RealClearInvestigations'
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January 26 to February 1, 2025 In RealClearInvestigations, Aaron Maté casts doubt on charges that former U.S. congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is a “Russian asset” whose views on Russia-backed Syria put her at odds with the agencies she is now named to oversee as President Trump's director of national intelligence. In advance of her Senate confirmation grilling last week, Maté reported: While critics cast as unpatriotic Gabbard's trip to meet President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus in 2017, overlooked is a congressional ethics investigation that found “no violations" in her overture. Critics have also failed to mention that such high-profile trips are not unprecedented: Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry’s visits with Assad, for example. Gabbard has not cast doubt on U.S. intelligence reports about Syrian chemical weapons attacks, as is alleged -- because no such reports have ever been released. Instead, the Obama administration, not the nation’s spy agencies, put out what amounted to press releases lodging allegations against the now-deposed Syrian government. Obama adviser Ben Rhodes, a former aspiring novelist with no intelligence experience, produced one such report called a “U.S. Government Assessment,” a term that carries no formal significance. After Syria’s most notorious chemical weapons attack in 2013 crossed President Obama’s self-declared “red line,” even the nation’s top intelligence official, James Clapper, said privately that the Assad regime’s culpability was not a "slam dunk" -- a position that would later mirror that of Gabbard, his would-be successor. Gabbard’s warning about the rise of Al-Qaeda in Syria has proved prophetic with the overthrow of the Assad regime last year. In RealClearInvestigations, Paul Sperry reports that new CIA chief John Ratcliffe has seen the evidence underlying the infamous "intelligence community assessment" (ICA) that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win – and is not convinced it supports that conclusion: Ratcliffe's skepticism, reported by Sperry for the first time, appears in written testimony he submitted to the Senate in advance of its hearing to confirm him as CIA director last week. Senate Democrats asked Ratcliffe if he concurred with the ICA’s finding that President Vladimir Putin and the Russian government “developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.” Ratcliffe answered that after reviewing the ICA’s underlying intel, including sources and methods, he could only agree that “Russia’s goal was to undermine confidence in U.S. democratic institutions and sow division among the American people,” according to page 38 of the document. In other words, Ratcliffe saw no concrete evidence to support a plot by Putin to side with Trump against Clinton. By painting Trump as a Trojan Horse for Putin, the ICA triggered years-long investigations by a special counsel and by both the Senate and House intelligence committees. Donald Trump's harshest critics now concede he may not be the "Russian agent” they once speculated he was, but still: The consensus among Washington’s elite remains that he's a beneficiary of Kremlin skullduggery. In RealClearInvestigations, Ben Weingarten reports that the sprawling global network formed to police online speech is looking like an early target in President Trump's promised goal of ending the government's participation in digital censorship: In his remote appearance last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Trump touted his executive order against such censorship before a body that has declared “misinformation and disinformation” the leading short-term risk to the globe for the second straight year. Newly sworn in as Trump’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio issued a mission statement for his State Department declaring that Foggy Bottom “must stop censorship and suppression of information.” The global “counter-disinformation” ecosystem encompasses research centers at top academic institutions and think tanks, fact-checkers, news raters, and like-minded for-profits – often funded and/or promoted by government agencies and powerful foundations, and operating and seeking to influence governments both stateside and across the Atlantic. It is not yet known what will happen to the State Department’s recently disbanded yet reconstituted Global Engagement Center, which funded entities such as NewsGuard. Critics have dismissed the reorganization as simply a rebranding. The more controversial part of Trump’s executive order may be its directive to identify those who quelled speech in the past, “with recommendations for appropriate remedial actions.” It is not clear if such remedial actions will include prosecutions. While some cheered the developments, one speech advocate cautioned they “may very well serve as an outlet for the Trump administration’s own censorial desires.” Waste of the Day
by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books LA Firefighter Gets $600K in Overtime, RCI
Pentagon Posts Costliest Month Since 2008, RCI
Up to $1M to NYC Homeless Shelter Execs, RCI
Education Earmarks Get a Failing Grade, RCI
Fed Contractor Hiring Hijinks for Higher Pay, RCI Trump 2.0 and the Beltway Hunter Biden Bank Account Tied to $60M Fraud, Just The News
Congress Forces Banks to Assist Snooping on Customers, Reason
Trump Temporarily Freezes Grants, Loans and Aid, The Handbasket
Heads Roll at Justice Department, Wall Street Journal
Trump Offers Buyouts to Almost All Federal Workers, Axios
Trump Tries to Tame Dysfunctional Budgeting, Wall Street Journal
USAID Staffers Put on Leave for Allegedly Defying Trump, Politico Other Noteworthy Articles and Series It is not clear yet why an Army Blackhawk helicopter collided with an American Airlines passenger jet over the Potomac last week, but this article reports that President Trump’s concerns that diversity, equity and inclusion hiring practices may be implicated reflect longstanding concerns in some quarters that the Obama and Biden administrations had jeopardized safety by prioritizing DEI at the Federal Aviation Administration. During both the Obama and Biden administrations, the FAA prioritized hiring more minorities and those with disabilities for key positions, including those in air traffic control: Air safety concerns prompted a group of 11 Republican attorneys general to write FAA Administrator Michael Whitaker last year, questioning the administration’s hiring practices and priorities. “Unfortunately, the Biden FAA, under your administration, appears to prioritize virtue-signaling ‘diversity’ efforts over aviation expertise. And this calls into question the agency’s commitment to safety,” they wrote. Diversity goals at the FAA ramped up during the Obama administration, were largely dropped under Mr. Trump’s first term, and resumed under President Biden. In a separate article, Just the News reports that the deadly collision near Reagan National Airport “was preceded by months of harrowing near misses at airports across America, as well as increasingly shrill warnings that the nation’s air traffic control and safety system is stretched to the limit.” President Trump’s executive order declaring that there are only two genders – guess which two? – poses a serious threat to the left-wing ideology embraced by the Biden administration and many corners of the medical community. But, this article reports, his action is more evolution than revolution, a reflection of ongoing and widespread challenges to that ideology: Since 2021, 24 states have passed laws banning the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries for youth who feel discomfort with their sex. An additional two – Arizona and New Hampshire—have prohibited the use of surgeries, but not hormones. A challenge to one of these laws, from Tennessee, is on the Supreme Court’s 2025 docket. The case, U.S. v. Skrmetti, will determine how states can regulate gender medicine – and, with its 6–3 conservative majority, the Court likely will rule in Tennessee’s favor. Nearly two dozen de-transitioners – young men and (more often) women who were given drugs and surgeries, only to realize later that what they really needed was counseling and time to mature—are now suing their doctors and clinics for medical mistreatment. Though these lawsuits are tough to win, even a single multimillion-dollar verdict or out-of-court settlement could send malpractice insurance premiums soaring and create a chilling effect in states where “gender-affirming care” remains legal. This article reports that scientific research is also undermining leftwing gender ideology: The gender medicine industry’s most powerful argument – that kids will commit suicide without access to 'gender-affirming care' – suffered another serious blow in February, when a Finnish study found that gender-dysphoric minors and young adults’ suicide risk, while higher than the general population’s, was still thankfully low. Crucially, the study was the first of its kind to control for psychiatric comorbidities. The researchers found that gender-dysphoric young people were not statistically significantly more likely to commit suicide relative to non-dysphoric individuals with similar levels of psychiatric problems. As head of the Foundation for Individual Rights (FIRE), Greg Lukianoff has long tracked efforts to quell speech on campus. In this article, he reports the spread of a hallmark of repression that surfaced on campuses more than a decade ago: bias response hotlines, in which students snitch on one another almost always regarding protected speech. Using some terrific recent work by Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon and a recent report on FIRE’s website, Lukianoff writes: In Oregon, the purveyors of these systems are using taxpayer money to provide “victims” of these “non-crime hate incidents” with “resources” that include therapy, help buying security cameras, and even assistance with paying their bills. Sure sounds like setting up a number of very tempting incentives to snitch on your fellow Americans for protected speech, doesn’t it? What could possibly go wrong? It gets worse, too. Bias reporting systems in some states, like Connecticut, let you report things you weren’t even there to witness yourself. In Philadelphia, bias reporting systems literally collect your personal information and reach out to you to recommend sensitivity training: … To justify this, some states go so far as to claim that “‘biased’ speech, while not actionable in itself, can lead to hate crimes.” Yes. Seriously: Lukianoff warns that the U.S. is “teetering on the edge of becoming like the United Kingdom, where police have been keeping databases of people for so-called 'non-crime hate incidents' since 2014 – and have in fact threatened to prosecute speech beyond their borders.” China is imposing its justice system on American soil using a web of U.S.-based nonprofits linked to a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) intelligence agency, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation found: Located throughout California, the greater Washington, D.C. area, Hawaii, and New York, the network of more than a dozen nonprofits share information with Chinese law enforcement officials, and some also host unsanctioned courtrooms in the U.S., a months-long investigation discovered. Although the Chinese government claims it appoints law enforcement officials overseas in order to more conveniently handle mundane matters like Chinese driver’s license renewal and international divorce cases, U.S. lawmakers and intelligence analysts say China’s underground courts could easily be weaponized to punish dissidents and expand communist influence abroad. … However, the DCNF found that not only are all the identified nonprofits led by individuals working with a Chinese intelligence service called the United Front Work Department (UFWD), but some of their leaders have also explicitly discussed forced repatriation operations with Ministry of Public Security (MPS) officials in China. Furthermore, several of the individuals appointed to operate overseas Chinese courts in the U.S. also belong to the nonprofit that ran a Chinese police station in New York, which the Department of Justice (DOJ) found sought to forcibly repatriate individuals back to China. From the Annals of How Our Government Is Abetting China’s Undeclared War on America, this article reports that 1.63 million middle and high schoolers in America reported vaping, according to a recent survey. This is a problem for many reasons, including the fact that a single vape can pack as much nicotine as 590 cigarettes. The top three vape brands they choose are all disposable Chinese vapes that seem designed to appeal to kids: Brightly colored, they come in hundreds of candy and fruit flavors and some even feature LED screens loaded with games. This article reports that while the FDA has authorized only 34 vaping products – none of which are Chinese – states are far more likely to approve such products. Oklahoma’s list of legal vapes, for example, lists more than 12,000 products: Chinese companies are exploiting a poorly written bill and some bureaucratic rubber-stamping to make a mockery of lawmakers’ intent. Oklahoma’s Alcoholic Beverage Laws Enforcement (ABLE) commission, which is empowered to create the list, doesn’t check if the products are actually authorized or lawful before adding them to the list. They rely instead on a notarized attestation from the manufacturer that the products were either marketed before 2016, the year the FDA assumed authority over vape products, or that they’ve been authorized by the FDA since. Once ABLE receives the attestation, without ever verifying the information, they simply add the product to the list. Twelve thousand times. “It was taking a full employee’s time for several months,” Lori Carter, the assistant director and general counsel of the Oklahoma ABLE Commission, tells me in a phone call from Oklahoma City. She acknowledges to me that the notaries’ signatures are often in Chinese. No matter. This article reports that Oklahoma is not alone in its failed efforts. The 10 or so states that do have registry laws and where they do actually fund enforcement – most of which kick in at various times this year – have also not solved the problem, in part because they lack enforcement resources. | 