Attention to the Unseen

Sami Sawalmeh reports: When I arrived in the central West Bank town of Qarawat Bani Hassan for a reporting trip on July 31, residents were dealing with the immediate aftermath of an explosion outside a local businessman’s property. An extortion ring operating from Jaljulia, a Palestinian town inside Israel, had detonated the device after demanding money from him, according to prominent figures from the town who preferred not to be named. (A video from the blast site, seen by +972,…

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The New York Times reports: They once had run free through the desert mountains of the West, a multicolored band of 68 wild mustangs that had never been saddled or corralled. Then the federal government rounded them up with helicopters, as it has with tens of thousands of other mustangs, in an attempt to control wild populations on public lands. The horses were held for years in a feed lot in Idaho while the government tried to find them what…

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The New York Times reports: A month after the Trump administration declared without evidence that thousands of noncitizens had illegally registered to vote in Nevada, officials with the Department of Homeland Security were unable to substantiate the claim. The administration claimed to have identified 278,000 noncitizens registered to vote in four states, including an exact number of 15,903 in Nevada. But during a meeting last week with state election administrators, Homeland Security officials said they had identified just 185 potential…

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Democracy Docket reports: A Florida lawyer who pleaded guilty after illegally accessing government election websites appears to have joined President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) — and taken part in a recent DOJ election monitoring operation in Minnesota. The apparent hiring of David Michael Levin would be among the most troubling example yet of the department’s Civil Rights Division bringing on lawyers — including the acting chief of the voting section — who have taken extreme steps to undermine…

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The Hill reports: The top lawyer for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is facing an ethics complaint with the Florida Bar after he launched a “Worst of the Worst” list for federal jurists, attacking their rulings. James Percival, the general counsel for DHS, has in recent weeks taken to social media to criticize judges who have made unfavorable rulings on the Trump administration’s immigration policies. The complaint, filed Wednesday by a group of nearly 130 former federal and state…

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The Washington Post reports: The Trump administration task force charged with investigating antisemitism on Ivy League campuses pressured universities into punitive settlements despite turning up little to no evidence of systemic abuse, according to a whistleblower complaint made public Tuesday. The complaint — filed by Haley Van Erem, a former career attorney in the Justice Department’s civil rights division who said she was involuntarily detailed to work on the probes last year — alleged that the outcomes of investigations into…

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The Washington Post reports: One bill proposes increasing the number of Supreme Court justices from nine to 13. Another would cut their lifetime terms to 18 years. Others would create an enforceable ethics code and place standards on how the court rules from its relatively opaque “shadow docket.” The latest wave of proposals to overhaul the Supreme Court have reached something of a fever pitch over the past few months, as Democrats grow increasingly frustrated with the court’s rightward turn….

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By Peter Elkind, Jen Fifield, Doug Bock Clark, Ken B. Morales and Andy Mannix This story was originally published by ProPublica It was late March when Joe Teirab, the second-in-command at Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office, received an urgent email from Washington. The federal government was scrambling to find criminal cases to back up President Donald Trump’s claims that illegal voting by noncitizens was tipping the scales in American elections. Agents from Homeland Security Investigations, a massive federal law enforcement agency,…

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