RealClearInvestigations Original Articles

By James Varney, RealClearInvestigations Part 1: Forbidden Fruit and the Classroom 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 reports. Such numbers would far exceed the high-profile abuse scandals 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...

Third in a seriesPart 1: Forbidden Fruit and the ClassroomPart 2: You the Taxpayer Are on the HookRelated: A Sex-Abuse Suspect Ensnared by His Alleged Victim By James Varney, RealClearInvestigationsAugust 28, 2024 To outward appearances, Michael Allen was a revered high school coach in the tiny community of Little Axe, Oklahoma -- a caring, charismatic leader who mentored star athletes on his girls' softball and boys' baseball teams. Ashley Rolen: “I watched them pass the trash right in front of me." Reclaim Oklahoma Parent Empowerment All of that changed when Allen and fellow...

Main Story:Sad Lesson of School Sex-Abuse 101: It's Pass the Trash By James Varney, RealClearInvestigationsAugust 28, 2024 Brent and Donna McGee were the “First Couple” of Wetumka, Oklahoma. He was athletic director and football coach at the high school who had once served as mayor; she was superintendent of the school system.  And as if all those levers of local power weren’t enough, they also owned the Dairy Queen, the prime hangout in this small rural town and a key source of high school jobs. Casey Yochum today, on the sports mentor he now condemns: "He was always...

By Vince Bielski, RealClearInvestigationsAugust 22, 2024 Jon Graft is on a mission to reignite the passion for learning by pushing a long-denigrated  classroom practice: vocational education. Jon Graft, superintendent: “We are changing the mindset of our communities.”  Butler Tech The superintendent of the Butler Tech District of high schools in Ohio is a leader in the growing movement to revive public education, marred by low test scores and high absenteeism, through a hands-on approach to learning that prepares students for careers in today’s...

More than a dozen jurisdictions run by Democrats – including Washington D.C., and several adjacent Maryland municipalities – allow noncitizens to vote in some local elections. San Francisco not only permits noncitizens to vote but appointed one to serve on its Elections Commission. Such developments, against a backdrop of millions of illegal migrants streaming into the United States under the Biden-Harris administration, bring new urgency to debates over election integrity. Many Republicans fear that a widespread effort is afoot to give noncitizens the full benefits...

By Paul Sperry, RealClearInvestigationsAugust 13, 2024 For the next five months, Dr. Kevin C. O’Connor will be one of the most powerful people in the world. The White House physician is the chief medical arbiter of Joe Biden’s fitness to continue as commander in chief in a war-torn world until the end of his term in January. Even as the public has long expressed concern about the 81-year-old president’s mental capacities and Democratic Party leaders pressured Biden to drop his bid for a second term, O’Connor has repeatedly given his boss a clean bill of health. As...

Second in a SeriesPart 1: Forbidden Fruit and the Classroom By James Varney, RealClearInvestigationsAugust 6, 2024 The teenage female athletes at California’s Pomona High School said they felt special when a handful of coaches there took them under their wing, spending more time with them than others, providing extra encouragement, sharing personal stories and, sometimes, seemingly harmless flirtatious talk. One track team member was amazed at a Nevada meet when she saw the coaches drinking, smoking marijuana, and sharing the party scene with teammates. But that attention turned to...

By Julie Kelly, RealClearInvestigationsJuly 30, 2024 After the evasive House testimony of now-former Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle and FBI Director Christopher Wray’s shortlived suggestion that Donald Trump may not have been hit by a bullet, one man alone may help allay Republican fears that the Biden administration will not conduct a forthright investigation into the attempted assassination of Trump last month: Joseph Cuffari. The Trump-appointed inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security has already opened two investigations into the U.S. Secret Service,...

Paul Fishbein’s conviction on rent fraud charges in New York City last year was a feast for the tabloids.  The story was crazy enough to get readers to click. Prosecutors said that Fishbein, 51, somehow convinced local housing agencies that he owned dilapidated apartment buildings that he didn’t, enabling him to move in tenants and skim government rent subsidies meant for lower-income, disabled, and elderly residents. Fishbein kept the con going for more than years. His take: $1.8 million.  It can help you find housing but it doesn't help auditors...

By Vince Bielski, RealClearInvestigationsJuly 17, 2024 Next month, the Huntsville School District in Arkansas will join the wave of public schools switching to a four-day week.  The shorter school week, which first emerged in a few rural areas decades ago, is now expanding into suburbs and smaller cities. At least 2,100 schools in half the states have embraced the three-day weekend mostly as an incentive to hire and keep teachers, prompting cheers of support from instructors, unions, and many families.   Jonathan Warren, Superintendent: “We recognize the potential risk,...

By James Varney, RealClearInvestigationsJuly 10, 2024 Every day millions of parents put their children under the care of public school teachers, administrators, and support staff. Their trust, however, is frequently broken by predators in authority in what appears to be the largest ongoing sexual abuse scandal in our nation’s history. 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, according to multiple studies. Such numbers would far...

Not long after Jeremy Gober started running a sleep center, he quit treating patients for narcolepsy and sleep apnea and went full-time submitting bogus insurance claims. According to Gober’s 2022 indictment, he committed at least one especially sloppy error: One of his make-believe billings included a Medicare claim for treatment in March 2018 for a patient who’d died in December 2017. Before Gober was caught, Medicare and California’s healthcare system, Medi-Cal, ended up paying him a total of $587,000 for claims that turned out to be fiction. It's your money. But, hey,...

By Paul Sperry, RealClearInvestigationsJune 26, 2024 Just before Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton faced off in their second presidential debate, then-National Intelligence Director James Clapper met in the White House with a small group of advisers to President Obama to hatch a plan to put out a first-of-its-kind intelligence report warning the voting public that "the Russian government" was interfering in the election by allegedly breaching the Clinton campaign’s email system. Trump and Biden, who debate again on Thursday with the impartiality of CNN moderators again in...

SAN FRANCISCO—Vice President Kamala Harris has long cast herself as a fearless pioneer of efforts to fight for social and environmental justice. “When I was elected DA of San Francisco,” Harris told a gathering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta last year, “I started the first environmental justice unit of any DA’s office in the country.” In her telling, the San Francisco District Attorney formed the special environmental justice unit in the early 2000s especially to protect the long-neglected community of Bayview Hunters Point, a...

Update: Tim Walz Cozied Up to Anti-Semitic Terror Defender Bazian, Free Beacon By Paul Sperry, RealClearInvestigationsJune 19, 2024 Echoing the Muslim prophet Muhammad, Professor Hatem Bazian, a University of California, Berkeley lecturer, told his fellow Muslims: “The Day of Judgment will never happen until you fight the Jews.” At the Santa Clara conference sponsored by the American Muslim Alliance, Bazian exhorted the crowd: “They are on the west side of the river, which is the Jordan River, and you’re on the east side until the trees and the stones...

By Julie Kelly, RealClearInvestigationsJune 13, 2024 Top officials at the Department of Justice are downplaying recently disclosed documents showing FBI agents were authorized to use deadly force during their 2022 raid of Donald Trump’s Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago. Responding to Trump’s claim that “Joe Biden was locked & loaded ready to take me out & put my family in danger,” FBI Director Christopher Wray said the bureau was following “standard operating procedure” as it executed a search warrant on Aug. 8, 2022, regarding classified material...

By Vince Bielski, RealClearInvestigationsJune 10, 2024 COLUMBUS, Ohio—On a bright morning in May at the Columbus Collegiate Academy Main, orderliness is on display. Students in khakis and blue tops carrying bulging backpacks walk briskly in line through the front doors of the single-story brick building – looking like young people who really want to be there.  In class after class, the predominantly black and Latino student body appears seriously engaged, with pencils in hand or fingers on keyboards. Teachers move rapidly through lessons. Hands shoot up to answer questions....

By James Varney, RealClearInvestigationsJune 7, 2024 Like-minded members of Congress have created hundreds of caucuses to help them work on specific issues – including the Arthritis Caucus, the Freedom Caucus, the U.S.-Japan Caucus, the Special Operations Forces, and the Bipartisan Candy Caucus. But two of them – the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus – stand out for the unparalleled fundraising they do through independent but closely aligned nonprofit arms. Filled with current members of Congress and representatives from some of...

By Ben Weingarten, RealClearInvestigationsMay 31, 2024 This summer the Supreme Court will rule on a case involving what a district court called perhaps "the most massive attack against free speech" ever inflicted on the American people. In Murthy v. Missouri, plaintiffs ranging from the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana to epidemiologists from Harvard and Stanford allege that the federal government violated the First Amendment by working with outside groups and social media platforms to surveil, flag, and quash dissenting speech – characterizing it as mis-, dis- and...