Attention to the Unseen

Michael Kruse writes: Stone met Trump in 1979. The matchmaker was the infamous Roy Cohn, and the context was the fledgling Ronald Reagan presidential bid. Just 27 at the time, six years younger than Trump, Stone was in New York working as the campaign’s regional political director. He needed people to help raise money. Trump was a Jimmy Carter donor but joined Reagan’s finance committee as well. “We hit it off immediately,” Stone recalled. Ever since, off and on, but…

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Jamelle Bouie writes: The wall of Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency has always operated both as a discrete proposal — an actual structure to be built under his leadership — and as a symbol with a clear meaning. Whether praised by its supporters or condemned by its opponents, the wall is a stand-in for the larger promise of broad racial (and religious) exclusion and domination. It’s no surprise, then, that some Americans use “Build the wall” as a racist chant,…

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The Washington Post reports: The United States and Venezuela were locked in a tense international standoff Thursday as the Trump administration kept embassy staff in the country despite an official order to eject them, and Russia demanded that the Americans cease “intervention” in the teetering oil-rich nation. Moscow and Beijing have propped up the socialist South American state for years, investing billions through loans and energy deals and setting up what is now a dramatic global power play over Venezuela’s…

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NBC News reports: Nearly three months after deeming Russia in violation of a chemical weapons law, the Trump administration has yet to impose tough new sanctions on Moscow required by the law and triggered by the poisoning last year of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal. Even as the European Union moves ahead, punishing four Russian officials this week in connection with the poisoning, the U.S. has not moved forward with its own penalties. The delay comes as the Trump administration…

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Kevin Poulsen writes: Russian oligarchs and Kremlin apparatchiks may find the tables turned on them later this week when a new leak site unleashes a compilation of hundreds of thousands of hacked emails and gigabytes of leaked documents. Think of it as WikiLeaks, but without Julian Assange’s aversion to posting Russian secrets. The site, Distributed Denial of Secrets, was founded last month by transparency activists. Co-founder Emma Best said the Russian leaks, slated for release Friday, will bring into one…

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The Washington Post reports: The White House’s top economist on Wednesday said the economy could completely stall in the first three months of 2019 if the government shutdown does not end, drawing a sharp contrast with the rosy economic picture President Trump has tried to paint during the month-long funding lapse. White House Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Kevin Hassett, in a CNN interview, was asked whether the economy’s growth rate for the first quarter of the year could fall…

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The New York Times reports: President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela scrapped all diplomatic ties with the United States on Wednesday and gave American diplomats 72 hours to leave, ordering them out with a derisive “be gone!” and accusing the Trump administration of plotting to overthrow him. Mr. Maduro’s actions came as he faced the most direct challenge yet to his hold on power in Venezuela, a once-prosperous country that has been devastated by years of political repression, economic mismanagement and…

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The Guardian reports: A fireball outside a courthouse. Hijackings and bomb alerts. Sealed-off streets, evacuations and arrests. Speculation about the next attack. It can seem as if Derry has stepped into a time machine. Television pictures in the past few days have shown images redolent of the Troubles, an era supposedly consigned to the city’s museums and murals. Ice and snow blanketed the scorch marks outside the Bishop Street courthouse on Tuesday as police with body armour and rifles patrolled…

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The New York Times reports: Joseph R. Biden Jr. swept into Benton Harbor, Mich., three weeks before the November elections, in the midst of his quest to reclaim the Midwest for Democrats. He took the stage at Lake Michigan College as Representative Fred Upton, a long-serving Republican from the area, faced the toughest race of his career. But Mr. Biden was not there to denounce Mr. Upton. Instead, he was collecting $200,000 from the Economic Club of Southwestern Michigan to…

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BuzzFeed reports: The plan was dazzling: a glass skyscraper that would stretch higher than any other building in Europe, offering ultra-luxury residences and hotel rooms and bearing a famous name. Trump Tower Moscow, conceived as a partnership between Donald Trump’s company and a Russian real estate developer, looked likely to yield profits in excess of $300 million. The tower was never built, but it has become a focal point of the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into Trump’s relationship…

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