Attention to the Unseen

The Washington Post reports: A convicted Jan. 6 rioter who later said that he regretted his participation in the U.S. Capitol attack has been hired by the Trump administration to work inside a Pentagon office that manages highly classified military operations, according to four people familiar with the matter. The appointment of Elias Irizarry, who was 19 at the time of the riot in 2021, to a post in the Defense Department’s Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict office has…

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Politico reports: President Donald Trump is retreating from plans for a $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” after a fierce backlash from congressional Republicans, according to two people granted anonymity to describe the decision. White House officials communicated the move Monday to top Republicans on Capitol Hill, the people said. The Justice Department, which was set to administer the fund, also indicated Monday it would “abide by the Court’s ruling” to halt progress after a federal judge in Virginia on Friday temporarily…

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The New York Times reports: In late April, a lawyer for the Justice Department told a federal judge that her colleagues had been in the midst of negotiations with a Rhode Island hospital about turning over gender-transition treatment health records, only for the hospital’s lawyers to stop responding. But Judge Mary S. McElroy of Federal District Court in Rhode Island concluded that was not true. While the government claimed it had not heard from the hospital since February, emails showed…

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Paul Krugman writes: There was a time when anti-immigration activists claimed not to hate immigrants as people. Their concern, they insisted, was only about illegal immigrants, the purported crime wave they caused, or the loss of jobs for the native born. If you believed any of that, you were naive. The Trump administration is trying to drive out all immigrants, legal as well as undocumented, with almost no pretense that its pogroms serve any wider social or economic purpose. And…

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The New York Times reports: The tax immunity agreement was more like a rescue operation than a formal legal settlement. It called for the I.R.S. to absolve Mr. Trump and his businesses of all audits they were currently facing — including a yearslong battle with the tax agency that could have cost the president more than $100 million. That fight stemmed partly from a refund that Mr. Trump had claimed — and collected — starting in about 2010. He justified…

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The New York Times reports: President Trump’s upheaval of the federal government has led to an exodus of more than 10,000 lawyers since the beginning of 2025, a striking loss of legal talent that has left some agencies pushing to find attorneys to carry out his agenda. Roughly one in five lawyers who worked in the government at the end of 2024 had left by March of this year, according to a New York Times analysis of federal employment data….

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The Intercept reports: A company run by former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, hired by the Israeli government to push pro-Israel views on a major conservative media network, has directed $13 million from Israel to several Republican digital strategy firms and allies, according to a previously unreported document filed under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Parscale was hired in part to influence major right-wing Christian media company Salem Media Group, where he is also an executive. His firm spent hundreds…

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The New York Times reports: A federal judge in Miami reopened President Trump’s $10 billion case against the I.R.S. in a striking turnabout, saying that she wanted to investigate “grievous allegations” that the hasty deal to resolve it was “premised on deception.” The ruling by the judge, Kathleen M. Williams, on Friday to revive the case shortly after closing it was a significant blow both to Mr. Trump, who had voluntarily dismissed the suit last week, and to the Justice…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: President Trump’s top aides have discussed whether he should kill the administration’s nearly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund in exchange for getting immigration enforcement funding passed next month, according to people familiar with the matter. More than a dozen Republican senators have privately urged top Trump aides to drop the fund since its creation last week, said people familiar with the outreach, including Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who is usually supportive of the president’s…

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The Associated Press reports: David Johnston was a licensed attorney when he illegally entered the Capitol with a mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters on Jan. 6, 2021. More than five years later, the South Carolina man is offering to help fellow “J6ers” apply for payouts from the Trump administration’s nearly $1.8 billion new fund for people claiming to be victims of a weaponized government. He’ll do it for a 10% cut of any award, capped at $5,000 apiece. “I…

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The Guardian reports: On a graffitied Sarajevo backstreet, a path leads past an overgrown patch of garden to a white door. Beyond is the registered office of a company that is on the brink of winning contracts worth more than $1bn. AAFS Infrastructure and Energy is close to securing a concession to build and operate a pipeline across the Balkans to allow fossil gas shipped from the US to replace supplies that come from Russia. “This could be the most…

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Mother Jones reports: “I certainly didn’t see anything at Delaney Hall that gives me a sense that things have changed since Minnesota,” Andy Kim told me. The New Jersey senator, a first-term Democrat, drew headlines Monday after he and other protesters were pepper-sprayed by ICE agents during a rally outside Delaney Hall, a private prison in Newark, New Jersey that ICE has repurposed to detain immigrants—nearly 900 as of early April, according to agency data reviewed by NBC News. Kim…

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Reuters reports: A judge on Friday ordered the removal of President ​Donald Trump’s name from the Kennedy Center for the Performing ‌Arts, ruling that the iconic Washington venue cannot be renamed without an act of Congress. U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper in Washington directed the Trump administration ​to take down all physical signage bearing Trump’s name and ​to eliminate any references to a “Trump Kennedy Center” from official ⁠materials within 14 days. “The Kennedy Center’s organic statute makes crystal clear…

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