RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week

RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week 
Dec. 8 to Dec. 14, 2019

Featured Investigations
The Carter Page/Ukraine Lie That Kept
On Lying for Mueller and the FBI

As Democrats moved toward impeaching the president, the Department of Justice’s Inspector General issued a scathing report indicating that the FBI and Special Counsel Robert Mueller exhibited gross negligence as they investigated the now-debunked Trump/Russia conspiracy theory. 

Time and again, IG Michael Horowitz's report shows, the FBI and Mueller withheld exculpatory evidence in official filings and allowed damaging information regarding Trump to circulate even after it had been discredited (see “pee tape” summary below). 

Paul Sperry of RealClearInvestigations reports that this pattern began early, as the FBI and Mueller knowingly kept alive a sensational but false narrative that junior Trump campaign aide Carter Page, as a favor to the Kremlin, gutted a Republican anti-Russia platform position on Ukraine at the party's 2016 presidential nominating convention. They used that false information repeatedly to help secure spy warrants on Page, suggesting to the court that he was “an agent of Russia.” 

Sperry fleshes out the revelation buried in the IG report with supporting documents and exclusive interviews: 

• The charge traces back to “Never Trump” Republicans saying Trump’s team watered down the party plank. 
• They were sources for a misleading Washington Post column. 
• The story was soon embellished by Democrat-paid opposition researcher Christopher Steele.  
• Steele implicated Page in his since discredited dossier. 
• The FBI included this material in all four of its court applications to spy on Page. 
• But the FBI had compelling evidence the claim was false. 
• Department of Justice officials also disregarded the exculpatory evidence. 
• The FBI’s lead agent told investigators that the bureau was operating on a “belief” that Page was involved in the Ukraine platform, and that he and the FISA team were “hoping to find evidence of that” from the wiretaps. 
• Yet investigators knew that Page was working for U.S., not Russian, intelligence. 

Sperry reports that the party’s Ukraine plank was not gutted but strengthened. Still, the alteration was cast as early, concrete evidence of an actual bending of prospective U.S. policy to suit the Kremlin. As a bipartisan red flag, it helped build a narrative of Trump treachery with, then as now, Ukraine playing a central role. 

Read Full Article 

Watchdog: FBI Knew 'Pee Tape'
Spurious, Didn't Tell Trump 

The Department of Justice Inspector General's report also reveals that the FBI kept Donald Trump in the dark even though it knew by early 2017 that the Steele dossier's explosive "pee tape" story was spurious.

Eric Felten reports in RealClearInvestigations: 

• The FBI confirmed in January 2017 the unverified nature of the yarn – that the Russians had recorded a 2013 prostitutes' urination "show" for Trump in a Moscow hotel room where the Obamas once stayed. 
• Ex-British spy Christopher Steele claimed that the episode, at the Ritz-Carlton near Red Square, had been "‘confirmed’ by a senior, Western staff member at the hotel.”  
• But Steele's only source for the tale told FBI agents that "he/she made it clear to Steele that he/she had no proof to support the statements from his/her sub-sources,” the IG’s report says. 
• This "Primary sub-source" said what he told Steele "was just talk; "word of mouth and hearsay” conversations “with friends over beers."  
• None of this doubt was mentioned to Trump on Jan. 6, 2017, when then-FBI Director James B. Comey told the President-elect about the pee tape in a Trump Tower meeting. 
• Even later in the month, when Trump asked the director at dinner to disprove the “golden showers thing,” Comey demurred, telling the president he didn’t want to “create a narrative that we were investigating him personally.” 
• At no time, in fact, did the FBI come clean that Steele’s “pee tape” claims were false, even as the dossier was being used to secure surveillance warrants.  

I Cover Financial Crime.
And I Got Held Up Without a Gun. 

How's this for a nightmare before Christmas? Hackers hijacking your identity to print personal checks and drain thousands from your bank account while applying for loans in your name and who knows what else? All while the police scratch their heads and the bank is pretty blasé about the whole thing? 

Attention, holiday shoppers: This could happen to you.  

The quasi-Hitchcockian scenario recently befell veteran financial journalist John F. Wasik. Highlights from his firsthand retelling in RealClearInvestigations: 

• Having covered fraud for decades, Wasik had taken all the security precautions you could think of: upgraded security, changed passwords -- the works. 
• It wasn't enough: His bank called about mysterious checks made out in his name -- to characters he never heard of. 
• Then he heard from a credit union and credit card company denying him credit. That’s funny: He hadn't even applied. 
• Then he found his personal details had been changed at one of the "big three" credit-rating agencies. 
• “How did they get this information?” Wasik demanded of his bank. The banker's response: shrugged shoulders.  
• The bank wouldn't even file a fraud report with the cops. 
• Few institutions want you to know the extent of information-stealing operations, Wasik says. 
• Trying to figure out on his own what happened, Wasik ran into dead ends – only to learn one thing for sure: Cyber-thieves are fiendishly adaptive. 
• Case in point: They've learned to work around the more secure chipped-based credit and debit cards by buying “fullz” – whole packets of people's personal info – on the dark web. 
• That leads to new scams – and more consumers on the hook for losses that banks don't cover. 
• Some 14.4 million American consumers fell victim to fraud in 2018. 

The Trump Investigations: Top Articles

Impeachment Charges Heading for Full House Vote, NY Times
Text of House Democrats' Articles of Impeachment, NBC News 
Senate GOP Weighs Short Impeach Trial, Bucking Trump, Washington Post 
Text: Justice Watchdog Report Critiquing FBI on Russia Probe, Justice Dept. 
NY Post Outs Likely Whistleblower, Citing Sperry in RCI, NY Post 
'Significant' FBI Agent Wore Several Hats in Spying Abuses, Daily Caller 
Inspector General Testifies FBI Is Not Vindicated, Washington Post 
FBI's Staggeringly Dysfunctional, Error-Ridden FISA Process, NY Times 
Twitter Thread Calls Out Journalists Who Blew Bogus Dossier, Twitter 
Barr and Durham Publicly Disagree With Horowitz Report, NY Times 

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

How U.S. for Decades Misled American Public on the Afghan War 
Washington Post 
This Washington Post series unpacks a confidential trove of government documents revealing that senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan: Throughout the 18-year campaign, they made rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hid evidence the war had become unwinnable. Since 2001, more than 775,000 U.S. troops have deployed to Afghanistan, many repeatedly. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589 were wounded in action, according to Defense Department figures. “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” said Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations. 

McKinsey Got Millions to Cut NYC Jail Violence; It Soared 
ProPublica 
Inmate violence is a serious problem at America’s jails and prisons. The prestigious consulting firm McKinsey & Company claimed it had a solution – a new anti-violence strategy called “Restart.” It claimed a more than 50% reduction at New York City’s notorious Rikers Island facility, but this article reports that number was bogus. "Jail officials and McKinsey consultants had jointly rigged the Restart program in its earliest phase," it says, "to all but guarantee there would be few violent episodes. ... They stacked the units with inmates they believed to be compliant and unlikely to get into fights or to attack staff.” McKinsey was paid $27.5 million by New York City. It defends its work. 

Internet Games, Chats Rife With Child Predators 
New York Times 
In the third installment of a series called "Exploited," the New York Times reports that sexual predators and other bad actors have found a point of easy access into the lives of young people: They are meeting them online through multiplayer video games and chat apps, making virtual connections right in their victims’ homes. The criminals strike up a conversation and gradually build trust. Often they pose as children, confiding in their victims with false stories of hardship or self-loathing. Their goal, typically, is to dupe children into sharing sexually explicit photos and videos of themselves – which they use as blackmail for more imagery, much of it increasingly graphic and violent. Six years ago, a little over 50 reports of the crimes, commonly known as “sextortion,” were referred to the federally designated clearinghouse that tracks online child sexual abuse. Last year, the center received over 1,500. And the authorities believe that the vast majority of sextortion cases are never reported. Earlier, the series reported on the proliferation of sexual abuse imagery on the internet.  

Merck's $1.3 Billion Cyberattack: Was It an Act of War? 
Bloomberg 
Here’s a surprising and frightening tale of the global economy. The drug company Merck has offices and computer servers around the world, including the Ukraine – a country in an ongoing conflict with Russia. In 2017, malware created by Russia’s military intelligence agency, the GRU, infected a host of systems in Ukraine, including a server in a Merck office there that was running an infected tax software application. The so-called NotPetya ransomeware soon spread, eventually crippling more than 30,000 laptop and desktop computers at the global drug-maker, as well as 7,500 servers, according to a person familiar with the matter. Sales, manufacturing, and research units were all hit. One researcher told a colleague she’d lost 15 years of work. A manufacturing facility that supplies vaccines for the U.S. market had ground to a halt. Merck did what any of us would do when facing a disaster: It turned to its insurers. After all, through its property policies, the company was covered—after a $150 million deductible—to the tune of $1.75 billion for catastrophic risks including the destruction of computer data, coding, and software. So it was stunned when most of its 30 insurers and reinsurers denied coverage under those policies. Why? Because Merck’s property policies specifically excluded another class of risk: an act of war. The claim is playing out in a New Jersey courtroom will have far-reaching consequences for victims of cyberattacks and the insurance companies that will or will not protect them.  

Crack vs. Heroin: Justice System Treats Races Differently 
Asbury Park Press 
This series highlights well-known racial disparities in drug arrests. But it is so intent on seeing those differences only through the lens of race that it ignores important complexities. It broadly claims that the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s led to stringent laws and harsh prison terms in large part because crack was seen as the drug of choice among its users. This narrative, however, ignores the fact that crack did indeed ravage poor neighborhoods and emerged at a time of rising violence -- such that many of the loudest calls for strict laws came from black leaders. The series also claims that because today’s opioid epidemic is affecting many white people, it's seen as a problem of addiction rather than crime, better addressed through treatment rather than jail. But the reporting ignores other differences in the crack-opioid dichotomy: Crime has not exploded during the opioid epidemic – making it appear less of a direct threat to communities – and many people became addicted to opioids through the legal channel of doctor-issued prescriptions.  

$620M in the 'Dark Money' Dems Decry Goes to Left Groups 
Washington Free Beacon 
Democrats hate “dark money” – when it is directed toward Republicans. Democratic donors have built a formidable dark money network to obscure the source of more than $620 million funneled to liberal groups and initiatives last year, tax forms show. The cash flow came from Arabella Advisors, a D.C.-based organization that says it provides "strategic guidance for effective philanthropy." In reality, the group does far more, funneling hundreds of millions in anonymous donations to some of the most influential advocacy groups on the left. The organization is led by Eric Kessler, a former Bill Clinton appointee and member of the Clinton Global Initiative. He set up a series of so-called fiscal sponsors, groups that offer their legal and tax-exempt status to other groups that are not yet recognized as nonprofits by the IRS. 

Detroit’s Comeback Is a Myth 
Spectator USA 
Detroit has made some progress since the bad old days, when both General Motors and the city itself went bankrupt and the mayor was sent to prison for lining his pockets with the public’s money. Today, the budget is balanced, condominiums are being built and thousands of people have moved downtown to live and work. Development is booming, much of it with substantial public subsidies. But Charlie LeDuff reports that Detroit’s supposed comeback has not reached most of the city’s residents:

Out here in the other Detroit, the glass is perpetually nearly half-empty: nearly half the children live in poverty; average household income is nearly half that of the United States in general; nearly half the adults are functionally illiterate and consequently nearly half the adult population are not only unemployed, but they’re not even looking for a job. … A recent study of US Census data showed that while 31,000 jobs were created in Detroit between 2011 and 2016, most went to suburbanites. The number of Detroit residents who had jobs declined over the same period by 4,500. Every year, thousands of people get their water shut off for non-payment, and thousands more lose their houses due to tax foreclosure. Consequently, the Social Security office does a booming business. Native Detroiters — read black Detroiters — call this the Johannesburg model of development.