Attention to the Unseen

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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Paul Rosenzweig and Arthur Rizer write: Twenty years ago, Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist—not generally thought of as a radical liberal—said: “We can think of no better example of the police power, which the Founders denied the National Government and reposed in the States, than the suppression of violent crime and vindication of its victims.” Last week Attorney General William Barr went full interventionist, telling the press that he was deploying federal law-enforcement officers to Chicago and Albuquerque, New…

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David Cole writes: The mass protests spurred by George Floyd’s killing have been more sustained and widespread than any this country has seen before in response to police abuse. When the initial ones prompted even more police violence—officers driving cars into peaceful demonstrators or beating them with truncheons, using chemical agents and flash grenades to clear crowds for a presidential photo op, pepper-spraying young and old alike—the aggression, much of it captured on video, only inspired more people to join…

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Elizabeth Goitein writes: It doesn’t take a legal expert to know that what’s happening in Portland, Oregon is an abuse of power. When unidentified federal forces dressed as soldiers pull people off the streets into unmarked vans, something is gravely wrong. What’s less apparent is that this abuse is part of an ongoing effort by the administration to get around “posse comitatus”: the principle that the president cannot use the military as a domestic police force. The implications for the…

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  The New York Times reports: After flooding the streets around the federal courthouse in Portland with tear gas during Friday’s early morning hours, dozens of federal officers in camouflage and tactical gear stood in formation around the front of the building. Then, as one protester blared a soundtrack of “The Imperial March,” the officers started advancing. Through the acrid haze, they continued to fire flash grenades and welt-inducing marble-size balls filled with caustic chemicals. They moved down Main Street…

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Andrew Manuel Crespo writes: This past week, the Department of Homeland Security held a news conference to clear up a few things about the federal paramilitary police force grabbing protesters on the streets of Portland, Ore. If the goal was to reassure everyone that these armor-clad agents were acting lawfully, it did not go well. Instead the conference revealed, with painstaking clarity, a very big problem: The deputy director of President Trump’s new federal police force does not know what…

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Masha Gessen writes: In a press conference on Tuesday, Chad Wolf, the acting head of the Department of Homeland Security, responded to media reports that unidentified federal agents using unmarked vehicles have been arresting protesters in Portland, Oregon. Since early July, men in military-style uniforms have waged battle against protesters there, using tear gas and nonlethal munitions; video and photographs coming out of Portland have shown scenes of urban warfare, with what looks like a regular army moving on unarmed…

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