RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week

RealClearInvestigations' Picks of the Week
December 3 to December 9, 2023

Featured Investigation:
Here's the 'Jan. 6 Jurisprudence'
About to Be Unleashed on Trump

In RealClearInvestigations, Julie Kelly examines the “January 6 Jurisprudence” that awaits Donald Trump in his election interference trial set for March in the nation’s capital. It’s the same carve-out legal system used against more than 1,200 defendants arrested so far in connection with the 2021 Capitol siege. Kelly reports:

• Judges have denied every change of venue motion, meaning Trump likely will join all other defendants in facing trial in Washington, D.C., an overwhelmingly Democratic city.

• Not one defendant has been acquitted, while at least 130 have been convicted at trial -- a track record that helps explain why most have opted for plea deals.

• Jury selection has repeatedly revealed a strong degree of bias against anyone tied to Jan. 6. 

• One anti-Trump juror described how she desperately tried to get selected as a juror and, once chosen, worked in tandem with a juror who had worked as a lawyer for the Department of Justice, the same agency prosecuting the defendants. “How that was allowed, I’ll never know,” the juror said. 

• The same juror dismissed the defendants as basically hayseeds: “These were people from, living, on farms in rural places, most of them had no concept of Washington, D.C.” 

• Jurors "hated us with a passion," a Proud Boy convict told RCI from his jail cell. "They wanted to see us die.”

• Several times, Judge Tanya Chutkan reassured skeptical defense lawyers that jurors would set aside their bias. But the jury returned unanimous guilty verdicts on all counts in less than four hours.

• This alternative legal system also involves indefinite periods of pretrial incarceration and excessive prison sentences.

Featured Investigation
Now Protecting the Homeland:
Wokespeak Grants to Arts Groups

In RealClearInvestigations, James Varney reports that the Department of Homeland Security, whose mission includes border security, is awarding counterterrorism grants to arts cooperatives and educational initiatives that strike some as odd for a department charged with protecting the United States.

• The grantees include a group devoted to “a musical celebration of black history to advance racial solidarity, equity and belonging.” Another is "utilizing theater arts” as “a tool to teach and practice conflict resolution in the classroom.”

• The grants are part of DHS’s “Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention” (TVTP) program. 

• Its budget has doubled in a reflection of the Biden administration’s wider “whole of government” effort to promote “diversity, equity and inclusion” and quash what it considers misinformation.

• During the Trump administration, the leftist Brennan Center for Justice faulted TVTP programs as “anti-Muslim and xenophobic" and “based on junk science … ineffective, discriminatory and divisive.”

• Now the Biden DHS is four square behind TVTP, using keywords to list favored characteristics of approved grants. These include “raising societal awareness” and “media literacy.”

• Some conservative critics see in “media literacy” efforts the government using taxpayer money to get around free-speech protections by paying third-party surrogates to censor views it doesn’t approve – as during the COVID pandemic. 

• A Rhode Island media literacy program says: “Doing your own research is fine, but it’s no substitute for the meticulous work of experts." 

Biden, Trump and the Beltway:
The New Hunter Biden Indictment

Other Biden, Trump and the Beltway

The Biden Campaign-Finance Probe That Wasn’t, National Review
Hunter Paid Joe Monthly Via His China Stash, Comer Finds, Daily Caller
Surge in Threats Against U.S. Public Officials, CNN
Tech Giants Funding Key Congress Staffers in AI Debate, Politico
Special Counsel Alleges Trump 'Sent' Jan. Sixers, Washington Post

Waste of the Day
by Adam Andrzejewski, Open the Books

7 Years and $14M of Embezzlement, RCI
49 Don't Report to USASpending.gov, RCI
EPA's Data Security Is Polluted, RCI
When Wisc. Went Loopy for Light Show, RCI
Dirty Zoos Vie for Mich. Broadband Funds, RCI

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

Documents:
Microsoft's Propaganda Deal With China
Washington Free Beacon

Microsoft helped Chinese state-run media outlets disseminate propaganda as part of previously unreported partnership agreements, documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show:

The nation’s second largest corporation signed collaboration deals with state-run Chinese media outlets including China Daily and People’s Daily, the latter of which is the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Chinese government. Summaries of the deal state Microsoft would provide China Daily with technology that lets the paper target potential readers and gave the People’s Daily access to an artificial intelligence bot specially designed to be controlled and censored by the Chinese Communist Party. … [China Daily] has taken positions critical of the U.S.-Israel relationship and called Russian president Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine a result of Washington’s "animosity towards Russia." Since the 1990s, Microsoft has entered into dozens of partnerships or cooperative agreements with various Chinese government entities, records show. The firm opened Microsoft Research Asia in Beijing in 1998, its largest research lab outside of the United States.

This article reports that Microsoft has roughly 9,000 employees in China and says it wants to surpass 10,000 employees by the end of the year. An executive wrote on the Chinese app WeChat last year that Microsoft hopes to "deepen the fertile ground for scientific research … [and] help to cultivate digital talents and join hands with Chinese innovation to go global."

In a separate article, Politico reports that top tech companies with major stakes in artificial intelligence are channeling money through a venerable science nonprofit to help fund fellows working on AI policy in key Senate offices, “adding to the roster of government staffers across Washington whose salaries are being paid by tech billionaires and others with direct interests in AI regulation”:

The new “rapid response cohort” of congressional AI fellows is run by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a Washington-based nonprofit, with substantial support from Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, IBM and Nvidia, according to the AAAS. It comes on top of the network of AI fellows funded by Open Philanthropy, a group financed by billionaire Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz.

The University of Washington Guide
to Blackballing Whites
City Journal

A recent internal investigation into faculty hiring at the University of Washington reveals an exhaustive effort to discriminate against white job applicants, including the creation of a how-to handbook, “Promising Practices for Increasing Equity in Faculty Searches.” This article reports that the handbook, obtained by the National Association of Scholars, spells out how to exclude candidates of undesirable races and ensure that candidates of preferred races get hired.

The handbook recommends drafting job descriptions that match the resumes of specific minority candidates. That way, the applications will perfectly suit the job posting. It directs institutions to “[v]isualize your ideal candidates and work backwards from there to word your advertisement. If you could pick anyone, with an eye towards URM scholars, which current scholars in your field would be the best fit for this job? How do they describe their work and goals? Consider using similar language.”

A hiring committee should also refrain from evaluating candidate competence. Committees should “[d]econstruct how evaluating candidates” on their productivity, verbal communication skills, or leadership “may advantage privileged groups over underrepresented groups.”

The handbook offers another clue as to how the department had so much success in hiring minority candidates: if a URM [underrepresented minority] candidate was rejected, the department simply reversed the rejection. Any “dropped URM candidates were automatically given a second look before moving on.” … If, somehow, a committee still managed to hire white people or the wrong minorities, the manual suggests developing an audit process to identify criteria where “white candidates, male candidates . . . receive higher scores,” so that those criteria can be removed.

In a separate article, City Journal reports on efforts to eliminate the use of standardized tests and other merit-based tools for determining admission to elite public high schools including Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Stuyvesant High School, Bronx High School of Science, and Brooklyn Technical High School in New York City: 

Across the United States, school districts and left-wing politicians, frustrated by the low number of black and Latino students attending selective public high schools, have adopted new admissions policies aimed at racially balancing the schools’ student bodies. As with the now-banned racial preferences in college admissions, these efforts reduce the number of Asian Americans at such schools—and they will likely be the next battlefield in the war over preferences.

In a separate article, the Washington Free Beacon reports on a new study that “just 4 percent of America's universities condemned Hamas's October 7 terror attack on Israel as an anti-Semitic crime, and only 2 percent committed to addressing persistent Jew-hatred on campus.”

Justice Dept. Reveals Scant Data
on Agent Shootings
NBC News

For nearly 30 years, this article reports, Congress and a string of presidents have been pushing federal law enforcement agencies that issue firearms, including the FBI, the ATF, the DEA and the U.S. Marshals Service, to become more transparent. But those four agencies overseen by the Justice Department have been slow to adopt reforms long embraced by big-city police departments, such as the use of body cameras and the release of comprehensive use-of-force data:

To understand how often federal officers and their task forces use deadly force, NBC News built a database of shootings that involved officers working for or with the ATF, the DEA, the FBI and the Marshals Service by reviewing five years’ worth of public documents, news releases, lawsuits and news reports. From 2018 to 2022, 223 people were shot by an on-duty federal officer, a member of a federal task force or a local officer participating in an operation with federal agents, according to an NBC News analysis. A total of 151 were killed, an average of 30 per year. Examinations of the incidents revealed that the Justice Department’s law enforcement agencies continue to use tactics that many big-city police departments now shun. They have fired at moving cars and shot people within seconds of encounters – without taking steps to de-escalate the situations.

Ozempic Maker Rains Money
on Obesity Doctors
Reuters

Dr. Lee Kaplan is a leading U.S. obesity specialist. He is also a highly paid messenger for Novo Nordisk, maker of the obesity drugs Wegovy and Saxenda. Novo has spent $1.4 million on Kaplan for consulting work and travel between 2013 and 2022, according to a Reuters analysis of federal data:

Those payments are part of a campaign to convince U.S. doctors to make Wegovy one of the most widely prescribed drugs in history – and to persuade skeptical insurers to pay for it. Novo spent at least $25.8 million over the past decade on U.S. medical professionals to promote its two obesity drugs, Wegovy and Saxenda, the analysis found. … Overall, at least 57 U.S. physicians each accepted at least $100,000 from Novo in payments associated with Wegovy or Saxenda over the period. They were an influential group: Forty-one were obesity specialists who run weight-management clinics, work at academic hospitals, write obesity-treatment guidelines or hold top positions at medical societies, according to a Reuters review of their credentials and publications.