Attention to the Unseen

Reuters reports: In January, the Franklin County Board of Elections in Ohio received a surprising call. The man on the line said he was an agent at the Department of Homeland Security – and he needed immediate access to voter records. Franklin County has a large population of Democrats and has long been a focal point of Republican skepticism about urban voting centers in Ohio. In the weeks that followed, the requests multiplied. According to emails reviewed by Reuters, the…

Read More Read More

The New York Times just obtained secret Supreme Court memos that expose how John Roberts built the shadow docket out of spite. Leah Litman and Steve Vladeck break it down:   The New York Times reports: Just after 6 p.m. on a February evening in 2016, the Supreme Court issued a cryptic, one paragraph ruling that sent both climate policy and the court itself spinning in new directions. For two centuries, the court had generally handled major cases at a…

Read More Read More

Reuters reports: The Trump administration has cut more than 4,000 employees from some of the nation’s top law-enforcement agencies, even as it vowed to crack down on crime, according to ​records obtained by Reuters. The records, from the U.S. Justice Department’s management unit, show that the total number of employees at the FBI has dropped more than 7% since the government’s ‌2024 fiscal year, a loss of about 2,600 people. The Drug Enforcement Administration’s staff has dropped by about 6%,…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: The Justice Department has identified 384 foreign-born Americans whose citizenship it wants to revoke, part of a push to increase the pace of denaturalizations by assigning the cases to prosecutors in dozens of U.S. attorney’s offices across the country. Senior Justice Department officials in Washington told colleagues during a meeting last week that civil litigators in 39 regional offices would soon be assigned to file denaturalization cases against the individuals, according to an official familiar…

Read More Read More

WFAA reports: U.S. Rep. Chip Roy, an Austin-based Republican, introduced new legislation today that, if passed, would allow for the deportation, denaturalization or inadmission of any immigrant or noncitizen found to be affiliated with communism, socialism or Islamic fundamentalism. Named after New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, the MAMDANI Act would radically change U.S. immigration law. Any noncitizen found to be affiliated with a communist party, a socialist party, the Chinese…

Read More Read More

Joe Patrice writes: Running a confidential informant program inside hate groups is expensive and dangerous work. For about four decades, the Southern Poverty Law Center has done it anyway. Its work contributed to the dismantling of the Ku Klux Klan as a political force. The SPLC’s work is so important that it routinely shared what it learned with the FBI. On Tuesday, the Trump Justice Department indicted them for it. A federal grand jury in the Middle District of Alabama…

Read More Read More

Politico reports: Members on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee are divided over whether President Donald Trump should pardon Jeffrey Epstein’s convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell in exchange for her cooperation in the panel’s Epstein investigation, Chair James Comer said in an interview Wednesday. Maxwell, who was deposed by the Oversight Committee as the sole convicted accomplice in the Epstein sex trafficking scheme, previously invoked her Fifth Amendment right in declining to answer the panel’s questions. Her lawyer has said…

Read More Read More

The Daily Beast reports: A Department of Homeland Security deputy assistant secretary for counterterrorism has been accused of picking up men on a sugar daddy website. Julia Varvaro, 29, allegedly had a profile on Seeking.com, a site that is often used by young, attractive singles looking for older, wealthier partners to help fund their luxury lifestyles, according to the Daily Mail. The profile, which was under the name “Alessia,” said its owner worked for a government agency and offered “seductive…

Read More Read More

By Hannah Allam This story was originally published by ProPublica March unfolded like a stress test for U.S. counterterrorism authorities. The month opened with a gunman in an Iranian-flag shirt killing three people at a bar in Texas. Then, an attack with homemade explosives outside the mayor’s mansion in New York City. Next came a deadly shooting March 12 on a Virginia college campus and, the same afternoon, a car-ramming at a Michigan synagogue. Days later, agents arrested a man…

Read More Read More

Sarah Fitzpatrick writes: On Friday, April 10, as FBI Director Kash Patel was preparing to leave work for the weekend, he struggled to log into an internal computer system. He quickly became convinced that he had been locked out, and he panicked, frantically calling aides and allies to announce that he had been fired by the White House, according to nine people familiar with his outreach. Two of these people described his behavior as a “freak-out.” Patel oversees an agency…

Read More Read More

By A.C. Thompson, ProPublica and FRONTLINE, and Gabrielle Schonder, FRONTLINE This story was originally published by ProPublica The National Guard soldiers in desert camo piled out of unmarked vans in East Los Angeles last June, cordoning off East Sixth Street, a residential street lined with single family houses, and blocking a nearby road leading to an elementary school. A squad of federal agents moved in flinging flash-bang grenades — explosives designed to disorient — into a small home before storming…

Read More Read More

By Doug Bock Clark and Jen Fifield This story was originally published by ProPublica In mid-December 2020, federal officials responsible for protecting American elections from fraud converged in a windowless, dim, fortified room at the Justice Department’s downtown Washington, D.C., headquarters. They had been summoned by Attorney General William Barr. Over the preceding weeks, Donald Trump’s claims that the presidential election had been stolen from him had reached a crescendo. He’d become obsessed with a conspiracy theory that voting machines…

Read More Read More