The easy way

This week

• Want to lay criminal charges against a political enemy when a career prosecutor says there isn’t enough evidence? No problem.
• Is free speech in America under “unprecedented” attack?
• & What’s the point of flying jets and drones into countries you’re not at war with—when you’re in the middle of a war?
• The question of recognizing a Palestinian state in 2025
• A look at the practicality of lecturing allies on committing civilizational suicide and the UN being a joke
• Moscow’s big influence campaign in tiny Moldova

Weather report

• Typhoon Ragasa in Southeast Asia

+ Cultural intelligence

• Where is Ukraine? And why is the idea of “Central Europe” so important to so many political leaders east of the West? Luka Ivan Jukic, Central Europe: The Death of a Civilization and the Life of an Idea.
• New music from Salif Keita.
• & What’s a calabash? … or a ngoni?

The world in brief

What’s happening, September 20-26

The case for the prosecutions

On the afternoon of September 20, last Friday, Erik Siebert cleared out his desk at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia. The career prosecutor had declined to bring charges against former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and others after his staff concluded the evidence didn’t support any prosecutions.

By Monday morning, Lindsey Halligan took the oath as Siebert’s replacement. Halligan had never prosecuted a criminal case in her life. Her most recent previous job had her removing “improper ideology” from museums belonging to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., as a White House aide. Before that, she’d represented U.S. President Donald Trump as his personal defense attorney.

By Thursday afternoon, she stood in a federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, securing Comey’s indictment with one day left before the five-year statute of limitations expired. The charging documents bore only Halligan’s signature—no career prosecutors joined the case.

Meanwhile, Aakash Singh in the Deputy Attorney General’s office sent directives to at least six U.S. attorney offices instructing them to investigate George Soros’s Open Society Foundations on potential charges ranging from material support for terrorism to racketeering. The memo cited a report from the Capital Research Center, a conservative watchdog group that claims Soros has “poured over $80 million into groups tied to terrorism or extremist violence.”

Why’s all this happening now?