Attention to the Unseen

Insider reports: One morning in October 2017, Allison Guerriero noticed something unusual on the floor of her boyfriend’s Park Slope, Brooklyn, apartment: a bag full of cash. There it was, lying next to his shoes, near the futon, the kind of bag that liquor stores give out. Inside were bundles of bills, big denominations bound up with rubber bands. It didn’t seem like something he should be carrying around. After all, her boyfriend, Charles F. McGonigal, held one of the…

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Zak Cheney-Rice writes: The crisis in Memphis is the latest lesson in how limited the most popular reforms are, including those that might have seemed like game-changers not so long ago. Body cameras may have given us visual evidence of Nichols’s deathly beating, but were no deterrent. The federal response is already assuming a familiar shape. “To deliver real change, we must have accountability when law enforcement officers violate their oaths,” wrote Biden on Thursday, years after the criminal convictions…

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Rolling Stone reports: In the final moments of Brandon Bernard’s life, before he was executed by lethal injection at a federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, on Dec. 10, 2020, President Donald Trump picked up the phone to entertain a final plea for mercy on Bernard’s behalf. The call was not with Bernard’s family or his attorneys. Nor was it with representatives from the Justice Department’s Pardon Attorney office, who had recommended just days earlier that Trump spare Bernard’s life….

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CNN reports: The Supreme Court did not disclose its longstanding financial ties with former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff even as it touted him as an expert who independently validated its investigation into who leaked the draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. The court’s inquiry, released last week with Chertoff’s endorsement, failed to identify who was responsible for the unprecedented leak. The decision to keep the relationship with Chertoff quiet is a reflection of a pattern of opacity at the…

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The New York Times reports: By summer 2020, it was clear that the hunt for evidence supporting Mr. Barr’s hunch about intelligence abuses had failed. But he waited until after the 2020 election to publicly concede that there had turned out to be no sign of “foreign government activity” and that the C.I.A. had “stayed in its lane” after all. On one of Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham’s trips to Europe, according to people familiar with the matter, Italian officials…

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In a 20-tweet thread, Timothy Snyder outlines the timeline and connections that now scream out for further investigation following the indictment of Charles McGonigal, the former Special Agent in Charge (“SAC”) of FBI’s Counterintelligence Division in New York: In April 2016, I broke the story of Trump and Putin, using Russian open sources. Afterwards, I heard vague intimations that something was awry in the FBI in New York, specifically counter-intelligence and cyber. We now have a suggestion as to why….

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Politico reports: Rep. George Santos’ congressional campaign reported dozens of transactions just cents below the threshold that would have triggered a requirement to preserve spending records — an unusual spending pattern that is now part of broader complaints about alleged financial improprieties. Santos, who admitted in December that he faked parts of his biography, already faces a complaint filed with the Federal Election Commission alleging his campaign repeatedly reported suspicious expenses. Those included eight charges of exactly $199.99 at an…

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The Washington Post reports: The National Archives is weighing whether to ask living former presidents and vice presidents to review their personal records to verify that no classified materials are inadvertently outstanding, according to two people familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to detail private conversations. The deliberation comes after the discovery and return of a limited number of records bearing classified markings in recent weeks at President Biden’s home and a think tank bearing…

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The New York Times reports: A former high-level F.B.I. official has been indicted in New York and Washington, D.C., on charges of taking money from a former foreign intelligence service agent and conspiring to violate U.S. sanctions on Russia by taking secret payments from a Russian oligarch, Oleg V. Deripaska, the authorities said on Monday. The former official, Charles McGonigal, who had been the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s counterintelligence division in New York before he retired in…

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The New York Times reports: Last spring and summer, employees of the Supreme Court were drawn into an investigation that turned into an uncomfortable awakening. As the court marshal’s office looked into who had leaked the draft opinion of the decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion, law clerks who had secured coveted perches at the top of the judiciary scrambled for legal advice and navigated quandaries like whether to surrender their personal cellphones to investigators. The “court family” soon…

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The New York Times reports: In a scathing ruling, a federal judge in Florida on Thursday ordered Donald J. Trump and one of his lawyers together to pay nearly a million dollars in sanctions for filing a frivolous lawsuit against nearly three dozen of Mr. Trump’s perceived political enemies, including Hillary Clinton and the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey. The ruling was a significant rebuke of Mr. Trump, who has rarely faced such consequences in his long history of…

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CNBC reports: Each of the Supreme Court’s justices was questioned — some of them multiple times — as part of an investigation into last year’s leak of a draft opinion of the ruling that ended up overturning the court’s landmark Roe v. Wade abortion decision, the head of that probe revealed Friday. The statement came a day after the Supreme Court refused to say whether the justices were among the nearly 100 court staffers and clerks who were questioned in…

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