Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: Federal prosecutors investigating former President Donald J. Trump’s handling of national security documents he took with him from the White House have ratcheted up their pressure in recent weeks on key witnesses in the hopes of gaining their testimony, according to two people briefed on the matter. The effort by the Justice Department shows how the investigation is entering a new phase as prosecutors seek to push recalcitrant witnesses to cooperate with them. A key…

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Dana Milbank writes: If the midterm elections degenerate into chaos in a couple of weeks — a very real possibility — then Nevada is poised to lead the way. Indeed, the chaos here has already begun. The election supervisors in 10 of the state’s 17 counties have already quit, been forced out or announced their departures. Lower-level election workers have quit in the face of consistent abuse. The state’s elections staff has lost eight of its 12 employees. The (Republican)…

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The Washington Post reports: Some of the classified documents recovered by the FBI from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home and private club included highly sensitive intelligence regarding Iran and China, according to people familiar with the matter. If shared with others, the people said, such information could expose intelligence-gathering methods that the United States wants to keep hidden from the world. At least one of the documents seized by the FBI describes Iran’s missile program, according to these people, who spoke…

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The Associated Press reports: The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol formally issued its extraordinary subpoena o Donald Trump on Friday, demanding testimony from the former president who lawmakers say “personally orchestrated” a multi-part effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The nine-member panel issued a letter to Trump’s lawyers saying he must testify, either at the Capitol or by videoconference, “beginning on or about” Nov. 14 and continuing for multiple days if…

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The New York Times reports: Former President Donald J. Trump is claiming that nine documents seized by the F.B.I. from his Florida residence are his personal property — but the Justice Department says they are official records that should be deposited with the National Archives, according to a new letter to the special master who is overseeing a review of the materials. The letter, filed on Thursday by the Justice Department, describes disputes over ownership and executive privilege claims involving…

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Jane Mayer writes: A powerful new litigant has joined one of the most momentous cases slated to be heard by the Supreme Court this term. The respondents in the case of Moore v. Harper filed a brief today that included a surprising new signatory: J. Michael Luttig, who has been known for years as perhaps the most conservative Republican judge in the country. Now, though, he has joined a coalition of veteran lawyers and nonpartisan government-watchdog groups who are fighting…

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Rolling Stone reports: Marjorie Taylor Greene was privately pressuring former Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler to get on board with the effort to overturn the 2020 election, text messages obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reveal. The leaked trove of texts show that before losing to current Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock in a Jan. 5, 2021 runoff, Loeffler was repeatedly pressured by Republicans to join Trump’s efforts to manipulate the certification of Electoral College votes that would finalize President Joe Biden’s election….

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Politico reports: Former President Donald Trump signed legal documents describing evidence of election fraud that he knew were false, a federal judge indicated on Wednesday. U.S. District Court Judge David Carter wrote in an 18-page opinion that emails from attorney John Eastman, an architect of Trump’s last-ditch effort to subvert the 2020 election, needed to be turned over to the Jan. 6 select committee. Those emails, Carter wrote, “show that President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud…

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Jonathan Chait writes: John Durham’s latest, and presumably final, humiliation is the capstone of his failed attempt to prove a conspiracy theory that has long been accepted as settled fact in the conservative universe. This theory holds that, in 2016, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or James Comey (or maybe all of them — the mastermind changes in different iterations) devised a plot to smear Donald Trump by ginning up an FBI investigation into his completely innocent and superficial connections to…

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Politico reports: The Justice Department is recommending a six-month jail sentence and $200,000 fine for Steve Bannon, the longtime adviser to Donald Trump who defied a subpoena to the Jan. 6 select committee. Prosecutors said Bannon, from the moment he received the select committee subpoena on Sept. 2021, “has pursued a bad-faith strategy of defiance and contempt.” A jury found Bannon guilty in July on two misdemeanor counts of contempt of Congress for refusing to testify and provide documents to…

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Norman Eisen, Danielle Brian and E. Danya Perry write: On Thursday, in what was probably its final public hearing before the election, the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol revealed new details about former President Donald Trump. Those details included Secret Service records documenting his determination to join a mob he knew was armed and headed for violence. The hearings have provided an indispensable record of an attempted coup that failed but that, as Representative Liz…

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The Washington Post reports: A former top aide to Vice President Mike Pence returned before a grand jury Thursday to testify in a criminal probe of efforts to overturn the 2020 election after federal courts overruled President Donald Trump’s objections to the testimony, according to people familiar with the matter. In a sealed decision that could clear the way for other top Trump White House officials to answer questions before a grand jury, Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell…

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David Rothkopf writes: The real culmination of the inquiry must be left to the Sphinx-like Department of Justice, whose silence might reveal its commitment to the secrecy that should surround an historically significant investigation. Or that silence might be followed by inaction. We just cannot know at this point, even though the Jan. 6 committee’s revelations made it clear that inaction in the face of the evidence that exists would be one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in U.S….

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The New York Times reports: A veteran F.B.I. counterintelligence agent testified on Thursday that the Trump Justice Department’s decision in 2020 to release sensitive documents about a bureau informant to a Senate committee examining the bureau’s Russia investigation had damaged national security. The agent told jurors at the trial of Igor Danchenko, who is charged with lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation about matters related to the anti-Trump Steele dossier, that Mr. Danchenko, a Russia analyst, had provided extraordinary…

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