RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week

RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
October 3 to October 9, 2021

Featured Investigation:
Durham Probes Pentagon Computer Contractors
in Anti-Trump Conspiracy

Cyberexperts who held lucrative Pentagon and homeland-security contracts and high security clearances are under investigation for potentially abusing their government privileges to aid a 2016 Clinton campaign plot to falsely link Donald Trump to Russia, Paul Sperry reports for RealClearInvestigations. Sperry reports:

• Special Counsel John Durham is investigating whether the contractors were involved in a scheme to misuse sensitive Internet data and create a false impression of a Trump backchannel to Russia’s international Alfa Bank.
• This effort in 2016 and 2017 produced political dirt that sent the FBI on a wild good chase.
• Prosecutors are investigating whether data presented to the FBI were faked or forged. 
• Investigators have subpoenaed the contractors and are exploring criminal charges, including giving false information and defrauding the government.
• In his recent indictment of a Clinton lawyer, Durham said the contractors’ project was driven not by data but by “bias against Trump.”
• The leader of the contractors was Rodney L. Joffe, 66 (“Tech Executive-1”), who has advised the Biden White House on cybersecurity.
• Joffe enlisted contractors connected to the Georgia Institute of Technology.
• Joffe allegedly worked with another computer scientist who used the pseudonym “Tea Leaves”: April D. Lorenzen.
• Joffe allegedly coordinated with Clinton foreign policy adviser Jake Sullivan, now President Biden’s national security adviser.
• In a potential conflict of interest, Sullivan’s wife worked as a clerk for Attorney General Merrick Garland when he was a federal judge. Garland controls the purse strings to Durham’s investigation.

Featured Investigation:
Colleges Learning Costly Woke Math
in the Courtroom School of Hard Knocks

As they reel from pandemic losses, colleges are racking up other costs not likely to turn up as line items on staggering tuition bills: untold millions of dollars in legal fees and settlements for allegedly violating the rights of students, professors, and applicants as schools pursue social justice causes. Steve Miller reports for RealClearInvestigations:

• Harvard’s legal costs fighting a continuing 2017 challenge to its racial admissions practices have surpassed $25 million.
• The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill spent more than $16.8 million by the end of 2018 and its costs have only grown as it, like Harvard, continues defending admissions allegedly favoring blacks and Hispanics over whites and Asians.
• Challenges to alleged free-speech violations continue to grow. The University of California San Diego in 2019 paid nearly $1 million after a four-year court fight over its move to defund student media because of a school newspaper piece satirizing “safe spaces.”   
• Cases of male students and others challenging charges of sexual misconduct cost colleges a reported average of $187,000 each to defend.
• In such sexual misconduct cases where the schools lose, the average settlement imposed is $750,000, costing universities $41 million annually.
• Behind the litigation: pushback against a growing “bloat” of aggressively woke administrators. School bureaucrats now outnumber faculty 2 to 1 at public universities, double the ratio in the 1970s. 

Featured Investigation:
Look Out, Real Estate Boom.
It’s the Closing Scam Tornado.

With many real estate transactions moving online because of the pandemic, scammers have been finding myriad new ways to game the once secure housing market as it sizzles across the country, John F. Wasik reports for RealClearInvestigations.

Last year more than 11,000 homeowners were conned out of more than $220 million in closing funds alone. But that's not all. Wasik reports on other scams giving sinister new meaning to the term “money pit”:

• Fake Rentals: Scamsters posting rental ads on major sites like Craigslist – either for real properties they don’t own or “spoofs” created with photographs. Typically they ask for below-market rates, dupe the gullible out of deposits, then disappear.
• Fraudulent Foreclosure Relief: Thieves promising a service to end foreclosure proceedings but actually making the cash of the unwitting vanish.
• Moving Scams: Fraudulent online moving "brokers" either taking an upfront fee and not moving clients’ possessions or holding furniture “hostage,” demanding a higher fee to complete the move. 
• Common Denominator: More people working from home means more valuable information being sent over less secure personal Internet connections 
• Also: Constrained construction due to the pandemic has led to greater competition in many markets, prompting increasing numbers to unwisely buy homes sight unseen.
• Plus: The rise of cryptocurrency makes it harder to trace bogus transactions and easier to launder ill-gotten gains.

Biden, Trump and the Beltway

New Details of Trump Pressure on DOJ Over Election New York Times
Alarm Over AG Garland’s Ties to Pro-CRT Consultancy National Review
Law Enforcement Had Warnings Before J6 Riot Politico
CIA Admits Losing Dozens of Informants New York Times

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

Data Trove Exposes Offshore Secrets of Wealthy Elites
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists
A giant cache of secret documents exposes the tax dodges of the rich and famous. Like previous troves of similar material – the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers – this one has a catchy name: the Pandora Papers. This article reports that the 11.4 million files comprise ...

... the confidential records of 14 offshore service providers that give professional services to wealthy individuals and corporations seeking to incorporate shell companies, trusts, foundations and other entities in low- or no-tax jurisdictions. The entities enable owners to conceal their identities from the public and sometimes from regulators. Often, the providers help them open bank accounts in countries with light financial regulation. … The records include an unprecedented amount of information on so-called beneficial owners of entities registered in the British Virgin Islands, Seychelles, Hong Kong, Belize, Panama, South Dakota and other secrecy jurisdictions. They also contain information on the shareholders, directors and officers. … They include more than 330 politicians and 130 Forbes billionaires, as well as celebrities, fraudsters, drug dealers, royal family members and leaders of religious groups around the world.

In a separate article on the material, the Washington Post reports on a South Dakota company that set up trusts to protect the assets of “a Colombian textile magnate caught in a scheme to launder the proceeds of an international drug ring, an orange juice mogul who settled with authorities in Brazil for allegedly colluding to underpay local farmers, and family members of the former president of a sugar producer in the Dominican Republic that has been accused of exploiting laborers and forcibly evicting families from their homes.”

Whistleblower: Millions in Fraud at ATF
CBS News
A whistleblower is accusing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives of paying out hundreds of millions in special bonus pay to employees who did not deserve the bump. Government regulations stipulate “law enforcement availability pay” is reserved for criminal investigators who are on call and expected to work unscheduled, additional hours. But, this article reports, many people in administrative positions were awarded the 25 percent pay hike. Last year, a lawyer for the Office of Special Counsel said the investigative body found "a substantial likelihood of wrongdoing." 

Feds Issue Google 'Keyword Warrants'
Forbes
Trying to track down men who might have sexually abused and trafficked a minor, law enforcement officials in Wisconsin asked Google to provide information on anyone who had searched for the victim’s name, two spellings of her mother’s name and her address over a 16-day period in 2019. This article reports that such “keyword warrants” are still rare but controversial because of their lack of specificity. Google deals with thousands of government requests for information each year; in many cases, the government has evidence the account holder is linked to a crime.

But search term orders are effectively fishing expeditions, hoping to ensnare possible suspects whose identities the government does not know. It’s not dissimilar to so-called geofence warrants where investigators ask Google to provide information on anyone within the location of a crime scene at a given time. … The [Wisconsin] case shows Google is continuing to comply with such controversial requests, despite concerns over their legality and the potential to implicate innocent people who happened to search for the relevant terms. From the government’s perspective in Wisconsin, the scope of the warrant should have been limited enough to avoid the latter: the number of people searching for the specific names, address and phone number in the given time frame was likely to be low. But privacy experts are concerned about the precedent set by such warrants and the potential for any such order to be a breach of Fourth Amendment protections from unreasonable searches.

Coronavirus Investigations

Utilities Cut Off Power but Take COVID Tax Credits
Guardian
At least 16 large electric utilities that received at least 1.25 billion in COVID-19 bailout funds still cut power to nearly 1 million struggling customers between February 2020 and June 2021. This article reports that “the companies received enough funding to forgive their customers’ debt hundreds of times over, but instead many handed out executive bonuses and increased shareholder dividends.” Lobbying records show that companies – which included NextEra Energy (parent of Florida Power & Light and others), Duke Energy, Southern Company, Dominion Energy, Exelon and DTE Energy — also dispatched lobbyists to secure beneficial Cares Act tax-code changes while opposing legislation that would have protected struggling customers. Quote:

Some utilities also sought sharp rate increases even as they took in public money, and regulators in several states approved the requests. Though companies have said their cost of doing business increased as they bought personal protective equipment for employees, set up staff to work from home, and made other adjustments, they could have cancelled all customers’ debt with just 8% of the bailout sum.

Global Syringe Shortage vs. Biden's Vaccine Push
Vanity Fair
President Biden’s pledge to help vaccinate the world is missing one crucial element – enough of the special syringes required to administer the doses made by Pfizer. That is not an oversight, this article reports. Global health advocates attending an August meeting ...

... warned the White House that, without the syringes, doses would sit idle in countries that received them. Then they offered an array of possible solutions, one being that the federal government could donate syringes from its own supply as a stopgap measure. Those present fully expected the White House to remedy the situation somehow, as several meeting participants recalled. Instead, White House representatives surprised the group by declining to pursue any of the offered solutions. “The general framing was, ‘It’s just not on the table,’” a participant recalled.

According to a second participant, the White House’s motivation for withholding the syringes wasn’t difficult to discern. “It was obvious from the coded language, they needed to save [them] for U.S. need,” this person told Vanity Fair.

Defending the decision, a White House official told those gathered that the U.S. government had always planned to donate the doses without syringes. One participant recalled thinking, “Just because it’s planned, it’s planned stupidity.”

Other Coronavirus Investigations

Did the Pfizer Vaccine Peak Too Soon? The Atlantic
States, Cities Sit on Hundreds of Billions in Pandemic Relief AP
Alaska: COVID Pushes System to the Brink AP
Did Political and Media Bias Stall Merck's New COVID Drug? Matt Taibbi