Attention to the Unseen

Politico reports: The tentacles of the Democratic impeachment investigation are extending far beyond the arms of President Donald Trump. The vice president’s office, acting chief of staff’s office, State Department, Energy Department, Office of Management and Budget and Justice Department are among the government entities quickly finding themselves ensnared in the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, joining a huge squad of White House lawyers, Cabinet officials and national security staffers — many of them detailed from the Pentagon, CIA and elsewhere in…

Read More Read More

The New York Times reports: After a jet carrying Attorney General William P. Barr touched down in Rome late last month, some diplomats and intelligence officials at the American Embassy were unsure why he had come to the Eternal City. They were later surprised, two officials said, to discover that he had circumvented protocols in arranging the trip, where he met with Italian political and intelligence officials. Everything about the visit was unusual — perhaps most of all, the attorney…

Read More Read More

The Guardian reports: When Hong Kong’s summer of protests began in June, the city was so shocked by police unleashing 150 canisters of tear gas and using their batons, it helped bring two million people into the streets to demonstrate again and denounce police brutality. Four months of rolling protests later, they used nearly 10 times as many tear gas rounds in 24 hours in a futile bid to control the city as China celebrated 70 years of communist rule…

Read More Read More

Al Jazeera reports: As clouds of white smoke billowed overhead, Showqi had no other option but to flee. Nearby, dozens of people scattered as they tried to outrun a fresh volley of tear gas fired by security forces in Tahrir Square, in the centre of Iraq’s capital, Baghdad. “They’re the lucky ones, [the ones] who were not targeted by government snipers,” Showqi said on Saturday, referring to the men who had run alongside him, some holding masks and pieces of…

Read More Read More

The Washington Post reports: By mid-May, the U.S. relationship with Ukraine was unraveling: The U.S. ambassador had been recalled home for no apparent reason, the country’s new president was anxious about U.S. support, and President Trump’s personal lawyer was hawking Kiev conspiracy theories. Amid this turbulence, an unexpected figure stepped forward to assert that he was now in charge of the U.S.-Ukraine relationship. Gordon Sondland, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, had no apparent standing to seize this critical…

Read More Read More

Vox reports: A top US diplomat told Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) that the Trump administration was blocking hundreds of millions of dollars in US military aid to Ukraine until the country agreed to launch investigations Trump was demanding, Johnson told the Wall Street Journal Friday. Johnson said that the US ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, told him in late August that the administration was demanding Ukraine investigate “what happened in 2016,” and that if President Trump had “confidence”…

Read More Read More

Jane Meyer writes: For nearly two years, conservative operatives have been trying to weaponize the Ukraine-based story that has led Trump to the brink of impeachment. A look back over the coverage of the story—a repeatedly discredited conspiracy theory involving Joe Biden and his son Hunter’s work in Ukraine—suggests that America’s news organizations continue to be just as susceptible to manipulation by political partisans pushing complicated and hard-to-check foreign narratives as they were in 2016. In fact, several of the…

Read More Read More