RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week

RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
October 17 to October 23, 2021

Featured Investigation:
Coming Into Focus:  Hillary's Secretive,
Russiagate-Flogging Pair of Super-Lawyers

This week in RealClearInvestigations, Aaron Maté reports on the elaborate two-track deception of two Hillary Clinton lawyers: Michael Sussmann, recently charged with lying to the FBI, and his colleague Marc Elias, who acted in tandem in 2016 to solicit and spread disinformation tying Donald Trump to the Kremlin. Maté reports:

• Before his alleged lie to the FBI in the debunked Alfa Bank affair, Sussmann enlisted Democrat-tied cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike to spoon-feed an even more consequential Russia allegation to the bureau: the still unproven claim that Russia was behind the hack of Democratic National Committee emails released by WikiLeaks.
• And days before Sussmann enlisted CrowdStrike, Elias retained the oppo research firm Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Trump and the Kremlin.
• Both tracks relied on secrecy and deception.
• Elias's role in the infamous Steele dossier was hidden from the public through lies, "with sanctimony, for a year," as one New York Times journalist put it.
• And, piecing together overlooked testimony and other evidence, Maté shows Sussmann controlled what the FBI was allowed to see, and not see, of CrowdStrike’s supposed evidence that Russians hacked the DNC server.
• A “tell” was when U.S. officials used squishy qualifiers – "likely" and "appear" – to signal that they lacked concrete evidence, a major evidentiary hole confirmed by buried testimony of CrowdStrike’s CEO.
• By hiring CrowdStrike and Fusion GPS, the Perkins Coie lawyers helped shape the Trump-Russia narrative in the highest reaches of U.S. intelligence -- upending American politics for years.

Biden, Trump and the Beltway

90 Seconds of Rage on the Capitol Steps 
New York Times
Even as its opening depicts the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol as a violent insurrection aimed at overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election, the body of this powerfully written article challenges the idea that the rioters had a plan or even much intention. It focuses on a group of strangers who met that day and are “now bound together by federal prosecutors as co-defendants in an indictment charging them with myriad felonies.” 

Amid the hand-to-hand combat, seven men from seven different states stood out. Although strangers to one another, they worked as if in concert while grappling with the phalanx of police officers barring entry to the Capitol. … [And yet] To a man, they are described in superlatives by relatives and friends: perfect neighbor, devout churchgoer, attentive father, good guy.

The first man the article profiles is Ray Mullins, a 52-year-old businessman and devout Christian from Clayton, Kentucky:

Mr. Mullins would later say that while he supported Mr. Trump’s re-election — he liked the president’s approach to business — he had also accepted the election results. “No one man has the power,” he would say. “You’re not supposed to put one man up on a pedestal and think he’s going to bring peace to the world.” Still, he left his wife and sister behind and joined the trespassing throng.

The next man the article describes is Peter Stager, 42 ...

... a burly truck driver whose long dark hair and full beard would distinguish him in any crowd. He had stopped to join the Trump rally on his way back from a delivery in New Jersey to take some photographs, his employer, Charlie Penrod, later testified. “And the other thing is, he was asked by the president to show support.” Had Mr. Stager instead kept driving, he would have returned to the small Arkansas city of Conway. Back to his one-story brick house on a working-class street where residents, Black and white, knew him as an even-keeled father of two teenagers who went out of his way to help others.

Even as it humanizes the rioters, the article underscores the harm they did that day to the nation and to themselves as captured in the closing paragraphs.

But never far from Mr. Mullins’s mind is what he thought to himself on the evening of Jan. 6, as he walked away from the profoundly damaged United States Capitol, his face wet with tears:

“We never should have come here.”

More Biden, Trump and the Beltway

School Board Assn, White House Sync on Domestic Terror Alarm Free Beacon
Steele Doubles Down on Dossier Claims Washington Examiner
Steele's Dossier Defense vs. Avalanche of Evidence Just the News
Trump Defense Boss Nixed Idea of Half of Army at Border New York Times
The Return of Catherine Lhamon at the Education Dept. National Review

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

Ransomware Gang Fakes Real Company to Attract Tech Talent
Wall Street Journal
The red hot labor market is even affecting organized crime networks. This article reports that the Russian cybercrime organization Fin7, believed to have built the software that shut down the Colonial Pipeline Co.’s operations in the spring, set up a fake company to recruit potential employees. The attempt to impersonate a legitimate company for recruiting purposes is a new development in ransomware, whose attacks have disrupted meat production, hospital care, education and hundreds of other enterprises. With hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal earnings, ransomware operators are increasingly operating like startups with professionalized support staff, software development, cloud-computing services and media relations, security researchers say:

While criminals have traditionally operated in the shadows – recruiting partners in criminal forums – the demands of Fin7’s growing business appear to have pushed it to recruit in the open, security researchers say. “You can find more qualified people when you search more broadly,” said Andrei Barysevich, the head of Gemini Advisory, a division of Recorded Future. … Information-technology jobs advertised by Bastion Secure offer salaries between $800 and $1,200 a month. That is decent pay in former Soviet countries such as Ukraine, but “a small fraction of a cybercriminal’s portion of the criminal profits from a successful ransomware extortion or large-scale payment-card-stealing operation,” according to the Recorded Future report.

How Police Use Force Against Children
Associated Press
The alleged lawbreakers have been handcuffed, felled by stun guns, taken down and pinned to the ground by police officers. This is news because all of them are children, some as young as six years old.  This article reports on an AP analysis of data on approximately 3,000 instances of police use of force against children under 16 during the past 11 years. 

Black children made up more than 50% of those who were handled forcibly, though they are only 15% of the U.S. child population. They and other minority kids are often perceived by police as being older than they are. The most common types of force were takedowns, strikes and muscling, followed by firearms pointed at or used on children. Less often, children faced other tactics, like the use of pepper spray or police K-9s. … Police reports obtained for a sample of incidents show that some kids who were stunned or restrained were armed; others were undergoing mental health crises and were at risk of harming themselves. Still other reports showed police force escalating after kids fled from police questioning. In St. Petersburg, Florida, for instance, officers chased a Black boy on suspicion of attempted car theft after he pulled the handle of a car door. He was 13 years old and 80 pounds (36 kilograms), and his flight ended with his thigh caught in a police K-9′s jaw.

In a separate article, the AP reports that prosecutors rarely use a powerful tool at their disposal to curb bad behavior by police: the Brady List that flags officers whose credibility is in question due to misconduct – a designation that must be shared with defense attorneys. Defense attorneys, public defenders, civil rights groups and even some prosecutors are calling for an increased use of Brady Lists, while police unions are resisting.

Facebook's Murky User Number Clouds Its Reach
Wall Street Journal
How many people use Facebook? Turns out the tech giant doesn’t even know. It's struggling to detect and deal with users’ multiple accounts on its flagship platform, according to internal documents that raise new questions about how the social-media giant measures its audience. This article – part of the Journal’s “Facebook Files” series – reports that an internal Facebook presentation this spring called the phenomenon of single users with multiple accounts “very prevalent” among new accounts. The finding came after an examination of roughly 5,000 recent sign-ups on the service indicated that at least 32% and as many as 56% were opened by existing users:

At issue is the reliability of information that helps inform some big advertisers’ spending decisions. While Facebook says it doesn’t bill advertisers based on its estimates of an ad’s target audience, some advertisers look at those estimates when planning where to allocate their budgets—especially big brands that have turned to Facebook to reach large audiences as broadcast and cable television viewership have declined.

Coronavirus Investigations

The revelation vindicates Republican senator Rand Paul, who got into heated exchanges with National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease director Anthony Fauci during his May and July testimonials before Congress over the gain-of-function question. At the second hearing, Paul accused Fauci of misleading Congress by denying that the U.S. had funded gain-of-function projects at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

$89M on Vaccine Lotteries; Looks Like None Worked
Business Insider
The idea made sense on paper – offer cash prizes to people who get vaccinated. Ultimately, more than 20 states ran such COVID lotteries – including Ohio's "Vax-a-Million," "VaxCash" in Maryland and "Vax and Scratch" in New York – which doled out at least $89 million in winnings. A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Health Forum reported that none of the states' lotteries were effective at raising vaccination rates; tellingly, this finding echoed previous studies involving lotteries and vaccines for children. The article does not go into much detail about why the efforts failed, though one expert notes:

"People like to gamble, but people love to get money for sure even more. If you buy into the idea that vaccines are dangerous – and I can't stress enough that that this idea is wrong – but if you believe that there's something sinister going on with this vaccine, it's unlikely that a payment is going to convince you, regardless of how big it is."

The Impending Mass Firing of the Unvaccinated
Chronicles
This article warns of coming public safety crisis as police, firefighters, doctors, nurses, paramedics, airport security and prison guards across the country face termination if they don’t comply with their employers’ vaccine requirements. Many have already lost their jobs or have been disciplined. Other say they will defy the vaccine mandates on principle. As a result, essential workers may soon be in short supply:

The U.S. federal government has set a deadline of Monday, Nov. 22 for all civilian federal workers to be vaccinated. The Transportation Security Administration has said four-in-10 of its employees are unvaccinated; any terminations of TSA staff due to not meeting the deadline would come right before one of America’s biggest travel periods, the Thanksgiving holiday. Meanwhile, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Agency is in an uproar over Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas threatening to terminate a significant portion of the unvaccinated workforce. Similar protests and potential firings over the COVID vaccines are happening all over America in government workplaces at the federal, state, and local level as well as in many parts of the private sector.