Attention to the Unseen

Murray Waas reports: On September 10, Nora Dannehy resigned as the deputy to John Durham, the federal prosecutor investigating the government’s probe into the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 election. Dannehy left her post and the Justice Department in part because of Attorney General William Barr’s pressure on Durham to release a report on his investigation’s findings before Election Day, according to a person familiar with her thinking. Trump had long been hoping a report out this fall…

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The Daily Beast reports: Drivers in a pro-Trump caravan shouted obscenities as they cruised through an intersection near Jennifer Merritt’s home in Larchmont, New York, on Sunday. Some flipped the bird at bystanders. Then one of Merritt’s neighbors saw something more alarming than rude hand gestures. “That guy has a gun!” the woman told Merritt of a man in a black pickup truck. As the COVID-19 pandemic wears on and the election looms, fans of President Donald Trump have increasingly…

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Barton Gellman writes: A wretched presidential campaign has played out at last, but Election Day is not how this story ends. Unable to overtake his opponent in the polls, Donald Trump decided months ago to run against the election itself. That race does not conclude when the ballots are counted. Trump has raged against fictional plots to steal his victory, maligning routine procedures such as voting by mail and counting ballots until there are no more to count. His rage…

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Olga Khazan writes: Some experts are worried that the period following this election may become as chaotic and violent as the early 1970s. Extremists recently plotted to kidnap the governor of Michigan. Militias have recruited police and soldiers into their ranks. The president has encouraged his supporters to monitor polling places, has told the extremist Proud Boys to “stand by,” and has agreed to a peaceful transfer of power only with heavy caveats. “All the signs are pointing to a…

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Zeynep Tufekci writes: For weather, we have fundamentals — advanced science on how atmospheric dynamics work — and years of detailed, day-by-day, even hour-by-hour data from a vast number of observation stations. For elections, we simply do not have anything near that kind of knowledge or data. While we have some theories on what influences voters, we have no fine-grained understanding of why people vote the way they do, and what polling data we have is relatively sparse. Consequently, most…

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Reuters reports: Russian government-backed social media accounts nurtured the QAnon conspiracy theory in its infancy, earlier than previously reported, according to interviews with current and former Twitter executives and archives of tweets from suspended accounts. Researchers said in August that the archives showed Russian accounts had helped spread QAnon in volume beginning in December 2017, but that team did not examine the history of specific QAnon promoters. A more granular review by Reuters shows Russian accounts began amplifying the movement…

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Richard L. Hasen writes: Just count the damn votes. We are nearing the end of a ridiculous pandemic-laden election season, where we may hit record turnout despite the most blatant attempt to suppress the vote in a generation. More than 90 million people have already voted, and we may reach a record turnout of over 150 million on election day. I am sure we would have exceeded that number by millions more votes if President Donald Trump and Republicans had…

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The New York Times reports: President Trump’s campaign is raising money for a prolonged political and legal fight long after Nov. 3 and recently began automatically checking a box to withdraw additional weekly contributions from online donors through mid-December — nearly six weeks after Election Day. Predicting “FRAUD like you’ve never seen,” the language on Mr. Trump’s website opts contributors into making the weekly post-election donations “to ensure we have the resources to protect the results and keep fighting even…

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Jane Mayer writes: The White House declined to answer questions for this article, and if Trump has made plans for a post-Presidential life he hasn’t shared them openly. A business friend of his from New York said, “You can’t broach it with him. He’d be furious at the suggestion that he could lose.” In better times, Trump has revelled in being President. Last winter, a Cabinet secretary told me Trump had confided that he couldn’t imagine returning to his former…

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