Attention to the Unseen

Shan Wu writes: The early facts we know from the discovery of “several classified documents from President Joe Biden’s time as vice president” by Biden’s lawyers while packing up his former office at the Penn Biden Center show very little similarity to the discovery and recovery of hundreds of classified documents found to have been kept by former President Donald Trump at his personal residence in Mar-a-Lago. The immediate and transparent actions by Biden’s lawyers make the likelihood of any…

Read More Read More

Reuters reports: Allen Weisselberg, a longtime executive for Donald Trump who served as the star prosecution witness in the criminal trial of the former president’s real estate company, was sentenced on Tuesday to five months behind bars for helping engineer a 15-year tax fraud scheme at the Trump Organization. Weisselberg, 75, is expected to be sent to New York’s notorious Rikers Island jail. The Trump Organization’s former chief financial officer pleaded guilty in August, admitting that from 2005 to 2017…

Read More Read More

Greg Sargent writes: As speaker, McCarthy has already declared that the GOP-controlled House will target the “weaponization of the FBI.” When the FBI executed a lawful search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home, Republicans treated it as a historic abuse of power, so there’s little doubt the committee will target criminal investigations into Trump. This will likely entail subpoenas designed to “investigate” the process by which law enforcement sought the Mar-a-Lago search warrant. There will also undoubtedly be subpoenas directed at ongoing…

Read More Read More

Politico reports: The White House said on Monday that it was cooperating with the Justice Department and the National Archives following the discovery of classified Obama-era documents in a private space at a Biden-connected think tank in November. “Since that discovery, the President’s personal attorneys have cooperated with the Archives and Department of Justice in a process to ensure that any Obama-Biden Administration records are appropriately in the possession of the Archives,” said Richard Sauber, special counsel to President Joe…

Read More Read More

The Daily Beast reports: During the nearly nine hours that Congress was under attack on Jan. 6, 2021, the official White House call logs show former President Donald Trump not placing a single phone call. And while historians may consider the missing call logs a crime of inaccurately memorializing history, it may also actually bolster the expected criminal case against Trump. “The first thing one thinks of is the Nixon tapes, the missing 18 minutes. It’s never been resolved,” said…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: When Representative-elect George Santos takes his seat in Congress on Tuesday, he will do so under the shadow of active investigations by federal and local prosecutors into potential criminal activity during his two congressional campaigns. But an older criminal case may be more pressing: Brazilian law enforcement authorities intend to revive fraud charges against Mr. Santos, and will seek his formal response, prosecutors told The New York Times on Monday. The matter, which stemmed from…

Read More Read More

Politico reports: The Jan. 6 select committee has unloaded a vast database of its underlying evidence — emails between Trump attorneys, text messages among horrified White House aides and outside advisers, internal communications among security and intelligence officials — all coming to grips with then-President Donald Trump’s last-ditch effort to subvert the 2020 election and its disastrous consequences. The panel posted thousands of pages of evidence late Sunday in a public database that provide the clearest glimpse yet at the…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: In some years, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. does the honors. In others, it might be Justice Sonia Sotomayor or Justice Clarence Thomas presenting the squared-off hunks of marble affixed with the Supreme Court’s gilded seal. Hewed from slabs left over from the 1930s construction of the nation’s high court and handed out in its magnificent Great Hall, they are a unique status symbol in a town that craves them. And while the ideological…

Read More Read More

David Cay Johnston writes: Don’t let the cynics who know little about our tax system trick you into thinking there was nothing all that new or important in the six years of Donald Trump’s taxes released Friday by the House Ways and Means Committee. In fact, even if some of it was previously teased by the committee, the dump includes a cornucopia of information that affects your wallet—including powerful evidence of criminal tax evasion. Among other things, Trump’s tax returns make a strong…

Read More Read More

Noah Bookbinder writes: Six years after Donald Trump should have disclosed his tax returns to the public, they have finally been released. This took advocacy, congressional action, and litigation that went to the Supreme Court—all to obtain basic financial transparency from a president. But the House Ways and Means Committee’s report on its investigation, released last week in conjunction with the committee’s vote to disclose Trump’s tax returns, revealed new information that may be as astonishing as anything in the…

Read More Read More

The Daily Beast reports: Even as Rep.-elect George Santos (R-NY) embarks on his apology tour, admitting he lied to voters for years about some of the most fundamental facts of his life, there’s been one mystery that Santos has been less than clear about: where his purported millions came from. The Daily Beast now has at least part of the answer—the identities of four Santos corporate clients. And while this new revelation might put Santos in even more hot water,…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: When George Piro learned that some of his former colleagues were spreading unfounded rumors about him, he was stunned. Mr. Piro, 55, was a highly decorated agent in the F.B.I. During his 23-year career, he earned a national intelligence medal for the months he spent interrogating Saddam Hussein, supervised several high-profile shooting investigations and consistently earned reviews that were among the highest for agents who ran field offices. Now, he stood accused of misconduct by…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: For the last two years, Democrats in battleground states have played defense against Republican efforts to curtail voting access and amplify doubts about the legitimacy of the nation’s elections. Now it is Democrats, who retained all but one of the governor’s offices they hold and won control of state legislatures in Michigan and Minnesota, who are ready to go on offense in 2023. They are putting forward a long list of proposals that include creating…

Read More Read More

Ronald Brownstein writes: The congressional committee investigating the January 6 insurrection delivered a comprehensive and compelling case for the criminal prosecution of Donald Trump and his closest allies for their attempt to overturn the 2020 election. But the committee zoomed in so tightly on the culpability of Trump and his inner circle that it largely cropped out the dozens of other state and federal Republican officials who supported or enabled the president’s multifaceted, months-long plot. The committee downplayed the involvement…

Read More Read More

Ryan Goodman and Justin Hendrix write: What follows are highlights of the January 6th Select Committee’s final report from our initial review. Our discussion includes but is not limited to the report’s findings and treatment of issues including: Criminal misconduct in efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Racism as a driver of efforts to overturn the popular vote in different parts of the country and in fueling some of the organized groups and individuals who attacked the Capitol. The…

Read More Read More