RealClearInvestigations Original Articles

A former inspector general who fast-tracked a “whistleblower” complaint that led to the first impeachment of President Trump in 2019 knew the whistleblower was a registered Democrat and Joe Biden loyalist yet still determined his complaint was "a matter of urgent concern that appeared credible," according to newly declassified documents. The documents also reveal the anonymous whistleblower secretly met with the Democratic staff of former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff prior to submitting his complaint in August 2019. Yet under direct questioning, the...

Underneath the glaciers polar bears patrol along Alaska’s North Slope, the decayed bodies of their ancestors who trod there eons ago have left trillions of cubic feet of natural gas, an energy bonanza for the modern world. That jackpot reservoir has left present-day Alaskans puzzling over how to divide the booty: How much do we need to keep for ourselves, and how much can we export? The answers lie hundreds or even thousands of miles away, among lawmakers in Juneau, in oil and gas company executive suites in New York and Texas, and in capitals of potential buyers spread across the Asian...

The State of Texas has become as synonymous with crippling public school debt as it is with oil wells and tumbleweeds.  Its public schools have $148.3 billion in bond debt – the most of any state by far – that will eventually have to be repaid, along with an additional $88.3 billion in interest. For every dollar of borrowed money public schools use to improve education, they must give 59 cents to outside creditors, including large institutions such as Wells Fargo and State Farm, as well as hedge funds. This costly debt burden, which is lining the pockets of...

RealClearInvestigations (RCI) has announced a new grant program for investigative reporters. At a time when journalistic resources are contracting across the country, RealClear is encouraging reporters to apply for grants of $20,000 to fund deep-dive reporting projects. Grantees’ work will be published on RealClearInvestigations.com, the go-to hub for in-depth, longform reporting from across the web. RCI’s editor, J. Peder Zane, said the challenges journalism is facing now provide a great opportunity for news outlets that remain committed to fair, accurate, and consequential...

NEW ORLEANS, La.—Although they received millions of taxpayer dollars, it can be hard to find the offices of health service providers in the Big Easy.  Consider Faith and Hope of New Orleans, a home health agency that took in $11.6 million from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) between 2018 and 2024. The company’s website, as well as federal and state databases, lists its address at 3720 Gentilly Street.    But RealClearInvestigations only found an empty building at that location last week. Repeated phone calls during...

Carter Page wasn’t the only adviser from Trump’s first campaign wiretapped by the FBI. Walid Phares was electronically monitored for a 12-month period between 2017 and 2018, according to the Washington-based FBI agent who was assigned to investigate him as part of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia collusion probe. As in Page’s case, the bureau withheld evidence exonerating Phares from the court to secure surveillance authorization, according to newly declassified FBI documents. “I had no idea any of this was happening,” Phares told...

Life on Jan. 9, 2020, was interesting for Joshua Helmer. At 31, he was midway through his second year as CEO of the Erie Art Museum in Pennsylvania. He had recently secured the loan of a Chuck Close painting from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and an upcoming sale, including a painting by another famous artist, David Hockney, would help Erie generate funds to buy new works. And then it was Jan. 10. "I knew I'd never work again," Helmer said, recalling his reading of a New York Times article that ran that day.  "He Left a Museum After Women Complained; His Next Job Was Bigger," was...

When an ICE agent shot and killed Minneapolis resident Renee Good after she allegedly obstructed immigration authorities with her vehicle, disobeyed their commands, and attempted to flee – drawing fatal fire from an officer nearly struck by the vehicle – politicians and pundits decried her death as murder. They called it particularly unjust because she was not acting as a protester but a legal observer. After federal agents arrested Don Lemon for allegedly disrupting a St. Paul church service in protest of the same Twin Cities immigration enforcement surge Good had opposed....

Half a century after the book “Why Johnny Can’t Read” sounded an alarm about the rise of illiteracy in the U.S., it has only gotten worse: A quarter of all young adults, many of them high school graduates, are now functionally illiterate. Unable to read more than basic, short sentences, their prospects in today’s information economy are bleak.  Half a century ago, this book raised the alarm about illiteracy in the U.S. Amazon This crisis gave rise to a movement that embraced the science of reading and produced a surprising success story in the Deep South,...

A few weeks before Christmas in 2022, Amber Lavigne was cleaning her 13-year-old’s bedroom when she stumbled upon her daughter’s secret: a chest binder. She learned that Autumn had been wearing the garment, which girls use to flatten their breasts to achieve a masculine appearance, for about two months at school in Maine, where she had adopted a boy’s name, Leo, and was using he/him pronouns.  It was the first of two chest binders Lavigne found that had been provided to her eighth-grade daughter by a social worker at the Great Salt Bay Community School, according to a...

California’s $200 billion-a-year Medicaid program, known as Medi-Cal, is one of the largest public healthcare systems in the nation. Behind the staggering price tag lies a program repeatedly flagged for waste, mismanagement, and fraud, raising fresh doubts as state leaders propose taxing billionaires to keep it afloat. For years, audits and federal investigations have documented everything from improper payments to large-scale fraud schemes. State officials have acknowledged that fraud has reached alarming levels in some sectors, including hospice services and in-home...

The future was supposed to have arrived this year in a cluster of counties just east of Atlanta in the form of a state-of-the-art factory that would churn out 400,000 electric vehicles a year. But when JoEllen Artz looks about her lifetime neighborhood, all she sees are holes. “Those shovel holes they made in the ground? That’s it,” she said of the planned site of a Rivian manufacturing plant. “It’s awful, awful.” The problem is not a lack of funds. On the promise of thousands of jobs, elected officials in Washington, D.C., and Atlanta have pledged some $8...

The push to “protect” children from cell phones and social media is gaining momentum worldwide. As EU and Asian countries consider legal limits on minors’ access to social media, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was grilled in a Los Angeles courtroom last week about whether his company’s popular apps, which include Facebook and Instagram, are addictive. That question already seems to have been resolved in the public mind. Pennsylvania now seems poised to become the 32nd state to ban or limit cell phones in its public schools. A parent leader who...

As ICE sweeps in Minneapolis have drawn wide attention, a little-noticed immigration case playing out in a New York federal court has significant implications for America’s relationship with Britain and the ongoing debate over global censorship.   In late December, the State Department announced its intention to revoke the visas of five foreign individuals who have allegedly censored Americans. The most consequential member of this group is Imran Ahmed, a British Labour Party political operative now living in the U.S., who is the CEO of an influential nonprofit,...

The decline of religion remains a fundamental reality in most Western countries, particularly in Europe, where over 50% of those under age 40 do not identify with any faith. Even in more religious America, some estimate that as many as 100,000 churches will close in the near future. Meanwhile, the ranks of “Nones,” those outside religious communities, have grown so large that their numbers rival those of Catholics and evangelical Protestants. Yet, as we document in a new report for the Chapman Center for Demographics and Policy, there are signs...

It was summer 2021, and my mother’s desk was a mess, including a torn envelope from the IRS shoved in the back of a drawer. “Mom?” I asked. “Did you pay your taxes?” My mother, increasingly forgetful at 84, said she wasn’t sure. She told me to call her accountant of 30 years, who said the taxes hadn’t been paid but that he would take care of it. That’s not all he took care of.  Within the year, a family member had my mother sign a blank check, which the accountant (or someone in his office) filled out for $25,000 to supposedly take over...

In December, bestselling author and humorist David Sedaris wrote a New Yorker magazine essay about a recent trip to Portland, Oregon. While on a walk to a donut shop, he “lost count of the strung-out addicts I passed on my way” before eventually encountering four homeless people huddled around an empty baby carriage and smoking drugs right on the sidewalk. Moments later, a dog belonging to one of the addicts rushed out and bit him.  Following the incident, Sedaris, a former methamphetamine addict himself, was struck by the fact that most people in Portland didn’t...

The Republican leader of Pennsylvania's state Senate saluted his allies in labor earlier this month after their successful, years-long effort to defeat what they saw as a job-killing climate initiative. "Thanks to this repeal, the members of this union won't have to pack suitcases to go to a job," Sen. Joe Pittman declared while introducing business agent Shawn Steffee of Boilermakers Local 154 in Pittsburgh. "They'll pack lunchboxes." In the years since state leaders had committed Pennsylvania to joining the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), membership in the union had dropped by...

Looking to reorient U.S. energy policy toward fossil fuels and nuclear plants, President Trump has access to an enormous sum of money made available by an unlikely source: the Biden administration and congressional Democrats. Legislation passed on party-line votes, most notably the $1 trillion Inflation Reduction Act, allocated hundreds of billions to the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency to fund various green energy projects. While some of that money has since been zeroed out by Republicans, more than $280 billion remains – allocated but unspent. Greg...