Attention to the Unseen

The Washington Post reports: The probably final public hearing of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol is expected to highlight newly obtained Secret Service records showing how President Donald Trump was repeatedly alerted to brewing violence that day, and he still sought to stoke the conflict, according to three people briefed on the records. The committee plans to share in Thursday’s hearing new video footage and internal Secret Service emails that appear to…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: In the emerging history of how a small group of lawyers aided former President Donald J. Trump’s attempt to stay in power despite losing the 2020 election, Kenneth Chesebro has received far less attention than others like Rudolph W. Giuliani and John Eastman. But documents show that Mr. Chesebro played a central part in developing the idea of having Trump supporters pretend to be electors from states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr., then claiming…

Read More Read More

Franklin Foer writes: As an appellate judge, Merrick Garland was known for constructing narrow decisions that achieved consensus without creating extraneous controversy. As a government attorney, he was known for his zealous adherence to the letter of the law. As a person, he is a smaller-than-life figure, a dry conversationalist, studious listener, something close to the opposite of a raconteur. As a driver, his friends say, he is maddeningly slow and almost comically fastidious. And as the nation’s chief law-enforcement…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: This spring, one of the lawyers representing former President Donald J. Trump made an urgent, high-stakes request to Christina G. Bobb, who had just jumped from a Trump-allied cable network to a job in his political organization. The former president was in the midst of an escalating clash with the Justice Department about documents he had taken with him from the White House at the end of his term. The lawyer, M. Evan Corcoran, met…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: The conversation started with potholes. Veronica Klinefelt, a Democratic candidate for State Senate in suburban Detroit, was out knocking on doors as she tries to win a seat her party sees as critical for taking back the chamber. “I am tired of seeing cuts in aging communities like ours,” she told one voter, gesturing to a cul-de-sac pocked with cracks and crevasses. “We need to reinvest here.” What went largely unspoken, however, was how this…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: Witnesses called to testify in a Georgia criminal investigation into former President Donald J. Trump and his allies have not always come willingly. A number of them have fought their subpoenas in their home-state courts, only to have local judges order them to cooperate. That was the case with Trump-aligned lawyers John Eastman in New Mexico, Jenna Ellis in Colorado and Rudolph W. Giuliani in New York; Mr. Giuliani was also told by an Atlanta…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel, set off political reverberations last year when he unveiled a lengthy indictment of an analyst he accused of lying to the F.B.I. about sources for the so-called Steele dossier, a discredited compendium of political opposition research about purported ties between Donald J. Trump and Russia. But the trial of the analyst, Igor Danchenko, which opens on Tuesday with jury selection in federal court in Alexandria, Va., now appears…

Read More Read More

Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project: A Russian businessman whose affairs were the subject of a recent OCCRP investigation was shot and badly injured in a parking lot in a small town in Quebec, Canada, on Friday afternoon. His shooting is expected to widen a cross-border investigation into a fake charity and a woman who masqueraded as a Rothschild at former U.S. President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. Police in Estėrel, a sleepy resort town in the French-speaking province, continue investigating…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: Late last year, as the National Archives ratcheted up the pressure on former President Donald J. Trump to return boxes of records he had taken from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago club, he came up with an idea to resolve the looming showdown: cut a deal. Mr. Trump, still determined to show he had been wronged by the F.B.I. investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia, was angry with the National Archives and…

Read More Read More

John Nichols writes: President Joe Biden on Thursday granted “a full, complete, and unconditional pardon” to every American who has been convicted under federal law for simple possession of marijuana. It was a responsible, necessary, and incredibly popular move. More than 70 percent of Americans favor expungement of the records of those with marijuana convictions, according to 2020 polling data compiled by YouGov.com. At a time when Republicans candidates are attacking Democrats for supporting criminal justice reform, this is a…

Read More Read More

J. Michael Luttig writes: The Supreme Court will decide before next summer the most important case for American democracy in the almost two and a half centuries since America’s founding. In Moore v. Harper, the Court will finally resolve whether there is a doctrine of constitutional interpretation known as the “independent state legislature.” If the Court concludes that there is such a doctrine, it would confer on state legislatures plenary, exclusive, and judicially unreviewable power both to redraw congressional districts…

Read More Read More

Bloomberg reports: Former President Donald Trump publicly said that one reason that the FBI found boxes of classified documents improperly stored at his Florida estate was that federal workers had packed up the White House after his 2020 defeat. But documents obtained by Bloomberg News under a Freedom of Information Act request suggest a different story. More than 100 pages of emails and shipping lists between White House and transition staff and the US General Services Administration describe the minutiae…

Read More Read More

The Washington Post reports: Aides who had worked in Donald Trump’s White House were not surprised this summer when the FBI found highly classified material in boxes at Mar-a-Lago, mixed with news clippings and other items. They’d seen such haphazard collections before. During his four years in office, Trump never strictly followed the rules and customs for handling sensitive government documents, according to 14 officials from his administration, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss what…

Read More Read More

Politico reports: Election officials are growing concerned about a new danger in November: that groups looking to undermine election results will try to install their supporters as poll workers. The frontline election workers do everything from checking people in at voting locations to helping process mail ballots — in other words, they are the face of American elections for most voters. And now, some prominent incidents involving poll workers have worried election officials that a bigger wave of trouble could…

Read More Read More