RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week

RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
November 28 to December 4, 2021

Featured Investigation:
Harvard's 'Lawfare' Programs Are an Omen
of Elections Decided Not at Polls -- But in Court

Building on the left’s challenges to every Republican presidential win since 2000, as well as new GOP voting laws enacted after Donald Trump’s 2020 loss, progressives at Harvard Law School are gearing up for a future when elections are regularly decided not at the polls – but in the courts, Mark Hemingway reports for RealClearInvestigations.

• Two Harvard Law programs have close ties to the Democratic Party and liberal activists with an interest in fighting elections through the judicial system.
• Harvard’s new Election Law Clinic offers students credit for political campaign work, and “hands-on litigation and advocacy work … with an initial focus on redistricting and voter suppression cases.”
• Harvard’s Democracy and the Rule of Law Clinic gives course credit for “an externship with Protect Democracy,” an anti-Trump nonprofit founded by Obama administration lawyers.
• Its “nonpartisan” arm, the Protect Democracy Project, had a major role promoting mail voting as part of the “well-funded cabal” that secured the 2020 election for Joe Biden, as detailed in Time’s “secret history of the 2020 election.”
• It gave $300,000 to a group that supported Eric Ciaramella, the Biden-tied “whistleblower” in the first Trump impeachment.
• It owns a company, VoteShield, that monitors voter databases for “anomalies.” Its partisan ties prompted one state it claims to monitor to steer clear of the firm.

Biden, Trump and the Beltway

Excerpt: 10% for the 'Big Guy' Joe Biden
New York Post
President Joe Biden has flatly denied any knowledge of or involvement in his son Hunter’s often questionable business dealings. This is false, New York Post columnist Miranda Devine reports in her new book “Laptop from Hell.” In this excerpt, Devine details face-to-face meetings between Joe Biden and one of Hunter’s business partners, Tony Bobulinski, who later blew the whistle on the Biden family’s business practices. These included, Bobulinski claimed, giving Joe a 10 percent stake in a global investment firm seeded with $10 million of Chinese money. Bobulinski asked Joe’s brother, Jim Biden – who was involved in some of Hunter’s dealings – about such arrangements:

As Jim talked, Bobulinski marveled at the political risk to Joe’s career if his family’s flagrant influence peddling during his vice presidency came to light. 

“How are you guys getting away with this?” he finally asked. “Aren’t you concerned that you’re going to put your brother’s [2020] presidential campaign at risk? You know, the Chinese, the stuff that you guys have been doing already in 2015 and 2016, around the world?” 

Jim chuckled and looked knowingly at Bobulinski. 

“Plausible deniability,” he said, using a term coined by the CIA during the Kennedy administration to describe the practice of keeping the president uninformed about illegal or unsavory activity so he can plausibly deny knowing anything if it becomes public knowledge.

In a separate project, RealClearInvestigations has aggregated articles by topic reporting on Hunter Biden and the Biden family’s business practices.

More Biden, Trump and the Beltway

Book Recounts Hunter's $10M-a-Year China Deal Daily Mail
Logs: Epstein Visited Clinton White House 17 Times Daily Mail
Jan. 6 Defendant Points to 4 Possible Undercover Agents Epoch Times
DoJ May Release Dissenting 'Alternative Mueller Report' Washington Examiner
North Carolina: A True Tale of Absentee Vote Fraud Politico

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

Chris Cuomo's Big Role in Hardball Defense of His Gov. Bro
New York Times
CNN news presenter Chris Cuomo was “suspended indefinitely” the day after the release of new evidence that he had been a key player in efforts to manipulate the press and discredit the women accusing his brother, former New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, of sexual harassment. The New York Times reported that thousands of pages of evidence and sworn testimony revealed that the journalist was part of a group that decided to publicize the confidential personnel file of one accuser in order to portray her as politically motivated and unhinged. The group also sought — and failed — to rally dozens of former female aides to pen an op-ed defending him. Chris Cuomo insisted to investigators that he had never manipulated coverage or spun other journalists to benefit his brother. And he has told viewers of his show that he acted only as a brother to be a sounding board “to listen and to offer my take,” advising him to tell the truth, whatever it was, and eventually to resign.

The American Prison System's War on Reading
Protean
Several states have issued bans on charities donating books to prisoners. Officials in Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington say the books can be used to smuggle in contraband – like the hollowed out centers of books in prison movies. This article challenges that narrative, reporting that there is no evidence that donations from groups such as Appalachian Prison Book Project or Philadelphia’s Books Through Bars are vehicles for cell phones, tobacco, and drugs. Instead, it reports, “the bulk of the contraband in today’s prisons is smuggled in by guards themselves, who profit handsomely from their illicit sidelines, sometimes making as much as $300 for a single pack of cigarettes.” What’s really going on?

With free books banned, prisoners are forced to rely on the small list of “approved vendors” chosen for them by the prison administration. These retailers directly benefit when states introduce restrictions. In Iowa, the approved sources include Barnes & Noble and Books-a-Million, some of America’s largest retail chains – and, notably, ones which charge the full MSRP [manufacturer's suggested retail price] for each book, quickly draining prisoners’ accounts. An incarcerated person with, say, $20 to spend can now only get one book, as opposed to three or four used ones; in states where prisoners make as little as 25 cents an hour for their labor, many can’t afford even that. 

The article also reports that many prisons restrict what inmates can read – and that these policies are racist.

For instance, many prisons have blanket bans on “urban” novels, a genre revolving around crime and intrigue in African-American communities. These are treated as contraband, and can’t be obtained through approved sources. Meanwhile, equally violent novels about white criminals, such as The Godfather or the Hannibal Lecter series, are allowed with no restrictions. … In Florida, the Department of Corrections bans “Police Brutality” by Elijah Muhammad, “Political Prisoners, Prisons, and Black Liberation” by Angela Davis, and many similar texts; it has no such bans for [Adolf Hitler’s] “Mein Kampf” or [the notorious white supremacist novel] “The Turner Diaries.” 

Congo: Kingpin of an Eco 'Blood Diamond'
New York Times
Batteries containing cobalt reduce overheating in electric cars and extend their range, but the metal has become known as “the blood diamond of batteries” because of its high price and the perilous conditions in the largest producer of cobalt in the world, the Democratic Republic of Congo. In its series of articles on the cobalt trade, the Times reports that corruption is also a major concern. And after this article last week, Congo's President ousted Albert Yuma Mulimbi, the chairman of the state-owned mining enterprise:

Without his chairmanship, Mr. Yuma will no longer have a significant role in partnering with international companies over major mining deals. “It is hard to underestimate the importance of this development — it is a significant step in the fight against corruption in Congo,” said J. Peter Pham, who until January served as a senior Central Africa official with the U.S. State Department. “Albert Yuma and the mining sector stand at the nexus of natural resources, political and economic power in the country.”

At least for now, Mr. Yuma will retain his role supervising the reform of small-scale and informal mining in Congo, one industry executive said. His plans include buying cobalt from the informal miners, also known as artisanal miners, and regulating pricing. Cobalt produced by artisanal mining, as opposed to industrial operations, makes up about 30 percent of the nation’s output.

He has also announced plans to increase safety at these sites.

Merit Deemed 'Malignant' at All Medical Schools
Washington Free Beacon
The two accrediting bodies for American medical schools now say that meritocracy is "malignant" and that race has "no genetic or scientific basis."  The Liaison Committee on Medical Education said that using race as a proxy for genetics "leads directly to racial health inequities," and that medical vulnerability is the "result of socially created processes" rather than biology. This article reports that the committee’s guidance won't just influence the way doctors talk, but also what they know and how they treat patients. It could even make them unwilling to screen racial minorities for serious conditions – including many types of cancer – that they are more likely to inherit, on the mistaken belief that genes play no role in racial health disparities. In separate articles, RealClearInvestigations has reported how woke ideology is influencing health care and medical research.

Coronavirus Investigations

Mystery as Africa Avoids Covid Disaster
Associated Press
Something mysterious going on in Africa. When the coronavirus first emerged last year, this article reports, health officials feared the pandemic would sweep across Africa, killing millions. Although it’s still unclear what COVID-19’s ultimate toll will be, that catastrophic scenario has yet to materialize in Zimbabwe or much of the continent even though fewer than 6% of Africans are vaccinated. Some researchers say the continent’s younger population (average age: 20) in addition to their lower rates of urbanization and more time spent outdoors may have spared it the more lethal effects of the virus so far. Several studies are looking into whether there might be other explanations, including genetic reasons or past infection with parasitic disease such as malaria which could “blunt” the tendency of people’s immune systems to go into overdrive when they are infected with COVID-19.

Other Coronavirus Investigations

Why Did Pfizer Hold Vax News Till After the Election? Federalist
Pfizer Lobbying to Thwart Whistleblowers Exposing Fraud Intercept
How Omicron Variant Rattled World in One Week Wall St Journal