RealClearInvestigations Picks of the Week

RealClearInvestigations'

Picks of the Week

July 13 to July 19

Featured Investigation:

EXCLUSIVE: Secret Meeting Opens Document Floodgates

on Trump/Russia Hoax

Paul Sperry reports for RealClearInvestigations that Trump administration are preparing to declassify long-buried classified documents that allegedly expose government efforts to claim Donald Trump conspired with Russia to steal the 2016 election. The potential release could strengthen criminal conspiracy cases against Obama and Biden administration officials who allegedly weaponized government agencies against Trump.

• Trump officials held an urgent Sunday meeting in a secure facility to discuss "new information on Russiagate" and potential criminal cases against Obama-era appointees who allegedly targeted Trump through government agencies.
• The materials include a secret 200-page congressional audit revealing how the Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) on Russia was allegedly rigged to frame Trump, emails linking the CIA's ICA drafting to the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane investigation, and Special Counsel John Durham's investigative notes and depositions.
• The information could support conspiracy to commit perjury cases against former CIA Director John Brennan and other Obama intelligence officials who allegedly gave false testimony to Congress about using the Clinton-funded dossier in the ICA.
• Documents reportedly show that CIA and FBI officials knew Clinton had approved a plan by Clinton foreign policy adviser Jake Sullivan to "stir up" a Trump-Russia scandal to distract from her email investigation, yet they used the Clinton-funded Steele dossier to obtain wiretaps against Trump's campaign.
• Evidence suggests the Obama administration protected Clinton while targeting Trump. The FBI treated Clinton with "kid gloves" during her email investigation while aggressively pursuing Trump through Crossfire Hurricane, despite knowing the Steele dossier was opposition research.

Waste of the Day

by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books

Indiana Gives Shady Corporate Tax Breaks, RCI

Antiquated Social Security Investments, RCI

L.A. Lifeguards Collect $500K+, RCI

Throwback Thursday - TV Experiment, RCI

“Luxurious” Toilets for Trump’s Golf Course, RCI

Trump 2.0 and the Beltway

Trump Accused of Sending Epstein Bawdy Note, Wall Street Journal

In Epstein Case, Democrat Senator Says: Follow the Money, New York Times

Trump's Epstein Attacks Tearing MAGA Apart, NBC News

Jill Biden Aide Invokes Fifth in Probe of Joe's Health, Associated Press

Memo Suggest D.C. Judges Are Biased Against Trump, Federalist

Biden $10B Electric Mail Truck Plan Flopping, New York Post

The DOJ Attorney-to-Leftwing Activist Pipeline, Daily Signal

The Secret Double Life of Trump’s Would-Be Assassin, CBS

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

IRS Building Vast System to Share Data With ICE 

ProPublica

In April, Ben Weingarten reported for RealClearInvestigations that the Trump administration was enlisting the Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration in its crackdown on illegal immigration. This article reports that those efforts are ramping up.

The Internal Revenue Service is building a computer program that would give deportation officers unprecedented access to confidential tax data. ProPublica has obtained a blueprint of the system, which would create an “on demand” process allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement to obtain the home addresses of people it’s seeking to deport. … In the past, when law enforcement sought IRS data to support its investigations, agencies would give the IRS the full legal name of the target, an address on file and an explanation of why the information was relevant to a criminal inquiry. Such requests rarely involved more than a dozen people at a time, former IRS officials said.

This article reports that the system the IRS is now creating would give ICE automated access to home addresses en masse, limiting the ability of IRS officials to consider the legality of transfers.

In a separate article, the Associated Press reports that ICE “officials will be given access to the personal data of the nation’s 79 million Medicaid enrollees, including home addresses and ethnicities, to track down immigrants who may not be living legally in the United States. … The extraordinary disclosure of millions of such personal health data to deportation officials is the latest escalation in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.”

In a separate article, the Washington Post reports that “the Trump administration has declared that immigrants who arrived in the United States illegally are no longer eligible for a bond hearing as they fight deportation proceedings in court. In a July 8 memo, Todd M. Lyons, acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told officers that such immigrants should be detained ‘for the duration of their removal proceedings,’ which can take months or years. Lawyers say the policy will apply to millions of immigrants who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border over the past few decades.”

Chinese Hackers Hitting Wider Range of U.S. Targets 

Washington Post

China may not be a war with the United States – but it’s actions are certainly hostile. This article reports that Chinese hackers, undeterred by recent indictments alleging widespread cyberespionage against American agencies, journalists and infrastructure targets, are hitting a wider range of targets and battling harder to stay inside once detected.

Hacks from suspected Chinese government actors detected by security firm CrowdStrike more than doubled from 2023 to more than 330 last year and continued to climb as the new administration took over, the company said…. Although the various Chinese hacking campaigns seem to be led by different government agencies and have different goals, all benefit from new techniques and from Beijing’s introduction of a less constrained system for cyber offense, the officials and outside researchers told The Washington Post. Chinese intelligence, military and security agencies previously selected targets and tasked their own employees with breaking in, they said. But the Chinese government decided to take a more aggressive approach by allowing private industry to conduct cyberattacks and hacking campaigns on their own, U.S. officials said.

In a separate article, the Wall Street Journal reports that “China’s military is extending its reach deeper into the Pacific, sending ships and aircraft into new territory in a push that has spurred the U.S. to strengthen defenses and alliances in the region. … In the U.S. view, the greatest menace in China’s wide-ranging military exercises is to Taiwan, the self-ruled island that Beijing claims as its own and has threatened to seize by force. Adm. Samuel J. Paparo, the head of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command, describes Chinese military exercises around Taiwan as rehearsals for an invasion.”

In a separate article, Bloomberg reports that China’s strength is growing in other ways. “The biotechnology industry is experiencing a tectonic shift, driven by Chinese drugmakers who have come a long way from their copycat days to challenge Western dominance on innovation. The number of novel drugs in China – for cancer, weight-loss and more – entering into development ballooned to over 1,250 last year, far surpassing the European Union and nearly catching up to the US’s count of about 1,440, an exclusive Bloomberg News analysis showed.”

Upended by Meth, Some Communities Are Paying Users to Quit 

New York Times

Fentanyl deaths have been dropping, in part because of medications that can reverse overdoses and curb the urge to use opioids. But no such prescriptions exist for methamphetamine, which has been spreading aggressively across the country. This article reports that some communities are now paying addicts to stay clean.

The approach has been around for decades, but most clinics were uneasy about adopting it because of its bluntly transactional nature. Patients typically come in twice a week for a urine drug screen. If they test negative, they are immediately handed a small reward: a modest store voucher, a prize or debit card cash. The longer they abstain from use, the greater the rewards, with a typical cumulative value of nearly $600. The programs, which usually last three to six months, operate on the principle of positive reinforcement, with incentives intended to encourage repetition of desired behavior – somewhat like a parent who permits a child to stay up late as a reward for good grades.

This article reports that the approach, known in addiction treatment as “contingency management,” or CM, produced better outcomes for stimulant addiction than counseling or behavioral therapy. Although it reports that “follow-up studies of patients a year after they successfully completed programs show that about half remained stimulant-free,” it does not say what percentage of people successfully completed the program.

With Rise of Drones and AI, Is U.S. Ready for Next War?

New Yorker

The effective use of cheap and deadly drones in Russia’s war on Ukraine is forcing the American military to rethink its reliance on highly sophisticated, super-expensive weapons, like nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and stealth fighters, which take years to design and cost billions of dollars to produce. This highly detailed article focuses on how the battlefield in Ukraine is changing the Pentagon’s thinking and a 32-year-old former video game designer named Palmer Luckey who is among those building businesses aimed at bringing Silicon Valley’s creativity and efficiency to the American military.

For generations, the U.S. military had fielded fantastically complex systems that ran on software Silicon Valley regarded as substandard and overpriced. Luckey envisioned cheap, mass-produced weapons whose main value lay in their operating system—in their brains, not their brawn. He began working at the juncture of weaponry and artificial intelligence, to devise systems that could accumulate data and then act on it. With machines to do the fighting, humans could be kept far away from the battlefield. The goal, as he has said, was to “turn warfighters into technomancers.” …  [Luckey] wanted to show off his creations, autonomous weapons that he believes will upend many of the American military’s most cherished notions of strategy and defense. He walked over to a model of the Dive-XL, an unmanned submarine that can go a thousand miles without surfacing and is designed to be produced as quickly as an IKEA couch. “I can make one of these in a matter of days,” he said.

So far, this article reports, the company Luckey helped found in 2017, Anduril, has secured several billion dollars’ worth of military contracts, including one for sending drones to Taiwan. Early this year, the company announced that it was taking over a twenty-two-billion-dollar project, formerly run by Microsoft, to develop “augmented reality” headsets for the Army to use in combat. To produce its weapons, Anduril is planning to open a sprawling factory near Columbus, Ohio. “Still, the essential question remains: In the uncertainties of combat, will Luckey’s unmanned systems work? Even admirers of the company evince some skepticism about weapons built around A.I. ‘I would take any claims of success with a grain of salt,’ a former senior Pentagon official told me. ‘The Pentagon needs to do its own testing.’”