RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week

RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
September 20 to September 26, 2020

Featured Investigation:
Dossier Source Was a Suspected Russian Spy,
and the FBI Knew It When It Spied on Carter Page

This week brought remarkable revelations in the Russiagate story largely informed by RealClearInvestigations’ original reporting.

In the latest (two others follow this summary), RCI’s Eric Felten reports that the FBI knowingly relied on the word of a suspected Russian spy to spy on a Trump campaign aide wrongly smeared as a Russian spy: Carter Page. The suspected spy is the Steele dossier’s "primary sub-source," Igor Danchenko, whose identity and much about him were disclosed recently by RCI’s Paul Sperry, including how Danchenko's wild fabrications came about: gossip among him and his drinking buddies, mostly childhood friends from Russia.

Now newly declassified Justice Department documents flesh out the checkered past of Danchenko -- although he isn't identified by name. Felten reports:

• Described as a Washington think tank “employee” in the DoJ’s summary, Danchenko was investigated by the FBI long before the Trump-Russia affair while a researcher at the left-leaning Brookings Institution.
• The probe began in 2009 after two junior researchers said Danchenko had told them that if they got a job in the incoming Obama administration, “had access to classified information” and wanted “to make a little extra money,” he “knew some people to whom they could speak.”
• The bureau discovered that Danchenko had contact “with the Russian Embassy and known Russian intelligence officers.”
• But before the FBI could get its spy warrant approved, Danchenko left the U.S. The FBI closed the investigation.
• It assessed that Danchenko was “a threat to national security.”
• “The revelations are further proof of what we already knew,” Republican Rep. Devin Nunes said, “that the Democrats, and only the Democrats, colluded with Russians to swing the 2016 election.”

Featured Investigation:
Secret Report: How Brennan Stifled
'Russia Backs Hillary' Intel

In his latest exclusive for RCI, Sperry reports that Ex-CIA Director John Brennan personally edited a crucial section of the intelligence report on 2016 Russian election meddling and assigned a political ally to take a lead writing role after career analysts disputed Brennan's take that Vladimir Putin intervened to help Donald Trump. Sperry got the story from two senior U.S. intelligence officials who have seen classified materials revealing  Brennan’s role in drafting the document:

• The sources described an unreleased review conducted by the House Intelligence Committee -- classified and locked in a Capitol basement safe soon after Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff took control of the panel in January 2019.
• Dissenting analysts working on the ‘intelligence community assessment” found Moscow preferred Hillary Clinton, the sources said, because they judged she would work with its leaders, whereas the Kremlin worried Trump would be too unpredictable.
• Nevertheless, Brennan personally inserted a crucial section on Putin’s support for Trump in the ICA.
• When the career analysts disputed Brennan’s view, he assigned a pro-Clinton CIA ally, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, to take a lead role in writing the report.
• Kendall-Taylor donated hundreds of dollars to Clinton during the 2016 campaign.
• Kendall-Taylor was a close colleague of Eric Ciaramella, identified last year by RealClearInvestigations as the “whistleblower" whose complaint led to Trump’s impeachment.
• The ICA is a focus of U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the “collusion” probe. He wants to know if the intelligence findings were juiced for political purposes.

Featured Investigation:
That Senate 'Collusion' Report?
It's Got No Smoking Gun
... but It Does Have a Fog Machine

Spirits soared among Trump-Russia conspiracy believers during the Democratic convention last month when the Senate intelligence committee released its final report on Russiagate. Democrats proclaimed that the tome’s evidence "is what collusion looks like." But Aaron Maté writes in RealClearInvestigations that this is actually not what collusion looks like. Rather, it's what innuendo, obfuscation, omissions and misdirection look like -- the same sorts that have long characterized the Russiagate affair.

In a two-part dissection of the report in RealClearInvestigations (here and here), Maté finds that:

• The panel presented no evidence to support its headline claim that Paul Manafort associate Konstantin Kilimnik was a Russian spy. It speculates without proof that Kilimnik was "likely" a channel to Russian intelligence, while failing to explain countervailing facts including his work with the Obama State Department.
• The released report neglects the FBI’s notes of its interview with Joseph Mifsud. But a newly public transcript has the Maltese academic denying advance knowledge of Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton or offering help to Trump aide George Papadopoulos.
• Like Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team before it, the Senate panel passed up an interview with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange -- though Assange's U.S. legal team says it agreed to it.
• It also passed up a proffered interview with oligarch Oleg Deripaska, and was oddly incurious about the work done for the Russian by dossier compiler Christopher Steele and Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson.
• The panel also did not interview an Italian journalist close to WikiLeaks who would undermine the panel’s insinuation that the group coordinated with Trump associate Roger Stone on its email leaks. 

Trump-Russia/2020 Election News

Durham Has Sought Details About Scrutiny of Clintons New York Times
In 2016, Ginsburg Favored Filling Vacancy in Election Year Fox News
Mueller Deputy: We 'Could Have Done More'Washington Post
Billions in Dirty Money Rolled Through Deutsche Bank BuzzFeed
Florida Seeks Investigation of Bloomberg Donation on Voting AP, Daily Mail
The Trump-Nixon Letters, Associated Press 

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

Senate Report Finds Possible Biden-Tied Criminal Activity
Just the News
A year-long GOP-led Senate investigation (read the full report here) concluded Wednesday that Hunter Biden's efforts to cash in on foreign business deals during his father's vice presidency raised alarms among U.S. government officials who perceived an ethical conflict of interest and flagged concerns about possible criminal activity ranging from bribery to sex trafficking. This article reports:

• The U.S. Treasury Department flagged payments collected overseas by Hunter Biden and business partner Devon Archer for possible illicit activities.
• State Department officials held serious concerns that Burisma was corrupt and had paid a $7 million bribe in 2014 to Ukrainian prosecutors while under investigation during Hunter Biden's tenure there.
• Hunter Biden paid women who appear to be linked to an Eastern European prostitution or human trafficking ring.

The New York Times’ article on the report ignores almost all of that, informing readers that “the report delivered on Wednesday appeared to be little more than a rehashing of unproven allegations that echoed a Russian disinformation campaign.” 

China Sharply Expands Mass Labor Program in Tibet
Reuters
China is pushing growing numbers of Tibetan rural laborers off the land and into recently built military-style training centers where they are turned into factory workers. This appears to mirror a program in the western Xinjiang region targeted at ethnic Muslims that rights groups have branded coercive labor. A notice posted to the website of Tibet’s regional government website last month said over half a million people were trained as part of the project in the first seven months of 2020 – around 15% of the region’s population. Of this total, almost 50,000 have been transferred into jobs within Tibet, and several thousand have been sent to other parts of China. Many end up in low paid work, including textile manufacturing, construction and agriculture.

Kentucky: How Americans Stopped Trusting Their Water
Guardian
Rural water systems face unique challenges in providing clean, safe, affordable, sustainable drinking water including difficult terrain, a lack of financial stability and expertise. About 97% of the country’s 153,000 public drinking water systems serve 10,000 people or less. This article explores these issues by focusing on Marion County, Kentucky, where 96% of residents rely primarily on bottled water for drinking, and only 56% use tap water for cooking because the tap water smells like a chlorinated swimming pool, and residents frequently report problems with bad taste, discoloration, sediment and irritated or burning skin after bathing. The county’s water problems first came into sharp focus – and were exacerbated – in October 2000 when a local coal company spilled 300 million gallons of coal slurry containing high concentrations of arsenic and mercury into nearby waterways. In the wake of the disaster, regulators proposed root and branch reforms to fix the broken infrastructure and management system that were largely ignored. 

NY Times Quietly Drop A Central Claim of 1619 Project
Legal Insurrection
The New York Times scrubbed a central claim of its 1619 Project without notifying readers of this major change. This article reports that the original text of the Project – which has won journalism’s highest awards, including a Pulitzer Prize and a George Polk Award – described it as a “major initiative” that “aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding” in slavery. The revised text drops the “true founding” claim. It now describes the Project as “an ongoing initiative,” (which may allow the editors to believe they can make changes without notice) that “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” As RealClearInvestigations has reported, this is just the latest in a series of controversies surrounding the Project, which is being taught in schools across the country. 

YouTube's Plot to Silence Conspiracy Theories
Wired
This article reports that YouTube’s algorithm system – which tees up new videos based on what viewers have just watched – is a “gateway drug” for conspiracy theories. One academic who interviewed attendees of a flat-earth convention, for example, found that, almost to a person, they'd discovered the subculture via YouTube recommendations. The belief that the world is not round may seem harmless, but this article reports:

Start with flat earth, and you may soon believe Sandy Hook was a false-flag operation or that vaccines cause autism or that Q's warnings about Democrat pedophiles are a serious matter. Once you convince yourself that well-documented facts about the solar system are a fraud, why believe well-documented facts about anything? Maybe the most trustworthy people are the outsiders, those who dare to challenge the conventions and who … would be far less powerful without YouTube's algorithms amplifying them. 

Coronavirus Investigations

The N95 Shortage America Can’t Seem to Fix Washington Post
Louisiana: Sent Home to Die of Covid ProPublica
Outed as RedState Covid Troll, Fauci Aide Quits Daily Beast
Pandemic Can Make You Lose Your Hair New York Times
U.S. Essential Workers Burned Out Amid Pandemic Guardian
Female Pilots Bear Brunt of Airline Job Cuts Reuters