RealClearInvestigations Picks of the Week

RealClearInvestigations'

Picks of the Week

January 18 to January 24

Featured Investigation:

Paul Sperry reports for RealClearInvestigations recently declassified documents reveal former President Barack Obama's central role in protecting Hillary Clinton while advancing investigations against Donald Trump during and after the 2016 election, raising questions now being examined by federal prosecutors.

• FBI Director James Comey obtained eight thumb drives containing Clinton's compromised State Department emails – including some from President Obama – but never examined them before exonerating Clinton on July 5, 2016.
• Hours after Comey cleared Clinton, Obama invited her aboard Air Force One for campaign rallies. Secret Service sources say the weeks of advance planning required meant Obama knew Clinton would be cleared well beforehand.
• Comey had been drafting his exoneration statement for months while circulating it at FBI headquarters, despite not interviewing Clinton until July 2. The FBI later admitted the thumb drives were necessary for a complete investigation.
• DNC communications show Attorney General Loretta Lynch secretly assured the Clinton campaign the FBI would go easy, while Obama pressured Comey through Lynch to end the email scandal as early as January 2016.
• On July 20, 2016, FBI headquarters shut down the Clinton Foundation investigation citing political sensitivities, barring agents from issuing subpoenas or conducting interviews.
• On the same day Comey cleared Clinton – July 5, 2016 – the FBI received the first Clinton-funded Steele dossier reports falsely alleging Trump-Russia collusion. Obama was later warned by the CIA that Clinton's campaign planned to create this scandal.
• Text messages reveal FBI agent Peter Strzok learned "the White House is running this" after attending an August 2016 meeting about the Trump investigation. Another message indicated Obama "wants to know everything we're doing."
• After Trump's election victory, Obama ordered intelligence agencies to revisit assessments and conclude Putin helped Trump win, relying partly on the discredited Steele dossier. Intelligence contradicting this conclusion was omitted.
• Federal grand juries are now examining alleged coordination between the Clinton campaign and Obama administration. Former CIA Director John Brennan and intelligence chief James Clapper have been designated investigation targets.

Waste of the Day

by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books

Students Lose in North Carolina’s Lottery, RCI

Texas Southern Univ. Spending, Inventory In Shambles, RCI

Somali Business Overbilled Maine Medicaid, RCI

Throwback Thursday - Rats Ate Afghani Aid, RCI

Anthem Overspent Health Insurance Funds , RCI

Trump 2.0 and the Beltway

ICE Memo Says Officers Can Enter Homes Without Warrants, AP

Inside Kash Patel’s F.B.I.: Meltdowns & Vendettas, New York Times

Why Democrats Abandoned the Clintons over Jeffrey Epstein, Wall Street Journal

Cops Probe Women Who Allegedly Doxed Stephen Miller, Washington Post

CA.: Rep. Eric Swalwell Accused of Lying about Residence, Daily Mail

Harris Campaign Asked Gov. Shapiro If He Was Israeli Agent, Washington Free Beacon

$1B Gets Seat on Trump's Gaza 'Board of Peace', AP

MAGA Is Discovering the Downsides of X, Politico

Are Jews Still Welcome in American Politics?, Tablet

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

Resistance 2.0 Pivots from Protest to Disruption 

Axios

This article reports that the mass movements against the Trump administration are poised to become more disruptive and potentially more violent during his second year in office.

Last year, protest turnout peaked at 7 million people during the second No Kings rally in October. Future protests could see 12 million participants, or about 3.5% of the U.S. population, per the Center for American Progress. Preliminary survey data shared exclusively with Axios by [Dana] Fisher [a professor at American University's School of International Service] shows an increase in protesters who are open to political violence. As of Jan. 16, 34% of those polled agreed that Americans "may have to resort to violence in order to save our country." That's up 11 percentage points from protesters surveyed at the October No Kings protest, and slightly down from a peak of 40% at the June No Kings protest. … “And they're starting to think through what types of tactics are ones that people are comfortable with and would be willing and open to participating in to expand the toolbox," [Fisher said].

In a separate article, the New Yorker reports on New Jersey Democrat Rep. LaMonica McIver who faces up to 17 years in prison after being charged by federal prosecutors with three felony counts of assaulting federal agents during a confrontation at an immigration detention facility in her state. This article reports that “the prosecution of McIver was the first in a pattern of escalating attacks by the Trump Administration against Democratic officeholders [and their staff],” including California Senator Alex Padilla and now former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander. “In October, six people, including a Democratic candidate for a House seat in Illinois, were indicted for “hindering and impeding” ICE officers during a protest outside Chicago. At the start of December, ICE agents fired pepper spray at Adelita Grijalva, a newly sworn-in Democratic congresswoman, who was protesting an immigration raid in Tucson.”

23 Ways We're Already Living

in the Chinese Century 

Wired

This special issue of Wired offers a series of articles about how China, despite obvious problems, is making good on its aim of becoming a global leader in technology and health. It reports, for example, that “a staggering 200-plus Chinese companies are trying to build humanoid robots. In the US, it’s closer to 16.” It documents how China has taken the lead in producing electric vehicles and battery technology – “in 2024, more than 80 percent of the world’s battery cells were produced in China” – as well as in solar energy, textiles and even online videos. While moral reservations hold back such research in the West, China is also taking the lead in cloning and gene-edited babies. The communist regime also has some 700 million surveillance cameras – more than the rest of the world combined – trained on its people.

In a separate article, Breitbart reports that untold numbers of Chinese who grew up in China but have U.S. citizenship will soon have the right to vote in American elections. “In his explosive new book, [Peter] Schweizer details how Chinese elites have exploited America’s birthright citizenship policies by engaging in a practice known as birth tourism, whereby Chinese mothers intentionally travel to the United States and give birth on American soil so that their newborn children will automatically be granted U.S. citizenship.

Chinese officials estimate that the number is a staggering fifty thousand of their own citizens per year. Scholars who have studied the subject in depth, like Australian-based professor Salvator Babones, put the figure even higher, perhaps twice that. “With up to 100,000 Chinese babies being born US citizens every year,” he writes, “birth tourism may result in millions of new elite Chinese-Americans.”

Exclusive: Venezuela’s New Prez Wanted Maduro Gone 

Guardian

After a U.S. raid captured Venezuelan dictator Nicholas Maduro, many people wondered why his henchmen were not also taken. This article reports it may be because some of his closest comrades had betrayed him.

Before the US military snatched Venezuela’s president, Nicholas Maduro, earlier this month, [Vice President] Delcy Rodriguez and her powerful brother pledged to cooperate with the Trump administration once the strongman was gone, four sources involved at high levels with the discussions told the Guardian. Rodríguez, who was sworn in on 5 January as acting president to replace Maduro, and her brother Jorge, the head of the national assembly, secretly assured US and Qatari officials through intermediaries ahead of time that they would welcome Maduro’s departure, according to the sources.

This article reports that communication between U.S. officials and Rodriguez began in the fall. By December, one American who was involved told the Guardian that Delcy Rodríguez told the US government she was ready: “Delcy was communicating ‘Maduro needs to go.’ “She said, ‘I’ll work with whatever is the aftermath,’ ” another person familiar with the messages said.

Job Applicants Sue to Open ‘Black Box’ of A.I. Hiring Decisions 

New York Times

The faceless person who decided you’re not right for the job is increasingly being replaced by a faceless machine as more companies are using artificial intelligence to screen resumes. The process, this article reports, is similar, in some ways, to how credit agencies rank consumers by assigning them a numeric score based on their finances and borrowing history. But some people are fighting back.

A lawsuit filed by a group of job applicants claims that some A.I. employment screening tools should be subject to the same Fair Credit Reporting Act requirements as credit agencies. The lawsuit’s goal is to compel A.I. companies to disclose more information about what data they are gathering on applicants and how they are being ranked. … Job seekers say the screening tool can become an algorithmic gatekeeper, blocking candidates from advancing to a human hiring manager and giving them no feedback on their scores or how the rating was generated. If the tool is making mistakes, candidates have no way to correct them.

This article reports that a Philadelphia lawyer who works with employers on A.I. issues and is not involved in the lawsuit, said companies could make a valid argument that these tools are different than how credit scoring works. The hiring software, he said, can be viewed as simply ranking candidates in the same way a human recruiter might sort applicants into tiers of desirable and less desirable candidates. “These tools are designed to be biased. I mean, they’re designed to find a certain type of person,” he said. “So they are designed be biased but they’re not designed to improperly be biased. And that’s a very fine line.”

Despite Trump’s Success, Immigration Isn’t ‘Solved’ 

RealClearPolitics

While the news suggests that the Trump administration’s immigration efforts have been focused on deportation, this reported opinion piece argues that the key to its efforts has been securing the border. Using the percentage of foreign-born residents, which closely tracks with changes in the overall illegal-alien population, as the key stat, Jeffery H. Anderson reports: 

The (over-16) foreign-born population in the U.S. rose by 2,181 people per day under Obama and by 1,168 per day during Trump’s first four years in office. It then rose by 5,035 per day under Biden – more than twice the rate under Obama and more than quadruple the rate during Trump’s first term. Since the start of Trump’s second term, however, it has fallen by 4,602 per day – falling almost as quickly as it rose under Biden. … ICE appears to be removing about 30,000 to 35,000 aliens per month from the interior of the country during the second Trump administration (some of whom are under age 16), out of a decline in the (over-16) foreign-born population of about 135,000 per month.

Anderson then concludes that at most 25% of the drop in the foreign-born population since January has resulted from ICE deportations from the interior of the country. At least 75% of the reduction in the foreign-born population has resulted from securing the border – that is, from far fewer people entering illegally, paired with people leaving voluntarily.