Attention to the Unseen

Andrew Sullivan writes: The leaked tape recording of Michael Cohen and Donald Trump discussing how to handle the payoff to silence yet another extracurricular paramour, Karen McDougal, is more important, it seems to me, than has been generally acknowledged. It’s only a shade under three minutes long. But unlike the Billy Bush tape, Trump is not performing or bragging or trying to charm someone he doesn’t know that well. He’s at work, with an intimate, trusted wingman, every single guard…

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Natasha Bertrand writes: CNN’s bombshell scoop Thursday night shined a bright light yet again on the June 9, 2016 meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan and raised the specter that President Trump and his surrogates may have been lying about one of the most significant Russia-related episodes of the 2016 election. According to CNN, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen is willing to testify that Trump approved the meeting between his son, son-in-law, campaign chairman, and a Russian lawyer—despite Trump and…

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Steve Coll writes: In 2011 and 2012, when Imran Khan, the former international cricket star and London night-club Lothario, first emerged from Pakistan’s political wilderness, he rode an Arab Spring-inspired wave of urban middle-class hopes for cleaner politics and better government. If Khan, a celebrity with his own income, came to power, the thinking went, then he might sweep away the family-based nepotism and corruption that had so curtailed Pakistan’s progress since independence, in 1947, and perhaps also loosen the…

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The Daily Beast reports: The Russian intelligence agency behind the 2016 election cyberattacks targeted Sen. Claire McCaskill as she began her 2018 re-election campaign in earnest, a Daily Beast forensic analysis reveals. That makes the Missouri Democrat the first identified target of the Kremlin’s 2018 election interference. McCaskill, who has been highly critical of Russia over the years, is widely considered to be among the most vulnerable Senate Democrats facing re-election this year as Republicans hope to hold their slim…

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The Daily Beast reports: While President Donald Trump pals around with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the U.S.’s racist right is making open overtures to Russian white supremacists. One day after Trump’s disastrous summit with Putin last week, the League of the South, a neo-Confederate hate group, announced that it would launch a Russian-language site. The southern secessionist group’s crush on Russia is the latest appeal by U.S. white supremacists to Russia and Putin—an alliance that has strengthened during the Trump…

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Michael Weiss and Catherine A. Fitzpatrick write: “The Dossier,” as everyone calls it, is talked about either as the key to what really happened in the 2016 presidential election, as likely ordered by Vladimir Putin; or it’s an artful but largely invented tapestry of libels and innuendo meant to discredit Donald Trump’s presidency. Most likely there is something in it of both. And in the shadowland of espionage it is even possible that parts of it were planted by Russian…

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