Welcome to Telos

The crisis in Washington demands mission-oriented journalism

On Waking Up

Some news: I recently left Politico, where I’ve served as the Chief Washington Correspondent since 2019.

The main reason? Their style of political coverage is not meeting the unprecedented moment of democratic peril we are facing.

I know that sounds dramatic, but the gap between what is actually happening in Washington and how it was being framed and reported became much too wide.

This new publication, Telos, is my modest attempt to do things better.

I don’t mean to pick on my friends in the media. All the people and institutions on Trump’s enemies list are struggling with how to respond.

Frankly, it took me too long to realize how bad things are.

My moment of extreme clarity came during Trump’s assault on the law firm Paul Weiss.

It didn’t receive much attention at the time, but in his executive order attacking the firm, the president criticized, but did not name, a Paul Weiss partner who “brought a pro bono suit against individuals alleged to have participated in”—and here, really pay close attention to the tortured euphemisms—“the events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”

The unnamed lawyer is Jeannie S. Rhee. The suit that she helped bring was against the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers for, as she described it with justifiable pride in a 2023 interview, “their role in planning and carrying out the deadly January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol.”

Paul Weiss was also proud of her work. On its website, the firm celebrated her victory in a companion case:

“The Proud Boys are a white supremacist group that has a penchant for violence. … As part of their reign of terror, the Proud Boys targeted [Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church] in a racist attack. On December 12, 2020 (just 3 weeks before the January 6, 2021, insurrection), more than 700 Proud Boys descended on D.C. for a ‘stop the steal’ rally that they extended into a ‘night march’ attacking Black churches, including Metropolitan AME, and destroying banners expressing support for the Black Lives Matter movement. Paul, Weiss, joined by our partners the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, quickly came to the church’s aid.”

Or at least they were proud.

Here’s what you get when you click on that link now:

Paul Weiss deleted its own history.

The original web page is gone. Memory-holed. Deleted from the firm’s own accounting of its historic successes.

If you had clicked on Rhee’s bio earlier this year, the first thing you would have learned about her legal experience is her work on the Russia investigation:

“From May 2017 to 2019, Jeannie worked with Robert Mueller in the Special Counsel’s Office, where she led the team investigating Russian cyber, social media and intelligence efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election. Jeannie's team was responsible for many of the office’s significant accomplishments: the two Russia-related indictments, the prosecution of Trump associate Roger Stone, and the guilty pleas of attorney Michael Cohen and campaign advisor George Papadopoulos. Jeannie also helped secure the guilty plea of former campaign manager Paul Manafort.”

That language—indeed, any reference at all to her work with Mueller—has been deleted.

Another Paul Weiss lawyer, Daniel J. Kramer, used to have this line in his bio: “He has teamed up with the Anti-Defamation League and States United Democracy Center in representing Washington, D.C. as it seeks recovery against the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers for harm to police officers during the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.”

It’s gone. (The case is gone, too—D.C. dropped it.)

Paul Weiss used to have a section on its site about “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” Now, it’s just about “Inclusion.” They used to brag that “[m]ost elite law firms profess a devotion to diversity and inclusion, but none can match Paul, Weiss’s history of putting it into practice.”

That language has disappeared.

There are other examples, but you get the point. One of the leading law firms in America deleted entire chapters of its own history, erased the accomplishments of its top partners, and rewrote its own stated core values to appease the federal government.

That is some 1984-level shit.

For me, there was something terrifying about digging into those details, which haven’t previously been reported, and comparing the old and new language. It revealed with such eerie specificity how these lawyers—prominent officers of the court—rescripted their own biographies and erased their proudest achievements.

It shook me. And there is no way to capture that when writing for a place such as Politico.

This is not a criticism of the specific lawyers. I have little idea how frightening it must be to get singled out in a president’s executive order like Rhee was.

But this coerced memory-holing of a private citizen’s identity also woke me up.

I saw too many headlines that covered Trump’s assault on these law firms as if it were an intriguing tennis match, and it made me painfully aware that vast swathes of the media are ill-equipped to cover the current crisis.

A Turning Point

The good news is that many people and institutions under attack are also waking up, starting with law firms.

Paul Weiss and Skadden Arps caved to the government. But Perkins Coie and Jenner & Block refused to be cowed.

The universities are also waking up. Columbia caved. But Harvard stood firm.

The corporate media, facing similar challenges, is lagging. Trump sued ABC News, and the leadership there caved. The White House Correspondents Association fired a comedian—whose assignment was to roast the president!—because she made a crass joke about his administration.

Unfortunately, at my publication, things weren’t much better. I saw up close how easy it was for a media conglomerate to grovel before the Trump administration when the wrong people are in charge.

After Trump attacked Politico for selling subscriptions to the federal government, Politico made a regrettable mistake. To smooth things over, they sent our White House reporter to be an onstage guest at CPAC, a sewer of media bashing and cheerleading for the degradation of our democracy where some activists were publicly organizing an unconstitutional third term for Trump—in other words, a coup.

A friend of mine who served in Iraq once tried to explain to me how psychologically disorienting warfare can be for soldiers the first time they’re in full-scale combat. It’s so horrific, so unlike any human experience, that the initial instinct is to deny that what’s happening is actually happening.

That’s the psychology that has seized many newsrooms, law firms, and other elite institutions in Washington for months.

We need to wake up.

Mission-oriented journalism

This publication is my earnest attempt to cover the crisis in Washington with a clear-eyed understanding of what is actually happening. Telos is the Greek word for purpose. Yes, it’s a little precious, but I wanted a daily reminder that journalism needs to be mission-oriented. It is not just the gathering of random facts from political combatants. It has an aim—a telos.

We are going to start small, but we have big ambitions. If you are interested in writing for us or joining the team, email me at telos@telos.news.

I originally considered raising money for this venture, but after the first conversation with a wealthy funder, I realized I would be recreating some of the same problems I was trying to fix in the current corporate media landscape.

So this effort will be 100% funded by Telos readers—you.

I have never written a fundraising appeal, and just typing this paragraph is deeply cringe-inducing for me. But we want to create not just a news outlet, but a news community. That’s the main reason for doing this here on Substack, where millions of readers and viewers are hungry for alternatives to what the media and tech giants are serving up.

And that means I need your help.

Specifically, please pay for a subscription to show that you believe in this project. If you do, you’ll be on the ground floor of a media company designed from day one to meet this moment of democratic backsliding. You can help me shape the direction of this effort and provide the support to expand and hire like-minded reporters. Many enormously talented journalists grinding away inside soulless institutions want to be part of this kind of project, but they don’t believe it’s financially viable.

Let’s wake them up.

In return, I promise that Telos will be the essential destination for news, analysis, opinion, and investigative reporting documenting the issue of our time: the assault on democracy by an administration weaponizing the state against its perceived enemies.

I’m sure we will talk a lot about traditional policy and politics—campaigns and elections, polling, the minutiae of legislative efforts, the midterms, and the presidential primaries. I’ve covered that stuff for almost 30 years. But right now, it all takes a backseat to Trump’s efforts to harness the power of the government against its people.

I come to this issue with more experience than I would like. Over the next days and weeks, I’m going to publish a trio of articles that I think will help you understand how we arrived at this moment. These pieces will be more personal than anything I’ve written before, and I hope they will give you much deeper insight into some of the people now running things in Washington.

The first big piece will be available this week. It’s a lengthy investigative article about the roots of the kind of lawfare that this administration is trying to perfect. It tells the story of the MAGA world’s recent legal efforts to silence press critics—and how they backfired spectacularly, partly because they relied on a lawyer who turned out to be a fraud.

At the heart of the story is a mystery about a stolen computer, which contains the secret files of top Trump officials as well as confidential materials from some of the largest media companies in the world.

The effort to secure the computer has been playing out in sealed proceedings in a small-town courtroom, where the key players, according to documents obtained exclusively by Telos, have exchanged accusations of theft, spying, corruption, adultery, insanity, and murder.

I assure you that the article is worth the Telos subscription price.

Finally, a quick thank you to the generous group of independent writers who I consulted and pestered over the last few months as I pondered this undertaking: James Fallows, Gabe Fleisher, Steve Schmidt, Jennifer Rubin, Joe Klein, Tim Mak, Tina Brown, Matt Labash, Elise Labott, Oliver Darcy, Chris Cillizza, Brian Beutler, Ryan Grim, and Hamish McKenzie. I’ll be sleeping on your couches if this doesn’t work out.