RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
January 30 to February 5, 2022
Featured Investigation:
Racially Sensitive 'Restorative' School Discipline
Isn't Behaving Very Well
School "restorative practices" -- having students atone for misbehavior via counseling rather than suspending them -- aren't faring very well after pandemic-forced shutdowns and the George Floyd murder. Focusing on Denver, which pioneered the lenient approach now adopted far and wide, Vince Bielski reports in RealClearInvestigations:
- Suspensions have fallen significantly – avoiding them is the policy, after all – but fighting and other serious incidents have not meaningfully declined.
- In fact, after Denver removed police from schools, violence spiked, with 102 student fights, 11 sexual assaults, 8 assaults on staff and 29 weapons violations.
- The story is similar elsewhere. Alexandria, Va., and at least one other district called the police back to school last fall to combat the jump in assaults and gun threats.
- One reason the restorative philosophy falls short: Some teachers and administrations don’t buy it. In schools with low test scores and overcrowded classrooms, it seems like another time-consuming educational fad.
- Besides, some students see a restorative conversation as simply an easy way to escape suspension.
- But President Biden’s education secretary, Miguel Cardona, appears set to renew Obama-era pressure against minority suspensions as “racist.”
- Haunting the policy is the 2018 Parkland, Fla., school massacre by a pathologically violent student who got little more than restorative counseling.
Featured Investigation
Conflict of Interest:
New Washington Post National Editor
Recused From FBI Coverage
The Washington Post is sidelining its new national editor, Matea Gold, from some of its biggest coverage areas – including the FBI, Justice Department, Russiagate and the Jan. 6 Capitol riot – because her husband, Jonathan Lenzner, is the FBI’s new chief of staff. And he has deep family ties to the Clintons.
As Paul Sperry reports for RealClearInvestigations:
- Gold had overseen coverage of the Russia investigation; Trump’s first impeachment, and his efforts to challenge the 2020 election in her previous job at the paper.
- The Post recently retracted and made corrections to several Russiagate articles.
- It is common for Washington journalists to be married to government officials and influencers. But Gold, her husband and their families have particularly close connections to Democrats.
- Lenzner’s father, Terry, was a private eye who, often under the direction of Hillary Clinton, investigated women who claimed they had had affairs with President Bill Clinton.
- Terry Lenzner’s firm IGI was the first investigative shop to launder payments for opposition research from political campaigns through law firms.
- In 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign employed a similar model in funneling more than $1 million to private investigator Fusion GPS and dossier author Christopher Steele through the law firm Perkins Coie.
- The FBI did not release a press advisory announcing Jon Lenzner’s appointment, a major change in bureau leadership on the seventh floor of the Hoover Building.
Biden, Trump and the Beltway
Memos Undercut Biden Story of Corrupt Ukraine Prosecutor
Just the News
Newly release memos show that just months before then Vice President Joe Biden forced the firing of Ukraine's chief prosecutor, U.S. State Department officials told the Ukrainian that they were "impressed" with his anti-corruption plan and fully supportive of his work. This appears to challenge Bidens’s claim that Viktor Shokin was fired in 2016 because the prosecutor wasn’t cracking down on corruption. This has wider ramifications because one of the companies Shokin was looking at, Burisma, was paying Biden’s son Hunter $83,000 per month. What’s more, that investigation fizzled after the prosecutor’s firing. This set of events prompted President Donald Trump in 2019 to ask Ukraine’s president to investigate the Biden family’s dealings in the country, a request that led to Trump’s first impeachment.
JP Morgan Subpoenaed in 2019 re: Hunter Biden China Deals
New York Post
A grand jury subpoena was issued 17 months before the 2020 election for Hunter Biden’s bank transactions involving the Bank of China, raising concerns that damaging material about then-candidate Joe Biden was hidden from voters. This article reports that ...
'... the order sent by the Department of Justice to JP Morgan Chase bank asked for the records of any international financial transactions for the past five years involving Hunter, his uncle James Biden and former business partners Devon Archer and Eric Schwerin, according to federal documents. The subpoena was issued just five weeks after Hunter allegedly left his laptop in a Delaware repair shop. A total of 15 businesses owned by Hunter and his associates were listed on the legal document. … A month after the election, in December 2020, Hunter announced that the US Attorney’s Office in Delaware was “investigating my tax affairs.” Also under investigation were Hunter’s foreign business dealings.
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Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway
No Evidence Fed Pick Led College Protest She Touted Washington Free Beacon
Trump Ally's Memo: Use Intel to Show Vote Stolen Washington Post
Leaked File Shows Biden's Afghan Failures Axios
Biden Admin Has Records on Nearly a Billion Gun Sales Washington Free Beacon
DOT Grant Program Still a White House Slush Fund Reason
Gerrymandering Critic Marc Elias Gets Rich Off It Washington Free Beacon
Dem Rep.'s Family Got Thousands in Campaign Funds Daily Caller
Other Investigations
'Big Speed Camera' Is Watching: Buttigieg's Controversial Push
Daily Mail
Expanding government surveillance may be coming for your wallet. This article reports that Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg wants to spend $14 billion to put “speed safety cameras” here, there, everywhere. While the cameras would result in more fines, the National Motorists Association argues “they can actually make our roads less safe.” Speed cameras have drawn sharp criticism from some on the left, who are angry that the fines are often used to fund police departments, making the issue rare ground for bipartisan agreement. A further irony is that while Buttigieg is advancing the plan to combat racism; he says it could provide more "equitable" enforcement than police traffic stops because cameras will have no awareness of the race of the driver. The city of Chicago’s experience might give him pause. ProPublica reports that African-Americans in the Windy City are far more likely to be ticketed by the machines than other residents.
Wall Street’s Green Push Exposes New Conflicts of Interest
Wall Street Journal
Conflict of interest is going green. The Big Four firms that audit the books, rate the bonds, advise on proxy voting and categorize the world’s companies are spending billions to boost their climate-related operations. For example, PricewaterhouseCoopers last year said ESG (environmental, social and governance) was a focus of its $12 billion investment plan.
'In many cases, firms that rate or evaluate companies on things like climate risk also sell services to help companies address these issues. Many of the firms providing these ratings, such as credit raters and auditors, are already managing deep conflicts of interest because they are paid by the companies they judge. Conflicts of interest in the credit-ratings industry were one cause of the financial crisis, according to lawmakers. One new set of potential conflicts springs from the widespread practice of selling ESG ratings alongside consulting and other services.
Institutional Shareholder Services, the nation’s biggest shareholder advisory firm, sells to investors its climate-risk ratings for thousands of companies. It also sells to those companies advice on how to increase those scores. “Improve ESG Ratings,” the Rockville, Md.-based firm says in its pitch to the roughly 5,000 businesses it covers. “Stand out among companies that you compete with for capital.”
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Other Noteworthy Articles and Series
FBI Role in Whitmer Kidnap Plot Looks Worse Than Jan. 6
Reason
Do the math. This article reports that the government's case against the 14 alleged extremists who plotted to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer relies on work of at least a dozen government informants and undercover FBI agents. Some of these government actors took lead roles in organizing the supposed plot. One of the informants, “Big Dan,” was even paid $54,000 by the FBI:
'"Big Dan" was no passive spectator: After initially alerting the authorities that he was involved in a Facebook group for militia members in which violence against police officers had been discussed, he agreed to become an informant. The government paid him $54,000 for six months' work. When the militia group surveilled Whitmer's vacation home, it was Big Dan leading the charge. According to the group's defense attorneys, Big Dan – an Iraq War veteran – took charge of training the other men in military tactics.
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The extensive involvement of “Big Dan” and other government assets in the plot, this article reports, “calls into question whether it would have moved forward at all without the government's prodding.”
DOJ Terror Unit: Many Cases, Few Details
Time
Considering that there were no successful mass terror attacks in the U.S. last year, the Biden administration may be hard pressed to prove its claim that domestic terror is on the rise. But even if it manages to find Americans actively plotting violent, treasonous attacks, this article reports that the new DOJ unit formed to combat the problem will face another obstacle:
'... [W]hile the Biden Administration has been scant on details on the new unit, former Justice and FBI officials and lawyers say it is likely to run into the same issues that have hamstrung such efforts for years. Under federal law, domestic terrorism itself is not a crime, political speech—no matter how hateful—is protected, and any attempt to expand federal investigative tools into Americans’ lives is likely to be met with political backlash from the right and left alike. Though Biden promised to “work for a domestic terrorism law” during his 2020 campaign, his Administration has so far proven reluctant to back several bipartisan efforts to write such new legislation. Instead, the unit will presumably rely on existing laws to charge domestic terrorists with other offenses, such as hate crimes and firearms offenses.
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Coronavirus Investigations
NYC Child Services Goes After Covid-Fearing Families
The 74
New York City schools have reported thousands of students to child protective services since August 2020 because their parents were afraid to send them back to class for fear of covid infection. The article reports that these cases can have lasting impacts on children and families:
'Child welfare investigations, which disproportionately involve low-income families of color, can have devastating impacts. Charges can stay on parents’ records for years — even in cases … where the agency ultimately found no evidence of neglect. Job prospects in fields like child care and education can be erased. And most dire, children can be separated from their parents – a trauma that studies show is later associated with elevated risks of mental health challenges, incarceration and even early death.
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Other Coronavirus Investigations
Data Show School Masks Are Unnecessary City Journal
Big Labor's $37M in Undue Pandemic Relief Washington Free Beacon
Public Education's Crisis of Epic Scale Washington Post