Attention to the Unseen

CNN reports: Senior officials throughout various departments and agencies of the Trump administration tell CNN they are alarmed at White House pressure to grant what would essentially be a no-bid contract to lease the Department of Defense’s mid-band spectrum — premium real estate for the booming and lucrative 5G market — to Rivada Networks, a company in which prominent Republicans and supporters of President Donald Trump have investments. The pressure campaign to fast track Rivada’s “Request for Proposal” (RFP) by…

Read More Read More

Ellen L. Weintraub, a commissioner on the Federal Election Commission, writes: Among many other recent developments not likely on anyone’s 2020 bingo card, a Supreme Court decision about foreign aid and legalized prostitution has shattered perceived constraints on the authority of the United States to robustly defend its elections against foreign interference. This summer, in U.S. Agency for International Development v. Alliance for Open Society International, the Supreme Court, in a 5-to-3 decision, with the majority opinion written by Justice…

Read More Read More

The Daily Beast reports: The FBI is investigating the purloined laptop materials from Joe Biden’s son as part of a possible foreign disinformation operation, a congressional source told The Daily Beast—an investigation at odds with a statement from President Trump’s director of national intelligence. John Ratcliffe, the director of national intelligence, told Fox Business on Monday that the dissemination of materials from Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop was not part of a Russian disinformation campaign. “The intelligence community doesn’t believe that…

Read More Read More

The Associated Press reports: Six current and former Russian military officers sought to disrupt through computer hacking the French election, the Winter Olympics and U.S. hospitals and businesses, according to a Justice Department indictment unsealed Monday. It details destructive attacks on a broad range of targets and implicates the same Kremlin unit that interfered in the 2016 U.S. election. The indictment accuses the defendants, all said to be officers in the Russian military agency known as the GRU, in hacks…

Read More Read More

Politico reports: He’s mused out loud about an embarrassing 2020 defeat. He’s acknowledged his severe deficit in key polls. And he’s made naked appeals to the critical voting blocs of suburban women and older adults — two demographics he has struggled to win over. Just weeks from Election Day, President Donald Trump is saying the quiet part out loud about his own campaign. The president is crisscrossing the country with a packed schedule, flying to some states he won handily…

Read More Read More

Politico reports: As news of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death rippled across Washington on the evening of Sept. 18, some of President Donald Trump’s conservative allies likened the sudden Supreme Court vacancy to an eleventh-hour bailout. Besieged by slipping poll numbers and new accusations that he misled Americans about the dangers of Covid-19, Trump — and his closest aides and allies — saw a Republican-led confirmation fight as a welcome detour to galvanize his base in the final month before…

Read More Read More

Donald B. Ayer and Alan Charles Raul write: When a vacancy on the Supreme Court arose nine months ahead of the election in 2016, Sen. Mitch McConnell said in no uncertain terms: “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President.” Now, after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg less than two months before Election Day, as voters are…

Read More Read More

The Washington Post reports: Five years ago, Donald Trump promised to preserve more than 150 acres of rolling woodlands in an exclusive swath of New York suburbia prized for its luxury homes and rural tranquility. In exchange for setting aside this land on his estate known as Seven Springs, Trump received a tax break of $21.1 million, according to court documents. The size of Trump’s tax windfall was set by a 2016 appraisal that valued Seven Springs at $56.5 million — more…

Read More Read More

Jamelle Bouie writes: Much of the point of the Republican alliance with Donald Trump was to establish control over the federal judiciary as a whole and the Supreme Court in particular. The deal was simple: Republicans would support him and his agenda, such as it was. He would nominate a cadre of reliably conservative judges, handpicked by the Federalist Society and backed by groups like the Judicial Crisis Network, to lifetime positions on the federal bench, where they would write…

Read More Read More

Trump issued this command on April 17: LIBERATE MICHIGAN! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 17, 2020 The Detroit News reports: Federal agents said Thursday they thwarted a plot to violently overthrow the government and kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer — a conspiracy that included visits to her home in northern Michigan and training with explosive devices. The alleged plot involved conspirators who met during a Second Amendment rally at the Capitol in Lansing in June and reached out to…

Read More Read More

Bloomberg reports: Elliott Broidy, a former top political fundraiser for President Donald Trump and the Republican Party, has been charged as part of a wide-ranging federal probe into back-channel efforts to influence the Trump administration on behalf of foreign interests. Broidy participated in a scheme to illegally lobby the Trump administration to stop investigating the embezzlement scandal at the 1MDB Malaysian state investment fund, according to charging documents unsealed on Wednesday. Jho Low, a Malaysian fugitive who was charged as…

Read More Read More

Politico reports: Amy Coney Barrett hasn’t even arrived yet, but the Supreme Court has begun delivering its first big signals of how aggressive a role the court plans to play in setting the rules for next month’s election. The court stepped in Monday night to reinstate a South Carolina ballot witness requirement, even as a Pennsylvania dispute over late-arriving absentee ballots is now teed up for imminent emergency action by the justices. And another simmering fight over voting rules in…

Read More Read More

Quinta Jurecic and Susan Hennessey write: Barely a week after the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, before the late justice had even been buried, President Donald Trump hosted a Rose Garden ceremony to formally announce his nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to fill the open seat on the Supreme Court. A week later, it appears that the inauspicious ceremony may have been at the center of the coronavirus outbreak now plaguing the White House and the Senate. Yet even with…

Read More Read More