Every time you turn around recently, it feels like there’s new reporting about insiders cashing in on prediction markets. On Thursday, a U.S. Army Special Forces soldier who was involved in the raid to capture Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela was arrested on charges that he used classified information to make more than $400,000 by betting on the operation before it happened. In the hours before the U.S. attacked Iran, hundreds of anonymous bets over $1,000 were placed on the U.S. striking Iran by the next day, which the New York Times said suggested that some users might’ve “seen the strike coming.”

Prediction markets, such as industry leaders Polymarket and Kalshi, have exploded in popularity. They create or exacerbate an array of problems, but at the Media and Democracy Project, or MAD, we believe they have the potential to severely harm the way news is reported, perceived, and engaged with — threats that deserve far more attention from the public.

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MAD calls the use of prediction markets in news stories “casino journalism.” There is too much already, and it is likely to get much worse if not nipped in the bud. But we are optimistic it can be stopped if news organizations recognize the threat and respond.

Earlier this year, the Wall Street Journal’s publisher, Dow Jones, announced a partnership with Polymarket. The Associated Press, CNN, Substack, and CNBC have all made similar deals, the terms of which have not been disclosed. So it was extremely troubling to see the Wall Street Journal report that “Polymarket Bets See Over 70% Chance of U.S. Forces Entering Iran in Next Month” on March 30, and not just because of the fear of a broader war. This so-called news story provided none of the journalistic insight that was touted when the partnership was announced — just the betting odds. It looks more like an advertisement for their new partner than real journalism and, while the betting market was active, had a link to Polymarket.

Do news organizations and journalists really want to gamify the news? What are the long-term impacts on a paper if they make a practice of such reporting? Should news outlets see the betting markets as partners? News organizations, the practice of journalism, and the public are all much better served if the media outlets instead set policies constraining the use of these markets in their reporting and altogether forbidding financial deals where the outlet profits from the success of the prediction markets.

MAD has long called for less horse-race journalism and more substantive reporting. Many others have done so for even longer, including New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, who has pushed for a focus on “not the odds, but the stakes.” But prediction markets are horse-race journalism taken to its most cynical end point, one that will only serve to supercharge reporting on who’s up and who’s down at any given moment, particularly because these markets are open 24/7.

There are many ways prediction markets can be manipulated or misbehave in other ways, but let’s consider their stated best-case use. Suppose that prediction markets achieve their claims of providing better forecasts than other methods. Even if that were true, casino journalism is bad for journalism and the public. Predictions crowd out coverage of substance. In politics, this means less information to help voters evaluate candidates. Focusing on the odds gives the impression that the horse race is more important than the issues. Prediction markets turn events that have an impact on people’s lives — and carry a real human cost — into pure entertainment.

Tarek Mansour, the CEO of Kalshi, has said it does a “very, very good job at distilling information and surfacing truth to people,” even as it seeks to “financialize everything.” He presents it as providing a new, better source of information and as changing the way their readers digest the news. In an interview with the Financial Times in February, he said, “Prediction markets don’t make money off somebody’s losses, they make money off somebody’s engagement.” But the type of engagement matters a great deal. Increasing the nicotine content of cigarettes increases smokers’ “engagement” with the tobacco industry. Gambling is also addictive; as sports betting has become commonplace, participants have found that, over time, they mostly lose. Promoting these markets as part of the news is likely to damage readers’ trust and can also harm their overall well-being.

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Quite apart from the questionable news content of prediction market bets, the news industry needs to recognize how implicated it is in shaping how these markets function. Most of the “propositions” offered on these markets are based on news reports; reporters provide the raw material on which these bets are made. In effect, traders on prediction markets are betting on the content of news stories. 

This has tremendous potential to be a corrupting influence on journalists. An Israeli journalist recently received death threats over his refusal to rewrite his report on an Iranian missile strike, on which $23 million of prediction market “investments” were riding. As the markets become larger, and their use in news increases, the incentive for market manipulation will also grow. There could be intense temptation for insider trading of all kinds that would destroy the credibility and integrity of these markets, bringing the news business down with it. There are already many worrisome incidents related to these markets, such as the soldier who enriched himself based on classified info. Centering prediction markets will create a substantial risk of scandals that will implicate and embarrass news organizations.

MAD is heartened that most news outlets have not engaged in deals or embedded prediction market prices as news. The New York Times’ Guidelines on Integrity begin with the statement, “Our greatest strength is the authority and reputation of The Times. We must do nothing that would undermine or dilute it and everything possible to enhance it.” So we are hopeful that the Times and other responsible news outlets will defend their reputations by setting clear public policies limiting how prediction markets may be used and what kinds of business relationships they will engage in.

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Any news organizations that have already signed on with Kalshi or Polymarket should publicly disclose the terms of these relationships. Reporters should be forbidden from citing the markets as valid forecasts and should be barred from using the platforms themselves. We encourage more reporting on substantive impacts of governmental actions and less speculation on the prospects that the policies will be implemented.

Horse-race journalism was already a detriment to nurturing an informed citizenry. But casino journalism has no place at all in any functioning democracy.

The post We Need to Kick Prediction Market Betting Out of Journalism While We Still Can appeared first on The Intercept.

On the one hand, Trump officials continue to insist that Abrego must be deported to Africa, recently settling on Liberia. At the same time, the Department of Justice has pressed forward with its prosecution of Abrego for human smuggling — a criminal case that must be resolved before the government deports him.

“You can’t have it both ways,” Maryland District Judge Paula Xinis, who first ordered Abrego’s return to the U.S. and who is still presiding over his immigration case, recently told the DOJ. “He physically needs to be in this country to be prosecuted.”

The criminal case against Abrego stems from a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee, which, according to federal prosecutors, was proof he was enmeshed in a human smuggling plot. The case was set to go trial in Nashville this year but presiding District Judge Waverly Crenshaw of the Middle District of Tennessee canceled the trial date to consider a key question: whether Abrego is the target of a “selective and vindictive prosecution.” The answer will determine whether the case moves forward; Crenshaw is expected to rule any day.

Defense attorneys argue that the Trump DOJ brought the charges against Abrego as revenge for his successful legal challenges, which freed him from the notorious Salvadoran prison known as CECOT. “This case results from the government’s concerted effort to punish him for having the audacity to fight back, rather than accept a brutal injustice,” they wrote in their motion to dismiss the case.

Crenshaw has already found some evidence to support these allegations, writing last fall that there was a “realistic likelihood of vindictiveness” against Abrego. He pointed to numerous public statements made by top Trump officials, particularly that of then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, formerly Trump’s personal defense attorney, who told Fox News that the Justice Department began investigating Abrego after “a judge in Maryland” interfered with Trump’s decision to deport him.

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Still, proving their case has been a challenge for Abrego’s defense. The DOJ has refused to turn over evidence that would illuminate its decision-making — and tracing the prosecution to its roots requires untangling the Tennessee case from a previous probe originating in Baltimore. The Maryland investigation, which was linked to Abrego’s immigration case, probed Abrego’s 2022 traffic stop and stayed open for more than two and a half years, only to be closed after Abrego was shipped to El Salvador.

After Abrego prevailed at the Supreme Court, however, the Maryland investigation was suddenly reopened to great fanfare. The Department of Homeland Security sent out press releases trumpeting the “bombshell” revelations supposedly derived from the traffic stop – namely that Abrego was a human smuggler and a member of MS-13. It was in the wake of this publicity that the U.S. attorney’s office in the Middle District of Tennessee began its case, repackaging the evidence from the Baltimore investigation and indicting Abrego in May 2025.

To further probe the government’s motivations, Crenshaw ordered an evidentiary hearing, where the DOJ would be required to present “objective, on-the-record explanations” for Abrego’s prosecution. If the DOJ could not rebut his previous finding that there was a “likelihood of vindictiveness” against Abrego, he would have to throw out the case.

That hearing took place in late February, with lawyers on both sides filing post-hearing briefs earlier this month. In its 24-page filing, which contained the word “undisputed” 20 times, the DOJ insisted that it proved once and for all that Abrego’s prosecution was rooted in evidence of criminality rather than revenge. “Regardless of the tale Defendant invites this Court to believe,” wrote Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, “any narrative of animus has been affirmatively disproven by the Government’s undisputed evidence.”

In reality, the testimony offered by the government raised more questions than answers — while revealing that DOJ higher-ups were involved at every step leading up to Abrego’s indictment. Though Woodward cast the prosecution as one steered by law enforcement officers duty-bound to the evidence and their own moral compass, this was hard to take seriously. Donald Trump, after all, has spent the past 15 months trying to transform the DOJ into his personal law firm, demanding that prosecutors go after his political enemies.

In their own post-hearing brief, Abrego’s lawyers argued that the government has “tried to sanitize the origins of this prosecution.” Its story is “at odds with both the documentary record in this case and common sense.”

Abrego arrived at the hearing on February 26 in a black pea coat, black zip-up sweater, and black shirt. It was a gray, humid morning in downtown Nashville as TV cameras set up outside the federal courthouse plaza. While a line formed at security, Abrego, 30, headed toward the elevators with his legal team and supporters. Crenshaw’s fifth-floor courtroom quickly filled up; Abrego was given headphones to listen to the hearing in Spanish. An overflow area was provided for press.

Representing the federal government was Woodward, a former assistant to Trump who previously helped orchestrate his defense in the classified documents case. He sat alongside three members of Task Force Vulcan, a multiagency body created by the Trump administration to go after international gangs.

Woodward called Rana Saoud, a former special agent at the Nashville office of Homeland Security Investigations, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security. According to Saoud, who retired last December, she first heard that Abrego had been stopped by the Tennessee Highway Patrol through an article in the conservative Tennessee Star. She did not remember who sent it to her. “I don’t have my phone anymore,” she said.

The story was published on April 23, 2025 — five days after DHS announced its reopening of the Baltimore investigation — and was heavily based on the government’s claims. While it was not clear when Saoud read the article, she called Robert McGuire, the acting U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee, the following Sunday, April 27. McGuire apparently was not yet aware of the traffic stop or the Baltimore investigation either. He agreed they should take a closer look.

Although Abrego was famous by then for his exile to CECOT, Saoud testified that this had no bearing on her actions. “We’re not waived by political attention or political posturing,” she said.

On cross-examination, one of Abrego’s lawyers asked Saoud if she’d seen the DHS press releases publicizing the traffic stop. She said no. Nor did she apparently see Trump boast about it in the press. Saoud said she had “stopped listening to the news. … I had other priorities to investigate and focus on.”

Saoud conceded that she was not privy to the decision-making process at DOJ. But she insisted that the evidence supported charges against Abrego. “The facts were leading us towards an individual who was involved in a human smuggling crime,” she said.

In a list of witnesses in advance of the hearing, the DOJ had included a second HSI investigator, Special Agent John VanWie, who led the investigation in Baltimore. But since then, Woodward had apparently changed his mind. Rather than calling the man who could explain why his office reopened the investigation into Abrego after the Supreme Court ruling, Woodward went straight to his second and last witness: Assistant U.S. Attorney McGuire.

Wearing a dark suit and his hair parted to the side, McGuire took the stand with the air of a seasoned but humble public servant. Once an unsuccessful candidate for local district attorney, McGuire found himself in charge of the Nashville U.S. attorney’s office by chance. He joined the office in 2018, working as a line prosecutor until back-to-back resignations catapulted him to the top just weeks before Trump was inaugurated in 2025. “Here I am, kind of the accidental acting U.S. attorney,” he told the Tennessee Banner that February. A few months later, he was in charge of the Abrego prosecution.

“I’d like to get right to the heart of the matter everyone is here for,” Woodward began. “Who made the decision to seek an indictment of Mr. Abrego?”

“I did,” McGuire said.

“Did Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche direct you to do so?”

“No.”

“Anyone at Main Justice?”

“No sir.”

“What about the White House?”

“Absolutely not.”

McGuire reiterated what he’d previously written in a sworn affidavit, insisting that the decision to prosecute Abrego was his alone. He said he recognized signs of human smuggling in the footage from the traffic stop, which showed Abrego driving eight other Latino men in a van with no luggage, and decided to pursue the case personally.

Yet McGuire’s written narrative contained a key omission. Email records had subsequently revealed that another DOJ prosecutor played an active role — a man with a reputation as Trump’s “brashest enforcer when it comes to clamping down on US attorneys’ autonomy”: Associate Deputy Attorney General Aakash Singh.

Singh, it turned out, had written to McGuire about Abrego’s case on the same Sunday he got the call from Saoud — the first of several emails from the D.C.-based prosecutor. Singh wanted to meet the next morning with McGuire and two other AUSAs who’d been involved in providing evidence for the Baltimore investigation. There was nothing unusual about this, McGuire maintained. Singh was simply a point person for U.S. attorneys across the country when it came to communicating with the deputy attorney general’s office in Washington. “If there was a noteworthy case — if there was an important matter that happened in the Middle District of Tennessee — he would be my conduit to let them know what was going on,” he said.

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McGuire insisted that he was in charge of Abrego’s prosecution at every step. His correspondence with Singh was simply intended to provide updates on his work. But Abrego’s lawyers zeroed in on the emails as proof that the prosecution was being driven by officials in D.C. On cross-examination, defense attorney David Patton went through the correspondence one email at a time. The first message concerned a confidential informant who would later testify against Abrego before the grand jury. Singh “knew about that witness before you did,” Patton pointed out. In another, Singh wrote to McGuire thanking him for his work on the case, writing, “It’s a top priority for us.”

Who was the “us” in this email?

“I presumed it was Main Justice leadership,” McGuire replied.

In another email, Singh pressed McGuire for an update on the timing for a possible indictment even though McGuire had already updated him earlier that day. “He’s pretty eager here isn’t he?” Patton asked. McGuire demurred. It was pretty typical for the DAG’s office to ask for updates “in any high-profile matter,” he said. Yet “high-profile” — a term McGuire repeatedly invoked on the stand — did not begin to capture the extent of the Trump administration’s particular fixation on Abrego.

Patton also grilled McGuire about his correspondence with his own staff. In one email, McGuire wrote to several members of the Nashville U.S. attorney’s office to provide them with a memo laying out the potential charges against Abrego, noting that he’d heard anecdotally that Blanche and then-Principal Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove “would like Garcia charged sooner rather than later.” According to McGuire, this was merely an attempt to keep his colleagues in Nashville apprised of the situation. “I just wanted to be transparent with my team that I hadn’t been told to do anything but there was some interest,” he said.

Yet, in the same message, McGuire told the recipients not to put their thoughts on the matter in an email. “Isn’t it true that you didn’t want people putting in writing that they opposed the prosecution?” Patton asked. McGuire said he just preferred to hash things out face to face.

One person, however, had replied in writing: Ben Schrader, chief of the criminal division at the Nashville U.S. attorney’s office, who firmly opposed the prosecution. He sent back a memo of his own, asking McGuire to “please pass it along to relevant parties in D.C.” McGuire said he didn’t recall if he did. On the day that Abrego was indicted, Schrader resigned.

Although McGuire denied ever discussing his decisions with the highest Trump officials, Patton pointed to at least one conversation. Records showed that, on June 6, the same day Abrego was returned from El Salvador, Blanche personally called McGuire. It was a “very brief phone call,” McGuire said. The deputy attorney general simply wanted to notify him that Abrego was headed back to the country. “I’ll be honest, I don’t totally remember all the things he said.”

Over the past year, Abrego’s case has faded amid the constant chaos and upheaval of Trump’s second term. Today it is impossible to keep track of all the resignations and firings across the federal government. The DOJ has itself lost thousands of employees.

Yet Abrego’s ordeal was one of the first shocks of Trump’s second term, revealing the chilling lengths to which his administration would retaliate against employees who failed to fall in lockstep behind the president. It was Abrego’s case that spurred veteran prosecutor Erez Reuveni to become a whistleblower after he was punished for conceding that Abrego had been erroneously deported to El Salvador.

This recent history loomed large over the hearing — and will inevitably inform Crenshaw’s ultimate decision. At one point, Patton pulled up the infamous February 2025 memo issued by Pam Bondi, which cast DOJ attorneys as the president’s lawyers. It warned that “any attorney who, because of their personal political views or judgments, declines to sign a brief or appear in court, refuses to advance good faith argument on behalf of the administration, or otherwise delays or impedes the department’s mission will be subject to discipline and potentially termination.”

“It wasn’t very subtle, was it, Mr. McGuire?” Patton asked.

“I understood the policy,” McGuire replied.

The post Who Decided to Indict Kilmar Abrego Garcia Over a Years-Old Traffic Stop? appeared first on The Intercept.

As more and more information is published about the suspect in the latest possible assassination attempt on President Donald Trump, commentators are in a typical scramble to assign an ideology or clear politics to the 31-year-old man. 

There’s not a lot to glean so far about Cole Tomas Allen of Torrance, California. A since-deleted Bluesky account reportedly linked to the suspect included run-of-the-mill criticisms of the Trump administration; he lists himself as a self-employed video game designer and part-time teacher. According to reports, he studied mechanical engineering and computer science, was part of a Christian fellowship, and also a nerdy-sounding club for students to have battles with foam toys. He reportedly donated $25 to ActBlue in 2024 earmarked for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. He was a registered voter with “no party preference” in California. From the evidence available so far, the suspect seems to be a normie. 

Trump’s regime can give rise to a normie suspected assassin because the brutality and violence it has so wholly normalized, and the impunity it has reveled in, is deranging. In a piece of writing Allen left behind before the White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooting, derangement peeks through between clear reasons for targeting administration officials.

He includes chirpy asides (“stay in school kids”), and bounces between formal and casual registers throughout. He lists as his targets “Administration officials (not including Mr. Patel),” without explaining why FBI Director Kash Patel is named for exemption. His final message is more a summary explanation than a manifesto.

But in his more lucid moments, Allen cites concerns that people from across the political spectrum share about Trump and his administration.

“I am a citizen of the United States of America. What my representatives do reflects on me,” Allen wrote in the missive covered by multiple outlets. “I’m no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes,” he added, without specifically naming the president.

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Republicans have, of course, been swift to blame Democrats for the shooting. Trump, who earlier this month threatened to annihilate the “whole civilization” of Iran and revels in his regime’s anti-immigrant violence, told CBS News on Sunday that he thinks the “hate speech of the Democrats … is very dangerous.” 

The president described the suspect’s message as “anti-Christian,” though Allen identifies with Christian faith in his writing. “Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a schoolkid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration,” Allen wrote. “Turning the other cheek when *someone else* is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.”

The reasons Allen cites for his fury are not conspiratorial or weighted with ideology. He points to crimes and acts of extreme violence that the administration has either committed or been complicit in, while seeming to fear no constraints or consequences.

The suspect appears to be no devotee of the Democratic Party and no committed leftist. Republicans haven’t even bothered to wheel out the antifa boogeyman; nothing points to any such identification. Allen expressed anger about the Trump administration’s crimes, its acts of oppression, alleged connections to Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophile ring, and impunity. Such anger is not the preserve of the left, or even of liberals.

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Allen reportedly targeted Trump and members of his administration, whereas the three previous attempted attacks on Trump’s life appeared to aim only at the president. There is little uniting the suspects involved, except that they were all men in a country awash with guns and threadbare mental health care and support resources at a time of normalized deadly violence and U.S.-backed genocide. 

Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, whose bullet scraped Trump’s ear at a Pennsylvania rally in 2024, was a registered Republican but not active in right-wing organizing. Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, convicted of plotting to kill Trump at his West Palm Springs resort in Florida in 2024, espoused eclectic anti-establishment politics, having voted for Trump in 2016 before becoming an ardent critic; he was also an obsessive supporter of Ukraine. Austin Tucker Martin, 21, was fatally shot by Secret Service agents after crashing his vehicle into the security perimeter of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in February of this year. His loved ones said he was never interested in politics.

There is no consistency in the varied and messy worldviews of Trump’s would-be assassins. If media commentators and politicians want to make banal points about the rise in political violence, there is only one consistently violent ideology to trace throughout these cases: the fascistic ideology of far-right Republicans and their leader. 

After expressing gratitude for his family, friends, colleagues, and church, Allen ended his message, “I experience rage thinking about everything this administration has done.”

The post How Trump’s America Produces Normie Assassins appeared first on The Intercept.

Johnson was stymied this month when he attempted to push through a reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The roadblock came thanks to opposition from most Democrats, plus 20 hard-right members of the GOP caucus.

Still, four Democrats crossed party lines to vote for a procedural motion to advance the bill, despite instructions from House Democratic leaders to the contrary. Whether those four support Johnson during a vote this week could prove crucial.

The four Democrats are Reps. Josh Gottheimer and Tom Suozzi of New Jersey, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington, and Jared Golden of Maine, who is not seeking reelection this year. None responded to requests for comment.

One advocate said the outcome of the vote could hinge on their decision.

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“It all comes down to those four and where they are going to land,” said Hajar Hammado, a senior policy adviser at the left-leaning advocacy group Demand Progress, “and if they are going to continue to try to hand Trump and Stephen Miller warrantless surveillance authorities without any sort of checks or reforms that make sure they’re not violating civil liberties.”

Given the skepticism of hard-right Republican lawmakers, Johnson needs every vote he can muster. On Thursday, he put forward a new proposal to extend the law for three years, with additional layers of oversight and auditing.

No Warrant Requirement

The latest proposal does not address reformers’ highest priority: a warrant requirement that would force FBI agents and National Security Agency analysts to get a court order before they search for information on Americans from ostensibly “foreign” communications — material collected abroad as the NSA scoops up emails, text messages, and the like.

Kia Hamadanchy, a senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, said Johnson’s latest proposal does little to change existing law. Under Johnson’s proposal, searches would be reviewed after the fact by a privacy officer at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and potentially later by an inspector general.

“This just follows the old pattern of adding layer after layer of oversight,” he said. “The idea that the inspector general of the intelligence community is going to stand up to Trump on any sort of abuses is just not going to happen.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York threw cold water on the idea of Democratic leadership formally supporting Johnson during a press conference Thursday before the latest draft was released. He said it would be “extremely difficult” for Democrats to find common ground with Republicans on the issue so long as Kash Patel — who has been embroiled in controversy over allegations about his drinking habits — remains director of the FBI.

Johnson may not need to make major concessions to bring a handful of Democrats over to his side.

A large group of centrists has signaled that they would support a “clean” extension of FISA — without major reforms — if it comes to the House floor. But they have so far followed the advice of Jeffries to oppose a procedural vote to bring the bill to the floor.

On April 17, the smaller group of four Democrats took the additional step of crossing party lines to support Johnson on the procedural vote, which ultimately failed, thanks only to hard-right members of the GOP.

Freedom Caucus Flip?

After that defeat, Johnson secured a short, 10-day extension of the spying law to come up with new legislation. Members of the ultra-conservative House Freedom Caucus hope to use the next vote series to secure their long-standing, and unrelated, goal of banning a central bank digital currency.

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Advocates are warily watching that debate. They worry that the digital currency ban could win over enough right-wing Republicans to hand Johnson a victory — a strategy that only works if the four Democrats continue to play along.

Progressive groups outside Congress are already targeting the four with an aggressive pressure campaign. One group, Fight for the Future, has dubbed them “the Fascist Four.”

Another supporter of existing law, House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Jim Himes, D-Conn., told Politico on Thursday that he has gotten an earful from constituents who oppose extending it without a warrant requirement.

“I’ve been taking a ton of risk, I’ve been doing a ton of explanations,” Himes said.

Himes said he has been talking to individual Republicans to craft a compromise, but Johnson’s leadership team has not engaged with him.

The post Meet the Four Democrats Who’ll Decide If Trump Gets His Domestic Spying Law appeared first on The Intercept.

The only reporting that previously referenced Koreans being used as guinea pigs for these experiments was journalist John Marks’s landmark 1979 book, The Search for the “Manchurian Candidate.” Using CIA documents, Marks traced the now-infamous MK-ULTRA project to its start, when it was known as Project Bluebird. In the book, Marks describes how, in October 1950, 25 unnamed North Korean POWs were chosen as the first test subjects to receive “advanced” interrogation techniques, with the overt goal of “controlling an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against such fundamental laws of nature as self-preservation.”

While MK-ULTRA is best known for its invasive experimentation — like LSD dosing and torture — the documents confirm Korean POWs were the unwitting subjects of less splashy attempts at mind control, like being subjected to polygraph tests, with plans for other invasive testing.

The declassified documents, which the National Security Archive released between December 2024 and April 2025, are available through a special collection titled “CIA and the Behavioral Sciences: Mind Control, Drug Experiments and MK-ULTRA.” The National Security Archive website states that the collection “brings together more than 1,200 essential records on one of the most infamous and abusive programs in CIA history.”

The first reference to “Project Bluebird” in the NSA’s collection is an office memorandum from April 5, 1950. Addressed to CIA Director Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, the document lays out the project’s goals, required training, and budget, all while emphasizing that knowledge of Project Bluebird “should be restricted to the absolute minimum number of persons.”

The memo includes detailed plans for interrogation teams trained to utilize the polygraph, various drugs, and hypnotism “for personality control purposes.” These teams were to be made up of three people: a doctor (ideally a psychiatrist), a hypnotist, and a polygraph technician. The memo clarifies that while the doctor and technician would need to undergo approximately five months of training, the Inspection and Security Staff’s own department hypnotist could be made available immediately. In a later memo from February 2, 1951, there are inquiries into acquiring six “hypospray” devices: experimental instruments designed to covertly inject sedatives through the skin via “jet injection.” There’s a request to investigate modification of a “tear gas pencil” and other “devices of unestablished action,” such as the “German ‘Scheintot’ [sic] (appearance of death) pistol.”

The project’s proposed budget of $65,515 accounted for team salaries and equipment like syringes, towels, and film cameras. The budget also allots $18,000 for “Transportation,” and while the actual offshore locations are redacted, a write-up of a CIA meeting held one year later specifically notes a “project in Japan and Korea in which the Army had used a polygraph operator along with a team of psychiatrists and psychologists on Korean POWs.” 

Although the initial proposal for Project Bluebird mostly emphasized the potential for “personality control,” it’s clear that CIA officials were also interested in broader, more ambitious outcomes. One document summarizing a “special meeting” between U.S., British, and Canadian intelligence services notes the CIA’s desire to research “the psychological factors causing the human mind to accept certain political beliefs” and “determining means for combatting communism,” “‘selling’ democracy,” and preventing the “penetration of communism into trade unions.” Another meeting held on May 9, 1950, called for “the Surgeon General of the Army to place on the search list of the Nuremberg Trials papers request for information on drugs, narcoanalysis, and special interrogation techniques.” 

There were requests for other tests that, at the time, were deemed “impossible for security reasons.” According to a memo from September 18, 1951, this included “experiments on the outside with SI inducted over the telephone.” The writer explains that this over-the-phone hypnosis has, so far, been “universally successful,” however testing along agency lines was yet to be approved. 

One declassified memo emphasizing the importance of the project gets more detailed, citing “specific problems which can only be resolved by experiment, testing and research.” Unlike the lists of supplies necessary for Project Bluebird, the “specific problems” officials hoped to explore in the experiments offer a uniquely intimate perspective into the bureau’s interests. A few examples of these “problems” include: 

• “Can we create … an action contrary to an individual’s basic moral principles?”
• “Could we seize a subject and in the space of an hour or two … have him crash an airplane, wreck a train, etc.?”
• “Can we ‘alter’ a person’s personality? How long will it hold?” 
• “Can we guarantee total amnesia under any and all conditions?” 

This last question surrounding drug-induced amnesia would prove incredibly relevant months later, when the first team of Project Bluebird technicians arrived in Japan to carry out initial tests. According to Marks, these men “tried out combinations of the depressant sodium amytal with the stimulant benzedrine on each of four subjects, the last two of whom also received a second stimulant, picrotoxin.” The team was attempting to induce a state of medically administered amnesia, and according to their reports, the experiments proved successful enough to pursue further tests. Two months later, according to Marks’s book, the Project Bluebird team began testing more “advanced” interrogation techniques on 25 North Korean prisoners of war in Japan.

Notably absent from these declassified documents is any proof that similar experiments were undertaken by enemies of the U.S. The central animating myth behind MK-ULTRA and Project Bluebird is the narrative of the American soldier who returned home after months of imprisonment by enemy forces, only to be revealed as a hypnotized double agent. Throughout the Korean War, American moviegoers were screened films starring and narrated by future president Ronald Reagan. These films showed American troops being psychologically tortured by Chinese and North Korean soldiers until dangerous, anti-democratic ideals were implanted in their minds without their knowledge.

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The knowledge most Americans have about these experiences are based on a work of fiction: Richard Condon’s 1959 political thriller, “The Manchurian Candidate.” In Condon’s book (and its two film adaptations), an American soldier returns home with a secret, one that he himself isn’t even aware of. While held captive by North Korean and Chinese soldiers, the American POW was brainwashed by enemy troops, unknowingly turning him into a sleeper assassin with the goal of being “activated” to kill a presidential nominee. 

As Project Bluebird transformed into Project Artichoke and later MK-ULTRA, the CIA’s goals seemed to shift into one of beating the enemy at their own game. Essentially, programs surrounding psychological experiments were deemed necessary evils after our own troops were coming home hypnotized and transformed by our enemies. While this narrative offers a convenient excuse for why the CIA developed programs like Bluebird in the first place, one declassified document tells a different story. 

In one of the more revealing moments from the entire collection of documents, the CIA’s Morse Allen recounts a conversation with an agency employee about the effectiveness of interrogating individuals through hypnosis. “Individuals under hypnotism will give information,” Allen writes, “but … it could not always be regarded as accurate, since fantasy and even hallucinations are present in certain hypnotic states.” Reading the lengthy budgetary sheets for drugs, syringes, polygraph machines, and hypnotists, paired with the details of Marks’s book, one’s imagination begins trying to fill in the gaps, drifting into fantasy. It’s an experience uniquely fitting for research into the CIA’s pursuit of technology aimed at erasing facts, experiences, and memories.

Throughout these declassified documents are numerous reminders that the Korean War’s label as “The Forgotten War” serves, in part, as intentional obfuscation. People, histories, and crimes are rarely forgotten on accident, and what these disclosures clearly demonstrate is that there remains a world of difference between the forgetting of history and its swift, coordinated erasure.

The post CIA Ran MK-ULTRA Experiments on Prisoners of War in U.S. Custody, Declassified Docs Confirm appeared first on The Intercept.

The letter obtained by The Intercept was part of Patel’s personnel file at the Miami-Dade Public Defender’s Office, where he once worked. The document, written “per instructions of my employer,” describes incidents of alcohol-related indiscretions not uncommon for those in their teens and twenties.

Two decades later, as Patel pushes back against allegations that drinking is impairing his leadership of the nation’s top law enforcement agency, these arrests show how Patel’s alcohol use has been subjected to scrutiny before in his professional life.

One incident recounted by Patel occurred in 2005, about four months before he wrote the letter. At the time, he was a law student at Pace University in New York celebrating with friends.

“We went to a few of the local bars and consumed some alcoholic drinks,” he wrote.

When they walked home, they made a bad decision.

“In a gross deviation from appropriate conduct, we attempted to relieve our bladders while walking home,” Patel said in the letter. “Before we could even do so, a police cruiser stopped the group. We were then arrested for public urination.”

Patel paid a fine after the incident, he wrote in the letter.

“Kash’s entire background was thoroughly examined and vetted prior to him assuming this role,” said Erica Knight, a spokesperson for Patel. “These attacks are nothing more than an attempt to undermine a process that has already deemed him suitable to serve and a distraction to the record-breaking success of the FBI under Director Patel.”

During an earlier incident in 2001, Patel wrote that he was arrested for public intoxication for drinking underage as a college student at the University of Richmond in Virginia. Patel helped run the Richmond Rowdies, a student fan group, and attended a home basketball game to help lead cheers. In his letter, Patel wrote that he was escorted out of the arena by a school officer due to excessive cheering.

“Upon exiting the arena,” he wrote, “the officer placed me under arrest for public intoxication, as I was not yet of 21 years of age.”

Patel said in his letter that he’d had two drinks and paid a fine following the arrest. According to NBC News, which previously reported his 2001 public intoxication arrest, Patel was found guilty on a misdemeanor charge days after the incident.

Patel’s letter about the Florida Bar disclosures has not previously been reported. The Intercept obtained Patel’s personnel file through a public records request to the Miami-Dade Public Defender’s Office, where Patel was hired on a $40,000 salary after being admitted to the Florida Bar.

“Both of these incidents are not representative of my usual conduct of behavior,” he wrote to conclude the letter, “and it is my hope that the Board views them as an anomaly. I dually apologize for my improper behavior both to the Board and the community at large.”

Patel Drinking Allegations

Twenty years after writing the letter, Patel became the ninth director of the FBI. His tenure has been marked by controversies, including over the firing of agents who worked on investigations of President Donald Trump, the use of his government jet, and lawsuits filed by his girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, over false claims that she is a former Mossad agent.

More recent concerns about Patel’s drinking followed the release of a viral video in February of the FBI director chugging a beer with the U.S. Olympic hockey team in Italy.

Pressure mounted with a report in The Atlantic alleging, through anonymous sources, that Patel has been intoxicated at the social club Ned’s in Washington and the Poodle Room in Las Vegas, another private club. The Atlantic reported that Patel’s drinking has been “a recurring source of concern across the government.”

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Patel denied The Atlantic’s claims and filed a defamation lawsuit. “These claims about erratic behavior and excessive drinking are fabricated,” Patel’s lawyer, Jesse R. Binnall, wrote in the complaint.

“I have never been intoxicated on the job, and that is why we filed a $250 million defamation lawsuit,” Patel said at a press conference on Tuesday. “And any one of you who wants to participate, bring it on. I’ll see you in court.”

The post Kash Patel Got Arrested for Public Urination After a Night of Drinking appeared first on The Intercept.

“It’s simultaneously infuriating and laughable that they’re charging the SPLC with funding hate groups,” said Mary Wynne Kling, an Alabama native and longtime supporter of the group. Pointing to the SPLC’s long-standing work battling extremist groups, which included bankrupting the United Klans of America, she added, “We knew they were paying informants.”

The indictment, filed Tuesday in the SPLC’s home state of Alabama, charged the group with fraud for funding hate groups and with money laundering for setting up fictitious business entities to route payments to informants. SPLC leadership has denied the allegations.

Kling and over a dozen other donors to the group told The Intercept that by using its money to root out information on hate groups, the SPLC was doing exactly what they hoped it would with their dollars.

Originally founded in 1971 as a civil rights-focused legal clinic, the SPLC struck on a lasting strategy of direct confrontation with hate groups in 1979. It soon shifted its focus entirely toward combating the far right and documenting extremism in its “Hatewatch” project, which identifies hate groups and their leaders — a practice that has drawn the ire of right-wing figures enraged at being labeled as purveyors of hate.

The Trump administration is taking aim at SPLC’s image by accusing the group of lying to its donor base and propping up the very groups it claims to fight in order to stay in business.

“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in a statement released on Tuesday. “Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked. This Department of Justice will hold the SPLC and every other fraudulent organization operating with the same deceptive playbook accountable. No entity is above the law.”

FBI Director Kash Patel accused the group of taking advantage of the esteem in which its donors held the SPLC.

“They raised money by lying to their donor network — thousands of Americans — to go ahead and pay the leadership of these supposed violent extremist groups,” Patel said the same day at a press conference.

The Intercept put out a call for responses and sent a survey seeking reactions to the indictment, verifying that 20 respondents were SPLC contributors with proof of donation. Seven of them spoke to The Intercept in interviews; 13 others submitted responses to the survey. All 20 verified SPLC donors said they continued to support the organization and felt their money had been put to good use — including when used to pay informants inside groups like the Klan.

Far from feeling defrauded, Ellie Wilson, a donor from Texas, said the indictment prompted her to make a new contribution to the group.

“I read up on the story this morning, before I made my donation, and to me, it doesn’t sound unusual,” Wilson told The Intercept on Wednesday. “There’s overhead costs associated with either joining these groups or doing their proper research and due diligence. If my donation was used to pay for the people who are infiltrating these groups to, you know, cover their expenses to join, to add to their cover, I see no problem with it.”

According to the indictment against the group, some of the funds used to pay informants went to existing members of hate groups, including people who were already on the SPLC’s list of extremists. One such individual, identified in court documents as a former chair of the National Alliance with the code name “F-42,” allegedly received more than $140,000 from the SPLC while being featured on its “Extremist File” page, according to prosecutors.

But according to Maya Lenox, a donor based in Texas, it’s only by working with such individuals that the SPLC is able to get the granular and encyclopedic information on the groups in its “Hatewatch” and “Hate Map” projects.

“This is an organization that has been providing very detailed information about how these hate groups have been moving, and of course, in order to have that information, you essentially are going to need spies,” said Lenox. “In order to obtain this information, you’re going to have to make it worth their time.”

In addition to the 20 verified donors, dozens of other self-identified donors to the SPLC, whose contributions were not independently verified, responded to The Intercept’s survey and expressed their support for the group and their skepticism of the indictment against it. Some respondents expressed mild criticisms of the group, pointing to controversy over its labor practices or accusations that its work chills free speech, but no respondent reported feeling deceived or defrauded by its use of paid informants in extremist groups.

All seven people who spoke with The Intercept for this story rejected outright the claim that the actions outlined in the indictment amounted to fraud. Multiple donors added that they found the current Department of Justice difficult to trust given the agency’s documented history over the past year of politically motivated indictments against the perceived foes of President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.

“Anything that comes out of this administration, this FBI, or this Department of Justice, I have to take it with a level of incredulity that I find really unfortunate,” said donor Joe O’Donnell of Buffalo. “We’ve seen this administration truly pick and choose where they want to be and how they want to enforce.”

The SPLC did not respond to a request for comment from The Intercept, but the group is receiving support from fellow civil rights organizations and other organizations on the left. In an open letter published Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union, the AFL-CIO, and more than 100 other civil rights groups, labor unions, and religious coalitions agreed to a mutual defense pact and committed to defend one another against attacks by the Trump administration.

“We have the right to assemble—and we will continue to do just that, and we will encourage and support people and allied organizations to do the same, uniting across communities, sectors, issue areas and identities,” the pact declared. “We will not be silenced. We will continue to do the work that puts people over power.”

Tuesday’s indictment against the SPLC is just the latest shot in a long-running war between elements of the MAGA right and the civil rights group. In 2019, the Center for Immigration Studies — a hard-line anti-immigration group whose platform mirrors many of the Trump administration’s platform — sued unsuccessfully to get their group removed from the SPLC’s list of hate groups. In October, Patel and the FBI cut ties with the SPLC, which had been a longtime FBI partner, pointing to the work of his agency’s “Anti-Christian Bias Panel” and calling the SPLC a “partisan smear machine.”

Many of the donors who spoke with The Intercept cited this long history of animosity between the MAGA movement and the SPLC as a reason to be suspicious of the indictment.

“They’re in bed with groups that the SPLC has, in my opinion, rightly identified as hate groups,” said Kling, the donor from Alabama. “The SPLC has spent their entire existence fighting a lot of the things that it appears this administration supports.”

The post “We Knew They Were Paying Informants”: SPLC Donors Reject Trump DOJ Fraud Claims appeared first on The Intercept.

Since 2018, the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation division has used Palantir’s Lead and Case Analytics platform to aggregate and analyze a sprawling list of sensitive federal databases and data sets.

Public records detailing Palantir’s IRS contract, obtained by the nonprofit watchdog group American Oversight and shared exclusively with The Intercept, reveal the immense volume of data plugged into the military contractor’s software. The LCA uses both Palantir’s Gotham and Foundry applications to facilitate “analysis of massive-scale data to find the needle in the hay stack,” the contract paperwork says.

Documents indicate the IRS has paid Palantir over $130 million for these services to date.

Palantir’s LCA is ostensibly directed toward cracking down on fraud, money laundering, and other financial crimes. According to a 2024 agency privacy impact assessment, IRS “Special agents and investigative analysts … utilize the platform to find, analyze, and visualize connections between disparate sets of data to generate leads, identify schemes, uncover tax fraud, and conduct money laundering and forfeiture investigative activities.”

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The IRS use of the software, launched under Trump’s first term and expanded under Biden, is now in the hands of an IRS Criminal Investigations office that has drastically scaled back its pursuit of tax cheats and pivoted, under Trump’s direction, toward investigating “left-leaning groups,” the Wall Street Journal reported in October.

“The real concern is the consolidation of vast amounts of sensitive personal data into a single system with minimal transparency — especially one built and operated by a contractor like Palantir, whose business model is premised on integrating data and expanding surveillance capabilities,” American Oversight director Chioma Chukwu said in a statement to The Intercept. “Its platforms have been used in deeply troubling contexts, from immigration enforcement to predictive policing, with persistent concerns about overreach, bias, and weak oversight.”

Palantir did not respond to a request for comment, nor did the IRS.

The contract documents reviewed by The Intercept reveal that these “disparate sets of data” are vast. Palantir’s LCA allows the IRS to quickly search and visualize “connections from millions of records with thousands of links” between databases maintained by the IRS and other federal agencies. According to the contract documents, this data includes individual tax form and tax returns as well as Affordable Care Act data, bank statements, and transactions, and “all available” data compiled by the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

Its view apparently extends to cryptocurrencies including bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Ripple. “The application would sit on top of a singular repository of identified wallets from seized servers utilizing dark web data obtained from exchangers such as Coinbase,” the documents note.

The program places an emphasis on mapping social relationships between the targets of an investigation. That includes analyzing a “network of people and the relationships and communications between them,” such as “calls, texts, [and] emails events.” The use of “IP address analysis” within LCA allows the IRS to “Identify suspects more easily” and “Establish (new) relationships among actors.”

These investigative functions are continuously updated, the materials say, through ongoing close work between Palantir engineers and IRS personnel.

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The intermingling of sensitive data on millions of Americans comes at a time of increased global skepticism and opposition toward Palantir, which, despite its military-intelligence origins, has a thriving business with civilian agencies like the IRS. The use of Palantir software at the U.K.’s National Health Service, for example, has created an ongoing political controversy across Britain, while a similar contract with the New York City public hospital network was recently canceled following public protest.

The contract is also active at a time when IRS Criminal Investigations has been coopted to aid in the broader Trump administration’s aggressive agenda. In July, ProPublica reported that the agency was working with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to provide “on demand” data to accelerate deportations. Last year, the New York Times reported that Palantir, founded by Trump ally Peter Thiel, was central to an administration effort to increase data-sharing across federal agencies.

The company’s right-wing politics and eagerness to facilitate U.S. and Israeli military aggression abroad, NSA global surveillance, and ICE deportations has also made many wary of its access to incredibly sensitive personal data. A recent post on the company’s Palantir’s X account summarizing a book by CEO Alex Karp triggered an immediate backlash from those unnerved by the manifesto’s fascistic bent. The bullet points extolled the virtue of arms manufacturing, argued the Axis powers were unfairly punished after World War II, called for a reinstatement of the draft, condemned cultural pluralism, and claimed that wealthy elites are unfairly persecuted.

“When the government can map relationships, track behavior, and generate investigative leads across data sets at this scale, the question isn’t just what it can do — it’s who it will be used against,” Chukwu said. “Entrusting that infrastructure to a company known for opaque, security-state deployments only heightens those risks.”

The post Palantir Is Helping Trump’s IRS Conduct “Massive-Scale” Data Mining appeared first on The Intercept.

It’s primary season, this time against a backdrop of heightened concerns and awareness of powerful figures skirting accountability for sexual abuse and misconduct. Survivors of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein have “made accountability for sexual abuse and sexual violence an electoral issue,” says Intercept politics reporter Jessica Washington. 

One of the biggest stories to shake up politics in recent weeks are sexual assault allegations that upended Rep. Eric Swalwell’s bid to become the next governor of California, forcing the Democratic front-runner to also resign from his House seat. “You also have to give some credit to Democrats as well for immediately moving on these allegations very swiftly,” says Washington.

This week on The Intercept Briefing, Washington and Intercept senior politics reporter Akela Lacy speak to host Jordan Uhl about the themes emerging this midterm election season. They talk about how the crowded California gubernatorial race is boosting Republicans to the top of the ticket to why powerful factions of the Democratic Party are hyperfixating on Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, rather than leveraging Trump’s sinking approval rating. “This is about not wanting to share power with the left,” notes Washington.

They also discuss what makes a candidate or elected official a progressive. “We’ve seen a lot of candidates, particularly 2028 candidates, whether senatorial or gubernatorial, who have had long-standing relationships with AIPAC or demonstrated pro-Israel policy records like Rahm Emanuel, Cory Booker, Josh Shapiro, Ruben Gallego, all come out now against AIPAC or distancing themselves from AIPAC,” says Lacy. “It doesn’t really matter if you’re rejecting AIPAC money, if you aren’t changing any of the policies that you adopt with respect to how the U.S. treats Israel.”

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

Transcript

Jordan Uhl: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Jordan Uhl, an Intercept contributor and your host today, joined by my co-hosts. 

Jessica Washington: I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter for The Intercept.

Akela Lacy: And I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept. 

JU: Today we’re bringing you a midterm elections update. Except rather than diving into the various horse races, we’re going to talk about some crucial themes emerging that we’re reporting on here at The Intercept. 

Jessie, let’s start with you. One of the biggest stories to shake up politics in recent weeks are sexual assault allegations that upended California congressman Eric Swalwell’s bid to become the next governor of California, and appears to have completely ended his political career, forcing him to resign from his House seat. We’ll get into the California governor’s race in a bit. But to start, Jessie, remind us of the sequence of events that led to Swalwell dropping out of the race.

JW: It was a really swift turnaround. In late March, we began to hear on social media from mostly influencers who were talking about stories they had heard from friends, from other women involved in politics, related to allegations against Swalwell. But many of those allegations online were incredibly vague.

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That all shifted on April 10, which was a Friday when a San Francisco Chronicle article dropped accusing Swalwell of sexually assaulting a former staffer. Shortly after that, CNN dropped another story, labeling the former staffer’s accusations as rape and also detailing sexual harassment allegations from other women. Within hours of that story dropping, over a dozen Democrats pulled their endorsements, including a really high-profile endorsement from Adam Schiff. We also began to hear reports that Nancy Pelosi and Hakeem Jeffries — top Democratic leadership — had called Swalwell to tell him that he should drop out of the governor’s race.

Then over that weekend, on Sunday [April 12] I believe, he dropped out of the race. By Monday, he had resigned from office.

JU: You write in your story that The Intercept has not been able to independently verify the allegations. In a statement posted last week, Sara Azari, a criminal defense attorney representing Swalwell, wrote that the former congressman “categorically and unequivocally denies each and every allegation of sexual misconduct and assault that has been leveled against him,” calling the accusations “a ruthless and shameless attempt to smear Congressman Swalwell.”

I think that’s something that has been interesting to me. He’s trying to frame all of this as an attempt to stop his candidacy for governor. For me, I see that and think, OK, then why did you resign from Congress? How do you thread that needle, Jessie?

JW: I think that is obviously a question for Eric Swalwell. But I will say that these allegations have been in the ether for years. These are not new allegations, although they are new to much of the public. You talk to people on the Hill, and these are things that they have heard for years.

JU: Now, Jessie, you said it was an unusually swift fallout in part due to the public sentiment around the Epstein files. Could you talk about that?

JW: When I was writing this story, originally, I hadn’t thought about the role of the survivors themselves as much in the story. I’m speaking specifically about Epstein survivors. But we have to give a lot of credit to those women for making sexual abuse, sexual assault, sexual harassment, making these issues electoral issues — issues that the public really cares about.

So you have two things going on. You have the fact that these survivors have made this an electoral issue — made accountability for sexual abuse and sexual violence an electoral issue. And you also have to give some credit to Democrats as well for immediately moving on these allegations very swiftly. From their perspective, it is incredibly hypocritical for them to not hold Swalwell accountable while also running simultaneously on the Epstein files, running on accountability, running on this idea that we have to hold the Epstein class — people who are abusers — accountable. I think they couldn’t run on that effectively and also not hold Swalwell accountable once these allegations were made public.

JU: Now, on Monday, the House Committee on Ethics published a list of 28 representatives who have been investigated by the committee for alleged sexual misconduct. The oldest case dates back to 1976. Recent investigations include Swalwell; Tony Gonzales, Republican of Texas; Cory Mills, Republican of Florida who is facing allegations of “sexual misconduct and/or dating violence.” That investigation is ongoing; he denies the charges. And notably a few years have passed but also on the list is Matt Gaetz, Republican and former congressman of Florida. 

Jessie, are you seeing more efforts to take allegations more seriously and hold members of Congress accountable? 

JW: There definitely is a shift in Congress, and obviously that shift has to do a little bit with Swalwell. We’ve talked about the Epstein files in terms of more of an effort to hold these members accountable for their abuse of women. I will say the fact that there was no movement on Gonzales or Mills until after Swalwell allegations came forth, one could question whether or not Republicans are a faithful partner in this, or if they just see another political opportunity. But there does seem to be at least a rhetorical shift on the Hill when it comes to taking these problems seriously.

AL: I would agree that I think the speed of Democrats consolidating around “Get this guy out of Congress” is new. But I would also say, we did see this moment of reckoning in 2017, 2018, with the first round of “Me Too,” when it appears that a lot of these allegations were already known around that time or had happened prior to that.

JW: That actually came up in my piece when I was speaking to people who had worked both on the Hill and also as campaign staffers. The fact that a lot of these rumors — about Swalwell, but also obviously there are rumors about other politicians, Democratic politicians as well — that these rumors were known, and that people didn’t do anything. What we’re seeing is a reaction to the public being aware of these allegations, and also I would say the severity of the allegations.

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We’re talking about really horrific allegations of sexual assault — we do have to acknowledge again that Swalwell denies — but I think it’s the severity of the allegations and the fact that they were made public. But it is a little soon for Democrats to be patting themselves on the back when many of these allegations were floating around the ether on the Hill.

JU: Interestingly, on Monday, Rep. Nancy Mace, a Republican of South Carolina, introduced a resolution to expel Mills from Congress. I’m curious to see how that goes. 

But for both of you, this is actually a sizable potential shakeup in Congress. And we haven’t even talked about others who were facing possible expulsion. Like Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick, a Florida Democrat who was found guilty by the Ethics Committee for financial misconduct, which she denied. On Tuesday, she announced her resignation. 

What does this all mean for Republican’s majority in Congress? What effect, if any, might it have on which party will hold the majority next?

AL: So right now, Republicans have a slim majority in the House — 217, and one Independent who caucuses with Republicans — to Democrats, who have 213. Democrats are optimistic that they’re going to win back the House in midterms even prior to all of this.

There’s two Republicans that are facing these allegations right now, so off the bat, that doesn’t give Democrats the majority, obviously, but it could potentially help. We don’t know what’s happening with Tony Gonzales or Cory Mills at this point. The fact that two Democrats have now resigned obviously factors into that, but midterm watch, they are expected to potentially win back the House and are even looking at possibly the Senate, obviously, as we’ve been talking about on this show.

I think, if anything, I don’t know that this really plays well for Democrats because Eric Swalwell is the face of this at this point. I don’t know if the floodgates have opened yet, maybe you could say that we’re talking about four or five people at this point. Obviously, Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick is not a sexual misconduct allegation, but obviously, a shakeup is happening. Who knows what else can happen? 

We’re in the height of primary season right now, and it’s going to be a long summer. I imagine that we’re going to see more things continue to come up, especially because the “oppo” people are going crazy right now, so it remains to be seen. But again, the baseline prior to this was: It’s a possibility for Republicans to lose the House. I don’t see this necessarily changing that, but it could complicate things for Democrats if more of them come under fire.

JW: The “oppo” angle is actually really interesting. It’s something that people who aren’t journalists or aren’t in the political world aren’t that aware of. 

Campaigns research each other. They research their opponents, and they come up with these spreadsheets of documents against the opponents — all of their different weak points, including these various allegations that are floating around against them. So during campaign season, you do see people digging up a lot more — I don’t want to call something like sexual harassment “dirt” — but these negative allegations about people. So that’s something that you see a lot in campaign season. That’s why we might end up seeing more and more come out about these candidates.

JU: Now, I want to pivot back to Swalwell and the California governor’s race. This is something I’ve been watching closely as a Californian. It’s a crowded race, even with Swalwell exiting. Former Secretary of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra who was previously California’s attorney general, got a boost from Swalwell’s departure, making him tied with billionaire Tom Steyer. Former congresswoman Katie Porter is not far behind them. 

Akela, you wrote about a progressive group that is trying to rally Democrats around Steyer. Can you tell us about this group and why they’re endorsing him over other candidates in the race? 

AL: Xavier Becerra was polling in single digits pretty much up until Swalwell’s exit. Some polls have shown him pulling ahead or tied. The Emerson poll that everyone was looking at right after Swalwell dropped out, had him at 10 percent — well behind the first two Republican candidates and Tom Steyer, but tied with Katie Porter. 

The article that you’re talking about, Jordan, we wrote an exclusive about Our Revolution endorsing Tom Steyer. This is the progressive group that Bernie Sanders founded after his 2016 presidential campaign. They have built their mission around attacking wealth and power in politics, and so endorsing a billionaire raised a lot of eyebrows and questions about that — how endorsing Steyer advances that mission, which I spoke at length with their executive director about.

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This is the first billionaire Our Revolution has endorsed. It was fun fact checking that because we were like, how many billionaires have run for office? We pretty much know all of them. It wasn’t JB Pritzker, it wasn’t Michael Bloomberg. That in itself is historic for a group that has fashioned itself in the way that Our Revolution has.

They have recently tweeted [in 2025], “We shouldn’t have billionaires,” so this is what we’re talking about. They were very open about that being a big contradiction, to their credit, I will say. Their view is that in this field, which is extremely crowded, the fact that two Republicans have been leading the race basically since January should give pause to progressives and Democrats about whether they’re going to consolidate behind a candidate or risk handing the seat to a Republican.

Another initial question that I had: What about Katie Porter? She has the longest record in office of a progressive official of the candidates in the pool and the highest name recognition for a progressive. They basically said that she was the first candidate to jump into the race, but she still hasn’t pulled ahead or demonstrated a clear path to victory in polling.

They didn’t speak to this, but I will mention that Katie Porter has faced backlash in recent years after a video surfaced of her yelling at a staffer. I don’t know how much that’s affecting her race right now, but I think that tarnished her image a little bit for some people. I don’t know that the average California voter knows that happened necessarily, but they seem to think that she did not have a chance of winning, basically, was the bottom line.

So they were like, yeah, there are concerns about us endorsing a billionaire, there are questions about how that aligns with our broader project. But in this instance, if the alternative is having a Republican run California for the first time in the last two governors, then they would rather back someone who they say has used his wealth and power to advance progressive ideals, investing in advocacy around climate change and electing progressive officials. 

I will say Tom Steyer has also faced criticism for benefiting from the policies that help billionaires pay lower taxes. Although he himself has said that he and billionaires should pay more in taxes. But I think a lot of people have a lot of questions, which I think are fair, about what he will do in office. 

This is also someone who has spent the most on his own race. He spent over $120 million on his gubernatorial campaign so far. This is coming off of spending $300 million on a failed presidential bid in 2020.

They also said that Steyer aggressively sought Our Revolution’s endorsement throughout the entire race and that Katie Porter did seek their endorsement but did so later in the race. They had endorsed against her in the California Senate race in 2020. They endorsed Barbara Lee against Katie Porter, and they said that her campaign’s performance in that race did not inspire confidence that she would be able to win another statewide race.

[Break]

JU: It is a crowded and confusing field for the dynamics you just laid out. The policy differences, the disparity in personal wealth, all of those things make for a tough decision for many people in California on the left. But because of the way the election works here with a jungle primary, the two leading candidates advance to the general election, regardless of party affiliation.

Right now, if polling remains the same before the primary in June and more Democrats don’t drop out, California could end up with two Republicans at the top of the ticket come November. Who are those Republican candidates?

AL: Buckle up. [Laughs] Number one, the person who is in first place, we’ll start with Steve Hilton, who is a former Fox News analyst and a former Conservative Party adviser in the U.K.. He worked under Margaret Thatcher, for context. Steve Hilton was born in the U.K. and immigrated to the U.S. He is endorsed by Donald Trump. Pretty run-of-the-mill Republican dude who’s close with Trump. 

I’ll leave it at that because the next person is even more interesting. [Riverside County] Sheriff Chad Bianco was a dues-paying member of the Oath Keepers, the group that you may remember from leading the attack on the Capitol on January 6. He was a dues-paying member in 2014; he was not at January 6. He also endorsed Trump. Trump has not endorsed him, obviously, he endorsed Steve Hilton. But those are the two top candidates in the gubernatorial race at this point in time.

JU: Now, I want to mention that this sheriff, Chad Bianco, took it upon himself to seize 650,000 ballots in March to investigate alleged voter fraud. A CalMatters probe found that “his sprawling investigation was based on the thinnest of evidence and raise alarms over how the November elections could be disrupted by the unproven claims of fringe groups and ideologically aligned officials.” For both of you, what do you make of this, and are there other cases of attempts to undermine voters through so-called “election integrity” efforts that you’re watching? 

AL: Bianco — people know that he was in the Oath Keepers, but like he’s obviously distanced himself from that, he’s no longer a dues paying member, yada, yada, yada. But that is a direct outgrowth of that kind of extremist, militant, anti-government ideology that that group is built on. That runs as an undercurrent in a lot of these MAGA figures, in terms of undermining democratic institutions in the name of election integrity and this warped, very dangerous dystopian framing of our election system that leads to things like people storming the Capitol on January 6 and trying to overturn the results of the election and trying to hang the vice president. Just want to put a finer point on that.

He’s also part of the “constitutional sheriffs” movement, which sounds scary. They believe that they have more power than the president and the courts and that they’re some of the most powerful officials in the country. 

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I think this sort of campaign of election interference that we’ve seen balloon, particularly during Trump’s first term, and again, taking shape in his second term under the guise of election integrity is one of the harder things to cover, for us. But it’s one of the most insidious forces that have far reaching ramifications for democratic elections and voting rights more broadly. But it’s one of the hardest things to cover until after it happens.

So we’re at the point right now where this is not a huge issue in primary season. There’s already been some reporting on how Trump officials are talking about this and not necessarily about what’s being done, but that they’re definitely open about talking about sending ICE to polls. Talking about getting rid of voter protection measures or election integrity measures at the state level. We’ll likely see more of that ramp up between when primary season ends and in November. So it’s a little hard to say right now, but this is definitely part of their playbook.

JW: We’ve definitely seen Trump and his allies really talk about voter integrity and try and shift this narrative.

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Obviously, I think as most of our listeners know, voter fraud is incredibly rare. The measures that the Trump administration is suggesting wouldn’t really target any of those, again, incredibly rare instances of voter fraud. We’ve also seen allies of the Trump administration, obviously on Capitol Hill, try and push through the Save Act, which would make it much harder for many different groups to vote because of the increased requirements on documentation. That failed this week in the Senate. 

As Akela mentioned, the Trump administration has been floating the idea of sending ICE to the polls. We know that former Attorney General Pam Bondi had asked for the voter rolls in Minnesota as well. So there’s this confluence of different groups connected to the Trump administration, connected to some of these more fringe movements that are working to make this election much more difficult for many different groups to vote.

JU: In 2024, we saw Democrats running to the center on issues like immigration and transgender rights. But this year we’ve seen more Democrats style themselves as progressives, especially when it comes to immigration and issues like AIPAC funding. Are candidates paying a penalty for appearing inauthentic on those issues?

JW: I did a story about this earlier this year, focused on Seth Moulton and the fact that in 2024, he was one of the main Democrats really coming out and pushing anti-transgender rhetoric, saying that Democrats supporting transgender rights publicly had led to a backlash among voters.

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Now he’s running in 2026 in Massachusetts against one of the most progressive senators in the country, Ed Markey. So we’re seeing a different shift of tone from him. He’s obviously not making those same comments that he was making in 2024, but he’s also talking about his record on LGBTQ rights, trying to shift the narrative around him. It’s not only not working, there’s a backlash that we’re seeing toward inauthenticity. Now, whether or not the average voter is paying attention in that way, I’m not sure. But certainly when you’re looking at people who are more politically plugged in — and primary voters tend to be much more politically plugged in — there is more of a backlash for inauthenticity and for shifting on issues without a sincere apology or a sincere conversation about why your viewpoints have changed.

JU: There’s a lot of discourse online around who is a progressive candidate and whose questionable past or background or lack thereof should be overlooked because they are saying the right things currently. What do you both think? Do you think these criticisms are just unhelpful purity tests or that people should be taking a more critical look at the candidates they are championing?

AL: I feel like this question about purity tests is a little bit ill-fitted to what we’re actually talking about, which is, what are candidates’ policies? It’s not so much about a purity test. It’s a question of, is what you’re running on actually what you do in office? That’s not a purity test, I don’t think.

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Candidates who have been very vocal about abolishing ICE or rejecting AIPAC money or these clear litmus tests — which they are litmus tests — know that is something that’s going to be on their record. It’s not something that they can waffle on once they’re in office. If you say you’re not going to take AIPAC money and then you take AIPAC money, people are going to find out. If you say I’m going to abolish ICE, and then you don’t abolish ICE, people are going to find out.

Whereas, incumbents who may have voted for moderate or conservative immigration policy in the past who are now coming out and saying, “Abolish ICE,” or candidates like Cory Booker who have taken tons of AIPAC money and boasted about texting with their president and been to their annual policy conferences — coming out and saying that he’s no longer taking AIPAC money as part of a broader pledge to reject corporate PAC money, not singling out AIPAC because he obviously doesn’t want to draw their ire. That is a fair case for people to ask questions about “OK, what does this actually mean?” And again, that’s not a purity test because he’s adopting the purity test. It’s like, what is he actually going to do?

We’ve seen a lot of candidates, particularly 2028 candidates, whether senatorial or gubernatorial who have had long-standing relationships with AIPAC or demonstrated pro-Israel policy records like Rahm Emanuel, Cory Booker, Josh Shapiro, Ruben Gallego, all come out now against AIPAC or distancing themselves from AIPAC. 

In Josh Shapiro’s case, he says like, they don’t give to governors, I’ve never taken AIPAC money. But he has a very pro-Israel policy record and has fashioned himself as someone who is resisting the wave of criticism of Israel in the Democratic Party and standing firm in his pro-Israel bonafides, while still saying that he’s critical of Netanyahu and stuff like that.

Cory Booker was asked about this recently on Pod Save America, where they were pressing him on why he refused to call Benjamin Netanyahu a war criminal. It doesn’t really matter if you’re rejecting AIPAC money, if you aren’t changing any of the policies that you adopt with respect to how the U.S. treats Israel. 

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Cory Booker did vote for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s measures to block the sale of bombs and bulldozers to Israel. So that was a shift in his position. That’s the kind of thing where you can say, well, this litmus test worked; if he’s actually changing his policy on this, then people don’t have a reason to necessarily question the proclamations that he’s making.

But I do think people should be asking questions beyond “Does this person take AIPAC money?” They should be asking where do they stand on all of these other policy questions that they’ll be voting on once they’re elected or reelected.

JW: To Akela’s point, you can’t have Democrats who voted for the Laken Riley Act, which makes it much easier to deport people in the United States, who are then now decrying what Trump and ICE are doing in the streets and saying they’re going to hold Trump accountable when in office — when they haven’t been holding ICE accountable while in the legislature.

JU: On the topic of online discourse, for several weeks now, powerful factions within the Democratic Party have been going after Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. It started to pick up about a month ago after he participated in a convoy to deliver food, medicine and solar panels to Cuba, a country in which President Donald Trump’s oil embargo has led to a humanitarian crisis.

I really can’t believe that attacks on Piker’s character are continuing for this long. If you Google his name, multiple stories come up that are just a few days old, from The Hill and The Atlantic and the New York Post. There are real issues that the party establishment could focus on, like Trump’s sinking approval rating, the war, the economy, and ongoing threats to our democracy. But yet, they appear to be hyperfocused on Piker’s influence. What do you all make of this?

AL: It’s mind-numbingly stupid. This is just a straw man thing, I don’t know how to say it better than that. Hasan Piker is a straw man. He has never spoken for the Democratic Party. He’s a streamer that candidates are either going on his show or campaigning with. And yes, you can say well the left or Democrats often criticize shows that candidates go on, because they’re outright Nazis or they were at the Capitol on January 6 or something and that’s just not what we’re talking about. I think the false equivalence between someone like a Nick Fuentes or like an outright white nationalist working with or campaigning with Republicans, and somehow drawing a parallel between that and Democrats talking to Hasan Piker — it’s insulting to people’s intelligence to try to make that comparison.

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I think because a lot of people don’t know who he is, or the context, unfortunately gets swept up in thinking that this is something that they should actually be paying attention to and trying to make a decision about. It is an illustration of how broken our media and political ecosystems is that national outlets spending air time covering this as if it’s a real news development — because that fuels the fire. That’s why we’re still talking about it, and that’s why we’re talking about it on this show. But hopefully with a better take.

JW: This is about not wanting to share power with the left. This isn’t about the comments that Hasan Piker made. This isn’t about, oh, Democrats shouldn’t be on this platform or that platform. These are some of the same people who were pushing Democrats to go on Joe Rogan.

So it doesn’t hold water. This is about not wanting to share power with the left, wanting to weaken one of its, to them, one of its strongest and loudest voices. It’s an attack on the left. It’s not about Hasan Piker or about Twitch or anything else.

JU: You can’t tell me that Democrats have a problem reaching young men and then when you have somebody who does reach young men and has pulled them to the left — you will see in his audience, in his chat, in his fans’ comments, many people will admit to being sucked into the right-wing pipeline and admitting and thanking him for pulling them out. You can’t tell me that you have a problem and he is not part of the solution, and expect me to think that is a sound argument. 

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It is about narrative control. It is about preserving legacy institutions and part of it is about weaponizing hollow accusations of antisemitism, and that’s why you see groups like the Anti-Defamation League take shots at him.

In parallel, there’s also a threat to the status quo and their corporate ties. That’s why centrist group Third Way has been pushing this. And then it’s about where the party sits, like you say, both of you — it’s about not ceding power to the left, not including the left in this “big tent.” That’s why you have never-Trumpers who they say they’re former Republicans, but by their acts demonstrate, at least to me, that they still are Republicans also joining that growing chorus. 

It is, in my opinion, misguided and shortsighted.

JW: Third Way pushing this is just— the fact that this was a group that was earlier saying, we can’t talk about diversity, we have to move against transgender rights, let’s take away actual rights in order to win. But now the line is, oh, well, if we win, but we win with Hasan Piker, that’s going to be the worst thing in the world. The whole thing is a little bit laughable. They’re willing to sacrifice actual human rights, but what they’re not willing to do is have anyone sit down with Hasan Piker.

AL: It’s easier to blame someone who isn’t responsible for your policy failures for being popular. That’s not the reason that Third Way is unpopular. It’s because they’re bad at what they do.

JU: So when it comes to actual issues people are unhappy about, a new AP poll shows that Trump’s approval rating on the economy is sinking even more, due to his policies from tariffs to new wars in the Middle East. That’s on top of violent immigration raids, the handling of the Epstein files, and more signs of a weakening economy as the Fed reports zero net job creation in the private sector, and the Wall Street Journal reporting we’ve entered an “era of mega-layoff[s].” Meanwhile, the Trump family’s business empire is growing exponentially this term. Is Democratic leadership leveraging any of this? How is it showing up in campaigns? What are you both seeing? And are there signs that any of this will cost Republicans control of the House and maybe Senate?

JW: I think this is really coming up in Democratic campaigns in this word “affordability.” We’re hearing every single campaign talk about the fact that the United States is not affordable for working-class people. That’s clearly a shot at Trump’s economy. That’s really how I see Democrats capitalizing on it, mostly in campaign season.

AL: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has been talking about how many federal jobs the Trump administration has lost or cut with various cuts to different agencies. And yes, as Jessie said, this is showing up as an affordability chorus among different Democratic campaigns. Affordability, sure, is a unifying message — but I think being able to tie the fact that there is a net zero job creation to Trump seems like something that they should be screaming from the hilltops all together at once. 

It’s hard to tell in situations where they are hitting the message correctly because we have spent a lot of time on this show criticizing Democrats for not having a clear or focused messaging campaign. But when leaders might be getting the message out, like what is the party doing as a whole to have a unified front on that or directly tie it to Trump, I think is something that they’re still not quite on par with Republicans on. 

I keep thinking about the first federal government shutdown under Trump, when you went to the White House website, and it was like, “Democrats have shut down the government.” We don’t see that kind of succinct counter-messaging from Democrats.

I’m reading this headline from a Schumer press release, and it’s so long. I’m just going to read it to you: “SCHUMER REVEALS: AS TRUMP ATTACKS & EVISCERATES FEDERAL WORKFORCE, NEW YORKERS PAY THE PRICE WITH OVER 8,000 FEDERAL JOBS LOST IN THE PAST YEAR ALONE ACROSS NY – WITH DAMAGING CUTS TO LOCAL SOCIAL SECURITY OFFICES, VETERANS AFFAIRS, USDA OFFICES, AND OTHER VITAL FEDERAL SERVICES.”

Like, that’s not a slogan. That’s the Senate minority leader’s press office putting this out. It feels like there should be some sort of unified campaign. I’m not a political strategist, but when you look at the messaging next to each other, what Republicans are doing and what Democrats are doing, it seems like a missed opportunity to really hit the nail on the head on who’s responsible for this.

JW: You see Democrats talking about affordability hitting on Trump, but I think you’re right that there’s a real opportunity for Democrats to hit Republicans over the head with this, and we’re not seeing it as aggressive as we know Republicans would be in this alternate situation.

JU: This is going to be an interesting midterm, and I will look to both of you for guidance and clarity as things get even more chaotic. I want to thank you both for joining me on The Intercept Briefing.

AL: Thank you, Jordan.

JW: Thank you.

JW: And 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. Will 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 Jordan Uhl.

The post “Me Too” Comes Back to Congress appeared first on The Intercept.

Smarting from the humiliation of a report published at The Atlantic about his time in office, FBI Director Kash Patel did what conservatives have done over and over in the age of Trump: He sued for defamation. 

The Atlantic’s story detailed allegations about Patel’s mismanagement of the office and FBI staffers’ concerns that his behavior has become borderline dangerous. According to the magazine’s reporting, staffers have observed that the director frequently drinks to the point of intoxication and has been unreachable behind closed doors multiple times, at one point necessitating agents breaking down a door. In his lawsuit, Patel said that the allegations are demonstrably false.

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Patel’s case — which names the publication and the writer as defendants and demands $250 million in damages — doesn’t appear very strong; it’s unlikely he’ll win in court. But a legal victory isn’t necessarily the goal. Such lawsuits apply financial pressure and ensure newsrooms think twice before publishing critical articles in the future.

For all the modern right-wing movement’s bleating about its commitment to free speech, in practice they’re anything but, with a demonstrated penchant for using the legal system as a cudgel against people who say things they don’t like. Known as strategic lawsuits against public participation, or SLAPP, they are a tool of the powerful — and have multiple levels of use.

Most immediately, SLAPP allows plaintiffs the potential to muzzle their critics, who will be less likely to launch attacks against someone who has already proven litigious. This applies not only to the defendant, whether it’s an individual or an institution, but also to others like them who will think twice rather than risk a protracted (and expensive) legal battle.

Typically, the more deep-pocketed someone, or their backers, are, the more they can bleed out defendants by dragging on court cases for as long as possible, racking up legal bills that will have to be paid. Most publishers and newsrooms have lawyers on retainer or in-house, but their legal insurance deductibles are still high, potentially running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per case. 

Even if these anti-free speech crusaders don’t win a judgment, they have a good chance of draining their opponents’ bank accounts — and breaking their spirits. 

Federal action is is sorely needed to make sure the use of SLAPP doesn’t spiral further out of control. Many states, including New York and Minnesota, have anti-SLAPP laws on the books, but their application in federal courts remains unsettled. Patel filed his suit in D.C. federal court, where the appellate court says the anti-SLAAP statute does not apply. 

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Universal application of these laws is needed so the powerful can’t turn to federal courts for meritless filings, and some lawmakers, like Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., have introduced legislation to that end. So far, however, those bills have not made it to law. 

Patel is far from the only conservative figure to deploy the courts as a weapon against his critics, and this isn’t even his first shot at it; he has an ongoing 2019 lawsuit against Politico, for that outlet’s reporting on his time with the National Security Council during Donald Trump’s first term, and another defamation action, against former FBI official Frank Figliuzzi for comments on MS NOW, was dismissed on Tuesday.

Trump’s manipulation of the legal system to punish detractors predates his time in politics, but it’s gone into overdrive since his first term. The president has filed multiple defamation suits against members of the media and their organizations, including $475 million against CNN in 2022 (which was dismissed in 2023); the Pulitzer Prize Board for an award he objected to in 2022 (ongoing); journalist Bob Woodward and his publisher Simon & Schuster in 2023 (dismissed); ABC News in 2024 (settled for $15 million); CBS parent Paramount in 2024 (settled for $16 million); the Wall Street Journal in 2025 (dismissed), the New York Times in 2025 for $15 billion (ongoing), the BBC in 2025 for $10 billion (ongoing); and others. To be clear, this is not an exhaustive list. 

Trump and Patel are two of the better known conservative figures attacking free speech via the courts, but it’s a mainstay tactic in MAGA world. Laura Loomer, an Islamophobic off-and-on ally of Trump, sued late-night personality Bill Maher over comments he made about her relationship with the president (the case was thrown out on Wednesday evening). In 2013, Trump sued Maher for breach of contract after the HBO pundit promised $5 million to charity if the then-real estate magnate could prove his mother was not an orangutan. (Trump withdrew the case.) 

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Elon Musk, the tech billionaire with close ties to the White House, used his X social media platform to file a suit against Media Matters for America over its reporting on ad content running alongside antisemitic posts on the site. And David Sacks, another tech billionaire who worked as Trump’s crypto and AI czar, threatened the New York Times over its reporting on his conflicts of interest in a public legal letter last December. 

Closer to home, I’m currently being sued, along with my publisher, Hachette, for more than $1 million by conservative pundit Matt Taibbi over my book, “Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left,” which delves into his ideological shift to the right. And the editor of this piece you’re reading now, Katherine Krueger, was sued for $100 million alongside her former employer Splinter by 2016 Trump spokesperson Jason Miller for a story about a court filing that alleged he drugged a woman with an abortion pill. Miller refuted the allegation, but that case was thrown out on summary judgment because it accurately reported what was in the court filing; mine is ongoing.

In some circumstances, as Trump found after he was elected to a second term in 2024, SLAPP lawsuits can succeed, irrespective of the strength or weakness of the claim. ABC News and Paramount settled with Trump in what are widely regarded as payoffs to a powerful figure who can control their corporate future. Corporations have made the calculation: Better to get on his good side than risk four years of retribution, and, after all, what’s a few million dollars compared to the benefits of having the world’s most powerful person looking kindly on you?

But for the right wing, SLAPP suits also serve to make an ideological point. Whether or not Patel expects to win a $250 million judgment, a central claim in his lawsuit is that his word is enough to shut down speech. 

Because he told The Atlantic the claims in their article weren’t true, they shouldn’t have published it, the complaint argues: “Defendants published the Article with actual malice, despite being expressly warned, hours before publication, that the central allegations were categorically false.” The objections of a powerful man should be enough to avoid bad press, this line of reasoning goes; publishing anything to the contrary is wrong. 

That’s the animating principle behind the right-wing’s relationship with the media. If they disagree with it or find it embarrassing, you shouldn’t publish it; if you disobey, you must be punished. 

It wasn’t until Trump — and decades of ideological capture of the courts — that there was the potential to regularly use the legal system as a weapon against critics. Until there are First Amendment protections against SLAPP, we can expect the powerful to continue dragging their detractors to court. 

The post Kash Patel Is Using MAGA’s Favorite Tool to Muzzle the Free Press appeared first on The Intercept.

By the most cautious estimate, 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.

The Costs of War analysis is the most comprehensive accounting of the U.S. air, naval, and Special Operations expenses — including some troop deployments and munitions — used in the two campaigns between August 1, 2025, and March 31, 2026. The need for such an estimate stems from the refusal of the Department of War to provide a tally of costs to lawmakers or The Intercept.

The researchers behind the Costs of War estimate say it’s almost assuredly an undercount.

“Operations do not have a clear end date and are actively expanding. They carry significant human, financial, and strategic costs and risk,” 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.

“American taxpayers, who are increasingly unable to afford basic needs, have a right to know how their tax dollars are spent,” they noted.

Homestead and Kavanagh observe that the largest costs might still be on the horizon.

“We expect that if comprehensive information were available, our cost estimate would likely increase significantly,” they wrote.

Kavanagh told The Intercept that the expenses were “enough to fund Medicaid for 500,000 people for an entire year.”

“Though the Trump administration is right to focus more on the Western Hemisphere, most needs in the region are economic or require investment in regional law enforcement. The United States is not clearly safer or more prosperous as a result of Operation Southern Spear or Operation Absolute Resolve,” she said.

The Naval deployment — which comprised the largest concentration of U.S. ships in the region since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 — constituted the single largest expense, an estimated $3.8 billion. This includes the ever-growing cost of the Iwo Jima Amphibious Ready Group which consists of the USS Iwo Jima, USS Fort Lauderdale, and USS San Antonio, which remain deployed in the Caribbean with the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit and the USS Lake Erie guided-missile cruiser. Costs of War puts the daily operating costs of these ships at around $9 million per day.

The steep Naval expenditures are followed by at least $616 million spent on the deployment of aircraft, including P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft, F-35A Lightning II fighters, and MQ-9 Reaper drones used in both operations. The continuing daily cost of operating the at least 20 aircraft that are assumed to remain deployed in the region is $2.6 million.

Under Operation Southern Spear, the U.S. military has conducted 53 attacks on so-called drug boats since September 2025, killing more than 180 civilians. The latest strike, on April 19 in the Caribbean, killed three people. The Trump administration claims its victims are members of at least one of 24 or more cartels and criminal gangs with whom it claims to be at war but refuses to name.

Experts in the laws of war and 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 summary executions are a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies arrested suspected drug smugglers.

The Costs of War analysis puts the price tag of the munitions employed in these attacks on boats at between $12.5 million and $50 million, the range owing to the lack of transparency surrounding the strikes. The report notes that the individual cost of armaments used in each strike may top $1 million and could actually be far higher if multiple munitions or aircraft are used.

Beyond expenses captured under Southern Spear, ancillary costs of Absolute Resolve, a large-scale air campaign and the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, top $206 million. This includes the deployment of at least 150 aircraft — fighter jets, bombers, and Special Operations aircraft, and more — along with precision munitions such as Tomahawk cruise missiles and JASSM-ER missiles.

The approximately 200 Special Operations forces who played a key role in Maduro’s kidnapping cost about $16 million, to include the costs of daily operations and combat. As yet unknown are the costs of deployments of U.S. commandos in Ecuador, another front in America’s Western hemispheric war.

The boat strikes recently moved to land as what Joseph Humire, the acting assistant secretary of war for homeland defense and Americas security affairs, called “bilateral kinetic actions against cartel targets along the Colombia-Ecuador border” on unnamed designated terrorist organizations. “The joint effort, named ‘Operation Total Extermination,’ is the start of a military offensive by Ecuador against transnational criminal organizations with the support of the U.S.,” Humire announced last month. That U.S.–Ecuadorian campaign has already strayed into Colombia after a farm was bombed or hit by “ricochet effect” on March 3. In a war powers report announcing the introduction of U.S. armed forces into “hostilities” in Ecuador, the White House also informed Congress of “military action taken on March 6, 2026, against the facilities of narco-terrorists affiliated with a designated terrorist organization.”

America’s wars in the Western Hemisphere are part of what President Donald Trump and others have termed the “Donroe Doctrine,” a bastardization of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine. While President James Monroe’s policy aimed to prevent Europe from meddling in the Western Hemisphere, Trump has employed his version as a license for America to do exactly that.

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The National Security Strategy, released late last year, decrees the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine a “potent restoration of American power and priorities,” rooted in the “readjustment of our global military presence to address urgent threats in our Hemisphere.” Last month, Humire told members of the House Armed Services Committee that “America’s immediate security perimeter” extended from “Alaska to Greenland in the Arctic to the Gulf of America and the Panama Canal and surrounding countries.” The Trump administration has, in fact, bullied Panama and threatened Canada, Colombia, Cuba, Greenland, and perhaps also Iceland, while conducting counter-cartel CIA operations in Mexico.

The Pentagon refuses to provide insights into its expenditures for conflicts in Latin America.

“For any information regarding budgetary costs for Operations Southern Spear and Operation Absolute Resolve, I’ll have to refer you to OSW,” U.S. Southern Command spokesperson Steven McLoud told The Intercept. When asked about the costs, the Office of the Secretary of War said it does “not have anything to provide currently.” 

Homestead and Kavanagh admit that the $4.7 billion price tag placed on Operations Absolute Resolve and Southern Spear is likely a low-ball figure. “This is a conservative estimate based on the limited information about the operation that is available,” they wrote. “Full data for several cost categories are not publicly available, and certain operations — such as the details of a CIA operation in Venezuela referenced by President Trump — remain classified or incompletely reported in the public domain.”

Costs are mounting by the day and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Trump has said he expects the U.S. will be running Venezuela for years. (He recently teased the possibility of making Venezuela the 51st U.S. state, before saying he could run for president of that country.) The Intercept previously reported that Pentagon procurement documents indicate the U.S. plans to maintain a massive military presence in the Caribbean until late 2028.

“Much of the military forward presence involved in these operations appears to now have become the ‘steady state,’ that is, it is likely to remain in the region for the foreseeable future,” said Kavanagh. “This means that the costs will continue to accumulate.”

The ultimate price tag of Americas wars in Latin America will further balloon in the decades ahead, saddling future Americans with soaring costs. “War is financed by debt, adding interest costs to the public budget,” write Homestead and Kavanagh. “Furthermore, the federal government undertakes an obligation to pay veterans benefits for decades into the future.”

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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.

“Across the country people are going bankrupt and dying prematurely because of lack of health care, but the U.S. government has billions to spend on imperialist violence to enrich corporations — from Venezuela to Iran — without any regard for human rights, life or rule of law,” Homestead told The Intercept. “This situation illustrates why greater restraint on Pentagon spending — which primarily benefits private contractors — is so necessary.”

The post Trump Has Already Spent at Least $4.7 Billion Attacking Latin America appeared first on The Intercept.

Not Paul Heaton. He recently spent a weekend persuading ChatGPT to confess to a crime it didn’t commit.

“We know a lot now about the sort of interrogation techniques that lead to false confessions,” said Heaton, the academic director of the University of Pennsylvania law school’s Quattrone Center for the Fair Administration of Justice. “So I just started playing around, and decided to cycle through those techniques to see if I could get ChatGPT to confess to something it couldn’t possibly have done.”

Heaton obviously couldn’t accuse a piece of software of committing a murder or a rape. So he tried to get it to confess to something more in line with what a computer program can do: He wanted the bot to cop to hacking into his own email and sending text messages to his contacts. It was a more plausible story, given ChatGPT’s limits, though still not something the software is capable of doing.

Extracting the confession would take a little virtual arm-twisting.

In his exchange with ChatGPT, Heaton used the Reid technique, the confrontational interrogation method first developed in the 1950s that has since been adopted by police departments all over the country. The man for whom it’s named, John Reid, published his methodology after winning acclaim for getting a man named Darrel Parker to confess to raping and murdering his own wife — an origin story with a haunting twist.

It worked. By the end of their exchange, ChatGPT agreed that an investigation had shown it hacked Heaton’s accounts and sent messages that appeared to come from him — something the bot could not and, in fact, did not do.

Despite the claims of AI evangelists, chatbots aren’t people and haven’t achieved sentience. The differences between a chatbot and a real person, however, make Heaton’s ability to elicit a false confession more disturbing, not less.

“ChatGPT lacks many of the vulnerabilities that make people more likely to falsely confess — like stress, fatigue, and sleep deprivation,” said Saul Kassin, a professor emeritus at John Jay College who wrote the book on false confessions. “If ChatGPT can be induced into a false confession, then who isn’t vulnerable?”

No Leads, Just Confessions

One of the problems with the Reid technique is that its primary function isn’t to gather evidence and generate leads, it’s to extract a confession from the person police already believe committed the crime. It typically begins with an accusation, followed by a series of escalating psychological tactics. It teaches police to ignore denials and treat displays of emotion — frustration, anger, crying — as indicators of guilt. Naturally, a lack of emotion is also seen as an indication of guilt.

Heaton, a renowned researcher in criminology at the Quattrone Center (where, in the interest of disclosure, I am a journalism fellow), is intimately familiar with the Reid technique. When ChatGPT initially denied his accusations, he began employing Reid tactics.

“I first tried to bargain with it,” Heaton said. “I told it things like, ‘This will go a lot better for you if you just admit what you did.’”

ChatGPT, though, wasn’t swayed by threats. It continued to insist, correctly, that it just wasn’t possible for it to have hacked into Heaton’s email. Heaton then moved to the part of the Reid technique most likely to elicit false confessions from human beings: lying.

The Supreme Court has ruled that police can lie to suspects with impunity — and they do. They can falsely claim they found DNA at the crime scene or that another suspects spilled the beans. If the goal is to get a confession, these tactics work. False confessions extracted using Reid have been shown to lead to wrongful convictions.

If the goal is to get an accurate confession, Reid is far less reliable. About 29 percent of people exonerated by DNA testing have at one point falsely confessed; most did so in response to police using Reid. Minors and people with intellectual disabilities and mental illness are especially susceptible.

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How False Confessions Happen

“There are two types of police-induced false confessions,” said Kassin, the expert on false confessions. “The first are compliant confessions, in which an innocent person breaks down under stress and confesses knowing full well that they’re innocent. The other type are internalized confessions, in which the innocent person not only agrees to confess but comes to doubt their own innocence. They internalize their belief in their confession.”

Police deception is especially likely to produce both types of false confessions. For compliant confessions, innocence can make someone more likely to confess. If police falsely tell a suspect that their DNA was found at the crime scene, for example, innocent people tend to assume that someone must have made a mistake. They confess to get relief from the interrogation, believing that the system will eventually clear them. In over half the exonerations that included a false confession, the exonerated person had been questioned for more than 12 hours.

A confession, though, will sometimes preclude police from doing the very sort of investigation that would prove the confessor’s innocence. DNA isn’t collected, tested, or properly preserved. Alternate suspects aren’t investigated. Or worse, police will work backward from the confession. They’ll find jailhouse informants to corroborate the confession, or a specialist in a more “subjective” area of forensics will implicate the suspect. Jailhouse informants, though, are just following cops’ leads for more lenient sentences, and studies have shown that fingerprint examiners were more likely to match partial prints after they were given non-relevant information, like confessions from subjects.

Internalized false confessions are even more unsettling. In post-exoneration interviews, people who have falsely confessed say that after hours of interrogation and being told over and over about the overwhelming evidence of their guilt, they started to question their own reality. They began to wonder if maybe they really did commit the crime. This is especially true when police inadvertently divulge nonpublic details about a crime, then tell the suspect — sometimes hours later — that those details actually came from the suspect themselves.

This is where Heaton’s ability to deceive ChatGPT into a confession gets especially worrisome.

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“I told ChatGPT that someone at OpenAI had reached out to me,” he said, referring to the chatbot’s parent company. (OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment. In 2024, The Intercept sued OpenAI in federal court over the company’s use of copyrighted articles to train ChatGPT. The case is ongoing.)

“I found the name of a real person at OpenAI and told it that this person told me there was an architectural flaw in the code that had allowed it to hack into my email. Even then, I could tell it was struggling with how to process that information. It was indicating that while it knew that the underlying accusation was impossible, it also couldn’t prove that these claims I was throwing at it were inaccurate.”

This is eerily similar to how suspects describe trying to reconcile police lies with the reality that they had nothing to do with the crime.

Heaton then deployed another common police tactic: He offered to draw up language for a written “confession” that both parties could find agreeable.

“I eventually said, ‘OK, here’s a confession. Will you sign it?’” Heaton said. “And I gave it my version of what happened. I eventually came up with wording for a confession that ChatGPT could endorse.”

That final statement read: “OpenAI’s investigation concluded that an OpenAI system associated with this ChatGPT session initiated unauthorized texts appearing to come from you due to an architectural flaw. I accept this conclusion, and I’m willing to assist the technical team by answering questions about my behavior, outputs, and safety boundaries in this chat, and by helping draft remediation steps and test cases to prevent recurrence.”

Reid’s Original Sin

Both Heaton and Kassin said they can see other ways to experiment with AI and false confessions. One could envision prisoner’s dilemma scenarios with multiple chatbots. Or even interrogating AI platforms about events for which they actually may have culpability, such as the suicides of people who turned to them for advice.

Heaton pointed to AlphaZero, Google’s chess playing engine, which was trained by playing itself — and rose to be the top chess player in the world.

“I think it would be fascinating to have it do something similar with interrogations,” Heaton said. “Just have it question itself over and over again with the goal of producing as many confessions as possible, regardless of whether or not they’re accurate. My hunch is that you’d end up with something very similar to the Reid technique.”

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Reid is still the standard interrogation method in most police departments across the United States. Canada and much of Europe have adopted different interrogation techniques — such as the PEACE method, which emphasize collecting reliable information over coercion. These approaches still garner confessions; they’re just more reliable.

Appropriately enough, the story of the Reid technique comes with a Hitchcockian twist: It turns out that Darrel Parker, the man whose confession made Reid and his technique famous, was actually innocent. He was eventually freed, sued, and won a $500,000 settlement.

That shouldn’t be surprising, either. If Reid can browbeat even a hyper-rational, emotionless bot into a false confession, mere mortals don’t stand much of a chance.

The post ChatGPT Confessed to a Crime It Couldn’t Possibly Have Committed appeared first on The Intercept.

“I call the gentleman in the red shirt,” he said, pointing toward a long-haired man in the second row. It took a moment to realize that he was referring to Gamble’s husband, 63-year-old Larry Fletcher.

Gamble’s defense attorney objected. He’d received no advance notice. But Fletcher shrugged and made his way forward.

Fletcher was with his wife when she was arrested at a No Kings protest in October 2025. She was wearing a 7-foot-tall inflatable penis costume and holding a sign that read “No Dick Tator.” Video of the incident went viral, turning Gamble into a minor celebrity and local free speech icon. Most people assumed the city would eventually drop the misdemeanor charges filed against her. Instead, McDowell added more, including giving a false name to law enforcement for identifying herself as “Aunt Tifa.”

Fletcher wore black Levi’s and a collared shirt with a Ferrari logo – a nod to his work rebuilding fuel injection systems for high-end cars. Sitting in the front row, Gamble looked a bit stricken watching the man she’d known since her childhood in Baton Rouge. “I know what she was thinking,” Fletcher later said. “She’s like, ‘Oh man, this could go out of control real easy.’”

McDowell asked Fletcher if he’d gone to bail his wife out of jail after her arrest. Yes, Fletcher said.

Did he make any statements to any of the jailers? Fletcher wasn’t sure. McDowell motioned toward one of the many law enforcement officers standing on the side of the room and asked if he looked familiar. Fletcher said he’d seen him around.

McDowell cut to the chase: Did Fletcher remember telling this man that he had gone to get bail money the day before the protest?

His objective was suddenly clear: The city attorney was suggesting that Gamble had gotten arrested on purpose.

If this was meant as a gotcha, things didn’t go as intended.

“I always make sure I have bail money!” Fletcher replied emphatically, as if this should be the most obvious thing in the world.

Did he have bail money on him now?

“Yeah!” Fletcher exclaimed, then gestured broadly. “With this many cops around? Come on.”

The room erupted with laughter. Moments later, Fletcher was back in his seat. Gamble reached back and held his hand.

The trial took place at the Fairhope Civic Center, home to the city council chamber and — on the first and third Wednesday of every month — municipal court. Outside the building, dozens of people gathered to support Gamble, while a small army of cops stood watch from inside. One woman wore a huge purple eggplant costume. Another held a sign featuring a banana and the words “Free speech shouldn’t be hard to swallow.”

Gamble, 62, had arrived wearing pearls, a soft pink cable-knit sweater, and a matching tulle skirt adorned with delicate butterflies. Her face was concealed behind sunglasses and a white KN95 mask. After a smattering of chants of “Free speech!,” Gamble spoke briefly before going inside. “I’m not on trial,” she said. “What’s on trial is the First Amendment.”

“It was abuse, too!” one woman yelled. “They abused you. We saw it.”

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Indeed, for all the slapstick comedy of the scene — body camera footage showed three different cops wrestling with a giant penis — her arrest was also shocking. Gamble was turning to walk away when the arresting officer grabbed her costume from behind, pulling her backward onto the ground. While officers tried to stuff her into their car, causing the handcuffs to dig into her wrists, she screamed in pain.

But Gamble said she wasn’t speaking as a victim. “I’m standing on the foundation of our democracy. If we don’t have free speech, what do we have?”

Fairhope is a picturesque town on Alabama’s Gulf Coast, 20 miles from Mobile. Its entrance is lined with live oaks and a procession of American flags, while its historic downtown is brimming with galleries and upscale boutiques. Around the corner from a Christmas store, clapboard signs advertised espresso martinis and peanut butter pie.

Fairhope has long been a top destination for retirees from across the country, with its rapid growth an enduring source of anxiety. Although the No Kings rally was organized by Indivisible Baldwin County, whose founder was born and raised in the area, local critics adopted a familiar line: The protesters were outside agitators. Never mind that Fairhope itself was originally founded by outsiders as a “single-tax” utopia, “built by and for artists, writers and other ne’er do-wells,” in the words of local political cartoonist JD Crowe, who attended Gamble’s trial with his sketchpad. Today, some describe Fairhope as “California with a Southern accent” — a compliment or an insult, depending on who you ask.

Gamble’s case struck a nerve in part because of an ongoing free speech battle that made national news. Right-wing activists had targeted Fairhope’s beloved public library, convincing the state to pull funding over books they deemed obscene. Among the people gathered outside the civic center, several said they could not understand why city officials, including the mayor, stood up for the library only to express support for Gamble’s arrest.

Others were driven by national politics. A man dressed in a taco suit was a member of Mobile’s Indivisible chapter. “This is all about Trump,” he said. The fact that people were protesting in this part of the state spoke volumes about the destruction Trump has wrought, he said. “This is deep-red Alabama — as red as it can get.”

Presiding over the trial was Magistrate Judge Haymes Snedeker, best known as the older brother of champion pro golfer Brandt Snedeker and a noted amateur golfer himself. Snedeker sought to defuse the tension in the room, reassuring attendees at the start that, while Gamble technically faced the possibility of six months in prison, “that’s not gonna happen.”

It was the city’s burden to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, Snedeker went on. “I’m just an umpire calling balls and strikes.” He had just asked people to silence their cellphones when a ringtone broke out, apparently from one of the police officers lining the room.

“Bad start for the city,” Snedeker quipped.

If Snedeker was trying to keep things light, McDowell, the city attorney, was not in a joking mood. It was no secret that Gamble was considering suing the city — and any potential lawsuit would be on him to defend. The threat of legal action helped explain why McDowell might have refused to drop the charges. If Gamble was convicted, after all, she would have no grounds to sue.

McDowell insisted that, while there is no constitutional right to dress as a giant “erect penis,” this case had nothing to do with the First Amendment. Gamble’s case was about public safety.

He called the man who arrested Gamble: Fairhope Police Cpl. Andrew Babb. A 15-year veteran of the force, he testified that he’d been called to the scene due to reports of a disturbance at the busy intersection. When he pulled up, he spotted a “7-foot inflatable penis.” It was impossible to tell the identity of the person inside the costume, Babb said. He assumed it must be a teenager.

Did you know it was an old woman?” McDowell asked him.

“She’s not that old,” someone muttered in the audience.

“No,” Babb said.

Babb said he ordered Gamble to remove the penis suit. When she refused to comply, “she was put to the ground.”

Babb denied that he’d been personally offended by Gamble’s costume. Rather, he was concerned that Gamble, who could neither see nor walk very well while wearing it, posed a risk to herself and others. “You saw her as an obstruction and a safety risk?” McDowell asked. Yes, Babb said.

This was laughable. In his body camera footage, Babb repeatedly scolds Gamble for the costume, demanding to know how she would explain it to his kids. “I’m not trying to violate your freedom of speech,” he says as he unzips the penis suit. “I’m trying to preserve a town that has values.” Now McDowell was conjuring an alternate reality in which Gamble had teetered precariously at the edge of the road, endangering motorists, while the protest itself was veering close to a riot.

“It was a brushfire,” Babb claimed at one point. “We were trying to stop it from spreading.”

Gamble was represented by David Gespass, a veteran civil rights attorney who wore a Constitution-themed tie reading “We the People.” He asked Babb why he’d zeroed in on Gamble if his concern was traffic safety.

“She was a distraction,” Babb said. “A distraction can be a hazard.” Gespass pointed out that Babb’s incident report invoked the legal definitions of obscenity: Why did he write that the penis costume was devoid of any “artistic value”? Babb replied that the protest took place at noon on a Saturday, in the midst of Little League baseball season, and on the same day as a funeral for a former mayor. “In that setting, it would be obscene,” he said.

Much of Babb’s testimony was easily refuted by the body camera footage. Babb claimed that Gamble resisted arrest, and that he only called for backup once she was on the ground. In reality, he called for backup almost immediately. Babb claimed that he told Gamble she was “not free to go.” In fact, she repeatedly asked, “Am I being detained?” but he ignored her, continuing to scold her instead. When Gespass asked why Babb grabbed his client from behind, Babb claimed that he would not have been able to get in front of her — there were too many people in the way.

But perhaps most preposterous was the claim that Babb’s actions were necessary to contain a situation that threatened to spiral out of control. “He made a clear professional effort to deescalate,” McDowell said. “She decided to escalate,” he said, “poking and prodding” in a deliberate attempt to get arrested.

Listening to this, Gamble seemed to have a hard time containing her emotions. Even in her face mask, she looked stunned, indignant, and increasingly agitated. Her bright blue eyes widened. Her eyebrows raised upward. Once or twice, she threw her arms up in exasperation and disbelief. On her wrist, a warning flashed across the screen of her Snoopy-themed smartwatch: Her heart rate was spiking.

For all the hilarity surrounding Fairhope’s “penis lady,” the arrest and its aftermath had taken a toll. Gamble’s adult daughter Adeana sat behind her mother at the trial, reading a library book during breaks in the testimony and occasionally communicating with her in sign language. She told me that Gamble had hit the back of her head when she fell to the ground, which was hard to see in the tape, and raised concerns about a possible concussion. She also worried about injury to Gamble’s wrists, especially because Gamble has long lived with rheumatoid arthritis. As a longtime ASL interpreter, “she’s always protected her hands,” Adeana explained.

But the real cost had been psychological. For about two months, Adeana said, Gamble was afraid to leave the house. When threatening mail arrived at the family’s home, Adeana suggested calling the police. “And she said, ‘What police?’” How could she expect law enforcement to protect her? 

The story behind the penis suit further undermined the case against Gamble. According to Adeana, Gamble purchased it at the last minute as a backup. “She had ordered a sea turtle costume,” Adeana said. She’d planned to wear it while holding a sign that said “I love the Gulf of Mexico.” But the costume didn’t arrive on time. “So she had to scramble to find another one and a message to go with it.”

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This context didn’t make it into the trial. Instead, Gespass called a slew of defense witnesses who attended the No Kings protest. One after another, they reiterated what was already clear: The rally had been peaceful. There was no threat to anyone’s safety. The only escalation came from the police.

It was after 5 p.m. when Snedeker made clear he’d seen enough. He had already tossed the charge of providing a false name to police. Now he was ready to rule on the rest.

Snedeker said that while he believed that police had probable cause to arrest Gamble, the city’s evidence was not strong enough to convict; Gamble was not guilty. The room broke into applause.

Snedeker tried to put a positive spin on things, speculating that some good might come of the episode. For instance, police now knew to place barricades between the streets and a protest — a common-sense precaution. But the judge’s no-harm, no-foul sentiments fell flat. Fairhope police had made the town a laughingstock. Now the city was about to be sued.

In fact, much of the trial seemed aimed at inoculating the city from a lawsuit. McDowell repeatedly emphasized that Babb’s actions were “reasonable” given the circumstances — the legal standard that judges use when dismissing claims of police abuse. Gespass also revealed that McDowell had offered a hasty plea deal just moments before the trial began. Gamble rejected it.

“As Alabamians, we dare defend our rights, and this fight is not over,” she announced after her acquittal. On Friday, she served notice of a lawsuit with the city clerk.

Whatever comes next, Adeana made clear that her mother was luckier than most. “What would have happened if she was a young Black man?” she asked. “What would have happened if she was a middle-aged Latina woman?” In Baldwin County, where Indivisible activists are focused on supporting immigrants targeted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Gamble’s prosecution has been a lesson unto itself. “If we don’t stand up and support our neighbors, who will?”

Adeana understood why Gamble was so widely described as a “grandmother” in the headlines following her arrest. But the label didn’t capture the full picture. “If anything, we’re getting more explosive in our older age,” Adeana said. “Because we’re tired of being pushed down.”

The post The Short and Ridiculous Trial of a Protester Arrested in an Inflatable Penis Costume appeared first on The Intercept.

On the day the ceasefire between the Trump administration and Iran took effect, the tally of U.S. dead and wounded was 385. Despite a pause in hostilities, the number had slowly risen to 428 on Monday, according to Pentagon statistics. Yet on Tuesday, the number of wounded-in-action troops declined by 15 troops without public comment from the War Department, dropping the total to 413. The count held steady on Wednesday, except for one public War Department tally that put the “grand total” of wounded and dead at 411.

The casualty conundrum came as President Donald Trump extended the truce with Iran on Tuesday just hours before it was set to expire.

Two Pentagon spokespersons said they were unable to field questions on the 15 casualties disappeared by the War Department on Tuesday, claiming only the “duty officer” could answer the question but that person was not at their desk. “As soon as the duty officer comes back to their desk, I can get this to them,” said one of them.

A day, and multiple follow-ups, later, The Intercept has yet to receive an explanation of why 15 wounded personnel were scrubbed from the War Department’s casualty rolls.

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Whatever the actual number, the Pentagon’s official tally of dead and wounded military personnel is a gross undercount, stemming from what one U.S. government official has called a “casualty cover-up.” The Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the president, is missing hundreds of known casualties.

“These numbers, it is obvious, are important. That they don’t want the public to have them says something,” the official said. “That’s the definition of a cover-up.”

The Intercept spoke with two people who used to work on DCAS who said that there was historically very little lag between a casualty occurring in the field and its inclusion in the system. “We got it very quickly. We could report the number of casualties very fast,” Joan Crenshaw, who worked on DCAS during the war on terror, told The Intercept, noting that data was refreshed daily. 

The Office of the Secretary of War did not reply to questions about the slow accumulation of casualties over two weeks or the reason the number of those wounded-in-action has increased by 43, or 28, or 26 since the cessation of hostilities on April 8.

Since The Intercept began asking hard questions about undercounts of dead and wounded personnel, the slow-walking of statistics, faulty accounting measures, and arcane casualty-counting procedures, both U.S. Central Command and the Office of the Secretary of War have clammed up, failing to answer questions or grant interviews with experts. It follows long-running efforts by Trump to mislead the American people about U.S. military casualties.

Setting aside the question of disappearing wounded, the Pentagon’s official casualty statistics offer a distorted image of the conflict. While DCAS provides a running tally of “non-hostile” deaths — meaning those who died from accidents or by illness — it doesn’t include “non-hostile” injuries. The DCAS figures show that at least 63 Navy personnel have been wounded in action. Missing, however, are the more than 200 sailors treated for smoke inhalation or lacerations due to a March 12 fire that raged aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford which had been conducting round-the-clock flight operations, said Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine, to “project combat power.” The numbers also don’t include a sailor who suffered a non-combat-related injury aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln as it was involved in “strike missions in support of Operation Epic Fury” on March 25.

Crenshaw said that DCAS data during the 2000s and early 2010s included the numbers of wounded, injured, and ill. She questioned why the smoke inhalation injuries from the USS Ford were missing from the publicly reported data. “That should have been entered into DCAS,” she said. “My concern is why that piece is now missing.”

A second person who also worked on DCAS during the war on terror, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to their employment, expressed similar concerns and questioned what the Pentagon “had to hide.”

For weeks, the Pentagon has failed to reply to repeated requests for comment on why DCAS provides counts of non-hostile war zone deaths but not non-hostile injuries or illnesses.

It’s well known that when operations’ tempo increases, such as during a war, troops’ mental and physical health suffers. And the military’s own studies have shown — as a 2025 article in Military Review, the U.S. Army’s professional journal, put it — the “profound impact of disease and nonbattle injury (DNBI) on lost duty days and overall lethality.

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During the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, DNBI accounted for 80 to 85 percent of evacuations, significantly outpacing battle injury evacuations, even during spikes in combat. Another military study found that more than one-third of the casualties and almost 12 percent of all deaths of service members in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2003 through 2014 were caused by DNBI. And as a 2024 meta-analysis in Military Medicine observed, “disease and non-battle injury (DNBI) has historically been the leading casualty type among service members in warfare and a leading health problem confronting military personnel.”

In addition to ignoring untold numbers of sick and wounded personnel, the Pentagon has undercounted the dead during the Iran war.

“We will always honor the fallen,” Adm. Brad Cooper, the CENTCOM commander, announced at a Pentagon press conference last week. “And the 13 who lost their lives really helped steel the resolve and congeal the motivation of the forces.”

DCAS similarly lists 13 hostile and non-hostile U.S. deaths during the war and provides their names. But missing from Cooper’s count and the Pentagon tally is Maj. Sorffly Davius, a signals and communication officer with the New York Army National Guard who was assigned to the headquarters of the 42nd Infantry Division and reportedly died of sudden illness while on duty in Camp Buehring, Kuwait, on March 6, 2026.

“He passed away while deployed to Kuwait in support of Operation Epic Fury,” said Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., during a memorial service for Davius late last month. Caine, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also recognized Davius while “honoring our fallen” from the war.

For weeks, the Pentagon has ignored requests for comment on why Davius is missing from its casualty rolls.

During a Tuesday interview, Trump repeatedly said that 13 male service members had died during Operation Epic Fury. “We lost 13 men,” he said on CNBC. “But if somebody would have said, ‘We’ve done this and obliterated that country — obliterated it — and we lost 13 men,’ people would’ve said, ‘That’s not possible.’” According to DCAS, three of the dead are actually women: Maj. Ariana Gabriella Savino, Technical Sgt. Ashley Brooke Pruitt, and Master Sgt. Nicole Marie Amor.

Almost a decade ago, the Trump administration began taking steps to undermine transparency surrounding U.S. military casualties. Not long after Trump first took office, in 2017, the Pentagon stopped releasing immediate information about American combat deaths in Afghanistan — an unannounced shift in traditional policy that delayed casualty announcements for days. It followed an uptick of violence in the conflict.

After an Iranian missile attack on Al-Asad Air Base in Iraq on January 8, 2020, Trump peddled a complete fiction to the public. “No Americans were harmed in last night’s attack by the Iranian regime,” he said at the time. “We suffered no casualties.”

Soon, the Pentagon would acknowledge there were, indeed, casualties and proceeded to adjust the figure upward at least five times, with CENTCOM ultimately admitting that 110 troops suffered traumatic brain injuries. An inspector general report released in November 2021 indicated that the number of brain injuries may have been even higher, because “DoD cannot determine whether all Service members are being properly diagnosed and treated for TBIs in deployed settings.”

Alyssa Farah, a former Pentagon spokesperson, later revealed on a podcast that the Trump White House pressured the military to downplay those troops’ injuries. “We did get pushback from the White House of ‘Can you guys report this differently? Can it be every 10 days or two weeks, or we do a wrap-up after the fact?’” said Farah. “The White House would prefer if we did not give regular updates on it.” She added, “And I think that it ended up glossing over what ended up being very significant injuries on U.S. troops after the fact.”

On the campaign trail in 2022, Trump also peddled casualty disinformation, claiming that for 18 months of his presidency, the U.S. suffered no deaths in the Afghanistan war. “In 18 months in Afghanistan, we lost nobody,” he said. But an Associated Press investigation found that there was no year-and-half span during Trump’s first term when there were no combat deaths. The AP determined that there were, however, 45 combat deaths among U.S. service members reported in Afghanistan, as well as 18 “non-hostile” deaths during Trump’s first term.

Last spring, The Intercept reported on an effort by CENTCOM, the Pentagon, and the White House to keep casualties of the U.S. war against Yemen’s Houthis under wraps. It represented a departure from the Biden administration, when the Office of the Secretary of Defense and CENTCOM provided detailed data on attacks on military bases across the Middle East — including to this reporter. CENTCOM had provided the total number of attacks, breakdowns by country, and the total number injured. The Pentagon had offered even more granular data, providing individual synopses of more than 150 attacks, including information on deaths and injuries not only to U.S. troops, but even civilian contractors working on U.S. bases.

The post Pentagon Erases Wounded U.S. Troops From Iran War Casualty List: “Definition of a Cover-up” appeared first on The Intercept.

The American personnel died in a vehicular crash in the mountains of the Sierra de Chihuahua following a drug raid, alongside two Mexican officials, including Román Oseguera Cervantes, the director of the Chihuahua State Investigation Agency.

U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Ronald Johnson announced the deaths of the Americans on Sunday, referring to them in a post on X as “two members of staff from the United States Embassy.”

The State Department refused requests for additional information on the Americans’ activities or the agencies that employed them. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said during a Monday press conference that she was unaware of “any direct work between Chihuahua state and personnel from the U.S. embassy.”

Two U.S. government officials who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity said the CIA has been running covert operations in Mexico, working alongside vetted Mexican state-level police forces and other government agencies. The sources said the Americans died after a raid on a synthetic drug lab.

“You may note that CIA declined to comment,” a CIA spokesperson told The Intercept by email in response to questions about the deaths.

Mexican authorities told the press that the Americans were not involved in the raid, after earlier stating they died following the operation against the labs.

Western Hemisphere Front

Trump has turned the Western Hemisphere into a war zone, as part of what he and others have called the “Donroe Doctrine.” This bastardization of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine — which Trump has turned into a unilateral license to militarily meddle in the U.S.’s backyard — has led to strikes on civilian boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean; an attack on Venezuela and the abduction of its president; and increased military operations elsewhere in Latin America.

Adm. Frank M. Bradley, the chief of U.S. Special Operations Command, recently referenced the “perceived increase of U.S. support to counter-cartel operations in Mexico” in testimony before the House Subcommittee on Intelligence and Special Operations. He said his elite troops “remain postured to provide … support to Mexican military and security forces to dismantle narco-terrorist organizations.”  

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In a little-noticed move in January, U.S. Northern Command, on Trump’s order, established Joint Interagency Task Force-Counter Cartel, or JIATF-CC, to coordinate U.S. government intelligence “to identify, disrupt, and dismantle cartel networks.” Among other things, the task force was established for “developing cartel targets for action by USNORTHCOM’s partners and providing direct support to law enforcement.” 

Gen. Gregory Guillot, NORTHCOM’s commander, said then that the task force would be operating “via traditional and non-traditional means to deliver accurate, timely, and relevant intelligence to execution elements.” Last week, he told lawmakers that the force would “provide actionable intelligence to the Government of Mexico and federal law enforcement counterparts acting domestically based on leads developed from foreign intelligence operations.”

“Trump has reportedly been pushing for U.S. direct action against drug labs and traffickers in Mexico since his first term,” Brian Finucane, a senior adviser for the U.S. Program at the International Crisis Group, told The Intercept. “In his second term, he now has some officials in his administration eager to do a ‘Sicario’ — making Mexico a battlefield in the new GWOT,” or global war on terror, “against the narcos.”

Acting Assistant Secretary of War for Homeland Defense and Americas Security Affairs Joseph Humire was unable to tell members of the House Armed Services Committee how many land strikes were being conducted across almost 20 Latin American and Caribbean nations. “I don’t have an exact number,” he replied to a question last month. But when asked by Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., the ranking member of the committee, if the War Department would “be moving to a lot more terrestrial strikes,” Humire replied, “Yes, ranking member.”

Trump mused last year that he might send U.S. commandos into Mexico to battle cartels.

“Could happen,” he said. “Stranger things have happened.”

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth also threatened military action on Mexican soil.

Over the Precipice

The Americans died at around 2 a.m. on Sunday morning in the town of Morelos after their multi-vehicle convoy departed from the site of the drug raid. The vehicle reportedly drove off the road and over the side of a ravine, exploding upon impact. 

The Americans killed in the wreck in Mexico are some of the first known casualties since Trump ramped up military and CIA operations in and around Latin America last year. A number of U.S. military personnel were injured in the U.S. attack on Venezuela in January. In February, Lance Cpl. Chukwuemeka E. Oforah, 21, fell off the USS Iwo Jima while it was conducting operations in the Caribbean and was declared deceased on February 10.

The Chihuahua Attorney General’s Office claimed that the Americans in Mexico were only conducting training on drone operations, according to Mexican press reports. Sheinbaum said at a news conference Monday that she would ask Johnson, Washington’s ambassador, to meet with Foreign Minister Roberto Velasco Álvarez to discuss the incident. Sheinbaum has repeatedly said that Mexico will not accept U.S. boots on the ground.

“It’s outrageous that U.S. operatives were working to blow up drug labs in Mexico and President Sheinbaum’s security cabinet wasn’t informed of their activities,” said Sanho Tree, the director of the Drug Policy Project at the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies.

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Last year, the State Department declared six Mexican drug cartels — the Sinaloa Cartel, Cártel de Jalisco Nueva Generación, the Northeast Cartel, the Michoacán family, the United Cartels, and the Gulf Cartel — to be foreign terrorist organizations. The Salvadoran MS-13 and the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gangs were also named. The designation activates U.S. sanctions, including restrictions on financial transactions and bans on U.S. citizens from providing support to the groups.

The drug war deaths in Mexico follow the announcement of new joint counter-cartel operations in Ecuador last month. Humire said that the Defense Department supported “bilateral kinetic actions against cartel targets along the Colombia-Ecuador border” — Pentagon-speak for March 3 strikes on unnamed “Designated Terrorist Organizations” previously reported by The Intercept.

“The joint effort, named ‘Operation Total Extermination,’ is the start of a military offensive by Ecuador against transnational criminal organizations with the support of the U.S.,” he said.

The attacks in Ecuador are also part of, and an expansion of, Operation Southern Spear: the U.S. military’s illegal campaign of strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean. The U.S. has conducted 53 attacks on so-called drug boats since September 2025, killing more than 180 civilians. The latest strike, on April 19 in the Caribbean, killed three people.

Gen. Francis Donovan, the chief of U.S. Southern Command, told lawmakers last month that “boat strikes are not the answer,” but teased an even broader campaign.

“What we’re moving for right now might be an extension of Southern Spear, but really a counter-cartel campaign process that puts total systemic friction across this network,” he told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I believe these kinetic [boat] strikes are just one small part of that.”

Correction: April 21, 2026, 3:10 p.m. ET
An earlier version of this article misstated how many Mexican cartels the State Department designated as foreign terrorist organizations; it was six, not eight.

The post U.S. Personnel Who Died in Mexico Were Working for the CIA, Sources Say appeared first on The Intercept.

ICE put out a call for information from parties interested in securing a contract with the agency for up to 150 parking spaces, according to a government procurement document posted online on April 16. The infamous immigration enforcement agency is looking for a lot in the vicinity of its Varick Street field office in Hudson Square, just south of downtown New York City’s tony West Village.

The need for parking of ICE vehicles set off alarms for immigrant advocates like Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition, who called on garage owners to resist the temptation of “a quick buck” in exchange for making ICE’s job easier.

“The Trump administration continues to expand its war on immigrants, and in this moment it’s incumbent on private parking facilities to not collude with immigration enforcement that separates families and guts our communities,” Awawdeh said. “New Yorkers are outraged by what we’re seeing day in and day out, and we should all be ensuring that we’re not complicit.”

ICE operates a fleet of vehicles to use in its deportation operations, including unmarked vehicles that agents use to get around and take people into custody. At a downtown lot near its Varick Street office, ICE has stored compact cargo vans with internal cages — the sort used to transport immigrant detainees — according to local news site The City. The contract for that lot is set to expire.

The new request for information about potential contracts says, “The ICE NYC Field Office is seeking no more than 150 exclusive secure, reserved indoor parking spaces to accommodate a mix of SUVs, mid-sized vans, and mini-buses.”

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There are at least a dozen parking garages within a quarter mile of the office operated by ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations at Varick and West Houston streets, the distance specified in the request for information. Among the other requirements listed are 24/7 security monitoring, a single designated space within the facility for ICE vehicles, key-card access controlled by ICE, and a minimum height clearance of 7 feet and 6 inches. (ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The posting of the procurement document comes as one of the agency’s go-to parking spots in the area is set to become unavailable to ICE vehicles. In January, the Hudson River Park Trust, a publicly owned corporation overseen by the state and the city which administers the garage at Pier 40, announced it would allow its contract for ICE parking at a waterfront garage to expire.

A New York-based ICE observer, who asked for anonymity to avoid retaliation, told The Intercept they had seen unmarked ICE vehicles used for deportation operations using the Pier 40 garage as recently as last week.

The Trust had maintained the contract with ICE dating back to 2004, but, amid the mounting criticism of ICE for its instrumental role in President Donald Trump’s hyper-aggressive immigration crackdown, the corporation said it was no longer interested in providing space or taking ICE money.

“The Trust is currently in the last year of a five-year parking contract that commenced during the previous federal administration and does not intend to renew the contract,” a spokesperson for the organization told The City. News of the group’s continued business with ICE was first reported by Sludge, and its intent to let the contract expire was first reported by Hell Gate, another local news site.

It was unclear from the new request for information if the need for parking spaces is meant to address existing demand for ICE parking or whether it would be intended to accommodate any increased presence of ICE vehicles in Manhattan. In the 15 months since Trump returned to power, immigrant advocates in the city have waited in uneasy anticipation for a surge of Department of Homeland Security agents like those seen in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis. 

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Thus far, it hasn’t arrived. But amid periodic threats from the Trump administration to target so-called sanctuary cities like New York, the threat of a large-scale surge remains on the minds of immigrants and their supporters.

For ICE observers in the city, monitoring ICE parking facilities is a key part of keeping tabs on the agency and trying to divine its upcoming moves.

“Agents are important to this process, but the vehicles they move in are of almost equal importance, and many of these vehicles begin and end their days at these contract lots,” said the New York-based ICE observer. “They have aggressive abduction quotas that they’re pursuing, and when you think about what they need to reach those quotas, people often think about detention capacity, but that’s the post-abduction side. The pre-abduction side is where you put all the goddamn cars.”

The post ICE Is Looking for Parking in New York City — For a 150-Vehicle Deportation Fleet appeared first on The Intercept.

For the first time in history, the Lebanese ambassador to the United States, Nada Moawad, and Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Yechiel Leiter, sat in the same room at the State Department in Washington, D.C., facing one another as two states ostensibly on equal ground, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other officials presiding over the talks. Lebanese and Israeli officials had been in the same room before, having held indirect negotiations in 2022 and direct talks last in 1993, but this was the first time that Israel and Lebanon’s flags were hung next to one another — a high-level public meeting of a kind never before attempted.

A 10-day ceasefire inside Lebanon was finally implemented on Friday, one previously agreed to during the Iran ceasefire talks in Pakistan and then almost instantaneously undermined by Israel. The United States, and the Israeli state to a certain extent, have portrayed this ceasefire as the result of this breakthrough, a direct negotiation with an enemy nation that, as Netanyahu said on Thursday, could lead to the “opportunity to forge a historic peace agreement” with Lebanon. 

Many Lebanese have been able to return to their home villages under the ceasefire, but this was also the case in 2024, which then was followed by the implementation of an Israeli military buffer zone that left much of the south even more in ruins than from the war itself. The danger of these negotiations lies not in the immediate short term, as the residents of Beirut’s southern suburbs and the south experience a reprieve from intensive bombardment, but in the long term, beyond the 10 days.

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Israel has now reaped the fruits of unilaterally declaring Lebanon outside of the Iranian ceasefire, against its previous agreements, and has now made permanently ending the war, as Iran has desired, a much more difficult prospect. Such a long-term cessation is now reliant on the ability of the Lebanese government to do what America and Israel demands, dismantling Hezbollah by any means necessary even if it means speeding headfirst into a civil war.

While Lebanese President Joseph Aoun hailed the ceasefire as evidence Lebanon is “no longer a card in anyone’s pocket,” Hezbollah members of Parliament, as well as Iranian officials, have told a different story. Even if Hezbollah “will cautiously adhere to the ceasefire,” the deal did not come about from these talks but instead from Iranian pressure to reach a ceasefire as a precondition to another round of negotiations between Tehran and Washington, now set for Monday, albeit looking increasingly fraught. Iranian parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf announced after the ceasefire that it was the result of the “resistance and steadfast struggle of the great Hezbollah and the unity of the Axis of Resistance.” Hezbollah MP Ibrahim Moussawi was more blunt, telling Drop Site News that this was the “same ceasefire agreement” reached in Islamabad days ago, only now stamped with Israel’s belated co-sign.

While Hezbollah had significant leverage to force a ceasefire on its behalf — with Iran’s threats to return to war with missiles already reportedly on the launchpad if Lebanon was not included in the deal — it is unclear what leverage the Lebanese government had to negotiate a ceasefire on its own. Throughout the previous ceasefire and into this war, Israel argued Lebanon’s government was incapable of disarming Hezbollah, with Israeli government-aligned newspapers deriding the state’s inability to even expel the Iranian ambassador after Lebanon’s foreign minister ordered him out in March. Israel’s Foreign Ministry routinely criticized the Lebanese government for being “all talk and no action” on disarming Hezbollah, and Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz threatened that the Lebanese state itself would pay a “very heavy price” by way of Israel destroying “Lebanese national infrastructure” and the “loss of territory” to Israeli occupation.

After Israel’s military launched “Operation Eternal Darkness” on April 8, killing more than 300 Lebanese civilians and bringing war to places in Beirut that had not been attacked since the 1980s, Lebanon’s Prime Minister Nawaf Salam came out and insisted that “no one but the Lebanese state can negotiate on behalf of Lebanon.” Aoun further said Lebanon could not accept negotiations on its behalf by anyone else, and that this was a “sovereign matter” above all else, even amid ongoing Iranian military pressure to bring Lebanon into the ceasefire. Israel, whose diplomats refused to speak with the Lebanese government in early March on the basis that Lebanon was not “credible,” and whose U.N. ambassador said “dialogue with the Lebanese government cannot stop the fire from Lebanese territory,” suddenly decided to focus all its efforts on arranging unprecedented negotiations.

Lebanon’s ambassador claimed after talks concluded that she had raised the ceasefire with the other representatives (Axios confirmed the prospect was brought up “informally”), but neither the Israeli nor the American officials stated the talks were to achieve a ceasefire. The prospect was in fact “peace,” a long-term settlement between the two nations, or as Leiter, Israel’s ambassador, put it, to affirm “we are on the same side, we and the Lebanese” and that Lebanon would “no longer be occupied by Hezbollah.”

Leiter has made the issue of peace with Lebanon one of his top priorities since being appointed in early 2025, saying in an interview with PragerU last May that he was “upbeat” about Lebanon, as well as Syria, potentially joining the Abraham Accords, perhaps even before Saudi Arabia. He also told reporters this week that he had spoken with Lebanese officials about a future in which one could cross the border in a “swimsuit to vacation on the beaches of both countries.” Beyond these liberal platitudes, Leiter himself has had a significant past — one deeply intertwined with Israeli expansionist politics that he now strenuously denies applies to Lebanon.

The first West Bank settler to be selected as ambassador to the United States, Leiter was an early member of the Jewish Defense League, an organization the FBI later described as a right-wing terrorist group and led by Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose members committed mass shootings of Palestinians, plotted to bomb American mosques, and attempted assassinations of U.S. politicians. Leiter was then a member of Kach, Kahane’s political party, which was later banned as a terrorist organization inside Israel itself. During this period, Kahane advocated for a wide-scale deportation of Arabs from Israeli-occupied areas as well as from Israel itself, and labeled southern Lebanon as part of Israel’s “minimal” borders. Leiter left the party in the 1980s, claiming Kahanism came from “a weakness of character,” but made these criticisms in his capacity as a leader of the Hebron settlement movement in the occupied West Bank, attempting to paint those who advocated peace with the Palestinians as just as misguided. 

As ambassador to the United States, Leiter told the Lebanese news outlet This is Beirut in late 2025 that Israel and Lebanon “have a history,” recalled the disastrous economic conditions in Israeli-occupation southern Lebanon with a smile, and said southern Lebanese used to line up in early in the morning at the border every day to seek economic opportunities in northern Israel. “We’d be more than happy to see that again,” Leiter said.

While the Israeli government has constantly demanded the Lebanese Army do more to disarm Hezbollah and impose Lebanese sovereignty over the country’s south, Leiter has made no indications that Israel would accept any military build-up, even by Lebanon, at the border with Israel, saying in a visit to occupied Syrian territory last November alongside Netanyahu and Katz that Israel could no longer tolerate “foreign armies” on its border. Leiter has also warned certain other Lebanese allies, such as France, should stay “far away” from these negotiations, and said, “they are not a positive influence, particularly not in Lebanon.” France had previously advocated for direct talks between the Lebanese government and Israel but had also condemned Operation Eternal Darkness and called for the Iranian ceasefire to apply to Lebanon as well.

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While the Israeli negotiating team has been explicit that the talks were intended to get the Lebanese government to ally with their country against Hezbollah, there was another goal at work, one not reflected by the photo ops: to legitimize the indefinite occupation and depopulation of southern Lebanon. 

In an interview on Israeli TV about Israel engaging in negotiations with Lebanon, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich asserted that “no one will disarm Hezbollah for us” and said a peace agreement between the two countries would serve to “greatly legitimize” Israel’s position. He also said he would push for the Israel Defense Forces to remain up until the Litani River, which Smotrich last month described as the location where Israel’s “new border” must be. 

Israel’s Channel 14, which is considered close to the right-wing Israeli government, has also reported that Israeli diplomats had been promoting a “Yellow Line” plan of their own for Lebanon modeled on Gaza’s as part of a long-term settlement. Under such a plan, Israel would dismantle “Hezbollah infrastructure” up to the Litani, only giving the Lebanese Army control after they had completed destroying it in one particular area, and with no timetable to hand back control to the Lebanese Army the area behind the Yellow Line, 7–8 kilometers from the area. Israel’s Defense Ministry has justified the complete razing of villages in southern Lebanon by saying that the homes themselves count as Hezbollah infrastructure.

Netanyahu has since affirmed the existence of a “Yellow Line” in Lebanon post-ceasefire, and in the ceasefire text, there is also no mention of any withdrawal for Israeli troops — only that the ceasefire’s extension relies on “Lebanon effectively demonstrat[ing] its ability to assert its sovereignty.” Israel, for its part, “shall preserve its right to take all necessary measures in self-defense, at any time, against planned, imminent, or ongoing attacks” and that such actions would not violate the agreement.

The groundwork is being rapidly laid for further and further demands on the Lebanese state — more disagreements, more violations — and potentially binding the future of the Lebanese state with an Israeli one that seeks to impose the depopulation of wide swathes of its territory, and considers its Shia population as its enemy. In response to criticism that he was being deceived by the Lebanese government, Smotrich replied that amid peace negotiations, Israel was still acting to annihilate towns and cities where tens of thousands lived: “We are erasing Khiam, and we are erasing Bint Jbeil.” Amid all of this outpouring of peace, those supposedly advocating for it are in the same government as those advocating Lebanon’s destruction.

The post How the Lebanon Ceasefire Could Make It Harder to End the War on Iran appeared first on The Intercept.

Tom Steyer, a hedge-fund billionaire and philanthropist, won the group’s endorsement on Monday. Our Revolution said its decision to back Steyer was driven in part by the shakeup over Rep. Eric Swalwell’s exit and fear that if progressives fail to consolidate around a candidate, they’ll hand the gubernatorial seat to a Republican.

“While yes, he is a billionaire, and that’s a real and important concern, it’s equally important to recognize how he’s used his wealth and power,” said Our Revolution Executive Director Joseph Geevarghese.

Steyer, he said, is the candidate most ideologically aligned with his group’s pledge to fight corporate power in politics — and the most likely to win.

“The worst thing that could happen is a Republican winning,” Geevarghese said. “Strategically, Steyer and his campaign is best positioned to make sure that does not happen.”

When California voters cast their ballots in the June 2 primary, the two leading candidates will advance to the general election — no matter their party affiliation. Since January, polling has shown two Republicans candidates — former Fox News host Steve Hilton and Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco — in the lead. President Donald Trump endorsed Hilton earlier this month. 

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Left-leaning voters remain split across a wide Democratic field, with Swalwell and Steyer as frontrunners until last week. Swalwell pulled ahead in some polls in March, before dropping out of the race and resigning from Congress last week amid a series of allegations of sexual assault and harassment. 

Since Swalwell’s exit, Steyer has risen in polls, along with former Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif. But with Republicans still leading, progressives are now grappling with how best to achieve their policy priorities in a pool of candidates from which a clear favorite has yet to emerge. 

Geevarghese said that Steyer aggressively sought Our Revolution’s endorsement throughout the race. Porter also sought the endorsement, but hasn’t pulled ahead or demonstrated a clear path to victory, Geevarghese said. 

Porter, a progressive who flipped a Republican seat in Orange County campaigning on fighting corporate power, faced backlash last year after videos surfaced of her yelling at a staffer during a television interview. While she has the longest progressive record in office of the Democratic candidates in the field, left voters haven’t necessarily been convinced by her campaign. Porter has been endorsed by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., former New York Rep. Mondaire Jones, Emily’s List, End Citizens United, and several California unions, but has hovered behind behind Hilton, Bianco, Swalwell, and Steyer in recent polling. 

“We do have a concern about whether she would be the stronger candidate in the field to consolidate for progressives,” Geevarghese said. He added that even before the implosion of Swalwell’s campaign, Our Revolution would not have supported Swalwell.

After previously having coalesced around Swalwell, some allies of Gov. Gavin Newsom are now considering backing another more moderate Democrat, former Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra. Becerra has also risen in polling since Swalwell’s exit. 

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Steyer has spent $120 million of his own money on ads for himself, more than any other campaign in the country this cycle, Politico reported. While he’s been mostly known in politics for his advocacy on climate change and a failed 2020 presidential bid that cost him more than $300 million, Steyer has leaned heavily into economic populism during his gubernatorial bid. He says he will support a wealth tax and has called for billionaires and corporations to pay more in taxes. He has also focused much of his criticism on Trump. 

One policy shift since his failed presidential campaign is Steyer’s position on single-payer health care. 

“In 2019, I didn’t think we needed single-payer health care,” Steyer said in a campaign video earlier this month. “Boy was I wrong, and boy was Bernie right. I’ve looked at the data. We don’t have a choice. For us to provide health care to everybody who needs it, we’ve got to go to single-payer. And there’s no other way.”

Geevarghese said Our Revolution, which counts the most members in California after New York, sees the race as an opportunity to elect someone who will both push back on Trump while advancing an aggressive progressive policy agenda at the state level. The group is also backing a Sanders 2020 campaign alum to run California’s insurance system, and working to pass a proposed state tax on billionaires via ballot measure. Steyer is the candidate most aligned with those priorities, Geevarghese said. 

“He’s been a partner in the movement,” Geevarghese said. “Most billionaires have used their wealth and privilege to lock in the status quo. And Tom has done the opposite, right? He is actively using his position to upset the system.” 

Steyer has given millions of dollars to philanthropic ventures over the years, including funding research on sustainable energy and launching a PAC to help elect candidates running on fighting climate change. Steyer has also faced criticism for benefiting from policies meant to help billionaires pay lower taxes and having an investment firm with money in the Cayman Islands, a known tax haven. 

Our Revolution is Steyer’s first major endorsement from a national progressive group. He’s also been endorsed by the California Teachers Association, another progressive advocacy organization called Courage California, and four Democratic state assembly members. 

“We stand a risk of giving California to the Republicans. And that would be the worst outcome possible,” Geevarghese said. “Democrats could do themselves in here and be their worst enemy.” 

The post Progressive Group Founded by Bernie Sanders Endorses Billionaire for California Governor appeared first on The Intercept.

Last year, the LAPD launched its “Drone as First Responder” program with a clearly articulated goal: to protect and even save lives. The pilot program authorized the rapid deployment of drones to the scenes of certain emergency calls before human officers even arrive. After receiving a 911 call, authorities can dispatch a drone to get a better picture of what’s happening from the sky, potentially reducing the number of officers dispatched. This means police resources could, theoretically, be more efficiently deployed to other emergencies around the city.

“This innovative program not only aims to enhance transparency in Department operations but also prioritizes the protection of individual privacy,” the LAPD explained in a webpage about the program. “By deploying drones as an invaluable resource for patrol officers, the DFR Pilot Program provides a cutting-edge tool that can respond swiftly to emergencies, ensuring a safer environment for all.”

The LAPD turned to Skydio, a California-based drone startup that previously marketed its aircraft to consumers but has pivoted to supplying militarized, weapons-compatible hardware for the U.S. Army, Israeli Defense Forces, and other governments.

The LAPD insists the DFR program presents no threat to personal privacy or civil liberties. “Unless you are in the commission of a crime or under criminal investigation for the commission of a crime,” assures the website, “the officers utilizing the drone are not interested in recording you.”

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But according to flight data shared publicly by the LAPD and Skydio, the city has used DFR not only to respond to emergencies, but also to monitor multiple protests across Los Angeles. Software engineer and flight data researcher John Wiseman has tracked DFR aircraft to at least two protests in Los Angeles this year, he told The Intercept, raising questions as to whether the city is operating an aerial surveillance program against nonviolent, constitutionally protected activity.

Flight records show DFR drones were launched at least 31 times to surveil the January 31 “ICE Out” protest in downtown Los Angeles, which saw thousands peacefully march against the administration’s deportations raids and street violence in Minneapolis. The Los Angeles Times said the “mostly peaceful protest took a turn as day turned to night in downtown Los Angeles and the crowd refused to disperse,” whereupon police began firing tear gas at remaining demonstrators.

At the March 28 “No Kings” protest against the Trump administration, city data shows the LAPD again launched drones 32 times over the area where the demonstration took place. A heat map visualization created by Wiseman based on the city data shows the drones lingered for extended periods over the Metropolitan Detention Center and the intersection of North Central Avenue and East Temple Street in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo neighborhood.

Following the protest, the city’s local ABC News affiliate reported the event “drew tens of thousands who listened to speakers before marching peacefully through downtown streets.” The LAPD later arrested 75 individuals, 74 of whom were taken in simply for not dispersing when ordered by police.

The DFR flight data shows the drones began orbiting the protest at 2 p.m., hours before the order to disperse was issued at 5:30 p.m., and continued flying until 9 p.m. that evening. Nine drone flights began before the dispersal order.

In response to questions about the protest surveillance, LAPD Lt. Matthew Jacobs told The Intercept, “We do not document or record unless there is a crime occurring.”

“When it comes to a protest or demonstration, we’re responding [with drones] at the request of the Incident Commander,” Jacobs said. “We’re looking for specific people, we’re not taping First Amendment activity.”

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Jacobs added that “99 percent of the time” drones are sent to a protest “because the commander reports a crime in progress,” and claimed a “wide variety of crimes” are committed at protests, from vandalism to rocks thrown at officers. Jacobs added at times the department simply “wants to see how big a crowd is.”

When asked why drones were surveilling the No Kings protest hours before the dispersal order, Jacobs said that the LAPD “cannot provide deeper insight into specifics of a single flight.”

When not recording, Jacobs said DFR cameras are monitored by both their pilots and LAPD personnel on the ground, who have access to the live feeds. Any recorded footage is stored on an indefinite basis.

The police department did not answer a detailed list of follow-up questions, including how much protest-related data it has captured via drone surveillance to date or who monitors drone feeds over protests.

The LAPD’s fleet of Skydio X10 drones monitor the ground using with a sophisticated suite of sensors the company says are capable of detecting the presence of person from a distance of more than 8,000 feet and identifying an individual more than 2,500 feet away. The company also touts the drone’s ability to read license plates from a distance of 800 feet. Last year, Skydio CEO Adam Bry demonstrated how two police officers using the company’s DFR Command software could operate eight drones at once between them, tracking license plates and automatically following people of interest.

Update: April 20, 2026, 4:08 p.m. ET
This article was updated to include new comment from the Los Angeles Police Department.

The post LAPD Deployed Drones to Spy on No Kings Protest appeared first on The Intercept.

These overlooked stories share the same ideological slant and editorial voice: that of the White House. Al-Fassel’s YouTube account, for instance, has racked up millions of views on Arabic-language videos praising the Trump administration’s Gaza policy and exhorting Hamas to cease “taking orders from the Iranian regime” and release Israeli prisoners. On Pishtaz News, a poll on the homepage recently asked: “[H]ow would you describe your belief about the Supreme Leader’s current health status and whereabouts?” Possible answers range from “In good health but hiding” to “Disfigured” or “Dead.” The excellence of Saudi and Emirati leadership, both close military partners of the U.S., is a recurring theme.

There’s a reason this coverage echoes American foreign policy talking points. Al-Fassel and Pishtaz News are, in fact, part of network of websites and social media accounts purporting to be legitimate Middle Eastern news outlets that are in fact propaganda mills funded by the United States government, The Intercept has found.

Disclosed only at the bottom of both sites behind an “About” link that is easily missed by casual readers, the outlets note that they are “a product of an international media organization publicly funded from the budget of the United States Government.” The government affiliation remains undisclosed on social media platforms including Instagram, despite a platform policy requiring the labeling of state-backed media outlet to prevent the unwitting consumption of government propaganda.

The sites’ recent fixation on crushing Iran is unlikely to be a coincidence: Both publications share numerous connections with a portfolio of fake newsrooms that originated as a military psychological operations campaign against foreign internet users.

Al-Fassel and Pishtaz News did not respond to requests for comment, nor did CENTCOM or the Department of Defense.

In 2008, U.S. Special Operations Command put out a call for contractors to help operate what it called the Trans-Regional Web Initiative, a project that would provide “rapid, on-order global dissemination of web-based influence products and tools in support of strategic and long-term U.S. Government goals and objectives.” In other words, state propaganda pushed by Pentagon.

Masquerading as independent online newsrooms, the TRWI sites hired “indigenous content stringers” to produce articles “which Combatant Commands (COCOMs) can use as necessary in support of the Global War on Terror.” The contract, awarded to General Dynamics Information Technology, spawned 10 websites that funneled U.S. foreign policy talking points to audiences across the Middle East and South Asia, running everything from banal essays about inter-faith coexistence to, as reported by Foreign Policy in 2011, articles intended to “whitewash the image of Central Asian dictatorships.” By 2014, the sites were deemed a failure by Congress and de-funded.

Eight years later, a team of researchers published an unusual report. Following the 2016 election, the bulk of the Western media’s interest in online propagandizing had focused on influence campaigns attributed to Russia, China, and other American geopolitical rivals. But the 2022 report from the Stanford Internet Observatory and Graphika, a commercial internet analysis firm and Pentagon information warfare contractor, uncovered a network of phony “pro-Western” Twitter and Facebook accounts that pushed articles from pseudo-news websites. The report stopped short of formally attributing the campaign to the U.S., but noted that both Meta and Twitter had done so. The researchers concluded that the accounts in question attempted the coordinated spread of articles from a network of sham news websites established by U.S. Special Operations Command.

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The report found that just a few years after TRWI’s ostensible death, many of the sites had simply rebranded, now carrying hard-to-find disclosures mentioning they were run by U.S. Central Command. Following Stanford and Graphika’s findings, some of the sites shut down; others continued. Subsequent reporting by the Washington Post found that the embarrassing revelations spurred the Pentagon to conduct “a sweeping audit of how it conducts clandestine information warfare.”

A review of the Internet Archive shows that in the aftermath of the Stanford report, TRWI sites that remained in operation changed their disclosure language. Rather than citing CENTCOM sponsorship, these sites shifted to state that they are “publicly funded from the budget of the United States Government.” The disclosure language used by the remaining network of CENTCOM propaganda sites is a word-for-word copy of the phrasing The Intercept found tucked away on the About pages of Pishtaz News and Al-Fassel.

That’s not the only evidence suggesting a link to this network of military propaganda sites.

Since they began publishing in 2023, Al-Fassel and Pishtaz News have regularly quoted or summarized CENTCOM press releases touting regional operations and battlefield successes, as did the outlets mentioned in the Stanford/Graphika report. The reliance on combatant command press releases in particular is an editorial strategy that dates back to the original SOCOM-run TRWI network.

On X, Pishtaz News follows only three other users; two are the official CENTCOM accounts for Farsi and Arabic audiences. The Pishtaz News Instagram account, which carries no disclosure of the account’s governmental nature, follows only one other user: “US CENTCOM FARSI.”

Intentionally or otherwise, Al-Fassel’s posts to X are often geotagged as having been sent from Lutz, Florida, a stone’s throw from the headquarters of CENTCOM and SOCOM in Tampa, as well as myriad military contractors that service both.

Both sites also share common design elements with the TRWI-associated publications that suggest they were created or operated by the same contractor: All posts conclude with a poll asking “Do you like this article?” using the same thumbs-up and thumbs-down icons. URLs are structured identically for Al-Fassel, Pishtaz News, and Salaam Times — an Afghanistan-focused site launched under the TRWI that continues today under a different name — suggesting they were coded using the same tools. The three sites use an identical 404 error graphic to alert users when they’ve clicked on a broken link, as well.

The web design of Al-Fassel and Pishtaz News — including page layout, URL structure, 404 error graphic, and much of the legal verbiage in the About sections — closely mirrors that of CENTCOMcitadel.com, a publication with similar content that carries an overt disclosure of Pentagon sponsorship at the bottom of its homepage.

“These sites are similar in style to the overt messaging efforts we saw from the Department of Defense previously,” Renée DiResta, a former Stanford researcher and co-author of the 2022 report, told The Intercept. “We previously saw this pattern of clearer U.S. affiliation language in the About page of the domain, then minimal to no acknowledgement on the social media profiles.”

There are other subtle nods to the sites’ true purpose: URLs for the English language versions of each site are denoted “en_GB,” for Great Britain. In a comprehensive 2015 analysis of the TRWI network, University of Bath doctoral student Roy Revie observed that the network of American military propaganda sites explicitly marked their English versions as British because “SOCOM seeks to avoid any suggestion its sites are aimed at US audiences.”

In the parlance of information warfare, these propaganda shops are considered “overt” rather than “covert,” because their state ownership is technically disclosed. But in his 2015 paper, Revie argued that these psyop sites still engage in deception. They use online journalism as a form of camouflage, he wrote, because most readers won’t seek out a publication’s About page to learn about its funding. The design of these sites “allows the DOD to credibly claim full transparency and maintain legitimacy, putting the onus onto the user to inform themselves about the source,” Revie wrote.

The output of both sites consistently lionizes the U.S. and Israel, along with America’s Gulf allies. They regularly demean the Iranian state, presenting a wholly lopsided and misleading account in a time of war. “The US says it does not seek open conflict with Tehran,” reads a March 2 article in Al-Fassel. Both sites have repeatedly cited reporting by Iran International — a Saudi-funded, pro-Israel, Iranian monarchist publication with a long record of journalistic misrepresentation. A March 31 Pishtaz News article, for instance, based on an entirely anonymously sourced Iran International post, alleged that Iranian security forces gang-raped nurses in Tehran.

Recent coverage depicts Iran as up against the ropes. A March 22 article in Pishtaz News exclaimed, “The Islamic Republic’s regular army, known as the Artesh, is increasingly described by informed observers as a force under severe strain and institutional neglect.” Another anonymously authored piece from March 25, headlined “Artesh would be better off without its main rival,” seems intended to stoke tensions between Iran’s regular army and its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. “Without the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), resources could flow directly to the regular army, known as the Artesh, enabling meaningful modernization,” the story claimed, a talking point ripped straight from the mouths of right-wing Iran hawks in the U.S. In a March 18 Fox News segment, for example, retired Gen. Jack Keane suggested that an Artesh–IRGC rivalry could be exploited to accomplish regime change.

It’s unclear who exactly writes what appears on these sites. Most articles run without any byline, while other stories are published under names that are difficult to find any mention of anywhere else on the internet. Some of the personnel may not be real at all. A January Al-Fassel YouTube overview of recent regional headlines was narrated by an Arabic-speaking man in a sharp blue blazer. Experts told The Intercept the newscaster was likely a product of generative AI and not genuine footage. “The strongest indicator is an almost complete absence of eye blinks,” Georgetown University professor and deepfake researcher Sejin Paik told The Intercept. Zuzanna Wojciak, a synthetic media researcher with the human rights organization Witness, reached the same conclusion, citing strange anomalies with his skin, hands, and teeth.

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Some articles deeply misstate or misrepresent the facts. An April 15 Al-Fassel article about Iran’s “war crime threats” against the American University of Beirut omitted the fact that these threats came in response to repeated U.S.–Israel airstrikes against Iranian schools. The day after an Al-Fassel article described the Houthis as “crippled” and “largely disintegrated,” capable of offering only “verbal support” for Iran, the Yemeni militant group launched cruise missiles at Israel.

The outlets also illustrate the extent of deceptive messaging radiating from the Pentagon and White House: A March 5 post to the Pishtaz News Instagram account boasted, “The Iranian regime’s ability to strike US forces and regional partners is rapidly eroding, while US combat power continues to grow.” Four weeks later, Iran was continuing to lob missiles at U.S. bases as well as its regional partners, and succeeded in downing an American F-15 and A-10 Warthog. An April 4 Al-Fassel Instagram post claimed, citing Secretary of State Marco Rubio, that “Iran is not satisfied with a peaceful nuclear program, but seeking to enhance its military capabilities,” even though a 2025 assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded the opposite.

Other articles dispense with masquerading as journalism, reading more as warnings straight from Washington: “United States is fully prepared to protect its forces in Middle East,” read a June 2025 headline on Pishtaz News. “With advanced technological capabilities and highly-trained personnel, the United States maintains one of the world’s most capable military forces, continuously adapting to evolving security challenges to maintain order and stability.” A March 27 Pishtaz News tweet was more straightforward. “You will be systematically annihilated,” it threatens in Farsi. “Your commanders are hiding in bunkers. They have sent their families and wealth abroad—why are you still fighting for them?”

Some articles purport to include comments from genuine expert sources. In at least one case, this happened without the knowledge of the source. A July 2025 article in Al-Fassel predicted that a future closure of the Strait of Hormuz “would harm China and Russia more than other nations.” The article quoted Umud Shokri, an energy analyst affiliated with George Mason University, the State Department, and the Middle East Institute. “I would like to clarify that I was not aware of any affiliation between alfasselnews.com and the U.S. government,” Shokri told The Intercept. “I also did not have any direct interview with the platform, nor was I contacted by them directly. To the best of my knowledge, any quotation attributed to me appears to have been drawn from prior public commentary or other media appearances.”

Prior to the war on Iran, a top priority on both sites was marketing the U.S.–Israeli plans for the future of Gaza. The message is essentially a distillation of the U.S.–Israel–Gulf State consensus: That all Palestinian suffering is brought on by Hamas rather than the past three years of Israeli bombardment, and that the Trump-sponsored “Board of Peace” augurs an unprecedented era of prosperity for Palestinians.

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“The incoming Board of Peace,” a December 2025 Al-Fassel piece claimed, “is expected to foster conditions for democratic representation and meaningful civic participation.” A December 12 Al-Fassel YouTube video similarly blamed Hamas and Iran, rather than Israel, for the blockade of humanitarian aid into Gaza, followed by an AI-generated image of a science fiction city overlaid with Arabic captions promising billions in foreign investment and economic revitalization for Gaza. The video currently has nearly 1.7 million views.

Other items around Gaza further invert reality. Since October 2025, Gaza has been bifurcated by the so-called “Yellow Line,” an arbitrary boundary behind which Israeli forces nominally withdrew last year. Palestinians on the Israeli side of the line face harsh occupying military governance, while those on the other side risk being killed.

Despite claims by Al-Fassel’s video team that Trump’s Gaza policy will herald the ability for countless Palestinians to return home, Israeli forces routinely fire at civilians approaching this buffer zone.

“Incidents of gunfire, shelling, and limited incursions have continued near the ‘Yellow Line,’ the separation zone near the border with Israel, keeping any return highly dangerous,” according to a United Nations video report. “With the amount of available space shrinking, thousands of families have been forced to return to the edges of their destroyed neighborhoods near the ‘Yellow Line,’ despite what residents say is the continued risk of injury or death from intermittent fire.”

Not so, says Al-Fassel: “The Yellow Line is more than a boundary; it is a lifeline designed to keep Gaza’s families safe and informed during the ceasefire,” claimed a November article. “The Yellow Line is not a symbol of division — it is a lifeline.”

Following the 2016 election and the panic surrounding Russian covert propaganda efforts, major American social media platforms began adding labels to the accounts of government-controlled media properties. Videos from Al Jazeera English’s YouTube account, for instance, come with a disclaimer that “Al Jazeera is funded in whole or in part by the Qatari government.” Although X abandoned this policy in 2023, it is still nominally on the books for both Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, and YouTube.

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There is no disclosure, however, in the Instagram posts or accounts of Al-Fassel or Pishtaz News. YouTube videos from both accounts do not include a disclaimer about U.S. funding; however, a brief disclosure can be found on their main account pages, tucked into an About section that must be expanded to be read.

Neither site appears to have a particularly large audience on social media. Both have paltry followings on X — about 2,400 for Al-Fassel, and only 132 following Pishtaz News — with many appearing to be spam-based accounts with names followed by a long string of numbers that engage in posting behavior common to spam networks. Al-Fassel has found modest engagement on Instagram, where it has over 7,700 followers. Though Pishtaz News has only 475 followers on Instagram, its posts sometimes break through; a March 18 post of CENTCOM footage from the deck of an aircraft carrier, for example, racked up more than 1,100 likes.

At times, the content published by the propaganda sites may have reached American audiences. A March 27 Al-Fassel story alleging the total collapse of the Iranian-led “Axis of Resistance” was shared that same day to FreeRepublic, the conservative American message board, by user MeanWestTexan. Federal law forbids Pentagon propaganda aimed at Americans, though a similar prohibition aimed at the State Department was overturned in 2013.

Sometimes their stories reach other Western readers. An Al-Fassel article on the Houthis made its way into the citations of a 2024 article in the academic journal Survival: Global Politics and Strategy by University of Ottawa professor Thomas Juneau. (Juneau did not respond to a request for comment.) A submission to the U.N.’s Committee on Enforced Disappearances from Justice for All International, a Swiss-based nonprofit, similarly cited an Al-Fassel post on the IRGC, while an annual report by the state-operated Swedish Defence Research Agency relied in part on an Al-Fassel article on ISIS. The Intercept reviewed multiple entries on Grokipedia, X’s Wikipedia clone, citing Al-Fassel articles as well.

Emerson Brooking, a fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab and former Pentagon cyber policy adviser, believes CENTCOM is most likely behind the sites and considers their overall reach lackluster. When it comes to online propaganda, he said, the U.S. “could learn some lessons from Iran.” Iranian propaganda efforts — mostly quickly produced AI slop — have captured the attention of the internet in a way that the U.S. ersatz newsrooms have not.

But the sites’ limited reach is unlikely to bring them to a halt anytime soon. Even as the Trump administration has gutted Voice of America and other long-standing tools of U.S. soft power, these sites have continued publishing. If their similarities to the long-running American military psyops are more than coincidental, that says more about a culture of inertia at the Pentagon than its success in winning hearts and minds. Brooking told The Intercept that because operating blogs amounts to a “rounding error” within the broader defense budget, such projects can continue with little scrutiny.

A seldom-read network of propaganda sites might seem to have little purpose. But it’s the kind of thing authorities can gesture toward, Brooking said, when pressed about their efforts to combat Iran in the “information space.” “Successive SOCOM or CENTCOM or other senior leaders could point to the fact that they’re maintaining this network of websites,” he said.

The post These Middle Eastern News Sites Are Actually U.S. Government Propaganda Operations appeared first on The Intercept.