Attention to the Unseen

The Associated Press reports: The U.S. Department of Justice cannot have the names and personal contact information for every person who worked during the 2020 election in Georgia’s Fulton County, a federal judge ruled Tuesday. The Justice Department in April served a grand jury subpoena seeking the names and personal contact information of county employees and volunteer poll workers. President Donald Trump has long claimed without evidence that widespread voter fraud in Georgia’s most populous county, a Democratic stronghold, cost…

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The New York Times reports: The Justice Department sent letters to all 50 states and the District of Columbia on Tuesday threatening criminal prosecution of top election officials if ballots cast by noncitizens were counted in upcoming elections. The letters arrived in the midst of an ongoing campaign by President Trump and his allies to tighten election rules to prevent a problem that doesn’t exist: widespread noncitizen voting in American elections. The effort has, however, continued to sow doubt and…

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Larry Woods writes: For 40 years in the constitutional law classes I teach at Tennessee State University, I have asked all my students to raise their hand if they are a citizen of the United States. Usually, after some hesitation, everyone or almost everyone raises their hand and I promptly challenge them,”prove it to me”. Since we do not have membership cards for U.S. citizenship, after thought and discussion, students usually say “I have a birth certificate.” Of course they…

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Marie-Rose Sheinerman writes: The official line remains the same: The 10-month campaign of strikes on small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific has nearly stopped the flow of drugs by sea into the United States. In December, President Trump boasted about a 92 percent drop in seaborne shipments. Last month, in an apparent sign of further progress, he said the decline was up to 97.2 percent. But government officials and agencies closest to the action, at sea and on…

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Quinta Jurecic writes: Nearly six months have passed since federal officers shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis. No one has been arrested, the Trump administration has provided no reason to believe that any serious investigation is taking place, and federal officials continue to stonewall state and local investigators in Minnesota. This inaction was predictable. The day after Good’s death, Vice President Vance insisted at a press conference that the agent who shot her…

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Wired reports: Voting was already underway when the ICE agents arrived at a polling site in Syracuse, New York, during the state’s primaries in June. The agents were there to see Paigelynne Gonyea, a poll worker who says they were concerned about an Instagram post she had supposedly made in January “doxing” an ICE agent. The only post she could find was one she had made crediting the Minnesota Star Tribune for identifying Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot…

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Timothy Noah writes: Being president of the United States is by far the most lucrative business venture of Donald Trump’s checkered business career. The June 30 release of his financial disclosure report makes this official. Trump has turned the American presidency into an extractive industry. In 2025, Trump mined more than $2.2 billion in income from being president, most of it from crypto, from which he extracted $1.4 billion. That’s all the more remarkable when you remember that crypto entered…

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Media Matters for America reports: Over the last several weeks, the outlines of a plot have begun to emerge that could signal how President Donald Trump, along with MAGA media figures and activists, could attempt to severely curtail voting rights under the pretext of declaring a national emergency posed by China. The details of the scheme remain publicly vague, and may not yet come to pass, but the short version looks something like this: First, the White House would declassify…

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The Guardian reports: Donald Trump has again been accused of “brazen crypto corruption” after financial disclosures revealed his family’s cryptocurrency ventures generated more than $1bn in his first year back in the White House. A 927-page disclosure, released on Tuesday by the US Office of Government Ethics, showed that the US president had earned more than $2.2bn last year in total, from real estate, golf resorts, branded merchandise, licensing deals and court settlements. But a set of extraordinary crypto takings…

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By Ken B. Morales This story was originally published by ProPublica In its term that ended last October, the Supreme Court passed an important milestone that went unnoticed: For the first time, it decided more cases by secret ballot, and with few signed opinions, than it did for cases argued in open court. These decisions, which make up the court’s “shadow docket,” are a fast-track way to get a decision from the top court. They rarely include arguments, have limited…

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Shane Goldmacher reports: Just days before the 2022 midterm elections, as Democratic candidates were drastically outspending JD Vance and other Republicans running for the Senate, the future vice president and the Senate G.O.P. campaign arm filed a lawsuit to try to change the rules of the game. They knew it was too late to affect that year’s elections. The lawsuit was part of a longer-term gambit to tilt the financial playing field in future elections in the Republican Party’s favor….

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The New York Times reports: In a slashing 43-page dissent from the Supreme Court’s decision on Monday allowing the president to fire the leaders of independent agencies for any reason or no reason, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the majority had destroyed the separation of powers and upended settled constitutional law. The ruling, she wrote, “promises to unleash only chaos.” In her dissent, Justice Sotomayor wrote that “today, this court undoes centuries of political practice and concludes that all three…

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The New York Times reports: In the tiny corner of the legal world that follows such things, the March ruling crashed down like a thunderbolt. It was issued by an obscure government agency called the Merit Systems Protection Board, whose purpose is to protect federal workers from unfair firings. But the decision backed President Trump’s assertion that he has broad authority to reshape the executive branch as he wants. The ruling broke with decades of precedent, accepting the White House’s…

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