Attention to the Unseen

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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The Washington Post reports: In February, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine — a 33-year career diplomat who had served presidents of both parties — received a blunt warning. “Watch your back,” Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch said she was told by Ukraine’s interior minister. The Ukrainian official relayed that a pair of Florida businessmen and a Kyiv prosecutor with whom Yovanovitch had clashed were working to oust her from the post she had held since 2016, she later told House investigators. The…

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Politico reports: House Democrats are calling Donald Trump’s decision to attack Marie Yovanovitch mid-hearing on Friday a blatant example of witness intimidation, further building the case to charge the president with obstruction in potential articles of impeachment. Lawmakers of both parties were stunned to see Trump’s disparaging tweet about the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine in the middle of a hearing where she had already described in great detail how she felt personally threatened by the president. “What you saw…

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Ken Dilanian writes: In his final statement to the jury in the trial of political operative Roger Stone, federal prosecutor Michael Marando sought to boil the case down to a simple and stark premise. “I know we live in a world nowadays with Twitter, tweets, social media, where you can find any political view you want,” he said. “However, in our institutions of self-governance — courts of law or committee hearings, where people under oath have to testify — truth…

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Noah Bookbinder writes: Impeachment is a constitutional procedure that should be reserved only for extraordinary times with the most extreme examples of abuse of power by a president. That is why, in our country’s history, only two presidents have been impeached. But this is one of those times. The evidence of wrongdoing by President Trump is overwhelming. The impeachment inquiry has been conducted so far in a sober, responsible way. As Wednesday’s hearing made clear, the witnesses are credible and…

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Renato Mariotti writes: If it looked like House Republicans were throwing a lot of mud at the wall to see what might stick during the first day of public impeachment hearings, that’s because they had settled into a strategy many defense attorneys adopt when the prosecution has the goods on their client—confuse the issues and distract the audience from the evidence at hand. I’ve tried many federal criminal cases, and Wednesday’s hearing looked a lot like trials in which the…

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CNN reports: In its effort to sell off the lease to the Trump International Hotel in Washington, the Trump Organization has put together a glossy investor brochure complete with pictures showcasing the hotel’s grandiose architecture, its central location and its spa’s Himalayan salt chamber. The hotel’s biggest selling point though, according to a copy of the brochure seen by CNN, is the one thing that the Trump family insists it didn’t take advantage of: profiting off foreign governments. “Tremendous upside…

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The Guardian reports: Trump’s conduct, according to analysts interviewed by the Guardian, hews more closely than any previous conduct by any other president to what scholars conceive as a concrete example of impeachable behavior. Frank O Bowman III, author of High Crimes and Misdemeanors: A History of Impeachment for the Age of Trump and a professor at the University of Missouri school of law, said that Trump’s having extorted actions with no legitimate US national purpose from a foreign country…

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