Attention to the Unseen

  The Washington Post reports: President Trump lashed out Tuesday morning at FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, suggesting that “he will never be able to fix the FBI” based on his reaction to a Justice Department inspector general’s report examining the bureau’s investigation of Trump’s 2016 campaign. “I don’t know what report current Director of the FBI Christopher Wray was reading, but it sure wasn’t the one given to me,” Trump tweeted. “With that kind of attitude, he will never…

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James Comey writes: For two years, the president of the United States and his followers have loudly declared that the FBI acted unlawfully in conducting a counterintelligence investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential campaign. They repeatedly told the American people that the FBI had done all sorts of bad things, such as tapping Donald Trump’s wires during the campaign, opening an investigation without adequate cause, with the intent to damage Trump, and inserting secret informants into the Trump…

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The New York Times reports: Attorney General William P. Barr sharply criticized on Monday the F.B.I.’s decision to open the Russia investigation, undercutting a major finding in a long-awaited watchdog report and at the same time showing his willingness to act as President Trump’s vocal defender. The report, by the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, found that the F.B.I. had adequate reason in 2016 to open an investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties with Russia. Mr. Horowitz did…

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The Washington Post reports: More than 500 legal scholars have signed on to an open letter asserting that President Trump committed “impeachable conduct” and that lawmakers would be acting well within their rights if they ultimately voted to remove him from office. The signers are law professors and other academics from universities across the country, including Harvard, Yale, Columbia, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Michigan and many others. The open letter was published online Friday by…

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Andrew Rice writes: Shortly before 5 p.m. on November 15, Attorney General William P. Barr arrived at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., his owlish face wearing a heavy expression. He and his entourage rushed by the lobby bar, where a television was tuned to CNN’s coverage of another day of damning impeachment hearings and raging presidential tweets. Inside a gilded ballroom, hundreds of conservative lawyers — many of them, like Barr, veterans of previous Republican administrations — were gathered…

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The Washington Post reports: Attorney General William P. Barr has told associates he disagrees with the Justice Department’s inspector general on one of the key findings in an upcoming report — that the FBI had enough information in July 2016 to justify launching an investigation into members of the Trump campaign, according to people familiar with the matter. The Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horo­witz, is due to release his long-awaited findings in a week, but behind the scenes at…

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CNBC reports: A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that Deutsche Bank and Capital One must hand over years of President Donald Trump’s financial records in compliance with House Democrats’ subpoenas. The ruling in the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals offers another judicial loss for Trump, who has fought off attempts to obtain his financial records, including his tax returns, through multiple lawsuits. The case is likely destined for the Supreme Court, where the president has already appealed…

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Lawfare‘s Scott R. Anderson, Margaret Taylor, Benjamin Wittes write: In the Ukraine affair, there is no Robert Mueller. There is no Kenneth Starr. If the House is going to get a detailed report on the conduct of President Trump with respect to Ukraine and the Biden family, it’s going to have to write that report itself. The House has authorized its intelligence committee to do just that. Under House Resolution 660, the Intelligence Committee “is directed to issue a report…

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The Washington Post reports: The federal investigation into two associates of Rudolph W. Giuliani is exploring a wide range of potential crimes — includingwire fraud and failure to register as a foreign agent — as prosecutors dig into the pair’s interactions with the president’s personal lawyer and the main pro-Trump super PAC, according to people familiar with the investigation. Giuliani’s dealings with the two men, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, are being investigated by federal prosecutors at the U.S. attorney’s…

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Politico reports: Don McGahn must testify to Congress about his time as the White House’s top lawyer, a federal judge ruled Monday — a decision that will put pressure on other reluctant Trump administration witnesses to testify about President Donald Trump’s actions. In a ruling that could reshape the balance of power between Congress and the executive branch, U.S. District Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson ruled that McGahn, who spent 30 hours talking to former special counsel Robert Mueller’s team,…

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Seth Cousins writes: During the first half of November, I made a brief journey with 14 fellow Americans, all of them strangers to me. Together we were the 12 jurors (and two alternates) sitting in judgment of longtime political consultant Roger Stone. We sat through five days of testimony and half a day of closing arguments. After eight hours of deliberation, we returned guilty verdicts on each of the seven counts we were charged to consider. Since we delivered that…

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The Washington Post reports: A confidential White House review of President Trump’s decision to place a hold on military aid to Ukraine has turned up hundreds of documents that reveal extensive efforts to generate an after-the-fact justification for the decision and a debate over whether the delay was legal, according to three people familiar with the records. The research by the White House Counsel’s Office, which was triggered by a congressional impeachment inquiry announced in September, includes early August email…

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The Times of Israel reports: In a decision that drastically shakes up Israeli politics amid already ongoing chaos, Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit announced Thursday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be charged with criminal wrongdoing in three separate cases against him, including bribery in the far-reaching Bezeq corruption probe. The decision marks the first time in Israel’s history that a serving prime minister faces criminal charges, casting a heavy shadow over Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, and his ongoing attempts…

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Yahoo News reports: Some officials within the FBI, which received its own copy of the whistleblower’s complaint in early September, chafed at a Justice Department move they believed was aimed at shutting down any inquiry at all, especially into potential counterintelligence issues raised by the allegations, according to a former senior U.S intelligence official who has discussed the matter with current FBI counterintelligence agents. There were “guys who wanted to run with it,” said the former senior official. “People were…

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Al Jazeera reports: US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on Monday that the United States is softening its position on Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, the latest in a series of moves by the Trump administration that reversed decades of US policy. Pompeo said the administration of President Donald Trump will no longer abide by a 1978 State Department legal opinion that the settlements were “inconsistent with international law”. “After carefully studying all sides of the legal…

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CNN reports: President Donald Trump ignored Pentagon advice Friday and pardoned two service members, while also restoring the rank of a third after all faced war crimes allegations. Trump granted full pardons to Army 1st Lt. Clint Lorance and Army Major Mathew Golsteyn, and restored the rank of Navy SEAL Eddie R. Gallagher, who had been demoted. Lorance was released from the United States Disciplinary Barracks in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, just before 10:30 p.m. local time Friday. He was wearing…

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