RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week

RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
March 28 to April 3, 2021

Featured Investigation:
Meet the Top Russiagate Prober
Who Couldn't Verify Anything in the Steele Dossier
Yet Said Nothing for Years

Undercutting insistent defenders of the Democrat-funded, anti-Trump Steele dossier, the FBI agent responsible for its vetting has admitted he could not verify a single one of its claims and publicly kept quiet for years -- including while a surveillance court accepted its evidence to effectively authorize unprecedented spying on an American presidential campaign, Paul Sperry reports for RealClearInvestigations:

• FBI analyst Brian Auten admitted as much to Senate Judiciary probers in just-declassified October testimony.
• Under oath: “So with respect to the Steele reporting, the actual allegations and the actions described in those reports could not be corroborated.”
• Auten, linchpin of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane probe, has hired a top criminal lawyer as Special Counsel John Durham reportedly zeroes in on Crossfire’s work.
• Internally, Auten debunked the dossier, yet deceptively and aggressively used it to advocate spy warrants on Trump adviser Carter Page.
• He oversaw an FBI spreadsheet that analyzed the credibility of the Steele dossier by relying on media reports -- sourced back to dossier author Christopher Steele himself.
• He did not mention to the FISA court glaring falsehoods such as the dossier’s assertion that Russia had a Miami consulate.
• He and colleagues called the dossier “Crown material,” as if it were valuable intelligence from America’s closest ally, Britain -- rather than “oppo” dirt from a partisan ex-British spy paid by Democrat-hired Fusion GPS.
• Auten also sifted emails, texts, and calls collected spying on Page, the FBI’s window onto the campaign.
• Auten attended meetings of a secret interagency entity -- the “Crossfire Hurricane Fusion Center” -- believed overseen by then-CIA Director John Brennan.

See also Sperry’s sidebar on Auten’s writing and teaching on ethics.

Biden, Trump and the Beltway

DOJ Probes Gaetz Cash to Women New York Times
Wild Alleged $25M Gaetz Extortion Washington Examiner
Biden Quietly Ramping Up Millions in Aid to Palestinians Associated Press
Manchin Saves Nominee, Manchin's Wife Gets a Plum Washington Free Beacon
SolarWinds Hack Got Emails of Top DHS Officials Associated Press

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

Chinese Propaganda Group Cozying Up to Black Colleges
Daily Caller
This article reports that a suspected front group for the Chinese Communist Party, the China-U.S. Exchange Foundation, has cultivated close ties to so-called "historically black colleges and universities" and members of the Congressional Black Caucus since 2014. Most of the think tank’s contacts with the colleges and black caucus members have been arranged by Wilson Global Communications, a Washington, D.C.-based communications firm, which the foundation has paid $667,641 since 2017.  The firm coordinates trips to China for college students and leaders of black colleges, all funded by the foundation. Wilson Global has also arranged contact between the think tank and members of the Congressional Black Caucus, including Reps. Sheila Jackson Lee, Jim Clyburn, Donald Payne and Hank Johnson. This outreach is considered part of a broad initiative to cozy up to prominent organizations in the U.S., including foreign policy think tanks and other elite universities.

Hunter Biden Gun Case: Much Amiss
Politico
A few months before Hunter Biden left his now-famous laptop at a Delaware shop, he and the widow of his brother, whom he was dating at the time, were involved in a bizarre incident involving a firearm.  She reportedly took Hunter’s gun and threw it in a trash can behind a grocery store, only to return later to find it gone. As Delaware police looked for the gun, which was disposed of across the street from a school, Secret Service agents supposedly approached the owner of the store where Hunter bought the gun and asked to take the paperwork involving the sale, according to this article. The gun store owner refused to supply the paperwork, suspecting that the Secret Service officers wanted to hide Hunter’s ownership of the missing gun in case it were to be involved in a crime. The Secret Service says it has no record of its agents investigating the incident and that Joe Biden was not under its protection at the time. In a separate article, Just the News reports that Hunter Biden and his business partner engaged in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to assist a fugitive Ukrainian oligarch, Dmitri Firtash, after he was indicted by the Obama administration in 2015.

California: Basic Income Programs Exclude Whites
Reason
The antiracist belief that discrimination is necessary to fight discrimination – yes, you read that right – has taken hold in the San Francisco Bay Area as new programs aimed at providing cash to the poor excludes whites. This article reports that a new government program in Oakland will provide 600 families with a $500 monthly cash stipend for 18 months. Only families deemed low-income with at least one child under 18 who are black, indigenous, and/or people of color are eligible. It's similar to another basic income pilot program being launched in nearby Marin County that will provide a $1,000 monthly stipend to 125 low-wage women of color with at least one child over the next two years.

The History of the KKK at Harvard University
Harvard Crimson
Around midnight on Feb. 5, 1952, a group of students lit a cross on fire near Harvard Yard. A black student passing nearby was assailed with racial epithets. Ultimately, the two freshman perpetrators, who claimed it was a prank, were put on temporary probation. Black students, including, J. Max Bond Jr., who would go on to become a prominent architect, were threatened with suspension should they go to the media with the cross burning. This article, based on a year of archival research, uses this incident to explore the Ku Klux Klan’s history at Harvard – which, it turns out, is almost nonexistent. A brief flurry of interest in the early 1920s seems to have vanished quickly.

California: LA Lifeguards Made Up to $392,000 In 2019
Forbes, RealClearPolicy
Some California lifeguards are drowning in cash. Auditors at OpenTheBooks.com found that seven Los Angeles lifeguards made more than $300,000 and 82 lifeguards had total earnings that exceeded $200,000 in 2019, the latest year available. Overtime pay drove earnings into corporate executive range. Thirty-one lifeguards made between $50,000 and $131,493 in overtime during the year.  In a separate article, ProPublica reports that a decade after California embarked on a sweeping prison overhaul that diverted thousands of inmates to county jails, state and local governing bodies have failed to adequately track billions in spending they’ve received to improve county lockups and rehabilitate offenders. A state audit has found that the lack of oversight has created enormous budget surpluses, opaque spending practices and progress reports to lawmakers that are “inconsistent and incomplete.” 

Why Animals Don't Get Lost
New Yorker
This fascinating article opens with the stories of two cats who found themselves alone, in the middle of nowhere, and managed to find their long way back home – in one case the trip was more than 200 miles. It reports similar abilities in bats, elephant seals, red-tailed hawks, wildebeests, gypsy moths, cuttlefish, slime mold, emperor penguins: To one degree or another, every animal on earth knows how to navigate—and, to one degree or another, scientists remain perplexed by how they do so. Consider our winged friends:

A bird that migrates over long distances must maintain its trajectory by day and by night, in every kind of weather, often with no landmarks in sight. If its travels take more than a few days, it must compensate for the fact that virtually everything it could use to stay oriented will change, from the elevation of the sun to the length of the day and the constellations overhead at night. Most bewildering of all, it must know where it is going—even the first time, when it has never been there before—and it must know where that destination lies compared with its current position. Other species making other journeys face additional difficulties: how to navigate entirely underground, or how to navigate beneath the waters of a vast and seemingly undifferentiated ocean.

The reporter observes: “The astonishment is that any physiology can contain a navigational system capable of such journeys.”

Coronavirus Investigations

Some Scientists Say Lab Leak Theory Never Got a Fair Look Undark
FDA Minimized Safety Risks at Merck Vaccine Plant Politico
Ill.: Virus Tests at Elite School Ran Afoul of Regulators New York Times
Medical Workers: We're Forging Vaccination Proof Daily Beast
Family Feud Behind America's Covid Swab Supply Bloomberg