Attention to the Unseen

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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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The Washington Post reports: Former president Donald Trump asked one of his lawyers to tell the National Archives and Records Administration in early 2022 that Trump had returned all materials requested by the agency, but the lawyer declined because he was not sure the statement was true, according to people familiar with the matter. As it turned out, thousands more government documents — including some highly classified secrets — remained at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence and private club. The later discovery…

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Politico reports: A year after Amy Coney Barrett joined the Supreme Court, the boutique Indiana firm SouthBank Legal opened its first-ever Washington office in Penn Quarter, a move the firm hailed in a 2021 press release as an “important milestone.” The head of the office, Jesse M. Barrett, is the justice’s husband, whose work is described by the firm as “white-collar criminal defense, internal investigations, and complex commercial litigation.” SouthBank Legal — which lists fewer than 20 lawyers — has…

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The Guardian reports: On Monday, the nine justices of the US supreme court will take their seats at the start of a new judicial year, even as the shock waves of the panel’s previous seismic term continue to reverberate across America. In their first full term that ended in June, the court’s new six-to-three hard-right supermajority astounded the nation by tearing up decades of settled law. They eviscerated the right to an abortion, loosened America’s already lax gun laws, erected…

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