RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week

RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
December 13 to December 19, 2020

Featured Investigation:
Biden's Pushing Ahead to the Obama Past
on Campus Rape. He'll Need Good Luck With That.

Joe Biden will face much more serious headwinds as he moves to restore and expand the Obama-era “believe women” approach to campus rape, policies jettisoned during the Trump years as unjust “kangaroo courts” for accused men, Richard Bernstein reports for RealClearInvestigations.

Bernstein reports on the transformed legal and political landscape since Vice President Biden’s time leading the Obama administration’s controversial push to end campus “rape culture,” an effort he vowed to revive during the campaign:

• In developments barely reported in major media, hundreds of colleges across the country have run into a legal thicket as they've implemented the original Obama “Dear Colleague” guidelines for college administrators. 
• Around half of the lawsuits heard by the courts have met with rulings in favor of the accused men – a rebuke to the Obama-Biden approach.
• The Supreme Court has a new conservative majority with President Trump’s three appointments -- including Amy Coney Barrett, who just before her elevation issued what some lawyers view as a watershed opinion in favor of campus due-process rights for the accused.
• Lawyers predict confusion ahead. It would probably take years to rescind and replace the rules formally adopted under Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos -- unlike the informal Obama policies imposed with a threat of withheld federal aid.
• Conservatives aren’t the only ones who have questioned the Obama guidelines. Late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg did too.
• Though Biden says the assault alleged by ex-staffer Tara Reade “never, never happened,” some experts believe he’d most likely be found guilty under the campus process he’s advocating. 

Featured Investigation:
With U.S. Senate Runoffs Ahead,
Georgia's Not Prosecuting
Its Unprecedented Number of Double Voters

More than 1,700 Georgians were singled out for illegally casting two ballots in 2020 elections — including last month’s hotly contested presidential race -- but their fraudulent votes weren't canceled out, Paul Sperry reports for RealClearInvestigations. And so far, none of the cheaters has been prosecuted, raising concerns about continued fraud as Georgia prepares to vote again in twin U.S. Senate runoff elections next month.

• Most double voters were Democrats who cast an absentee ballot either by mail or drop box and also voted in person on Election Day, officials said.
• The highest share of offenders were from Fulton County, which includes Atlanta.
• Double voters exploited pandemic-inspired absentee balloting.
• They typically deposited absentee ballots in widely installed drop boxes before or after voting in person and the votes were allowed to count -- despite being flagged in the system.
• Many poll workers were recruited and trained by the Democrat-run Georgia chapter of the ACLU and a minority-owned temp agency run by Democrat donors.
• Before the election, the ACLU urged anyone “threatened with prosecution” over double voting to contact the chapter for legal assistance.
• That same ACLU chapter is now signing up poll workers for the Jan. 5 runoffs. 
• Some Georgians believe the failure of the Republican Secretary of State to target cheaters is out of fear of being labeled “racist” by activist Stacey Abrams.
• Democrats hope to sweep the Georgia runoffs for one-party control of both houses of Congress and the Presidency. 

Trump-Russia/2020 Election News

You wouldn’t know it from the mainstream media but this was a major week in presidential scandals as new documents provided more damning information about Biden foreign business dealings and further evidence of FBI malfeasance regarding the Russiagate probe.

As Fox News reported, correspondence between Hunter Biden and the Chairman of a Chinese energy company from 2017 shows President-elect Joe Biden's son extending "best wishes from the entire Biden family," and urging the chairman to "quickly" send a $10 million wire to "properly fund and operate" a proposed joint venture. In the same letter, Hunter describes his business associate Tony Bobulinski as “a very close friend” of “the Biden family.” The letter does not prove Bobulinski’s claim that Joe Biden was involved in his son’s dealings but it leaves no doubt that Hunter Biden wanted people to think just that.

On the Trump front, The Epoch Times reports that newly classified documents indicate that the FBI had investigations open into candidate Donald Trump earlier than July 31, 2016, the date long cited in the bureau’s official narrative. In a text message dated July 28, 2016, former Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok mentioned “our open [counterintelligence] investigations relating to Trump’s Russian connections.” Mining other Strzok texts, the Daily Caller identifies evidence that suggests the FBI may have been working through CNN to publicize the false and salacious Steele dossier that smeared Trump. Briefly: On Jan. 5, 2017, former FBI Director Jim Comey met with President Obama, Vice President Biden and others in the Oval Office, where they discussed Russiagate. On Jan. 6, Comey briefed then President-elect Trump about parts of the Steele dossier – a meeting CNN used on Jan. 10 as an excuse to push the dossier into the mainstream. New Strzok texts dated Jan. 9 indicate the FBI had detailed advanced knowledge about CNN’s coverage: “Story no longer Sciutto, now Evan Perez. Internal nervousness about nature of allegations,” Strzok wrote, referring to two CNN reporters.

 Other Trump-Russia/2020 Election News 

In Brennan's Hand: Russia Monitored Clinton's Trump Smear The Federalist
Biden Energy Pick Granholm Strongly Pushed Russiagate Breitbart
Hunter Biden Subpoena Has Wide Scope Associated Press 

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

As More Women Fill America's Jails, Medical Crises Mount
Reuters
The fourth installment of a series, “Dying Inside,” investigating deaths in America’s prisons, this article focuses on female inmates. It reports that the number of women held in America’s jails has risen more than 20% over the past decade, to an average of more than 115,000 inmates a day. And more and more are arriving in need of medical attention or with debilitating health conditions that strain the capacity of lockups typically designed for men. Thousands arrive pregnant each year. About 70% suffer from mental illness and they’re more likely to experience drug and alcohol addiction. As more women land in America’s local jails, more are dying there, too. Analyzing data it obtained from more than 500 U.S. jails, Reuters documented 914 deaths of female inmates from 2008 to 2019. In a three-year stretch from 2008 to 2010, 171 women died in the jails surveyed. From 2017 to 2019, the number rose to 287 dead, amid a spike in drug and alcohol deaths across America. Seventy percent of the women who died over the 12-year period – at least 639 inmates – were awaiting trial, presumed innocent of the charges they faced. The death toll doesn’t include a category of collateral fatalities: their infant children. In a separate article, The New Republic reports that many of the 230,000 women and girls in U.S. jails and prisons were abuse survivors before they entered the system. And at least 30 percent of those serving time on murder or manslaughter charges were protecting themselves or a loved one from physical or sexual violence. 

Mom vs. Child Services, aka the 'Family Destruction System'
Mother Jones
“Do we need to abolish Child Protective Services?” That's question posed in the headline as this article depicts a system that removes too many children from their parents. It reports that only about 15% of children are placed in foster care because of physical abuse. The vast majority are taken from their homes based on the judgment call of case workers, often an assessment of “the way the family is living.” Increasingly, as with black challenges to police conduct, parents are mobilizing to confront a system perceived as having unlimited and unaccountable power over their lives. In a separate article, USA Today reports that, in defiance of widely accepted best practices, Florida aggressively removes children from parents – most of them mothers – who have been battered by an intimate partner. 

China: Export-Bound Cotton Tainted by Forced Labor
BBC
The human rights abuses just keep coming from China. This article reports that the country is forcing hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and other minorities into hard, manual labor in the vast cotton fields of its western region of Xinjiang. Newly discovered online documents provide the first clear picture of the potential scale of forced labor in the picking of a crop that accounts for a fifth of the world’s cotton supply and is used widely throughout the global fashion industry. Since attacks in 2013 and 2014 that the government attributed to Uighur Islamists and separatists, China has been building “re-education” camps for anyone displaying supposedly suspicious behavior, such as installing an encrypted messaging app on a phone, viewing religious content or having a relative living overseas. Meanhwhile, a huge industrial expansion has been under way since 2018, featuring the building of hundreds of factories. The parallel purpose of mass employment and mass internment, this article reports, is made clear by the appearance of many factories within the walls of the camps, or in close proximity to them. Work, the government appears to believe, will help transform the “outdated ideas” of Xinjiang’s minorities and remake them as modern, secular, wage-earning Chinese citizens. The use of forced slave labor to pick cotton exported around the world raises more ethical dilemmas for global companies. 

Ex-Cuomo Aide: Years of Sex Harassment
New York Times
A former aide to New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has accused him of sexual harassment, asserting that the governor would often discuss her physical appearance, something she said occurred over the course of years. “I could never anticipate what to expect: Would I be grilled on my work (which was very good) or harassed about my looks?” Lindsey Boylan, the former aide, wrote on Twitter. “Or would it be both in the same conversation?” In another Twitter thread earlier this month, Boylan described her experience working for Cuomo as “beyond toxic” and “endlessly dispiriting.” Boylan, a Democrat who recently launched a campaign for Manhattan borough president, has not provided any specific evidence against Cuomo, who denies her claims. On Saturday, after the Associated Press reported that President-elect Joe Biden was considering the governor for attorney general, Boylan pleaded with Biden to reconsider. 

The Shady Sex-Work Abolitionist Group That Gutted Pornhub
Daily Beast
Is opposition to child pornography a Trojan horse being used to shut down the legal sex industry? This article raises that question in the wake of Nicholas Kristof’s New York Times column, “The Children of Pornhub,” which reported that many videos of child rape victims were available on the porn platform. In response, Pornhub announced that it would remove all content submitted by unverified users, effectively disappearing some 10.6 million videos in a single day. Nevertheless, Mastercard and Visa subsequently cut ties to Pornhub and other large porn websites. This article asserts that at least one activist group Kristof worked with, Traffickinghub, is using the specter of child porn to destroy the entire industry. “The movement’s founder, Laila Mickelwait," it reports, "works for the Christian ‘anti-trafficking’ non-profit Exodus Cry—a fringe evangelical group with far-right ties that aims to abolish the commercial sex industry entirely.” Sex workers who spoke with the Daily Beast received the news of Pornhub’s changes with ambivalence. “Everybody was outraged by the fact that they could lose a significant form of income if a major platform isn’t taking mainstream forms of payment,” said Curvy Mary, a performer who participates in Pornhub’s Model Program, “which could potentially take away a big chunk of our customer base.”

Coronavirus Investigations

Anti-Mask Sheriffs Leave Detainees Sitting Ducks Daily Beast
Texas: Inmates Set Fires Over Pandemic Conditions Marshall Project/WFAA
Family Emails: A Covid Calamity Unfolds in Real Time Akron Beacon Journal
Meet the Canine Super-Squad Sniffing Out Coronavirus Guardian
Christmas Is Beginning to Look a Lot Like Flu Pandemic 1918 Smithsonian