RealClearInvestigations Picks of the Week

RealClearInvestigations'

Picks of the Week

February 8 to February 14

Featured Investigation:

Caring for Mom Is an Education in Scams and Fraud

In a deeply personal reported article for RealClearInvestigations, Nancy Rommelmann draws on the six years she has spent caring for her mother who suffers from dementia to expose the epidemic of financial exploitation targeting America's elderly. It is an onslaught of criminality and greed perpetrated not only by professional scammers but trusted professionals and family members that the aged know and rely upon.

• Elder exploitation is surging nationwide. With 67 million Baby Boomers controlling $85 trillion in wealth, the FBI received 836,000 cyber fraud reports in 2024 – a 33% increase – with victims losing an average of $20,000 each.
• When Rommelmann's 84-year-old mother forgot to pay her taxes, her accountant of 30 years exploited the situation by having her sign a $25,000 blank check, then pocketed most of the money meant for bill-paying.
• The most devastating betrayals come from within: 60% of elder abuse cases are perpetrated by family members. A relative forged Rommelmann's mother's signature and, with a lawyer's help, attempted to raid her bank accounts.
• Her mother's loneliness made her vulnerable to scammers. Despite warning signs taped to her walls reading "ALL THE CALLERS ARE LYING TO YOU," she continued falling for cons within days.
• At an average of $25/hour, 24/7 care, comes out to $18,000 a month, or $216,000 a year. Even then, hiring help brings its own risks. Rommelmann encountered caregivers who inflated hours and agencies that were fronts for fraud.
• Neurological testing revealed her mother could only name two presidents and couldn't answer basic memory questions, yet family members screamed the assessment was a lie when it blocked their access to her finances.
• Rommelmann's critical advice: intervene in your parents' finances five years earlier than you think necessary. By the time warning signs appear, substantial damage has often already occurred.

RCI Podcast

In the latest episode of RealClearInvestigations Podcast, RCI Editor J. Peder Zane, and RCI Senior Reporter James Varney speak with Nancy Rommelmann about her article about elder care fraud. In the news round-up, Zane & Varney discuss articles that report on Bill and Hillary Clinton’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, the Trump family’s lucrative bets on crypto and YouTubers who are making a fortune posting arrest videos that humiliate young women. Watch it here.

Waste of the Day

by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books

EPA Missed Obvious Payment Inaccuracies, RCI

Unclear Goal for Digital Inclusion Grants, RCI

HUD Lead Removal Grants Lack Oversight, RCI

Americans Lead Moroccan Pottery Classes, RCI

Secret Settlements get Taxpayer Money, RCI

Trump 2.0 and the Beltway

Trump Dropped Dime on Epstein to Cops in 2006, Miami Herald

Members of Congress Fleeing Job at Historic Rate, NBC News

Jared Kushner at Center of Gabbard Whistleblower Complaint, Wall Street Journal

Maxine Waters New Target in Dem's Intergenerational War, Politico

The Corrupt Pardon at the Center of Trump’s UAE Windfall, National Review

Trump Admin Nepo Babies Love Their Crypto, Wall Street Journal

Trump Sets Off AI Surge in Federal Government, Washington Post

Inside the Iranian Regime's Online 'Bot Army' Against Trump, Washington Free Beacon

Dems Fear Suit Seeking to Ban Illegals from Census, Federalist

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

Trump Admin Nepo Babies Love Their Crypto 

Wall Street Journal

There’s plenty of smoke surrounding the crypto windfalls enjoyed by family members of Donald Trump and Steve Witkoff – Trump’s special envoy – but it’s still hard to find the fire. This article reports that the crypto firm World Liberty Financial, which is headed by Steve’s son Zach Witkoff, has become a cash cow for the families.

The younger Witkoff now tours the globe alongside a phalanx of aides with an American flag pinned to his suit jacket and counts some of crypto’s most powerful figures as friends, including Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, who Trump pardoned in October. He sports a Richard Mille timepiece worth half a million dollars on one day, a $250,000 rose-gold Patek Philippe on another. Eric Trump is the public face of a bitcoin company where he holds a $90 million stake, while his brothers, Don Jr. and 19-year-old Barron join him as co-founders of World Liberty. Brandon Lutnick, the 28-year-old son of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, runs his father’s former Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald, a midtier investment bank that has become a top choice for crypto deals. World Liberty has earned the Trump family at least $1.2 billion in cash in the 16 months since its launch, not counting paper gains of at least $2.25 billion from various crypto holdings. By contrast, it took eight years for President Trump’s real estate, golf and brand empire to throw off that amount of cash between 2010 and 2017, according to Trump Organization financial statements disclosed in a New York lawsuit with the state attorney general. The Witkoffs have earned at least $200 million from World Liberty.

The article provides no evidence of any illegality. But, especially given the sketchy nature of cryptocurrency – a favorite currency for criminals and speculators – the work by the Journal and other news organizations to report on this story feels necessary. Maybe there is fire, or maybe not. But it’s hard to tell if you’re not paying attention.

In a separate article, Bloomberg reports that drug cartels are shifting their money laundering to crypto. It includes many anecdotes of people who give drug dealers crypto for their cash, keeping a percentage of the money for themselves.

Just outside Boston, an agent accepted $140,000 in bundles of 10-dollar bills behind an apartment building and dropped the equivalent minus commission into a Colombian broker’s crypto wallet. An FBI operation in Kentucky took control of a crypto dealer’s dark-web account and flipped one of his mules, who then wore a wire during 80 cash pickups worth more than $15 million. And in a sting that stretched across the eastern half of the US, freelance couriers handed off boxes and bags of cash—almost $2 million in a dozen parking lot meets – to undercovers posing as crypto dealers.

This, law enforcement officials say, is what money laundering looks like today, with participants ranging from low-level gig workers to more ambitious brokers working for Chinese networks and orchestrating cash pickups across several cities. These people trade in a range of cryptocurrencies, as well as more traditional laundering techniques, basing their offerings on the risk of the trade and what the client needs. 

The Kids Sent to ICE’s Texas Detention Center 

ProPublica

The first Trump administration was attacked for separating families as it enforced immigration laws. Now it is being criticized for keeping families together. This article focuses on the detention center in Dilley, Texas, where about 3,500 people – half of them minors with their parents – have been held, usually for less than a month. The reporter asked some of the children to write letters about their experiences.

A 14-year-old Colombian girl, who signed her name Gaby M.M. and who a fellow detainee said had been living in Houston, wrote a letter about how the guards at Dilley “have bad manner of speaking to residents.” She wrote, “The workers treat the residents unhumanly (sic), verbally and I don’t want to imging (sic) how they would act if they where unsupervised.” Nine-year-old Maria Antonia Guerra, from Colombia, drew a portrait of herself and her mother wearing their detainee ID badges. A note on the side said, “I am not happy, please get me out of here.” … They told me they feared what might happen to them if they returned to their home countries and what might happen to them if they remained here. Thirteen-year-old Gustavo Santiago said he didn’t want to go back to Tamaulipas, Mexico. “I have friends, school, and family here in the United States,” he said of his home in San Antonio, Texas. “To this day, I don’t know what we did wrong to be detained.” He ended with a plea, “I feel like I’ll never get out of here. I just ask that you don’t forget about us.”

The article also reports concerns about the education, medical treatment and quality of food provided in the camp. This is not a good situation for children, but this article pulls on the heartstrings instead of suggesting how the government can enforce immigration laws without disrupting family life.

Ghislaine Maxwell's Key Role in the Clinton Global Initiative 

New York Times

Newly disclosed documents should make Bill and Hillary Clinton’s upcoming testimony about their relationship with the late financier and convicted sex criminal even more interesting. This article reports that Epstein’s longtime companion, Ghislaine Maxwell, played a substantial role in supporting the creation of the Clinton Global Initiative, one of President Bill Clinton’s signature post-White House endeavors, new documents released by the Justice Department show.

Maxwell took part in budget discussions related to the first Clinton Global Initiative conference; talked through challenges about it with both Clinton aides and Publicis Groupe, the company that produced the inaugural event; and arranged to wire $1 million to pay Publicis for its work on “the Clinton project” … The source of the money is unclear, including whether Mr. Epstein provided the funds. However, the emails show that he was aware of the payment. “Ask him to tell you why i million now and where will it be going,” Mr. Epstein wrote to Ms. Maxwell a few days after she received the wiring instructions from Publicis.

This article reports that Maxwell’s involvement in the launch of the Clinton Global Initiative took place in 2004, before Mr. Epstein’s 2006 indictment and 2008 guilty plea for solicitation of prostitution with a minor – one could also say Maxwell’s involvement took place while Epstein was committing his crimes. Bill Clinton has said he stopped speaking with Epstein sometime before his 2006 indictment. But the Clintons continued to be friends with Maxwell.

She was already known to have attended Chelsea Clinton’s 2010 wedding along with her then-boyfriend, Ted Waitt, a tech billionaire who was a friend of the Clintons and a prolific Clinton Foundation donor. And she remained in the Clinton orbit even after reports began surfacing accusing her of misconduct related to Mr. Epstein’s abuse of young women. Ms. Maxwell told the Justice Department last year that she last saw Mr. Clinton sometime between 2016 and 2018, when she said they had dinner together in Los Angeles.

In a separate article, the AP reports that after years of investigation and the review of millions of documents, the FBI has found scant evidence for the charge that has fueled the Epstein saga: that he led a sex trafficking ring serving powerful men. “Videos and photos seized from Epstein’s homes in New York, Florida and the Virgin Islands didn’t depict victims being abused or implicate anyone else in his crimes, a prosecutor wrote in one 2025 memo. An examination of Epstein’s financial records, including payments he made to entities linked to influential figures in academia, finance and global diplomacy, found no connection to criminal activity, said another internal memo in 2019.”

Killers Without a Cause: The Rise in Nihilistic Extremism 

Washington Post

Amid a wave of high-profile killings and political violence in the United States, this article reports, investigators have been confounded regularly by the absence of a recognizable agenda. The assailants in several cases – shootings, a bombing, a planned drone attack – resisted familiar labels and categories. They were not Democrat or Republican, or Islamist militant, or antifa or white supremacist.

Recent assailants who have been tagged as nihilists include the following: A 15-year-old shooter in Madison, Wisconsin, who left behind a manifesto titled “War Against Humanity” in which she described the human race as “filth.” A 24-year-old man who plotted a drone attack to blow up the Nashville power grid was seeking to precipitate “the start of the end … for the interconnected or otherwise globalized world.” A self-described “anti-natalist,” 25-year-old Guy Edward Bartkus, blew himself up outside an in vitro fertilization clinic in May, having argued that humans should not be brought into existence without their consent. … In their manifestos, these attackers declared their contempt for humanity and a desire to see the collapse of civilization. Law enforcement officers and federal prosecutors have begun to describe these attacks as a contemporary strain of nihilism, an online revival of the philosophical stance that arose in the 19th century to deny the existence of moral truths and meaning in the universe. … In past decades, people holding solitary grievances against society may have struggled to act on them. But the internet has provided them easily accessible technical expertise and, despite their distaste for society, a sense of community. The IVF clinic bomber queried an AI application for information about the “detonation velocity” he could create with a certain type of chemical. The Nashville plotter seeking to sow chaos by blowing up the city’s power grid allegedly found information on YouTube about how to build a drone to carry explosives. They found places online to share their anger with the like-minded.

“There was a time when terrorist activity was organizational in nature. It was structured: bomb maker, recruiter, foot soldier, leader,” said Michael Jensen, the director of research for the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab at American University. “The advent of the internet chipped away at that pretty quickly.” Jensen added, “What is scary now is we don’t know where the next threat might be coming from.”

America’s Expensive Annoyance Economy Is Growing 

Annie Lowrey, Atlantic

It has never been easier to spend your money. But, this article reports, it has also never been harder to get your money back if you are not satisfied.

We live in a world of “total bureaucracy,” as the anthropologist David Graeber put it. Our grandparents bought goods and services outright, but we purchase subscriptions and rentals and insurance coverage and contracts, handling rebates and intermediaries and applications and enrollment periods. As of 2018, the country had 826,537,000 consumer-arbitration agreements in force, one study found. And that’s an undercount. “Companies have worked really hard to make it easy for you” to spend, Lindsay Owens, the executive director of Groundwork, told me. “Of course, when it comes to trying to get out of a purchase or out of a subscription, the same design choices are flipped and reversed.” She likened digital consumer platforms to Las Vegas casinos. Designers create colorful playgrounds with flashing lights and free drinks and chandeliers and mirrors and water features, where gamblers never know what time it is and never see a path to the exit.

This article reports that the American government doesn’t help the situation. “Washington wraps essential programs in red tape, forcing millions of people who have lost a job, lost their insurance coverage, developed a disability, given birth to a child, gotten divorced, or slid into poverty to pay a tithe in paperwork before accessing aid. The government shuns universal, direct services and opts for subsidies, grants, credits, and loan guarantees. It works through nonprofits and contractors and subgovernments, so people rarely know what is on offer and who is actually providing it.”