Attention to the Unseen

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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Jamelle Bouie writes: A new vacancy on the Supreme Court means a new round of political theater over the beliefs and qualifications of the president’s eventual nominee. But what does it mean for a Supreme Court justice to be “qualified”? The Constitution is silent on the question, and there’s not much to take from the framers either. To the extent that “qualified” means anything to most people, it’s that the nominee has ample experience on the bench, a standard in…

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Jesse Wegman writes: Even if you are a political junkie, there’s a good chance you didn’t realize that the United States Constitution grew 58 words longer this week. Those words, which begin, “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex,” are the text of the Equal Rights Amendment. Section 3 of the amendment states that it takes effect two years after its ratification, which…

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Jack Shafer writes: Everybody is two-faced about the Supreme Court. First, they fuss about the court having become a venue for politics. This was the position Justice Sonia Sotomayor took last month. Someone who votes reliably with the minority of justices who were appointed by Democratic presidents, she received a chorus of hallelujahs from her comrades when she worried aloud during oral arguments in an abortion case that if the court did not decide her way in the case, the…

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The New York Times reports: Attention quickly turned on Wednesday to Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as one of a small number of likely options who could fulfill President Biden’s pledge to nominate the first Black woman to the Supreme Court, after the disclosure that Justice Stephen G. Breyer has decided to retire. Judge Jackson, 51, already successfully went through the Senate confirmation process last year, when Mr. Biden elevated her from the Federal District Court in the District of Columbia…

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CNN reports: The San Jose, California, city council voted Tuesday night to adopt a first-in-the-nation ordinance requiring most gun owners to pay a fee and carry liability insurance, measures aimed at reducing the risk of gun harm by incentivizing safer behavior and easing taxpayers of the financial burden of gun violence. The council in the Silicon Valley city split the vote into two parts: the first approving the bulk of the proposal, including the insurance provisions, and the second approving…

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The New York Times reports: The National Archives has turned over to the House select committee investigating the assault on the Capitol last Jan. 6 a large batch of documents that former President Donald J. Trump had sought to keep out of the panel’s hands, citing executive privilege. The committee has yet to make the documents public or disclose how far along it is in scrutinizing them for any new information about the roles played by Mr. Trump and his…

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