RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week June 24 toJune 30 Featured Investigation At least seven unusual approaches were made to the Trump campaign during the spring and summer of 2016, before the full-fledged launch of the Russia investigation. Most of those contacts - including Donald Trump Jr.'s much-publicized meeting with a Russian lawyer in June 2016 - offered the prospect of information damaging to Trump's Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. As Lee Smith reported for RealClearInvestigations, all of these approaches were made by people who shared this in common: They had close ties either to the FBI, Western intelligence agencies or the Clinton. He wrote: Two of these approaches were made by one U.S. government informant already publicly identified as such, Stefan Halper. Another was made by a man who swore in court that he had worked as an FBI informant. Two others were made by figures associated with Western intelligence agencies. Another two approaches included political operatives, one foreign, with ties to the Clintons. President Obama's director of national intelligence, James Clapper, has asserted that dispatching Halper to follow the Trump campaign "protected" it from the Russians. But Mark Wauck, a former FBI agent with experience in such tactics, sees an effort at entrapment. "What appear to have been repeated attempts to implicate the Trump campaign, in some sort of quid pro quo arrangement with Russians who claimed to have ‘dirt' on Hillary," Wauck told RealClearInvestigations, "look like efforts to manufacture evidence against members of the Trump campaign or create pretexts to investigate it." Smith's reporting details those seven approaches, noting that they ramped up after the May 3 Indiana primary made it clear that Trump would almost certainly win the GOP nomination. He also notes that "All the offers were rebuffed or ignored — except Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with a Russian lawyer who was partnered with a political operative paid by Hillary Clinton and who provided no untoward information." Nevertheless, he wrote: The opening of the FBI's full investigation into the Trump campaign on July 31, 2016 was an extraordinary event, launched despite the DOJ's traditional reluctance to investigate political campaigns in the middle of an election. That decision has raised even more questions following the report this month from the Justice Department's inspector general, which detailed many instances of anti-Trump bias in the upper echelons of the FBI. "Crossfire Hurricane" was reportedly initiated because of the vague tip regarding Russian dirt that Alexander Downer had passed on to the State Department almost two months earlier. The six other Russia-related approaches that occurred before July 31 might have shown the FBI that the Trump team was free of Russian influence. Read Full Article The Trump Investigations: Top Articles One Unverified File the Feds Won't Leak: About Loretta Lynch RealClearInvestigations The FBI, which has been roundly criticized for leaks to the media, is refusing to let even members of Congress with top security clearances to see intercepted material that could be a Rosetta Stone of both the Clinton email investigation and the Trump-Russia probe. That material - which has been outlined in press reports - consists of unverified accounts intercepted from putative Russian sources in which the head of the Democratic National Committee allegedly implicates the Hillary Clinton campaign and Attorney General Loretta Lynch in a secret deal to fix the Clinton email investigation. As Paul Sperry reported for RealClearInvestigations: True or false, the material is consequential because it appears to have influenced former FBI Director James B. Comey's decision to break with bureau protocols because he didn't trust Lynch. In his recent book, Comey said he took the reins in the Clinton email probe, announcing Clinton should not be indicted, because of a "development still unknown to the American public" that "cast serious doubt" on Lynch's credibility - clearly the intercepted material. If the material documents an authentic exchange between Lynch and a Clinton aide, it would appear to be strong evidence that the Obama administration put partisan political considerations ahead of its duty to enforce the law. If the material is a fabrication, it may constitute the most fruitful effort by the Russians to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. For if Comey had not gone around Lynch and given his July 2016 press conference clearing Clinton, he almost certainly would not have publicly announced the reopening for the case just prior to the election - an event Clinton and her allies blame for her surprising loss to Trump. Let's Review What Peter Strzok Did, The Hill FBI Lawyer Who Sent 'Resistance' Text Interviewed Papadopoulos, Daily Caller Goodlatte: Strzok's Closed Testimony 'Not Believable', Washington Examiner Spymaster Brennan, Out of the Shadows, New York Times Magazine Other Noteworthy Articles and Series How China Played Loan Hardball to Take Over Sri Lankan Port New York Times Are China's loans to developing countries more akin to loansharking than foreign support aid? This article raises that question through an in-depth examination of a Sri Lankan port financed through Chinese loans. The port was a bust, and when Sri Lanka couldn't pay its debts, it transferred control to China, giving it territory just a few hundred miles off the shores of a rival, India, and a strategic foothold along a critical commercial and military waterway. The debt deal also intensified accusations that China's "global investment and lending program amounts to a debt trap for vulnerable countries around the world, fueling corruption and autocratic behavior in struggling democracies." The Biggest Digital Heist in History Isn't Over Yet Bloomberg Since late 2013, a band of cybercriminals has penetrated the digital inner sanctums of more than 100 banks in 40 nations, including Germany, Russia, Ukraine, and the U.S. -- and stolen about $1.2 billion. The thieves - allegedly led by a Ukrainian named Denis Katana - have figured out how to program ATMs to spit out cash like a slot machine and how to inflate account balances and shuttle millions of dollars around the globe. Deploying the same espionage methods used by intelligence agencies, they appropriated the identities of network administrators and executives and plumbed files for sensitive information about security and account management practices. The First Family of Counterfeit Hunting Narrative.ly The two brothers grew up with a target on their back, working undercover for their father, a legendary private detective hunted down counterfeit products made by organized crime syndicates around the globe. Their father, who had bounties on his head, once told them: "Listen. There might be a time when I'm going to tell you to move, get out of the way, duck. And you'd better do it, because it's going to be important." Despite or because of the danger, Rob and Jason Holmes followed in his dangerous footsteps. They and their team at IPCybercrime spend their days tracking down knockoffs online, feeding the information back to the name-brand companies who employ them - Louis Vuitton, Disney, Tiffany & Co. - to use in their cases against counterfeiters. Reporter Ali Watkins Dated More Than One Hill Staffer New York Times The late New York Times editor Abe Rosenthal once quipped that he didn't care if his reporters were sleeping with elephants so long as they weren't covering the circus. Intelligence beat reporter Ali Watkins violated that basic tenet of journalism - aimed at avoiding conflicts of interest - when she had a three-year intimate relationship with James Wolfe, who was head of security at the Senate Intelligence Committee. Watkins reportedly told her editors at Politico, BuzzFeed News and the Huffington Post that she was she was dating a man connected to intelligence work on Capitol Hill but that he was not a source -- which appears to be untrue. Evidently, her editors expressed no curiosity about his identity. When Politico editors finally learned the man was Wolfe, a powerful official on a committee that she covered, they took no action. The ethical failure was not enough to prevent the New York Times from hiring Watkins, albeit after she had ended her affair with Wolfe. Child Marriage Is Legal in 48 States BuzzFeed In 2010, the U.S. State Department denounced "all cases of child marriage as child abuse." While it was referring to the practice abroad, child marriage was legal, through various loopholes, in all 50 US states — a contradiction often highlighted by supporters of legislation raising the marriage age to 18. Since then, only two states have banned marriage for people under 18. Nineteen states still don't have minimum ages for people to marry. South Carolina: Pregnant Girls Young as 12 Can Marry Post & Courier Nearly 7,000 underage girls — some as young as 12 and 13 — have wed older males in South Carolina over the past 20 years, endangered by decades-old legal loopholes that can expose children to sexual abuse. In some cases, these grooms are much older. Since 1997, dozens of South Carolina men in their 40s, 50s and 60s have married teenage girls who were not yet 18. Many of these unions are made possible by a 1962 state law that sets no minimum age for marriage as long as the bride is pregnant. Fla.: Job Centers Gave Away Millions Wrongly Tampa Bay Times Tampa Bay's two largest job placement agencies handed out $6 million in Visa and gas cards since 2014 - all paid for with public tax dollars - and a share of that money went to people who didn't use the centers to find work and never had to account for how they spent it. Two-thirds went to people who were not on public assistance, though the money is supposed to help those in need. Nearly 700 received $1,000 or more, including many who already had jobs and never asked for help. One agency mailed out thousands of cards, totaling more than $240,000, without checking to make sure they reached the intended recipients. DJ's Chewing Gum Helped Crack 1992 Murder Case Washington Post DNA analysis requires DNA - a problem if the uncaught criminal has never provided a sample to the authorities. But a new technique, genetic genealogy, is widening the net by allowing law enforcement to use DNA samples from family members to hone in possible suspects. The technique has caught on and been used to solve cold cases across the country, leading to the arrest of alleged Golden State Killer Joseph James DeAngelo, and, as reported in this article, a local DJ accused of murdering an elementary school teacher in Pennsylvania a quarter century ago. |