RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week

No abortion law in the United States regulates medical treatment for miscarriages or ectopic pregnancies, and every state with one has a clear exemption for treatments to save the life of the mother, Hemingway reports. But that hasn’t stopped assertions otherwise:  

• During the Georgia gubernatorial debate, Democratic challenger Stacey Abrams claimed that the state’s new law restricting abortion means “women can be investigated for miscarriages and other pregnancy losses.”    

• Advocating to enshrine the right to abortion in California’s constitution, Hillary Clinton also conflated abortion and miscarriage. “Women — not politicians — should be able to make decisions about their own lives,” she tweeted. “That includes abortion care and miscarriage management.”    

• And the popular liberal TikTok influencer PoliticsGirl said the election was about whether Republicans pass laws that determine “if you get to live or die during an ectopic pregnancy.”  

• The new interpretation of “abortion” has gotten traction in the media, with the Washington Post and New York Times suggesting that many medical providers have also embraced an expansive definition of the word for fear of “running afoul of abortion bans."  

• Yet neither news outlet appears to have talked to public officials in Texas about whether the state’s abortion law would stop women from receiving care following a miscarriage. The answer, according to the Texas attorney general, is that it does not.  

Featured Investigation
Beyond ‘MAGA Deniers’:
Here Are the Well-Funded Forces
Arrayed Left and Right
to Challenge the Election 

For those skeptical of getting the full story from media emphasizing "MAGA election deniers," Ben Weingarten has the antidote in RearClearInvestigations: A comprehensive look at well-financed forces both left and right jockeying to influence and preparing to challenge this year’s election results if need be – not to mention elections to come. 

Weingarten surveys the battlefield of “lawfare” – a hidden but defining force shaping American democracy: 

• Major media outlets emphasize Republicans’ role, but the GOP says it’s only playing catchup after its legal shortcomings were exposed in 2020 against the Democrats’ robust legal efforts.  

• During the 2020 election, Democrat Party organizations, campaigns, and interest groups launched 120 election-related lawsuits, compared with just 40 brought by Republicans – many in response to Democrat suits.   

• This election cycle, lawmakers pushed over 1,000 election-related bills, with largely Democrat-led states passing laws easing voting rules and regulations and largely Republican-led states passing laws strengthening them.  

• Top Democrat lawyer Marc Elias voices alarm at increased Republican lawfare, but his critics will find this quite rich coming from him: As Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign lawyer, he was a linchpin of the Russiagate scandal and the Clinton campaign’s charge that Trump’s election was illegitimate.   

• Democrat efforts include The 65 Project seeking to disbar Trump 2020 election lawyers, an apparent effort to block conservative legal talent from future vote challenges. 

Featured Investigation: 
Gen. Flynn Warns
of an FBI Perjury Trap for Trump
'Like They Tried to Set Me Up' 

In RealClearInvestigations, Paul Sperry interviews Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who tells him the  FBI may have “set a perjury trap” for Donald Trump just like the bureau set him up when he was Trump's national security adviser, setting in motion Flynn's ouster from his job. 

Details: 

• The D.C. Beltway has been awash in rumors that the former President will be indicted after the Nov. 8 midterms. 

• A grand jury is investigating whether Trump and his aides conspired to conceal documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate from agents and made false statements when certifying they produced all of them.  

• But the FBI and Justice Department are using semantics to entrap Trump, Flynn told RealClearInvestigations.  

• Flynn says FBI agents asked Trump for all documents in his custody “bearing classification markings,” as opposed to classified documents, which he says was a carefully worded distinction designed to trip up the former  president.  

Biden, Trump and the Beltway 

It has long been clear that despite his blanket denials, Joe Biden not only knew about but had a hand in his son Hunter’s foreign business dealings while Joe was serving as Vice President. This article reports that another whistleblower who claims to have direct knowledge of Biden’s involvement has spoken to Senate investigators:

The informant says they were party to a 2012 conference call involving then-VP Joe, Hunter, 52, his business partner Jeff Cooper, 53, late Senate majority leader Harry Reid and his son Key Reid, 48, who was also in business with Hunter. The spring 2012 call was about Hunter, Key and Jeff's new venture into online gambling in Latin America, the whistleblower said, adding that Joe was active on the call discussing details of the business, and appeared to be involved as a "silent partner." "He wasn't passive, he was talking about it. If I had to describe him, he was like a member of the Board of Directors," the source said.   

The article also reports that Cooper denied ever having a call about any of his companies with the Joe Biden, calling the claim a “complete fabrication.” Key, Hunter and the White House did not respond to requests for comment. 

Why Progressives May Be Biggest Midterm Losers, to Centrists Tablet 
Behind Florida Win: DeSantis Re-Drew Black Districts  ProPublica 
McCarthy-Tied Lobbyist Beltway's No. 1 Unelected Figure?  Politico 
9/11 Panel's Debrief of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney  Wall St Journal 
Ivana Trump's Improbable Rise and Tragic Death  Vanity Fair 

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series 

The FBI is a “broken” “politicized bureaucracy” that is “rotted at its core,” according to a report issued by Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee, based primarily on the testimony of whistleblowers within the agency. The report claims that under the leadership of Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland, the bureau maintained a “systemic culture of unaccountability” and was full of “rampant corruption, manipulation, and abuse.”  Quote:

Some of the allegations leveled in the report include the contention that the FBI “manufactured” a controversy about domestic violent extremism, by “orchestrating” the failed plot to kidnap Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, which was foiled in 2020. It also alleges that the Bureau attempted to minimize allegations of wrongdoing by Hunter Biden, who is currently being investigated for tax-related felonies by Delaware’s U.S. Attorney, David C. Weiss, a holdover from the Trump administration. Other allegations include the “purging” of conservative employees who dissent from the FBI’s efforts to promote “diversity, equity and inclusion,” which the report terms as a “woke agenda.” 

Activists Target Musk's Twitter  
Wall Street Journal 

Twitter Inc. has suffered “a massive drop in revenue” because advertisers have bowed to pressure from activist groups who do not believe the platform will aggressively police speech they don’t like, according to its new owner, Elon Musk. This article reports that: 

Mr. Musk’s remarks came after several big-name advertisers, including food company  General Mills  Inc.,  Oreo maker  Mondelez International  Inc.,  and  Pfizer  Inc.  and others  have temporarily paused their Twitter advertising  in the wake of the takeover of the company by Mr. Musk, The Wall Street Journal has reported. German car-making giant  Volkswagen  AG  said it had recommended to its various brands they pause advertising on Twitter to assess any revisions the company makes to its brand safety guidelines. 

This article reports that Musk said that the company hadn’t changed content moderation and had tried to address activists’ concerns. “Extremely messed up!” he said, casting the pullback as an assault on free speech. 

Business Giants Get Cheaper Loans
for Diversity Quotas  
Washington Free Beacon 

Many prominent businesses are now writing racial and gender quotas into their credit agreements with banks, seeking lower interest rates for workforce diversity programs. Over the past two years,  this article reports, major players including Pfizer, Ernst & Young,  Prudential ,  BlackRock  and  Telefónica have secured lending agreements, known as a credit facility, that links the interest rate charged by banks to the company’s internal diversity targets, creating a financial incentive to meet them. If the business achieves its targets, it won’t have to pay as much interest on the loans it takes out; if it falls short, it is required to pay more.  

"Let’s say Wells Fargo will loan to BlackRock at 1 percent if it meets diversity quotas, and the market interest rate is 5 percent," said Will Hild, the executive director of Consumers’ Research. "Every other company that has to borrow at 5 percent is now at a disadvantage vis-à-vis BlackRock. So other companies will have to follow BlackRock’s lead, or they will go out of business, because BlackRock will be able to subsidize its products through Wells Fargo." 

Migrants' Perilous Jungle Trek
From Venezuela
New York Times 

For decades, Panama’s untamed Darién Gap was considered so dangerous only a few thousand dared to cross it each year. Today, this article reports, it is a traffic jam, as hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Ecuadoreans, Peruvians and, above all, Venezuelans, cross through the jungle there on their journey to the United States. To report this article, which includes many compelling photographs, two New York Times journalists crossed the 70-mile Darién route, “interviewing migrants, guides, law enforcement, community leaders and aid workers” along the way. Quote:

The route began at a Colombian beach town, passed through several farms and Indigenous communities, crossed over a grueling mountain called the Hill of Death and then wound along several rivers before arriving at a government camp in Panama. What became clear is that the Darién has grown into a multimillion-dollar migrant business increasingly organized to move a maximum number of people – with guides who have assembled into cooperatives, locals who have marked the route with blue flags and trafficking operations that ply their services openly on Facebook and TikTok. As a result, tens of thousands of people are entering the harrowing jungle knowing the biggest barrier still lies ahead – finding some way into the United States.  

Coronavirus Investigations 

“You are a close contact,” the woman on the phone told the British journalist Thomas Hale in Shanghai. “You can’t go outside.” Soon men in hazmat suits arrived and ordered him into a van to who knows where. All the passengers, Hale writes, shared this in common: “None of us – not me, not the other passengers, not our driver – had tested positive for COVID-19.” They were, instead, collateral damage in China’s “zero COVID” policy which seeks maximal suppression of the virus through isolating even people like Hale, who evidently was in a bar where there had been a positive case. Quote: 

The facility [one of many in China] consisted of neat rows of what might be described as cabins, each one a shipping container-like box, sitting on short stilts above the ground. On the side of some of the rows, a large smiling animal had been painted, like a mural on a temporary school built after a natural disaster. It was hard to tell how many cabins there were in all. Fluorescent outdoor lighting flickered above, and a camera was positioned with a view of every door. Neither was ever turned off. Most of us hovered in our doorways, taking in our new surroundings. “There’s no hot water,” someone shouted. Somewhere a woman wailed, and it occurred to me there were no children here. “She’s got no food,” Resident 1 explained. A hazmat-suited worker arrived to hand out instant noodles. 

Still, Hale writes, it wasn’t a complete hellhole thanks to his discipline and the Internet: “I kept to a strict personal routine: language study, work, lunch, work, press-ups, playlists from the band Future Islands, online chess, reading or watching episodes of  "The Boys"  on Amazon Prime, in that order.”