RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
January 9 to January 15, 2022
Featured Investigation:
Capitol Cop Who Shot Ashli Babbitt Refused
To Answer Investigators' Questions
Investigators from three agencies cleared Lt. Michael Byrd of wrongdoing in the shooting death of unarmed Jan. 6 rioter Ashli Babbitt without actually interviewing him about the shooting or threatening him with punishment if he did not cooperate with their criminal investigation, Paul Sperry reports for RealClearInvestigations.
Sperry reports:
- After being cleared by the Department of Justice and the Capitol and District of Columbia police, Byrd went on “NBC Nightly News” to tell anchor Lester Holt that he issued fair warning to Babbitt before firing on shooting the Air Force veteran -- but he never swore that under penalty of perjury to investigators.
- “He didn’t provide any statement to investigators and they didn’t push him to make a statement,” Babbitt family attorney Terry Roberts told RCI, calling the probe a “whitewash.”
- Byrd did not invoke his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent, which makes the reluctance of authorities to lean on him or sanction him for not cooperating all the more puzzling.
- Documents reveal that eyewitnesses — including three cops — told investigators they did not hear Byrd give Babbitt any warnings, contradicting what Byrd told NBC.
- Byrd admitted to Holt that he never actually saw Babbitt brandish a weapon -- a fact that use-of-force experts writing for the Lawfare blog found problematic.
- The Democrat-dominated House Jan. 6 panel has not explored the Babbitt killing -- the worst violence of the day and one of the most high-profile officer-involved shooting cases in U.S. history.
- Meanwhile, the feds have thrown the book at suspected Capitol rioters.
Featured Investigation:
The Escalating Nationwide Battle
Over Private Millions to Bankroll Public Elections
Democrats across the country are pushing to continue allowing private money to fund public elections as Republicans try to limit the practice, which they say gave Joe Biden an unfair and perhaps decisive advantage in 2020, Steve Miller reports for RealClearInvestigations.
Details:
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- So far at least 10 GOP-controlled states have passed laws to prohibit or limit the use of private money in public elections. These include the swing states of Arizona, Florida, Georgia, and Ohio.
- During 2020, nonprofits donated more than $400 million to this purpose. Most of the funding, around $350 million, came from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, distributed primarily through the Center for Tech and Civic Life.
- Democrats and others contend such money is necessary to support the work of underfunded election boards facing the added challenges of the pandemic.
- Republicans say the private grants were disproportionately allocated to counties eventually won by Biden.
- With federal election funding distributed primarily based on population, most money tends to flow to logistically challenged cities and larger counties — often Democrat-run.
- In the case of 2020’s outsized private grants, however, the transparency laws governing federal spending didn't apply.
- Congresswoman Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.): “Our elections should never be for sale, but they were in 2020.”
- Meanwhile, the progressive Brennan Center for Justice says 25 states have enacted 62 new laws that make it easier to vote.
Biden, Trump and the Beltway
Oath Keepers Leader, 10 Charged With J6 Sedition Wall Street Journal
Insurrection Double Standards City Journal
Twitter Allows Iranian Threats to Assassinate Trump Free Beacon
Report: Congress Is Much Better at Trading Than You Unusualwhales
DHS Can't Locate 50K Migrants Let Go in U.S. in '21 Washington Free Beacon
How NYC’s Noncitizen Voting Could Become a Fiasco City Journal
Other Noteworthy Articles and Series
Biden Ed Sec'y May Have Solicited Letter Likening Parents to Terrorists
Fox News
Did the Biden administration concoct a reason to potentially spy on American parents? This article suggests it may have. It reports that Education Secretary Miguel Cardona appears to have solicited the much-criticized letter from the National School Boards Association that compared protesting parents to domestic terrorists, according to an email exchange reviewed by Fox News. The Department of Justice relied on that NSBA letter, which suggested using the Patriot Act against parents, in creating its own memo directing the FBI to mobilize in support of local education officials.
'In the Oct. 5 email, NSBA Secretary-Treasurer Kristi Swett recounted that NSBA interim CEO Chip Slaven "told the officers he was writing a letter to provide information to the White House, from a request by Secretary Cardona." A Department of Education spokesperson denied that Cardona solicited the NSBA letter, despite the email indicating he did.
'
Traffic Cams Nail Minorities the Most
ProPublica
Are machines racist? That’s the suggestion of this article, which reports that “a ProPublica analysis of millions of citations" -- issued for violations recorded by red light and speed cameras in Chicago -- "found that households in majority Black and Hispanic ZIP codes received tickets at around twice the rate of those in white areas.” The article does not report that the cameras are faulty and, deep in the piece, it acknowledges the key fact that “both red-light and speed cameras are distributed roughly evenly among the city’s Black, Latino and white neighborhoods.” The problem, it seems, is that African-Americans are more likely to break the rules of the road. Yet here is how ProPublica frames the piece:
'“We felt the brunt of it the way white people didn’t,” said Olatunji Oboi Reed, a longtime activist for racial equity in transportation in Chicago who has received a handful of camera tickets over the years. “Fortunately, I’ve always been in a situation where I can survive financially, unlike many Black and brown people in the city; one ticket is throwing their whole finances in a hurricane.”
'
While devoting dozens of paragraphs to the false narrative of racism, the article provides just one brief mention of a response that might mitigate the impact of financial penalties on poorer residents -- that is, besides getting more motorists to obey the law. But even that passage includes the false suggestion that racism is “baked into” to the program’s design:
'City officials said they are trying to mitigate the financial harm caused by camera tickets. They pointed to a pilot program that halves the costs of fines and allows for some debt forgiveness for low-income residents. That initiative, which was announced last year with no mention of the racial inequities baked into the camera program, is scheduled to start by the end of March.
'
Tobacco Backs ‘Anti-Smoking’ Vapers
Daily Beast
A pro-vaping group that warns cigarettes can kill has an unlikely sponsor: mammoth British American Tobacco. According to sources and internal documents, this article reports, BAT has played a central and hands-on role in orchestrating, directing, and funding the World Vapers’ Alliance – a seemingly grassroots lobbying group designed to recruit pro-vaping advocates around the world under an anti-smoking guise. The article suggests that BAT, which has a market cap of $90 billion and sells traditional cigarette brands such as Lucky Strike and Pall Mall as well as e-cigarettes, may be trashing one of its products as part of a larger effort to make sure people keep smoking something:
'While BAT acknowledges that it’s good to give up smoking, the company doesn’t want to give up its nicotine delivery business – or tobacco. So, instead of urging smokers to quit, it urges them to start vaping.
'
Fauci's Dept. Paid $205K to Study Transgender Monkeys
Washington Free Beacon
Dr. Anthony Fauci's division of the National Institutes of Health paid over $200,000 during the coronavirus pandemic for researchers to study why transgender women have high rates of HIV by injecting male monkeys with female hormones. This article quotes Dr. Katherine Roe, a neuroscientist with People for the Ethical Ttreatment of Animals, who said the study is "yet another pointless, wasteful monkey torture experiment":
'"It's just bad science to suggest that dosing monkeys with feminizing medication makes them good stand-ins for humans," Roe told the Washington Free Beacon. "This study will not help to prevent or treat HIV and will not help transgender women."
Roe says the study is ineffective because monkeys cannot contract HIV. They contract Simian Immunodeficiency Virus, a milder form of the disease. She faults the National Institutes of Health for spending billions of dollars on using monkeys in HIV research, since the primates cannot contract AIDS.
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Coronavirus Investigations
FDA Behind States' Racial Rationing of Covid Treatment
Washington Free Beacon
The FDA’s emergency use authorizations for monoclonal antibodies and oral antivirals allowed their use only for "high risk" patients who contracted Covid, including guidance on what factors put patients at risk. One of those was race:
'The FDA "fact sheet" for Sotrovimab, the only monoclonal antibody effective against the Omicron variant, states that "race or ethnicity" can "place individual patients at high risk for progression to severe COVID-19." The fact sheet for Paxlovid, Pfizer’s new antiviral pill, uses the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s definition of "high risk," which states that "systemic health and social inequities" have put minorities "at increased risk of getting sick and dying from COVID-19."
'
This article reports that the policy is having real-world impacts.
'In New York, racial minorities are automatically eligible for scarce COVID-19 therapeutics, regardless of age or underlying conditions. In Utah, "Latinx ethnicity" counts for more points than "congestive heart failure" in a patient’s "COVID-19 risk score" – the state’s framework for allocating monoclonal antibodies. And in Minnesota, health officials have devised their own "ethical framework" that prioritizes black 18-year-olds over white 64-year-olds – even though the latter are at much higher risk of severe disease.
'
Military Files on Virus Research Appears To Contradict Fauci Testimony
Project Veritas
The possibility that COVID-19 was created in a lab in Wuhan, China rests in part on the idea that that Chinese researchers there were conducting “gain of function research,” which manipulates viruses to make them more dangerous to people (in hopes of being able to create a treatment for the illness). This article reports that in 2018 a group that receives funding from the U.S. government, EcoHealth Alliance, sought funding from the Defense Department in 2018 to conduct gain-of-function research of bat-borne coronaviruses. The request was denied but it raises new questions about scientific work done prior to the pandemic.
'According to the documents, NIAID [National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases], under the direction of Dr. Fauci, went ahead with the research in Wuhan, China and at several sites across the U.S. Dr. Fauci has repeatedly maintained, under oath, that the NIH and NAIAD have not been involved in gain of function research with the EcoHealth Alliance program. But according to the documents obtained by Project Veritas which outline why EcoHealth Alliance’s proposal was rejected, DARPA certainly classified the research as gain of function.
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Fauci disputed the report in sworn testimony before the Senate this week, stating, “We have never seen that grant, and we have never funded that grant.” The article does not report whether the Wuhan lab found another funding source for its gain of function research.
Other Coronavirus Investigations
Omicron Isn’t Mild for the Health-Care System The Atlantic
Hospitals Letting Infected Staff Members Stay on the Job Associated Press
Will the Omicron Wave Break Nursing? New York Magazine
The Army of Millions Who Enforce China’s Zero-Covid Policy New York Times