Attention to the Unseen

NBC reports: In his almost 45 years as a federal judge, John Coughenour has seen it all, including high-profile criminal trials that put his own safety at risk. But this year, the 84-year-old senior district judge did something he hadn’t considered for a long time: He retrieved a gun he had stored at the federal courthouse in Seattle years ago and brought it back to his home in case he needed it to defend himself. Coughenour is one of dozens…

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The Guardian reports: Amid high-profile arrests in its Spanish cell, the American-born and designated neo-Nazi terrorist group the Base – once a major preoccupation of FBI counter-terrorism efforts – has all but faded from US headlines. But a flurry of online activities shows the group is still active stateside and considers the US an operational nerve center. Headed by Rinaldo Nazzaro, an ex-Pentagon contractor turned alleged Russian intelligence asset, the Base has been busy of late pursuing European expansion: besides…

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The Washington Post reports: Reps. Ro Khanna (D-California) and Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) said Sunday that they will seek to find Attorney General Pam Bondi in contempt of Congress for not releasing more documents related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Bondi’s top aide, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, said in an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he didn’t take their threats seriously. Khanna and Massie wrote legislation that passed Congress nearly unanimously and was signed by President Donald…

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Sarah Fitzpatrick writes: Jeffrey Epstein’s victims began the day believing they might finally get something they’d been requesting for years: a direct conversation with the nation’s top law-enforcement official before the Justice Department made public a full trove of long-buried documents and photos. The release of the Epstein files, as the department’s hundreds of thousands of investigative materials have come to be known, might finally provide clarity on what the government knew about Epstein’s sex-trafficking scheme and when it knew…

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The New Republic reports: A Trump-appointed judge was so upset with the living conditions in which ICE detained an immigrant in Long Island, New York, that he threatened to hold the government in contempt. U.S. District Judge Gary Brown, who was appointed by Trump in 2019, issued a 24-page ruling Thursday vehemently castigating the Department of Homeland Security for refusing to provide photos of a holding room that illegally held a noncitizen for multiple nights, calling it “putrid and cramped.”…

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The Washington Post reports: By the time a federal judge in 2023 sentenced convicted fraudster Trevor Milton to four years in prison, Salt Lake City businessman Liejo Supoto had long given up hope of recovering the more than $100,000 he had invested in Milton’s hydrogen-powered truck company. Supoto didn’t know that a federal law requires certain criminal offenders to pay what’s called restitution to compensate their victims for losses. In Milton’s case, prosecutors argued that the former CEO of Nikola…

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  The Trump administration is ramping up efforts to strip more naturalized immigrants of their U.S. citizenship, with The New York Times reporting that officials are seeking 100 to 200 cases per month. The news comes less than two weeks after the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case to decide the constitutionality of President Trump’s executive order aiming to end birthright citizenship.

David E. Sanger writes: One of the many oddities of the huge buildup of American forces off Venezuela is the speed at which the Pentagon has released short clips of what it has identified as drug boats being struck and destroyed by American missiles — part deterrence, part bravado, and, to the many legal scholars questioning the legality of the operation, part evidence of extrajudicial killings. So it was striking that on Tuesday, just as the Pentagon released three more…

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  “The Domino’s pizzas arrived at the homes of federal judges without explanation,” the Times editorial board wrote earlier this year. “The message was clear: We know where you live.” In the Opinion Video above, Esther Salas, a federal district judge in New Jersey, describes the stakes of increasingly frequent threats against members of the judiciary, which, in Judge Salas’s view, are fueled by today’s sharply divisive political rhetoric. If a judge is forced “to think about a safer choice”…

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  The New York Times reports: One evening in early 1976, a bushy-haired Jeffrey Epstein showed up for an event at an art gallery in Midtown Manhattan. Epstein was a math and physics teacher at the city’s prestigious Dalton School, and the father of one of his students had invited him. Epstein initially demurred, saying he didn’t go out much, but eventually relented. It would turn out to be one of the best decisions he ever made. At the gallery,…

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NBC News reports: Former special counsel Jack Smith told a congressional committee Wednesday that his team found “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that President Donald Trump engaged in a “criminal scheme” to overturn the results of the 2020 election, according to parts of his opening statement obtained by NBC News. Trump also “repeatedly tried to obstruct justice” to keep secret his retention of classified documents found during an FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Smith told members of…

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