RealClearInvestigations Picks of the Week

RealClearInvestigations'

Picks of the Week

March 22 to March 28

RCI Podcasts & Videos

On this week’s episode of the RealClearInvestigations Podcast, RCI Editor J. Peder Zane and RCI Senior Reporter James Varney speak with Jacob Siegel about his masterful new book, “The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control,” which details how technology and progressivism have helped give rise to censorship, surveillance and propaganda.

On The Miller Report: Real Clear Journalism, Maggie Miller interviews James Varney about his RCI article (see above) on citizen sleuths uncovering red flags of fraud and abuse in government programs.

Featured Investigation:

Citizen Sleuths Spotlight Red Flags Galore

in Government Spending

James Varney reports for RealClearInvestigations that a growing brigade of citizen journalists – armed with laptops, cellphones, and government data – is uncovering red flags that may signal widespread fraud and waste in federal health-care programs. Their work, exposing spending patterns that government agencies have long failed to address, is gaining traction as the Trump administration has made rooting out fraud a central priority.

• Visiting providers listed in New Orleans as recipients of millions in Medicare and Medicaid payments, RCI found abandoned houses and vacant buildings where functioning health-care businesses were supposed to be operating.
• Independent researcher Walter Curt built an interactive map using a February DOGE data dump of Medicaid provider information, rating businesses by "priority" based on suspicious spending patterns – though he stops short of making specific fraud accusations.
• Analyst Jennica Pounds, known on X as DataRepublican, identified nearly $4 billion in Medicaid claims tied to a single Brooklyn ZIP code of just over 30,000 people – a figure that would amount to $143,000 in care per resident.
• The Department of Health and Human Services accounts for roughly one-third of Washington's entire budget, at $1.2 trillion, making it a vast and difficult-to-monitor target for fraud.
• Experts warn that Congress has created reimbursement rules so lax that Medicare and Medicaid function, in the words of one Cato Institute scholar, as "giant ATMs" – with powerful lobbying interests working to preserve the status quo.
• State officials, particularly in New York, have pushed back against the citizen investigators, calling their analyses politically motivated – but have not disputed the underlying numbers.
• Despite the attention, analysts caution that identifying statistical outliers is not the same as proving fraud, and that bad actors may adapt faster than the bureaucracies tasked with catching them.

Waste of the Day

by Jeremy Portnoy, Open the Books

Feds Bought Golf Carts For $8.4 Million, RCI

NYC’s $3.5 Million Toilets “In Purgatory”, RCI

AZ School Vouchers Used For Hot Tub, RCI

Beverly Hills’ Low-Income Area, RCI

Cybersecurity Programmers' Foreign Ties, RCI

Trump 2.0 and the Beltway

Jack Smith’s Lawfare Against Kash Patel, Federalist

Inside Trump's Daily Video Montage Briefing on Iran War, NBC News

Harder for Blue States to Get Disaster Funding Under Trump, Politico

Mike Pence Versus the Heritage Foundation, CNN

Is Tulsi Gabbard on the Way Out?, Tablet

Other Noteworthy Articles and Series

Israel Thought It Could Spur Rebellion Inside Iran 

New York Times

While the shooting war against Iran seems to be going according to plan for the U.S. and Israel, the hope that the Iranian people would rise up against their rulers has not materialized. This article reports that the head of Israel’s foreign intelligence service, the Mossad, had told Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu his service would likely be able to galvanize the Iranian opposition – igniting riots and other acts of rebellion that could even lead to the collapse of Iran’s government.

Mr. Netanyahu adopted the plan. Despite doubts about its viability among senior American officials and some officials in other Israeli intelligence agencies, both he and President Trump seemed to embrace an optimistic outlook. Killing Iran’s leaders at the outset of the conflict, followed by a series of intelligence operations intended to encourage regime change, they thought, could lead to a mass uprising that might bring about a swift end to the war. “Take over your government: It will be yours to take,” Mr. Trump told Iranians in his initial address at the war’s start, after saying they should first seek shelter from the bombing.

Three weeks into the campaign, this article notes, an Iranian uprising has not yet happened as widespread fear of Iran’s military and police forces has dampened prospects both for nascent rebellion in the country and for ethnic militias outside of Iran to launch cross-border incursions. “A lot of protesters are not coming into the street because they’ll get shot,” said Nate Swanson, a former State Department and White House official who was on the Trump administration’s Iran negotiating team led by Steve Witkoff until July. “They’re going to get slaughtered. That’s one thing. But the second thing is that there’s a good chunk of people who just want a better life, and they’re just sidelined right now. They don’t like the regime, but they don’t want to die opposing it. That 60 percent is going to stay home.”  

In a separate article, the New Yorker reports on Reza Pahlavi, the 65-year-old son of the long-ago deposed Shah of Iran who had been considered “the most obvious figure to lead an overthrow of the Islamic Republic.” This detailed article describes Pahlavi’s maneuverings to restore his family to power and the various forces inside and outside of Iran who are not so keen on the idea. At bottom, Pahlavi lacks a sufficient network inside the country to lead an overthrow of the regime. “They never took him that seriously,” Vali Nasr, a professor at Johns Hopkins, said of the Administration. “There’s a difference between having an organization on the ground versus just having people who like you. If you’re going to help change a regime, you have to have a ground game.” For his part, Trump and his aides now refer to Pahlavi as the “loser prince.”

In a separate article, the Intercept reports on a far less covered aspect of the war – Israel’s campaign in Lebanon against Iran-allied forces of the terror group Hezbollah. “Israel’s wave of attacks on Lebanon are the deadliest conflict in the country since the 1975-1990 civil war. According to the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health, Israeli airstrikes have killed more than 1,000 people, 118 of them children, and displaced 1 million others.”

TSA Tipped Off ICE Before Arrests at SF Airport 

New York Times

In 2019, Angelina Lopez-Jimenez skipped her immigration hearing in which a judge ordered that she be deported back to Guatemala. She did not leave. This article reports that nothing happened in her case until she recently purchased airplane tickets for herself and her 9-year-old daughter to visit relatives in Miami. The T.S.A. discovered she had violated the law and informed ICE, which arrested her at the San Francisco Airport. Cell phone videos of her arrest by other passengers went viral, drawing wide attention to the incident.

Democratic officials recoiled this week at the detention. [Rep. John] Garamendi, a Democrat, said that it was the latest example of how the Trump administration was rounding up mothers and children instead of focusing its immigration enforcement on dangerous criminals. He also condemned the sharing of passenger information by T.S.A. with ICE, saying that data sharing seemed to be “omnipresent” under the Trump administration, putting personal information at risk and bypassing due process. “The real story here is the way in which databases are being used,” he said in an interview. “A mother and her daughter are detained, and within 36 hours, they’re sent to Guatemala.”

Although Democrats say they oppose open borders and support the rule of law, Nancy Tung, who is the chairwoman of the San Francisco Democratic Party, told the Times – while noting she was not speaking in an official capacity – that it was frightening to her that airports were now among the growing list of everyday places where immigrants could be picked up. “These are not the violent criminals that the Trump administration talks about,” Ms. Tung said. “It’s just wrong.”

California School District Allegedly Buried Teacher Sex Abuse 

California Post

This article reports that a Los Angeles-area school district “consistently mishandled” rampant sex abuse complaints involving teachers and coaches – hiding reports that staff were molesting, harassing, and grooming minors from state regulators.

El Monte Union High School District “systemically” broke state laws surrounding child sex abuse claims and botched as many as 113 abuse cases over the course of decades, California Attorney General Rob Bonta said Friday. Sex abuse cases that were swept under the rug included a wrestling coach who repeatedly groped boys during practice sessions and a special education teacher who molested and sent nude photos to an autistic girl, numerous lawsuits have alleged. “In more than 100 cases, we found the district failed to conduct a legally compliant investigation” into sex abuse reports, Bonta said at a press conference. “In five cases, where we did not find evidence that a staff member made the mandated report about sexual abuse of a student by another staff member, that staff member was able to continue to abuse the student and abused and harassed additional students,” he added.

This article echoes James Varney’s 2024 series for RCI, which revealed the extensive sexual abuse scandal occurring at public schools across the country. Given the roughly 50 million students in U.S. K-12 schools each year, the number of students who have been victims of sexual misconduct by school employees is probably in the millions each decade, Varney reported. Such numbers would far exceed the high-profile abuse scandal that rocked the Roman Catholic Church and the Boy Scouts of America. For a variety of reasons, ranging from embarrassment to eagerness to avoid liability, elected or appointed officials, along with unions or lobbying groups representing school employees, have fought to keep the truth hidden from the public.

Feds Turning Blind Eye to White Collar Crime

Bloomberg

The rich have always been able to afford more justice. This article reports that this is not just the ability to afford better lawyers. Since the turn of the century, the government has been increasingly willing to take a fat check to settle cases of alleged white collar crime.

Under President Barack Obama, the Justice Department prosecuted hundreds of individuals in connection with the subprime mortgage and foreclosure crises, but the defendants were mostly bit players. The large financial firms and their senior executives emerged unscathed. Companies paid multibillion-dollar fines that were minuscule compared with their quarterly profits. After he left office, Ben Bernanke, who was Fed chairman at the time of the crisis, conceded that more bankers should have been sent to prison. The DOJ’s widespread use of deferred prosecution agreements and nonprosecution agreements beginning in the early 2000s helps explain why they weren’t. DPAs were originally conceived in the 1930s to spare poor and young defendants the stain of a criminal record. Ironically, they emerged over the last two decades as a primary mechanism to handle major cases of corporate crime as companies, not their executives, became the main defendants. In exchange for avoiding prosecution (or even being charged with a crime, in the case of NPAs), companies strike these agreements, which might require corporate structural reforms, including ethics reform, and the payment of penalties or victim restitution. These agreements include multibillion-dollar cases of money laundering, kickbacks, bribes, mortgage-securities fraud and collusion in fixing interest rates – or what bootlegger Al Capone would have called the “legitimate rackets.”

This article reports that, despite their popularity, DPAs and NPAs don’t always yield justice. “They’re typically finalized based on internal investigations conducted by the corporation itself, usually with the help of outside law firms, rather than by law enforcement or public regulators. And companies and their senior officers are rarely punished for violating the terms of the agreements, which are seldom closely monitored by the Justice Department for compliance.”

The Truth About the Supposed Truck Driver Shortage 

Reason

The American economy depends on truckers and, for decades, businesses and the powerful American Trucking Associations union have complained about a shortage of drivers. The problem is not a lack of people who want to drive trucks, but shockingly low wages that make many of them leave the trade. The article reports that this situation is happening by design: trucking companies have an incentive to keep wages low (more profits for them) because the government provides millions to the industry to train new drivers. Turnover, in short, is good for business.

Scratch beneath the surface of the ad copy for any truck-driver training school or retraining program, and government grants and subsidies become immediately apparent. From funds doled out by the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act to Pell Grants to $47 million in extra funding from the Biden administration, the industry is awash in taxpayer largesse create by government money. … The large fleets that have captured a great deal of the American truckload market are not interested in raising wages or adjusting any of the Big Brother intrusiveness of the job. What they will do, and have done, is complain endlessly about a shortage of drivers and demand that the government do something to produce more of them. Many truckers fancy themselves believers in the free market, yet major players in their own industry have effectively allied with the state in a mass wage-suppression operation.

This article reports on a 2019 study that found, “Of the 7.8 million people employed throughout the economy in jobs related to trucking activity, 3.5 million were truck drivers in 2018. There are over 10 million CDL (Commercial Driver's License) holders in the U.S., but most are not current drivers and not all are truck drivers.”

In a separate article, the Daily Caller reports that the trucking industry is “beleaguered with illegal migrant drivers who can’t speak English, shady companies skirting enforcement regulations and hundreds of trucking schools handing out licenses like candy.