RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
July 17 to July 23, 2022
Featured Investigation:
Here Are the Senior Biden Officials
Entangled in Durham's Criminal Russiagate Probe
Several people tied to a 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign plot to cast Donald Trump as a Kremlin collaborator have top jobs in the Biden administration—including at least two senior appointees cited by Special Counsel John Durham in his “active (and) ongoing" criminal investigation, Paul Sperry reports for RealClearInvestigations.
Details:
- Government watchdogs anticipate that Biden’s presidency could be pulled into the so-called Russiagate scandal.
- Jake Sullivan, now Biden’s national security adviser, and Caroline Krass, a top lawyer at the Pentagon, were involved in efforts in 2016 and 2017 to advance the Clinton campaign’s false claims about Trump through the media and federal government, documents show.
- Dafna Rand of the State Department and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler also pushed Trump-Russia collusion, evidence shows.
- Congress has referred at least a dozen cases of potential perjury involving former Clinton campaign and Obama officials who have testified behind closed doors.
- Republican sources say the pivotal roles played by Krass, Sullivan, Rand and Gensler may be among the first to draw attention from Congress if, as expected, the GOP regains power during the midterms.
- Good for the goose, good for the gander: Republicans vow to investigate the long effort to question Trump’s 2016 victory much as Democrats have used control of Congress to cast the former president and the Jan. 6 Capitol assault as threats to American democracy.
Featured Investigation:
Rights Abuser China Emerging
as Dubious Linchpin
of Biden's Lithium-Battery Supply Chain
Joe Biden's fist bump of a controversial Saudi oil prince during a trip aimed at making U.S. gasoline cheaper --even as the President hinders fossil fuels at home -- is hardly the only jarring aspect of his energy strategy.
As Steve Miller reports for RealClearInvestigations, Biden’s administration will likely end up relying on human-rights-abusing China to process the vast amounts of U.S.-mined lithium needed to power a renewable future for America – with no guarantee all of the lithium will return to the U.S. in batteries. Miller reports:
- A Chinese-dominated mining company, Lithium Americas, is tapping millions of dollars in American subsidies to extract huge amounts of lithium on the Nevada-Oregon border.
- Given a dearth of U.S. processing capacity, the mineral is likely to be sent to China, a lithium-processing giant, to be incorporated into batteries, energy experts say.
- That scenario undercuts the Biden administration's emphasis on domestic sourcing of green energy and will increase U.S. energy dependence on a hostile power -- one accused of using forced Uighur labor in the manufacture of both lithium batteries and solar panels.
- A Lithium Americas executive said the lithium to be mined is “uncommitted,” meaning the product would not necessarily be provided only to domestic U.S. users and producers.
Biden, Trump and the Beltway
DOJ Secretly Thwarted Release of Russia Documents
Just the News
In the final hours of the Trump presidency, the U.S. Justice Department raised privacy concerns to thwart the release of hundreds of pages of documents that Donald Trump had declassified to expose FBI abuses during the Russia collusion probe, this article reports. They included “hundreds of pages of sensitive FBI documents that show how the bureau used informants and FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign and misled both a federal court and Congress about flaws in the evidence they offered to get approval for the investigation.” The DOJ cited the need to redact private information in order to slow-walk the release of the material, presumably until the Biden administration took over. The documents that Trump declassified have never seen the light of day.
Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway
Feds Mull Tax, Lying Charges vs. Hunter Biden CNN
Hunter Met VP Often After Son's Trips Abroad New York Post
WashPost Scribe: Sarah Palin Not So Horrible After All Washington Post
HHS Pays $172M to Help Illegals Stay in U.S. Fox News
Biden Halts Prosecutions of Most Illegal Border Crossers Washington Free Beacon
Other Noteworthy Articles and Series
Cities Won't Pay to Fix Toxic Pipes
Guardian
Many U.S. cities have a history of severe lead problems because of old pipes. Now, some of them are essentially telling residents: pay up for the replacement or get more poison in your water, according to a Guardian investigation funded by the Open Society Foundations of George Soros. In Providence, for example, work crews “dug up pipes only at the homes of those who paid or took out loans for thousands of dollars, as well as under the public streets,” bypassing a tenement building that hadn’t paid for the work:
'It is a similar story nationally: a recent study of Washington DC’s early lead replacement programs found that when the water provider for the city asked residents to pay for replacement of the portions of pipes on their own property, 66% of homeowners in the wealthiest parts of the city took advantage of the program, compared with only 25% for areas with the lowest incomes.
'
Facial Search Tool Puts Children in Crosshairs
The Intercept
Often called the Google of facial recognition, PimEyes allows anyone to search for images of children scraped from across the internet. This raises a host of alarming possible uses, an Intercept investigation has found, because search results include images labeled “potentially explicit,” which could lead to further exploitation of children at a time when the dark web has sparked an explosion of images of abuse. The tech empowers potentially dangerous actors, including:
'Abusive parents searching for kids who have fled to shelters. Governments targeting the sons and daughters of political dissidents. Pedophiles stalking the victims they encounter in illicit child sexual abuse material. … “There are privacy issues raised by the use of facial recognition technology writ large,” said Jeramie Scott, director of the Surveillance Oversight Project at the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “But it’s particularly dangerous when we’re talking about children, when someone may use that to identify a child and to track them down.”
'
Pulitzer Panel Stands by Disputed Prize for Russiagate
Pulitzer Board, Pulitzer.org
Last November in RealClearInvestigations, Aaron Maté detailed a series of serious uncorrected errors in Russiagate articles published by the New York Times and the Washington Post in 2017 that were awarded a Pulitzer Prize. His RCI reporting, as well as other critiques and demands that the award be rescinded by former President Trump, led the Pulitzer Board to commission two outside reviews of those prize-winning articles. In a brief statement the Board declared:
'The separate reviews converged in their conclusions: that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes. The 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting stand.
'
In a violation of bedrock principles of journalism that value transparency and full disclosure – basically the more information, the better—a Pulitzer representative told RCI that the Board would not be releasing the reviews. As a result, the public does not know who conducted the reviews, which questions they asked, and how they evaluated the material. This seems more like a cover-up than a reckoning.
Coronavirus Investigations
How Two COVID Swindlers Joined the Jet Set
Los Angeles Times
The husband-and-wife grifters were not the sharpest knives in the drawer, so the fact they were able to scam in $18 million through phony COVID-19 relief claims in just five months says as much about government failings as their own moral shortcomings. This article details the simple, bogus loan applications they filed to secure the loot and the lavish lifestyle it funded in Tarzana, in suburban Los Angeles, and Europe, where they were fleeing the FBI, their arrest and conviction:
'Posing as “Iuliia Zhadko” and “Viktoria Kauichko,” [the couple] opened bank accounts for many of the fake companies that applied for loans. … Their carelessness — it didn’t take long for auditors to flag that many businesses had attached the same employee lists to their loan applications — had done them in.
'
When the FBI raided their Tarzana house, the man was seen tossing a grocery bag into the backyard bushes. FBI agents fetched it and dumped the contents onto the lawn: $451,000 in cash. Still, they were allowed to remain free as they awaited trial. That's when they took off to Europe in a private jet, where they led a lavish lifestyle until they were apprehended once more. This time for keeps.
New Vaccines Will Be Ready in Fall. America Won’t Be.
The Atlantic
Health experts expect another COVID surge this fall, but despite development of a new vaccine based on the latest strains of the virus the government seems ill-prepared to handle it. This article reports:
'Yes, fall’s vaccine recipe seems set. But much more needs to happen before the nation can be served a full immunization entrée. ... When, exactly, will the updated shots be ready? How effective will they be? How many doses will be available? We just started prepping for this new inoculation course, and are somehow already behind. Then, once shots are nigh, what will be the plan? Who will be allowed to get one, and how many people actually will? Right now, America’s appetite for more shots is low, which could herald yet another round of lackluster uptake. There’s little time to address these issues. Fall “is, like, tomorrow,” says Jacinda Abdul-Mutakabbir, an infectious-disease pharmacist at Loma Linda University, in California.
'