RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week

RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
June 26 to July 2, 2022

Featured Investigation:
Willful Blindness:
Feds Ignore Massive Illegal Alien ID Theft
Plaguing Americans as U.S. Coffers Fill

Millions of Americans have had their identities stolen by illegal immigrants who need their Social Security numbers to work. Mark Hemingway and Ben Weingarten report for RealClearInvestigations that federal and state authorities have done little to crack down on this criminality, which delivers billions in tax dollars to their coffers. They report:

• A 2018 Treasury inspector general report documented 1.2 million cases in which illegal aliens used Social Security numbers that belonged to someone else or were fabricated in 2017. The Social Security Administration projects this number will rise to 2.9 million by 2040.
• One study found that that the federal government collects about $22 billion annually in tax receipts from illegal aliens, with the bulk going toward Social Security ($12.6 billion) and Medicare ($5.9 billion) – programs from which noncitizens are ineligible to receive benefits.
• Illegal aliens can purchase identities from dealers for $80 to $200 along with a green card as can be done in Los Angeles, or via the dark web for as little as $4.
• The Trump administration tried to address the problem by notifying employers when the Social Security numbers provided by their workers did not match government records. President Biden ended this practice.
• The three federal agencies directly involved in immigration and tax issues – the Department of Homeland Security, the Social Security Administration, and the Internal Revenue Service – do not appear to have vigorous programs in place to police the matter.
• One former IRS Commissioner told Congress it doesn't want to "discourage a lot of people from paying the taxes they owe."
• The IRS' Internal Revenue Manual, which governs employees' policies and practices, refers to people engaged in identity theft as "borrowers" of other people's information.
• Some victims of identity theft report their lives were ruined due to being saddled with the financial and criminal conduct of the fraudsters.
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Biden, Trump and the Beltway

Voicemail:
Joe Biden Sought to Chat China Business w/ Hunter
Daily Mail

How many smoking guns does the mainstream media need to focus on President Joe Biden's dishonesty and possible corruption? That question surfaced again with the release of a voicemail confirming once more that President Biden is lying when he says he never discussed his son Hunter's foreign business dealings with him. This article reports Biden called his son in 2018 saying he wanted to talk to him about a New York Times story detailing Hunter's dealings with the Chinese oil giant CEFC. "I thought the article released online, it's going to be printed tomorrow in the Times, was good. I think you're clear," Joe said in the voicemail.

Files on Hunter's abandoned laptop previously disclosed by DailyMail.com show that he struck a deal with the Chinese company worth millions of dollars after touting his family connections. The Times' 2018 story pointed out CEFC's chairman Ye Jianming had been arrested in China and his top lieutenant Patrick Ho had been convicted in the US for bribing African officials to help Iran evade oil sanctions. It revealed that Ye had met with Hunter at a Miami hotel in 2017 to discuss 'a partnership to invest in American infrastructure and energy deals.' The Times reported that when Ho was arrested, he called Joe's brother Jim Biden – who told the newspaper that he believed the call was meant for Hunter.

Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway

Witness: Instigator Epps Acted Suspiciously on Jan. 6 Epoch Times
The Progressive Push for Permanent Mail Voting American Conservative
DC Power Players Pay Thousands to Find Dates Politico
Trump's Tech Biz Needs the Leftists He Vilifies Reuters
Jan. 6 Committee's Alleged Lies About Ex-DoJ Lawyer Federalist
GOP Aide Delivers Explosive Jan. 6 Testimony Politico
The DoJ Official Driving Probe Into Trump Push to Keep Power New York Times

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

Does China Execute Prisoners for Organs?
Tablet

China's organ transplantation system began a period of rapid expansion around the year 2000. Thousands of new doctors were trained, hundreds of hospitals opened new transplant wings or constructed dedicated buildings, new patents for transplantation technologies were registered, and domestic immunosuppressant manufacturing began. A leading surgeon told Chinese media the number of hospitals doing liver transplants after 2000 "rose abruptly like spring bamboo after rain." But where were all those organs coming from? This article argues – but does not claim to prove – that the answer may lie in China's longtime practice of harvesting organs from executed prisoners.

Theories as to whose bodies made up the shortfall between the number of transplants and the number of officially recorded death penalty prisoners have confounded analysts since 2006. The leading hypothesis to date has been that political prisoners – mostly practitioners of Falun Gong, and more recently probably Uyghur Muslims, too – were killed extralegally, and their organs monetized.

It scours hundreds of medical papers to support this theory.

Hackers for Hire Provide Courtroom Edge
Reuters

During the last decade a group of cyber-mercenaries based in India built an underground hacking operation that would become a hub for private investigators who sought an advantage for American and international clients embroiled in lawsuits. A Reuters investigation based on data from two providers of email services the spies used to execute their espionage campaigns,

identified 35 legal cases since 2013 in which Indian hackers attempted to obtain documents from one side or another of a courtroom battle by sending them password-stealing emails. The messages were often camouflaged as innocuous communications from clients, colleagues, friends or family. They were aimed at giving the hackers access to targets' inboxes and, ultimately, private or attorney-client privileged information. … Reuters reached out to every person in the [email] database – sending requests for comment to each email address – and spoke to more than 250 individuals. Most of the respondents said the attempted hacks revealed in the email database occurred either ahead of anticipated lawsuits or as litigation was under way. The targets' lawyers were often hit, too. The Indian hackers tried to break into the inboxes of some 1,000 attorneys at 108 different law firms, Reuters found. Among the law firms targeted were global practices, including U.S.-based Baker McKenzie, Cooley and Cleary Gottlieb.

Revealed:
Prince Charles Pressured Ministers for Benefits
Guardian

Prince Charles exploited a controversial procedure to compel government ministers to secretly change a proposed law to benefit his landed estate, according to documents uncovered by the Guardian. Under a secretive procedure known as Queen's consent the monarch and her eldest son are given copies of draft laws in advance so they can examine whether the legislation affects their public powers or private assets. Buckingham Palace claims the Queen's Consent is "purely formal" with no influence on laws.

[But] the newly revealed documents, concerning a leasehold reform act that became law in 1993, provide detailed evidence of Charles applying pressure on elected ministers to ensure an exemption to prevent his own tenants from having the right to buy their own homes. … In practical terms only a small number of Newton St Loe tenants are affected by the ban. But they say they have suffered bitter financial hardship as a result of the prince's special rights. One, Jane Giddins, said she and her husband cannot borrow against their home to pay for social care for themselves in the future. She added that the value of the 99-year-old lease on their home – their main asset – diminished steadily as it got closer to ending. "It is total injustice, and feudal," Giddins said.

CEO Stock Sales Suggest Insider Trading
Wall Street Journal

Some corporate leaders may have figured out how to game SEC rules to effectively commit insider trading with impunity, this article reports. Under a system called "prearranged trading plans," top executives and other company insiders can be shielded from allegations of trading on inside information as long as they sell using an automated trading plan set up when they didn't know about any impending news. The rule allows these arranged trades to begin immediately. This article suggests that many trades are executed with knowledge of impending news.

A Wall Street Journal analysis of 75,000 prearranged stock sales by corporate insiders, using a comprehensive compilation of the data, shows that about a fifth of them occurred within 60 trading days of a plan's adoption. The timing in aggregate made the trades more profitable: On average, those trades preceded a downturn in share price more often than when insiders waited longer to trade, the analysis found. Collectively, insiders who sold within 60 days reaped $500 million more in profits than they would have if they sold three months later, according to the analysis, which examined trades from 2016 through 2021 and adjusted returns to remove the effect of sector-wide moves in the market. For those who waited 120 days or more after adopting a plan, roughly half sold before a downturn and half before a stock upturn, suggesting that the sellers reaped no unusual gains after more time had passed.

Coronavirus Investigations

The Case for the Lab-Leak Theory
spiked

When it comes to the mysteries of COVID-19's origin, one thing seems clear – that it originally came from a horseshoe bat living far from the Chinese city of Wuhan where it first infected human beings. The central question is, and always has been, who or what brought the bat virus more than a thousand miles north in the autumn of 2019 to the middle of a modern city? This article by science journalist Matt Ridley says the best evidence suggests it was the government-run, American-supported lab in Wuhan:

The Wuhan Institute of Virology (and nowhere else in China) is home to the team that collaborated with American labs to develop techniques for manipulating SARS-like viruses in the laboratory to test their infectivity. It kept live bats in the lab to experiment on. It grew live SARS-like viruses in culture and infected human airway-epithelial cells with them. It developed humanised mice to test viruses on. It was swapping parts of spike genes from newly discovered viruses collected from nature into cultured viruses in the lab.

SARS-CoV-2 is the only SARS-like virus ever found – among hundreds – with a furin-cleavage site in its spike protein: an insertion of 12 letters of genetic code that makes the virus especially infectious, and is therefore the reason we had a pandemic and not just a localised outbreak. But in September 2021 a document was leaked to internet sleuths that showed the Wuhan laboratory was party to plans in 2018 to insert novel furin-cleavage sites into undefined SARS-like viruses in its possession. Yet the institute and its American collaborators had never bothered to tell the world about this plan, and they ignored the furin-cleavage site in their seminal 2020 paper about this virus in the journal Nature.

Other Coronavirus Investigations

Long COVID Symptoms Often Missed in Seniors Washington Post
COVID Has Defeated the Government Atlantic
Misleading Data Behind CDC Push to Get Kids Vaccinated Daily Caller