Attention to the Unseen

The New York Times reports: On the morning of Sept. 11 last year, about two dozen family members of those killed in the terror attacks filed into the White House to visit with President Trump. It was a choreographed, somewhat stiff encounter, in which each family walked to the center of the Blue Room to share a moment of conversation with Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, before having a photograph taken with the first couple. Still, it was…

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CNBC reports: Liberal billionaire George Soros took aim at President Donald Trump and China on Thursday at his annual dinner amid the World Economic Forum. Chinese President Xi Jinping is “trying to exploit Trump’s weaknesses,” Soros told the gathering. He also accused Xi of using “artificial intelligence to have total control of his people.” And while Soros did not discuss the Democratic presidential primary, in which he has yet to make an endorsement, he said the 2020 election will not…

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Henry Siegman writes: The threat of a new war with Iran that might have replicated what has been the worst disaster in the history of America’s international misadventures — George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq based on fabricated lies — sucked the air out of all other international diplomatic activity, not least of what used to be called the Middle East peace process. Yet the failure of the peace process has not been the consequence of recent mindless and destructive…

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The Daily Beast reports: Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman sent Jeff Bezos a photograph of a woman loosely resembling the one he was having an affair with months before the National Enquirer published a report exposing the liaison, according to a United Nations investigation. Two United Nations special rapporteurs released a statement Wednesday detailing forensic evidence linking MBS to the Bezos hack, which suggests the future king of Saudi Arabia may have been threatening the owner of The Washington Post…

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Isaac Chotiner writes: On Tuesday, Brazilian prosecutors charged the journalist Glenn Greenwald with “cybercrimes” as part of what the government claims was his role in a “criminal organization.” They allege that Greenwald—who reported on wrongdoing in Brazil’s judicial establishment last year for the Intercept, the Web site he co-founded—participated in the hacking of cell phones, the content of which was later used in his stories. But the reporting itself is the reason much of the Brazilian government is furious with…

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Greg Sargent writes: Now that Mitch McConnell has rolled out the rules for President Trump’s impeachment trial, the full dimensions of the Senate majority leader’s efforts to cover up Trump’s bottomless corruption are coming into view. They’re worse than expected, which is really something given McConnell’s long-running devotion to shielding Trump from accountability. As it happens, the formal legal brief that the White House just released in Trump’s defense itself illustrates the true nature of this attempted coverup as clearly…

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The Washington Post reports: President Trump’s legal defense team and Senate GOP allies are quietly gaming out contingency plans should Democrats win enough votes to force witnesses to testify in the impeachment trial, including an effort to keep former national security adviser John Bolton from the spotlight, according to multiple officials familiar with the discussions. While Republicans continue to express confidence that Democrats will fail to persuade four GOP lawmakers to break ranks with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.),…

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Jackson Diehl writes: When the postmortems are written about President Trump’s foreign policy — sooner, we have to hope, rather than later — one phrase will stand out as a hallmark of failure: “maximum pressure.” Much of this president’s international engagement has been a hodgepodge of impulsive and contradictory actions. But to the extent there is a Trump doctrine, it amounts to this: Use tariffs, sanctions and other means of economic pressure to compel U.S. adversaries — and, as often,…

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The Guardian reports: The Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos had his mobile phone “hacked” in 2018 after receiving a WhatsApp message that had apparently been sent from the personal account of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, sources have told the Guardian. The encrypted message from the number used by Mohammed bin Salman is believed to have included a malicious file that infiltrated the phone of the world’s richest man, according to the results of a digital forensic analysis. This analysis…

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Politico reports: He has spent one out of every three days as president visiting one of his luxury resorts, hotels or golf courses. He has leveraged his powerful international platform to promote his developments dozens of times. And he has directed millions of dollars from U.S. taxpayers to his businesses around the globe. In three years in the White House, Donald Trump has accomplished something no president before him has done: fusing his private business interests with America’s highest public…

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George T. Conway III writes: President Trump has filed his answer to the articles of impeachment against him. In legal parlance, an “answer” is a document filed at the beginning of a proceeding, typically a civil case, in which the defending side gives its response to factual allegations and lists the basic grounds for its defense. Trump’s answer did neither, not in any serious way. His arguments are wrong on the facts and wrong on the law, but that’s not…

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