RealClearInvestigations Picks of the Week

RealClearInvestigations'

Picks of the Week

July 20 to July 26

Featured Investigation:

How Obama Admin Turned ‘Unverifiable’ Report

Into Russiagate Dynamite

A newly declassified congressional report reveals that the Obama administration's Intelligence Community Assessment claiming Putin worked to elect Trump was built on fundamentally flawed intelligence and analytical failures by CIA Director John Brennan, Paul Sperry reports for RealClearInvestigations. 

• The ICA's central conclusion that Putin "preferred" Trump was based on "one scant, unclear and unverifiable fragment of a sentence" from a Russian defector who merely speculated that Putin was "counting on" Trump winning—secondhand information with uncertain meaning. 
• CIA Director John Brennan ordered analysts to use this unreliable intelligence despite violations of Intelligence Community analytical standards. A House report questioned Brennan's "character" and "ethics," suggesting he misled policymakers and fellow intelligence officers. 
• The key source was reportedly Oleg Smolenkov, an anti-Trump Russian defector living in Northern Virginia with only "secondhand access" to Kremlin information. NSA Director Mike Rogers dissented, noting the source "did not have direct access" to Putin and lacked corroborating sources. 
• Before Trump's victory, Brennan's Nov. 6 memo to then-President Barack Obama concluded "Putin expected [Clinton] to win." Only after Trump won did Brennan resurrect the shelved, unreliable intelligence to support the new assessment that Putin helped Trump. 
• Brennan insisted on including the discredited Steele dossier, funded by Hillary Clinton's campaign, as supporting evidence. When confronted about the dossier's flaws, Brennan reportedly responded: "Yes, but doesn't it ring true?" 
• Career CIA officers initially removed the defector's tip from the ICA's first draft, but Brennan "countermand[ed]" their decision and reinserted it in the final report. Only a handful of Brennan's handpicked analysts saw the raw intelligence out of 250 Intelligence Community Assessment participants. 
• The same unreliable source was used for claims about Putin ordering DNC material leaked to WikiLeaks and Russian FSB hacking operations—making Smolenkov the foundation for multiple key ICA conclusions despite his questionable access and reliability. 

Featured Investigation:

Russiagate's Architects Suppressed Doubt To Peddle False Claims

Aaron Maté reports for RealClearInvestigations that newly declassified documents reveal Obama administration intelligence leaders concealed significant internal doubts about foundational Russiagate allegations which undermined their public narrative of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

• Despite public claims of "high confidence" in Russian hacking, a September 2016 intelligence assessment showed the FBI and NSA had "low confidence" that Russia was behind the hack and release of Democratic Party emails, lacking "sufficient technical details" to link the material to Russian actors.
• The Obama administration suppressed these dissenting views while publicly promoting confident assertions. President Obama personally approved statements claiming Russian responsibility and ordered a new public intelligence assessment that excluded key agencies and relied on the debunked Steele dossier.
• A senior intelligence official who led the original September assessment was "sidelined" after questioning why a new assessment was being created that contradicted multiple previous assessments. This "whistleblower" was later pressured to accept unsupported findings.
• Intelligence agencies relied heavily on forensic evidence from CrowdStrike, a private cybersecurity firm working directly for the Clinton campaign. CrowdStrike president Shawn Henry later testified in closed-door hearings that his firm "did not have concrete evidence" that Russian hackers had actually exfiltrated data from DNC servers.
• The January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment claimed Putin ordered the operation based on speculative psychological analysis rather than hard evidence. Mid-level classified documents show only "moderate confidence" in key allegations that were later presented as established facts in the Mueller report.
• Intelligence officials went from "low to moderate confidence" in Russian interference allegations to "high confidence" within months, primarily by incorporating the Clinton-funded Steele dossier as "further information" while suppressing internal dissent and evidentiary gaps.

Waste of the Day

by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books

Texas Pay Raises Instead of Flood Warnings, RCI

Trump Staffers' Record-Breaking Salaries, RCI

Nevada’s Mechanics Fail Test, RCI

Throwback Thursday - Tax Breaks for 3 Years, RCI

“Make Art Great Again”, RCI

Trump 2.0 and the Beltway

Top Intel Officials Contradicted Brennan on Russiagate, Federalist

Clinton Email Probe Omitted Crucial Evidence, Daily Signal

Mystery Surrounds Another Brennan Russiagate Doc, Tablet

Dem Russia Hoax Investigator Now Top Lawyer At NSA, Daily Wire

DOJ's Frantic Scouring of the Epstein Files, New York Times

MAGA Bot Network Divided Over Trump-Epstein Kerfuffle, NBC News

Why Does Renovating the Fed Cost $2.5 Billion?, Wall Street Journal

Trump Has Respected the Judicial Branch, City Journal

Howard Lutnick: Trump’s Tariff Dealmaker-in-Chief, New Yorker

Trump’s Campaign to Crush the Media, Atlantic

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

Report Says COVID Was Chinese Bioweapons Project

City Journal

Covid-19 pandemic was probably the result of a military-research-related accident in a Chinese laboratory, according to a new report by Robert Kadlec, a bioweapons expert likely to head the Trump administration’s top Pentagon post for countering weapons of mass destruction. This article reports that China knew even before the outbreak that the SARS-CoV-2 virus appeared to have severe, enduring neurological effects.

Kadlec asserts that there is no evidence that the SARS-CoV-2 virus was deliberately released. But while illicit research aimed at developing bioweapons is extremely difficult to detect and prove, his report cites what he calls “concerning writings by Chinese military strategists indicating an interest in biology’s potential as a weapon,” including bacteria and viruses, even after it joined the treaty banning bioweapons in 1984. The SARS-Covid virus released from the lab in China may well have been part of that offensive bioweapons effort.

Kadlec’s report adds to the growing consensus that the pandemic, which killed 7 million people and sparked untold economic and political havoc, was the result of a leak at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and not a naturally occurring outbreak of a deadly virus originating in animals. The U.S. government and other scientists initially insisted, and some continue to insist, that the Covid-19 pandemic was such a naturally occurring event. 

Skeletal Children Fill Gaza Hospitals 

Guardian

A series in reports in major newspapers is documenting the growing food crisis in Gaza. This article reports that “Gaza has never been hungrier, despite several warnings about impending famine over the course of nearly two years of war. Over just three days this week public health officials recorded 43 deaths from hunger; there had been 68 in total before that."

Israel imposed a total siege on Gaza from 2 March. When the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, lifted it on 19 May he claimed the government was acting to prevent a “starvation crisis” … In fact the Israeli government simply shifted course to draw out the starvation crisis, letting in only minimal quantities of aid so that Gaza’s descent towards famine progressed a bit more slowly. The Israeli government announced plans to channel all aid through a secretive US-backed organisation that runs four militarised distribution points. Hundreds of people have been killed trying to get food handed out at sites Palestinians describe as “death traps,” which have handed out supplies that meet only a fraction of Gaza’s needs.

This article reports that one woman told the Guardian, “My children have become skeletal, skin and bone. Even the slightest effort makes them dizzy. They sit down again, asking for food, and I have nothing to give. I can’t lie and say I’ll bring them something when I know I won’t be able to.”

A New Era of Floods Has Arrived. America Isn’t Prepared. 

Washington Post

From last year’s disaster in Asheville to this month’s catastrophic floods in Central Texas, this article reports, the world has entered a new era of rainfall supercharged by climate change, rendering existing response plans inadequate.

A Washington Post analysis of atmospheric data found a record amount of moisture flowing in the skies over the past year and a half, largely due to rising global temperatures. With so much warm, moist air available as fuel, storms are increasingly able to move water vapor from the oceans to locations hundreds of miles from the coast, triggering flooding for which most inland communities are ill-prepared. … To understand why inland regions are so vulnerable to heavy rainfall, The Post compared the response to Helene in western North Carolina with that of Florida’s Gulf Coast, where the storm hit first. The investigation, based on analysis of cellphone data and interviews with two dozen meteorologists, disaster experts and storm survivors, revealed how scant flood awareness and a lack of effective warnings led to far fewer evacuations in North Carolina’s mountainous western counties.

This article reports that “the fact that many North Carolinians remained in harm’s way was not the fault of any one person or institution. …Instead, it resulted from a cascade of decisions all stemming from the mistaken assumption that hurricanes are mainly a coastal threat – an assumption that fails to account for the increasingly destructive power of torrential rain.”

FBI Spied on Catholic Priest Who Honored Confidentiality

National Review

This article reports that the FBI began investigating and surveilling a Catholic priest in 2023 after he refused to divulge details about a recently arrested parishioner being held in jail who was converting to Catholicism. The FBI’s Richmond Field Office, the same branch responsible for producing an anti-Catholic memo in 2023, tracked the priest’s movements and coordinated with several other FBI offices and a foreign law enforcement agency to gather intelligence on the clergyman and his priestly organization.

[Shortly after his refusal] FBI Richmond employees quickly began examining the priest’s ordination history and affiliation with the Society of Saint Pius X, a traditionalist priestly fraternity that holds an irregular canonical status with the Catholic Church. … Individuals from the FBI’s counterterrorism division were also brought into the loop to help coordinate investigative steps … [Emails show] agents were tracking the priest’s movements and had access to his credit card information during a trip he took to Canada. 

This article reports that the priest is also mentioned in the Richmond field office’s infamous anti-Catholic memo issued in January 2023 which likened traditionalist Catholics to violent extremists and was quickly retracted in February 2023 after widespread backlash. Ever since, the FBI has done damage control and cast the document as an isolated product developed by one office, rather than a reflection of a broader pattern.

FLA: Alligator Alcatraz' Contracts Scrubbed from Database 

Reason

This article reports that state contracts for Florida's controversial "Alligator Alcatraz" detention camp were removed from a public database and replaced with far less detailed documents after media outlets began writing about them last week.

The Florida Division of Emergency Management, which is overseeing the state's new immigrant detention camp in the Everglades, says the contracts contained "proprietary information." However, open government advocates and state Democratic lawmakers say that removing details of the contracts flies in the face of Florida's promises to provide transparency in public spending, especially given the massive expenditures of taxpayer money involved. The most recent reporting on the ballooning costs of the Everglades detention camp puts it at $250 million and growing.

"That's a lot of our money that we deserve to see how it's spent, and it's a high profile project," David Cuillier, director of the Brechner Freedom of Information Project at the University of Florida, says. "There's a lot of public interest, so those are two reasons why this information should be proactively posted online."

Why Are Men and Women Are More Politically Divided

City Journal

In most wealthy nations, women have steadily closed the gap with men in education, income, and professional achievement. Given this, one might expect that their cultural values and outlook on the world would also grow more aligned. That hasn’t happened. Part of the reason, this article asserts, is that men and women are different. And, most provocatively, it reports that these differences become more apparent in rich societies where the sexes have more freedom.

Interestingly, countries with greater sociopolitical equality and gender egalitarianism tend to show the largest sex differences in personality traits. For example, men and women in highly egalitarian countries like Denmark and Sweden differ more from each other than do men and women in more traditional societies such as Vietnam and Botswana. … Take crying: women across cultures cry more than men, but the gap is especially pronounced in rich countries with high levels of sociopolitical equality. The same pattern appears in educational preferences. In developing countries, women are more likely to study engineering and other lucrative fields. In richer countries, where economic security is more assured, women tend to opt for less remunerative majors such as communications or psychology. In relatively rich and free societies, people are better able to express their underlying traits and preferences. In contrast, less affluent and less egalitarian societies tend to impose stricter behavioral expectations, which compress sex differences.

In a separate article, the New York Times reports that so many women have become disillusioned with men that a term has been coined to describe the phenomenon: heterofatalism.