Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, will bring fresh perspectives to the job if she is confirmed. She may serve for decades. But there is little reason to think she can do much to alter the court’s conservative trajectory in the short term. Her replacement of Justice Stephen G. Breyer would substitute a liberal for a liberal and would do nothing to shift the basic dynamic of the current court, which is…

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Politico reports: The North Carolina attorney general’s office says a constitutional prohibition on insurrectionists seeking federal office could be applied to GOP Rep. Madison Cawthorn if a state board determines he aided or encouraged the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. In a late Monday court filing, state attorneys said a provision of the 14th Amendment — disqualifying insurrectionists from holding federal office — is not a defunct Civil War-era relic meant to apply only to former Confederates but…

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The Guardian reports: A massive leak from one of the world’s biggest private banks, Credit Suisse, has exposed the hidden wealth of clients involved in torture, drug trafficking, money laundering, corruption and other serious crimes. Details of accounts linked to 30,000 Credit Suisse clients all over the world are contained in the leak, which unmasks the beneficiaries of more than 100bn Swiss francs (£80bn)* held in one of Switzerland’s best-known financial institutions. The leak points to widespread failures of due…

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Michael Conway writes: Mazars USA LLP, the longtime accounting firm for the Trump Organization, has a new role: star witness in New York Attorney General Letitia James’ civil investigation into whether Trump’s company engaged in fraud. Mazars has some explaining to do. And none of it bodes well for the Trump Organization. On Monday, James made public a bombshell letter from Mazars dated Feb. 9 warning that 10 years of the “Statements of Financial Condition for Donald J. Trump” ending…

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The Daily Beast reports: Predictably, Donald Trump wants you to think his longtime accounting firm’s decision to ditch the Trump Organization last week is no big deal. In fact, he would like you to not think about it at all. But that hasn’t stopped members of his inner sanctum from wondering if the highly publicized investigations in New York could actually be what ultimately torches the ex-president’s sprawling family business. Which is why after accounting firm Mazars USA dropped the…

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Charlie Savage writes: When John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel investigating the inquiry into Russia’s 2016 election interference, filed a pretrial motion on Friday night, he slipped in a few extra sentences that set off a furor among right-wing outlets about purported spying on former President Donald J. Trump. But the entire narrative appeared to be mostly wrong or old news — the latest example of the challenge created by a barrage of similar conspiracy theories from Mr. Trump…

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The New York Times reports: Donald J. Trump’s longtime accounting firm cut ties with him and his family business last week amid ongoing criminal and civil investigations into whether Mr. Trump illegally inflated the value of his assets, court documents filed on Monday show. In a letter to the Trump Organization on Feb. 9, the accounting firm notified the company of its decision and disclosed that it could no longer stand behind annual financial statements it prepared for Mr. Trump….

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David Corn writes: The latest Donald Trump scandal is about as surprising as finding mold on pizza left in the fridge for a month. A few days ago, the Washington Post revealed that when Trump vacated the White House he took 15 boxes of presidential documents and other items with him. That was a possible violation of the Presidential Records Act, which requires the preservation of all documents—memos, letters, notes, emails—related to a president’s official duties. It was enacted in…

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The New York Times reports: The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has discovered gaps in official White House telephone logs from the day of the riot, finding few records of calls by President Donald J. Trump from critical hours when investigators know that he was making them. Investigators have not uncovered evidence that any official records were tampered with or deleted, and it is well known that Mr. Trump used his personal cellphone, and those…

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CBC reports: For nearly two weeks anti-vaccine mandate demonstrators and their big rigs have entrenched themselves in Ottawa’s parliamentary district and its neighbourhoods. Despite a strategic strike by police to cut off supplies to truckers encamped in the city’s downtown core, protesters appear to still have the upper hand on police. It’s a success that experts partly attribute to the deep knowledge of law enforcement and military tactics that exist in the convoy’s organizational structure. The group Police on Guard,…

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Politico reports: Prosecutors late Monday began laying out their trial strategy for Jan. 6 cases in the clearest detail yet, indicating they intend to call multiple Capitol Police officers, a former Senate aide, a member of the Three Percenters militia who was granted immunity and the Secret Service agent who helped supervise then-Vice President Mike Pence’s visit to the Capitol that day. Prosecutors revealed their proposed witness list in the case of Guy Reffitt, a Texas man who was charged…

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Chris Geidner writes: President Joe Biden’s judges are different. Not only are they different from those of President Donald Trump, but Biden’s judicial nominees are different from those of any president before him. In three ways, the first year of Biden’s judicial selections tells an important story about the effect the president is looking to have on the judiciary — a story that provides the clearest available information about how Biden will likely choose his first Supreme Court nominee. First,…

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NBC News reports: Chinese spying in the U.S. has become so widespread that the FBI is launching an average of two counterintelligence investigations a day to counter the onslaught, FBI Director Christopher Wray said in an interview. Wray has become the U.S. government’s most outspoken critic of the Chinese government’s spying. In an exclusive NBC News interview, he said the sheer scale of Chinese efforts to steal U.S. technology shocked him when he became FBI director in 2017. “This one…

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Bruce Ackerman and Gerard Magliocca write: Donald Trump is already signaling that he will run for president in 2024. A Biden-Trump rematch risks worsening our country’s already deep divisions. But there’s more to be worried about: The next election will provoke a genuine constitutional crisis, unless decisive steps are taken soon to prevent it. Section 3 of the 14th Amendment — the Disqualification Clause — expressly bars any person from holding “any office, civil or military, under the United States”…

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The New York Times reports: Six weeks after Election Day, with his hold on power slipping, President Donald J. Trump directed his lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, to make a remarkable call. Mr. Trump wanted him to ask the Department of Homeland Security if it could legally take control of voting machines in key swing states, three people familiar with the matter said. Mr. Giuliani did so, calling the department’s acting deputy secretary, who said he lacked the authority to audit…

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