Attention to the Unseen

Marc A. Caputo reports: While Trump served as president, [former Rep. Matt] Gaetz acted as his unofficial eyes and ears in Congress. During this campaign, he helped him prepare for his debates. Gaetz is close to Trump campaign manager and incoming White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. Previously, the two worked closely together and helped rescue Ron DeSantis’s floundering 2018 gubernatorial campaign. Gaetz is also a frequent presence at Mar-a-Lago events, where he met his wife, Ginger Luckey, the…

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The New York Times reports: As he prepares for his last act as special counsel, Mr. Smith’s ultimate audience will not be a jury, but the public. Department regulations call for him to file a report summarizing his investigation and decisions — a document that may stand as the final accounting from a prosecutor who filed extensive charges against a former president but never got his cases to trial. It is not clear how quickly he can finish this work,…

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The Intercept reports: Donald Trump has made no secret of his desire for revenge. On the campaign trail, he joked about being a dictator on “day one” in office, pledged to jail journalists, and threatened to retaliate against political foes who he felt had wronged him. Now, just days after he secured a second term in the White House, Congress is already moving to hand a resurgent Trump administration a powerful cudgel that it could wield against ideological opponents in…

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Politico reports: A collective sense of dread has taken hold at the Department of Justice, which drew Donald Trump’s rage like no other part of the federal government during his campaign. Some career attorneys at DOJ are already considering heading for the exits rather than sticking around to find out whether threats from Trump and his allies are real or campaign bluster. Those threats range from mass firings of “deep state” lawyers to expelling special counsel Jack Smith from the…

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Politico reports: Donald Trump pledged in one of his final campaign speeches to work with Democratic mayors and governors if reelected. But just hours after the former president was projected to win back the White House, some blue-state leaders were actively plotting against him. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, one of Trump’s fiercest critics, on Thursday called a special legislative session to funnel more resources toward the state’s legal defenses to preemptively combat Republican policies around immigration, the environment, LGBTQ+ rights…

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NBC reports: The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s federal election interference case has granted a request from special counsel Jack Smith to hit pause on the process and give him a month to formally request how to move forward — likely the first step in ending the prosecution. In a filing on Friday, Smith said that “as a result of the election” the prosecution “respectfully requests that the Court vacate the remaining deadlines in the pretrial schedule to afford the Government…

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Lisa Needham writes: It has often been said that Donald Trump was running for president to keep himself out of prison. Mission accomplished. But the fact that Trump wasn’t behind bars long ago, that he didn’t suffer any consequences for his criming and now likely never will, can be laid squarely at the feet of one man: Attorney General Merrick Garland. Garland dragged his feet on prosecuting Trump for election interference and pilfering classified documents, making it easy for him…

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Ankush Khardori writes: We have just witnessed the greatest failure of federal law enforcement in American history. The reasons for Donald Trump’s reelection are numerous and will be hotly debated in the weeks ahead. But the story of his comeback cannot be told without seriously grappling with how he managed to outrun four criminal cases, including — most notably — the Justice Department’s prosecution over Trump’s alleged effort to overturn the 2020 election. At the root of it all are…

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Politico reports: Seventy-five days. That’s how long special counsel Jack Smith has to figure out how to unwind his unprecedented efforts to put former and future President Donald Trump in prison. Smith’s two cases against Trump — one for conspiring to overturn the 2020 election; the other for hoarding classified documents and obstructing justice — were doomed the moment the 2024 race was called. That’s because longstanding Justice Department policy forbids prosecuting a sitting president, and even if it didn’t,…

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The New York Times reports: A 24-year-old Tennessee man was arrested on Saturday moments before he planned to use a drone carrying an explosive to destroy a Nashville power substation to further his “violent white supremacist ideology,” federal prosecutors said Monday. The man, Skyler Philippi of Columbia, Tenn., had plotted the attack to push an extremist ideology called “accelerationism,” which calls for the complete collapse of American society, according to a criminal complaint prepared by the F.B.I. Christopher Wray, the…

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Reuters reports: Elon Musk’s pro-Trump group does not choose the winners of its $1 million-a-day giveaway to registered voters at random, but instead picks people who would be good spokespeople for its agenda, a lawyer for the billionaire said on Monday. Musk lawyer Chris Gober was trying to persuade a Pennsylvania judge that the giveaway was not an “illegal lottery,” as Philadelphia district attorney Lawrence Krasner alleged in a lawsuit seeking to block the contest ahead of Tuesday’s U.S. presidential…

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