Attention to the Unseen

Julian Borger writes: The arrest warrants issued by the international criminal court (ICC) represent an earthquake on the world’s legal landscape: the first time a western ally from a modern democracy has been charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity by a global judicial body. Inside Israel, the warrants against Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, will not have an immediate impact. In the short term they are likely to rally support around the prime minister…

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NBC News reports: President-elect Donald Trump announced Thursday evening that his new pick for attorney general is Pam Bondi. Bondi previously served as Florida’s attorney general. The announcement came just hours after former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., withdrew from consideration. “For too long, the partisan Department of Justice has been weaponized against me and other Republicans — Not anymore,” Trump said in a post to Truth Social. “Pam will refocus the DOJ to its intended purpose of fighting Crime, and…

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ABC News reports: President Donald Trump’s picks to lead the next administration are talking about abolishing entire agencies and firing tens of thousands of federal workers at a time. But can his administration actually do all that? Experts believe Trump can get much further on upending the government system this go-around compared to his first term — in part because the typical checks and balances are expected to lean in his favor. Next year, the House and Senate are on…

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Reuters reports: Members of the over 2 million-strong U.S. civilian federal workforce are looking to an unlikely source to protect it from Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s promise to slash government employees and cut costs: the incoming Republican-controlled Congress. Federal employee unions are lining up lawyers and preparing public campaigns to try to stave off any mass firings, but they’re hoping Republican Congress members will join Democrats in defending their importance to local economies, health and safety, union members and…

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Liz Dye writes: Donald Trump’s nomination of Matt Gaetz as attorney general is a giant middle finger to anyone who believes in the rule of law. But his nominees for other key Justice Department positions may be both more consequential and potentially more dangerous for democracy. That’s partly because Gaetz is a lazy fool who never tried a federal criminal case and is functionally a “liberal tears” meme made flesh. It’s not that he’s too stupid to be dangerous —…

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Mark Joseph Stern writes: The 2024 election marked a painful setback for Democratic hopes of rebalancing the federal judiciary: When Donald Trump reenters the White House in January, he will have a pliant Republican Senate majority eager to confirm his hard-right judges. But federal courts don’t tell the whole story: Across the country, voters also elected liberal justices to their state Supreme Courts, which function as a key backstop for civil rights and democracy as federal courts lurch rightward. Progressives…

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Karl Bode writes: Surprising exactly nobody, Donald Trump has appointed Brendan Carr to lead the nation’s top telecom and media regulator. As we noted last week, there’s zero daylight between Carr’s policies and the policies of unpopular telecom giants like AT&T and Comcast. Carr is as close to the dictionary definition of “regulatory capture” as you’re going to get (with a few additional wrinkles we’ll get to down below). You might recall that Trump’s team promised it would “blacklist” any participants in Project 2025,…

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David Nir writes: [A] never-invoked provision of the Constitution found in Article 2, Section 3, … says that “in Case of Disagreement between” the Senate and House “with Respect to the Time of Adjournment,” the president “may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper.” To our nation’s founders, this rule represented a considerable narrowing of executive power, since it applies to only a single issue: disputes between the two houses over adjournment. Alexander Hamilton, for instance, noted…

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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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