After Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg finishes his trial with Donald Trump, he’ll have to turn to Harvey Weinstein. The disgraced former Hollywood mogul saw his 2020 conviction on sex crimes charges overturned Thursday by New York’s top court in a 4-3 decision that shocked the public. But Catherine A. Christian, a former prosecutor who spent more than 30 years in the Manhattan DA’s Office, wasn’t surprised. “A number of us were expecting that it probably would be reversed if there was some sort of intellectual honesty, because you don’t want to make bad law for bad defendants,” Christi ..read more

The stakes couldn’t be higher for Donald Trump. As he stands trial in Manhattan in the first-ever criminal prosecution of a U.S. president, stuck in a courtroom four days a week, he’s also running a reelection bid that, if successful, could effectively save him from his various criminal prosecutions. Meanwhile, the gritty lower-Manhattan courtroom at 100 Centre Street where Trump is spending his days remains something of an enigma to the public. There are no cameras, and much of the trial proceedings have been withheld from public view thanks to New York’s antiquated court system and some unus ..read more

When news broke one Saturday night in March 2023 that President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the Federal Aviation Administration was withdrawing, Mark Walker was the reporter on duty in the New York Times Washington bureau. Assigned to write up the news, Walker asked the White House for a comment just before midnight. Assistant press secretary Abdullah Hasan was still up and emailed a quote blaming the withdrawal on a barrage of “unfounded Republican attacks.” After going through edits, Walker’s 502-word story was posted on the Times’ website in the wee hours Sunday morning. Then all hell broke ..read more

PALO ALTO, California — Walk around the airy Stanford campus or step into a venture firm’s charmless office on Sand Hill Road. Drive up US-101 to San Francisco for cocktails at a beautiful Russian Hill home to take in the sunset over the Bay with startup founders and investors. And you can’t miss it. It’s not (only) the animal spirits AI-raging in Silicon Valley. The last time that the place was this hot was after the iPhone came out in 2007, says one top venture capitalist, “except that the tech world is like 10 times larger now than it was then.” There’s something bigger that hits you. It’s ..read more

NEW YORK CITY — Brian Glenn was about to go live. Amid the hundreds of reporters crowded outside a Manhattan courthouse on the first morning of Donald Trump’s criminal trial last week, Glenn, the director of programming for Right Side Broadcasting Network, would be delivering the news from the circus straight to hundreds of thousands of faithful MAGA viewers. Glenn looked like a typical television newscaster, but a bright blue and white pin he wore on the lapel of his suit set him apart from others in the press corral: It featured a big, bold “47” — a nod to Trump’s possible return to the pres ..read more

There are no atheists in foxholes and few isolationists in high office. Confronted with sobering briefings revealing Ukraine on the brink of collapse, Speaker Mike Johnson made the leap from Benton, Louisiana (pop. 2,048) congressman to custodian of the trans-Atlantic alliance. “It was the intelligence, it was the Europe generals who are in charge of the freedom of the world and of course it was the developments as well, everything has escalated,” Johnson told me, alluding to the conversations he had with the American brass at European Command. If those developments, namely Ukraine running out ..read more

As the Jan. 6 committee was working on its bombshell investigation into the Capitol riot and President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the last election, committee staffers took some time out of their seemingly 24-hour jobs one day in 2022 to brief a group of lawyers and legal pundits on a Zoom call. The people on the call weren’t affiliated with the investigation or the government. But they would have been familiar to anyone who watches cable news. They were some of the country’s most well-known legal and political commentators, and they were there to get insights into the committee’s work ..read more

This weekend, the annual White House Correspondents Dinner will cap off what is informally known in Washington as silly season — the series of dinners where the powerful and connected raise glasses, rub elbows and tell jokes. As someone who has attended dozens of these dinners (and has written jokes for dozens more), there will be plenty of laughs from the well-dressed and well-lubricated audience. But the laughs this year — as they have been throughout the last couple of silly seasons — will be less har de har and more cri de coeur. That’s because if tragedy plus time equals comedy, as Steve ..read more

Speaker Mike Johnson is on the verge of his biggest legislative victory yet — and it might mean his undoing. Johnson’s decision to maneuver a long-stalled, sprawling foreign aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan through the House amid stiff resistance from many conservative Republicans has once again raised the threat of a coup through the motion to vacate. How that drama ends is still unclear. But in the meantime, the move has fueled an extraordinary experiment in bipartisan governing of the House, as Democrats stepped in to save the aid — supporting the rule governing the legislation in ..read more

The bellhop at the Orlando hotel delivered a large red bag to the Cypress Penthouse, where he was met at the door by a woman in a green-and-white dress with a green-and-white “Shevin for Governor” sash around her neck. It was Myrna Shevin, the wife of Florida’s attorney general, and she did not look happy. Because the bellhop was one of her husband’s opponents in the 1978 gubernatorial Democratic primary. That was Bob Graham, a young state senator from Miami with a quirky campaign gimmick: He was spending 100 days working 100 different jobs done by ordinary Floridians. This was the first time ..read more