Attention to the Unseen

Ashley Parker and Sarah Fitzpatrick write: After Pam Bondi’s ouster today, which followed Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s firing last month, Cabinet secretaries and other senior administration officials were anxiously eyeing their phones, wondering whether they’d be next. One top official didn’t have to wait long: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth removed the chief of staff of the Army, General Randy George. Several people familiar with the White House’s plans told us that there are active discussions about others…

Read More Read More

Wired reports: In the early morning last September 30, hundreds of federal agents swarmed the South Shore Apartments, a beige brick building on Chicago’s South Side. As feds in body armor rappelled down from a Black Hawk helicopter overhead, others crashed through the building’s doors with battering rams, rounding up residents at gunpoint. A group of burly, masked agents wearing helmets and bulletproof vests, and toting suppressor-equipped M4 rifles, moved through the hallways in a rapid, tightly organized file. Padraic…

Read More Read More

By Agnel Philip This story was originally published by ProPublica Our reporting started, like much of our work, in a spreadsheet. As I parsed through federal court data, I noticed something odd: Within months of President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, prosecutors began filing obscure charges related to trespassing on military property — so many, in fact, that more cases were filed in 2025 than in the prior decade. Nearly all of these charges originated from cases along the…

Read More Read More

Washington Examiner reports: The national chief of the Border Patrol, Michael Banks, was known among colleagues for taking regular trips abroad to engage in sex with prostitutes, according to six current and former Border Patrol employees who spoke with the Washington Examiner. Banks “bragged” to colleagues while in his previous management role at Border Patrol about paying for sex with prostitutes while traveling in Colombia and Thailand over the course of a decade. Banks’ behavior was said to have been…

Read More Read More

Sen. Mark Warner writes: In the decade since President Vladimir Putin of Russia directed a sweeping campaign of hacking and social media messaging to try to tilt the 2016 presidential election toward his preferred candidate, the United States has rightly focused on shoring up our elections against foreign meddling. But I fear that foreign interference is no longer the most pressing danger to our elections. It is increasingly evident that the greatest threat now comes from inside our own government….

Read More Read More

Politico reports: Long before John Eastman helped devise Donald Trump’s bid to overturn the 2020 election, he had another pet cause: ending birthright citizenship. The idea was once relegated to obscure articles in right-wing journals and little-noticed debates before conservative groups. But Trump ushered it into the limelight on his first day back in office last year by issuing an executive order purporting to upend the well-established understanding that virtually everyone born on U.S. soil gets American citizenship. Now, Eastman…

Read More Read More

By Ken B. Morales and David Armstrong This story was originally published by ProPublica In the first days after Pam Bondi was appointed attorney general last year, the Department of Justice began shutting down pending criminal cases at a record pace. The cases included an investigation into a Virginia nursing home with a recent record of patient abuse; probes of fraud involving several New Jersey labor unions, including one opened after a top official of a national union was accused…

Read More Read More

Wired reports: President Donald Trump’s rhetorical war on elections has seemed to only get more serious with time. Over the past couple of months, he’s told podcaster turned FBI deputy director turned podcaster Dan Bongino that Republicans “should take over the voting” in 15 places and “ought to nationalize the voting.” He told Reuters that “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.” And he told NBC he will only accept the midterm results “if the elections…

Read More Read More

Scott Titshaw and Stephen Yale-Loehr write: On April 1, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on one of the most consequential immigration cases in decades. At issue is whether President Trump’s executive order restricting birthright citizenship can stand. The stakes could not be higher. If the court sides with Trump, the damage will ripple far beyond undocumented immigrants. It will affect legal visa holders, green-card holders and even U.S. citizens. It would also create an underclass of American-born children, some…

Read More Read More

Liz Dye writes: Two years ago, a court in Florida threw out Michael Flynn’s malicious prosecution lawsuit seeking $50 million from the US government. Yesterday, the government agreed to settle it anyway, handing $1.25 million in taxpayer dollars to the former national security advisor. Clearly this is an outrageous abuse by the Trump DOJ. It’s also a template for the looting to come, as everyone from Proud Boy Enrique Tarrio to Trump himself lines up to feed at the government…

Read More Read More

Democracy Docket reports: During a norm-shattering appearance at a conservative political conference Thursday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said he couldn’t understand why anyone would disagree with a president deploying federal agents to the polls. Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Blanche was echoing recent calls from far-right activists for President Donald Trump to deploy Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to voting sites during the 2026 midterms — a tactic clearly meant to intimidate voters and poll…

Read More Read More

MS NOW reports: Special counsel Jack Smith gathered evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump took many top secret documents that related to his worldwide business interests, and investigators considered this a likely motive for Trump concealing them at his Florida club after he left the White House, according to newly released case records. The special prosecutor also had evidence indicating that after leaving office Trump had shown a classified map to passengers on a private plane, including his future chief of…

Read More Read More