Attention to the Unseen

Politico reports: Elizabeth Warren has been on the receiving end of an onslaught of jabs, swipes, missives, think-pieces and general bashing from opponents this past week, the likes of which she hasn’t experienced since she jumped into the presidential race. But more surprising than the attacks — Warren, having risen to frontrunner status, had those coming — has been her response. In two words: No comment. Her surrogates and campaign aides aren’t going on cable TV to defend her —…

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Eric Levitz writes: These are anxious days for Democrats who favor gated communities and unfettered trade. Americans who believe in a woman’s right to choose and private equity’s right to loot, now need a Klonopin with their morning news. Elizabeth Warren — the slayer of Summers, stumper of Stumpf, and all around bane of (finance) capital — boasts comfortable leads in Iowa and New Hampshire. In at least one of those states, a Trotskyist fellow traveler is her closest competitor….

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The Washington Post reports: From Baghdad to the Shiite Muslim shrine city of Karbala and farther south, Iraqis are pushing for a revolution. They fill central squares to sing and dance from daybreak, and face down riot police when night falls. Iraq’s streets are no stranger to power struggles. They’ve been a stage for sectarian conflict and for the Islamic State’s emergence. But the crowds are different this time, and so is the threat now posed by the largest grass-roots…

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Peter D. Feaver and Will Inboden write: The news of the death of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi during a raid by U.S. special operations forces on Oct. 27 capped a dizzying three weeks in the Trump administration’s Syria policy. The turmoil began on Oct. 6, with President Donald Trump’s peremptory decision to pull back about 100 U.S. soldiers from their positions embedded with Kurdish forces in northern Syria. A few days later, he ordered the withdrawal from the…

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Fred Kaplan writes: The House impeachment probe has reached a point where continuing to defend President Donald Trump requires a prodigious capacity for denial or self-delusion. Sen. Lindsey Graham, Trump’s denialist in chief, summed up the situation on Tuesday when asked about Gordon Sondland’s revision to his testimony before the committees three weeks earlier. Originally, the hotel tycoon–turned–ambassador couldn’t remember much about a quid pro quo. But now that his memory had been refreshed by other witnesses’ depositions (which may…

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Jennifer Rubin writes: “I think it’s either fear or complicity.” That is how former Maine Republican senator and secretary of defense William S. Cohen tries to explain Republicans’ subservience to President Trump and willful disregard for replete evidence of corruption. “It’s predominantly fear. He will target them,” Cohen tells me in a phone interview Wednesday afternoon. He points to Trump’s public declaration that four congresswomen of color should “fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came”…

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Vox reports: Senior State Department officials and career diplomats repeatedly warned the Trump administration that taking away legal protections for immigrants from El Salvador, Honduras, and Haiti would put national security, foreign relations, and the immigrants’ American-born children at risk, according to internal State Department documents. But Trump did it anyway — and concerns about the 2020 election appear to have helped determine the timeline for requiring immigrants to leave, according to the documents, which will be released in a…

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Julia Davis reports: Standing beside an approving Donald Trump at a rally in Kentucky on Monday night, Republican Sen. Rand Paul demanded the media unmask the whistleblower whose report about the president’s alleged abuse of power dealing with Ukraine sparked impeachment proceedings. American news organizations resisted the pressure, but—in a 2019 re-play of “Russia, if you’re listening”—Kremlin-controlled state media promptly jumped on it. Shortly after Sen. Paul tweeted out an article that speculated in considerable detail about the identity of…

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NBC News reports: As President Donald Trump and his allies continue to denounce the CIA whistleblower whose complaint led to an impeachment investigation, pressure is building on the spy agency’s director, Gina Haspel, to take a stand on the matter, current and former intelligence officials tell NBC News. “It will be incumbent on her to protect the whistleblower — and by extension, the organization — moving forward,” Marc Polymeropoulos, a recently retired CIA officer who oversaw operations in Europe and…

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ProPublica reports: Last November, a top Trump appointee at the U.S. Agency for International Development wrote a candid email to colleagues about pressure from the White House to reroute Middle East aid to religious minorities, particularly Christian groups. “Sometimes this decision will be made for us by the White House (see… Iraq! And, increasingly, Syria),” said Hallam Ferguson, a senior official in USAID’s Middle East bureau, in an email seen by ProPublica. “We need to stay ahead of this curve…

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Rep. Adam Schiff writes: A little over one month has passed since the White House released the record of President Donald Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Americans read for themselves how President Zelensky sought more weapons critical to Ukraine’s defense, and how President Trump responded: “I would like you to do us a favor though” and laid bare his abuse of the power of the presidency. From the call record alone, we have stark evidence…

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Politico reports: Gordon Sondland, a key witness in the impeachment inquiry, revealed that he told a top Ukrainian official that hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid would “likely” be held up unless the country’s government announced investigations into President Donald Trump’s political rivals — a major reversal from his previous closed-door testimony. The acknowledgment of a quid pro quo is an explosive shift that threatens to upend claims by the president’s allies that military aid was not used…

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