Attention to the Unseen

ProPublica reports: The new patrol officer parked his black Dodge Charger outside a house off Main Street and approached on foot. A Mexican ballad was playing. Someone had called in a noise complaint, claiming it sounded as if people were fighting. But as the officer, Jaron Alexander, got closer, he found nothing of the sort. A middle-aged woman greeted him as her daughter, Joanna Martinez, petite and visibly pregnant, looked on. “What kind of party are you all having?” she…

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Politico reports: President Donald Trump is escalating his crusade to exert control of America’s elections as his party barrels towards a potentially bruising midterm. The Justice Department has already filed lawsuits in nearly every state to try and gain access to voter files. Trump revisited his longstanding bid to restrict mail voting, sparking a legal battle that reached the Supreme Court. He sought to make anti-terrorism funds for state and local governments contingent on how they administer elections. He has…

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The Washington Sun reports: White House attorneys are evaluating whether to issue mass pardons to junior staffers, as Trump allies press the administration to protect lower-ranked officials from prosecution and other legal challenges, according to two sources familiar with the conversations. While President Donald Trump has publicly discussed issuing pardons for top aides and issued pardons for billionaires and major donors, questions have mounted about the potential legal jeopardy facing thousands of employees who have implemented the White House’s agenda….

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Richard L. Hasen writes: From Alaska to California and who knows where else, DOJ has been filing cases to interfere with how states count and certify votes. The agency’s latest moves—as factually unsupported as they are legally vacuous—demonstrate that for all the fear about DOJ coming in with guns blazing to try to overturn the results of the elections, it is most likely to be shooting blanks. The main reason that DOJ has been losing election-related lawsuits is that the…

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Matthew Cole writes: In late spring 2020, a source I knew to be reliable called me with a story. The Dutch government had hacked into Jared Kushner’s phone and monitored him as he accessed a Dubai-based bank account. What was odd, the source said, was that the money in the account—hundreds of millions of dollars—had come from a bank in Azerbaijan. Most importantly, Kushner appeared to have transferred significant amounts of money from the Dubai account to other individuals, including…

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The New York Times reports: A federal judge in California on Wednesday blocked the Homeland Security Department from carrying out most field operations focused on uncovering voter fraud in nine states as part of a broader push to identify noncitizen voters. The ruling came less than two weeks before the midterm elections. The Trump administration has launched a blitz of operations focused on finding evidence of noncitizen voting or tying up election processes in states where it has dubiously claimed…

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Jamelle Bouie writes: You can understand the Trump administration as, in its essence, a cargo cult devoted to the illiberal tradition in American politics. At every turn, it seeks to instantiate a society where, as the historian Steven Hahn writes, “rights-bearing may be defined or limited by specific rulers or be based on communities of race, ethnicity, religion, and gender” and where “civil and political standing tend to be marked by social and cultural exclusions.” To this end, it uses…

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By Molly Redden, Avi Asher-Schapiro, William Turton and Kirsten Berg This story was originally published by ProPublica On March 3, 2020, Sen. Lindsey Graham walked into a private dining room at Charlie Palmer Steak in Washington, D.C. Graham’s time was expensive. He was meeting with two executives and a lobbyist from a Hawaiian naval defense contractor called Navatek. And he had required them to commit to $40,000 in campaign contributions for a 45-minute meeting. Navatek’s CEO, Martin Kao, was confident…

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HuffPost reports: President Donald Trump’s efforts to interfere with the 2026 elections have almost universally failed. Courts have halted his most egregious actions, Congress has rejected his anti-voting legislation and civil groups have stepped up to support election officials. The list of Trump’s failures is long. Courts blocked both of his executive orders aimed at limiting access to voting, including an effort to direct the Postal Service not to deliver certain mail ballots. His administration has lost all 26 cases…

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By Andy Mannix and Doug Bock Clark This story was originally published by ProPublica A few months into President Donald Trump’s second term, political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security made an unusual request of its agency focused on cybersecurity: Secretly acquire a voting machine and hack it. The appointees wanted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to procure the machine, examine it and report back the findings so they could be given to the White House, according to…

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