Attention to the Unseen

The Associated Press reports: U.S. State Department officials were informed that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was feeling pressure from the Trump administration to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden even before the July phone call that has led to impeachment hearings in Washington, two people with knowledge of the matter told The Associated Press. In early May, officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv, including then-Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, were told Zelenskiy was seeking advice on how to navigate the difficult…

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Politico reports: Seventy percent of Americans believe President Donald Trump was wrong to pressure Ukraine’s leader to pursue probes into his political opponents, according to a new survey, and more than half of respondents now believe he should be removed from office. An ABC News/Ipsos poll published Monday found that 51 percent of those surveyed think Trump should be impeached by House lawmakers, as well as convicted in a Senate trial. Six percent say that while Trump’s actions were wrong…

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Reuters reports: The United States has the world’s highest rate of children in detention, including more than 100,000 in immigration-related custody that violates international law, the author of a United Nations study said on Monday. Worldwide more than 7 million people under age 18 are held in jails and police custody, including 330,000 in immigration detention centres, independent expert Manfred Nowak said. Children should only be detained as a measure of last resort and for the shortest time possible, according…

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Politico reports: President Donald Trump campaigned hard in three conservative Southern states this fall, aiming for a string of gubernatorial wins that would demonstrate his political strength heading into impeachment and his own reelection effort. The plan backfired in dramatic fashion. The latest black eye came on Saturday, when Trump’s favored candidate in Louisiana, multimillionaire businessman Eddie Rispone, went down to defeat. The president went all-in, visiting the state three times, most recently on Thursday. Earlier this month, Kentucky Gov….

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Politico reports: On May 28, 1986, newly commissioned 2nd Lt. Michael Pompeo stood at attention in Michie Stadium at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, first in his class. The career he was about to launch would take him from commanding a tank platoon in Germany to a seat in Congress, and ultimately to the right hand of President Donald Trump as secretary of State. Also on the field that day was classmate Mark Esper, who this July landed…

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The New York Times reports: In the 2017 fiscal year, FedEx owed more than $1.5 billion in taxes. The next year, it owed nothing. What changed was the Trump administration’s tax cut — for which the company had lobbied hard. The public face of its lobbying effort, which included a tax proposal of its own, was FedEx’s founder and chief executive, Frederick Smith, who repeatedly took to the airwaves to champion the power of tax cuts. “If you make the…

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Robert Reich writes: On Thursday, the New York Times reported on a study showing that Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax (and presumably Bernie Sanders’ even more ambitious version) would reduce economic growth by nearly 0.2% a year, over the course of a decade. Under the headline “Warren Wealth Tax Could Slow the Economy, Early Analysis Finds”, the Times trumpeted the analysis, from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, as “the first attempt by an independent budget group to…

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Wilfred Codrington III writes: Is a color-blind political system possible under our Constitution? If it is, the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 did little to help matters. While black people in America today are not experiencing 1950s levels of voter suppression, efforts to keep them and other citizens from participating in elections began within 24 hours of the Shelby County v. Holder ruling and have only increased since then. In Shelby County’s oral argument, Justice…

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Rachel Donadio writes: From the olive grove just outside the high cement wall—one topped with spirals of razor wire, enclosing one of Europe’s most infamous holding pens for asylum seekers—you can see all the way clear to the Aegean Sea, gray-blue in the distance. It’s a straight shot across the water to Turkey, just six miles away at the narrowest stretch, an ancient Dardanelles trade route. Moria, on the Greek island of Lesbos, is a symbolic place—a hinge between the…

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Renee DiResta, Michael McFaul and Alex Stamos write: In 1983, an anonymous letter from an author claiming to be an American scientist appeared in an Indian newspaper, asserting that the HIV virus raging across the world was a bioweapon released by the United States. Over the next several years, similar claims appeared in leftist and alternative newspapers around the world and ended up becoming widely believed among those predisposed to distrust the Reagan administration. As late as 2005, a study…

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