Attention to the Unseen

The Daily Beast reports: With the rape trial of former President Donald Trump just days away, his effort to prevent jurors from hearing about another incident—when Trump allegedly forced himself on a different journalist—fell flat Monday. The federal judge overseeing the case ruled that Trump’s legal team made their appeal too late. And now jurors are poised to hear about a separate incident that could show a pattern of sexual assault from the former president. It’s the latest sign that…

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The Daily Beast reports: The fake GOP electors in Georgia that former President Donald Trump recruited as part of his failed attempt to stay in power are starting to point fingers at each other, court documents revealed on Tuesday. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, the Atlanta-area prosecutor who’s investigating Trump’s effort to upend American democracy there, laid out the details in a legal memo to a state judge—one that hints at criminal indictments to come. According to the memo,…

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Jamelle Bouie writes: The law is a little different for those at the top. As the world now knows, Justice Clarence Thomas did not disclose a real estate deal he and his family made in 2014 with Harlan Crow, a billionaire Republican donor. Thomas and several other relatives sold his mother’s home in Savannah, Ga., along with two vacant lots, for $133,363 to a company owned by Crow. “Soon after the sale was completed,” according to ProPublica, “contractors began work…

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The Daily Beast reports: A little-known lawyer in New York has long been the thorn in Donald Trump’s side, pressing deeper with every passing year by taking down his scammy charity, blocking his presidential policies, investigating his finances, grilling his annoyed son with questions, and finally indicting the former president last month. Matthew Colangelo, after years of relentlessly aggressive work, is finally on Trump’s personal radar—and that of his most combative MAGA allies, who’ve painted a target on his back…

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The New York Times reports: For years, thousands of New Yorkers and tourists have walked past an unassuming office building in Lower Manhattan. On Monday, federal prosecutors unsealed criminal charges accusing two men of helping run an unauthorized Chinese police outpost there, one of more than 100 around the globe used to intimidate and control China’s citizens abroad, and to stamp out criticism of the ruling Communist Party. The two men were arrested on Monday and charged with conspiring to…

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The Washington Post reports: Over the last two decades, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has reported on required financial disclosure forms that his family received rental income totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars from a firm called Ginger, Ltd., Partnership. But that company — a Nebraska real estate firm launched in the 1980s by his wife and her relatives — has not existed since 2006. That year, the family real estate company was shut down and a separate firm was…

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The Washington Post reports: As a lawyer for a conservative legal group, Matthew Kacsmaryk in early 2017 submitted an article to a Texas law review criticizing Obama-era protections for transgender people and those seeking abortions. The Obama administration, the draft article argued, had discounted religious physicians who “cannot use their scalpels to make female what God created male” and “cannot use their pens to prescribe or dispense abortifacient drugs designed to kill unborn children.” But a few months after the…

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The Washington Post reports: The leak of hundreds of classified intelligence documents about the war in Ukraine and U.S. spying on allies has left many officials asking: How did this happen again? Jack Teixeira, a 21-year-old, low-level National Guard member assigned to an intelligence support squadron in Massachusetts, allegedly removed hundreds of classified documents from his office on base and brought them home. He then shared them with his friends in an online community united by their love of guns…

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