The bombshell New York Times report that the U.S. and Israel hoped to install former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the leader of Iran puts the lie to so much of what hawks in the West have been trying to sell their publics about the Iran war.

Despite claims by President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Iran war was never about freedom for the Iranian people.

That much is obvious thanks to Ahmadinejad’s role in recent Iranian history: In 2009, Iranians rose up against a stolen election in what was known as the Green Movement, which was violently crushed by Iran’s security forces to keep Ahmadinejad in power.

Though a populist, Ahmadinejad at the time dismissed the protests as nothing more than the result of “emotions after a soccer match” or, in another instance, “dirt and dust.” These are not the bona fides of a leader who will lead Iran into democracy.

Instead of a campaign for Iranian freedom, this war — like much of the U.S. and Israel’s last 20 years of going after Iran — has been about catastrophically weakening Iran. Here, reading between the lines of history, Ahmadinejad’s position as an Israeli–U.S.-backed coup leader starts to make sense.

Ahmadinejad had been largely quiet until he suddenly reemerged into headlines on Tuesday with the Times report. After killing Iran’s supreme leader in the opening hour of the war, according to the Times, Israel targeted a building on Ahmadinejad’s street, ostensibly to “free” him from what was effectively either house arrest or the strict monitoring of his movements. According to some reports, the guards keeping watch on Ahmadinejad were indeed killed, but Ahmadinejad himself was injured, too.

How, if the plot had been successful, was Ahmadinejad supposed to take over? Was the assumption that by assassinating the top leadership, including Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps generals, Ahmadinejad would be able to gain the support of the rest of the top echelon of the security forces? That would be a far-fetched notion.

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While he retained his populist credentials over the years, Ahmadinejad’s clashes with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and with the “nezam,” or regime, over social and political issues lost him whatever support he still had among the military wings and the Basij militia. Those forces — though they had helped crush the 2009 protests on Ahmadinejad’s behalf — remained fiercely loyal to Khamenei and the political system of “Guardianship of the Jurist.”

For now, Ahmadinejad is nowhere to be found, raising suspicions that he is in the custody of the IRGC or dead.

Good for Israel

It’s hard to imagine the Iranian president who declared in his first few months in office that “Israel must vanish from the pages of time” and subsequently questioned the Holocaust being a good choice for Israel. History shows, though, how Ahmadinejad’s eclectic positioning has previously coincided with Israeli interests.

Coming to power after President Mohammad Khatami’s reform movement and his call for “dialog among civilizations,” Ahmadinejad’s stances damaged Iran’s reputation almost beyond repair.

And this was, somewhat ironically, a boon to Israel, whose leaders could point to the malevolent nature of the Islamic Republic. Ahmadinejad was the perfect figurehead for a bogeyman Iran that needed to be taken down a notch.

Israel and its allies in Washington made hay of Ahmadinejad’s every word — for instance, his sponsorship of a Holocaust denial cartoon contest — and succeeded in turning his remarks into the justifications for an unprecedented and devastating sanctions program. Ahmadinejad’s rule was, in so many ways, bad for Iran.

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Which is why, even at the time and certainly later, there were suspicions privately aired in Tehran that he could actually be a Mossad asset — with the caveat, of course, that no hard proof ever emerged. Still, at a time when gaining the trust of the west in nuclear negotiations was paramount, Ahmadinejad was building Israeli hard-liners’ case against talks for them.

Now, of course, the allegation that Ahmadinejad was primed as a coup leader — the first report from an even remotely reliable outlet of a real link to Israel — has only added to the rumors, as have his most recent trips abroad, to Viktor Orbán’s Hungary and to Guatemala, both allies and supporters of Israel.

Trump himself admitted before this latest revelation that Israel bombed some of the people who were candidates to be an Iranian Delcy Rodríguez — the Venezuelan figure who seamlessly took control from kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and reportedly is cooperating with the U.S. The most solid hint Trump gave was that he had someone “inside” Iran in mind, dashing the hopes of Iranian royalists.

Don’t Listen to Israel

Whether or not it is true that Ahmadinejad was an Israeli asset — whenever he may have been recruited or even just unwittingly manipulated — he would have fit Trump’s bill. What he never would have been was a beacon of freedom for the Iranian people. Insofar as the broad contours of the Times report are accurate, we can now be assured that the well-being of the Iranian people has not really ever been at the top of either Trump or Netanyahu’s minds.

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The U.S. and Israel may have some commonality in what they’d like to see with Iran, but not entirely. Israel’s interests lie mostly in defanging Iran, even seeing it descend into a failed state that can neither threaten Israel nor challenge its hegemony in the region. The U.S., on the other hand, has consistently focused on Iran’s nuclear potential.

Both Democratic and Republican administrations have indicated that if the nuclear issue was resolved to the satisfaction of the U.S., Iran could potentially be rehabilitated and rejoin the international community. That would have left Iran with the potential to grow into a regional powerhouse and global force — something Israel has long opposed, which is why it tried so hard to derail the 2015 nuclear agreement.

Whatever happens, Ahmadinejad will never be a factor in Iranian politics, even if in the unlikely event that he one day resurfaces alive and free. The Venezuela option for Iran now seems silly, a chimera that should have never been considered.

If the White House had listened to a handful of Iranians or those who know Iran well, rather than Netanyahu and war hawks in Congress, perhaps 175 school children and their teachers would be alive today. The Strait of Hormuz might be open and free. And a nuclear deal could have already been signed.

Instead, there has been war and destruction, wasted lives and wasted treasure, chaos in the region, and the global economy wobbling. Ahmadinejad has once again been bad for Iranians — and now everyone else, too.

The post Ahmadinejad Is Still Bad for Iranians — and Still Great for Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

As a longtime employee at the Shelby County Jail in downtown Memphis, Story had seen the young man come in and out of the detention facility known as 201 Poplar since the 1980s. Shaw acted cocky, but there was fear in his eyes. Story, a devout Christian, occasionally had conversations with him about God.

In 1994, Shaw became a witness in a grisly triple homicide. A local drug dealer, along with his mother and a teenage friend, had been abducted, murdered, and buried in a freshly dug grave at a cemetery in South Memphis. Prosecutors arrested 25-year-old Tony Carruthers, who had recently gotten out of prison. There was nothing directly tying him to the crime — and he swore that he had nothing to do with it. But Shaw claimed that Carruthers confessed to him. In 1996, a jury sentenced Carruthers to die.

Like most people, Story assumed Carruthers was guilty. But in January 1997, Story himself was accused of a crime he swore he did not commit. He was arrested and charged with selling drugs to an undercover officer. There was no evidence against Story — in fact, the presiding judge initially threw out his case for lack of probable cause. But in 1999, he was tried, convicted, and given probation. The main witness against him was Shaw.

Story was convinced he’d been framed. Over the previous decade he’d become known as a whistleblower, documenting violence and abuse at the jail. This made him a target for retaliation. “I had some enemies within the sheriff’s department,” he said.

Story lost his job and his pension as a result of his conviction. He had been fighting to clear his name for 20 years when, one week before Christmas 2017, he got an envelope in the mail from Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville. That return address was written in elaborate script below the name “Tony Von Carruthers.”

The envelope contained records confirming what Story had long known to be true: Shaw had been a paid confidential informant. Although this had been an open secret in Memphis for decades, the Shelby County District Attorney’s Office repeatedly denied it. “I have talked to the prosecutors who tried your client and neither is aware of any situation where Alfredo Shaw acted as a paid informant for anybody,” the office had written to Carruthers’s post-conviction attorneys.

The enclosed documents chronicled drug buys Shaw made on behalf of the sheriff’s department between 1991 and 1997. Conspicuously absent was the date when Story supposedly sold drugs to Shaw. Story believed that this should exonerate him. But the courts disagreed.

Story did not know precisely why Carruthers mailed him the records. Nor did he know the truth behind Carruthers’s innocence claim. But when he heard that Tennessee had set an execution date for Carruthers, he was deeply disturbed. No one, he says, should be executed based on the testimony of Alfredo Shaw.

“I’d hate to see him murdered, put to death, when there’s so many open ends,” he said.

Tony Carruthers is scheduled to die by lethal injection on Thursday morning at 10 a.m.

He has maintained his innocence for 32 years.

On Monday, Carruthers’s supporters, including family members and advocates from the American Civil Liberties Union, delivered a stack of petitions to the office of Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee at the state Capitol in Nashville. Despite mounting calls for Lee to stop the execution, on Tuesday he announced that he would not intervene.

In a clemency petition, his attorneys describe Carruthers’s case as a travesty of justice: a death sentence based on lies and a flimsy narrative that was bankrupt from the start. Among those who have spoken out against the execution is Story, now 72. He is joined by another ex-jailer, Bernard Kimmons, who also says he was wrongfully convicted of selling drugs based on Shaw’s testimony. Wearing “Save Tony Carruthers” T-shirts, the men told a Memphis news station that Shaw has a track record of putting innocent people in prison. “We’re not the only ones he’s done this to,” Kimmons said.

False testimony by jailhouse informants is a leading cause of wrongful convictions, often used to fill the gaps in cases where the state’s evidence is weak. The Innocence Project has found that roughly a quarter of death row exonerations are in cases involving a jailhouse snitch.

In Carruthers’s case, no physical evidence implicated him in the murders. Fingerprints from the crime scene have never been linked to anyone, and a blanket found buried with the victims has been shown to have an unknown male DNA profile. Some of the most horrifying details of the crime have also been discredited in the decades since Carruthers’s trial. The case remains infamous in Memphis because of the ubiquitous claim that the victims were buried alive. But this has long been debunked. Although a medical examiner said at trial that the victims suffocated to death, he later retracted his testimony — and other experts have said there was never anything to support it.

These red flags — a lack of physical evidence, unreliable witnesses, and bogus forensic testimony — are all-too familiar features of wrongful convictions. But Carruthers’s case is uniquely shocking in another way: He was sent to death row after acting as his own lawyer at trial. Carruthers’s attorneys have long argued that this doomed Carruthers from the start. They write in his clemency petition that he has a long history of undiagnosed mental illness and “was not competent to stand for trial, much less competent to represent himself.”

Carruthers’s self-representation was especially self-sabotaging where Shaw, the jailhouse snitch, was concerned. By the time Carruthers went to trial in 1996, Shaw had recanted his statements implicating Carruthers in an explosive TV interview, and prosecutors decided against calling Shaw as a witness. But in a perverse irony, Shaw ended up testifying anyway — not for the state, but for the defense. “In an effort to show that the prosecution had secured the indictment with an untrue story,” the clemency petition explained. “Mr. Carruthers believed he had to call Alfredo Shaw to the stand.”

The result was so disastrous that a judge later reversed the conviction of Carruthers’s co-defendant, concluding that Carruthers’s self-representation had violated his co-defendant’s right to a fair trial. That man, James Montgomery, got out of prison in 2015.

To Carruthers’s sister, Tonya, who joined the petition delivery in Nashville — and who said she plans to witness her brother’s execution — the past 32 years have been a living nightmare. She argues that her brother’s conviction was a case of guilt by association — and that his own record made it easy for him to take the fall for a crime he did not commit.

For decades, she said, the press adopted the state’s narrative of the case without examining the obvious problems with the case. “He was already portrayed as a monster in the media before his trial ever started.”

The triple murder that sent Carruthers to death row began as a missing persons case. Forty-three-year-old Delois Anderson lived in North Memphis with her son Marcellos Anderson, her niece Laventhia, and Laventhia’s two young daughters. She worked at a bank during the day and took classes at night.

On the evening of February 24, 1994, Laventhia would later testify, she came home to an empty house. It looked like Delois had been home. “Her car was there. Her purse was there. Her keys were there,” Laventhia said. In Delois’s bedroom, a pack of cigarettes and lighter were in their usual spot, and she had apparently served herself a plate of greens for dinner.

Laventhia figured her aunt had stepped out and would return soon. But that didn’t happen; Laventhia never saw her again.

Around 2:40 a.m. the next morning, a sheriff’s deputy in Mississippi responded to a call about a car on fire just south of the Tennessee state line. The vehicle, a white Jeep Cherokee with gold trim, was traced to a Memphis man who said he had lent it to Marcellos Anderson, nicknamed Cello.

Within a week, news broke that a suspect had led police to a grave of a woman who had been recently buried at the Rose Hill cemetery in South Memphis. Authorities got permission to exhume the body. Under the casket, beneath some wooden planks, were the remains of Anderson, his mother, and 17-year-old Frederick Tucker. Their hands were bound together; Delois Anderson had a pair of socks wrapped around her neck. Tucker and Marcellos Anderson had been shot.

The murders were front-page news in Memphis, where frenzied media coverage soon turned into bad press for law enforcement officials. Police had two main suspects in custody: Carruthers and a man named James Montgomery — the brother of the man who led authorities to the bodies. But Montgomery’s brother had since fled the state, leaving prosecutors without a key witness. With no other evidence against the two defendants, a judge threw out the first-degree murder charges.

Prosecutors scrambled, urging police to “get out and beat the bushes,” as one assistant district attorney would later testify. Before long, a new witness came forward: 28-year-old Alfredo Shaw.

On March 27, Shaw gave a tape-recorded statement to a pair of sergeants with the Memphis Police Department. He said that Carruthers carried out the murders on behalf of a pair of drug dealers who had been robbed by Anderson and Tucker. In fact, he said, Carruthers had tried to enlist him in the crime. “I stated to Tony that I did not want to be involved in that,” Shaw said.

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Shaw claimed that he and Carruthers were in the back of the jail’s law library when Carruthers divulged how it went down: He and Montgomery had gone to Anderson’s house in search of the stolen money but only encountered his mother, Delois. They demanded she call her son, who returned to the home with the teenage Tucker. “Carruthers told me they put the gun to Marcellos and made them all go get in the Cherokee,” Shaw said. Carruthers and Montgomery then drove the three victims to Mississippi, where Carruthers shot Anderson and Tucker and set the jeep on fire. They then drove Delois, who was still alive, to the cemetery along with the two bodies, which they threw into the grave. Delois was screaming, Shaw said. So Montgomery pushed her into the grave, too.

Two days later, Shaw repeated the story to a grand jury.

In the two years between the indictment and the trial, however, Shaw began to have second thoughts. In February 1996, he contacted a local TV reporter and, with his identity concealed, recanted his statements on Memphis’s Channel 13. He said that he had been coerced and coached by Shelby County Assistant District Attorney Gerald Harris, who offered him money and promised to dismiss pending criminal charges against him.

Harris appeared in the TV segment too. He told the news station that Shaw was not credible. “I’m not gonna put that kind of witness on,” he said. Like all criminal defendants, Carruthers “has got a right to a fair trial.”

Carruthers and Montgomery were tried together in April 1996. Rather than the murder-for-hire plot Shaw described, prosecutors argued that the men wanted to take over the local drug trade. The theory was constructed entirely from circumstantial evidence, with witnesses testifying that said they saw the men with the victims at some point on February 24, 1994.

“It was all just stories,” Carruthers’s sister Tonya recalled. She attended the trial every day with their mother, describing it as a media circus and a hostile atmosphere. “Our family name became the scourge of the community,” she said. “We were not treated well at all in court.”

Tonya had spoken to her brother shortly after the murders. She remembers him being extremely upset. Although he ran in the same circles as Anderson and did not get along with him, he would never have killed him, she said — and he certainly would not have done anything to hurt his mother. Carruthers’s own daughter was related to the Anderson family through his ex-girlfriend. “If I knew that was gonna happen,” Tonya remembers him saying, “I would’ve done anything I could to stop it.”

Presiding over the trial was Shelby County Criminal Court Judge Joseph Dailey. Case records show that Dailey became convinced that his life was in danger due to reported death threats that swirled around the case from the start. He imposed a gag order on the press to prevent reporters from printing witnesses’ names, as well as unprecedented security measures in the courtroom and at his home.

Dailey was also fed up with Carruthers before the trial began. One by one, defense attorneys appointed to the case told the judge that their client was erratic and abusive and asked to be removed. Dailey ultimately refused to appoint any more attorneys, leaving Carruthers to represent himself. “He is the person who put himself in this position,” Dailey later said while denying Carruthers a retrial.

Several of the state’s witnesses knew Carruthers from prison. One man testified that he had worked with Carruthers on a work detail that included doing shifts in a cemetery — and that Carruthers remarked that hiding a body in a grave would be a good way to get away with a murder. “If you ain’t got no body, you don’t have a case,” he said. Another witness testified about a pair of letters Carruthers sent from prison, in which he boasted ominously about a “master plan” to settle scores on the streets. “Everything I do from now on will be well organized and extremely violent,” he wrote.

Carruthers pointed out that the letters did not actually implicate him in the killings. “He can’t say if I was just in prison just bragging or just running off at the mouth,” he told Dailey. But the judge allowed the letters as evidence.

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The state had already rested its case on April 24, 1996, when Carruthers called Alfredo Shaw to the stand. His goal was to show that, as a jailhouse snitch, Shaw falsely implicated him in the murders in exchange for money and favors. But Dailey blocked Carruthers from questioning Shaw about being a confidential informant. The resulting testimony was a disaster for Carruthers.

Shaw testified that he contacted homicide detectives through a Crime Stoppers hotline after hearing about the murders on the news. Carruthers then presented him with his previous statements to police and to the grand jury, creating the impression that Shaw had been consistent in his accounts. When he tried to pivot to show that Shaw had disavowed his previous statements, it backfired. Shaw explained that he only wavered in his accounts because he’d been afraid for his life.

Carruthers and Montgomery were swiftly convicted. In his closing argument urging jurors to sentence the men to die, Harris emphasized the suffering of the victims as they slowly suffocated. “This woman, Delois Anderson, is in a grave, in a pit, alive,” he said. “The tragedy of it is that as she actually breathed in her last breath she was in effect killing herself, bringing things into her body, dirt being on top of her.” It was hard to imagine a more horrifying scene.

After a few hours, the jury came back with a death sentence.

Carruthers had been on death row for well over a decade when an investigator with his federal lawyers in Nashville did a deep dive into his life and background. Such investigations are a critical step in modern capital defense: One of the first things a lawyer is supposed to do to uncover any evidence of trauma, abuse, or mental illness — the kind of mitigating factors that can persuade a jury to spare a client’s life.

None of the attorneys originally appointed to represent Carruthers had undertaken such an investigation. And Carruthers was not able to do such work on his own behalf.

“Perhaps the most prominent issue affecting Tony’s family is that of severe mental illness,” the investigator later wrote in a report. Relatives across generations had schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and Carruthers displayed symptoms of both. When he was 14, his mother, Jane Carruthers, admitted him to a local hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. He stayed for five days.

Before long, Carruthers was in and out of juvenile jails. Staff at one facility recommended that he be placed “in a structured therapeutic environment,” but this was easier said than done. His mother was a single parent raising four children; while she worked hard all her life, she struggled to afford the family’s basic needs, let alone cover the kind of care her son might have needed.

“She was extremely hard-working,” Tonya said about her mother, who died a few years ago. “Oftentimes she worked two jobs.” For years she did overnight shifts at the Sheraton hotel in downtown Memphis, where Tonya remembered having occasional meals. Although Tonya described many challenges throughout their childhood, she went on to thrive in a way that her brother never did. Carruthers had anger issues, his sister told the investigator, which worsened as he got older.

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After Carruthers turned 20 — an age where mental illness commonly manifests — he became increasingly manic and volatile. On one occasion, according to the report, Carruthers was accused of setting a fire at a house where he was staying. After being restrained and placed in a police car, Carruthers “ate the vinyl off the left rear passenger door, spitting chunks of it on the floor,” according to a police report. A Memphis officer still remembered the episode years later, describing it as a kind of “psychosis.”

At the time, such episodes were attributed to drugs or alcohol. But Carruthers’s legal team was certain that undiagnosed mental illness played a role. Although he repeatedly refused to cooperate with evaluations that could have yielded more specific diagnoses, defense experts nonetheless concluded that he had a type of schizoaffective disorder, whose symptoms included “pervasive delusions and paranoia.”

This was consistent with Carruthers’s behavior at trial, which jurors found off-putting, as well as his ongoing hostility toward his defense attorneys. To date, his case records are filled with declarations, transcripts, and countless letters documenting the fraught relationship with lawyers who were ill-equipped to represent Carruthers — and who Carruthers believed were conspiring against him.

After he was sent to death row, Carruthers became fixated on a belief that he was going to win a lucrative lawsuit against his lawyers. One state post-conviction lawyer memorialized a meeting in which Carruthers showed him a photograph of a green 2006 Jaguar; Carruthers said he planned to buy it with the proceeds from his civil litigation. “He was totally serious about this,” the lawyer wrote. “Tony also told me that it would be okay if the staff poisons him to death, because then his daughter will get a lot of money from the state, and that is his biggest concern.”

Carruthers has always rejected the suggestion that he was not competent to stand trial. While Tonya does not deny that he has shown symptoms of mental illness, she also points out that his paranoia is, in fact, well-founded given what happened in his case.

Decades after Carruthers was sentenced to die, both James Montgomery and Alfredo Shaw gave statements to his defense investigators saying that Carruthers did not participate in the crime. Montgomery pointed at a different man, who died in 2002, as the person who helped kidnap and kill the victims. But the courts refused to allow testing that might confirm this claim.

Shaw, meanwhile, met with a defense investigator on three different occasions while in federal prison in 2011. According to the investigator, he repeated what he had told the TV reporter in 1996, adding that, after the interview aired, police and prosecutors threatened to go after him if he did not revert to his original account. Shaw became visibly tense and upset as he spoke, the investigator wrote.

The investigator summarized Shaw’s account in a declaration. “I testified falsely at trial because I was fearful that the District Attorney’s Office would retaliate against me,” it read. But Shaw said he was too scared to sign it.

It would take another six years for Carruthers’s attorneys to obtain the first batch of records confirming that Shaw was a paid informant — the same ones that Earley Story later received in the mail. And it was not until 2024 that they obtained additional records casting light on Shaw’s history as a confidential informant, not only for the sheriff’s department, but also for the Memphis Police Department as well. The records showed once again that Shaw was a paid snitch, with every incentive to lie on the stand. By then, Carruthers’s appeals had long been exhausted.

On the eve of his execution, the full story behind Carruthers’s case now stands to be buried with him. The state may put Carruthers to death, Tonya said, but families on both sides still deserve to know the truth of what happened in 1994.

In the meantime, she wants the public to know that he is not the killer who was portrayed in the press. “Please let people know that my brother is not a monster.”

The post False Testimony Sent Tony Carruthers to Death Row. Tennessee Is About to Kill Him. appeared first on The Intercept.

Within days of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, Republican lawmakers across the South moved with remarkable speed to carve up Black constituencies and consolidate political power. Tennessee rushed to dismantle Memphis’s majority-Black district. Louisiana went further, postponing an ongoing election and moving to eliminate a majority-Black district that snakes for more than 200 miles, from Baton Rouge to Shreveport. South Carolina and Georgia began maneuvering toward special sessions to redraw districts to be even more favorable to Republicans.

Democrats have warned that up to one-third of the Congressional Black Caucus could disappear, and Republicans aim to pick up as many as 15 House seats. 

The immediate reaction shattered the comforting fiction that America has somehow transcended race in its democratic life. The court may describe these protections as outdated relics of another era, but the swift political response revealed something older and more durable beneath the surface: preserving racial hierarchy remains one of the most potent organizing instincts in American politics.

The Supreme Court’s continued dismantling of the Voting Rights Act is often framed as a tragedy that primarily affects Black Americans. It is that. But in a much larger sense, it also reveals how willing the country is to weaken its own democracy to keep these racialized systems of power intact.

Jim Crow for All

It is no surprise that many of the former slaveholding states have once again moved to cheat the nation out of its democratic values. While most Confederate soldiers did not personally own slaves, the poison of white supremacy still convinced countless poor and working-class white men to fracture the country, slaughter their fellow Americans, and march themselves into mass death on the battlefield to preserve a racial order that benefited an elite planter class more than it ever benefited them.

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After the Civil War, the South could have become a multiracial democracy built around poor Black and white laborers with overlapping economic interests. During Reconstruction, formerly enslaved Black Americans briefly helped build some of the South’s first systems of universal public education and expanded democratic participation across the region. But Southern elites responded by enacting Jim Crow laws — not merely to dominate Black Americans, but also to preempt any nascent democratic solidarity. As historian Heather Cox Richardson has written, wealthy Southern landowners understood that interracial democracy threatened the entire economic order that had sustained plantation rule. 

The system harmed Black Americans most brutally. White racists got what they wanted: segregation, lynchings, and Black exclusion from political life. But it also left millions of poor and working-class white Americans trapped inside oligarchic state structures, one-party political machines insulated from accountability and designed to serve landowners, industrialists, and political dynasties. As Suresh Naidu, a professor of economics and international affairs at Columbia University, found in his study of postbellum Southern disenfranchisement that poll taxes and literacy tests didn’t just suppress Black voters — they also hurt democratic participation across the South as a whole, reducing overall voter turnout by 8 to 22 percent.

As a result, public goods, such as schools and sanitation, weakened, labor organizing collapsed under racial division, and political options narrowed for Southern whites. These shadows still haunt the South, the region that accounts for the nation’s highest poverty rates and lowest per capita GDP compared to other regions.

Southern Comforts 

Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed the Voting Rights Act into law, infamously observed that “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket.” Johnson was articulating a fundamental truth about American political history: Racial status has often been used as compensation for democratic and economic weakness.

It’s a system that has never disappeared. 

The erosion of democracy in our current era also cuts both ways. As the Voting Rights Act is chipped away, blue states are increasingly incentivized to answer Republican gerrymandering with politically motivated maps of their own. The country drifts further from representative democracy and deeper into a retaliatory system where both parties manipulate their electorates for survival.

Ordinary Americans become pawns in a larger struggle over racial hierarchy and entrenched political power. Millions of voters — many of them white Americans — are treated as acceptable political sacrifices in the effort to preserve white conservative hegemony across the South. Their votes become collateral damage in a campaign of anti-Blackness. 

It is an odd gamble to watch: these southern Republican yes-men rushing to exploit the hollowed-out voter protections at a period of time when their states have so much to lose. As other Republicans have voiced concerns about Trump’s unilateral war on Iran, it is actually the bodies of the South that stand to risk the most, as Southern states have long supplied a disproportionate amount of the nation’s combat troops.

Trump’s tariff wars have also hammered away at that historic pillar of Southern agriculture, particularly the soybean, cotton, poultry, and manufacturing sectors that rely heavily on exports to foreign markets. Farmers across states like Arkansas, Texas, Georgia, and the Carolinas have been forced to depend on bailouts after retaliatory tariffs slashed export demand and destabilized prices.

The South’s democratic decline has carried material consequences far beyond voting booths. Today, many of the same states most aggressive in restricting voting rights also rank among the nation’s worst in healthcare access, maternal mortality, and rural hospital closures. And as I’ve written before, the South also leads the nation in rates of gun violence. 

Millions of poor and working-class white Southerners now live with the realities of political systems shaped by a stark lack of public investment and democratic accountability. In trying to keep Black Americans farther from opportunity and power, white Southerners ultimately moved those civic possibilities farther from themselves, too.

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What we stand to be left with is an electoral system based on voting blocs engineered by the elites, for the elites. Researchers found that when politics harden into insulated gerrymandered coalitions, democratic systems become less responsive, less representative, and more vulnerable to authoritarian behavior. Politically jaded Americans, who increasingly identify as independents or report feeling disenfranchised by both parties, have now catapulted themselves into an arena with even fewer choices and no real levers left to pull to exercise political power.

In response, the Democrats have largely offered a restrained, institutional response, with House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries urging Americans to “summon the courage, character and conviction” of civil rights figures like Rosa Parks and John Lewis, which feels backwards as hell as the Supreme Court incinerates their legacies.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is populated with politicians and legal thinkers who have long resented the hard-fought civil rights victories in the 1960s. Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s closest political advisers, has railed against the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, the law which banned European preferences in immigration. Russell Vought, an architect of Project 2025 and Trump’s current director of the Office of Management and Budget, has argued that the post-1960s civil rights bureaucracy should be remolded away from protecting diversity and toward defending the interests of white Americans.

The right-wing campaign to roll back civil rights protections has always rested on a myth, on a dismissal of the role Black Americans have served throughout American history. It assumes the long battle for equal protections, fair labor, and true democracy was only for the benefit of Black people. It’s a falsehood that serves only to deepen racial divisions to discourage any form of class-based solidarity. Instead, we have been here through time to hold America to its promised principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — a stress testing of its legitimacy for all. 

But for a court so convinced America has made “great strides” in ending racism, it is worth asking why its allure is still so powerful, and why so many white Americans are willing to trade away parts of their own freedom in its service. Perhaps it lies in the pervasiveness of understanding racism as only a “Black problem” — an unfortunate deviation from an otherwise “normal” white arrangement. As sociologist Robert Terry once put it, “To be white in America is not to have to think about it.” But that lack of self awareness carries a cost: generations of white Americans re-ushering in white hegemony so reflexively they often fail to see how it has shrunk their own democracy, political imagination, and livelihoods in the process.

The post The End of the Voting Rights Act Isn’t Just a “Black Problem” appeared first on The Intercept.

The 3rd Congressional District race unfolded along key fault lines animating the Democratic Party, from the influence of special interest groups to Israel and its genocide in Gaza. It staked out a clear contest between the party’s progressive and moderate wings.

The split marked a contrast to the 7th Congressional District primary in the Lehigh Valley, where the left and the establishment united behind Bob Brooks, a firefighters’ union chief who sailed to victory Tuesday night.

Brooks will run in what’s expected to be a tight general election in November against freshman Republican Rep. Ryan Mackenzie. Rabb is all but guaranteed to win the deep blue seat being vacated by retiring Rep. Dwight Evans.

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Rabb, who has been a vocal critic of U.S. military support for Israel, attracted endorsements from progressive members of Congress like Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y. One of his top opponents, state Sen. Sharif Street, earned the support of Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., while Dr. Ala Stanford, a pediatric surgeon, was backed by a pro-Israel super PAC. Also on the ballot was Shaun Griffith, an attorney who never broke through in the polls. 

In a statement released Tuesday night, the Democratic Socialists of America celebrated Rabb, who recently joined the group’s Philadelphia chapter, and pointed to key political causes for the left in Congress.

“There is a new Democratic Socialist in Congress,” the group wrote on X. “We will be with Congressman Rabb every step of the way in the fight to abolish ICE, free Palestine and win Medicare for All.”

Rabb has collected endorsements from 10 members of Congress, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and progressive groups including the Pennsylvania Working Families Party, the Philadelphia chapter of DSA, Justice Democrats, and Jewish Voice for Peace Action.

“Chris Rabb is exactly what Democratic voters nationwide are demanding — progressive trailblazers who fight for their communities, not just when it’s politically convenient but when it’s morally necessary,” said Alexandra Rojas, executive director of Justice Democrats, in a statement. “While the party machine has spent decades failing to meet the needs of its voters, Rabb has taken the fight to corporate interests, billionaire CEOs, and Republican extremists his whole career.”

Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, considered one of the Democratic Party’s moderate rising stars, waded into the race in its final weeks to try to stop a powerful Philadelphia union backing Street from inadvertently boosting Rabb’s campaign with attack ads against Stanford, Axios reported. Nevertheless, Stanford and Street appeared to split establishment-friendly support, trailing late Tuesday night with about 30 and 25 percent of the vote, respectively, to Rabb’s 44.

Union Boss to Compete for Key Swing Seat

In the Lehigh Valley, Brooks handily defeated his primary opponents in the 7th Congressional District, marking a win likely to be claimed by the left and center alike.

Brooks campaigned on affordability and fighting corruption, highlighting his union bona fides rather than aligning with a specific wing of the Democratic Party. By late Tuesday night he had secured more than double the support of any of his competitors: former federal prosecutor Ryan Crosswell; former Northampton County Executive Lamont McClure; and Carol Obando-Derstine, an engineer who previously worked for former Sen. Bob Casey, D-Pa., and former Gov. Tom Wolf.

On the campaign trail, the retired firefighter argued that the real divide in his district was between the working class and the billionaire class and their allies. “The whole system is rigged against us, and the only way we’re going to fix it is by sending people like us to Washington, D.C., to represent us,” Brooks said at a recent event.  

Unlike in the 3rd District, progressives and more mainstream Democrats united behind Brooks. Shapiro, the governor, has been an outspoken surrogate for Brooks, who was also endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders and the Working Families Party.

In a statement celebrating Brooks’s win on Tuesday night, Sanders pointed to two other candidates with union backgrounds who prevailed in primaries this year.

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Brooks’s win “follows the recent progressive victories of iron worker and union leader Brian Poindexter in OH, and union organizer Analilia Mejía in NJ,” Sanders wrote on X. “We’re making progress!”

“We deserve representatives who come from the working class and will stand up for the working class, and that’s what Bob has done for his entire life and career,” said Nick Gavio, mid-Atlantic communications director for the Working Families Party, in a statement announcing the party’s endorsement.

The Cook Political Report rates the general election for the 7th District a toss-up, and Brooks is expected to face a tight contest against Mackenzie, who narrowly flipped his Lehigh Valley seat from blue to red in 2024 and is widely considered to be one of the most vulnerable members of the House this cycle. 

As of late Tuesday night, Brooks had nearly 42 percent of the vote, while Crosswell and McClure came just shy of 21 percent each, and Obando-Derstine received just over 17 percent.

Brooks benefited from critiques of his opponent, Crosswell, a former Republican who launched his campaign after quitting the Department of Justice in the early days of the Trump administration, when federal prosecutors were under pressure to drop corruption charges against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams in return for Adams’s cooperation on immigration enforcement. Crosswell faced criticism for his previous role in prosecuting “many, many” immigration cases as an assistant U.S. attorney while running for district with one the largest, but politically diverse, Latino communities in the state. 

“Trump has built his agenda on targeting our immigrant community. I’ve seen exactly what that means for families like mine,” Obando-Derstine, who was born in Colombia, wrote in a statement to The Intercept. “Anyone who chose to carry out those attacks against our community has no business being in office. We deserve leaders who stand with us when it matters, not just when it’s easy.”

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Advertisements from a mysterious super PAC called “Lead Left” also became a backdrop to the race. The ads attacked both Brooks and Crosswell on their progressive credentials, and sought to curry left-leaning support for McClure. “Lamont McClure kicked ICE out of Northampton. He takes on Trump and wins,” says the narrator in one of the advertisements.

Although the donors are anonymous, the super PAC reportedly has connections to a prominent Republican donation-processing firm.

This developing story has been updated.

The post Pennsylvania Results: Chris Rabb to Join the Squad in Congress as Bob Brooks Tries to Flip Key Seat  appeared first on The Intercept.

It also reaffirmed the grip of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in GOP politics.

AIPAC’s super political action committee and two other groups backed by pro-Israel donors poured more than $15.8 million into the race either opposing Massie or supporting his opponent, former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein, according to Federal Election Commission reports released through Tuesday.

That blizzard of cash may not have been as important for Republican primary voters as Trump’s hatred of Massie. Still, it helped make the 4th Congressional District race the most expensive House primary in history, with overall spending reaching $32 million, topping the 2024 New York Democratic primary in which AIPAC’s super PAC aided Westchester County Executive George Latimer in ousting then-Rep. Jamaal Bowman.

Massie had framed the race in terms that led to accusations of antisemitism, calling it “a referendum on whether Israel gets to buy seats in Congress.” He denied the charge and repeated similar language in his concession speech Tuesday night. “For 14 years, those S.O.B.s in Washington tried to buy my vote,” Massie said. “Why did the race get so expensive? Because they decided to buy the seat.”

Massie is a libertarian contrarian who reliably votes for the conservative position on measures in the House — but he has generated headaches for Trump on everything from the Justice Department’s files on Jeffrey Epstein to the NSA’s surveillance of Americans.

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He has also been a critic of U.S. funding for Israel and the war on Iran. His vote has helped make every attempt at blocking the conflict through a war powers resolution bipartisan, although so far all of them have fallen short.

A spokesperson for AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project, described Massie as “the most anti-Israel Republican in the House.”

The Kentucky representative says he is taking a stand on principle: He has always opposed foreign aid in general.

“I have never voted for foreign aid to Egypt, to Syria, to Israel or to Ukraine,” Massie told CBS News. “But the ones in Israel, since they’re the biggest recipients of it, that makes them a little bit mad.” 

Republicans still overwhelmingly support Israel, according to public opinion polls. But the share who do so has declined significantly over the last few years, and younger GOP voters are much less supportive of unconditional funding for Israel.

When he emerged for his concession speech on Tuesday, a grinning Massie told the crowd, “I would have come out sooner but I had to call my opponent and concede, and it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv.”

In a statement congratulating Gallrein on Tuesday, AIPAC announced that voters “support Democratic and Republican candidates who view a strong U.S.-Israel relationship as an American interest and reject those who focus on attacking that alliance and pro-Israel Americans.”

“Massie has been one of the most consistently hostile voices in Congress toward the U.S.-Israel relationship and the millions of Americans who support it,” read the AIPAC statement posted on X. “Our community was proud to support Gallrein and help ensure Massie’s defeat.”

The race was dogged by accusations of antisemitism and salacious, negative advertising. Massie’s opponents seized on a pro-Massie super PAC’s television ad that featured a picture of anti-Massie billionaire donor Paul Singer with a rainbow Star of David and that accused Gallrein of being backed by “the gay mafia.” Meanwhile, the anti-Massie camp created a deepfake artificial intelligence ad pointing to the few times he crossed party lines to accuse him of being in a “throuple” with progressive Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.

Singer was the largest donor to MAGA KY, the Trump-supported super PAC that was created specifically to oust Massie.

Also spending against the representative were the United Democracy Project and the Republican Jewish Coalition Victory Fund.

This developing story has been updated.

The post Thomas Massie Loses His Seat in a Win for Trump — and AIPAC appeared first on The Intercept.

Experts say Trump administration policies — like dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development and withdrawing from WHO — have further undermined global health security and negatively impacted the response to the outbreak. WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus warned of emerging cases in urban areas, including reports of cases in Uganda’s capital, Kampala, and Goma, a crossroads city in Congo that borders Rwanda.

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The Intercept reported on the porous borders and worrying  public health responses in Goma during an Ebola outbreak in 2019. At the time Anthony Fauci — then the head of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — laid out the dangers of Ebola spreading in that urban center. “Since Goma is a city of millions of people, and since it has an international airport, it is a great concern,” he explained. “If Ebola could get into Goma and spread in Goma, that increases the likelihood that it could spread beyond the DRC into neighboring and distant countries.”

Experts have expressed alarm that the virus has been spreading undetected for weeks at least — and likely months — in Ituri Province, a remote area of eastern Congo that borders South Sudan and Uganda. The region, long riven by conflict, is home to many displaced persons and a haven for itinerant workers and smuggling operations. It has weak medical and public health infrastructure, making contact tracing is extremely difficult.

“The province of Ituri is highly insecure. … Conflict has intensified since late 2025, and fighting has escalated significantly over the past two months, resulting in civilian deaths. Over 100,000 people have been newly displaced, and in Ebola outbreaks, you know what displacement means,” said Tedros. “The area is also a mining zone, with high levels of population movement that increase the risk of further spread.”

Previously, USAID supported NGOs and healthcare workers in rural communities on the front lines of such outbreaks. “They’re the people standing between us and disaster,” said Margaret Harris, a former senior WHO official and a medical doctor who responded to Ebola outbreaks in West Africa in the mid-2010s and Congo in the late 2010s.

Harris praised the past work of USAID, and the U.S. in general, in responding to previous outbreaks of Ebola. This current outbreak can be managed, she said, but that it will take funding, training, equipment, and supplies — like personal protective equipment, medications, and fluids — for local healthcare workers. Harris, now a global health specialist at the United Nations Institute for Training and Research said that while some might argue that governments should pay for their own healthcare workers, she noted such front-line personnel provide a service that extends far beyond a nation’s borders. “They are protecting global health security,” she told The Intercept, adding: “And they were also simply doing good for ordinary people.”

A U.S. government official with experience working with foreign non-governmental organizations, who spoke on background because they were not authorized to talk with the press on the subject, told The Intercept on Tuesday that there was “no question” Trump administration policies have helped to undermine the global public health response. This indictment was echoed by Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn, the ranking member on the House Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies subcommittee.

“The Trump administration has systematically dismantled much of our global health infrastructure, without giving a thought to the consequences. Now, we are seeing those consequences play out,” DeLauro told The Intercept, noting that the administration dissolved USAID, cut the United States off from the WHO, and carried out mass layoffs across the domestic global public health space.

“This will not be the last outbreak of a deadly infectious disease,” DeLauro said. “We must invest in global health infrastructure. Not only to be reliable and effective partners, but to be prepared for the next outbreak. In public health, isolation is not a strategy. Infectious diseases do not respect political borders.”

On Monday, the State Department announced that on “May 15, 2026, within 24 hours of learning of the confirmed cases, the Department leveraged its outbreak response and humanitarian assistance capabilities.” The WHO actually issued an alert of a high-mortality outbreak in Ituri, which included deaths among healthcare workers, 10 days prior. On May 14, blood samples were finally analyzed across the country, in Congo’s capital, Kinshasa. A day later, the analysis confirmed Bundibugyo virus disease, a strain of Ebola.  

“I cannot help but wonder if the administration had not taken such drastic action to dismantle so much of our global health infrastructure, that we would have been able to identify this outbreak earlier and stop it from spreading as much as it has,” DeLauro said in a separate press release.

“It is false to claim that the USAID reform has negatively impacted our ability to respond to Ebola,” a State Department spokesperson told The Intercept. “In fact, by bringing USAID global health functions under the new GHSD bureau at the State Department, our efforts are more aligned and effective. Funding and support to combat Ebola continue, working with allies and partners.”

When asked about the lag between the first notification of a disease outbreak and the U.S. response, the spokesperson did not reply to multiple requests for comment.

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On his first day back in office last year, Trump began the process of withdrawing the U.S. from the WHO and cutting all funding for the U.N. health agency. “World Health ripped us off,” Trump said at the time. The withdrawal process was completed January of this year.

Tedros announced that WHO has a team on the ground supporting the national responses to the African outbreak, noting his organization had “deployed people, supplies, equipment and funds,” including millions from an emergency fund.

“The outbreaks of Ebola and hantavirus in the past two weeks show why international threats need an international response,” Tedros said on Tuesday, also referring to the recent outbreak on an expedition cruise ship of a rare virus carried by rodents. “They show why the world needs the international health regulations, and why it needs WHO.”

The post Ebola Outbreak Rages After Trump Gutted Global Health Safeguards appeared first on The Intercept.

In yet another staggeringly corrupt and unprecedented move, President Donald Trump’s Justice Department on Monday announced a $1.776 billion slush fund, drawn from public coffers, to funnel payouts to Trump loyalists.

The fund is part of a deal decided by the Trump administration to drop its weak $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over a leak of the president’s tax returns. The entire lawsuit had itself become an egregious example of self-dealing: Trump’s Justice Department suing Trump’s IRS on behalf of Trump.

Over 90 House Democrats recently signed an amicus brief to the presiding judge asking that she dismiss the suit. A settlement, the Democrats wrote, would create a “specter of corruption unparalleled in American history.”

Before the judge could respond, however, Trump withdrew the lawsuit and moved to set up something even worse than that specter: a slush fund beholden entirely to Trump, with little in the way of judicial or congressional oversight.  

According to the Justice Department announcement, the so-called “anti-weaponization” fund — to remedy the purported weaponization of the U.S. government — will be paid out to Trump allies who claim they were targeted by President Joe Biden’s administration. The irony that the fund itself is just one of Trump’s countless weaponizations of the government should be lost on no one.

The fund amount — $1.776 billion — is, of course, an on-the-nose reference to American independence and tells us everything we need to know about this deal. For most of the country, there is little of substance in this too-cute-by-half dollar amount. Instead, the material benefit will go to the largely to the white ruling classes with some crumbs for Trumpian militia members convicted under Biden.

Trump’s reckless and brutal presidency is materially harming the American working classes — even the white working class. With his popularity at historic lows, Trump can only turn to payouts like this, pardons, and the spectacle of white supremacist violence; these are all he has to offer his allies and dwindling base.

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That’s what this slush fund does: nod to Trump’s allegiance to his supporters, the vast majority of whom will get little other than the mood elevation that comes with having their resentments recognized — what W.E.B. DuBois once called the “psychological wages” of whiteness, a benefit that is only felt by virtue of the greater oppression of others.

Trump’s authoritarian capitalism will not, after all, uplift the white working class; there aren’t enough U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement signing bonuses or slush-fund payouts to go around.

January 6 Loyalists

The slush fund money would come directly from the Treasury Department’s Judgment Fund, which is typically used to pay legally reached settlements and court judgments. But in this case, a commission picked by Trump’s attorney general will apparently hand out payments as it pleases.

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No specific recipients have been named yet, but beneficiaries could reportedly include Proud Boys and other January 6 Capitol rioters, many of whom have since pardoned by Trump.

The fact that any payouts will be funded by taxpayer dollars is not mentioned in the Justice Department’s fund announcements.

“This is a theft far worse than Watergate,” wrote civil rights attorney Aaron Reichlin-Melnik on social media. “There is no other word for it. They are stealing $1.78 BILLION dollars to pay Trump’s allies, despite knowing that these people are not legally entitled to any money.”

The Trump regime hopes programs like this “anti-weaponization” fund can appease just enough of an active base to hold power under minority rule, while enriching all those in Trump’s inner circles who in turn stick by his side regardless of what happens in elections.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., told the New Republic that he sees the fund as Trump and his lawyers “figuring out a way to refund the January 6 militia, presumably to get them ready for the next round of battle.”

Raskin added that, should the Democrats retake the House and Senate in the midterms, they would shut down the fund and demand transparency about any payments made. According to the Congress member, any payouts to January 6 participants would violate the Fourteenth Amendment by aiding in an insurrection against the U.S. It is, however, no easy task to claw back money once doled out.

“It is my personal opinion that this is a criminal act and people should respond accordingly,” noted Reichlin-Melnik.

The problem is that for Trump’s regime and its loyal Supreme Court, the distinction between presidential criminal corruption and permissible executive action has all but evaporated.

The challenge, then, is to show that Trump’s meager offerings are not worth accepting.

The post Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization” Fund Is a Handout to His Hardcore Supporters appeared first on The Intercept.

Following the lead of his predecessor, former California Attorney General Kamala Harris, Becerra’s office was battling a defense that argued Robert Lewis, originally sentenced to death in 1991, was ineligible for execution because he was intellectually disabled. Lewis’s attorney, Robert Sanger, told The Intercept that while individual attorneys general can’t control everything their deputies do, he was disappointed with how Becerra’s office handled the case. 

“I was kind of feeling like it would be a good time for the AG to say, ‘OK, we tried and he’s intellectually disabled. We got that determination made. Let’s just let it go,’” Sanger recalled. “Instead, it went all the way to oral arguments in front of the [state] Supreme Court.”

The effort failed: The Supreme Court of California overturned Lewis’s death sentence in 2018, and the state legislature overwhelmingly passed a measure banning the practice of adjusting IQ based on race in death penalty cases two years later. 

Becerra is now polling first in the crowded race to replace term-limited Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom. His campaign had at first lagged behind his opponents, but then-Rep. Eric Swalwell was hit with explosive sexual assault allegations — which he denies — and dropped out, and Becerra surged to the front of the field. He’s just ahead of Trump-backed Republican candidate Steve Hilton, followed by Tom Steyer, the hedge-fund billionaire racking up endorsements from progressive groups including Our Revolution and praise from the California chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. 

In Lewis’s case, Becerra picked up where Harris left off; her office had been the first to ask the courts to artificially inflate Lewis’s IQ so the state could execute him. 

“On the one hand, he’s part of a long line of Democratic attorney generals who have taken this approach of, ‘It’s not my problem,’ not accepting responsibility for what their criminal attorneys are doing in court,” said Natasha Minsker, who leads the California Anti-Death Penalty Coalition, which helped push the bill banning the practice of race-based IQ adjustments for people on death row. “On the other hand, it just demonstrates where their true priorities and values are.” 

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Becerra has not taken a clear public position on the death penalty in his gubernatorial campaign, but his critics have raised concerns about his pursuit of executions at a time when his party was moving in the opposite direction. He has said he has “serious reservations” about the death penalty and voted for a 2016 state ballot measure to abolish it in California, where the state hasn’t executed anyone since 2006. Still, two years after his vote, Becerra’s office argued to execute Lewis. Though Newsom imposed a moratorium on capital punishment in 2019, Becerra fought to uphold death penalty sentences during the Covid-19 pandemic. And though he oversaw law enforcement for four years in California, a state that has significantly cut its prison population in recent years and adopted other reforms under pressure from activists, Becerra’s criminal justice record has not played a large part in his gubernatorial campaign. 

After serving as California attorney general, Becerra was named secretary of Health and Human Services during the Biden administration. His name recognition from that post, plus 24 years in Congress, have earned him endorsements from Democrats including Reps. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., and Ted Lieu, D-Calif.; state and local elected officials; and several labor unions including SEIU California, California State Council of Laborers, and the United Nurses Associations of California.

Still, his former colleagues from his time leading HHS raised eyebrows as his campaign gathered speed after Swalwell’s exit, and some of Becerra’s critics have seized on his overseeing of migrant children as HHS secretary. Also looming behind his surge is a criminal trial involving his former political adviser and Newsom’s former chief of staff, Dana Williamson, who pleaded guilty on Thursday to three felonies in a corruption case involving scheme to steal money from Becerra’s campaign. In a statement last week after the plea, Becerra said; “As I said from day one, I was not involved, I did nothing wrong. And now the record confirms it. We can close the book on this.”

Becerra’s criminal justice record has received less scrutiny in the gubernatorial race, where Becerra is competing with Republican opponents stressing their own tough-on-crime bonafides. 

Becerra’s campaign website outlines his priorities as fighting Donald Trump, building more affordable housing, lowering costs, building clean energy, improving California’s disaster preparedness, channeling AI “for human benefit,” and addressing homelessness. It does not have a specific page devoted to criminal justice. 

In response to a questionnaire from the political arm of the California chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union, which declined to comment on Becerra’s record for this story, Becerra said he agrees with reforms like prioritizing prevention strategies over punitive sentencing and improving funding and staffing for public defender’s offices. He also said he would support banning facial recognition in police body cameras, more public access to police records, and having social service workers respond to homelessness and mental health crises instead of police. 

“We see this repeatedly,” Minsker said. “Democratic politicians want to take credit for the progressive things they did as attorney general, but they are not taking responsibility for the regressive positions that the office advanced under their leadership.” 

Becerra’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment. 

While Becerra has not had to thoroughly address his criminal justice record yet on the campaign trail, the topic plagued his predecessor as attorney general, Kamala Harris, when she ran for president in 2020. 

Harris, who served as California attorney general from 2011 to 2017 and San Francisco district attorney before that, faced myriad attacks from left and right that hampered her first presidential bid over her prosecutorial record while she campaigned as a reformer. 

At the time, activists across the United States were animated by the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, which set off a wave of protests and heightened scrutiny of so-called “tough on crime” politics. Six years later, the political winds have largely shifted.

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Sanger, the attorney in the IQ death penalty case, said he felt that some of the attacks on Harris were unfair, because attorneys general “can’t go through and regulate every single thing that their deputies do in these very complex cases.” But, he added, he’s been generally dissatisfied with California’s last three top prosecutors. 

“I have been disappointed in each one of those attorneys general in not taking a more active role with their deputy attorneys general, and with them not taking a position on the death penalty,” Sanger said. 

As attorney general, Becerra also faced criticism for shielding police from measures designed to hold them accountable. Two major California newspaper editorial boards wrote scathing criticisms in 2019 saying Becerra sided with law enforcement “against public transparency” and had betrayed both “public trust and the law” by not complying with a state police transparency law. 

At the time, Becerra threatened to charge journalists with crimes unless they destroyed a list of police officers convicted of crimes. Becerra took more than $300,000 in campaign funds from law enforcement unions in his run for attorney general. The political action committee for the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, a state prison guards’ union, gave $320,000 to a group backing Becerra and other candidates that cycle. News outlets raised questions about his ability to “police the police,” while owing much of his campaign support to their unions. 

The prison guard’s union gave $25,000 in March to a group opposing Steyer. The group, “California is Not for Sale, No on Steyer for Governor 2026, a Coalition of Housing Advocates, Labor and Small Business,” is spending $24 million against Steyer and is backed by the state’s real estate and energy industries. Steyer is self-funding his campaign with more than $120 million. The CCPOA did not respond to a request for comment.

The prison guards’ union is one of many special interest groups that have played an outsized role in California politics, said James King, a formerly incarcerated prison reform advocate in Oakland. King, who is supporting Steyer, said the CCPOA was spending against Steyer because he is campaigning against those kinds of special interests. Plus, the union wants to preserve its budget, which has increased even as the state has shrunk its prison population in recent years, King said.

“It’s deeply ironic” that groups including the CCPOA “are funding an initiative called ‘California is Not for Sale,’” King said. “They have shown time and time again that they are only interested in advancing the status quo. And it’s clear that any candidate they are working to oppose and spending money to oppose, they must see as a threat to the status quo.” 

In 2020, Becerra sided with law enforcement again to oppose a bill to require independent state investigations of police killings after previously having refused to conduct an independent investigation into the police killing of 22-year-old Sean Monterrosa, whom a police officer shot in the back of the head. Becerra’s office later launched an investigation into destruction of evidence in the case. 

Monterrosa’s sister, Michelle Monterrosa, told the San Francisco Standard last week that she won’t vote for Becerra in the gubernatorial election. “How can we trust someone who continues to put his own advancement before actually standing with the people?” Monterrosa said. 

The post Xavier Becerra Pushed to Inflate a Black Man’s IQ to Execute Him as California AG appeared first on The Intercept.

The group had an anodyne name — the Center for Democratic Priorities — and no track record in Michigan politics. It was incorporated in Delaware seven months ago under a shroud of secrecy.

Online sleuths soon discovered, however, that whoever was behind the group had used the same consulting firm employed by a super PAC affiliated with AIPACs to buy the ads. Suspicions fell on the pro-Israel lobbying shop or its super PAC affiliate, which has repeatedly created so-called “pop-up” super PACs to influence elections elsewhere. AIPAC issued a denial that it was funding the ads.

Thanks to Federal Election Commission rules, voters may not know the true source of the ad campaign for months.

With the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision 16 years ago, special interest groups began using a raft of loopholes to pour money into elections without disclosing who was doing the spending. Super PACs can take in unlimited donations and spend unlimited amounts — as long as they do not coordinate directly with candidates. Now, big money forces in politics are growing ever more sophisticated about exploiting legal loopholes to obscure their identity.

Today, groups are setting up pop-up affiliates, gaming disclosure deadlines, and using party-specific conduits — akin to a sub-political action committee — to help deflect attention away from the origins of their cash.

“All their spending on election ads immediately before a primary or general election is anonymous to voters — particularly when they use names that have no meaning and have no indication of the broader groups they are tied to,” said Shanna Ports, senior legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center and a former attorney in the Federal Election Commission’s enforcement division. “They are very damaging to transparency for that reason.”

In the 2026 election cycle, front groups are proliferating, with cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence industries getting in on AIPAC’s game.

Groups aligned with the two tech industries have split their operations into Democratic- and Republican-aligned affiliates. The benefit can be twofold: obscuring the ultimate source of the donations, while also attracting from the large pool of partisan funders who want to give donations solely to one party.

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New “Dark Money” Documentary Shines Light Into the Shadows Cast by the Super-Rich

The “pop-up” super PACs and party-affiliate PACs are not always “dark money” — a loosely defined term that generally refers to political operations that don’t disclose their donors’ identities. Nevertheless, the way they are set up can make it much more difficult for voters to follow the lavish campaign spending.

Campaign finance experts say the trend is poised to continue unless Congress and the FEC decide to act. Until then, here is a guide to who is funding the groups, what they are called and how they work.

Pop-Up Politics

AIPAC used a complicated web of political committees to influence the Illinois primary elections in March. Whether or not it is using the same tactics in Michigan — the group did not respond to a request for comment — observers expect it to continue to hide its campaign spending in the months to come, as primary candidates battle over AIPAC’s influence.

AIPAC itself is a tax-exempt nonprofit, which prohibits direct engagement with electoral politics. But the group is publicly affiliated with a traditional political action committee that can take donations of up to $5,000 per year; AIPAC PAC can donate directly to candidate campaigns.

AIPAC’s supporters can also give to United Democracy Project, a so-called “super PAC.” United Democracy Project is openly affiliated with AIPAC, an increasingly toxic brand among Democrats.

As AIPAC weighed involvement in the recent Illinois primaries, three new “pop-up” super PACs took advantage of campaign finance reporting loopholes to hide their donors’ identities. The groups — Elect Chicago Women, Affordable Chicago Now, and Chicago Progressive Partnership — were created so late in the campaign that they were only required to disclose their donors after voting in the primary was over.

The groups’ donors were finally revealed after the election. They included two wealthy Chicago political donors: Michael Sacks, the CEO of an asset management firm, and Anthony “Tony” Davis, the co-founder of a private equity firm.

Before those groups filed official campaign finance reports, journalists had built a circumstantial case linking them to AIPAC through the use of campaign vendors linked to the pro-Israel lobby group.

Eventually, the hard truth emerged. FEC reports filed after the election revealed that Elect Chicago Women and Affordable Chicago Now got funds from United Democracy Project. Then Elect Chicago Women turned around and handed $1 million to the third group, Chicago Progressive Partnership.

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That complicated two-step helped Chicago Progressive Partnership conceal its donors as it was running ads that many observers said were misleading. In Illinois’s 9th Congressional District, the group attempted to boost one pro-Palestinian candidate in an apparent attempt to harm another, the influencer Kat Abughazaleh. Abughazaleh ultimately lost.

In the same congressional race, Elect Chicago Women spent money to support state Sen. Laura Fine and oppose progressive Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, who won.

In other races, it was easier for voters to track how AIPAC-aligned groups were spending their money. In some of the contests, the pop-up super PACs never popped up. Instead, United Democracy Project spent directly.

In Michigan, the new group Center for Democratic Priorities has yet to file any registration documents with the FEC. If it is classifying itself as a super PAC, it will not have to file disclosures revealing its donors until July 15, according to Ports.

Gambling on Races

With AI and crypto becoming increasingly ubiquitous, Washington is trying to sort out the regulations that could have huge impacts on these industries. In turn, crypto and AI businesses are making huge investments in electoral politics. So far, however, crypto and AI have taken a different approach to influencing elections than AIPAC. Rather than using “pop-up” super PACs, they have divided their influence operations into Republican and Democratic affiliates.

The biggest crypto super PAC is called Fairshake. The group is funded by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, as well as two crypto companies the firm has invested in, Coinbase and Ripple Labs.

The venture capital firm’s co-founder Marc Andreessen rose to fame in the 1990s for co-founding the web browser Netscape. More recently he has become notable as one of Donald Trump’s biggest defenders in the tech world and a frequent visitor to Trump’s Florida estate Mar-a-Lago.

Fairshake spends money on Republican primaries through its GOP affiliate, Defend American Jobs, and Democratic races through an outfit called Protect Progress. Fairshake has portrayed itself as an equal-opportunity shop, but the group’s extraordinary spending in favor of Republican candidate Bernie Moreno in 2024, when he ousted former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in Ohio, opened it up to accusations of partisanship.

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Brown is now running to return to the Senate against JD Vance’s Republican replacement, Jon Husted. His rhetoric this time around has been notably more muted when it comes to crypto.

Fairshake’s split personality allows donors to pick a single-party affiliate for its campaign giving. Democratic megadonor and angel investor Ron Conway donated to Protect Progress in 2024, for instance, only to announce later that year that he was breaking from the network over its support of Moreno.

The model of using party-specific affiliates may be less deceptive than “pop-up” super PACs, Ports said, but it is still misleading.

“They know that a Republican voter doesn’t want to hear from a super PAC that supports Democratic candidates. [Republican voters] are not going to trust that messaging as much, or vice versa,” she said. “They are dividing this money up to try to present their message as persuasively as possible to their target audiences.”

Fairshake’s spending on Republicans has not gone far enough for some figures in the fractious crypto world. The Winklevoss twins — the brothers behind a top Coinbase competitor, a cryptocurrency exchange called Gemini, which is distinct from Google’s AI assistant — have given millions’ worth of bitcoin to the Digital Freedom Fund PAC, which is explicitly opposed to the Democratic Party. The Digital Freedom Fund has also drawn donations from crypto exchange Kraken, another Coinbase competitor. So far the PAC has not spent heavily on political campaigns, but that could change as the midterm election season heats up.

Yet another crypto political action committee, The Fellowship PAC, is chaired by an executive at the domestic affiliate of the international stablecoin company Tether, which has recently begun mounting a push into the U.S. market. The company is backed by $10 million in donations from Cantor Fitzgerald, the bank that holds the U.S. Treasury notes backing Tether’s stablecoins. Former Cantor Fitzgerald chief Howard Lutnick serves as Trump’s commerce secretary. The PAC has endorsed only Republican candidates thus far.

Artificial Interference

Two of the artificial intelligence industry’s biggest players are backing rival political influence operations. OpenAI and Anthropic have picked their fighters in a battle over how much of a role the government should play in regulating AI.

On one side, OpenAI President Greg Brockman and his wife have donated to Leading the Future, a super PAC that aims to be an umbrella organization for the industry along the lines of Fairshake.

Perplexity AI and Andreessen Horowitz — which was an early investor in OpenAI — have also given money to the umbrella super PAC.

Leading the Future has a Democratic affiliate, Think Big, as well as a Republican arm, American Mission. Conway, the Democratic megadonor, has given only to Think Big, while Joe Lonsdale, the voluble right-wing venture capitalist, has given to American Mission.

If that structure sounds eerily similar to Fairshake, that is no accident. One of Leading the Future’s shot-callers is Josh Vlasto, a political operative who once worked for two powerful New York Democrats: former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

OpenAI has generally favored a more relaxed approach to AI regulation. One of its top competitors, Anthropic, has staked out a position — at least rhetorically — in favor of stricter rules.

To pursue that aim, Anthropic recently created a traditional corporate political action committee, AnthroPAC, that can donate directly to politicians.

The $380 billion company has also made a major donation to a political nonprofit called Public First Action. That group sits at the heart of a network of affiliated super PACs: the bipartisan Public First PAC, the Democratic-aligned Jobs and Democracy PAC, and the Defending Our Values PAC for Republican causes.

The Republican and Democratic affiliates are led respectively by former Reps. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, and Brad Carson, D-Okla.

Public First Action has donated to all three super PACs. In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson called the three PACs “aligned” but said they all operate independently and that Anthropic does not play a role in directing any of the groups’ political spending.

“Public First Action did not establish Jobs and Democracy PAC, Public First PAC, or Defending Our Values PAC, all of which are independent from Public First Action and were established separately,” said the spokesperson, Anthony Rivera-Rodriguez.

In a recent North Carolina primary, Public First Action’s Democratic affiliate spent $1.6 million boosting incumbent Rep. Valerie Foushee over her opponent Nida Allam, a Durham County commissioner who has supported a moratorium on AI data center construction.

Allam told The Intercept that she believes the Anthropic-backed super PAC network has split its spending arms into Democratic and Republican affiliates to blunt attacks like those that have dogged United Democracy Project. AIPAC’s super PAC has long faced criticism in Democratic primaries for drawing donations from Trump-supporting billionaires.

Anthropic and its backers “are trying to confuse folks to say, ‘we’re not the same,’ so that their spending is not on the same FEC reports,” she said.

Anthropic voluntarily disclosed its donation to Public First Action. But since the group is set up as a nonprofit rather than a campaign committee, voters may never know who Public First Action’s other donors are. And the group does not intend to disclose them, Rivera-Rodriguez said.

“We’d welcome a broader conversation about transparency in political spending, starting with the hundreds of millions Big Tech companies are spending to prevent any regulation of AI whatsoever,” he said. “That said, Public First Action, Jobs and Democracy PAC, Public First PAC, and Defending Our Values PAC make all public disclosures required by law either to the FEC or the IRS, and those filings are publicly available online. Additionally, all advertisements by those groups include the required disclaimers identifying who is paying for the advertisement.”

Allam is convinced that spending from AIPAC and the Anthropic-backed groups helped tip her race. She claimed 48.2 percent of the vote compared to Foushee’s 49.2 percent.

“For the incumbent to not receive more than 50 percent of her district’s support, that shows you that working families want change, they want something different,” she said. “We can build a progressive grassroots movement without being aligned with the same people who gave us Trump and MAGA Republicans.”

Correction: May 18, 2026, 12:53 p.m. ET
A graphic previously featured the Winklevoss twins as represented in the 2010 movie “The Social Network”; the images have been replaced with photos of the Winklevoss twins.

The post Who’s Spending in Your Congressional Election? We Tracked the Front Groups Fueling the 2026 Midterms. appeared first on The Intercept.

Both justices railed against the decision, with Alito calling it a “scheme” to get around their ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson that eliminated the nationwide right to an abortion in 2022. Abortions have increased since their decision, Alito lamented, largely due to telehealth access. 

In 2025, far more residents of states with total abortion bans received telehealth provisions of medication abortion than traveled out of state to receive care in places with fewer restrictions. And roughly two-thirds of all abortions in the U.S. in 2023 were medication abortions. But advocates warn that the dissents from Thomas and Alito highlight that the threat to abortion access still looms large.

“We’re breathing a sigh of relief. I would say that the immediate threat to mifepristone is over,” said Claire Teylouni, interim co-executive director of Reproductive Equity Now, “But it’s certainly clear from reading those dissents that the threat … is far from over.” 

In his dissent, Thomas argues that the Comstock Act, an anti-obscenity law passed in 1873 that remains on the books but has not been enforced in decades, prohibits the mailing of abortion medication. “The Comstock Act bans using ‘the mails’ to ship any ‘drug … for producing abortion,’” Thomas wrote. “Applicants are not entitled to a stay of an adverse court order based on lost profits from their criminal enterprise.”

The Comstock Act originally prohibited the mailing of “obscene” materials, such as pornography, contraceptives, and any drug or device that can be used to produce an abortion. But legal scholars have argued that the law is unenforceable and unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds and other modern case law. 

In 2022, a Department of Justice memo clarified that the law does not prohibit the mailing of drugs that could be used to perform an abortion because there is “an insufficient basis for concluding that the sender intends them to be used unlawfully.” 

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Despite the memo and the fact that the Comstock Act has not been enforced in decades, conservatives, including Thomas and Alito, have been eager to use the law to push a national abortion ban.

“Enforcement of the Comstock Act has the potential to threaten the broader supply chain with regard to the reproductive health care system as a whole,” warned Teylouni. Arguably if enforced, the law could even jam up access to surgical tools used in abortion care and the shipping of abortion medication to states without bans.

Republican lawmakers have argued that the Comstock Act should be enforced by the courts to “prosecute those who obtain mifepristone through the mail.” In Project 2025, policy analysts similarly argue that the Department of Justice should enforce federal laws like Comstock to prohibit the mailing of abortion medication writ large.  

President Donald Trump has previously claimed that he would not enforce the Comstock Act in this way, but advocates have seen troubling signs out of the administration about how they might eliminate access to mifepristone in other ways.

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“We’re focusing on some pressing threats that are already ongoing,” said Anna Bernstein, principal federal policy adviser at the reproductive and sexual health research organization Guttmacher Institute.

In late 2025, the Food and Drug Administration began a safety review of mifepristone, despite over 20 years of evidence that it’s a safe medication. Bernstein said her organization is keeping a close eye on the “politically motivated” review at the FDA, which she argues flies in the face of the science.

The combined regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol, the drug typically used in tandem with mifepristone to induce a medication abortion, carries a less than 1 percent risk of serious adverse events. Comparatively, the risk of maternal death associated with childbirth is roughly 14 times higher than the risk associated with abortion care.

But despite medical evidence of its safety, the threat to mifepristone from the FDA has increased in recent days. FDA Commissioner Marty Makary resigned earlier this week, and he was replaced by Kyle Diamantas, a former lawyer.

Within hours of his appointment on Tuesday, Diamantas was reportedly on the phone with anti-abortion advocates reassuring them of his moral opposition to abortion. According to a press release sent from an anti-abortion advocate, regarding her conversation with Diamantas, she said that he promised that reviewing mifepristone would be a “top priority” and that he was “pro-life.”

“We continue to have concerns that the [review is] going to be politicized and not based in science and medicine,” said Teylouni.  

The Thursday ruling allows providers to continue to send mifepristone through the mail or to retail pharmacies, while the case plays out in the lower courts. Earlier this month, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had reinstated previous FDA requirements that mifepristone be dispensed in person, threatening telehealth access, a critical lifeline for abortion access for people in states with and without abortion bans. 

The Supreme Court issued an initial ruling staying the appeals court decision earlier this month, which they extended on Monday, before making their final decision on Thursday to allow access to continue while the Louisiana v. FDA case plays out in court.

But a looming concern for advocates is that both the courts’ more politically attuned conservatives and members of the Trump administration could be waiting to make a move on abortion access until after the midterms in a ploy to avoid the disasters of the post-Dobbs elections.

“We’re definitely concerned, because we know that the Trump administration understands that it’s politically unfavorable to restrict access to abortion and to mifepristone,” said Guttmacher Institute’s Bernstein. “We’ve all seen the reports of them slow-walking to the midterms, and we know why politically they might want to do so.” 

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While the Comstock Act serves as a significant threat to abortion access, advocates note that if mifepristone is no longer able to be sent through the mail, people can still access medication abortion care. 

Mifepristone works by stopping the pregnancy from growing and initiates the separation of the embryo from the uterine lining. The other drug, misoprostol, causes contractions which expel the contents of the uterus.

Misoprostol can be safely and effectively used on its own to induce an abortion. However, the process of abortion “is prolonged when it’s with a misoprostol-alone protocol,” explained Dr. Ushma Upadhyay, a public health scientist at the University of California, San Francisco’s Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health research coalition. “And patients report higher levels of side effects, so a lot of cramping and a lot more bleeding.”

Despite the small victory yesterday, Teylouni said that abortion advocates cannot afford to be “complacent” right now. 

“This decision could have been the biggest blow to abortion access since the Dobbs decision,” she said. “Anti-abortion extremists are not going to stop attempting to ban abortion, and they want to see the Comstock Act invoked and enforced to limit telehealth prescribing again.” 

The post A “Scheme” Against Dobbs: SCOTUS Dissent Hints at Next Phase of Abortion Rights Fight appeared first on The Intercept.

Thursday’s scathing analysis by the Department of War’s inspector general came on the same day that the top U.S. commander overseeing the war in Iran dismissed reports of civilian casualties and said the U.S. had no means to corroborate reports of strikes on hospitals and schools. The inspector general specifically notes that the military stopped funding a database that tracks civilian harm that could be used for such verification.

While damning, the former chief of harm assessments at the Pentagon’s Civilian Protection Center of Excellence nonetheless called the new report a “whitewash” that downplays the evisceration of the Center and the entire enterprise devoted to reducing civilian casualties.

The report focuses on the implementation of the Pentagon’s 2022 Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan, or CHMR‑AP, which was mandated by the department to take full effect by the end of 2025. The inspector general found serious deficiencies and a chronic failure to meet timelines for 11 objectives consisting of 133 incomplete “implementing actions” by the end of last year. The inspector general found that the Department of War “did not fully implement any of the CHMR-AP objectives by the end of FY 2025.”

“This is a crisis of the Trump Administration’s own making: They slashed the staffing and funding for civilian harm mitigation, and now they can’t adequately follow the law and implement the CHMR-AP, leaving civilians and our own military personnel at risk,” Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee and the co-chair of the Protection of Civilians in Conflict Caucus, told The Intercept. “The Inspector General’s report is clear about what that means: wasted munitions, failed strikes, damaged alliances, and propaganda wins for our adversaries. The Trump Administration needs to reverse course immediately so we can save lives and protect our national security.”

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The Intercept has previously reported on Hegseth’s gutting of CHMR efforts. More than a year ago, five current and former Defense Department officials described Pentagon efforts to eliminate or downsize offices, programs, and positions focused on preventing civilian casualties.

The 43-page inspector general report details continuing efforts to hamstring protections for civilians in war zones, noting that “DoW Components ended funding for the CHMR data management platform, stopped holding Steering Committee meetings, lost or reassigned many of the personnel dedicated to CHMR, and lost personnel and leadership” at the Center of Excellence, which is focused on training and employing tools for preventing civilian casualties.

Wes Bryant, who until last year served as the chief of civilian harm assessments and senior analyst and adviser on precision warfare, targeting, and civilian harm mitigation at the Center of Excellence, is one of those “lost personnel,” having been forced out of his job after blowing the whistle on efforts to dismantle CHMR efforts.

“It is completely whitewashed of the truth,” Bryant said of the report. “It reads as if the IG is completely deliberately ignoring the fact that the center and the entire CHMR enterprise was targeted for immediate shutdown, that 90 percent of billets were either terminated or forced out, and that what exists of the Center of Excellence since March 2025 is a shell on paper with no budget, no mandate or real mission, no authority and is completely locked out of visibility and oversight on all investigations and operations.”

The watchdog’s evaluation noted that Hegseth’s War Department “may not comply with its civilian casualties and harm policy” — which is required under federal law. The investigation also found that eliminating CHMR funding and personnel also “decreases readiness and increases risk to DoW personnel, mission success, and military objectives,” according to officials at the Joint Staff, which is headed by Gen. Dan Caine, and at geographic combatant commands, which oversee U.S. operations in various corners of the world.

While couched in stilted language, the report details dangers to civilians due to cuts to CHMR efforts. It makes note of deficiencies in “personnel and capabilities” to protect civilians under Pentagon regulations that are mandated by federal law. And it mentions a lack of necessary “tools” at the Center of Excellence, including a “data management platform” meant to track civilian harm incidents. The report notes that “according to Joint Staff and [combatant command] officials, eliminating CHMR funding and personnel makes mitigating or responding to civilian harm more difficult.” Such officials also noted that “eliminating CHMR funding and personnel reduces battle space awareness and increases the risk of civilian casualties, damaged coalitions and alliances, loss of legitimacy, increased local resistance, propaganda opportunities for adversaries, prolonged conflicts, and failed strikes.”

“This report makes it clear that the DoD is not complying with the law, nor its own policies, both of which were built on a bipartisan basis upon years of hard-learned lessons from wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria,” Madison Hunke, the U.S. program manager of the Center for Civilians in Conflict, told The Intercept. “As Congress develops the budget for the upcoming fiscal year, they must ensure that it not only provides the DoD with the resources it needs to comply with law and policy but also conduct rigorous oversight to keep the DoD accountable for implementing these critical programs.”

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Reporting by The Intercept found a combatant command that has gone from a military backwater to one engaged in regular kinetic activity — U.S. Southern Command — is unable to cope with the volume of civilian casualty reports. After the U.S. attacked Venezuela in January , the U.K.-based watchdog group Airwars attempted to submit documentation of civilian casualties to SOUTHCOM, which oversees military operations in Latin America. The organization learned that SOUTHCOM has no mechanism for submitting these reports. After reaching out to the Pentagon, Airwars was told to submit documentation to the Center of Excellence.

The report specifically mentions the Center’s “support for organizations such as the U.S. Southern Command,” despite the fact that the Center “lost large numbers of personnel and leaders,” does not have “the tools designed to meet its statutory roles and duties,” and that the Army had developed plans, early last year, to euthanize it.

The report notes that an official from an unnamed combatant command “stated that they largely divested their CHMR personnel, functions, and responsibilities as of March 2025.” Another said that they did not “want to spend resources on actions or make future commitments for a program that may be significantly changed.”

As the Pentagon has starved the CHMR enterprise, the U.S. has killed more than 2,000 civilians across the world — from Latin America to Africa to the Middle East — during Trump’s second term. “This is unprecedented in terms of the sheer number of theaters where harm to civilians has been reported within such a short space of time,” Megan Karlshoej-Pedersen, a policy specialist with Airwars, told The Intercept, referencing attacks in the Caribbean Sea, the Pacific Ocean, Iran, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen.

Airwars tracked reports of at least 224 civilians in Yemen killed during the Trump administration’s campaign of air and naval strikes — codenamed Operation Rough Rider — against Yemen’s Houthi government in the spring of 2025. This nearly doubled the civilian casualty toll in Yemen from U.S. attacks since 2002, meaning that almost as many civilians were reportedly killed in 52 days as the previous 23 years of airstrikes and commando raids.

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The preliminary findings of a U.S. military investigation revealed by The Intercept and other outlets determined that the United States conducted an attack on the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, Iran, in February, contradicting assertions by President Donald Trump that Iran struck the school. More than 150 civilians were killed, most of them children.

Almost 115,200 civilian homes, commercial properties, and other civilian sites have been damaged in the U.S.–Israel war on Iran, according to a report from the Iranian Red Crescent Society last month; this includes 763 schools. The Red Crescent also reported that more than 334 medical, health, pharmaceutical, and emergency centers have been damaged, including 18 of its own centers. Twenty-four health workers have been killed and 116 injured, according to Iran’s Ministry of Health and Medical Education.

“U.S.–Israeli airstrikes have killed at least 2,362 civilians, including 383 children, and injured over 32,314 civilians, according to official figures,” Raha Bahreini, a regional researcher with Amnesty International’s Iran Team told The Intercept and other journalists during a press briefing late last month.

On Thursday, Adm. Brad Cooper — the senior officer overseeing U.S. combat operations in Iran — told senators that the strike on the school in Minab was the only civilian casualty incident he knew of after more than 13,600 U.S. strikes.

Airwars has chronicled more than 300 civilian casualty incidents in Iran since the start of the conflict.

“How do you explain the publicly available information that 22 schools have been hit and multiple hospitals?” asked Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., citing a New York Times report. “There’s no way we can corroborate that,” Cooper replied.

The inspector general’s report specifically says that a database used for tracking civilian harm — which could be used in verification efforts — was abandoned. The “Army stopped funding the data management platform,” it notes.

Cooper said that preventing civilian harm is “a matter that I’m passionate about.”

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Hegseth has launched overlapping efforts to weaken transparency, scuttle accountability, hobble military justice, and undercut protections for civilians in conflict — from replacing the Pentagon press corps with pro-administration sycophants and firing the top legal authorities of the Army and the Air Force last year, reportedly pursuing changes that would encourage lawyers to approve more aggressive tactics and take a more lenient approach to those who violate the laws of war.

Late last month, Hegseth repeatedly dismissed congressional concerns about civilian harm and respect for the laws of war in testimony before the House Armed Services Committee. “The Department of War fights to win,” Hegseth replied when asked if he stood by his statement that the U.S. would afford enemies “no quarter” — a war crime.

While the U.S. has been clinging to a rickety ceasefire with Iran for more than a month, Trump has previously threatened to commit genocide there. “We’ll go back and finish them off. And, by the way, more than that,” he said on Friday.

Bryant believes that efforts by congressional Democrats and press coverage of civilian casualties — and the ensuing pressure on Hegseth — has kept the lights on at what remains of the Center of Excellence and held CHMR on life support. “Given all the controversy and heat that Hegseth and the administration have since received for civilian casualties, it has behooved them to be able to technically say that some semblance of the program still exists,” he told The Intercept. “However, I can tell you with 100 percent confidence that it exists at this point entirely on paper and as a legal CYA,” or cover your ass.

The post Internal Pentagon Report Reveals Hegseth Is Willfully Putting Civilians in Danger appeared first on The Intercept.

The woman, a dual citizen of New Zealand and the United States with residences in Manhattan and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was one of 30 passengers who left the MV Hondius expedition cruise ship while it docked at Saint Helena island, in the South Atlantic, in late April after one passenger had already died of a lethal strain of hantavirus. A second and third passenger died days later, one on board and one in a hospital in South Africa, but by the time the ship had become a focus of headlines worldwide, the woman was well on her way on a globe-hopping itinerary.

The CDC informed health officials in various states of other Americans potentially exposed to the virus, but failed to alert New York health officials about the Manhattan woman.

There is no indication that the woman intended to come back to the United States or to New York any time soon. Instead, she continued on a multi-continental trip around the world. Her ability to continue traveling — and the lack of notice issued to authorities in the location to which she might eventually return — raise worrying questions about the potential spread of the disease, said Dr. Abraar Karan, an infectious disease specialist at Stanford University.

“If she’s on the loose, then we need to be aware of where she might come back to,” Karan said. “So the New York Department of Health, and officials at the port of entry, they need to make sure this person is flagged when they return.”

The traveler, a 75-year-old former pharmaceutical executive, matches the description of a former ship passenger who is now in quarantine in Taiwan, according to local news reports there. Her peregrinations first came to light in reporting by Intercept contributor Jacqueline Sweet, who published a report on the traveler on her personal Substack.

The woman’s dual nationality and connection to addresses in multiple states appears to have muddied the lines of communication.

A spokesperson for the New York State Department of Health told The Intercept that after raising the issue with the CDC, they learned that the agency had notified a different state of the woman’s possible exposure to the virus. The spokesperson did not identify the state in question, but public records show the woman is registered to vote at an apartment in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Despite her voter registration in Florida, she has referred in social media posts to the co-op she owns in Manhattan as her home.

Representatives of the CDC and the Florida Department of Health did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment. Florida has not reported that it is monitoring any residents for possible exposure to hantavirus.

New York and other states — including California, Arizona, Washington, Georgia, Virginia, and North Carolina — have reported residents with possible exposures, with some states indicating they received notice from the CDC and others saying cruise passengers self-reported. All 18 U.S. citizens who returned to the country directly from the cruise are currently in quarantine in Omaha, Nebraska, and Atlanta, Georgia, while another 16 citizens who shared a plane with a woman evacuated to Johannesburg are being monitored.

From the South Atlantic to a Global Conference

The outbreak took place aboard the MV Hondius, an “expedition” cruise ship that takes adventurous passengers on a monthlong specialized polar tour, stopping at hard-to-reach islands in the South Atlantic. The cruise attracted wildlife enthusiasts, biologists, and extreme travelers attempting to visit as many countries and territories as possible, willing to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for the trip.

On April 6, one of those travelers, a 70-year-old Dutch man who prior to the sea voyage had spent more than three months traveling in South America, became ill. He died onboard on April 11, and on April 24, the victim’s 69-year-old wife disembarked at Saint Helena; the next day, she flew to Johannesburg, South Africa, where she died soon after. A third passenger died on May 2 — the same day that the World Health Organization declared an outbreak of hantavirus as the culprit.

The CDC has been accused of a slow response to the outbreak, holding its first briefing on the crisis on May 9, a week after WHO announced that the deaths were caused by the rare Andes strain of hantavirus, which is spread in South America by the pygmy rice rat and which can be transmitted among humans via close physical contact with someone already showing signs of infection. Because the early symptoms of the virus, including fever, fatigue, and muscle aches, are common in many other viral infections, the disease can be hard to identify before the rapid onset of more serious symptoms like pneumonia and respiratory distress.

In the case of the hantavirus outbreak, as with other public health crises, officials need to walk a careful line between ensuring safety and avoiding panic, Karan said. And the key to keeping a lid on the outbreak is ensuring proper quarantine for anyone with a potential exposure.

“Because this took place on a cruise ship, it actually helped us detect this quickly, and for now it appears to be decently contained,” Karan said. “But the problem is that, it’s not like you have a camera on these people to know if they’re not going out or seeing other people. So you don’t definitely know unless they’re quarantining at a monitored center.”

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Compounding the trouble, however, is that many of the passengers on the cruise are part of an “extreme travel” subculture whose lifestyle centers around relentless jetsetting. Even with the international attention being paid to the ship and its passengers, a number of people have been found to have trekked globe-spanning itineraries since the outbreak was revealed. 

The itinerary of the Manhattan woman after she left the MV Hondius showed a complexity typical of such “extreme travelers.” In a social media post on April 28, the traveler said she had flown from Saint Helena to Johannesburg, where she stayed in a hotel before flying on to Hong Kong and then to Bangkok, Thailand. In Bangkok, she wrote that she took a shuttle across the city to its second airport and flew to Trang, in southern Thailand, where she stayed in a hotel overnight before taking a boat to the island of Ko Ngai. Her most recent social media post was from Hanoi, Vietnam, several days before reports surfaced of the former ship passenger matching her description under quarantine in Taiwan.

She was just one of 30 travelers who left the ship while it docked at Saint Helena, prior to the declaration of an outbreak — setting off a scramble by global public health officials to identify everyone who might have been exposed.

The profile of the passengers themselves complicated the picture, according to Alina Chan, a molecular biologist and co-author of “VIRAL: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19” who advocated for more scrutiny of a possible lab origin for the virus that caused the Covid pandemic.

“The cruise selected for these extreme travelers, and you cannot ask for a potentially better superspreader,” Chan said. “And if one of the passengers presented to an international hospital with symptoms without the hospital being aware of their exposure on the ship, by the time the hospital would know, healthcare workers could have already been exposed.”

Most public health officials agree the hantavirus outbreak is unlikely to transform into a pandemic. But the incubation period for the Andes virus is anywhere from four to 42 days, raising concerns that the traveler and others who left the ship prior to the outbreak becoming known could transmit the virus to others if they become sick. That’s led global health officials to scramble to identify passengers and notify their home countries. But the timing of these communications, and how they unfolded, are unclear, as the case of this woman reveals.

While the CDC alerted a number of states, including New York, to the fact that residents with potential exposures could be coming home, the Manhattan-based traveler appears to have slipped through the cracks, and state health officials there only learned of her connection to the state after receiving inquiries from Sweet.

It appears that the MV Hondius’s parent company first reported that this passenger was a New Zealand national to New Zealand health authorities. After The Intercept began making inquiries with the New Zealand Ministry of Health in conjunction with reporters from news outlet Radio New Zealand, as well as to the woman and other conference attendees, the Ministry of Health told Radio New Zealand that although the woman had ignored their previous attempts to contact and assist her, on Tuesday she suddenly contacted them. The Ministry of Health said they had alerted the United States last week that she was in fact a resident of the U.S., and not New Zealand, and on Tuesday, they also alerted health officials in the country she is in currently, which is unknown.

On Monday, news from New Zealand broke that an American woman, since reported as being from California, had turned up in remote Pitcairn Island, a tiny South Pacific island with less than 50 residents. She had flown from Saint Helena after departing the MV Hondius early to San Francisco, before flying to Tahiti and then taking a boat voyage to Pitcairn. It’s unknown if any health authorities contacted her before her travels. She is now being quarantined on the island.

Reached by The Intercept, a spokesperson for the California Department of Public Health pointed to an existing press release about monitoring hantavirus exposures and added: “When we have new information to share, we will do so.”

Chan advised that “the WHO should make a list of all passengers available to all countries so they can be aware of visitors with exposure, rather than rely on each country.” Communication between the WHO and the United States was delayed in the days of the MV Hondius outbreak, since the Trump administration left the global health alliance, but the CDC and the WHO have reportedly been working together for the past week. 

“In a best-case scenario there are no more waves, but this shows the WHO and the CDC are not prepared. This was the best-case scenario, with the passengers all known from the cruise,” Chan said. “When you can mess up with this controlled of a scenario, what will happen next time?”

The post CDC Didn’t Tell New York About Resident on Hantavirus-Plagued Cruise appeared first on The Intercept.

IN 16 pages, the Trump administration’s new official counterterrorism strategy outlines in broad terms who it views as terrorist threats and priority targets, ranging from anti-fascist activists to ISIS and so-called narco-terrorists. The line “We will find you, and we will kill you” appears in the memo.

“[The] strategy brings together Trump’s war on the wider world, which stretches from interventions and wars in Yemen and Somalia to Venezuela and the Caribbean Sea,” says Intercept senior reporter Nick Turse. “It combines it with the administration’s war on dissent at home which has also been lethal, as we saw on the streets of Minneapolis. … We can consider this strategy a new declaration of war by the Trump administration on its enemies both foreign and domestic, both real and imagined.”

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This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington and colleagues Turse and Noah Hurowitz, who covers federal law enforcement, dissect how the Trump administration is painting anyone it wants to go after — state and non-state actors — as terrorists.  “Fundamentally, this document is a list of the administration’s enemies and a promise of what they’re going to do to them,” says Hurowitz. “This anti-terror imperative makes for a very flexible and useful means of tamping down on dissent.”

“We’re not just talking about rhetoric here,” says Washington. “We’ve seen the administration actually use these terms in action when it comes to the boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific that killed nearly 200 people as of early May.” 

“The actual legal justification for the strikes is, like so much else, secret,” says Turse, who has been covering the attacks on so-called narco-terrorists. “We’re talking about a fake war in which the enemies aren’t even read into the fact that they’re in an armed conflict with the United States.” He adds, “It’s really built on a quarter-century of executive overreach and targeted killings around the world. It’s the price of Congress allowing Presidents Bush, Obama, Biden, and Trump to hunt and kill people by drone from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and Somalia. It took this legally dubious, at best, post-9/11 drone war and laid the groundwork for a completely illegal one in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean.”

“Say what you will about the people around President Trump,” Hurowitz notes, “but they have proved very adept at finding levers of power and levers of pain to go after their enemies.”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Jessica Washington: Welcome to the Intercept Briefing. I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.

Maia Hibbett: And I’m Maia Hibbett, managing editor at The Intercept. 

Last week, we talked about the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act, and the news on that subject has been moving really fast. I was wondering if first you could just give us a quick update on what else is happening since that last conversation.

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JW: There’s been a lot happening since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act last month, well, gutted it again further, I should say. In Tennessee, Gov. Bill Lee signed into law a new congressional map eliminating the only majority-Black district. Then in Alabama, House primaries are next week, but the Republican governor is planning to hold a special vote in four districts in August after the state redraws a more GOP-friendly map. Republican leaders like Speaker Mike Johnson are excited about it. Here he is talking about it on “Fox and Friends.”

[Clip]

Brian Kilmeade: There’s Tennessee, Alabama. How many more? 

Rep. Mike Johnson: Potentially South Carolina, maybe Missouri, Mississippi. There are other states who are similarly situated. And we think the analysis is, by the end of all this, when you correct all that, Republicans’ll probably pick up between seven and eight seats and maybe double digits, depending on how many states get involved. That’s obviously a good thing for the outcome.

[Clip ends]

JW: My only reaction to hearing that is that Republicans are clearly hiding the ball here. They’re saying that this is about fairer representation, but in Mississippi, they’re clearly trying to eliminate representation for Black Americans. The governor has called to redraw a map that would eliminate Rep. Bennie Thompson’s district. He is the only Black representative representing Mississippi, a state that is nearly 40 percent Black.

Maia, did anything strike you in that clip or just anything about this redistricting effort at all?

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MH: I just keep getting struck by the way Republicans are framing this as some sort of anti-racist effort, that the way congressional districts are drawn sometimes to take into account the racial diversity or lack thereof of an area is inherently anti-democratic. And as you’ve pointed out before, in reality, that’s a disingenuous framing of what they’re doing.

JW: Yeah. We’re going to continue to watch the fallout from the Supreme Court. But I want to talk about some other news. 

There’s been talk online that we might be facing a new pandemic. Maia, what can you tell us about the hantavirus, and do I need to start stockpiling toilet paper?

MH: No, please, no one go buy a lot of toilet paper. Never helpful. 

There’s definitely a lot of chatter and panic online, but I don’t think there’s any sign that this is going to be a new pandemic. A pandemic is when there is this uncontrolled disease spread on a global scale, and there’s really no sign that’s going to be the case here.

It is, however, really fascinating. This is a wild example of a group of people who have been traveling all over the world, who are all on a ship together, and then a very rare infectious disease breaks out. People are certainly freaked out and worried about this when they’re reading about it online, and I think there’s a lot of information on Twitter, on Instagram, everywhere. There’s a lot of panic. 

What the general scientific consensus says is still that this strain of the virus, which is known to spread between people, is still more likely to spread animal to human, not human to human. And when it does spread between humans, it typically requires close contact. So you’re having a conversation with someone and your faces are close together, you’re exchanging saliva, there’s some sort of large droplet transfer, something like that, is the most likely way for this to spread between people.

We don’t know everything about it, and of course, viruses do change, but that is still the overall scientific consensus. It’s not known to spread the way Covid does, where it’s aerosolized and someone in the room has it and anyone else in the room could get it.

The most well-known vector for this disease to spread is from people actually inhaling particles from the feces or urine of rodents, especially rats. So really the people, I think, who are at the highest risk are anyone who might be in a setting where they’re cleaning that up or otherwise really directly exposed.

JW: Gross, but I do feel a little bit safer. [Laughter.]

But one thing, I do have some concerns about — we know who’s in charge of HHS, we know who’s in charge of the FDA. Do we have the public health infrastructure to deal with something like this?

MH: We know that since the Trump administration came back into office and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was appointed to be in charge of Health and Human Services, the CDC has been pretty dramatically gutted. And the Trump administration just doesn’t have the kind of infrastructure the U.S. government used to maintain in order to keep an eye on pandemics and other disease outbreaks. So that certainly is concerning.

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For example, there was a lot of chatter last week. Marjorie Taylor Greene was spreading claims that ivermectin was going to be helpful for keeping this virus at bay, and Intercept contributor Austin Campbell reached out to the CDC and asked what they thought of that, and he just never heard back. They never had a stance on it. 

Another Intercept contributor, Jackie Sweet, tracked down for a piece this past week on her Substack the case of a 75-year-old cruise ship passenger who had dual residency in both the U.S. and New Zealand. She had managed to totally evade the supervision of public health authorities, which is staggering because there were fewer than 150 people on that ship. So it’s a little bit wild that they couldn’t keep track of them all.

JW: So what I’m hearing from you is that we’re lucky that it’s this kind of virus and not something that is easier to transmit person to person?

MH: I would say that’s right, yeah.

JW: I want to talk about some other reporting that we published this week. On Tuesday, my co-host Akela Lacy published a story about Mahmoud Khalil, a former Columbia University student and Palestinian rights activist who was detained by ICE for protesting in support of Palestinians as a part of the Trump administration’s targeting of student protesters. So I know the story goes into a little bit more detail about that targeting. Maia, what can you tell us about the story?

MH: I think a lot of our listeners probably remember this moment last spring when he was detained, and he was one of the first of this group of students that the Trump administration was targeting. What Akela’s story found was that two days before ICE arrested Mahmoud Khalil, the FBI had gotten an anonymous tip which accused him of calling for, and this is a quote from the tip, “violence on behalf of Hamas.”

Now, we don’t really have any detail in this document on what the tip is. It came in via a FOIA request that his legal team received and passed on to Akela, and the document is mostly redacted. But what we do know is that less than two weeks after they got the tip, the FBI closed this investigation, and they found that the tip did not warrant further investigation.

But by then, he was already in ICE detention in Louisiana, and the Trump administration was already calling him a “Hamas supporter” and accusing him of being a supporter of terrorism. At this point, we now know that the FBI at least had found that allegation was not worth looking into.

JW: That’s really interesting. It feels like we’re going to be unraveling what actually went behind the Trump administration’s targeting of these students. This really fits into broader efforts from the Trump administration to target any of the president’s perceived political enemies, both abroad and in the United States.

MH: Exactly. And this week, everyone in the newsroom has really been focused on this project that you’ve been working on with our colleagues, Nick Turse and Noah Hurowitz, about how the Trump administration is taking that political targeting apparatus to the next level, and what the next phase of it will look like. Could you tell us a little bit more about that project?

JW: We’ve been poring through this new counterterrorism strategy that’s been handed down from the Trump administration. I know that sounds incredibly boring, but this is a document laying out the president’s strategy for coming after his political enemies in the United States and abroad, and potentially giving him the authority to kill his political enemies.

So we’ve been really looking into this next evolution of President Donald Trump’s attempt to label his enemies — so anyone who disagrees with him — as “terrorists.” And I’ve now successfully dragged both of my brilliant coworkers onto the show to talk about it. Nick is a senior reporter covering national security and foreign policy, and Noah is a federal law enforcement reporter.

MH: Let’s hear that conversation.

JW: Nick, Noah, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Nick Turse: Thanks so much for having us.

Noah Hurowitz: Thanks for having us.

JW: Let’s dive right into this project. Last week, the Trump administration released its counterterrorism strategy. The 16-page memo outlines who they view as terrorist threats and priority targets. The three of us have been combing through this document for an in-document analysis that we just published.

To start, Nick, can you tell us a bit more about this document and the objectives of the administration?

NT: I consider this a truly foundational document, a genuine distillation of Trumpism as both a movement and a system of governance. The document is the brainchild of the senior counterterrorism director at the National Security Council, Sebastian Gorka, who’s a truly bizarre figure and whose credentials for the job of counterterrorism czar are highly dubious.

This Gorka-led strategy brings together Trump’s war on the wider world, which stretches from interventions and wars in Yemen and Somalia to Venezuela and the Caribbean Sea, and it combines it with the administration’s war on dissent at home which has also been lethal, as we saw on the streets of Minneapolis. The 2026 counterterrorism strategy puts so-called domestic “antifascist” or antifa organizations on par with actual terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State and Al Qaeda as well as with international drug cartels. 

It states that there are three major types of terrorist threats. So we’re talking about what they call legacy Islamist terrorists, Al Qaeda and ISIS; narco-terrorists like the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua; and these supposed violent left-wing extremists, which include anarchists and anti-fascists. The latter are longtime Republican boogeymen but don’t actually exist in a real way as, say, urban guerrillas or something like that in the United States.

This is a fictional foe. We can consider this strategy a new declaration of war by the Trump administration on its enemies, both foreign and domestic, both real and imagined.

JW: I think that’s a really good way to look at this document. If we think about it as a foundational text of the Trump administration, then the foundation of the Trump administration is a politics of vengeance, which I think is borne out in so many of the administration’s policies, both at home and abroad.

Noah, I want to bring you in. One thing that this document does is loosely define who is and who isn’t a terrorist. So I want to ask you, what did we now learn about who’s considered a terrorist?

NH: One thing that I found really interesting about this document is that it specifically calls out previous weaponizations of government counterterrorism policy, which is, I think, a pretty clear reference to the prosecutions of right-wing groups, and specifically participants in January 6.

As we know, FBI Director Kash Patel, prior to becoming head of the FBI, was very critical of the federal government’s policies toward violent right-wing extremists, which statistically have been a majority of the domestic terrorists in the United States. This document really explicitly does away with that and explicitly names left-wing groups or left-wing people holding left-wing ideologies as terrorists.

There’s a specific line about doing away with the weaponization of counterterrorism policy against American citizens, when in reality we’ve seen the very explicit weaponization of counterterrorism policy and rhetoric by this administration against its domestic foes, if you will.

Most notably, the language used to describe Alex Pretti and Rene Good in Minneapolis following their deaths, and also the prosecution of nine protesters for their roles in a demonstration outside of an ICE facility in Texas last July. This is the Prairieland case in which eight defendants were convicted on terrorism charges. They might say that they’re ending the weaponization of counterterrorism against American citizens, but in reality, we’ve seen a dramatic escalation of it.

JW: One group that you didn’t mention here, but is mentioned repeatedly throughout the document, are people who the administration calls adherents to radical pro-transgender ideology.

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Clearly throughout this document, we’re seeing references to the Christian right, references to the idea that anyone who does not adhere to these very specific tenets of white Christian nationalism — a very specific subset of white evangelical Christianity — that those groups are also considered terrorists under this document.

In April, the Trump administration released the anti-Christian bias task force report which allegedly detailed the Biden administration’s radical efforts to punish Christians and also highlighted President Donald Trump’s efforts to restore religious liberty. There are very similar themes to that document. There clearly is an effort to target anyone who is not a part of MAGA world, and so that includes, obviously, Christian nationalists, but other groups as well.

Noah, I want to ask, how would you characterize what the administration has outlined here?

NH: Fundamentally, this document is a list of the administration’s enemies and a promise of what they’re going to do to them.

JW: Nick, we’re not just talking about rhetoric here. We’ve seen the administration actually use these terms in action when it comes to the boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific that killed nearly 200 people as of early May.

The administration has alleged that they are targeting “narco-terrorists.” This has been going on now since September of last year. What evidence has the administration provided to justify what appear to be extrajudicial killings?

NT: Actually, we haven’t seen one shred of evidence. Instead, we’ve been treated to outlandish claims that are demonstrably outright lies. President Trump has repeatedly claimed that the vessels that the U.S. is attacking are trafficking fentanyl, a synthetic opioid. Trump says that the boats are hit, and then you see bags of fentanyl floating in the ocean.

First off, fentanyl is shipped in dramatically smaller quantities than, say, cocaine. You wouldn’t see bales of it floating in a body of water in the aftermath of an airstrike. It’s really beside the point. No fentanyl comes to the United States from South America. Ninety-nine percent of the fentanyl comes into the U.S. through legal ports of entry primarily from Mexico by U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents. Cartels would have to smuggle fentanyl down to South America to smuggle it back by boat.

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The actual legal justification for the strikes is, like so much else, secret. There is a classified opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. It was drawn up by an interagency lawyers’ group, including representatives of the CIA, the White House Counsel, Department of Justice, and the War Department’s Office of General Counsel. It claims that narcotics on these supposed drug boats, cocaine essentially, are lawful military targets because their cargo generates revenue for cartels whom the Trump administration claims are in a non-international armed conflict with the United States.

Government officials told me that this secret memo wasn’t actually signed by the assistant attorney general until days after the first boat strike on September 2 of last year. So the strikes came before the horse. I should also note that attached to this secret legal memorandum is a similarly secret list of what they call “designated terrorist organizations,” or DTOs. That list is secret too. 

So we’re talking about a fake war in which the enemies aren’t even read into the fact that they’re in an armed conflict with the United States. 

JW: As you’ve reported, nearly 200 people are dead as a result of these strikes, but there are survivors. What do we know about the survivors of these strikes?

NT: Yeah, very little at this point. Most survivors have been gravely injured, or they’ve been left to die at sea by the United States. What’s notable is that behind closed doors in classified briefings, military officials have said that they can’t actually hold or try the individuals that survive because they can’t satisfy the evidentiary burden. They can’t bring these people to court because they know they would lose. To me, that says that there’s a higher evidentiary standard to hold someone on drug charges than to kill them for supposed smuggling. So I think of these strikes as a centerpiece counterterrorism strategy of the Trump administration.

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It’s really built on a quarter-century of executive overreach and targeted killings around the world. It’s the price of Congress allowing Presidents Bush, Obama, Biden, and Trump to hunt and kill people by drone from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and Somalia. It took this legally dubious, at best, post-9/11 drone war and laid the groundwork for a completely illegal one in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean.

Experts in the laws of war, as well as members of Congress from both parties, say that these boat strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military isn’t permitted to deliberately target civilians, even suspected criminals who don’t pose an imminent threat of violence.

JW: It is so telling that they say they have the legal authority to kill people, but not the legal authority to hold them. I think it just shows the entire game, frankly.

[Break]

JW: Noah, the strategy repeatedly references narco-terrorists in Latin America as principal targets for the Trump administration’s counterterrorism efforts around the world. Does this help us to understand anything about what the administration has been doing in Venezuela, Cuba, and elsewhere?

NH: I think what it helps us understand is that the drug war is and always has been a instrument for various U.S. foreign policy objectives, particularly in Latin America.

Actually labeling these somewhat nebulous drug trafficking groups as explicitly as terrorist groups was, until fairly recently, a right-wing fever dream. But on day one, President Trump signed an executive order asking the State Department to label various drug trafficking groups in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America as terrorist groups. What that tells us is that the war on drugs continues to be a very useful cudgel for U.S. foreign policy in the region.

It’s been used by Trump to discipline and pressure President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico. It’s been used to underwrite the sanctions regime against the government of Nicolás Maduro. Then, of course, as a pretext for the kidnapping of Maduro in January.

This counterterrorism strategy, like the national security strategy released late last year, makes repeated reference to the Monroe Doctrine, which is a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy dating back to 1823 when President James Monroe issued a diktat, if you will, basically saying that the Western Hemisphere is closed to further colonization by Spanish forces and other European powers, and basically it’s our corner of the world, butt out. 

The strand of “American First” nationalism that undergirds the Trump administration’s foreign policy is heavily influenced by this Monroe Doctrine. Now what’s interesting is that it was posed as a sort of anti-colonial doctrine — that the Spanish should stop meddling, that the British should stop meddling. But it has been used in an essentially colonialist or imperialist fashion by the United States to assert power in the Western Hemisphere for centuries now.

It is popular among American-first nationalists because it is a vision of the world that predates liberal internationalism, and instead — it’s not isolationist, it’s not, “We’re going to sit in our country and take care of ourselves” — it is, “We are going to take care of ourselves by projecting power in the Western Hemisphere.”

That is something that we’ve seen very explicitly from the Trump administration, both in rhetoric, in the national security strategy and the counterterrorism strategy, and in its actions. We’ve seen that in Venezuela. We’ve seen that in Cuba with the reinforced blockade. We’ve seen that in Mexico with the Trump administration’s treatment of President Claudia Sheinbaum. 

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We’ve seen that in other countries where it appears that the Trump administration, especially through Marco Rubio, are trying to create a sort of Pan-American right-wing project linking the brain trusts and power of Javier Milei in Argentina, the supporters of Juan Orlando Hernández in Honduras, the administration in Paraguay, and the the government of Ecuador, where we’ve also seen military strikes against alleged drug traffickers.

JW: Nick, this Pan-American view isn’t really limited to the Western Hemisphere. We had a conversation with historian Greg Grandin as well where he got into this. Can you talk about how the administration has also loosened rules of engagement and the effects of that on countries with U.S. military operations?

NT: This new strategy boasts that as soon as Trump retook the White House he reinstituted loosened rules of engagement that were used during his first term in office. In retrospect, we know that these weak rules during Trump’s first term had a profound effect across the Middle East and Africa. Attacks in Somalia, for example, tripled after Trump relaxed targeting principles. At the same time, U.S. military and independent estimates of civilian casualties across U.S. war zones, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen all spiked. The U.S. conducted more than 200 declared attacks in Somalia during Trump’s first term, and that was a more than 300 percent increase over the eight years of the Obama presidency.

Now, Trump, already in less than a year and a half in office in the second term, is on the cusp of eclipsing his first four years of strikes in Somalia. A review of the Trump era rules by the Biden administration found that the operating principles used in these strikes including what had previously been at a near-certainty that civilians would not be injured or killed in the course of operations, were severely watered down.

When I talked to retired Brig. Gen. Donald Bolduc, who led Special Operations Command Africa during Trump’s first term, he told me that this shift in the rules of engagement led to a major shift in who could be targeted and who would be killed. In essence, it made it much easier to strike targets.

Back in 2023, in an investigation for The Intercept, I found that these rules in one case led to the deaths of three and possibly five civilians in a strike in Somalia, including a young mother, a 22-year-old, Luul Dahir Mohamed, and her 4-year-old daughter, Mariam. Members of the U.S. strike cell didn’t know what they were looking at and somehow misidentified Luul as a man and completely missed Mariam.

The mother and child had hitched a ride in a pickup truck that the U.S. targeted. Luul and Mariam actually survived the initial strike but were killed in a double-tap attack as they fled for their lives. This was only possible because of these loosened rules of engagement that Trump has now bragged about in this 2026 counterterrorism strategy.

JW: Frankly, it’s alarming to think that now we’re going to see even more incidents like that, like you just described. And we’re seeing people targeted here at home too. 

Nick, I was looking at a piece you did last year focused on NSPM-7, the presidential memorandum that effectively created a secret list of domestic terrorists, which included everyone from anti-Christians to anti-capitalists.

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One of the haunting questions from your piece was whether the administration has the authority to kill people on the list that it has designated as terrorists. The line “We will find you and we will kill you” appears in this new counterterrorism strategy. I know that stuck out to both of us as incredibly chilling.

Does this new strategy give us an answer to your earlier question? Does the administration have the legal authority to kill its enemies?

NT: The White House and Justice Department have never answered this question. It’s been left hanging there in both cases since the fall when I started asking.

But in December, Gen. Gregory Guillot, the Chief of U.S. Northern Command, a four-star general who takes his orders from Pete Hegseth and oversees the United States, seemed to answer this question, and worryingly so. When he was asked about his willingness to attack so-called designated terrorist organizations within U.S. borders by Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island. Guillot said that if he had questions about such an order, he would ask Hegseth, and if not, if he thought it was a legal order, then he would “definitely execute that order.”

Now, as far as four-star generals go, Guillot has a good reputation. People on the Hill, decent people there, like him. He’s not a Hegseth acolyte, not a MAGA general. But the military are, in the end, orders followers. They kill on command. They do what they’re told. You don’t get four stars on your shoulder by saying, no, sir, that’s immoral. I won’t do what you want, sir. 

You don’t see a lot of military officers at any level pushing back against the orders of this administration to attack and kill people, whether it’s in Iran or Venezuela, or specifically the boat strikes that every legal authority worthy of that name says are illegal extrajudicial killings.

With secret lists of both foreign and domestic terrorists, we don’t know who can be targeted. But it’s possible that so-called left-wing extremists could be targeted and killed on Trump or Hegseth’s say-so. In a world of secret wars, secret enemies lists, secret legal findings, we just can’t know for sure. And that alone should scare every American.

JW: I think most people in the United States would like to believe that the military would not follow those kinds of orders. But as you’ve documented throughout your entire career, we cannot count on individual soldiers not following through on those orders.

The fact that we now have an enemies list and a counterterrorism strategy that is rather explicit about targeting the left, that includes the words “We will find you and we will kill you,” I think that should be terrifying to pretty much anyone.

Noah, you’ve covered other targets, specifically nonprofits. Can you talk a little bit about how that fits into the broader efforts to not only tamp down but arguably eliminate any dissent? Has the Trump administration strategy here evolved over the last year? And if so, how?

NH: As we’ve mentioned before, this anti-terror imperative makes for a very flexible and useful means of tamping down on dissent. Prior to the Trump administration returning to power, I reported extensively on what was known as the “nonprofit killer bill,” which was a piece of legislation in Congress that would allow the Treasury Department to revoke the nonprofit status of any 501(c)(3) organization found to be providing material support for terrorism.

That was a bill that had received relatively broad bipartisan support prior to the reelection of Donald Trump, and then in the immediate aftermath of the reelection of Donald Trump, it became much more of a partisan issue because suddenly the Democrats looked around and realized that we were going to be handing this tool to a new emboldened Trump administration. So that bill ended up languishing in legislative hell. 

I see that as an early warning sign of the way in which the Trump administration planned to use this terrorism rhetoric to tamp down on pretty non-terroristic political enemies. I think that we’ve seen most clearly that coming through in its prosecution of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

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Now, that is through the DOJ. They are not necessarily using the rhetoric of anti-terror against the SPLC in that lawsuit, which is based on the use of undercover informants in white supremacist groups. They did accuse the SPLC of essentially providing material support to these extremist groups by paying informants, but it was a slight evolution of the somewhat more crude use of this terrorism label against political enemies.

But we do see that they are using every tool in the toolbox to delegitimize, to prosecute, to make the lives harder of anyone they see as their political enemies.

JW: What’s also fascinating, maybe horrifying is the better word, is the fact that they don’t even have to pass this legislation. They don’t even have to convict these organizations on any charges, and yet there’s already damage. The Intercept has been reporting on the fact that certain financial institutions essentially complied in advance and began preventing donations from their donor-advised funds to SPLC. 

Nick, at different points in history, we’ve seen the government target civilians it perceived as enemies of the state, from the McCarthy era to COINTELPRO to the war on terror. Perhaps it’s too soon to tell the full impact, but how does what we’re seeing now with the Trump administration compare to these other periods?

NT: I was really struck by some of the language in this new counterterrorism strategy. At one point, it notes that the national counterterrorism activities “will prioritize the rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups” whose ideology is and this is quoting, “anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”

This language of neutralization, it really harkens back to the FBI’s analogous and infamous COINTELPRO program that you mentioned which was employed in the 1960s and 1970s to target the civil rights movement; the new left; anti-Vietnam War protesters — basically domestic groups and individuals. It’s very much the spiritual precursor to Trump’s current war at home. It’s just that COINTELPRO was secret, and Trump’s effort is out and proud.

According to a 1976 Senate Select Committee report on U.S. intelligence activities, COINTELPRO turned a law enforcement agency into a law violator. The Senate committee found that the FBI went beyond the collection of intelligence to secret action designed to “disrupt and neutralize target groups and individuals,” and that they used wartime counterintelligence techniques that were antithetical to a democratic society. There was a 1967 internal FBI memo that laid this out basically that this type of counterintelligence was meant to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” — that language again — “African American groups and leaders.”

These efforts were meant to, this is another quote, “cause serious physical, emotional, or economic damage to the targets,” according to the Senate committee. Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, was one of the targets of the FBI’s campaign. The Senate Select Committee again uses that same language. They said that the FBI targeted him to neutralize him. The man that was in charge of the FBI’s what they called “war against Dr. King,” said that they used the same methods they employed against Soviet agents. It’s the Cold War at the time, very much at war with the Soviet Union.

To me, I think Trump is really reinstituting COINTELPRO under a new name.

JW: The groups that you just mentioned are all generally considered left-leaning movements. What impact did those efforts have on leftist movements in the United States?

NT: Yeah, COINTELPRO and some analogous operations were going on at the same time. They really weakened activist groups. They sowed dissent within organizations, discord among members. They broke up families. They encouraged gang warfare on the streets of American cities. It got people killed.

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They utilized informants and agent provocateurs. They undermined groups that were trying to bring about social change through democratic means and hurt people that really just wanted to build a better, more inclusive America.

We can talk about the promise of 1960s radicalism and the movement and people trying to bring about social change and how it failed. But, we can’t seriously address those failures if we don’t talk about a sophisticated government campaign that was meant to undermine those groups and destroy those people.

JW: Are we doomed to repeat that history, to repeat that fate of previous leftist movements? Or is there a way for alleged enemies of the state to fight back? Noah, I want to start with you.

NH: Oh, yeah, we’re doomed. [Laughter.] Just kidding. No, I think there are definitely ways to push back on these. The Trump administration has been dealt a number of defeats in various district courts on a number of important policies.

So it’s going to be really important for groups like the SPLC to fight back from a legal basis. We’re also seeing a number of the charges that are being brought against protesters in various cities that have been invaded by ICE fall apart. The Prairieland case in Texas was actually a bit of an outlier. If you look at a lot of the cases, particularly in Chicago and Los Angeles, the charges brought against protesters there, where the rhetoric of terrorism has been used against them by the administration, have often fallen apart because juries see through what the prosecution is saying against them.

I think that we are early in this administration and we’re going to keep seeing creative methods used to tamp down on dissent. Say what you will about the people around President Trump, but they have proved very adept at finding levers of power and levers of pain to go after their enemies. 

The SPLC lawsuit is a really good example of that. I’m sure they knew that these donor-advised funds were going to stop allowing donations there. It’s not just the bad press. It’s not just the legal headaches. There’s all sorts of problems that you kick off when you make an accusation like this in court.

So we are going to continue to see this so-called anti-terrorism carried out against leftist groups. It’s just going to be really important to find creative ways to push back on.

JW: Nick, how does the left survive this?

NT: The only reason that we, the public, that Congress, anyone ever found out about the COINTELPRO program is because a tiny group of academics, a daycare director, and a taxi driver broke into an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, in 1971, stole more than a thousand classified FBI documents, and exposed the FBI’s illegal operations.

The Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, as they called themselves, changed our understanding of how underhanded and unhinged the U.S. government is and can be. And they were just regular people. 

I’m not encouraging people to break into an FBI field office, but activists are still smart and committed, and I’m confident they’ll find a way to expose today’s illegality.

I hope and I humbly ask that they send whatever they uncover to The Intercept.

JW: Sounds like we’re going to have a lot more documents to go through. We’re going to leave it there. We go into much more detail about the far-reaching implications of the administration’s counterterrorism strategy beyond what we cover here, so you can check out our story. You can find it at theintercept.com, and we’ll link it in the show notes. 

Nick and Noah, thanks for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.

NT: Thanks so much for having us. 

NH: Thanks so much.

JW: That does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our Managing Editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

This show and our reporting at The Intercept doesn’t exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. 

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. Do leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners to find us.

Let us know what you think of this episode, or If you want to send us a general message, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington. 

The post “We Will Find You and We Will Kill You” appeared first on The Intercept.

The brainchild of National Security Council official Sebastian Gorka, the “Counterterrorism Strategy” weaves together Trump’s war on the wider world — which stretches from interventions and wars in Yemen and Iran to Nigeria and Somalia to Venezuela and the Caribbean Sea — with the administration’s war on dissent at home, which has targeted immigrants, legal observers, activists, protesters, and the press.

Under the guise of protecting America, it takes aim at wide swaths of Americans, putting targets on the backs of the most vulnerable.

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“We Will Find You and We Will Kill You”

The “Counterterrorism Strategy” formalizes a drastic shift in focus for counterterror efforts. Now, according to the Trump administration, the nation is battling three major types of terror groups: “Legacy Islamist Terrorists,” the long-standing focus of America’s counter-terror efforts; “Narcoterrorists and Transnational Gangs”; and “Violent Left-Wing Extremists, including Anarchists and Anti-Fascists.”

This last group is defined in the document as people the administration deems to be “anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.” This puts antifa — a fictional foe that is actually a collection of ideas and not an organization — on par with actual terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State group, and drug-trafficking syndicates such as the Sinaloa Cartel and Jalisco New Generation Cartel. 

The memo makes no mention of right-wing extremist groups, despite rafts of research, from the U.S. government and others, demonstrating that such groups have been responsible for the majority of violent attacks in America in recent years.

Following 9/11, the George W. Bush administration published the first official National Strategy for Combating Terrorism. The 2003 document purported to set “the course for winning the War on Terror,” with a focus on “destroying the larger al-Qaida network,” by defining the threat and laying out big-picture goals and objectives. New strategies have been issued numerous times, over multiple presidencies, since.

Explaining the 2026 strategy last week, Gorka leaned into the lies which permeate the Trump administration’s document. “Very simply, it’s common-sense counterterrorism based on reality not fake threats,” he explained. “In the president’s foreword and in chapter one, we make it very clear we will not permit the use of the most powerful national security tools in the world including the counterterrorism enterprise to be used as political weapons.”

Rep. Valerie Foushee, D-N.C., had a very different interpretation, calling the strategy “a plan on how they’re going to attack people on the left,” noting that antifascists are “not a real terrorism threat in the United States.” She added that the effort is “completely corrupt.”

To contextualize the U.S. government’s radical new approach to counterterrorism, The Intercept analyzed the document, highlighting revelatory passages that show how the Trump administration is bringing the war on terror home.

“We Will Kill You”

History ultimately judges presidents by their priorities, both deeds and words.

While calling out slavery as the cause of the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln still focused his second inaugural address on reconciliation over retribution. “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan—to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations,” he pronounced.

On the eve of World War II, as the threat of fascism loomed over the world, President Franklin D. Roosevelt readied a nation for war, not with ferocious rhetoric but by envisioning a new world founded upon the freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. “That is no vision of a distant millennium,” he told Congress on January 6, 1941. “It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.”

These presidents were deeply flawed. Both committed grave injustices, were responsible for immense harm, and neither lived up to their most laudable words. But those words survived for a reason and are now part of the American canon.

For President Donald Trump, the “2026 Counterterrorism Strategy” is as good as any collection of words in defining him. Nothing better illustrates his vision of America’s role in the world than Trump’s capstone quote. He concludes the foreword with words that ring true from the streets of Minneapolis, where federal agents killed U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti during anti-ICE resistance; to a school building in Minab, Iran, where more than 100 children were killed in a U.S. airstrike; to the Eastern Pacific Ocean and Caribbean Sea, where close to 200 civilians have been killed in attacks on alleged drug boats; and should follow him forever: “We Will Find You and We Will Kill You.”

Treating Americans as Terrorists

Under U.S. law, the government can designate “foreign terrorist organizations,” a process that typically entails a formal declaration by the secretary of state at the direction of the president, allowing the Treasury Department to impose financial penalties and the Justice Department to prosecute people for providing “material support” to such groups. Congress has not passed any law creating a domestic terrorism designation, nor is there a standalone crime of “domestic terrorism.” 

This has not stopped Trump from aiming the counterterror apparatus at domestic targets in his second term. Under National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, which Trump issued last September, vaguely defined enemies are not only typified by “support for the overthrow of the United States Government,” but also advocacy of opinions clearly protected by the First Amendment including “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” as well as “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

In this document, the Trump administration makes clear it considers any American who it believes has “adopted ideologies antithetical to freedom and the American way of life” to be a terror threat.

“The Trump administration has repurposed the ‘terrorism’ framing and applied it to new boogeymen, like alleged narcos as well as a caricature of their domestic political opposition,” Brian Finucane, a senior adviser for the U.S. Program at the International Crisis Group, told The Intercept.

White-Washing Right-Wing Terror

What’s notable here isn’t just the “major terror groups” included — it’s the type of groups the Trump administration omitted. 

“Absurdly, the document incorrectly labels drug cartels, ‘legacy Islamist terrorists,’ and violent left-wing extremists as the top counterterrorism threats — despite years of data proving that right-wing extremism has presented the most persistent and deadly threats to Americans for decades,” said Rep. Bennie G. Thompson, D-Miss., ranking member of the House Committee on Homeland Security. 

In fact, a 2025 analysis conducted by the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies found that, over the past decade, right-wing extremists carried out 152 attacks in the United States and killed 112 people, compared with 35 attacks and 13 deaths attributed to left-wing militants. Islamist jihadist-inspired attacks resulted in 82 deaths over the same span.

“Radical Ideologies”

The new “Counterterrorism Strategy” signals a jarring shift in the priorities of the national security apparatus. Instead of having the security state primarily focus on foreign actors and those domestic threats responsible for the most violence in recent years — like white supremacists and violent militias — the president is effectively siccing them on anyone who dares to disagree with him or his supporters. 

“This is a very severe degradation of freedom of thought [and] freedom of speech in the country, and it should be raising alarm bells,” said Robert P. Jones, president and founder of Public Religion Research Institute.

“It does look like a very straight blueprint drawn from white evangelical Protestant Christian circles,” said Jones, the author of the forthcoming book “Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy.”“What they call radical ideology is essentially anything that differs from that conservative, white evangelical Protestant worldview.”

The Narcoterrorist Boogeymen

By labeling drug-trafficking networks as terrorists, Trump is operating in a long tradition of using the rhetoric of war to refer to an issue that is rooted in public health. The terrorism framing is simply the logical next step in the decadeslong war on drugs that is, more often than not, used as a cudgel by U.S. policymakers to keep Latin American countries in line, said Alexander Aviña, a historian at Arizona State University.

“They’re using drug war counterterrorism as a cover,” Aviña said. “They’re effectively maintaining control over the region through a bunch of proxy right-wing governments, but it’s being framed as counterterrorism, as an anti-drugs operation. The innovation here is that they’re applying war on terror legislation and laws to drug trafficking organizations”

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The problem with labeling drug networks as “terrorists,” however, is that the vast majority of drug traffickers differ from organizations like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State group in that they have no real membership, and they operate for profit, not to achieve an ideological objective.

Legacy Islamist Terrorists

Despite Trump’s boasts of his prowess at fighting terrorism, both Al Qaeda and ISIS were the top threats in his 2018 counterterrorism strategy. They are called out specifically in the new document as well.

In fact, Gorka’s inclusion of ISIS directly contradicts longtime claims by Trump. “We defeated ISIS in record time,” Trump said in his 2024 election-night speech. Last year, at his commencement speech at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, he said: “I defeated ISIS in three weeks.”

“Politically Motivated” Killings of Christians

The idea that Christians, who make up two-thirds of the U.S. population, are under siege is belied by the data. Hate crimes motivated by anti-Christian bias are far rarer than attacks motivated by racism or xenophobia in the United States, and other religious groups are far more likely to report being the victim of a religiously motivated hate crime than Christians. An analysis of 2023 FBI hate crime data found that less than 10 percent of religiously motivated hate crimes were believed to be motivated by anti-Christian bias. 

“There’s really no evidence-based reason why a report focused on the domestic front would disproportionately feature violence against Christians. There’s just no evidence that that is the most pressing problem facing us in the United States today,” said PRRI’s Jones.

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing, right-wing influencers and media outlets rapidly spread misinformation about the shooter’s gender identity and supposed “pro-transgender” ideology based on unverified claims about the bullet casings used in the shooting. Trans people are far more likely to be victims of gun violence than perpetrators. In mass shootings carried out between 1966 and 2025, less than 1 percent of the shooters were transgender, according to the Violence Prevention Project. The overwhelming majority of shooters were cisgender men. 

“In the immediate aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder, news outlets and people with large platforms online raced to share unconfirmed reports that wrongfully tied the LGBTQ+ community to the shooter,” Human Rights Campaign national press secretary Brandon Wolf told The Washington Blade. “Jumping to those conclusions was reckless, irresponsible, and led to a wave of threats against the trans community from right wing influencers, and a wave of terror for the community that is already living scared.”

“Neutralization” of Adversaries

While Trump has frequently threatened his political opponents in public, experts in extremism told The Intercept that “this kind of language” in a national security document should raise alarm bells. It’s one thing when the president rants about “radical gender ideology” at a rally, said Jones. “But when it gets put into a national presidential security memo, when it gets put into a report that’s led by a task force at the U.S. Department of Justice, and when it’s put into a counterterrorism document … these are laying the legal framework for prosecution.” 

This language of “neutralization” in this new strategy harkens back to the FBI’s analogous and infamous COINTELPRO program, which was employed in the 1960s and 1970s to target the civil rights movement, the New Left, and anti-Vietnam War protesters, among other domestic groups and individuals and, according to a 1976 Senate Select Committee report on U.S. intelligence activities, “turn[ed] a law enforcement agency into a law violator.” The FBI, the committee found, “went beyond the collection of intelligence to secret action designed to ‘disrupt’ and ‘neutralize’ target groups and individuals,” using “wartime counterintelligence” techniques that “would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity,” which they were not.

A 1967 FBI memo notes that purpose of this type of “counterintelligence endeavor is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” African American groups and leaders. Efforts included “sending anonymous poison-pen letters intended to break up marriages,” “encouraging gang warfare,” “falsely labeling members of a violent group as police informers,” and other means to “cause serious physical, emotional, or economic damage to the targets,” according to the committee. Their investigation found that civil rights leader “Martin Luther King, Jr. was, for instance, the target of an intensive campaign by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to ‘neutralize’ him” and that “the man in charge of the FBI’s ‘war’ against Dr. King” said they used the same methods employed against Soviet agents.

An Antifa Obsession

Antifa, short for antifascist, is a decentralized, leftist ideology, a collection of related ideas and political concepts much like feminism or environmentalism. Over the last decade, however, Republicans have used it as an omnibus term for left-wing activists — as if it were an organization with members and a command structure. They have increasingly blamed antifa for terrorist violence.

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In 2019, during his first term, Trump floated the idea of declaring antifa “a major Organization of Terror,” likening it to the group MS-13, an international criminal gang that originated in the U.S. and that the administration added to the foreign terrorist organization list last year. “The United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization,” Trump tweeted in 2020, during protests after the police killing of George Floyd.

Then-FBI Director Christopher Wray said, however, that antifa was “not a group or an organization” but a “movement or an ideology.” Trump lashed out, calling antifa “well funded ANARCHISTS & THUGS who are protected because the … FBI is simply unable, or unwilling, to find their funding source.” After Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an effort to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, Trump blamed “antifa people” for inciting violence. 

Finally, last September, Trump signed an executive order designating antifa as a “domestic terror organization.” He followed it by issuing NSPM-7, which directs the Justice Department and elements of the Intelligence Community and national security establishment to target “anti-fascism … movements” and “domestic terrorist organizations.” 

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On his press tour touting the new strategy, Gorka said “left-wing violent radicals like antifa and the anarchists” were the “most ascendant” terror group and — without evidence — claimed they were “the people who killed our friend Charlie Kirk.” He said these leftists are “people who think that if you don’t agree with them politically, they get to kill you.”

Locking Up Trump’s Enemies

The new document detours to discuss the wrongful detention of Americans abroad. Ironically, the Trump administration has unlawfully detained thousands of people residing in the United States, including those with legal status, targeting everyone from perceived political dissidents to racial and ethnic minorities. 

Last year, the Trump administration detained Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk for writing an op-ed, as revealed by legal documents unsealed as a result of litigation from The Intercept and other parties. 
Also in 2025, the administration sent Kilmar Ábrego García, a Salvadoran national with an order preventing his deportation to his country of origin, to CECOT, a prison in El Salvador notorious for human rights abuses. He has since been released to his home in Maryland, but the administration has continued to target him, including with criminal prosecution.

The Monroe Doctrine

Issued by President James Monroe, the Monroe Doctrine is a foundational principle of U.S. foreign policy opposing any foreign interference in the Western Hemisphere — except by Washington. It’s seen by American nationalists and by modern “America First” Trump ideologues as marking a “golden age” of U.S. power in the region, according to historian Greg Grandin.

“Going back to World War I and World War II, America First nationalists have liked the Monroe Doctrine because they saw it as an alternative to liberal internationalism,” Grandin said. “They were never isolationists, even though that word is often applied to them, because they’ve long claimed the right to intervene and project power in the Western Hemisphere.”

Now, Trump is using the spectre of terror to justify extrajudicial killings of alleged drug traffickers at sea and the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Boat Strikes and Bogus Stats

The U.S. military has conducted 58 attacks on so-called drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean since September 2025, killing more than 190 civilians. 

Experts in the laws of war, as well as members of Congress from both parties, say the strikes are illegal, extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.

The assertion that this campaign has resulted “in a more than 90% decrease in maritime drug smuggling” into the U.S. slightly tempers similarly outlandish and false figures from Trump, who regularly claims that “drugs entering our country by sea are down 97 percent.” Experts say these claims are meant to deceive the American people. “It wouldn’t be the first time this administration just made up something out of whole cloth,” Sanho Tree, the director of the Drug Policy Project at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, told The Intercept.

Even the Pentagon’s own figures refute Trump’s numbers. “He’s trying to imply that 97 percent of the cocaine that left South America by boat headed to the United States has been stopped,” said Rear Adm. William Baumgartner, the former commander of the Seventh Coast Guard District, who oversaw drug-interdiction operations in the Southeast U.S. and the Caribbean Basin. “That’s not true and is contradicted by the administration’s own statements.” Acting Assistant Secretary of War for Homeland Defense and Americas Security Affairs Joseph Humire, for example, offered completely different numbers to Congress, telling the House Armed Services Committee in March that there “has been a 20 percent reduction of movements of drug vessels in the Caribbean and an additional 25 percent reduction in the Eastern Pacific.”

The “Trump Corollary”

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen an attempt by the administration to enshrine a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, with the term also appearing in the administration’s national security strategy document in December. But it’s not entirely clear what, precisely, this corollary means, said Aviña, the historian.

“It’s supposed to be an addition to the Monroe Doctrine, but we don’t get a very precise definition of what that is,” said Aviña. “It harkens back to the Roosevelt Corollary, but Teddy Roosevelt was very clear about what his addition was: international police power.” Trump makes no claim to a new power. “So Trump is working in that tradition, but in a weird and imprecise way.”

Loosened Rules and Civilian Deaths

The loosened rules of engagement during Trump’s first term had a profound effect across the Middle East and Africa. Attacks in Somalia tripled after Trump relaxed targeting principles, while U.S. military and independent estimates of civilian casualties across U.S. war zones spiked. The U.S. conducted 219 declared attacks in Somalia during Trump’s single term in the White House, a more than 329 percent increase over the eight years of the Obama presidency. Trump is already on the cusp of eclipsing those numbers in less than a year and half. Since taking office last year, Trump has overseen at least 190 attacks in Somalia.

A review of Trump-era rules by the Biden administration found that, in some countries, “operating principles,” including a “near certainty” that civilians would “not be injured or killed in the course of operations,” were reportedly enforced only for women and children, while a lower standard applied to civilian adult men. All military-age males were considered legitimate targets if they were observed with suspected al-Shabab members in the group’s territory, Donald Bolduc, who led Special Operations Command Africa at the time, told The Intercept. 

A 2023 investigation by The Intercept found that Trump’s directive contributed to a particularly disastrous attack in Somalia that killed at least three — and possibly five — civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter, Mariam Shilow Muse. The mother and child survived the initial strike but were killed by a double-tap attack as they fled for their lives. “They know innocent people were killed, but they’ve never told us a reason or apologized,” said Abdi Dahir Mohamed, one of Luul’s brothers. “No one has been held accountable.”

Using Europe to Promote Bigotry

The document employs its section on Europe to shamelessly promote racism, white nationalism, and Christian supremacy employing a stilted worldview that ignores the U.S. role in the immigration it rails against.

“Trump officials are clearly weaponizing anti-Muslim bigotry in their campaign to heap pressure on Europe. They are baselessly insinuating that European policies that welcomed migrants — who largely fled their home countries due to the impact of U.S. backed wars and regime changes — created an incubator for terrorism,” Erik Sperling, the executive director of Just Foreign Policy, told The Intercept. “At the same time, however, the White House continues to implement the exact kind of violent, interventionist policies that drove mass migration and generated extremism in the first place.”

“There is this kind of praising of Western culture and values, the denigration of ‘alien cultures,’” said Jones. “What’s behind those is really a sense of European superiority, and that gets translated into the U.S. in racial terms. So it really is a white Christian worldview here that’s being projected and protected.”

A Bid to “Protect Christians”

Experts on white supremacy and Christian nationalism told The Intercept that the Trump administration is spreading misinformation about a Christian genocide in Africa in order to stoke white Christian nationalist and anti-immigrant sentiments at home. “In Nigeria, it’s genocide against Christians, and in South Africa, it’s the supposed genocide against these white Afrikaners,” Christine Reyna, a professor of psychology at DePaul University, told The Intercept. “And so in absence of an actual genocide in the United States against either of these two groups, you can keep that narrative of that existential fear of extermination and genocide and oppression that is alive and well within a certain subset of white Americans.”

In addition to using the conflicts in Africa to spread propaganda domestically, experts on Christian nationalism tell The Intercept that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth believes in waging war to achieve Christian supremacy abroad, without respect to international laws or norms. “Hegseth believes that he is carrying out a spiritual and actual war to vanquish a Christian nation’s enemies and protect and promote a Christian nation,” Sarah Posner, an investigative journalist covering the Christian right, said on The Intercept Briefing podcast. “For Hegseth, biblical law is the only law he feels obligated to obey. The law of war, international law governing military conflicts, and human rights and civilian rights in war — he believes don’t apply to him.”

Trump’s Holy War in Nigeria

While Christians have been the victims of violence in Nigeria, they have not been the primary target, and experts overwhelmingly reject the idea that a Christian genocide is occurring in that country. Research from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data, an independent global monitor of conflict and protest data, found that of the 1,923 attacks on civilians in Nigeria that occurred as of November of last year; 50 of those attacks targeted Christians because of their religion. According to experts, the majority of the violence has focused on land disputes. 

Trump’s Christmas Day attack was another in a long string of failed and futile U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Africa documented by The Intercept over the last decade This includes blowback from U.S. operations and failed secret wars, civilians killed in drone strikes, coups by U.S. trained officers, increases in the reach of terror groups, surging fatalities from militant violence, human rights abuses by allies, massacres of civilians by partner forces, and a catalogue of other fiascos.

Doubling Down on Failures in Africa

The document casts Trump’s strategy as a departure from the failed forever war interventions of Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. But Sarah Harrison — who served as an associate general counsel at the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel, International Affairs, where she oversaw the Africa portfolio, and as counsel to the deputy assistant secretary of defense for African affairs — sees little difference. “Setting aside the bombast about protecting Christians, the fundamentals of Trump’s Africa CT policy isn’t that distinct from his predecessors: a light military footprint to facilitate intel sharing and drone strikes with an emphasis on supporting the partner nation. These policies fail because they ignore the drivers of conflict and refuse to acknowledge the need for a political solution,” she told The Intercept.

The U.S. government’s own statistics bear out this record of futility and failure. Throughout all of Africa, the State Department counted 23 deaths from terrorist violence in 2002 and 2003, as U.S. counterterrorism efforts began to ramp up on the continent in the wake of 9/11. Last year, there were 22,307 fatalities from militant Islamist violence in Africa, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution. This represents an almost 97,000 percent increase since the early 2000s, with the areas of greatest U.S. involvement — Somalia and the West African Sahel — suffering the worst outcomes.

“Reality-Based” Counterterrorism

The document ends as it began, with unserious bombast that reads like little more than AI slop fashioned from administration talking points. Evoking the administration’s 2025 National Security Strategy, which called for a restoration of “Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity,” the Trump administration appears to be making up for its own insecurities with claims that the president has restored America’s “civilizational confidence” through a baptism of fire. In reality, the document projects a heady blend of weakness and anxiety and espouses a counterterrorism strategy akin to a 12-year-old boy’s vision of foreign policy: boasts about killing one’s way to victory.

In a post-release media tour where he spoke with MAGA outlets and administration sycophants, Gorka expressed amazement at how little negative reporting there was about the new counterterrorism strategy. “Even the left, they’re so on their heels. I did a kind of press call when we released the strategy,” said Gorka. “Fifty articles were written. … Only one of them … was even slightly negative.” (The Intercept’s invite must have been lost in the mail.) He continued: “We are moving so fast, they just can’t keep up with us — which is delicious.” His interviewer, Dean Cain, best known for playing second fiddle in “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman,” responded, “That’s wonderful.” 

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“If the U.S. government counterterrorism enterprise hadn’t jumped the shark before, it certainly has now,” said Finucane. “The administration has repurposed the terrorism framing and applied it not only to alleged narcos but also perceived domestic political opponents — as we saw with the way the administration baselessly smeared Renee Good and Alex Pretti as ‘terrorists’ after gunning them down. The whole situation would be much funnier if the Trump administration wasn’t currently engaged in a lawless killing spree under the guise of ‘counterterrorism.’”

The post How Trump’s New Counterterrorism Strategy Puts You at Risk appeared first on The Intercept.

In an escalation of its efforts to criminalize and eradicate trans healthcare, Donald Trump’s administration has sent its first known criminal subpoenas to hospitals that have provided gender-affirming care for young trans people. 

New York University Langone received a criminal grand jury subpoena last week from the US Attorney’s Office in the Northern District of Texas demanding information about teens who received care from the hospital’s now-shuttered trans youth health program, as well as information on the medical staff who provided that care. 

In accordance with a New York state shield law, the hospital posted a public notice to inform affected patients. The notice also said “several” other institutions had received similar subpoenas, which the hospital said demands “information pertaining to patients under the age of 18 who received gender affirming care” between 2020 and 2026.

Previous administrative subpoenas for confidential patient information have been reliably quashed in courts around the country as blatantly unconstitutional, illegal intrusions into patient privacy. So far, these have been related only to civil investigations. The Langone subpoena means that the federal government has now launched a criminal investigation into trans youth healthcare providers, and in Northern Texas, a judicial district prone to extreme, right-wing decisions. 

It appears that providers, not the trans patients or their guardians, are the target of the criminal investigation. Since federal grand juries are the black boxes of the criminal legal system, little information is available about the details of the case. It is not even publicly known what charges the prosecutors could be pursuing. The subpoena demands sweeping information including medical records relating to any patients under 18 who received gender-affirming treatments, including puberty blockers, hormone treatments, or any other “clinical services.” What we do know for certain is that resisting every government demand here is the only acceptable path forward. 

When it comes to healthcare providers, New York’s Shield Law is specifically in place as a protection from out-of-state prosecution. But the law has not yet been robustly tested against a federal case. 

“The hospital may try to fight the subpoena, in whole or in part, in court — but because the federal government is strategically pursuing the case in one of the most conservative courts in the country, Langone faces an uphill battle,” S. Baum wrote in the trans news and advocacy site Erin in the Morning. “This round of litigation could also put the efficacy of Shield Laws to the test.”

The Justice Department’s aim, whether or not the grand jury leads to prosecutions, is to further intimidate and harass healthcare providers and hospital administrators nationwide into preemptively ending services for trans young people. Many institutions, including NYU Langone, have already complied and stopped providing such care. Convening the grand jury is yet another direct and immediate attack on trans kids and adults, and a threat to bodily autonomy and medical confidentiality more broadly.

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We also know by now that the Constitution or our country’s laws are no constraint on the Trump administration. Prosecutors and lawmakers will continue to throw everything they can against the wall until something sticks to establish a new political-legal reality — one usually achieved after a case winds its way up to a favorable federal judge, and eventually the far-right Supreme Court. 

Meanwhile, NYU Langone has shown itself to be an easy target. In response to threats from the federal government last year to withhold funding, the hospital ended its Transgender Youth Health Program. Despite the fact that a federal court in April ruled that the government cannot withhold funding over trans healthcare provision, more than 40 hospital systems have stopped providing necessary medical care to trans youth based on the Trump regime’s threats. 

The fact that Langone already bent to Trump’s demands by shuttering the program but is still facing a potential criminal probe only proves the folly of compliance. Should the hospital, or any other hospital system, supply federal prosecutors with patient’s or worker’s personal information, patients would be well within their rights to sue for HIPAA violations and potentially even civil rights violations given the discriminatory nature of the request. Patients and their families can also file a motion against the subpoena — a precedent that has been set when it comes to administrative subpoenas asking for trans patients’ information. 

Earlier this year, for example, the families of six trans teens who had received treatment at the Children’s Hospital Los Angeles filed a motion to quash an administrative subpoena on behalf of themselves and more than 3,000 other transgender youth patients and families whose identities and private medical information the subpoena demanded. A settlement was reached, in which the government withdrew the subpoena requests seeking patient-identifying information and instructed Children’s Hospital to redact all such information from any documents produced.

Meanwhile, a federal judge in the Northern District of Texas — from the same district where the criminal grand jury is empanelled — ruled earlier this month that Rhode Island Hospital in Providence must comply with a Justice Department administrative subpoena for trans youth patient information, including names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and medical records. In response, the Rhode Island Office of Child Advocate filed an emergency motion to quash the request. In a hearing over the motion in a Providence court, U.S. District Judge Mary McElroy slammed the Justice Department for conducting a “fishing expedition” by seeking medical records and patient information in a scrambling effort to criminalize healthcare provision; she also said the case was quite clearly “shopped” to Texas. 

For institutions and individuals, the stakes for resisting a criminal grand jury subpoena are higher. Individuals can be jailed and fined for the length of the grand jury in order to compel them to testify, and institutions can be slapped with hefty fines. But the consequences of giving in are graver still: Hospitals that capitulate to these demands could be subject to costly patient class action over privacy and rights violations. Institutions that hand over information are also aiding the potential criminal prosecution of medical care providers — an attack on the entire medical profession.

“If NYU Langone and other providers turn the confidential data of their patients over to the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for Northern Texas, everyone’s privacy, everyone’s healthcare, everyone’s civil rights are compromised,” Brad Lander, the former New York City comptroller and congressional candidate, wrote on Bluesky.

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In March, a federal court ruled that a case brought by Columbia University students could proceed against the university. The lawsuit argues the university became a “third-party collaborator” in unconstitutional actions when it supplied the names and disciplinary records of students involved in Palestine solidarity organizing. The court determined Columbia could be found liable as a “state actor” for acting under government coercion to suppress student speech. Students and civil rights advocates sued the school for handing over student information in response to a congressional subpoena. While a civil, rather than a criminal, case, the finding should make institutions reflect on their readiness to comply with discriminatory and unconstitutional requests from this administration. 

“If the calculus before was that it’s better to comply with the federal government because it is either face saving or economically saving for these private institutions, now there’s the counterbalance: If you capitulate, you’ve actually opened yourself up to liability for selling out your constituents,” civil rights attorney and CUNY law professor Zal Shroff, who is representing plaintiffs in the case against Columbia, told me. 

Given that a federal grand jury subpoena is itself explicitly coercive, it’s unclear whether exactly the same legal claim could be made against NYU should it comply with the government’s demands. Shroff noted, “It may be that they are seeking to use the criminal process to avoid what has been found in the civil process,” but that nonetheless, “legal consequences work in multiple ways” when it comes to people’s ability to challenge private entities for their compliance with the administration’s harms. Continued complicity with Trump’s regime, however, has a known result. 

“NYU caved and ended care and they’re still being hit with a grand jury subpoena. It’s incredibly clear that no amount of preemptive compliance will stop this attack,” Harvard Law instructor Alejandra Caraballo wrote on Bluesky. “You either fight or you will be destroyed by this administration. Caving will not save you.” 

The post DOJ Escalates War on Trans Youth Healthcare With Criminal Subpoenas appeared first on The Intercept.

In an order handed down on Thursday, Oklahoma County District Judge Natalie Mai set Glossip’s bond at $500,000. She ordered him to live with his wife, wear an electronic monitoring device, and abide by a curfew from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m., and forbade him from traveling outside the state.

Shortly after 5 p.m., Glossip, 63, walked out of the Oklahoma County jail accompanied by his wife Lea and members of his legal team, who expressed gratitude to everyone who has supported him. “It’s overwhelming but it’s amazing at the same time,” Glossip said.

“We are extremely grateful that Judge Natalie Mai has granted Richard Glossip a bond,” Glossip’s longtime attorney Don Knight wrote in a statement. “In doing so, she rejected the State’s claim that there is a strong case for guilt. For the first time in 29 years of being incarcerated for a crime he did not commit, during which he faced 9 execution dates and ate 3 last meals, Mr. Glossip now has the chance to taste freedom while his defense team continues to pursue justice on his behalf.”

Mai’s decision comes more than a year after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Glossip’s conviction and death sentence based on false testimony and prosecutorial misconduct. The momentous victory before the high court seemed certain to mark the end of Glossip’s decadeslong ordeal.

But in June 2025, Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, who is running for governor, announced that he would retry Glossip for first-degree murder, opening a new chapter in the protracted legal saga. Glossip has remained in jail ever since.

His next court appearance is scheduled for June 23.

Glossip was twice convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of his boss, motel owner Barry Van Treese, who was brutally killed at the Best Budget Inn on the outskirts of Oklahoma City in January 1997. A 19-year-old handyman named Justin Sneed admitted to fatally beating Van Treese with a baseball bat but insisted that Glossip bullied him into doing it. Sneed’s account became the basis for the state’s case against Glossip — and for a plea deal that allowed Sneed to avoid the death penalty. Sneed is serving a life sentence.

Prosecutors told jurors at Glossip’s 1998 trial that he’d taken advantage of the younger, more vulnerable Sneed, offering him money to kill their boss so that Glossip could take over the motel. “Glossip encouraged, aided and abetted and sent Mr. Sneed off to do his dirty work,” they said.

But this story began falling apart not long after Glossip arrived on death row. A video of Sneed’s police interrogation cast serious doubt on the state’s version of events, revealing coercive questioning by Oklahoma City detectives who pressured Sneed into implicating Glossip. 

Glossip’s conviction was overturned twice. In 2001, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals ruled that Glossip’s lawyers had been ineffective for failing to present the interrogation video to jurors. But in 2004, a second jury convicted Glossip and resentenced him to death. More than 20 years later, in February 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court again vacated Glossip’s conviction, finding that Sneed had lied on the stand during Glossip’s retrial — and that prosecutors had failed to correct Sneed’s testimony. This misconduct, combined with “additional conduct by the prosecutor further undermines confidence in the verdict,” the justices wrote.

Glossip came close to execution numerous times, as Oklahoma authorities aggressively defended their conviction despite mounting evidence pointing to his innocence. Drummond, who came into office in 2023, broke with his predecessors and took unprecedented steps to block Glossip’s execution — only to announce months after Glossip’s Supreme Court victory that he would retry Glossip for first-degree murder. 

The state has since fought to keep Glossip locked up at the Oklahoma County Jail. At a bond hearing last summer, prosecutors insisted to Oklahoma County Judge Heather Coyle that Glossip is guilty and poses a danger to the community. Coyle ruled in their favor but later stepped down from the case after Glossip’s lawyers discovered that she was close friends with the lead prosecutor at Glossip’s second trial. Five more judges subsequently stepped down from the case due to their own ties to the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s Office.

Mai’s order granting bond came on the heels of a setback for Glossip’s legal team, who had hoped to resolve the case once and for all. In April, following a daylong hearing in Oklahoma City, Mai declined to enforce a previous agreement between Drummond and Knight that would have allowed Glossip to walk free. After hearing testimony on the matter from Knight and from the Oklahoma solicitor general, Mai sided with the state, ruling from the bench that “the matter should go on for trial.”

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In a subsequent motion, Glossip’s lawyers argued that, while Mai may have concluded that the agreement was not enforceable for the purpose of resolving the case, it was still grounds to release Glossip from jail.

“Regardless of the parties’ differing views,” they wrote, “it remains significant that … the Attorney General believed that an appropriate resolution of this case should result in Mr. Glossip’s release from custody. The State’s chief law enforcement officer did not see Mr. Glossip as a dangerous individual who should remain incarcerated, or one against whom the State had proof beyond a reasonable doubt that he was guilty of murder.” 

In a reply brief, Jimmy Harmon, the chief of the criminal justice division of the AG’s office, wrote that in making her decision Mai should not consider anything Drummond has said about the case.

Mai apparently disagreed. In her order, Mai quoted a letter Drummond wrote to the parole board in 2023, expressing his view that the record didn’t support a first-degree murder conviction.

“The Court fully expects that the State will rigorously prosecute its case going forward and the defense will provide robust and effective presentation for Glossip,” Mai wrote. “The Court hopes that a new trial, free of error, will provide all interested parties, and the citizens of Oklahoma, the closure they deserve.”

At Glossip’s most recent bond hearing in February, Harmon alerted the judge that she should not expect anything new from the state at Glossip’s third trial. “The evidence presented will be essentially the same as was presented in the first two trials,” he said. 

This evidence, which was never strong to begin with, has been diminished and discredited in the decades since Glossip was first sent to death row. While Knight has spent more than a decade uncovering new evidence debunking the state’s case, the state is evidently prepared to once again rely on Sneed, whose credibility has been fatally undermined. “Besides Sneed, no other witness and no physical evidence established that Glossip orchestrated Van Treese’s murder,” Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote last year. 

As Mai prepares to preside over a trial based on the same discredited evidence, Glossip, who is now 63, is set to rejoin the free world for the first time in nearly 30 years. “After everything we’ve been through together over the years, knowing that my husband is finally coming home is a feeling I can’t even begin to describe,” his wife Lea said.

Meanwhile, Glossip’s legal team is gearing up for trial “against a system that the United States Supreme Court has found to be guilty of serious misconduct by state prosecutors,” Knight said. “Mr. Glossip is deeply grateful to the many thousands of people who have expressed support for him over the years and now looks forward to the day when he is exonerated and truly free from this decades-long nightmare.”

Update: May 14, 2026, 7:08 p.m. ET
This article has been updated to include new details after Richard Glossip’s release from jail.

The post “It’s Overwhelming but It’s Amazing”: Richard Glossip Released From Jail After Three Decades appeared first on The Intercept.

California state Sen. Scott Wiener’s opposition might seem uncharacteristic for someone running a progressive campaign, but it’s consistent with the priorities of two top donors to a super PAC backing his candidacy.

Crypto mogul Chris Larsen and venture capitalist Garry Tan — a pair of wealthy Bay Area tech executives funding a pro-Wiener super PAC called Abundant Future — have been outspoken advocates of stopping the taxes, both of which aim to help fill funding gaps in healthcare and social services after the Trump administration’s recent cuts to Medicaid. Larsen has poured millions of dollars into the fight.

The statewide tax, known as the Billionaire Tax Act, would levy a one-time 5 percent tax on the state’s billionaires’ wealth and assets. The local San Francisco proposition, colloquially known as the Overpaid CEO tax, would tax companies whose CEO makes 100 times more than their median worker, which mostly applies to companies with billionaire CEOs. Both will likely be on the ballot in November, as Wiener also hopes to be.

Larsen, the billionaire co-founder and executive chairman of the blockchain service Ripple Labs and now a mainstay in Bay Area political funding, has donated $100,000 to the PAC backing Wiener — the most of any individual donor — and $700,000 opposing the Overpaid CEO tax, according to federal and San Francisco city records. He’s spent far more fighting the statewide billionaires’ tax, sinking $5 million of his own wealth and another $5 million from Ripple into the Golden State Promise PAC, an anti-tax PAC he founded, per state records. Larsen gave an additional $2.5 million to a separate anti-billionaire tax group, Building a Better California, founded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. (Brin has reportedly already left the state to avoid the tax.)

Tan, the CEO of startup incubator Y Combinator, has less money to throw around, but he’s made vocal opposition to the tax measures a key part of his brand. He frequently invokes the specter of billionaires and startups fleeing the state and spreads claims that the statewide tax would mean Google’s founders would owe 50 percent of their stocks, which the tax’s backers have dismissed as false. He’s contributed $25,000 to Abundant Future.

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Larsen and Tan likely see their support as “political investments that they expect a return on,” said Jeremy Mack, executive director of Phoenix Project, which tracks corporate spending in San Francisco politics. Wiener owes much of his political strength to the donors who have boosted his housing causes during his state Senate career, including Larsen and Tan. With those backers now animated against the wealth taxes, Mack said that supporting them would be “political suicide” for Wiener.

But Wiener’s opposition to the taxes positions him against the political currents now driving the Democratic Party’s progressive wing. California’s major labor unions, a supermajority of San Francisco’s board of supervisors, and national progressive leaders like Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., all support the pair of taxes. Even Pelosi, Wiener’s would-be predecessor and a known moderate, is in favor of the local San Francisco tax. SEIU California, one of the state’s largest labor unions, withdrew its endorsement of Wiener in early April over his opposition to the tax measures.

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Both of Wiener’s opponents in the three-way June 2 primary — progressive member of San Francisco’s board of supervisors Connie Chan and Justice Democrats co-founder Saikat Chakrabarti — are in favor of the taxes. Most California voters support the statewide billionaire tax, according to a March poll, including 72 percent of Democratic voters. 

“If you look at who is bankrolling [Wiener], he is doing the bidding of massive corporate interest,” Justin Dolezal, a San Francisco bar owner and co-founder with Small Business Forward, an advocacy group that supports both wealth taxes, told The Intercept. “That’s what he’s looking out for, rather than the average, everyday working San Franciscans.”

Wiener’s campaign did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. 

While Wiener in the past has brushed off concerns of corporate backers influencing his policy, saying that he and his wealthiest donors “have agreements and disagreements,” their alignment in opposition against two popular wealth taxes has drawn concern from housing and homelessness advocates, who were already skeptical of Wiener for boosting housing development in the city that they argue favors real estate corporations. The real estate industry was consistently among his top donors during his state Senate elections.

Wiener is a proponent of the “Yes in My Backyard” movement that seeks to address the housing crisis by increasing the housing stock, while opponents criticize it for its emphasis on boosting development rather than redistributing wealth. The movement has morphed over the past several years with the growth of the abundance movement, which is popular among San Francisco’s powerful billionaires and aims to remove regulations and red tape to speed up development.

In addition to being top donors to Abundant Future, Tan and Larsen, along with Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppleman, have been consistent supporters of Wiener’s YIMBY vision. During his decade in the state Senate, Wiener introduced a series of bills that cut regulations to accelerate housing development across the state, a core tenet of YIMBYism and abundance. Critics on the left dismissed his policies as rewards for corporate commercial real estate developers that failed to meet San Francisco and the state’s housing needs, as well as exacerbating gentrification and displacement of its low-income residents. Opponents instead argue for redistribution of wealth, using the housing that already exists and direct investment in services for low-income people. 

Confronting challenges over his support from wealthy donors during his campaign for Congress, Wiener often refers to his track record of taking on corporations, such as introducing AI regulation bills, one of which drew the ire of some of his tech backers, including Tan. But earlier this year, Wiener and Tan partnered on a failed state bill that would have restricted Big Tech companies from self-preferencing their products over smaller companies. While Wiener touted the legislation as a way to rein in the likes of Apple and Google, Tan’s company, Y Combinator, likely would have benefited because it helps launch new startups.

Tan has also worked to insulate the tech sector from organized labor, accusing the state’s labor leaders of having the goal of “killing the tech golden goose and taking maximum waste into the budget … until CA ceases to work for everyday Californians.” 

Larsen, meanwhile, railed against unions at a San Francisco business event in January, calling on his peers to “start fighting on par with the unions when they propose these absolutely stupid propositions like this crazy CEO tax.” Larsen echoed the message at a separate tech donor gathering Tan hosted months later. 

Larsen did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. A spokesperson for Tan told The Intercept to “look at Mr. Tan’s posts on X/Twitter,” where Tan has called the billionaire tax “a destroy tech in California proposition” and the overpaid CEO tax “bad policy wrapped up in anti-billionaire bullshit.”

Wiener’s legislative record reveals an inconsistent history of supporting progressive taxation. In 2018, he opposed a successful local tax on big businesses to fund homelessness services. Two years later, Wiener supported the first iteration of the CEO tax, the first of its kind nationwide, before it was undone in 2024. 

At a candidate forum in January, Wiener said he supported progressive taxes, but he would wait until the Billionaires Tax Act got on the ballot to decide. In April, Wiener said he opposed the local CEO tax, saying he didn’t want to interrupt San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie’s economic recovery agenda and that he would pursue similar progressive tax reform in Congress. And last week, after the state billionaire tax’s backers announced they had the necessary signatures to enter it on the ballot, Wiener said he was also against the statewide tax.

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“California already has an unstable boom-bust tax system because of the devaluation of property taxes and reliance increasingly on income taxes on wealthy residents,” Wiener told the San Francisco Standard. He said he disagreed with the approach, especially given that it’s a one-time tax.

“It sounds like a person that’s in opposition, but doesn’t want to be seen as Republican,” said Paul Boden, a longtime advocate for people living unhoused. “It’s the neoliberal justification for continuing down the same neoliberal path since Reagan: that doing something that might impact some wealthy people is bad for all of us.” 

Boden, the executive director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project, has long sparred with Wiener on his housing and homelessness policy. In 2016, when Wiener was a San Francisco board supervisor, Boden spoke out against a letter Wiener wrote to the city’s police chief, which had called for a sweep of homeless encampments amid that year’s winter storms. He has criticized Wiener’s housing policies, arguing they prioritize middle-income San Franciscans over the city’s poor.

The results of Larsen and Tan’s ad spending can already be seen on the airwaves in and around San Francisco. Abundant Future has been running ads and sending mailers that paint Chakrabarti, who is advocating to nationalize AI by turning struggling AI companies into public utilities, as a carpetbagger amid his surge in recent polls. Larsen has said that he supports candidates promoting AI regulation, and he plans to spend millions backing Alex Bores, a New York congressional candidate facing heavy oppositional spending from a PAC backed by openAI.

Larsen-funded ads released by his Golden State Promises PAC aired during California’s recent gubernatorial debate, saying the billionaire tax would “backfire and hurt you.”

Supporters of the local and state wealth taxes argue that more revenue is needed to address California’s shortfall due to federal healthcare funding cuts, which is estimated at a $100 billion loss over the next five years. There are more than 200 billionaires who live in the state, according to Forbes data compiled by tax advocates. Most of the revenue from the one-time state tax would go to healthcare, with some set aside for food assistance at schools and other education programs. 

Revenue from San Francisco’s local Overpaid CEO tax — which has been estimated to bring in $250 to $300 million each year — is designed to go to the city’s general fund, with its supporters hoping to invest in healthcare, mental health treatment, and housing support. Larsen and opponents are also funding support for a dueling “poison pill” measure, which would negate the Overpaid CEO tax if approved.

To Mack of the Phoenix Project, this kind of spending is par for the course in politics but should inspire voters to think critically about whom they support.

“The more politicians are in their pockets,” said Mack, referring to wealthy donors, “the less we can expect regular Californian/San Franciscan people’s voices to matter.”

Correction: May 14, 2026, 4:05 p.m. ET
A previous version of this article misstated the first name of a San Francisco bar owner and co-founder with Small Business Forward; he is Justin Dolezal, not Jerome.

The post This California Congressional Hopeful Opposes a Billionaire Tax. So Do His Tech CEO Backers. appeared first on The Intercept.

David Suarez, a city commissioner for Miami Beach, is accused of hiring the trucks to drive past a Jewish Voice for Peace demonstration outside the Art Basel festival in Miami Beach in December. The trucks accused JVP of being an “extremist group” and singled out members Alan Levine and his wife, Donna Nevel, with the label “Jew Hater,” according to court documents that Jewish Voice for Peace South Florida filed on Wednesday.

The trucks arrived while JVP and other Palestine solidarity organizations were protesting Art Basel in what has become an annual tradition since 2023. Activists have picketed each year outside the annual art fair, calling for a boycott over financial ties between Art Basel sponsor UBS and Elbit Systems, an Israeli weapons manufacturer.

Nevel, a native of Miami Beach who described her early education in Jewish ethics as a driving force behind her activism, accused Suarez of targeting her and her husband over their clashing views of Judaism and Israel’s assault on Gaza.

“The Commissioner has targeted me and called me a Jew hater because I differ with his views on Israel,” Nevel said. “When we saw the billboards, we didn’t know Commissioner Suarez was the one who created and paid for them, but having watched his destructive, taunting behavior in City Commission meetings over and over again, I can’t say I was shocked to learn it was him — though, even for him, it was extreme.”

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Supporting exhibits filed alongside the motion include an invoice from Mobile Billboards of Miami dated December 6, 2025, charging Suarez $4,000 for the rental of three trucks, and an email from the company to a Gmail account that JVP claims is the commissioner’s personal email address.

After publication, Suarez sent The Intercept an email doubling down on his accusation. “You can use this response, only in its entirety,” Suarez wrote, “as a jew, I can spot a jew hater a mile away.”

The motion, filed in the Southern District of Florida on Wednesday, requests that the court compel Suarez, Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner, and others to produce documents related to a larger court case brought by JVP over a city ordinance that the group claims was passed to stifle its protests against the genocide in Gaza.

“In the months since October 2023, the Mayor and the Miami Beach City Commission have become active supporters of Israel’s campaign of relentless destruction in Gaza,” the group wrote in its broader complaint filed in September of last year. “At the same time, the Defendants have aggressively sought to silence critics of the Israeli onslaught in Gaza, first by adopting a resolution that prohibited the City from hiring contractors who refused to do business with Israel, then by publicly castigating Israel’s critics for their views, and finally by passing an unconstitutional anti-protest Ordinance explicitly designed to silence criticism of Israel.”

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The city government of Miami Beach has come under fire recently for allegations that it targeted pro-Palestine residents, including Raquel Pacheco, a local artist who in January received a visit to her home by police after writing a Facebook post criticizing Meiner for his pro-Israel views. In March, Pacheco sued the city, Meiner, and police chief Wayne Jones in federal court alleging that the visit to her home violated her First Amendment rights.

A spokesperson for Meiner told The Intercept that the police visit was motivated by legitimate security concerns and denied that it took place due to disagreement with Pacheco’s political speech.

Similar stunts to the Miami Beach billboard trucks have become a hallmark of pro-Israel groups seeking to discredit and attack pro-Palestine activists. Accuracy in Media, a pro-Israel pressure group focusing on allegations of antisemitic media bias, has hired so-called “doxxing trucks” on multiple occasions to personally call out members of the pro-Palestine movement at Columbia University and other college campuses. In January, a state court in New York ruled that a defamation lawsuit over the tactic could proceed.

Update: May 13, 2026, 6:11 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with a statement from the Miami Beach mayor’s office.

Update: May 14, 2026
This story has been updated with a statement from city commissioner David Suarez.

The post Miami Beach Official Hired Billboard Truck to Call Pro-Palestine Activists “Jew Hater,” Lawsuit Alleges appeared first on The Intercept.

On March 6 of last year, two days before unidentified officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement abducted and arrested Khalil at his home, the FBI received an anonymous tip claiming that Khalil, listed incorrectly as a 22-year-old, had called for “violence on behalf of Hamas.” 

According to the heavily redacted documents, as of March 19, 2025, the FBI had closed an investigation into the tip and determined that Khalil “does not warrant further FBI investigation.” But by then, ICE had already secretly taken Khalil, now 31, thousands of miles away to a detention center in Louisiana. Despite the FBI’s decision to close the tip, the Trump administration continued to paint Khalil as a “Hamas supporter” and a threat to national security. 

It’s unclear if the FBI tip was directly related to Khalil’s ICE arrest, and the FBI did not respond to The Intercept’s question about whether the tip was shared with ICE. But Hamid Bendaas, a spokesperson at the Institute for Middle East Understanding, which has worked with Khalil since his arrest, said the timing reflects “a threat to us all.”

Though the FBI document says Khalil did not warrant further investigation, “that didn’t stop ICE from holding him in a detention center and separating him from his wife and newborn son for months,” Bendaas said. 

The document comes to light as the Trump administration has fast-tracked Khalil’s deportation case, which Khalil’s legal team argues is a form of retaliation against his protected political speech in support of Palestine. Khalil’s team received the FBI document, which has not been previously reported, via a lawsuit over a public records request and shared it exclusively with The Intercept.

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Khalil was the first of thousands of students the Trump administration targeted for deportation over First Amendment-protected speech in support of Palestine or criticizing Israel. The Trump administration exploited an obscure provision in immigration law to claim that Khalil and other students, including Mohsen Mahdawi and Rümeysa Öztürk, presented a threat to U.S. foreign policy interests. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who ordered Khalil to be deported, has repeatedly claimed that he sympathized with terrorists, echoing claims from far-right doxing groups that had targeted Khalil in the months leading up to his arrest. Trump’s unprecedented crackdown came after years of similar attacks on pro-Palestine students that gained speed under former President Joe Biden. 

“Under Trump’s rogue presidency being led by extremists and conspiracy theorists,” Bendaas said, “any of us can be kidnapped by federal agents in the middle of the night simply for speaking against U.S. support for Israel’s genocide, no matter what the facts or Constitution says.” 

The Center for Constitutional Rights, part of Khalil’s legal team, submitted a request for public documents related to his arrest nearly a year ago, on May 29, 2025. After denials and delays, CCR filed a lawsuit on November 20 claiming that federal agencies, including the FBI, had improperly withheld the records. CCR said it has since received other documents from the Department of Justice and is expecting more from other agencies in the coming months.

“Despite the FBI closing its investigation with no findings to support the accusation, the Trump administration continued to label Mr. Khalil a supporter of Hamas in public comments,” said CCR staff attorney Samah Sisay. “This document further supports our argument that the Trump administration had no legitimate reason to target Mr. Khalil besides his free speech in support of Palestine.”

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In a statement to The Intercept, an FBI spokesperson said, “We let documents obtained through the FOIA process speak for themselves and decline to comment further.”

Reacting to the FBI file, an attorney at Palestine Legal condemned the Trump administration’s approach but called it “representative of the tactics used more broadly against Palestine activists.”

“Revelations that false reports were made against Mahmoud prior to his government sanctioned kidnapping, and that the administration continued to make false claims that Mahmoud posed a danger, even though the FBI found these claims to be unsubstantiated, are highly representative of this administration’s broader approach of acting first and making up justifications later, with no regard for truth or the findings of the administration’s own experts,” said Zoha Khalili, a senior managing attorney at Palestine Legal. “Around the world, people who demand freedom, equality, liberation, and the basic necessities of life for Palestinians have been smeared, silenced, investigated, and even imprisoned for their advocacy.”

Khalil’s team also plans to appeal the Board of Immigration Appeals order rejecting Khalil’s appeal to terminate his deportation proceedings. He is still fighting a separate federal habeas corpus case and cannot be deported while the case proceeds.

Update: May 12, 2026, 4:06 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with a comment from an attorney at Palestine Legal sent after publication.

The post FBI Quietly Closed a Probe Into Mahmoud Khalil While He Was in ICE Detention appeared first on The Intercept.

Two weeks ago, the Pentagon claimed the war had cost $25 billion, a figure that analysts said was likely a gross undercount. In testimony before the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, the Department of War’s comptroller, Jay Hurst, said the cost of the war has risen “closer” to $29 billion because of the “repair and replacement of equipment” and “general operational costs” of keeping troops in the Middle East.

Experts also expressed skepticism at this revised count.

“The costs of this war are still growing, and the Pentagon is still not being straight with taxpayers or lawmakers about the numbers. If the numbers being thrown around in committee hearings were complete, why would the Pentagon continue withholding a comprehensive, itemized cost assessment from Congress?” said Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog advocating for an end to wasteful spending. “Taxpayers deserve answers, and lawmakers need them in order to craft a responsible budget.”

Hurst, War Secretary Pete Hegseth, and Gen. Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff are on Capitol Hill to discuss the Pentagon’s $1.5 trillion budget request for 2027 before House and Senate appropriations subcommittees on Tuesday. Hegseth said the massive sum — the largest request in history — “reflects the urgency of the moment” and would address both the “deferment of long-standing problems as well as position our forces for the current and future fight.”

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Murphy called the dramatic 45 percent increase a negotiating tactic. “They’re seeking $350 billion through reconciliation and $1.15 trillion in the base budget, but they know reconciliation is a long shot. It’s all about trying to make a $1.15 trillion Pentagon budget seem reasonable in comparison,” said Murphy. “But there’s nothing reasonable about it. It’s a roughly $150 billion increase over last year.”

Americans, Murphy said, deserve an explanation for the runaway military budget. “If they can’t defend the nation with a trillion dollars, they’re doing it wrong.”

President Donald Trump said Monday that the ceasefire with Iran — which went into effect on April 8 — is “on life support” after Iran’s response to the latest U.S. peace proposal. Reuters, citing Iranian state media, reported that Iran’s proposal included war reparations from the United States, lifting sanctions on Tehran, and recognition of its sovereignty over the Strait of Hormuz. Trump rejected Iran’s reply as “totally unacceptable” and called it a “piece of garbage.”

Hegseth said the Pentagon was prepared to reignite hostilities with Iran. “We have a plan to escalate, if necessary; we have a plan to retrograde if necessary. We have a plan to shift assets,” the secretary testified, declining to say more in the public hearing.

An analysis by The Intercept found that Trump has embroiled the U.S. in more than 20 military interventions, armed conflicts, and wars during his five-plus years in the White House. The expenses of this wide-ranging war on the world are rising across the globe.

The Intercept was, for example, the first outlet to reveal that the U.S. military’s intervention in Venezuela and attacks on boats in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific — Operations Absolute Resolve and Operation Southern Spear, respectively — have already cost taxpayers at least $4.7 billion, according to an exceptionally cautious estimate from Brown University’s Costs of War Project.

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The ultimate price tag of Americas wars in Latin America will further balloon in the decades ahead, saddling future Americans with soaring costs, according to the report. “War is financed by debt, adding interest costs to the public budget,” wrote authors Hanna Homestead, a research analyst with the National Priorities Project, and Jennifer Kavanagh, the director of military analysis at Defense Priorities, a nonpartisan research group. “Furthermore, the federal government undertakes an obligation to pay veterans benefits for decades into the future.”

Recently, Linda Bilmes, a former assistant secretary and chief financial officer of the U.S. Department of Commerce and currently a public policy professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, told The Intercept that the already-excessive expense of the Iran war would likely be pushed into the trillions of dollars by such long-term costs like veterans benefits and interest on the debt to pay for the war.

The post Hegseth Asks for More Money as Iran War Costs Skyrocket appeared first on The Intercept.