RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week

RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
June 5 to June 11, 2022

Featured Investigation:
FBI Chief Comey Misled
Congress’s 'Gang of 8'
Over Russiagate, Lisa Page Memo Reveals

In multiple ways, the FBI misled top lawmakers and the Justice Department about evidence tying the Trump campaign to Russia, according to a recently declassified document and other material.

Paul Sperry reports for RealClearInvestigations that talking points prepared by FBI lawyer Lisa Page for then-Director James Comey in advance of a March 9, 2017 meeting with congressional leaders was riddled with half-truths, outright falsehoods and critical omissions:

• The memo advised that collusion evidence against Trump campaign officials Paul Manafort and Carter Page was credible because it was “derived primarily from a Russian-based source.”
• The FBI knew beforehand that the source of this information, Igor Danchenko, lived in the United States. Danchenko had also told the bureau in a January 2017 interview that much of the material was dubious hearsay passed along over drinks with his high school buddies and an old girlfriend.
• The FBI also failed to disclose that Danchenko had funneled his material to Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence agent who was digging up anti-Trump dirt for Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
• Adding to the deception, Comey intentionally referred to Steele by the codename “CROWN,” making it appear as if the opposition research compiled from Danchenko and others was a product of British intelligence.
• Both the Senate and the House opened investigations based in part on the misrepresentations in the briefing.
• The FBI repeated these untruths to the Justice Department and the foreign intelligence surveillance court, obtaining warrants to spy on Carter Page.

Featured Investigation:
Team Zuckerberg Masks
the Heavily Pro-Democrat Tilt
of 2020 Election 'Zuck Bucks,' Study Finds

The $332 million in “Zuck bucks” provided to a progressive group to help run the pandemic-challenged 2020 elections was distributed on a highly partisan basis that favored Democrats, according to a new election analysis unpacked by Mark Hemingway for RealClearInvestigations.

Hemingway reports that the new study shows how the election scales were tipped through unprecedented private bankrolling of the progressive Center for Tech and Civic Life by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan:

• According to CTCL tax filings examined in the new analysis, the group made its 50 largest grants in terms of per capita spending in counties where the average partisan lean in favor of Democrats was 33 points – meaning the Zuck bucks could be expected to stimulate more Democratic votes in closely contested states such as Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. 
• The report contrasts with a report Zuckerberg commissioned, which emphasized that “more Republican jurisdictions … applied for and received grants.”
• That conclusion is misleading, the authors of the new analysis say, because Republican jurisdictions were far more likely to receive grants of less than $50,000.
• The report is from election data experts at the right-leaning Caesar Rodney Election Research Institute and nonpartisan research outfit Evolving Strategies.
• RealClear’s Hemingway has closely followed CTCL’s role in election 2020, which even many on the left acknowledge was crucial to Joe Biden’s defeat of Donald Trump. Hemingway helped edit the 2021 book “Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections” by Mollie Hemingway.

Biden, Trump and the Beltway

As major news outlets trumpeted the start of televised primetime congressional hearings on the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, they gave scant coverage to two startling events. On Wednesday an armed man bent on assassination was arrested near the home of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh. Nicholas John Roske, 26, of Simi Valley, Calif., told authorities he was “upset” by the leaked draft of an opinion by the Supreme Court signaling its intention to overturn Roe v. Wade. Roske, who has been charged with attempted murder, said he was also angered by the recent school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.

Then on Thursday, the FBI arrested the GOP’s leading candidate for governor in Michigan in connection with the Jan. 6 protests. Ryan Kelley never entered the Capitol, but he has been charged with four misdemeanors:

Kelley’s situation plays against the backdrop of the FBI’s recent track record in Michigan politics. The feds failed to win convictions in an alleged plot to kidnap Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a case marred by charges of FBI entrapment. Kelley is in a field of Republicans vying to replace Whitmer.

Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway

Jan. 6 Hearings: Takeaways From Day One Wall Street Journal
Files Belie Biden Admin Claims re: Disinfo Board Daily Caller
Pa.: Dem Ex-Rep. Guilty of Ballot-Box Stuffing Just the News
Prostitute on Hunter Biden Laptop Got $20K PPP Stimulus Daily Wire
Texting With ‘Megalomaniac’ Steve Bannon The Atlantic
Soros Spent $40M to Elect 75 Progressive Prosecutors Washington Examiner

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

Rise of U.S. Immigration Surveillance Under Biden
Coda Story

It turns out immigration authorities are making some effort to stay on top of the border-crossers awaiting hearings, and this article is none too happy about it. It reports that the number of people under electronic surveillance while their deportation cases are pending has skyrocketed since Joe Biden took office in January 2021 and a surge of illegal immigration began. This article casts the monitoring as a form of repression. “You feel you’re in prison again,” one immigrant said. And while it highlights the suffering of those who are required to wear obtrusive ankle bracelets, it reports that they are a distinct minority:

Even that seemingly happy development is given a dark twist: “SmartLINK is expanding the boundaries of ICE’s digital monitoring system, this time from a wearable device to something that is less visible but ever-more ubiquitous.”

The Overseas Doctor Prescribing Abortions
Politico

If Roe v. Wade is overturned,  a Dutch doctor named Rebecca Gomperts “may quickly become the most controversial abortion provider in America – even though she isn’t in America,” this article reports. Gomperts runs an organization called Aid Access, which mails abortion pills – typically mifepristone and misoprostol – to people who are up to 10 weeks pregnant. It has been able to do so because Gomperts and many of her colleagues operate beyond the reach of U.S. state and federal laws, with prescribing doctors and a pharmacy based overseas.

Rise in Suicides by Young Children Baffles Families
Wall Street Journal

This article begins with an almost unimaginable tragedy: the story of a 10-year-old girl who took her own life. Indeed, her father still finds it hard to believe that one so young could even consider suicide. In fact, the number of children dying by suicide has risen dramatically in recent years. Among females ages 10 to 14, the rate of suicide more than tripled between 2007 and 2020, from 0.5 per 100,000 to 2 per 100,000 according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics. Among males the same age, the rate jumped from 1.2 per 100,000 to 3.6 per 100,000 over the same period:

The numbers upend a long-held belief that children who haven’t hit puberty yet don’t think about killing themselves or, if they do, that those thoughts are fleeting:

Battery Shortage New Peril
to Green Dreams and Grids
Reuters

Will the green movement give us a summer of brownouts and blackouts? This article reports that one of the movement’s Holy Grails remains elusive: mega-batteries that can store power for when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. U.S. renewable energy developers have recently postponed, canceled or renegotiated at least a dozen major storage projects thwarted by labor and transport bottlenecks, soaring mineral prices, and other challenges. The delays, which have not been previously reported, span states including California, Hawaii and Georgia:

Coronavirus Investigations

U.S. Has Wasted More Than 82 Million
COVID Vaccine Doses
Axios

Over 82 million doses of COVID-19 vaccines distributed across the country have gone to waste since the start of the pandemic. That represents slightly more than 11 percent of doses distributed by the federal government, this article reports:

• 'CVS and Walmart, two pharmacy chains that have worked to administer COVID-19 vaccines, were together responsible for more than 25% of the doses that went to waste.'

• 'Other pharmacies — including Rite Aid and Costco — and dialysis centers each wasted more than a quarter of the doses they received, per NBC News.'

• 'Among states, Oklahoma discarded about 28% of the doses it received, while Alaska threw away nearly 27% of its doses.'

WHO Now Agrees ‘Lab Leak’ Theory Needs Investigation
Washington Post

A team of scientists convened by the World Health Organization has said a theory about COVID-19’s origins that the WHO had previously dismissed as “extremely unlikely” – that it may have been created in a Chinese lab – needs further investigation. The scientists said they had not received any new data that would allow them to better evaluate that theory and that available data suggest that the virus emerged in nature. But ...

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