Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: Two separate New York State fraud investigations into President Trump and his businesses, one criminal and one civil, have expanded to include tax write-offs on millions of dollars in consulting fees, some of which appear to have gone to Ivanka Trump, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The inquiries — a criminal investigation by the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., and a civil one by the state attorney general, Letitia James…

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Matt Naham writes: There’s a big difference between a) waving around a stack of affidavits in a safe space and b) bringing your claims before a judge. We saw that difference on Tuesday in the Trump campaign’s case in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. President Donald Trump has repeatedly and falsely said from the get-go that he “won Pennsylvania by a lot.” Now that the election has been called for Joe Biden, lawyers for the president’s campaign and the Republican National Committee—some…

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ProPublica reports: A hearing on Wednesday in an election case captured in miniature the challenge for the Trump campaign as it gears up for what could become an all-out legal assault on presidential election results in key swing states: It’s easy enough to file a lawsuit claiming improprieties — in this case, that Pennsylvania had violated the law by allowing voters whose mail-in ballots were defective to correct them — but a lot harder to provide evidence of wrongdoing or…

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Joshua A. Geltzer writes: Even as President Trump falsely claimed electoral victory early Wednesday morning, he implicitly acknowledged that the election results are not, in fact, decided yet by pledging to go to court to obtain the result he wants — reelection. But going to court requires making actual legal arguments. And, for all of the complex election-related legal questions that might still arise as the votes are counted, none of the claims Trump made on Wednesday morning qualifies as…

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USA Today reports: The U.S. Postal Service blew a court-ordered deadline Tuesday to sweep mail-processing facilities in more than a dozen states for missing election ballots that could number in the hundreds of thousands. U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington ordered the sweep Tuesday morning after the Postal Service said its delivery performance had dropped over the past five days and could not say whether more than 300,000 ballots received in its facilities had been delivered. The sweep…

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The New York Times reports: Geoffrey S. Berman was outraged. The top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, Mr. Berman had traveled to Washington in June 2019 to discuss a particularly delicate case with Attorney General William P. Barr and some of his top aides: a criminal investigation into Halkbank, a state-owned Turkish bank suspected of violating U.S. sanctions law by funneling billions of dollars of gold and cash to Iran. For months, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey had been pressing…

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Reuters reports: The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday handed a setback to Republicans by declining to quickly decide whether to hear their latest bid to overturn a lower court’s ruling that extended Pennsylvania’s deadline to receive mail-in ballots in next Tuesday’s election. The justices declined to expedite their consideration of the request by the Republican Party of Pennsylvania to hear and decide before the election its appeal of a ruling by the state’s top court ordering officials to count mail-in…

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In an editorial, the New York Times says: What happened in the Senate chamber on Monday evening was, on its face, the playing out of a normal, well-established process of the American constitutional order: the confirmation of a president’s nominee to the Supreme Court. But Senate Republicans, who represent a minority of the American people, are straining the legitimacy of the court by installing a deeply conservative jurist, Amy Coney Barrett, to a lifetime seat just days before an election…

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Richard L. Hasen writes: If [Amy Coney] Barrett does not recuse herself from election disputes next month, there’s every reason to worry that a 5-4 court could interfere in the election to help Trump if a case that might swing the outcome gets before the court. So why not panic about all of this? Mainly because, as both Jonathan Lai and Greg Sargent explained on Tuesday, the chances of the election being decided by the Supreme Court are very slim….

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The Washington Post reports: Twenty former U.S. attorneys — all of them Republicans — on Tuesday publicly called President Trump “a threat to the rule of law in our country,” and urged that he be replaced in November with his Democratic opponent, former vice president Joe Biden. “The President has clearly conveyed that he expects his Justice Department appointees and prosecutors to serve his personal and political interests,” said the former prosecutors in an open letter. They accused Trump of…

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The Daily Beast reports: The FBI has failed to produce a legally required report detailing the scope of white supremacist and other domestic terrorism, despite mounting concerns that the upcoming election could spark far-right violence. According to a key House committee chairman, that leaves the country in the dark about what the FBI concedes is America’s most urgent terrorist threat, as well as the resources the U.S. government is devoting to fight it. In June, the bureau was supposed to…

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Jamie Crooks and Samir Deger-Sen write: The current court is, despite occasional hand-wringing on the right over a decision or two, the most conservative this nation has had in nearly a century. Yet each time it has delivered significant conservative victories — such as Citizens United, which struck down key campaign finance limits, written by our former boss in 2010 — liberals accepted the outcome as the law of the land. But it is wrong to think that such acquiescence…

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Star Tribune reports: In the wake of protests following the May 25 killing of George Floyd, a member of the Boogaloo Bois opened fire on the Minneapolis Police Third Precinct with an AK-47-style gun and screamed “Justice for Floyd” as he ran away, according to a federal complaint made public Friday. A sworn affidavit by the FBI underlying the complaint reveals new details about a far-right anti-government group’s coordinated role in the violence that roiled through civil unrest over Floyd’s…

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CNN reports: The doomsday scenario of lawyers and judges setting surprise terms for voting or even deciding the election this year has loomed large. Yet that likelihood is diminishing by the day, several elections law experts say, with the terms for voting already essentially set in many states and a calm coming over the courts in pre-Election Day litigation. The focus on courts has been extreme at times this year, especially with President Donald Trump pushing for the confirmation of…

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