RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
Feb. 11 to Feb. 17
Featured Investigation
With this week's indictments of 13 Russian citizens and three Russian companies over meddling in the U.S. presidential election, but still and yet no formal charges that Americans knowingly colluded, it's worth asking now more than ever: What kind of Scandal-Gate is this?
Here's a name many Americans would buy into: Boomerang-Gate, since the collusion investigation keeps swooping back on those who launched it.
As Paul Sperry reported for RealClearInvestigations this week, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes is examining the role CIA Director John Brennan and other Obama intelligence officials played in promoting the salacious and unverified Steele dossier on Donald Trump – including whether Brennan perjured himself in public testimony about it.
The aide, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, said Nunes will focus on Brennan as well as President Obama’s first CIA director, Leon Panetta, along with the former president’s intelligence czar, James Clapper, and national security adviser, Susan Rice, and security adviser-turned-U.N. ambassador Samantha Power, among other intelligence officials.
“John Brennan did more than anyone to promulgate the dirty dossier,” the investigator said. “He politicized and effectively weaponized what was false intelligence against Trump.” …
Several Capitol Hill sources say Brennan, a fiercely loyal Obama appointee, talked up the dossier to Democratic leaders, as well as the press, during the campaign. They say he also fed allegations about Trump-Russia contacts directly to the FBI, while pressuring the bureau to conduct an investigation of several Trump campaign figures starting in the summer of 2016.
(And as if the FBI weren't tarnished enough by this affair, it faced intense criticism this week for missing obvious red flags of a Florida school shooter's murderous intent.)
Apart from the fact that the CIA Director was trumpeting a dossier that former FBI Director James Comey has described as “salacious and unverified,” Brennan’s activities may put him in legal jeopardy. In May 2017, Sperry reported, “Brennan also swore that he did not know who commissioned the anti-Trump research document (testimony excerpt here), even though senior national security and counterintelligence officials at the Justice Department and FBI knew the previous year that the dossier was funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign.”
Other Noteworthy Articles and Series
Robust D.C. Home Prices All About Federal Power, Power, Power
RealClearInvestigations
The real economy may govern Main Street, but it has little sway in the nation’s capital. Thanks to the never-ending flow of tax dollars, recessions are events district insiders mostly hear about on the news. One place to see this D.C. Difference is the Washington real estate market, which is a bubble that never bursts. Values in both luxury homes and the broader market tend to hold their ground and appreciate in value over time – providing a less obvious leg up in life’s most important personal investment to those within the federal government’s orbit.
His Cheatin' Art: Playmate on Trump's System of Infidelity
New Yorker
Fasten your seat belts: Donald Trump may have cheated on his wives before he was elected president! Then, he tried to hide his infidelity! This article “provides a detailed look at how Trump and his allies used clandestine hotel-room meetings, payoffs, and complex legal agreements to keep affairs—sometimes multiple affairs he carried out simultaneously—out of the press.” Call it the art of the kiss and no tell.
First-Class Travel Marks Pruitt's EPA Tenure
Washington Post
Unlike his predecessors, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt often flies in business or first class on official business, racking up big bills at taxpayer expense. In one three-day period last June, he bought a first-class, round-trip ticket between Washington and New York ($1,641.42); flew with President Trump on Air Force One to Cincinnati (free), before using a military jet to get to New York ($36,068.50) where he had a first-class seats on commercial flights to and from Rome ($7,0003.52). Federal regulations require officials to “consider the least expensive class of travel that meets their needs.”
The IRS Is Coming for Your Passports
National Review
Beginning this month, the Internal Revenue Service will begin denying passports to some American citizens who owe at least $50,000 in unpaid taxes and, in some cases, revoking the passports of Americans with tax delinquencies. Kevin Williamson also reports that there is “no appeal, no procedural remedy in the law, no redress for those who have been wrongly targeted.”
Big Decline in the Black Incarceration Rate
Washington Post
The decline in the U.S. imprisonment rate is producing a “a sizable and surprising racial disparity”: African-Americans are benefitting from the national de-incarceration trend as whites serve time at increasingly higher rates. The rate of imprisonment among African-American men has tumbled 22 percent since 2000, while the rate for white men is 4 percent higher than it was in 2000. As a result, the racial disparity has shrunk by nearly one quarter.
Nurses and Cooks Fill In for Federal Prison Guards
USA Today
Hundreds of secretaries, teachers, counselors, cooks and medical staffers were tapped last year to fill guard posts by the Bureau of Prisons because of acute officer shortages and overtime limits at prisons run by the federal department. The moves were made despite repeated warnings that the assignments placed unprepared employees at risk. And the practice has continued for years even though the agency has been rebuked by Congress and federal labor arbitrators.
Texas: How a SWAT Team Killed a Police Shooter
Dallas News
A peaceful protest against police violence turned deadly in Dallas in July 2016, when a lone gunman murdered five officers, wounding nine others along with two civilians. This deeply reported article combines a strong narrative with maps, drawings, photographs, videos and other alternative story forms, to focus on the SWAT team’s hours-long effort to subdue the heavily armed shooter after he was trapped in a school – long enough to explode a bomb near him.
Hungry? You Could Eat a Horse
1843 Magazine
In our judge-not world of moral relativism, gastronomy may be the last realm with strong and numerous taboos. Would you eat a dog? Or a cat? How about Secretariat? In some parts of Italy horse meat – or carni equine, which sounds better to our era, anyway – is becoming popular. One restaurant offers a mane course of “Horse Three Ways” (“French tartare, a slice of roasted horse and pesto di cavallo.”). Fans say it's tasty and low-fat and nothing anyone should have a cow over.
