Attention to the Unseen

Newsweek reports: An Obama-era acting solicitor general of the United States has argued that the White House is “engaged in unprecedented obstruction” of the Ukraine probe. Law professor Neal Katyal told MSNBC that the Trump administration’s approach to the ongoing impeachment inquiry was “in many ways even worse” than former President Richard Nixon’s alleged obstruction of the impeachment investigation amid the Watergate scandal. His comments come as the White House has sought to block administration staffers from delivering depositions before…

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Susan Simpson writes: At the heart of the impeachment inquiry, members of Congress may have been mistakenly led to believe that there were two phone calls between President Donald Trump and Ambassador Gordon Sondland in early September—with the second call having the possibility of helping the President’s case. That’s not what happened. There was only one call, and it was highly incriminating. The call occurred on September 7th. In this call, Trump did say there was “no quid pro quo”…

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Reuters reports: UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson said it was best if U.S. President Donald Trump did not get involved in Britain’s upcoming election when he visits London for a NATO summit next week. “What we don’t do traditionally as loving allies and friends, what we don’t do traditionally, is get involved in each other’s election campaigns,” said Johnson, whose Conservative Party has a commanding lead in the polls ahead of the Dec. 12. “The best (thing) when you have…

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Adam Serwer writes: Donald Trump is a war-crimes enthusiast. This is not an exaggeration, a mischaracterization, or a misrepresentation. As a candidate, the president regaled his audiences with vivid tales of brutality, some apocryphal, and vowed to imitate them. On the campaign trail, Trump frequently invoked a false story about General John Pershing crushing a Muslim insurgency in the Philippines with bullets dipped in pig’s blood, declaring, “There was no more radical Islamic terror for 35 years!” He vowed to…

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The New York Times reports: President Trump had already been briefed on a whistle-blower’s complaint about his dealings with Ukraine when he unfroze military aid for the country in September, according to two people familiar with the matter. Lawyers from the White House counsel’s office told Mr. Trump in late August about the complaint, explaining that they were trying to determine whether they were legally required to give it to Congress, the people said. The revelation could shed light on…

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Philip Bump writes: President Trump certainly wouldn’t be the first employer to retroactively try to designate a staff member as an independent contractor, but he might be the first to do so to aid his fight against being impeached and removed from the White House. His assertion to former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly that his personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani was acting independently on Ukraine, perhaps for other clients, has an obvious goal. Giuliani was the point of contact…

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The New York Times reports: As Rudolph W. Giuliani waged a public campaign this year to unearth damaging information in Ukraine about President Trump’s political rivals, he privately pursued hundreds of thousands of dollars in business from Ukrainian government officials, documents reviewed by The New York Times show. Mr. Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, has repeatedly said he has no business in Ukraine, and none of the deals were finalized. But the documents indicate that while he was pushing Mr….

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Jane Mayer writes: For nearly three years, President Trump has spun an alternate reality in which he was not helped and tainted by Russia during the 2016 Presidential campaign but, rather, his political opponents and his accusers were. During a rambling fifty-three-minute live phone interview with “Fox & Friends” on Friday, Trump insisted again that the plot to block his election and bring him down once he was installed in the White House was “perhaps the biggest scandal in the…

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The Guardian reports: Plenty of Jews in the UK would say the chief rabbi does not speak for them. They may be from different traditions in Judaism – progressive or ultra-Orthodox – or they may be secular. But many, probably most, agree with the thrust of his unprecedented intervention in next month’s general election. Ephraim Mirvis, the UK’s most senior Jewish leader who represents Orthodox Judaism, accused Jeremy Corbyn of allowing a “poison sanctioned from the top” to take root…

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