By Tracy Wilkinson @ LATimes.com, Jan. 23

The Trump administration took the unusual and provocative step Wednesday of recognizing the leader of the political opposition in Venezuela as the country's legitimate president.

The move comes as the Trump administration has sought ways to ramp up pressure on the socialist government of President Nicolas Maduro, which it accuses of widespread human rights abuse, drug trafficking and a host of other crimes. Already, Washington has blacklisted several senior Venezuelan officials and put sanctions on some of its export industries, including mining.

In a statement, President Trump said he was recognizing Juan Guaido as the interim president of Venezuela because he is the head of “the only legitimate branch of government duly elected by the Venezuelan people,” a reference to the country’s National Assembly, Venezuela's legislative body that Maduro has sidelined and replaced with his own legislature stacked with his supporters [....]

But the justices allowed the public release of a partially-redacted legal filing that disclosed a few more facts about the dispute.

By Josh Gerstein @ Politico.com, Jan. 22

The Supreme Court announced Tuesday that it will maintain much of the secrecy surrounding a mysterious legal dispute that appears to have pitted an unknown foreign company against special counsel Robert Mueller. The showdown, which centers on the company’s refusal to comply with an apparent Mueller subpoena, has emerged as one of the most intriguing aspects of the ongoing probe of the Trump campaign’s potential collusion with Russia [....]

The newly-released filing reveals that the confidentiality went even further than previously known: at some point, lawyers for the company were excluded while prosecutors made an unusual “ex parte” presentation to the appeals court judges [....]

....Another detail: Had Kavanaugh but not Roberts wanted to hear the case immediately, his vote would have been sufficient in conjunction with the three hardline conservatives, since it only takes four votes for the justices to agree to hear a case. The reasonable conclusion, therefore, is that Kavanaugh didn’t want to rush the DACA case — and that he didn’t want to allow Trump’s DACA rescission to take effect right away....

By Alex Isenstadt @ Politico.com, Jan. 21

'Patriot Pass' is the Republican Party's answer to ActBlue, Democrats' online money behemoth.

“This is a system that will take what has been disparate — campaigns and super PACs and different people that raise small-dollar donations — and put them together.” -MIKE SHIELDS, DATA TRUST SENIOR ADVISER

He described the attack a decade later in his last sermon, which he delivered the night before his assassination.

By DaNeen L. Brown @ WashingtonPost.com, Jan. 21

On the afternoon of Sept. 20, 1958, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was autographing books in the shoe section of Blumstein’s Department Store in Harlem when a well-dressed woman wearing rhinestone glasses stepped out of the long line and shouted: “Is this Martin Luther King?”

King looked up from signing copies of his first book, “Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story,” his memoir about the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott [....] King, then 29, answered: “Yes, it is.”

That’s when Izola Ware Curry, the black daughter of sharecroppers, pulled a letter opener with an ivory handle from her purse and swung at King. The civil rights leader tried to block the attack. Curry sliced King’s hand before plunging a seven-inch blade into the left side of King’s chest, according to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University. [....]

Martin Luther King Jr. courageously spoke out about the Vietnam War. We must do the same when it comes to this grave injustice of our time.