Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: Erik Prince, the security contractor with close ties to the Trump administration, has in recent years helped recruit former American and British spies for secretive intelligence-gathering operations that included infiltrating Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda, according to interviews and documents. One of the former spies, an ex-MI6 officer named Richard Seddon, helped run a 2017 operation to copy files and record conversations in a Michigan office…

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The Washington Post reports: President Trump’s company charged the Secret Service $157,000 more than was previously known — billing taxpayers for rooms at his clubs at rates far higher than his company has claimed, according to a new trove of receipts and billing documents released by the Secret Service. Many of the new receipts were obtained by the watchdog group Public Citizen, which spent three years battling the Secret Service over a public-records request from January 2017. When added to…

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John Nichols writes: Elizabeth Warren won the ideas primary, and on Thursday she claimed that victory. “A year ago, people weren’t talking about a two-cent wealth tax, universal childcare, canceling student loan debt for 43 million Americans while reducing the racial wealth gap, breaking up big tech, or expanding Social Security. And now they are,” she told her supporters. “And because we did the work of building broad support for all of those ideas across this country, these changes could…

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Eric Levitz writes: In states across the nation on Tuesday, pluralities of Democratic primary voters expressed a favorable opinion of “socialism.” In revealing that a candidate could secure a hammerlock on 20 percent of the Democratic electorate, and ownership of a historically powerful online fundraising apparatus, by embracing radical social-democratic reform, Sanders changed the ideological incentives facing his co-partisans and the terms of the Democratic debate. In the 2020 field, the “moderate” candidates supported a public option strong enough to…

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Amanda Terkel writes: Elizabeth Warren wasn’t trying to be the first female president. She wanted to be president. She wanted to cut banks down to size and relieve student debt. Root out the corrupt influence of money in politics and go after monopolies. Warren didn’t focus on how she’d be breaking a glass ceiling. She didn’t shy away from her gender, but when she talked about feminism, it was most often centered on female organizers and the movements they’ve led…

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The Atlantic reports: For the past several months, Bloomberg has been the wild card. He made the risky move of skipping all four early nominating states to bet it all—or at least half a billion dollars of his personal fortune—on Super Tuesday. For a brief moment, the strategy seemed to be working. He rose to the top tier in polling for many of the contests. Then came a miserable Nevada debate and a reconsideration of how he would actually perform…

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Politico reports: Just hours after Joe Biden surged to the top of the Democratic presidential pack, Senate Republicans announced a new phase of their investigation targeting the former vice president and his son Hunter. Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) told reporters on Wednesday that he is likely to release an interim report within one to two months on his panel’s probe of Hunter Biden’s ties to a Ukrainian gas company, Burisma. “These are questions that Joe Biden…

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