Attention to the Unseen

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,”…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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NPR reports: The National Rifle Association acted as a “foreign asset” for Russia in the period leading up to the 2016 election, according to a new investigation unveiled Friday by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. Drawing on contemporaneous emails and private interviews, an 18-month probe by the Senate Finance Committee’s Democratic staff found that the NRA underwrote political access for Russian nationals Maria Butina and Alexander Torshin more than previously known — even though the two had declared their ties to…

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In a letter addressed to the chairs of the Senate and House Select Committees on Intelligence, the whistle-blower wrote: In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election. This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political…

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ABC News reports: The FBI has arrested a U.S. soldier who allegedly discussed plans to bomb a major American news network, planned to travel to Ukraine to fight with violent far-right group Azov Battalion and allegedly distributed information online on how to build bombs. He also allegedly suggested targeting Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke. According to charging documents in the case, Jarrett William Smith, who transferred to Fort Riley, Kansas, in July, joined the U.S. military only after first expressing…

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Renato Mariotti writes: What Trump is alleged to have done is not a garden variety crime; it’s worse. It involved misusing $250 million in aid appropriated by Congress for his benefit—the kind of gross misconduct that easily clears the bar of high crimes and misdemeanors set by the Constitution when impeaching a president. Which means the best way to hold Trump accountable for that misconduct isn’t a criminal trial; it’s for Congress to impeach him. Pursuing criminal cases that won’t…

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In an editorial, the New York Times says: It’s not every day that a whistle-blower in the intelligence community files a complaint about the president of the United States. But it seems to have happened last month, when an unidentified intelligence employee alerted the inspector general of the intelligence community, Michael Atkinson, to multiple acts by President Trump, including a promise he is said to have made to a foreign leader during a phone call. The complaint alarmed Mr. Atkinson…

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Jamelle Bouie writes: Should [Democrats] win a federal “trifecta” — the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives — they’ll still have to deal with a Trump-branded judiciary. It’s entirely possible that a future Democratic agenda would be circumscribed and unraveled by a Supreme Court whose slim conservative majority owes itself to minority government and constitutional hardball. So what should Democrats do? They should play hardball back. Congress, according to the Judiciary Act of 1789, decides the number…

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The New York Times reports: The Border Patrol, whose agents have gone from having one of the most obscure jobs in law enforcement to one of the most hated, is suffering a crisis in both mission and morale. Earlier this year, the disclosure of a private Facebook group where agents posted sexist and callous references to migrants and the politicians who support them reinforced the perception that agents often view the vulnerable people in their care with frustration and contempt….

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Hanna Rosin writes: Nearly a year after the fateful Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh have become martyrs in separate and hostile galaxies — one for #believeallwomen and the other for those who believe Democrats will use any means necessary to take down good and honorable men. So there is a weird satisfaction in rewinding the story more than 30 years, back to the moment when the two lived in suburban Maryland and coexisted as part…

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Politico reports: The nation’s top intelligence official is illegally withholding a whistleblower complaint, possibly to protect President Donald Trump or senior White House officials, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff alleged Friday. Schiff issued a subpoena for the complaint, accusing acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire of taking extraordinary steps to withhold the complaint from Congress, even after the intel community’s inspector general characterized the complaint as credible and of “urgent concern.” “A Director of National Intelligence has never…

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