RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
July 24 to July 30, 2022 In RealClearInvestigations, Leighton Woodhouse presents a case study in factors driving record drug deaths across the nation: the fatal overdose of Adam Rashid, 25, an addict in San Francisco. Through him, Woodhouse reveals the deadly fault lines of a system that seems almost designed to fail: In 2019, after years of living on city streets across the country despite his father's desperate efforts to bring him home, Rashid sought treatment at San Francisco General Hospital. But he was discharged and put back on the streets due to a lack of meaningful addiction care options and laws that would compel treatment. Soon after his release, Rashid was found unconscious on the second floor of The Gap near the city’s Tenderloin district, drug paraphernalia scattered about him. At Saint Francis Memorial, his second hospital on the same day, Rashid was evaluated, given a cookie and some Kool-Aid -- and discharged just two and a half hours later. At 8:45 p.m., Rashid called his father from the hospital and agreed to come home. But he never got off at his subway stop in Oakland. Instead, he nodded off and rode to the end of the line and back to the opposite terminal. There, about midnight, police found him dead of a fentanyl overdose. “He was trying to seek help,” said the father. But the negligence and indifference of people who should have known better “ultimately killed him.” Biden, Trump and the Beltway Joe Biden met with at least 14 of his son Hunter’s business associates – including associates from Mexico, Ukraine, China and Kazakhstan – while he was vice president in the Obama White House, casting further doubt on the president’s repeated claims that, as he put it in 2019, "I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” This article reports: Two of Hunter’s Mexican business associates, Miguel Aleman Velasco and Miguel Aleman Magnani visited the West Wing on Feb. 26, 2014, according to the Obama White House visitor logs, and Joe was later photographed with Hunter giving Velasco and Magnani a tour of the White House Brady Press Briefing room. … Emails, which were reviewed by Fox News Digital, from more than a year later showed that Hunter arranged a video conference with his father and Carlos Slim, a Mexican billionaire with whom Hunter was seeking to do business with at the time, on Oct. 30, 2015. Hunter later confirmed in a text message to a business partner that he had spoken with his father about Slim. "Spoke to my dad about ‘Slim ask,’" Hunter wrote on July 24, 2018, to which Cooper responded, "Oh that sounds SO F’ING GOOD." In a separate article, the New York Post reports that another former business partner of Hunter Biden – a man named James Gilead – referred to Joe Biden as “the big guy” who would receive money from Hunter’s foreign business deals. This confirms the earlier claim made by another Hunter Biden associate, Tony Bobulinski, that Joe was dubbed “the big guy” and that he was cut in on the action. Whistleblowers described by Republican Senator Chuck Grassley as “highly credible” are alleging a widespread effort within the FBI to discredit negative information about President Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, during the runup to the 2020 presidential election. In a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland and FBI Director Christopher Wray, Grassley writes: It’s been alleged that the FBI developed information in 2020 about Hunter Biden’s criminal financial and related activity. It is further alleged that in August 2020, FBI Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Brian Auten opened an assessment which was used by a FBI Headquarters (“FBI HQ”) team to improperly discredit negative Hunter Biden information as disinformation and caused investigative activity to cease. Based on allegations, verified and verifiable derogatory information on Hunter Biden was falsely labeled as disinformation. … Importantly, it’s been alleged to my office that Auten’s assessment was opened in August 2020, which is the same month that Senator [Ron] Johnson and I received an unsolicited and unnecessary briefing from the FBI that purportedly related to our Biden investigation and a briefing for which the contents were later leaked in order paint the investigation in a false light. Paul Sperry of RealClearInvestigations reported this about Auten in 2020: The unnamed FBI ‘Supervisory Intelligence Analyst’ cited by the Justice Department's watchdog for failing to properly vet the so-called Steele dossier before it was used to justify spying on the Trump campaign teaches a class on the ethics of spying at a small Washington-area college, records show. When he first ran for the presidency, Donald Trump promised to “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C. The sharp resistance within the government that he faced in office suggests he failed. This investigative series, which draws on extensive interviews with dozens of Trump and GOP insiders, says finishing that job will be a top priority of a potential second Trump term: Former President Trump’s top allies are preparing to radically reshape the federal government if he is re-elected, purging potentially thousands of civil servants and filling career posts with loyalists to him and his "America First” ideology, people involved in the discussions tell Axios. The impact could go well beyond typical conservative targets such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Internal Revenue Service. Trump allies are working on plans that would potentially strip layers at the Justice Department — including the FBI, and reaching into national security, intelligence, the State Department and the Pentagon, sources close to the former president say. … They intend to stack thousands of mid-level staff jobs. Well-funded groups are already developing lists of candidates selected often for their animus against the system — in line with Trump’s long-running obsession with draining “the swamp.” This includes building extensive databases of people vetted as being committed to Trump and his agenda. Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway Sources: Roberts Tried to Flip Kavanaugh on Roe Ruling CNN
Jan. 6 Chair Thompson Backed Protest Template on Jan. 6, 2005 Examiner
100+ Attacks On Pro-Lifers Since Dobbs Leak Breitbart
2020 Vote Skeptics Court Local Sheriffs New York Times
State Department Funding Atheism Abroad Just The News
Capitol Cop Use-of-Force Reports Suggest Jan. 6 Foul Play Epoch Times
Justice Dept. Investigating Hack of Federal Court System Politico Other Noteworthy Articles and Series China tried to build a network of informants inside the Federal Reserve system, at one point threatening to imprison a Fed economist during a trip to Shanghai unless he agreed to provide nonpublic economic data, a congressional investigation found. This article reports: Fed employees were offered contracts with Chinese talent-recruitment programs, which often include cash payments, and asked to provide information on the U.S. economy, interest-rate changes and policies. … In the case of the economist, the report said, Chinese officials in 2019 detained and tried to coerce him to share data and information on U.S. government policies, including on tariffs while the U.S. and China were in the midst of a trade war. The report by Republican staff members of the Senate’s Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs doesn’t say whether any sensitive information was compromised in what it said has been a decadelong effort that began around 2013. Access to such information could provide valuable insights given the Fed’s extensive analysis of U.S. economic activity, its oversight of the U.S. financial system, and the setting of interest-rate policy. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell strongly disputed the report’s findings and called its characterizations of some employees unfair. Long before Russia invaded Ukraine, the Kremlin was building a network of secret agents to smooth its path. This article reports that five people with knowledge of the Kremlin’s preparations said war planners around President Vladimir Putin believed that, aided by these agents, Russia would require only a small military force and a few days to force Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s administration to quit, flee or capitulate. One source with direct knowledge of the Kremlin’s invasion plans told Reuters that Russian agents were deployed to Chernobyl [home of the nuclear facility] last year to bribe officials and prepare the ground for a bloodless takeover. … At a national level, sources with knowledge of the Kremlin’s plans said Moscow was counting on activating sleeper agents inside the Ukrainian security apparatus. The sources confirmed Western intelligence reports that the Kremlin was lining up Oleg Tsaryov, a hotelier, to lead a puppet government in Kyiv. And a former Ukrainian prosecutor general disclosed to Reuters in June that Ukrainian politician Viktor Medvedchuk, a friend of Putin, had an encrypted phone issued by Russia so he could communicate with the Kremlin. Though Russia captured Chernobyl, its plan to take power in Kyiv failed. In many cases, the sleeper agents Moscow had installed failed to do their job or had overstated their influence in the years leading up to the invasion. In return for not paying taxes, nonprofit hospitals are supposed to provide community benefits. The clearest form is free or discounted care for poor patients who otherwise couldn’t afford it. But despite receiving billions of dollars in tax breaks in exchange for providing support to their communities, a Wall Street Journal analysis suggests nonprofit hospitals are less generous than their for-profit competitors: These charitable organizations, which comprise the majority of hospitals in the U.S., wrote off in aggregate 2.3% of their patient revenue on financial aid for patients’ medical bills. Their for-profit competitors, a category including publicly traded giants such as HCA Healthcare Inc., wrote off 3.4%, the Journal found in an analysis of the most-recent annual reports hospitals file with the federal government. … Nonprofits and their for-profit competitors overall fell well short of the share of patient revenue that government hospitals, such as those owned by cities and counties, wrote off as financial assistance, which was 4.7% in the most recent year. A cache of documents reveal that the Portland Public Schools system has launched a war against the “gender binary” and adopted a new curriculum teaching K-5 students to subvert the sexuality of “white colonizers” and begin exploring “the infinite gender spectrum.” Christopher F. Rufo reports: The curriculum begins in kindergarten with an anatomy lesson featuring graphic drawings of children’s genitalia. The lesson avoids the terms “boy” and “girl” in favor of the gender-neutral variants “person with a penis” and “person with a vulva,” because, according to the curriculum, some girls can have penises and some boys can have vulvas. “Any gender and kid can have any type of body,” a related presentation reads. In first and second grade, students are introduced to the key tenets of gender-identity theory. “Gender is something adults came up with to sort people into groups,” the curriculum states. “Many people think there are only two genders, girls and boys, but this is not true. There are many ways to be a boy, a girl, both or neither. Gender identity is about how you feel about yourself inside.” … By the end of fifth grade, the curriculum explicitly asks students to make a “commitment to change,” according to the dictates of gender ideology. Students receive a list of six commitments, including: “I commit to learning more about what LGBTQIA2S+ words mean and how they have changed over time”; “I commit to learning about the history and leadership of Black trans women”; “I commit to practicing pronouns and correcting myself EVERY time”; “I commit to attending QSA/GSA and being a leader at my school”; and “I commit to watching and reading books, movies, and TV shows that have LGBTQIA+ characters.” In a separate article, the Washington Free Beacon reports that a New York City public school encouraged students as young as 10 years old to keep a list of all the "microaggressions" they witnessed, both at school and in their own families … [and] to list their gender identity – "cisgender," "nonbinary," or "trans"—as well as their sexual orientation on a graded worksheet., Coronavirus Investigations The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention coordinated with personnel at Twitter, Facebook, and Google to censor users who expressed skepticism or criticism of COVID-19 vaccines, according to a trove of internal communications obtained by America First Legal and shared exclusively with the Washington Free Beacon. Although many of the posts flagged by the CDC contained false information about the COVID-19 vaccines, the efforts to police misinformation also resulted in mistaken acts of censorship. An April 2021 email from a CDC staffer to Facebook states that the "algorithms that Facebook and other social media networks are apparently using to screen out posting by sources of vaccine misinformation are also apparently screening out valid public health messaging, including [Wyoming] Health communications." The communications reveal a high level of coordination between the government and tech industry during the pandemic and raise questions about the extent to which other private companies are working with the federal government to censor the public. Other Coronavirus Investigations Fauci’s $414K Pension to Exceed Biden’s $400K Salary Open the Books
COVID Keeps Evolving. Why Haven't Vaccines? Wired |
