Attention to the Unseen

Politico reports: A former senior ethics official and lawyer on the National Security Council has filed a complaint with a Pentagon watchdog raising concerns that he was retaliated against for reporting that the national security adviser and his chief of staff “committed several ethics and legal compliance violations” late last year and into 2020. Lt. Col. Yevgeny Vindman, the twin brother of impeachment witness Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman (Ret.), filed the complaint on August 18, according to his attorneys and…

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The Washington Post reports: The New York attorney general is investigating President Trump’s private business for allegedly misleading lenders by inflating the value of its assets, the attorney general’s office said Monday in a legal filing. In the filing, signed by a deputy to Attorney General Letitia James, the attorney general’s office said it is investigating Trump’s use of “Statements of Financial Condition” — documents Trump sent to lenders, summarizing his assets and debts. The filing asks a New York…

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The Guardian reports: The attorney general, William Barr, told Rupert Murdoch to “muzzle” Andrew Napolitano, a prominent Fox News personality who became a critic of Donald Trump, according to a new book about the rightwing TV network. Barr’s meeting with Murdoch, at the media mogul’s New York home in October 2019, was widely reported at the time, with speculation surrounding its subject. According to Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth, by CNN media reporter Brian…

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Isaac Chotiner spoke to Bloomberg‘s Joshua Green about Steve Bannon and the federal criminal charges he now faces: When did you hear about the charges, and what do you make of them? I was actually out on a boat in the middle of a lake, and I looked at my phone and I had five texts that all said the same thing from different people: “Holy fuck, Bannon.” And I knew the moment had arrived when he had stepped in…

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The Intercept reports: President Donald Trump’s campaign, ordered by a federal court judge in Pennsylvania to back up its claims of fraud in the state’s vote-by-mail system, has documented only a handful of cases of election fraud in recent years — none of which involved mail-in ballots. The revelation, which came in the form of a partially redacted 524-page document produced by the Trump campaign last week, undermines the claim by Trump team operatives that mail-in ballot fraud is a…

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Barbara McQuade and Chuck Rosenberg write: Materiality appears to mean different things to the leadership of the Justice Department these days, depending on the defendant. An FBI lawyer named Kevin Clinesmith will reportedly soon plead guilty to a felony in federal district court. According to the charges filed against Clinesmith, he made a false statement to a colleague that was relayed to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, in connection with an FBI application to surveil Trump campaign foreign policy adviser…

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The New York Times reports: A former F.B.I. lawyer intends to plead guilty after he was charged with falsifying a document as part of a deal with prosecutors conducting their own criminal inquiry of the Russia investigation, according his lawyer and court documents made public on Friday. The lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, 38, who was assigned to the Russia investigation, plans to admit that he altered an email from the C.I.A. that investigators relied on to seek renewed court permission in…

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Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes: Early in the afternoon of Sunday, June 7th, nine members of the Minneapolis City Council appeared together on a stage in Powderhorn Park, masked and socially distanced. Demonstrations over the killing of George Floyd had been unfurling for nearly two weeks, and though the police commissioner had fired all four of the officers present during his death, and though the district attorney had indicted the police officer Derek Chauvin for murder, the protests had only grown more…

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NPR reports: The Attorney General of New York took action today to dissolve the National Rifle Association, following an 18-month investigation that found evidence the powerful gun rights group is “fraught with fraud and abuse.” Attorney General Letitia James claims in a lawsuit filed Thursday that she found financial misconduct in the millions of dollars, and that it contributed to a loss of more than $64 million over a three year period. The suit alleges that top NRA executives misused…

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The New York Times reports: The Manhattan district attorney’s office suggested on Monday that it has been investigating President Trump and his company for possible bank and insurance fraud, a significantly broader inquiry than the prosecutors have acknowledged in the past. The suggestion by the office of the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., came in a new federal court filing arguing that Mr. Trump’s accountants should have to comply with a subpoena seeking eight years of his personal and…

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Victoria Bassetti and Norman Eisen write: Of President Donald Trump’s many career skills, perhaps the least appreciated is his lifelong and uncanny ability to sniff out lawyers who will serve his will. In slightly more than 500 days in office, Attorney General William Barr has pivoted from establishment D.C. attorney—sworn to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States—into Trump’s family lawyer. The office of the attorney general is one of the oldest in our constitutional system, and the…

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Reuters reports: President Donald Trump on Thursday raised the idea of delaying the Nov. 3 U.S. elections, an idea immediately rejected by both Democrats and his fellow Republicans in Congress – the sole branch of government with the authority to make such a change. Critics and even Trump’s allies dismissed the notion as unserious and simply an attempt to distract from devastating economic news. Trump’s statement on Twitter comes as the United States is enduring the greatest crises of a…

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HuffPost reports: President Donald Trump’s campaign is violating federal election law by funneling close to a quarter-billion dollars to date through private companies in order to hide the ultimate recipients of the money, including the wife of one of his sons and the girlfriend of another, a watchdog group charged in a complaint filed Tuesday. “The money is being laundered through corporations run by top Trump campaign officials,” said Brendan Fischer, a lawyer with the Campaign Legal Center. “That has…

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