RealClearInvestigations Original Articles

By Julie Kelly, RealClearInvestigationsTuesday, October 3, 2023 Attorney General Merrick B. Garland is the public face of the government’s unprecedented effort to identify, arrest, and prosecute those connected to the Jan. 6, 2021 protest at the Capitol. But the person handling the day-to-day management of the one of the largest and most politically freighted efforts in the history of American law enforcement has largely flown under the radar: Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. Nathan Hughes: He's part of the steady stream of Jan. 6 defendants still being...

In RealClearInvestigations, Ben Weingarten presents a timeline of events focusing on federal authorities’ pursuit of alleged Biden family corruption. It's relevant to the House impeachment inquiry getting under way, which has already produced a chronology of the Bidens' alleged influence-peddling. Here RCI sets forth the federal responses to that activity, which the inquiry will also scrutinize. Highlights: The timeline covers major threads, including the development and collapse of Hunter Biden’s plea deal; IRS whistleblower allegations of slow-walking and subversion of the case...

A timeline of events focusing on federal authorities’ pursuit of alleged Biden family corruption. This resource will be updated as warranted. Summary (Click links just below to jump to desired section.) Nov. 2018-June 2020: Hunter Biden Probe Begins; President Trump Impeached While Pursuing Biden-Ukraine Information; Alleged Justice Department Undermining of Probe Begins June 2020-Dec. 2021: Evidence of Influence-Peddling With Nexus to Joe Biden Grows; Alleged Sabotage of Hunter Biden Probe Intensifies Jan. 2022-Jan. 2023: Prosecution Sought and Denied; IRS Whistleblowers Blindsided by...

As worshippers gathered at the Calvary Chapel in 2020, they were being watched from above.   Carson Atherly, Cavalry Chapel cleric: He got a notice of violation "every Sunday." YouTube Satellites were locking in on cell phones owned by members of the nondenominational Protestant church in San Jose, Calif. Their location eventually worked its way to a private company, which then sold the information to the government of Santa Clara County. This data, along with observations from enforcement officers on the ground, was used to levy heavy fines against the church for violating...

Speaker Kevin McCarthy, announcing that the House of Representatives will pursue an impeachment inquiry, suggested that the probe will hinge in part on deceiving the American public about Hunter Biden’s foreign business ventures.    Ryan Toohey, FTI Consulting: Key Beltway shaper of the public narrative for Burisma. LinkedIn “President Biden did lie to the American people about his own knowledge of his family’s foreign business deals,” McCarthy said at a press conference. GOP lawmakers, he added, have “uncovered credible allegations into...

In a raft of glowing reviews, Hunter Biden’s 2019 memoir “Beautiful Things” was celebrated as an “unflinchingly honest” (Entertainment Weekly), “confession and an act of contrition” (Guardian), that was “candid” and “doesn’t hold back details” (New York Times) of his substance abuse and broken relationships.   While describing the book as an “unvarnished confessional,” the Washington Post exalted it as a “harrowing, relentless and a determined exercise in trying to seize his own narrative...

As the Biden administration and governments worldwide make massive commitments to rapidly decarbonize the global economy, the persistent effort to silence climate change skeptics is intensifying – and the critics keep pushing back.  Global Climate Intelligence Group This summer the International Monetary Fund summarily canceled a presentation by John Clauser, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who publicly disavows the existence of a climate “crisis.” The head of the nonprofit with which Clauser is affiliated, the CO2 Coalition, has said he and other members...

Grassroots resistance to the Biden administration’s ambitious push for a “zero-carbon” economy is coalescing in varied new state laws and local ordinances that threaten to bog down solar and wind development in a multi-front legal and regulatory war on a scale not seen before.  Until recently and with few exceptions, squabbles pitted loosely organized local residents against renewable developers, with an average of two major projects a month facing protests and legal action in mostly rural areas, according to a database of renewable rejections compiled by Robert...

By James Varney, RealClearInvestigationsSeptember 12, 2023 The Biden administration is misleading the country about the amount of land that will be required to meet its ambitious renewable energy goals, RealClearInvestigations has found.   National Renewable Energy Laboratory: Critics call its estimates "utter rubbish," among other things. NREL The Department of Energy’s official line – echoed by many environmental activists and academics – is that the vast array of solar panels and wind turbines required to meet Biden’s goal of “100% clean...

The Biden administration is fraying relations with some allies and generating pushback from Congress by spending millions of taxpayer dollars to promote the woke ideology abroad that has stirred controversy at home since President Biden took office.   Sen. J.D. Vance, Republican of Ohio: He's among lawmakers holding up appointments of ambassadors over concerns about exporting “woke” ideology.  AP In a "national security memorandum" shortly after his swearing-in, Biden ordered all federal agencies with dealings abroad not only to protect LGBT rights in...

At her first appearance in the criminal case against Donald Trump for his alleged attempt to overturn the 2020 election, U.S. District Court Judge Tanya S. Chutkan repeatedly warned the former president’s lawyers that politics would not be tolerated in her courtroom.  “The fact that [Trump is] running a political campaign has to yield to the orderly administration of justice,” Chutkan said during the August 11 hearing. “If that means he can’t say exactly what he wants to say about witnesses in this case, that’s how it has to...

The Swiss billionaire Hansjörg Wyss has a profound interest in American politics. Over the years, he has pumped $475 million he has earned manufacturing medical devices into left-wing advocacy groups – $72 million in 2021 alone, according to a new report from the conservative watchdog group, Americans for Public Trust.  Hansjörg Wyss: Since 2016, some $245 million of the Swiss billionaire's spending on American politics has gone to Arabella Advisors, which controls a vast network of progressive nonprofits. Oceana /The Wyss Foundation According to a biography...

By Vince Bielski, RealClearInvestigationsAugust 17, 2023 Conservative Christian education is being born again.   Arcadia Christian Academy, which opened in Arizona on Aug. 8, is one of dozens of Christian micro-schools popping up across the country, offering a hybrid in-class and at-home education to keep costs down and the odds of survival up in an increasingly competitive K-12 sector. What’s more, many long-established Christian schools are growing their enrollment after years of stagnation.  The recent post-pandemic rebound in Christian education, prompted by...

President Biden’s stance toward China hardened this month when he issued an executive order prohibiting American investment in Chinese companies developing advanced technologies that could be used by the military.  Xi and Biden: best of frenemies. AP But a growing chorus of critics, including some Democrats, argue that the administration’s effort to grapple with America's foremost adversary is contradictory, illustrated in the White House’s Beijing-empowering pursuit of ambitious climate change goals.  Reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by...

For the second time in three years, the Washington Post has quietly “updated” one of the most consequential fact checks in the history of American politics – its October 2020 article undercutting reports that Hunter Biden arranged a dinner meeting between one of his foreign business clients and his father, who was then vice president of the United States. The original article by the Washington Post’s chief fact checker, Glenn Kessler, was published the same day as the New York Post’s pre-election scoop revealing that Joe Biden had attended a 2015 dinner with...

By Lee Fang, RealClearInvestigations, leefang.comAugust 3, 2023 Throughout the United States, it takes three times as many hours of training to become a nail technician, a barber, or a plumber as it does to become a police officer.  Finland, Australia, Denmark, and Germany – countries with far less crime and a fraction of American gun violence – spend dramatically more to prepare officers before sending them off into the streets. Finland, for instance, provides police cadets with 5,500 hours of training, nearly 14 times the minimum 408 training hours required by the...

By Paul Sperry, RealClearInvestigationsAugust 1, 2023 The FBI’s efforts to mislead a federal court in order to wiretap an adviser to the Trump campaign were more extensive than previously reported, according to classified documents described to RealClearInvestigations. John Durham, special counsel: The FISA abuse that got away. AP The embattled bureau tried to hide its misconduct by redacting information about its actions under the guise that it involved sensitive intelligence information. RCI has learned that at least some of the redacted material, included in a...

 By Ben Weingarten, RealClearInvestigationsJuly 26, 2023 GOP lawmakers and other conservative critics are working to expose and fight a secretive executive order by President Biden to expand voter participation in elections, which they suspect has become a powerful government-wide complement to private left-wing election financing that could tip the 2024 campaign illegally and unfairly in Democrats’ favor.  Cast as a civil rights measure, the executive order is one whose implementation the Biden administration is reluctant to disclose. Mikhail Nilov Cast as a civil...

This essay and the series it inaugurates, The 1735 Project, is not about the failings of the two dominant political parties. Rather, it will focus on the media’s role in the degradation of U.S. politics and America’s national discourse. This endeavor, which will consist of numerous reported essays, is about the abdication of a responsibility that the press willingly — often courageously — shouldered throughout the 20th century. AP This duty, and the roadmap for fulfilling it, was memorably described at the end of the 19th century by an...