RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
Oct. 6 to Oct. 12, 2019
Featured Investigations
It's Not All About the Bidens:
Why Trump Has Ukraine on the Brain
The Trump-Ukraine whistleblower furor is explained by Trump opponents' fear of the President's determination to get to the bottom of a years-long campaign against him - one in which Ukraine always figured heavily, Lee Smith reports for RealClearInvestigations.
Smith, a RCI contributor, is the author of a book out this month, "The Plot Against the President." He's won vindication for his against-the-grain skepticism about Trump-Russia collusion - a theory ultimately debunked by Robert Mueller's long and costly investigation. (Examples of Smith's early, prescient reporting for RCI can be found here, here, here, and here.)
Now Smith reports the ways Whistlegate -- in which Trump supposedly pressured Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden in return for military aid -- actually looks like Russiagate by other means.
Key points:
- In both cases, Trump is alleged to have taken or solicited dirt on his Democratic opponent from a foreign power in exchange for favors to that country's government.
- It was understandable, Smith writes, that once Trump was cleared by the Mueller Report, the President would urge Ukraine's new leader to investigate Trump-Russia's origins -- because Ukraine always figured in that disproven narrative in major ways.
- Fusion GPS, the Democrat-hired opposition research firm behind the spurious Steele dossier, also circulated two previously undisclosed dossiers on Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort and Ukraine.
- Democrats asked Ukraine's leaders to help dig up dirt on Trump and his associates in 2016 and then publicly denounce him.
- When Democrats discovered shady dealings in Ukraine by Manafort, they advanced a narrative that made Trump guilty by association.
- Without evidence, they argued that because one of Manafort's clients, Ukraine's former President Viktor Yanukovych, was supposedly close to President Vladimir Putin of Russia, Trump was also in Putin's pocket.
- This narrative ignored Manafort's urging Yanukovych to forge close ties with the European Union instead of Russia.
- It also ignored the fact that the Ukrainian energy company that paid Joe Biden's son tens of thousands of dollars a month was run by one of Yanukovych's allies.
Though many have forgotten it now (and anti-Trump media are loathe to bring it up), the questionable Trump-Manafort-Ukraine argument was advanced through media leaks as a keystone to the Trump-Russia collusion narrative by intelligence officials and Clinton operatives. So the current Ukraine furor looks like old wine in new bottles, Smith concludes.
But why the repackaging? Smith answers: "Anti-Trump forces in the government and media are working to vindicate their previous efforts and discredit a forthcoming Justice Department inquiry into the origins of Russiagate by again connecting Trump and a foreign power to a U.S. election."
Here Are the Giuliani-Ukraine Notes Few Have Seen
RealClearInvestigations
Notes of Rudolph Giuliani's interviews with two former Ukrainian prosecutors include one’s allegation that then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko warned him against investigating energy firm Burisma Holdings “as it was not in the interest of Joe and/or Hunter Biden.”
Eric Felten reports for RealClearInvestigations:
- The notes were published by a Ukrainian news site, and their authenticity was confirmed by Giuliani.
- The notes have turned over to congressional committees, but have not been publicly released in the United States.
- They are likely to figure in Trump impeachment proceedings.
- The Ukrainian prosecutor was later fired, under what President Trump says was pressure from Vice President Biden, whose son Hunter had a lucrative role on the Burisma board.
The Trump Investigations: Top Articles
White House Declares War on Impeachment Inquiry, New York Times
4 Intel Aides Alarmed at Pressure on Ukraine, Washington Post
Claim: 2nd Whistleblower on Trump-Ukraine, New York Times
Whistleblower Tie to Unidentified Dem in Presidential Race, Examiner
Campaign Finance Charges vs. 2 Giuliani Ukraine Associates, New York Times
Trump Sought Tillerson's Help for Client of Giuliani, Bloomberg
Trump Adviser: China Provided Info About Hunter Biden, Financial Times
What Hunter Biden Did Was Legal. That’s the Problem. New York Times
Durham Probe of Trump Campaign Surveillance Expands, Fox
Intel Inspector's Stonewall on Backdated Whistleblower Rules, Federalist
Lying FBI Press Aide Got Sports Tickets From CNN and NYT, Daily Caller
Other Noteworthy Articles and Series
Farrow Book: Alleged Matt Lauer NBC Anal Rape
Variety
A former NBC employee claims that Matt Lauer raped her while they were covering the Sochi Olympics in 2014; she also says that back in New York she had several more sexual encounters with him. “It was completely transactional,” the woman, Brooke Nevils, told reporter Ronan Farrow, who relays her story in his new book on the #MeToo movement. “It was not a relationship.” Lauer admits the affair, but claims it was consensual. The Daily Beast reports that the report plunged NBC News into turmoil. The New Yorker ran three excerpts from Farrow’s book, “Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators,” including this one which details Harvey Weinstein’s use of Israeli private-intelligence agency Black Cube to surveil his accusers and the journalists trying to tell their stories.
Alabama: Jails Free Sick Inmates to Avoid Hospital Bills
AL.com/ProPublica
Across Alabama, inmates suffering heart attacks, on the verge of diabetic comas, and brutalized in jail beatings have been released so sheriffs wouldn’t have to pay for their medical care. Some were rearrested once they had recovered. Several Alabama sheriffs, including Washington County Sheriff Richard Stringer, said in interviews that they often find ways to release inmates with sudden health problems to avoid responsibility for their medical costs.
West Virginia: Suspicious Insulin Injections, Deaths at VA Hospital
Washington Post
About a dozen deaths at the Louis A. Johnson VA Medical Center in West Virginia reflect a frightful pattern: Elderly patients in private rooms were injected in their abdomen and limbs with insulin the hospital had not ordered — some with multiple shots. The insulin, which was quickly absorbed, was given late at night when the hospital staff had emptied out. Within hours, the veterans’ blood-sugar levels plummeted. The deaths from the second half of 2017 through July 2018, initially found to be of natural causes, are now being investigated as homicides.
Top Secret Russian Unit Seeks to Destabilize Europe
New York Times
An elite unit inside the Russian intelligence system skilled in subversion, sabotage, and assassination has been executing a coordinated campaign to destabilize Europe. The poisoning of an arms dealer in Bulgaria; a thwarted coup in Montenegro; and the use of a nerve agent in an attempt to assassinate a former Russian spy living in Britain last year are among the activities alleged to be carried out by the group, known as Unit 29155. The purpose of Unit 29155 underscores the degree to which the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin is actively fighting the West with his brand of so-called hybrid warfare – a blend of propaganda, hacking attacks and disinformation – as well as open military confrontation.
Why Is the U.S. Still Using Hypnosis to Convict Criminals?
Guardian
In recent decades, the scientific validity of several forensic practices that prosecutors once relied on to secure convictions has been undermined – including the analysis of blood-spatter patterns and the study of what distinguishes arson from accidental fires. This article focuses on another suspect practice, hypnosis, which has been used as a forensic tool by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies since the World War II. Proponents argue that it allows victims and witnesses to recall traumatic events with greater clarity by detaching them from emotions that muddy the memory. Yet multiple studies have established that hypnosis often harms subjects’ recall.
The Ugly Side Of GoFundMe: Is It a 'White Savior' Platform?
Atlantic
A wealthy young man dealing with emotional loss met a black teenager named Chauncy who didn’t have enough to eat. He bought him some food. That made him feel good. So he soon started a Go Fund Me page for the boy – hoping to raise $250 so the kid could buy a lawnmower to start a landscaping business. Ultimately, he raised $342,106, enough to purchase a house. According to this article, that’s a problem. “GoFundMe campaigns that go viral tend to follow a template similar to Chauncy’s Chance: A relatively well-off person stumbles upon a downtrodden but deserving ‘other’ and shares his or her story; good-hearted strangers are moved to donate a few dollars, and thus, in the relentlessly optimistic language of GoFundMe, ‘transform a life.’" The article adds: "GoFundMe campaigns blend the well-intentioned with the cringeworthy, and not infrequently bring to mind the ‘White Savior Industrial Complex’ – the writer Teju Cole’s phrase for the way sentimental stories of uplift can hide underlying structural problems. ‘The White Savior Industrial Complex is not about justice,’ Cole wrote in 2012. ‘It is about having a big emotional experience that validates privilege.’ ”
