Attention to the Unseen

The Washington Post reports: The Trump administration has appealed a federal judge’s order to halt the construction of President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom, arguing in an emergency motion that pausing the $400 million project would raise national security risks. The motion, which was filed Friday night in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, argues that U.S. District Judge Richard Leon’s “shocking, unprecedented, and improper injunction” to stop construction would imperil Trump, his family and White House…

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Pablo Andreu writes: I was born in the wee hours of Dec.15, 1980 at St. Mary’s Hospital, now Hoboken University Medical, the same hospital where Frank Sinatra was born. It wasn’t until I was a teenager that I learned my family was undocumented at my birth and on through my early childhood. I was an adult by the time I realized I had gained U.S. citizenship through birthright, which the Trump administration is now attempting to strike down. On Wednesday…

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Democracy Docket reports: President Donald Trump’s executive order on mail voting is highly likely to be declared unconstitutional and blocked by courts. But it might also screw up the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) 30 ongoing lawsuits for state voter rolls. Legal experts say the voter suppression diktat may be as strategically foolish as it is doomed. “The only real legal effect of this executive order might be to kill the remaining DOJ lawsuits seeking to seize voter data,” said David…

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Ashley Parker and Sarah Fitzpatrick write: After Pam Bondi’s ouster today, which followed Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s firing last month, Cabinet secretaries and other senior administration officials were anxiously eyeing their phones, wondering whether they’d be next. One top official didn’t have to wait long: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth removed the chief of staff of the Army, General Randy George. Several people familiar with the White House’s plans told us that there are active discussions about others…

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Wired reports: In the early morning last September 30, hundreds of federal agents swarmed the South Shore Apartments, a beige brick building on Chicago’s South Side. As feds in body armor rappelled down from a Black Hawk helicopter overhead, others crashed through the building’s doors with battering rams, rounding up residents at gunpoint. A group of burly, masked agents wearing helmets and bulletproof vests, and toting suppressor-equipped M4 rifles, moved through the hallways in a rapid, tightly organized file. Padraic…

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By Agnel Philip This story was originally published by ProPublica Our reporting started, like much of our work, in a spreadsheet. As I parsed through federal court data, I noticed something odd: Within months of President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, prosecutors began filing obscure charges related to trespassing on military property — so many, in fact, that more cases were filed in 2025 than in the prior decade. Nearly all of these charges originated from cases along the…

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Washington Examiner reports: The national chief of the Border Patrol, Michael Banks, was known among colleagues for taking regular trips abroad to engage in sex with prostitutes, according to six current and former Border Patrol employees who spoke with the Washington Examiner. Banks “bragged” to colleagues while in his previous management role at Border Patrol about paying for sex with prostitutes while traveling in Colombia and Thailand over the course of a decade. Banks’ behavior was said to have been…

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Sen. Mark Warner writes: In the decade since President Vladimir Putin of Russia directed a sweeping campaign of hacking and social media messaging to try to tilt the 2016 presidential election toward his preferred candidate, the United States has rightly focused on shoring up our elections against foreign meddling. But I fear that foreign interference is no longer the most pressing danger to our elections. It is increasingly evident that the greatest threat now comes from inside our own government….

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Politico reports: Long before John Eastman helped devise Donald Trump’s bid to overturn the 2020 election, he had another pet cause: ending birthright citizenship. The idea was once relegated to obscure articles in right-wing journals and little-noticed debates before conservative groups. But Trump ushered it into the limelight on his first day back in office last year by issuing an executive order purporting to upend the well-established understanding that virtually everyone born on U.S. soil gets American citizenship. Now, Eastman…

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By Ken B. Morales and David Armstrong This story was originally published by ProPublica In the first days after Pam Bondi was appointed attorney general last year, the Department of Justice began shutting down pending criminal cases at a record pace. The cases included an investigation into a Virginia nursing home with a recent record of patient abuse; probes of fraud involving several New Jersey labor unions, including one opened after a top official of a national union was accused…

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Wired reports: President Donald Trump’s rhetorical war on elections has seemed to only get more serious with time. Over the past couple of months, he’s told podcaster turned FBI deputy director turned podcaster Dan Bongino that Republicans “should take over the voting” in 15 places and “ought to nationalize the voting.” He told Reuters that “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.” And he told NBC he will only accept the midterm results “if the elections…

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Scott Titshaw and Stephen Yale-Loehr write: On April 1, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on one of the most consequential immigration cases in decades. At issue is whether President Trump’s executive order restricting birthright citizenship can stand. The stakes could not be higher. If the court sides with Trump, the damage will ripple far beyond undocumented immigrants. It will affect legal visa holders, green-card holders and even U.S. citizens. It would also create an underclass of American-born children, some…

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Liz Dye writes: Two years ago, a court in Florida threw out Michael Flynn’s malicious prosecution lawsuit seeking $50 million from the US government. Yesterday, the government agreed to settle it anyway, handing $1.25 million in taxpayer dollars to the former national security advisor. Clearly this is an outrageous abuse by the Trump DOJ. It’s also a template for the looting to come, as everyone from Proud Boy Enrique Tarrio to Trump himself lines up to feed at the government…

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