Attention to the Unseen

ABC News reports: Mark Zaid, the attorney representing the whistleblower who sounded the alarm on President Donald Trump’s dealings with Ukraine and triggered an impeachment inquiry, tells ABC News that he is now representing a second whistleblower who has spoken with the inspector general. Zaid tells ABC News’ Chief Anchor George Stephanopoulos that the second person — also described as an intelligence official — has first-hand knowledge of some of the allegations outlined in the original complaint and has been…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: A second intelligence official who was alarmed by President Trump’s dealings with Ukraine is weighing whether to file his own formal whistle-blower complaint and testify to Congress, according to two people briefed on the matter. The official has more direct information about the events than the first whistle-blower, whose complaint that Mr. Trump was using his power to get Ukraine to investigate his political rivals touched off an impeachment inquiry. The second official is among…

Read More Read More

NBC News reports: Weeks before the whistleblower’s complaint became public, the CIA’s top lawyer made what she considered to be a criminal referral to the Justice Department about the whistleblower’s allegations that President Donald Trump abused his office in pressuring the Ukrainian president, U.S. officials familiar with the matter tell NBC News. The move by the CIA’s general counsel, Trump appointee Courtney Simmons Elwood, meant she and other senior officials had concluded a potential crime had been committed, raising more…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: The Treasury Department’s inspector general is investigating how the department handled a congressional request for President Trump’s tax returns, which Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has refused to turn over. The inquiry comes amid new concerns about political interference in the handling of Mr. Trump’s tax returns, which — like those of all presidents — are subjected to a mandatory audit. An Internal Revenue Service whistle-blower filed a complaint over the summer claiming that senior Treasury…

Read More Read More

Judge Andrew Napolitano, a political commentator on Fox News, writes: The whistleblower’s revelation caused the White House to release a near-verbatim summary of the conversation between the two presidents. By releasing it, Trump has admitted to its accuracy. In it, Trump asked Zelensky for dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden, who at this writing is Trump’s likely Democratic opponent in the 2020 presidential election. Trump also admits to holding up $391 million in aid to Ukraine – $250 million…

Read More Read More

CNBC reports: The head of the Federal Election Commission subtweeted President Donald Trump on Thursday after the president called on China to investigate his potential 2020 rival Joe Biden and his son Hunter. In a post on Twitter, chair Ellen Weintraub resurfaced a June memorandum stating that it is illegal for anyone running for public office to solicit help from a foreign national. Is this thing on? 🎙 https://t.co/K6phZRex8k — Ellen L Weintraub (@EllenLWeintraub) October 3, 2019 Weintraub had originally…

Read More Read More

The Washington Post reports: An Internal Revenue Service official has filed a whistleblower complaint reporting that he was told at least one Treasury Department political appointee attempted to improperly interfere with the annual audit of the president or vice president’s tax returns, according to multiple people familiar with the document. Trump administration officials dismissed the whistleblower’s complaint as flimsy because it is based on conversations with other government officials. But congressional Democrats were alarmed by the complaint, now circulating on…

Read More Read More

Neal K. Katyal and Joshua A. Geltzer write: One of the first things new prosecutors at the Justice Department learn is that cover-ups are rarely singular. There is often a cover-up of the cover-up. Allegations of one cover-up, then another, emerged last week. Officials in the Trump administration tried to “lock down” the phone call memo between President Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine (the first cover-up), and then officials in the executive branch made efforts to keep this information…

Read More Read More

  Retired Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters tells CNN’s Anderson Cooper that he thinks if President Donald Trump loses the 2020 election, he could be spending time in court, or prison, for the rest of his life.

The Washington Post reports: Attorney General William P. Barr has held private meetings overseas with foreign intelligence officials seeking their help in a Justice Department inquiry that President Trump hopes will discredit U.S. intelligence agencies’ examination of possible connections between Russia and members of the Trump campaign during the 2016 election, according to people familiar with the matter. Barr’s personal involvement is likely to stoke further criticism from Democrats pursuing impeachment that he is helping the Trump administration use executive…

Read More Read More

Politico reports: As President Donald Trump and his allies attack the whistleblower that kicked off the House’s impeachment inquiry, the still unidentified person gained a powerful ally on Tuesday: Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley. The most senior GOP senator has fashioned a career on protecting whistleblowers during presidencies of both parties. And in the middle of one of the most tempestuous political storms in two decades, the seventh-term Iowan is sticking to his position even if it’s at odds with the…

Read More Read More

Kevin Poulsen reports: It began late Friday with a story from the conservative website The Federalist headlined “Intel Community Secretly Gutted Requirement Of First-Hand Whistleblower Knowledge.” The article claimed “the intelligence community secretly revised the formal whistleblower complaint form in August 2019 to eliminate the requirement of direct, first-hand knowledge of wrongdoing.” “It seems like they are jumping to a lot of conclusions based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the law, the regulatory framework, and the language on one form,”…

Read More Read More

Benjamin Franklin was a leading voice in the debates framing the Constitution. Howard Chandler Christy/Architect of the Capitol By Clark D. Cunningham, Georgia State University As Congress moves toward a possible formal impeachment of President Donald Trump, they should consider words spoken at the Constitutional Convention, when the Founders explained that impeachment was intended to have many important purposes, not just removing a president from office. A critical debate took place on July 20, 1787, which resulted in adding the…

Read More Read More

The Associated Press reports: As Washington plunges into impeachment, Attorney General William Barr finds himself engulfed in the political firestorm, facing questions about his role in President Donald Trump’s outreach to Ukraine and the administration’s attempts to keep a whistleblower complaint from Congress. Trump repeatedly told Ukraine’s president in a telephone call that Barr and Trump personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani could help investigate Trump’s Democratic rival Joe Biden, according to a rough transcript of that summertime conversation. Justice Department officials…

Read More Read More

Anne Applebaum writes: In the nearly 30 years that have elapsed since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, I doubt whether a single day has gone by without some Western diplomat, somewhere in the post-Soviet space, talking about the need for the rule of law. The U.S.S.R. was a totalitarian state in which judges and prosecutors were controlled by the ruling party. The result was injustice, oppression and corruption. Since the former Soviet republics gained independence, Europeans and…

Read More Read More

Noah Feldman writes: The Department of Justice must investigate Rudy Giuliani’s potential crimes in trying to get Ukraine to interfere in the 2020 U.S. election. It also needs to investigate whether White House officials criminally covered up evidence of Trump’s call with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy. And because the whistle-blower complaint alleges that the top law enforcement official in the federal government, Attorney General William Barr, “appears to be involved” in these events, a special counsel must be appointed. Barr…

Read More Read More