Attention to the Unseen

Mother Jones reports: San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin was at home cooking dinner on a Thursday evening in January when he opened a new app called Clubhouse that lets people drop into virtual “rooms” and listen to live, unrecorded conversations. Someone had messaged Boudin to let him know that tech investors were hosting an “interesting” conversation about the “Future of SF.” As he prepared his food, some of them were speaking critically about San Francisco’s liberal political leaders. Soon,…

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The Daily Beast reports: A sheriff’s deputy who went to law school but remained a cop for another two decades. A prosecutor best known for tackling juvenile offenders. And the guy who literally wrote the book on racketeering cases against mafia goons. This is the team Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is assembling to investigate Donald Trump—to go after his advisers and their attempts to manipulate election results in Georgia. In interviews with Willis, her staff, five former members…

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HuffPost reports: For years, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has been a lonely voice in the Senate on the need to put people with all kinds of different legal backgrounds into lifetime federal judgeships. “We face a federal bench that has a striking lack of diversity,” she said at a 2014 event on this topic, hosted by Alliance for Justice, a progressive judicial advocacy group. “President Obama has supported some notable exceptions but … the president’s nominees have thus far been…

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USA Today reports: Charges against police officers, public safety workers and military veterans in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol have reignited concerns among lawmakers and law enforcement officials about violent extremists infiltrating government agencies. Out of 324 arrests in the Capitol riot so far, 43 are current or former first responders or military veterans, according to USA TODAY analysis. At least four police officers and three former officers face federal charges. Two have been fired, one resigned and…

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The Intercept reports: As the Biden administration turns its attention to an infrastructure system beset with problems, a strange new issue has emerged: conspiracy theorists. That’s according to a detailed intelligence report, produced by the New York Police Department and obtained by The Intercept, which finds that cellphone towers and other critical infrastructure have become an attractive target for conspiracy theorists, especially in the weeks and months following the presidential election. Conspiracy theorists, joined by far-right white supremacist groups, “increasingly…

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The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports: Frustrated that their successes were limited to the loyal underlings who committed crimes and not the Mafia bosses who orchestrated them, prosecutors developed legal remedies that allowed them to go after the Vito Corleones of the world in addition to the Luca Brasis. Now, nearly 50 years into their existence, it’s not just organized crime figures who find themselves ensnared by the widening reach of racketeering laws. [Continue reading…]

CNBC reports: Civil rights and activist groups are turning up the pressure on large Georgia companies like Coca-Cola and Delta Airlines to oppose sweeping voting restrictions proposed by Republican state legislators. “We’ve got the power of organized people. They’ve got the power of organized money. And between us and them, we could put pressure on these legislators or, worst case scenario, the governor to kill these bills,” Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, told CNBC. Groups including Black Voters…

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The New York Times reports: A protester was burning an American flag outside the 2016 Republican convention in Cleveland when Joseph Biggs rushed to attack. Jumping a police line, he ripped the man’s shirt off and “started pounding,” he boasted that night in an online video. But the local police charged the flag burner with assaulting Mr. Biggs. The city later paid $225,000 to settle accusations that the police had falsified their reports out of sympathy with Mr. Biggs, who…

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Politico reports: A Texas man who joined a mob at the Capitol on Jan. 6 told two rioters he had set up a security company as a front to access law enforcement-grade weaponry that could be used to “take back our country,” according to private, encrypted messages revealed Saturday by prosecutors. Guy Reffitt, who drove from Texas to Washington, D.C., also said in recorded conversations that he and others were carrying firearms during the siege of the Capitol. He also…

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Jane Mayer writes: On February 22nd, in an office in White Plains, two lawyers handed over a hard drive to a Manhattan Assistant District Attorney, who, along with two investigators, had driven up from New York City in a heavy snowstorm. Although the exchange didn’t look momentous, it set in motion the next phase of one of the most significant legal showdowns in American history. Hours earlier, the Supreme Court had ordered former President Donald Trump to comply with a…

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HuffPost reports: John Dean, the White House counsel to President Richard M. Nixon who was once dubbed the “master manipulator” of the Watergate scandal, says he knows legal trouble and former President Donald Trump is in it deep. Dean shared a report on former Trump personal attorney Michael Cohen, who has been meeting with the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which is investigating Trump for potential fraud, including tax fraud. It was Cohen’s seventh meeting with the DA’s office. Dean pointed…

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The Associated Press reports: New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s grip on power appeared increasingly threatened Thursday as a majority of state legislators called for his resignation, Democrats launched an impeachment investigation and police in the state capital said they stood ready to investigate a groping allegation. The firestorm around the Democrat grew a day after the Times Union of Albany reported that an unidentified aide had claimed Cuomo reached under her shirt and fondled her at his official residence late…

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