Attention to the Unseen

Mother Jones reports: On Friday, a federal judge in Washington, DC sentenced a veteran GOP operative to 18 months in prison for funneling $25,000 from a Russian businessman to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. Jesse Benton, a longtime aide to both Ron and Rand Paul, was convicted in November on six related charges. The court found that he and another GOP operative accepted $100,000 from Roman Vasilenko, a St. Petersburg-based influencer who wanted photos with Trump to display on his social…

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Dennis Aftergut writes: This weekend brought the strange news that Jack Smith, the special counsel investigating Donald Trump, asked the grand jury to issue a subpoena to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago office for an empty folder. Why? The Guardian reports that last month, Smith subpoenaed the folder, marked “Classified Evening Briefing,” even though Trump’s lawyers told him it had nothing in it. This tells us something important: that Smith is serious about pressing forward with a case against Trump for his 18 months of obstructing government efforts to…

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  Former Trump Vice President Mike Pence has been subpoenaed by Special Counsel Jack Smith. “It does suggest, even though it contradicts the best evidence we’ve had to date, that Smith is far along not just in Mar-a-Lago but January 6th, as well,” says Harry Litman.

Mother Jones reports: It was shocking news: Charles McGonigal, a former counterintelligence chief for the FBI, was arrested for his alleged role in two separate schemes. In one, he purportedly accepted $225,000 from an Albanian American businessman, while he was still in the FBI, and did favors for that businessman and Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama. In the other, McGonigal, after he retired in 2018, allegedly provided investigative services to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, who was sanctioned in 2018 for assisting the global “malign” activities of Putin’s…

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Norman L. Eisen, E. Danya Perry and Fred Wertheimer write: A criminal investigation of former president Donald Trump now being restarted by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and also discussed in a new book by one of his former prosecutors, Mark Pomerantz, raises vital issues of both election integrity and accountability. Both the investigation and the book address Trump’s hush money payments in the last days of his 2016 campaign and related matters. His personal attorney went to jail for campaign finance…

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Politico reports: A federal judge in Washington, D.C., suggested Monday that there may be a constitutional right to abortion baked into the 13th Amendment — an area she said went unexplored by the Supreme Court in its momentous decision last year overturning Roe v. Wade. In a pending criminal case against several anti-abortion activists, U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization concluded only that the 14th Amendment included no right to abortion but stopped…

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ABC News reports: A Florida man and a Maryland woman have been arrested on federal charges of plotting to attack multiple energy substation with the goal of destroying Baltimore, the U.S. Department of Justice announced Monday. The suspects, Sarah Clendaniel of Catonsville, Maryland, and Brandon Russell of Orlando, Florida, were allegedly fueled by a racist extremist ideology as they “conspired to inflict maximum harm” on the power grid with the aim to “completely destroy” Baltimore, U.S. Attorney Erek Barron and…

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CNN reports: Long before the leak of a draft opinion reversing Roe v. Wade, some Supreme Court justices often used personal email accounts for sensitive transmissions instead of secure servers set up to guard such information, among other security lapses not made public in the court’s report on the investigation last month. New details revealed to CNN by multiple sources familiar with the court’s operations offer an even more detailed picture of yearslong lax internal procedures that could have endangered…

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The New York Times reports: After Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined the Supreme Court, his wife, Jane Sullivan Roberts, gave up her career as a law firm partner to become a high-end legal recruiter in an effort to alleviate potential conflicts of interest. Mrs. Roberts later recalled in an interview that her husband’s job made it “awkward to be practicing law in the firm.” Now, a former colleague of Mrs. Roberts has raised concerns that her recruiting work…

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The Washington Post reports: His obsessively precise written opinions for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit in Richmond had marked Luttig as one of the leading conservative intellectuals in the legal system — the most conservative judge on the most conservative court in America. More than a quarter-century later, it was Luttig (pronounced LEW-tig) who would get a late-night call to come to the aid of his tribe: Mike Pence, in his final days as vice president,…

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The New York Times reports: The Manhattan district attorney’s office on Monday began presenting evidence to a grand jury about Donald J. Trump’s role in paying hush money to a porn star during his 2016 presidential campaign, laying the groundwork for potential criminal charges against the former president in the coming months, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The grand jury was recently impaneled, and the beginning of witness testimony represents a clear signal that the district attorney,…

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Greg Sargent writes: Senate Democrats, prepare to investigate the investigations of the investigators. If this sounds likely to be mind-numbingly complicated, well, yes, it is. But there’s only one way to tackle this difficulty: head-on. The New York Times disclosed extraordinary new revelations this past week about prosecutor John Durham’s years-long quest to delegitimize the FBI investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. In 2019, this obsession of President Donald Trump was initiated by his attorney general, William P….

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David Dayen writes: Somewhere in Plains, Georgia, an aide or 98-year-old Jimmy Carter himself is rifling through old boxes, searching for any document from the late 1970s marked “classified.” I’m not sure what threats there are to the Republic from high-level information about Rhodesia or the Warsaw Pact slowly decomposing in a filing cabinet, but the National Archives is on the case, directing former presidents and vice presidents to scour their properties for any official secrets. (Carter has found classified…

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