RealClearInvestigations'
Picks of the Week
March 23 to March 29, 2025 In RealClearInvestigations, Paul Sperry examines a former FBI agent's allegation of a "honeypot" sex sting set by bureau Director James Comey for Donald Trump, and finds a tale that could be ready for the bunco squad: -
At first blush, the bombshell allegations sound plausible, given the FBI's surveillance violations and other serious misconduct on Comey's watch during the Trump-Russia affair. -
But the allegations are not so much a “whistleblower disclosure,” as described, but a disgruntled former FBI agent's two-page letter, summarizing allegations leveled by an “FBI employee” whom he does not name. The letter has been published by RCI for the first time. -
The letter contains substantial errors. It claims that after two undercover "honeypot" agents “infiltrated" the Trump campaign in 2015, “one of the individuals [they] targeted was George Papadopoulus [sic].” Only Papadopoulos didn’t join the Trump campaign until March 2016. -
The letter goes on to say the "investigation was closed because the New York Times obtained a photograph of one of the undercovers and was about to publish it," thereby imperiling the agent's life. A Times spokeswoman denied this accusation: “We never had a photo.” -
While the letter appears to confirm suspicions held by President Trump and his team that Comey targeted him long before mid-2016, even his new FBI director, Kash Patel, pushed back on the revelations. -
Patel defended a female New York agent rumored to be involved: “[S]he was NOT a honeypot.” -
Contacted by RCI, the ex-G-man appeared to back off the allegations. But the House Judiciary Committee said it is still looking into the complaint.
In RealClearInvestigations, Bob Ivry and Jeremy Portnoy examine a massive source of federal misspending that Elon Musk and his minions have yet to address: “Zombie” agencies or programs that live on despite expired authorizations, and account for at least 8% of the budget. -
The Zombies, nearly half of which have been officially dead for more than a decade, persist in a very expensive budgetary netherworld. -
In a deep dive last year, Congressional Budget Office analysts were able to find dollar amounts for 491 of the programs, with total expenditures of $516 billion. -
Another 155 will expire on Sept. 30, the CBO says. -
Of the 1,503 agencies or programs, 22 required a reauthorization vote as long ago as the 1980s, according to the CBO. Among them: the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Energy Information Administration. -
The Legal Services Corp. is the granddaddy of them all: Its authorization expired in 1980. -
The fault lies not with the agencies, but Congress, an expert says. Lawmakers have a hard enough time funding the government for another year; they hardly ever get around to reauthorizing existing programs.
Waste of the Day
by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books Florida County Chasing $9.3M in Election Funds, RCI
Contractor Boeing Lacks Trained Workers, RCI
Trump's Mar-a-Lago Trips = Tens of Million$, RCI
Lawless Spending in Bell, California, RCI
LA's Untrackable $2.3B for Homeless, RCI Trump 2.0 and the Beltway Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me War Plans, Atlantic
5 Revelations From Trump Team's War Plan Texts on Signal, Politico
How Secure Is Signal? Cyber Whizzes Weigh In, Politico
Experts: ‘Really Scary’ Info Shared in Signal Chat, New York Post
Online: Private Data, Passwords of Top U.S. Security Officials, Spiegel
How Trump Is Throttling Biden's Climate Dreams, Politico
VP Tasked With Killing 'Distorted' Smithsonian Narratives, Newsweek
Insider: Biden Demanded Media Submit to 'Quote Approval', Mediaite
Third Biden Dog Attacked Agents While Joe Was VP, Washington Examiner Other Noteworthy Articles and Series Entitlements may be the third rail of American politics, but they are also where the money is – which presents a heavy challenge to the Trump administration’s effort to trim the federal deficit. This Wall Street Journal investigation offers an opportunity to achieve real savings through reforming Medicaid systems that double-paid health insurers for the coverage of hundreds of thousands of patients across the country, costing taxpayers billions of dollars: The insurers, which are paid by state and federal governments to cover low-income Medicaid recipients, collected at least $4.3 billion over three years for patients who were enrolled – and paid for – in other states, a Wall Street Journal analysis of Medicaid data found. The patients were signed up for Medicaid in two states at once, in many cases following a move from one to the other. Most were getting all their healthcare services through one insurer in one state, even though Medicaid was paying insurers in both states to cover them. Private insurers oversee Medicaid benefits for more than 70% of the about 72 million low-income and disabled people in the program. The companies get paid each month for each person they cover. They aren’t supposed to get paid if a patient leaves for another state. … Insurers said it is up to states to verify people’s eligibility, and to disenroll them if necessary. This article reports that cracking down on this practice won’t make much of a dent in the Great Society spending that is driving deficits and debt. Medicaid and Medicare together cost taxpayers more than $1.8 trillion a year. But a billion here, a billion there, and before long you’re talking about real money. From the Annals of Even Communists Like Being Rich, this article reports that Chinese President Xi Jinping has amassed more than $1 billion in assets through relatives, according to a U.S. intelligence report. The irony, of course, is that Xi has led a high-profile campaign the last 13 years aimed at stamping out cronyism and corruption while his family was cashing in. Xi is not alone: The report stated that as many as 65% of all government officials in China receive unofficial income through bribery or graft – despite more than a decade of anti-corruption efforts that have ensnared over 5 million Chinese Communist Party officials. “Corruption is an endemic feature of and challenge for China, enabled by a political system with power highly centralized in the hands of the CCP, a CCP-centric concept of the rule of law, a lack of independent checks on public officials, and limited transparency,” the report said. Police in California locked down a children’s hospital in Loma Linda this after a caller threatened a mass shooting at the facility. Mayhem did not ensue, The next day, this article reports, the Claremont Police Department received “a chilling 911 report: A caller said they were holding someone captive inside a Claremont McKenna College restroom, carrying a bomb and preparing to shoot anyone they saw on campus. The call triggered a massive deployment of law enforcement and SWAT team members and sent waves of panic coursing through campus as students scrambled to find cover.” But ... ... the crisis was [also] fake, the result of a "swatting" call, a hoax 911 report made in the hope of generating a large law enforcement response. … Swatting is a growing problem across the state and country. But California law can make it challenging to hold people accountable for the chaos their threats cause. Although falsely reporting an emergency to 911 is a misdemeanor offense, lawmakers are seeking tougher penalties for threats that cause mass disruption and target vulnerable populations such as schoolchildren or hospital patients. Under current law, threats are only considered to be a crime when they are made against an individual — not an institution, such as a school or hospital. Now, state legislators are backing new legislation to close that loophole. This article reports that in January 2024, FBI agents opened investigations into more than 100 separate threats targeting more than 1,000 institutions in 42 states during a one-month period. “They have never broken the law,” declares the headline on this article about people who are living in the country illegally: During his campaign and at his inauguration, President Trump said he would launch the largest mass deportation in U.S. history and that he would target “millions and millions of criminal aliens” who pose a threat to national security and public safety. In the first 50 days of the administration, ICE made 32,809 arrests of which nearly half – 14,111 – were convicted criminals and about a third – 9,980 – had pending criminal charges, according to a Homeland Security statement. But the operations also led to the arrest of 8,718 immigrants with no criminal history, including the parents of a 10-year-old girl who is a U.S. citizen and was recovering from brain cancer. This article reports that “living in the country illegally is a civil violation, not a criminal offense, unless someone has been deported and returns to the country without permission.” In 2023, John Murawski reported for RCI on the efforts of radical scholars to read the Bible and interpret faith through a “queer lens.” “Rather than merely settling for the acceptance of gender-nonconforming people within existing marital norms and social expectations," Murawski reported, "queer theology questions heterosexual assumptions and binary gender norms as limiting, oppressive and anti-biblical, and centers queerness as the redemptive message of Christianity.” Now the University of Richmond in Virginia is offering a “Queer Bible” religious course, Campus Reform reports: The class “brings together queer theory, sexuality, and the Bible in order to explore what it means to ‘queer’ the Bible and biblical interpretations.” Class readings “include both biblical texts and queer and trans scholarship on the Bible. Topics may include questions of sexuality, gender identity, and queer hermeneutics, queer time, queer affect, and queer pleasure in the Bible.” In a separate article, CNN reports that despite massive loan forgiveness carried out during the Biden administration, the student debt load continues to rise. “The loan portfolio totals a staggering $1.8 trillion in debt, with an estimated 40% of loans past due, the sources said, up from what CNN has previously reported based on publicly available information.” |
