Attention to the Unseen

Michael Conway writes: The House Judiciary Committee grappled 45 years ago with the same thorny issue that it faces this week: how to respond to an executive branch defiantly refusing to comply with congressional subpoenas. That committee is currently dealing with the Trump administration’s refusal to comply with its subpoena for the unredacted report (and its supporting documents) of special counsel Robert Mueller and contemplating issuing one to compel the testimony of Attorney General William Barr, who refused an invitation…

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The Washington Post reports: The notes, scribbled rapidly on a legal pad, captured the fear inside the White House when President Trump raged over the Russia investigation and decreed he was firing the FBI director who led it: “Is this the beginning of the end?” The angst-filled entry is part of a shorthand diary that chronicled the chaotic days in Trump’s West Wing, a trove that the special counsel report cited more than 65 times as part of the evidence…

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Benjamin Wittes writes: I was willing to give Bill Barr a chance. Consider me burned. When Barr was nominated, I wrote a cautious piece for this magazine declining to give him “a character reference” and acknowledging “legitimate reasons to be concerned about [his] nomination,” but nonetheless concluding that “I suspect that he is likely as good as we’re going to get. And he might well be good enough. Because most of all, what the department needs right now is honest…

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Politico reports: Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Thursday accused Attorney General William Barr of committing a crime by lying to Congress, blasting him in a closed-door meeting and later at a news conference. “We saw [Barr] commit a crime when he answered your question,” Pelosi told Rep. Charlie Crist (D-Fla.) during a private caucus meeting Thursday morning, according to two sources present for the gathering. “He lied to Congress. He lied to Congress,” Pelosi said soon after at a news conference….

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The New York Times reports: House Democrats, decrying what they called an erosion of American democracy, threatened on Thursday to hold Attorney General William P. Barr in contempt of Congress after he failed to appear at a hearing of the Judiciary Committee and ignored a subpoena deadline to hand over Robert S. Mueller III’s full report and evidence. They seized on a letter from Mr. Mueller to the attorney general in which he took Mr. Barr to task for the…

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Reuters reports: The U.S. State Department allowed at least seven foreign governments to rent luxury condominiums in New York’s Trump World Tower in 2017 without approval from Congress, according to documents and people familiar with the leases, a potential violation of the U.S. Constitution’s emoluments clause. The 90-story Manhattan building, part of the real estate empire of Donald Trump, had housed diplomats and foreign officials before the property developer became president. But now that he is in the White House,…

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The New York Times reports: The conversation at a London bar in September 2016 took a strange turn when the woman sitting across from George Papadopoulos, a Trump campaign adviser, asked a direct question: Was the Trump campaign working with Russia? The woman had set up the meeting to discuss foreign policy issues. But she was actually a government investigator posing as a research assistant, according to people familiar with the operation. The F.B.I. sent her to London as part…

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