Attention to the Unseen

Politico reports: Donald Trump asked the country’s top legal official in late December about a conspiratorial draft complaint aimed at overturning the 2020 election results, according to a previously unreported account of Trump’s phone call with former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen. Rosen persuaded Trump the lawsuit wasn’t a good idea, he told Senate investigators last weekend, two sources familiar with his testimony said. The previously unreported details underscore how hard DOJ lawyers worked to shoot down the increasingly harebrained…

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Motherboard reports: On January 27, the pro-Trump channel OAN broadcast a segment interviewing an “expert mathematician” named Ed Solomon who claimed to have found evidence within precinct-level reporting that the election was rigged by an algorithm. The basis of Solomon’s claim is that he found several precincts throughout the country reporting exactly the same results at various times throughout the vote tabulation process. Asked by host Christina Bobb what the likelihood of what Solomon claimed to have found being a…

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The New York Times reports: Jeffrey A. Rosen, who was acting attorney general during the Trump administration, has told the Justice Department watchdog and congressional investigators that one of his deputies tried to help former President Donald J. Trump subvert the results of the 2020 election, according to a person familiar with the interviews. Mr. Rosen had a two-hour meeting on Friday with the Justice Department’s office of the inspector general and provided closed-door testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee…

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Molly Ball reports: It wasn’t a cop bar; that was the point. They weren’t there to meet other cops. They were there to meet girls. The three police officers took seats at the wine bar in D.C.’s trendy Navy Yard neighborhood—exposed concrete walls, leather banquettes, $13 tuna tartare—and despite its being a wine bar, despite the Wednesday night half-price-wine special, they ordered beers. May 12, 2021, was a balmy night, and dozens of newly vaccinated young urbanites mingled out on…

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Mike Ferrara, Shawn Crowley, and Magdalene Zier write: “All of them – all of them were telling us, ‘Trump sent us.” In harrowing, heart-wrenching testimony before a House select committee established to investigate the events of Jan. 6, U.S. Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino A. Gonell and his Capitol Police and D.C. Metropolitan Police Department colleagues described last week how those they witnessed violently breaching the Capitol explicitly pointed to then-President Donald Trump’s role in causing the insurrection. Although the court…

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Politico reports: Former President Donald Trump pressured top Justice Department officials to publicly call the 2020 election “illegal” and “corrupt” and “leave the rest to me,” according to handwritten notes released by a House committee on Friday. The notes, written by former acting Deputy Attorney General Richard P. Donoghue, shine additional light on the Trump’s unprecedented effort to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory during his waning days in office, based on false claims of fraud. Donoghue’s notes detail a Dec….

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The Associated Press reports: The Justice Department says the Treasury Department must provide the House Ways and Means Committee former President Donald Trump’s tax returns, apparently ending a long legal showdown over the records. During the Trump administration, then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said he wouldn’t turn over the tax returns because he concluded they were being sought by Democrats who control the House of Representatives for partisan reasons. The committee sued for the records under a federal law that says…

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Norman Eisen, Claire Finkelstein and Richard Painter write: This week, Tom Barrack, who was the chair of Donald J. Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee, was charged with multiple crimes, including conspiracy to act as an unregistered agent of a foreign government. The prosecution is a welcome first step to rein in both foreign lobbying generally and the corruption seemingly surrounding the former president specifically, but much more is needed on both counts. Barrack allegedly tried to influence Trump’s 2016 campaign and…

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Politico reports: A federal judge has handed down the first felony sentence in the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol, sending a Tampa man to prison for eight months for obstructing Congress’ effort to tabulate and certify the electoral vote. The sentence Paul Hodgkins, 38, received Monday for marching onto the Senate floor with a Trump flag during the chaotic Capitol takeover was less than half of what prosecutors recommended, but U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss also declined the…

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The Daily Beast reports: A witness in the New York investigation against the Trump Organization has told prosecutors that Donald Trump personally guaranteed he would cover school costs for the family members of two employees in lieu of a raise—directly implicating the former president in an ongoing criminal tax fraud case. The explosive claims come from Jennifer Weisselberg, the ex-wife of a longtime company employee, during a teleconference call with investigators on Friday, June 25, according to two sources who…

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Politico reports: The legal reckoning for attorneys who pushed former President Donald Trump’s spurious claims of election fraud advanced on Monday, with a federal court in Detroit holding a hearing on whether to impose sanctions over a suit filed last year seeking to decertify Joe Biden’s victory in Michigan and declare Trump the winner. Two of the most prominent attorneys in the pro-Trump camp — Dallas-based Sidney Powell and Atlanta-based L. Lin Wood — are among the lawyers who brought…

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Ankush Khardori writes: You could be forgiven if you experienced a vague sense of bewilderment after the Trump Organization and Allen Weisselberg were charged, depending on what you were reading and watching in the days that preceded it. Just that week, some prominent legal commentators had suggested that Trump himself might be charged (despite days of reporting indicating otherwise), that the charges would extend beyond the tax-fraud scheme that is reportedly at issue (and ultimately alleged), or that the Trump…

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Vanity Fair reports: When we last checked in with Rudy Giuliani, things weren’t looking so hot for Donald Trump’s former personal attorney. Aside from having gone from “America’s mayor” to “what the hell happened to that guy”—which is a big aside!—Giuliani was facing a whole bunch of very serious legal issues including but not limited to: his apartment and office being raided as part of a criminal investigation into his Ukraine dealings; a Justice Department probe of his work involving…

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