China Money for Higher Ed?

[WEEKLY UPDATE]

SEDITION IN THE OBAMA OVAL OFFICE?

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Barack Obama, Joe Biden and their top intelligence officers huddled in
the Oval Office shortly before Donald Trump was inaugurated to discuss
what they would do about this new President they despised. Now we aim
to find out more about this conspiracy.

We just filed a FOIA suit against the Department of Justice, the FBI
and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) for all
records related to the January 5, 2017, meeting at the Obama Oval
Office during which the Steele Dossier and the investigation of
General Flynn were discussed (_Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of
Justice and ODNI_
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(No. 1:20-cv-01947)).

The Oval Office meeting
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reportedly included President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden,
National Security Adviser Susan Rice, Deputy Attorney General Sally
Yates, FBI Director James Comey, CIA Director John Brennan, Director
of National Intelligence James Clapper and other Obama administration
political and law enforcement officials.

At least two records describing the meeting – a January 20, 2017,
memo
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Rice sent to herself and a set of notes
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taken by FBI counterespionage chief Peter Strzok – have been
declassified and made public. Sally Yates also detailed the meeting
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to Robert Mueller’s investigation.

We sued after the DOJ, FBI, and ODNI failed to respond to identical
May 20, 2020, FOIA requests for:

* All records regarding the January 5, 2017, meeting at the White
House between former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, former
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former CIA Director
John Brennan, former Director James Comey, President Obama, and
others. This request includes all records created in preparation for,
during, and/or pursuant to the meeting, as well as any and all related
records of communication between any official or representative of the
Department of Justice and any other individual.

The meeting took place just two weeks prior to Trump’s inauguration.
Last week we released emails
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between Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page that included a frantic
exchange between top bureau officials in the days prior to and
following Trump’s inauguration discussing a White House
counterintelligence briefing that could “play into” the FBI’s
“investigative strategy.”

Obama’s infamous January 5, 2017, Oval Office meeting is a key
moment in the corrupt effort to smear and spy on President Trump and
target General Flynn with a malicious prosecution. Rather than delay
and stonewall, it is urgent the FBI, DOJ, ODNI release all records
about this malicious, seditious conspiracy.

JUDICIAL WATCH SUES ON ILLICIT FOREIGN FUNDING OF OUR COLLEGES AND
UNIVERSITIES

We have steadily revealed China’s connections to our universities
and other institutions. Just last month we reported
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that the National Institutes of Health booted 54 scientists for their
financial ties to China.

We want to know more, and so we have filed a FOIA suit against the
U.S. Department of Education for all records related to its
investigations of colleges and universities accepting foreign gifts
and contracts (_Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Education_
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(No. 1:20-cv-02010)).

We sued after the department failed to respond to our May 4, 2020 FOIA
request for:

All information, documents, and communication(s) between the
Department and all schools currently under a Section 117 investigation
regarding acceptance or reporting of foreign gifts including, but not
limited to, gifts to affiliated foundations, all ancillary or foreign
campuses, and individual departments or professors between January 1,
2018 and present; and

Any preliminary findings or reports that cover all open and closed
investigations of the Department regarding false or misleading
reporting of foreign gifts, including all source documents and
information relied upon to determine findings or other report content.


According to our suit, Section 117 of the Higher Education Act
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20
U.S.C. § 1011f, “requires U.S. institutions of higher education
receiving federal funding to report any gifts from, or contracts with,
foreign sources with a value of $250,000 or more in a twelve-month
period. Section 117 also authorizes the Department of Education to
open an administrative investigation, and, if necessary, ask the
Attorney General to initiate a civil action to enforce the law.”

On May 4, 2020, the ranking members of seven committees, including
Rep. Jim Jordan of the Committee on Oversight and Reform, Rep.
Virginia Foxx of the Committee on Education and Labor, Rep. Michael
Rogers of the Committee on Homeland Security, Rep. Frank Lucas of the
Committee on Science, Space and Technology, Rep. Devin Nunes of the
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Rep. Mac Thornberry of the
Armed Services Committee, and Rep. Michael McCaul of the Foreign
Affairs committee, wrote
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to Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos outlining their concerns about
foreign influence in American institutes of higher education. In the
letter, they specifically highlight the Chinese Communist Party’s
attempts to silence academic research into the origins of COVID-19. It
is not publicly known if they have received these records or the
briefing.

It was reported
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on June 15, 2020, that “More than 70 U.S. universities that received
funding from the Chinese government did not disclose those donations
to the Department of Education, prompting concerns from lawmakers and
watchdogs about Beijing and the Communist Party's growing influence on
American college campuses.”

On June 9, 2020, Dr. Charles Lieber
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former chair of Harvard’s department of chemistry and chemical
biology, “was indicted by a federal grand jury … on charges that
he lied to U.S. officials about his ties to a Chinese-run program
aimed at furthering the communist superpower’s scientific and
technological development.”

Since May 2019, we have represented the Zachor Legal Institute in a
Texas Public Information Act lawsuit, seeking information about
potential influence
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by
the Qatar government’s funding of certain Texas A&M University
programs and a Texas A&M campus in Education City, Al Rayyan, Qatar
(_Qatar Foundation for Education, Science and Community Development v.
Ken Paxton, Texas Attorney General
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(No. D-1-GN-18-006240)).

China is a clear and present danger to the United States, and this
lawsuit aims to expose secret Chinese and other nefarious foreign
funding of America’s colleges and universities.

SOROS FUNDS ST. LOUIS PROSECUTOR CHARGING COUPLE FOR PROTECTING HOME

We’ve had our eye on billionaire George Soros for years as he pours
money into every leftist scheme imaginable. Now, little known to most
people, he’s helping to set up a cadre of prosecutors across
America. Our _Corruption Chronicles_ blog has the latest
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A controversial city prosecutor investigated for abusing her power to
pursue a bogus criminal case against a political nemesis and fined for
campaign finance violations just received a hefty reelection
contribution from leftwing billionaire George Soros. Her name is
Kimberly Gardner
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and in 2016 she made history for getting elected as St. Louis
Missouri’s first black chief prosecutor after serving in the state
legislature. Gardner ran on a platform of reforming the criminal
justice system, has wrongfully charged cops and conducted a two-year
witch hunt of former Missouri Governor Eric Greitens, who was
exonerated of all wrongdoing. In that case, Gardner was forced to
withdraw her indictment accusing the Republican governor of felony
invasion of privacy for supposedly taking a compromising photo of his
mistress and using it to keep her quiet about the extramarital affair.


Now the Soros-backed prosecutor is targeting the St. Louis couple,
Mark and Patricia McCloskey, that defended their home last month when
hundreds of Black Lives Matters protestors trespassed onto their
property on their way to the St. Louis mayor’s house. The
McCloskeys, both attorneys, confronted protestors with guns and
demanded they leave their property. A local newspaper report
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describes the incident like this: “Americans saw the story they
wanted to see. Some saw respected professionals fearing for their
safety, reasonably exercising their Second Amendment rights to defend
their home from violent trespassers. Others saw an overwrought, older
affluent couple, recklessly pointing their weapons and asserting their
white privilege.” The local prosecutor subscribes to the latter
version. This week Gardner, whose official title is St. Louis Circuit
Attorney, charged the McCloskeys with unlawful use of a weapon, a
felony.

Shortly after the incident in late June, Gardner issued a public
statement
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indicating that she would criminally charge the couple for protecting
their property. “I am alarmed at the events that occurred over the
weekend, where peaceful protesters were met by guns and a violent
assault. We must protect the right to peacefully protest, and any
attempt to chill it through intimidation or threat of deadly force
will not be tolerated. My office is currently working with the public
and police to investigate these events. Make no mistake: we will not
tolerate the use of force against those exercising their First
Amendment rights, and will use the full power of Missouri law to hold
people accountable.” Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, the
state’s chief law enforcement officer, has filed a court brief
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seeking to get the case dismissed. “The right to use firearms to
defend one’s person, family, home, and property has deep roots in
Missouri law,” the court document states. “Self-defense is the
central component of the right to keep and bear arms, which receives
the highest level of protection from the Missouri Constitution.
Missouri’s statutes specifically authorize Missouri citizens to use
firearms to deter assailants and protect themselves, their families,
and homes from threatening or violent intruders. A highly publicized
criminal prosecution of Missouri citizens for exercising these
fundamental freedoms threatens to intimidate and deter law-abiding
Missouri citizens from exercising their constitutional right of
self-defense.”

Almost half of St. Louis felony cases have been bungled by Gardner,
according to news reports
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and more than 65 attorneys have quit or been fired
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from the prosecutor’s office during her tenure. Among them is Rachel
Smith, Gardner’s chief trial assistant, who resigned after 19 years
in office. She was the fourth prosecutor to fill the role of chief
trial assistant since Gardner took office in 2017. Last year Gardner
was fined $63,009
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for campaign
finance violations after a Missouri Ethics Commission investigation
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found her
election committee violated multiple campaign finance laws. The panel
found that Gardner and her campaign failed to report around 100
contributions totaling over $305,000 and 255 expenditures totaling
about $90,000.

Nevertheless, Soros’ support has not wavered. A Soros-linked group
called Missouri Justice Public Safety PAC
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recently gave
Gardner’s 2020 campaign $78,000, according to a news article
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that includes her most recent financial report
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The leftwing billionaire also funded
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Gardner’s 2016 campaign and has donated generously to leftist
candidates in local prosecutor elections nationwide, including
Houston, Chicago and Albuquerque. Judicial Watch has reported
extensively on Soros’ global campaigns to further advance the
left’s radical agenda abroad and domestically and published an
investigative report
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on the financial and staffing nexus between his deeply politicized
Open Society Foundations (OSF)and the U.S. government. OSF works to
destabilize legitimate governments, erase national borders, target
conservative politicians, finance civil unrest, subvert institutions
of higher education and orchestrate refugee crises for political gain.
With the help of American taxpayer dollars, Soros bolsters a radical
leftwing agenda that in the U.S. has included: promoting an open
border with Mexico and fighting immigration enforcement efforts;
fomenting racial disharmony by funding anti-capitalist racialist
organizations; financing the Black Lives Matter movement and other
organizations involved in the riots in Ferguson, Missouri; weakening
the integrity of our electoral systems; promoting taxpayer funded
abortion-on-demand; advocating a government-run health care system;
opposing U.S. counterterrorism efforts; promoting dubious
transnational climate change agreements that threaten American
sovereignty and working to advance gun control and erode Second
Amendment protections.

STATE DEPARTMENT PUSHED LEFTIST REVOLUTION?

The State Department has joined the Left’s war on language and other
institutions, including the traditional family. Our _Corruption
Chronicles_ blog explains
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In the latest move by a U.S. government agency to appease leftists,
the State Department is quietly overhauling language used in agency
materials that may be considered exclusionary or offensive. Judicial
Watch obtained a copy of a memo from a State Department source asking
the agency’s 69,000 employees to report “outdated and
non-inclusive language in Department of State policies, documents or
webpages.” The directive was issued this month by the State
Department’s Office of Civil Rights (S/OCR) and it provides an
“outdated form submission” for employees to note specific examples
of what amounts to politically incorrect language that is to be
“updated.”

The S/OCR offers several examples to guide employees through the
process of reporting policies, documents and web pages that do not use
“inclusive” language. This includes obsolete racial terms or
language that implies “preference for the traditional nuclear family
structure and stereotypical gender roles,” according to the
document. Other examples include using the outdated phrase
“handicapping condition” rather than the contemporary word
“disability.” The widely distributed memo ends by encouraging
employees to participate in a process that can easily be compared to
Marxist language manipulation. “If you are aware of policies or
documents containing outdated language or instances where language
could be more inclusive S/OCR would welcome you completing the form at
the link below with the relevant outdated language information for our
office’s follow-up.”

Most major federal government agencies—including the departments of
Homeland Security, Justice, Defense, Health and Labor—have civil
rights offices that handle discrimination and other related issues.
All of them are generously funded by American taxpayers and their
mission statements are quite similar, though they operate
individually. Like many of its counterparts, the S/OCR claims its
mission
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is to propagate fairness, equity and inclusion at the Department of
State. Furthermore, its business is conflict resolution, employee and
supervisor assistance and diversity management. “S/OCR manages the
Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) administrative process for the
Department and works to prevent employment discrimination through
outreach and training,” according to the S/OCR’s mission
statement.

The State Department is hardly alone in caving into the increasingly
powerful leftist mob’s demands for political correctness. Just last
week Judicial Watch obtained outrageous, anti-bias training materials
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from the Department of Defense that are used to train service members
on diversity topics. The material essentially indoctrinates troops
with anti-American and racially inflammatory training. It features
chapters on power and privilege in which cadets are taught that
privilege is linked to various forms of identity including sexual
orientation and religion. Students are also taught that there is
“sexual orientation privilege
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associated with the “marginalization of non-heterosexual lifestyles
and the view that heterosexuality is the normal sexual orientation.”
The guide also notes
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that,
“Statistics show Whites are the majority in senior leadership
positions (i.e., flag officers, general officers, and Senior Executive
Service) and lend itself [sic] to the perpetuation of racism.” A
section addressing “Cross-Cultural Communication
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states: “Gender includes the social construction of masculinity and
femininity within a culture and incorporates his or her biological,
psychological, and sociological characteristics. Sex refers to a
person’s biological or physical self. Although sex determines who
will bear children, gender accounts for our roles in life and how
these life roles affect our communication.”

The nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency has also caved
into demands from the left. Several years ago, Judicial Watch
uncovered records
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showing that the terrorist front group Council on American-Islamic
Relations (CAIR) got the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to
purge anti-terrorism material determined to be offensive to Muslims.
Judicial Watch obtained hundreds of pages of FBI documents with
details of the shocking arrangement and subsequently published a
special in-depth report
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on
the subject. The same Islamic activists that strong-armed the FBI
later demanded an overhaul
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in the way all law enforcement officers are trained in the United
States.

TRUMP EFFECT: BIG BET ON VIRUS DRUG STILL WINNING

A frightening consequence of the pandemic is the politicization of
health information. The Left, which includes the legacy media, is
destroying lives as it demonizes anything President Trump proposes. As
Yale epidemiology professor Dr. Harvey Risch has said
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of hydroxychloroquine, "It's a political drug now, not a medical
drug." It might save up to 100,000 lives, he said.

That’s not what you hear in the media, as our chief investigative
reporter Micah Morrison, reports
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in his _Investigative Bulletin_.

The president’s pandemic policies are under fire, but in one area a
big Trumpian bet is still coming up a winner. Three new studies
suggest that the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine (HC) shows
success in the fight against the coronavirus.

In Michigan, a study of more than 2,500 patients at six Detroit-area
hospitals found that HC, administered early, significantly cut the
death rate. “Our analysis shows that that using hydroxychloroquine
helped save lives,” said Steven Kalkanis, CEO of the Henry Ford
Health System. “It needs to be used early,” he added. “It needs
to be used in a hospital setting.”

In New York City, researchers with the Mt. Sinai Health System
studying more than 6000 patients with Covid-19 found they died at a
lower rate when treated with HC. In the study, after adjusting for
other risk factors, the Mt. Sinai researchers found that
“hydroxychloroquine use was associated with decreased in-hospital
mortality.”

And in India, a massive study of more than 300,000 people, including
front line medical personnel, found that HC provided prophylactic
benefits. “The task force of medical experts, including physicians
and super specialists, have recommend and backed the drive to
administer HC in cluster areas and high exposure cases,” a senior
medical official told the Indian Express. “The benefits seem to far
outweigh the debate around its risks and it has certainly helped in
implementing the preventive strategies.”

Read about the India experience here
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Read the Mount Sinai study here
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and
more on the Detroit study here
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Of course, none of this was supposed to happen. Trump’s enthusiastic
embrace of the drug was widely ridiculed. A president with a medical
opinion! How dare he! Warnings about the drug
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flowed from the media, political opponents, the Food and Drug
Administration, the World Health Organization, the American Medical
Association, and others. Trump not only stuck to his path, but
brazenly doubled down in May with the announcement that he himself was
taking HC
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as a prophylactic.

Is HC a miracle drug in the fight against the virus? No. If it was,
we’d know by now.

But it does seem to help in certain cases, such as when administered
early to healthy patients with no underlying conditions, or as a
prophylactic for front line personnel. Serious people are giving HC a
serious look. Prescriptions for the drug in the U.S. jumped
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more than 150% earlier this year. International supply efforts surged
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None of this
would have happened without Trump.

All this suggests a kind of Trump Effect that may be with us long
after Trump himself has departed the political scene. As we observed
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back in April, when we first looked at the HC controversy, Trump
pounded the bully pulpit, preferred outside channels of information,
distrusted experts, hewed to deregulatory impulses, leaned on the
levers of government, and embraced conservative and social media to
promote the drug. This turned out to be not just a winning bet, but a
winning strategy. Others doubtless will take note.

Until next week,
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