battlefield, a system being used in a province where the Chinese are repressing millions Muslims applies the ideas of military cyber systems to civilian public security. The system taps into networks of neighborhood informants, tracks individuals, tries to anticipate potential misbehavior, and then recommends which security forces to deploy. Reckless Loans Devastated a Generation of Taxi Drivers
New York Times
Over the past year, a spate of suicides by taxi drivers in New York City has highlighted in brutal terms the overwhelming debt and financial plight of medallion owners. All along, officials have blamed the crisis on competition from ride-hailing companies such as Uber and Lyft. But a New York Times investigation found much of the devastation can be traced to a handful of powerful industry leaders, who helped inflate the price of taxi medallions into a bubble that eventually burst. They convinced cab drivers to take out loans to purchase medallions, this article argues, against all common sense. Genetic Science of Depression Built on Nonexistent Foundations
Atlantic
In 1996, a group of European researchers found that a certain gene might influence a person's risk of depression. Over the next two decades, the gene inspired at least 450 research papers. But a new study concludes that this seemingly sturdy mountain of research is actually a house of cards, built on nonexistent foundations. "This should be a real cautionary tale," said Matthew Keller, who led the project. "How on Earth could we have spent 20 years and hundreds of millions of dollars studying pure noise?" Rich Kids Get Extra Time on SATs
Wall Street Journal
Across the country, the number of public high-school students granted extra time and other special allowances for test-taking has surged in recent years, federal data show. And students in affluent areas are more likely than students elsewhere to get the fastest-growing type of these special allowances, known as "504" designations, a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from 9,000 public schools found. Inside Google's Civil War
Fortune
The legendary talent of Google's workforce is undoubtedly good for business, but its legendary "wokeness"? Perhaps not so much. Tensions are the rise - and employee walkouts are becoming common - as workers have clashed with management over business decisions made in secret, the treatment of marginalized groups of employees, and harassment and trolling of workers on the company's internal platforms. "It's the U.S. culture war playing out at micro-scale," says Colin McMillen, an engineer who left the company in February. "People are beginning to say, ‘I don't want to be complicit in this,' " says Meredith Whittaker, leader of Google's Open Research group and a walkout organizer. Workers are beginning to take responsibility, she says: "I don't see many other structures in place right now that are checking tech power." Rats Are Taking Over New York City
New York Times
Sky-high rents aren't stopping one lowly group of residents from flocking to New York City: rats. This article reports that so many rats regularly lurk on a sidewalk in Brooklyn that it is the humans who avoid the rats, not the other way around. Not even cars are safe: Rats have chewed clean through engine wires. Tenants at a public housing complex in the South Bronx worry about tripping over rats that routinely run over their feet. Rat sightings reported to the city's 311 hotline have soared nearly 38 percent since 2014; in the same period, active signs of rats nearly doubled in city health inspections. A Manhattan avenue lined with trendy restaurants has become a destination for foodies — including rat foodies who help themselves to leftovers. How hip is that? |
