RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week

RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
Sept. 1 to Sept. 7, 2019

Featured Investigation:
Why Was the FBI So Incurious
About This Hot Collusion Tip? 

The FBI failed to run down a hot Trump-Russia tip in December 2016, Eric Felten reports for RealClearInvestigations. But did it overlook treasonous wrongdoing? Probably not. Felten says the episode probably has more to do with the feds' lack of interest in checking the credibility of the Democrat-paid opposition researchers pushing such claims -- the same ones it was relying on in probing Donald Trump.

Here are the details, from recently released FBI files:

• A month after Donald Trump’s election in 2016, Steele dossier promoter Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS passed on to the FBI a startling new claim: The Trump campaign might have moved against GOP strategist Rick Wilson for dishing on the President-elect's ties to Russia. 
• Here, or so it seemed, was a Trump insider, with closely guarded secrets to tell, who could have provided agents with firsthand evidence of collusion with Russia. 
• Yet it wouldn't have been hard to debunk the claim. Wilson was already a well-known Never-Trumper and never even worked for Team Trump. 
• Still, the FBI did nothing to pursue the tip. “Nope. Not a word,” Wilson said when asked whether he had ever heard from the bureau. 
• The inaction was puzzling -- from investigators professing to do everything to "verify, corroborate or refute" the claims of Simpson and his dossier compiler, Christopher Steele.  
• Felten suggests that, amid Obama administration alarm as Trump was about to take office, the FBI may have been too invested in the Steele-Simpson collusion narrative. 

To test the hypothesis that Steele and Simpson had reliable information, all FBI agents needed to do was call Rick Wilson, Felten writes. They didn’t even pick up the phone. 

The Trump Investigations: Top Articles

Rep. Nunes Sues GPS for Conspiracy to Obstruct Probe, The Federalist 
Overstock CEO's Wild Maria Butina Story Maybe Not So Wild, Rolling Stone 
Jury Acquits Greg Craig in Case Tied to Mueller Probe, Daily Caller 

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series 

How Corporate Britain Hides Sex Bias Cases 
Bloomberg 
Every year hundreds of workers who file sex-discrimination grievances in British courts settle their cases in return for money—and silence. Employers from hairdressers to police departments to multinational corporations have been sued for sex discrimination in cases that were later withdrawn. Now, you can see who’s been sued, and how many of those suits vanished before any alleged bad behavior could be publicly exposed in court. A relatively new and little-known public database analyzed by Bloomberg shows that 2,195 sex-discrimination suits were dropped before court rulings in the past two and a half years, out of 3,585 suits in total. In finance, for example, at least 71 complainants brought lawsuits that later vanished into the ether, out of 94 suits altogether filed against major banks such as Barclays, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, and Banco Santander.  

DEA Agents Surprise and Search Amtrak Southwest Riders 
The Intercept 
DEA Special Agent Perry Jay Perry is behind as many as 1,600 criminal cases against drug couriers. His secret weapons are train and bus depots around Albuquerque that seem to attract an inordinate amount of drug trafficking; and a capacious interpretation of the Constitution’s tolerance for stops and searches. This article notes that it’s legal for Perry to search people without probable cause, a warrant, or a dog because travelers supposedly realize that they have the right to decline to submit to his searches. Perry and others in his interdiction unit have testified that they receive manifests ahead of time listing the passengers who will be arriving in Albuquerque. And Perry is not the only cop riding the rails: “His tactics,” the article reports, “offer a case study in how law enforcement targets mass transit in the war on drugs, generating thousands of busts and a steady stream of revenue from seized assets." 

As Patients Struggle With Bills, Hospital Sues Thousands 
New York Times 
Some hospitals across the country are increasingly taking their patients to court over unpaid bills. This article focuses on the Carlsbad Medical Center in New Mexico, which has filed more than 3,000 lawsuits against patients over medical debt since 2015, more than 500 of them through August of this year alone. It is not alone. In Memphis, Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare, a nonprofit hospital, filed more than 8,300 lawsuits from 2014 through 2018, including some against its own employees. In Virginia, hospitals filed more than 20,000 lawsuits over patient debt in 2017 alone. Just five hospitals accounted for half of the resulting wage garnishments in the state. Nationally, more than one in four consumers in 2018 were reported to credit bureaus over unpaid debt. More than half of those reports involved medical bills. 

Dutch Mole Aided U.S.-Israel Stuxnet Hack of Iran 
Yahoo News 
How did the U.S. and Israel launch the Stuxnet virus attack that targeted Iran’s nuclear program? The answer, according to this article, is an inside mole recruited by Dutch intelligence agents at the behest of the CIA and the Israeli intelligence agency. The mole – an Iranian engineer – then provided much-needed inside access when it came time, using a USB flash drive, to slip Stuxnet onto those systems. But then this supposed news article turns into – you guessed it – an attack on President Trump, arguing, without any proof, that he has snuffed out such cooperation with allies by pulling out of the Iran deal. At the end, the article reports that the Stuxnet attack was not very effective, because the Iranians discovered it quickly. Nevertheless, the reporters say it was a milestone because it led to Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. 

Mysterious Vaping Illness Is 'Becoming an Epidemic' 
New York Times 
So far this summer more than 215 otherwise healthy people in their late teens and 20s have shown up at hospitals this summer with severe shortness of breath, often after suffering for several days with vomiting, fever and fatigue. Some have wound up in the intensive care unit or on a ventilator for weeks. The cause of this mysterious and life-threatening illness seems tied to vaping, perhaps vaping marijuana. Health investigators are now trying to determine whether a particular toxin or substance has sneaked into the supply of vaping products, whether some people reused cartridges containing contaminants, or whether the risk stems from a broader behavior, like heavy e-cigarette use or a combination of that and vaping marijuana. Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said he suspected a link to illicit products — perhaps related to ingredients including THC — because the main manufacturers of e-cigarettes had not suddenly altered their ingredients on a wide scale. 

She Spent More Than $110K on Drug Rehab. Her Son Still Died. 
Vox 
The opioid crisis has been a boon for rehab clinics. However, this article reports, while effective, evidence-based addiction treatment exists, many programs do not offer that, instead sucking patients and families into a rehab industry that is largely unregulated, shockingly ineffective, and ruinously expensive. It reports that American rehab is dominated by a 12-step approach, modeled after Alcoholics Anonymous, which works only for some patients and doesn’t have strong evidence of effectiveness outside of alcohol addiction treatment. That’s often coupled with approaches that have even less evidence behind them. There’s wilderness therapy, equine therapy, and a confrontational approach built around punishments and “tough love.” Evidence suggests the latter approach can make things even worse. 

Shocking Number of Vegetative Patients Might Be Conscious 
Vice 
Six years ago, when he was 19, Juan Daniel Torres Perez was in a hospital bed, unable to move or talk. Doctors told his parents that his brain was irreparably damaged after it had been starved of oxygen for hours. His body remained, but the son they knew was gone. He was almost completely unresponsive to the world around him. And yet he was conscious the whole time. “I could hear my mom and dad from the very beginning,” he said recently.  This article says that Perez is not an anomaly. There are, it reports, likely thousands of people around the world who have been incorrectly diagnosed as vegetative—considered nothing more than the husks of their former selves, with no internal thoughts—when in fact they are present in some capacity, stuck inside bodies that don’t cooperate, with no way to communicate. Perhaps 40% of the roughly 4,200 Americans deemed to be in a vegetative state each year are misdiagnosed. There could be anywhere from 112,000 to 280,000 people in minimally conscious states currently in the U.S. In many cases, it’s because these patients have not received the kinds of brain imaging and bedside diagnostic tests that could accurately tell if they are conscious. 

Inside the Weird Fake Seed Scams All Over Amazon 
Mashable 
Imagine a juicy sweet strawberry – only it’s blue! That’ll get your friends talking at the next book club. And you can order seeds for this magical breed and many others on Amazon, eBay, Etsy, and online gardening marketplaces like JackSeeds. One problem: they aren’t real. We can send a man to the moon but we still haven’t developed a blue strawberry, or rainbow roses or peppers genetically engineered to look like penises. Despite complains, the seeds continue to be available. This article reports that there are dozens of fake seed sellers on Amazon alone, and they're nearly impossible to trace.