RealClearInvestigations Original Articles

By Vince Bielski, RealClearInvestigationsApril 22, 2025 GEO Prep Mid-City Academy, located in one of the poorest sections of Louisiana, did something almost unheard of in public education – it went from dying to thriving in just a few years.   Kevin Teasley, GEO Academies: “We don’t chase fads." geoacademies.org The Baton Rouge K-8 school, which is almost entirely filled with disadvantaged black students drawn from a lottery, repeatedly received a failing grade until new leadership took over in 2017. It steadily improved and landed in the top third...

By Paul Sperry, RealClearInvestigationsApril 16, 2025 As a Democratic politician, civil-rights activist, tax attorney and serial entrepreneur, Stacey Abrams has founded or co-founded a dizzying array of nonprofits and LLCs, some of which co-mingle funds.Records show many of her start-ups have no office or staff and are based out of Abrams’ home in Atlanta. A number of them have failed, dissolved or have fallen into debt and had tax liens attached, and some are under state or federal investigation. A list:Fair Fight Inc.Fair Fight ActionFair Fight PACFair Fight GeorgiaFair CountNew...

By her own admission, Stacey Abrams has made a number of "personal financial missteps” in her career. Despite a history marked by bill collectors, tax liens, and ethics investigations, the Georgia politician and Democratic Party activist has managed to amass a small fortune – while working most of her career in the not-for-profit sector.  Flush with government largesse: $1.9 billion from the Biden EPA. Rewiring America Financial records show that when she first entered statewide politics in 2018, she reported a net worth of less than $109,000. By 2022, the...

Last month, President Trump singled out Georgia activist Stacey Abrams as someone who helped orchestrate a controversial $2 billion deal between left-wing nonprofit groups and the Environmental Protection Agency during the Biden administration.  She was involved. powerforwardcommunities.org “We know she’s involved,” Trump told Congress.  He was right. But after his statement, the Washington media went into overdrive to pooh-pooh her role in a frenzy of “fact-checking.”  The Washington Post, for one, claimed Abrams’ role in the Biden...

While limiting strings-attached grants and curbing federal regulation, President Trump’s efforts to dismantle the Department of Education also take aim at a key tool bureaucrats use to oversee schools in all 50 states: civil rights investigations. Selene Almazan, advocate for the disabled:  Trump  administration changes have left clients "in limbo, or distraught, thinking there will be no accountability,” inclusionlaw.com Probes handled by the department’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) against public schools, colleges and universities roughly doubled...

By Nancy Rommelmann, RealClearInvestigationsApril 10, 2025 Joe Ziegler is not a beaten man – not for his antagonists’ lack of trying. Across his seven-year pursuit of Hunter Biden’s unpaid taxes, Ziegler, a special agent in the Internal Revenue Service’s criminal investigative division, and his colleague Gary Shapley were shunned, threatened, and lied to. Ziegler was doxed. Shapley was told to accept a demotion or resign. Convinced the IRS and Department of Justice were stonewalling their efforts to bring charges against a sitting president’s son, the agents went...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - Like the other programs launched at universities around the country to revive the classical liberal arts and America’s founding principles, the University of North Carolina’s School of Civic Life and Leadership has faced fierce antagonism from entrenched faculty and administrators. Mostly, the opposition comes from academics on the left who typically demean the push for traditional civics education as a rightwing enterprise. J. Christopher Clemens: Quit as provost after months of acrimonious infighting. UNC School of Civic Life and Leadership But here...

California’s wide range of problems – including declining schools, widening inequality, rising housing prices, and a weak job market – show the urgent need for reform. The larger question is whether there is the will to change. Although the state’s remarkable entrepreneurial economy has kept it afloat, a growing number of residents are concluding that the progressive agenda, pushed by public unions and their well-heeled allies, is failing. Most Californians have an exceptional lack of faith in the state’s direction. Only 40% of California...

California’s economic, academic, media, and political establishment still embraces the notion of the state’s inevitable supremacy. “The future depends on us,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said at his first inauguration, “and we will seize this moment.” Others see California as deserving and capable of nationhood, a topic that has resurfaced with Trump’s presidency as it reflects, as a New York Times column put it, “the shared values of our increasingly tolerant and pluralistic society.” Critics say this vision is at...

By Lee Fang, RealClearInvestigations and LeeFang.comMarch 31, 2025 The abrupt withdrawal last year of President Joe Biden as the Democratic presidential nominee, followed rapidly by his replacement with Vice President Kamala Harris, irked many voters left out by the process. Yet social media seemed to ooze with enthusiasm and Gen Z-friendly hipster appeal.  Charli XCX: Now that was brat ... instagram.com/charli_xcx  Influencers flooded the web with neon-matcha green pro-Harris videos synced to beats from singer Charli XCX's album “Brat” released last year. The poppy...

By Bob Ivry and Jeremy Portnoy, RealClearInvestigationsMarch 25, 2025 In 1974, Congress created the Legal Services Corporation to connect lower-income Americans involved in civil disputes with free legal help. The law that established the agency stipulated that authorization for its funding would expire in 1980, when lawmakers were required to vote on whether to keep it alive. Unauthorized since 1980. lsc.gov They never did. Still, Congress has funded LSC every year since. In fiscal 2025, its 51st year, LSC’s 135 employees will spend 95% of its now $560 million annual...

Just eight days before the 2024 election, a lawyer claiming to represent an anonymous FBI whistleblower sent a politically explosive letter to Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee alleging former FBI Director James Comey first began investigating Donald Trump shortly after he announced his run for president in June 2015, and did so without foundation. James Comey, former FBI director: Accused of running a “honeypot” sting operation against Trump in 2015. AP Donald Trump: He was the target of one FBI probe in 2016, so a probe the year before has the ring of...

Fresh off its decision to claw back $20 billion in “greenhouse gas reduction” money the Biden Environmental Protection Agency parked at Citibank, the Trump administration is setting its sights on another massive chunk of planned green spending receiving less attention. Environmental Protection Agency The $7 billion Solar for All program – part of the $27 billion Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund -- is meant to “enable over 900,000 households in low-income and disadvantaged communities to benefit from distributed solar energy,” according to the EPA’s...

By Ana Kasparian, RealClearInvestigationsMarch 19, 2025 VENICE, Calif. – Francesca Padilla was awakened by the sound of screaming people and breaking glass. Soon she could hear the tortured howls of her neighbor’s dog Togo as the bungalow right next to her Venice home was engulfed in flames.   Gigi Graciette, TV reporter: Says fire officials have been advised by higher-ups to evade questions about homeless fires from local journalists. gigigraciette.com "It was yelping so loud--the sound isn't the usual dog sound--it was suffering,” another neighbor told...

Can a single judge unilaterally thwart the president of the United States? That’s the contentious question the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to resolve last week in response to court orders blocking its effort to curtail birthright citizenship, and after a slew of decrees requiring the president do everything from halting major actions on DEI and domestic spending to disbursing billions in foreign aid.  The head of the Senate Judiciary Committee makes his feelings known about a new judicial injunction over the weekend. X At issue is a legal remedy,...

When the Biden administration announced $27 billion in environmental grants last April, it set the clock ticking on a predicament: how to get the unprecedented sums for the President's envisioned NetZero future out the door before the fiscal year ended on Sept. 30? Lee Zeldin, Trump EPA Administrator: Sees "a deeply entrenched pattern of political favoritism" in Biden grant awards. AP The task was complicated by the fact most of the money – $20 billion – would go to just eight nonprofits that, like the Environmental Protection Agency itself, had never handled such...

A lobbyist for the College Board delivered a sharp warning to William Slater last month. She was not happy that the Tennessee Republican lawmaker had recently introduced a bill to allow the state’s public universities to accept the Classic Learning Test, an upstart competitor to the College Board’s famed SAT, as an admissions exam. Jeremy Tate, pioneer of the Classic Learning Test: “Absolutely the College Board is trying to undermine the CLT,” he says. Classic Learning Initiatives The lobbyist aimed to kill the bill.  “She let me know that the...

By Paul D. Thacker, RealClearInvestigationsMarch 4, 2025 Jay Bhattacharya was in pretty terrible shape five years ago. He was losing sleep and weight, not because of the COVID-19 virus but in response to the efforts of his colleagues at Stanford University and the larger medical community to shut down his research, which questioned much of the government’s response to the pandemic.  Jay Bhattacharya: Goes before the Senate this week. Hoover Institution Some of his Stanford colleagues leaked false and damaging information to reporters. The university’s head of...

By Bob Ivry and Jeremy Portnoy, RealClearInvestigationsMarch 3, 2025 To crack down on Pentagon spending, the Defense Department adopted a program in 2015 to track spending on lodging and entertainment. But so few officials used the Visa government travel charge card that nearly 4 million card transactions worth $1.2 billion couldn’t be reviewed in enough detail to check for misuse, abuse, and fraud, the Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General said last month.  Beetle Bailey: Goldbricker of the past -- and icon of Pentagon incompetence and...