This midterms cycle, however, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s strategy seems to suggest the opposite. Contrary to its signature slogan, AIPAC’s name has become anathema to voters across the political spectrum repulsed by Israel’s genocide in Gaza and frustrated by Washington’s outpouring of military aid for a foreign government while domestic costs soar.

So it’s going underground. As The Intercept reported in December, AIPAC entered the 2026 midterms by returning to its strategic roots — funding other groups and uniting donors, rather than focusing on direct-to-candidate spending. Now, AIPAC has announced that it will no longer officially endorse or contribute directly to candidates. 

Though progressives welcomed the announcement as evidence of AIPAC’s retreat, it’s far from a sign that AIPAC is backing down. The group is expected to continue spending heavily on elections through its super PAC, which took advantage of campaign finance loopholes to conceal its involvement in several races this cycle until after elections had already passed. To Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, AIPAC’s opting for obscurity shows that “its brand has become politically radioactive.”

But how much has really changed? As AIPAC shifts strategy, a new project by The Intercept reveals the hundreds of candidates still taking its cash, plus how the money paid off for them. The data suggests that though the pro-Israel lobbying giant may be weakened, it’s still dominant.

The Intercept tracked how much the group and its super PAC spent on elections to put pro-Israel candidates on the ballot in this year’s midterms — including the money it tried to keep out of the public eye. While AIPAC makes use of a series of new pop-ups and pass-throughs, it still poured millions directly into 2026 midterm races. Its candidates usually still win.

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The new data builds on a 2024 project in which The Intercept documented just how AIPAC shaped the last congressional class. At the time, Donald Trump was preparing for his return to the presidency as Kamala Harris ran a campaign hamstrung by public disillusionment over the Biden administration’s unflinching support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. To critics of Israel desperate to stop the violence, the two parties looked equally bleak, and the pro-Israel lobby’s grip on Congress appeared unshakeable. 

It’s been different this cycle. Primaries across the country saw candidates win after vowing to cut off or restrict military aid to Israel, and incumbents signed on to legislation blocking weapons transfers in an attempt to keep their seats. But the shift should not be overstated: AIPAC still waded into nearly three-quarters of races, and its candidates still won far more often than they lost.

In total, AIPAC or its super PAC, United Democracy Project, spent on 333 of the 473 seats up for election this year.

These are the dollars AIPAC and UDP spent directly in races. The former makes contributions to candidates, while the latter, as AIPAC’s leading super PAC, makes independent expenditures, like buying ads. They made up the bulk of the pro-Israel lobby’s known elections spending — $53.3 million from AIPAC and $66.7 million from UDP, compared to $53.7 million and $41.4 million last cycle. Simultaneously, the groups took up another tack: making it harder to tell which races they were actually involved in. The group’s donors poured money into races where AIPAC didn’t officially endorse a candidate. AIPAC’s board president hosted a fundraiser for a candidate who swore the group wasn’t backing her. And in a series of races, no one knew for certain that AIPAC had spent on the election until after it was over.

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The group tested different strategies in different states, spending directly in the Michigan Senate race, for example, while concealing its spending in several other primaries. In those races, UDP gave money to other committees, including a series of “pop-up PACs,” groups that registered just before primaries, allowing them to delay disclosing their donors until after the election passed. Several of those groups took money from AIPAC’s super PAC, spent on ads against candidates critical of Israel, and then disappeared. 

The pop-ups and pass-throughs represent AIPAC’s most talked-about new tactic, but the lobbying group and its flagship super PAC still sunk the bulk of their spending into key races and high-priority states. The Intercept analyzed where AIPAC employed which strategy, how UDP dollars flowed through pop-up PACs, and which candidates received the most AIPAC and UDP cash in their primaries. 

The Direct Spending

The pro-Israel lobby’s biggest investment in the primaries turned out to be a disappointment. UDP spent more than $30 million on ads attacking Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Senate race or backing his opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens. Now that El-Sayed is the Democratic nominee, UDP is also battling El-Sayed in his general election contest with Republican Mike Rogers, spending just over $500,000 so far. 

Thanks in part to the deluge of spending, the El-Sayed–Stevens contest was one of the marquee primaries of 2026, pitting a vocal critic of the pro-Israel lobby who could become the first Muslim U.S. senator against an enthusiastic AIPAC cash recipient who famously said: “Israel comes to me in my dreams.” It’s one of the key races where we’re breaking down the money AIPAC and UDP spent in favor of one candidate and against a clear opponent. We’re skipping Democratic House candidate Adrian Boafo, who benefited from $5.7 million in UDP spending, because his Maryland primary included 23 other candidates.

After Stevens and Boafo, the top AIPAC and UDP recipient from this year’s primaries was Rep. Wesley Bell, a moderate Democrat from Missouri who fended off a challenge from former Rep. Cori Bush to return to the House (AIPAC spent millions to oust her last cycle). When UDP spending is excluded, Bell received more AIPAC funding in the primaries than any other Democrat.

On the Republican side, the top beneficiary was Ed Gallrein, the Trump-backed challenger who unseated Rep. Thomas Massie in Kentucky. Massie, a libertarian critic of all foreign aid — including to Israel — was the relatively rare Republican incumbent AIPAC and UDP opposed.

Often, the pro-Israel groups backed Republican incumbents. Two more top recipients were Sen. Tom Cotton, who easily won his primary in Arkansas, and John Cornyn, who lost to state attorney general Ken Paxton in Texas.

But the greatest Republican recipient of AIPAC largesse — ahead of Gallrein, when UDP is excluded — did not face a primary opponent.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, now facing a tight general election contest against Democratic candidate Troy Jackson, has been a longtime beneficiary of campaign cash aligned with the pro-Israel lobby. Asked by Zeteo last year for her comment on Americans killed by the Israeli military, Collins shook her head and said only: “I am pro-Israel.” 

The Pop-Ups

On top of the $53.6 million it spent directly on races this cycle, United Democracy Project poured another $13.1 million into Democratic primaries by giving money to other committees whose names or stated agendas indicated no connection to Israel policy. That $13.1 million, more than triple the $3.5 million United Democracy gave through other groups last cycle, helped fund at least three pop-up PACs that formed this year. 

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The groups’ names offered little insight into their political agendas, as The Lever recently highlighted. UDP spent the most on popup PACs in a series of Democratic primaries around Chicago, where groups with names like Elect Chicago Women, Chicago Progressive Partnership, and Affordable Chicago Now! used their funds to attack candidates running on rejecting AIPAC money or ending U.S. military support for Israel. Several of the groups also received funding from major United Democracy Project donors, and three of them shut down after the primaries and gave their money back to United Democracy Project. 

In other cases, United Democracy Project funded long-established political action committees with ties to current or former House Democratic leaders, like Bold America, which was formed by former members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. That group got almost a quarter of the $12.2 million it reported raising this year from UDP. The UDP share, $2.8 million, was nearly equivalent to the $2.9 million Bold America spent against Darializa Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist and pro-Palestine activist who defeated incumbent and Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chair Adriano Espaillat in New York.

The super PAC EDW Action Fund was similar. Former Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chair Cheri Bustos and former Rep. Annie Kuster formed that group in late 2023 as an offshoot of the political action committee Elect Democratic Women. Like Bold America, EDW Action got about a quarter of its funding from UDP. It also provided more than 80 percent of the funding for Pro-Choice Majority Action, a new PAC that formed in May and spent in 12 primaries. The group presents itself as supporting Democratic women, but Pro-Choice Majority Action notably spent against pro-Palestine candidates like Melat Kiros, who ran a primary challenge against Rep. Diana DeGette, D-Colo., and won. 

In a statement to The Intercept, Pro-Choice Majority Action spokesperson Lenny Young dismissed reporting characterizing the group as a pop-up PAC and said it had backed 23 candidates with a range of views on Israel across the primaries and general election.

“To suggest that we would deny a Democratic woman from being elected to Congress because of her position on Israel, on either side, misses the whole point,” Young said. “We want more Democratic women in Congress because we believe it would improve the lives of women and families. Period.”

Bold America did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. Emails to Elect Chicago Women, Chicago Progressive Partnership, and Affordable Chicago Now! bounced back because the groups have shut down.

UDP gave another $2.65 million to groups that did not spend directly on ads in Democratic primaries this cycle. 

In August, United Democracy Project gave $1.65 million to a group called SD PAC, also known as Save Democracy PAC, which registered in 2020 and has supported Democratic candidates in past general elections. The group did not directly conduct any outside spending in Democratic primaries this year, but it funneled money to affiliate groups that did — some of which funded attacks against progressives.

The other recipient of money from UDP, Palmetto Action, formed in May and only spent in South Carolina’s Republican Senate primary. The group backed Sen. Lindsey Graham before his death in July, then received a cash infusion from UDP and started supporting Graham’s sister, Darline, ahead of a special Senate primary. The group did not report any additional spending in its last filing due before the general election.

Palmetto Action, Save Democracy PAC, and EDW Action Fund did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

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If last cycle AIPAC proved that it could leverage its financial advantage to target critics of Israel, its performance this cycle suggests that its money has become a faltering superpower. 

New pro-Palestine groups have sprung up to spend against AIPAC — though their pockets aren’t nearly as deep. When candidates went head-to-head this cycle in primaries defined by U.S. military support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, pro-Palestine candidates often came out on top. 

For decades before it started spending directly on elections, “AIPAC operated in the shadows,” Friedman, of Foundation for Middle East Peace, said. Its endorsements were once “clear but unofficial,” she added, and its funding operated through “informal understandings with big donors and allied but ostensibly independent PACs.” 

Today, “AIPAC is trying out a sort of middle road,” Friedman said. “It will return in part to the shadows — no direct endorsements, no direct donations — but it will also continue to flex its power directly in elections, via tactics it has been testing and honing these past four years.”

If anything, next cycle could see an expansion of the recent pop-up PAC strategy, making it harder to tell when AIPAC is involved — until it’s too late. 

The post AIPAC Isn’t Retreating. Here’s How It’s Already Shaping the Next Congress. appeared first on The Intercept.

Super PAC networks bankrolled with millions of dollars from Anthropic and OpenAI executives spent heavily in competitive primaries earlier this year, including a high-profile race in New York City. They were touted as the looming successor to another single-issue group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, as AIPAC moved its spending underground.

Yet as public outrage over data centers and AI’s threat to jobs soared, artificial intelligence super PACs dramatically throttled back spending on congressional races compared to the primaries. The biggest AI super PAC network has spent only modestly ahead of next week’s general election — and mostly in safe seats.

An Intercept analysis of AI spending in the 2026 midterms, based on Federal Election Commission records and independent race ratings, shows that only 5 percent of their direct expenditures have gone to contested general election races. The industry’s avoidance of the contested races that could determine control of the next Congress suggest that the PACs have realized how the public has soured on the tech, campaign finance and industry observers told The Intercept.

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“Essentially these companies underestimated how much the public despises the data center buildout, and the inescapability of AI systems that no one asked for that say they will automate jobs and maybe kill us all,” said Rick Claypool, a research director for the president’s office at Public Citizen, a nonprofit campaign finance watchdog.

Although there is still time for a last-minute flurry of spending, the story of AI’s role in the 2026 midterm elections may turn out to be the story of a single race — a primary in New York — that forced the industry to step away from the limelight.

Claypool’s group released an analysis earlier this year of “corporate supremacist” super PACs, a new breed of campaign committees modeled on a crypto super PAC called Fairshake that spent tens of millions on the 2024 elections.

The model was to amass a massive war chest and use it to punish candidates who opposed the company’s preferred government regulations, while throwing cash at allies or potential allies from both parties.

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The first big AI super PAC to launch in August 2025 was Leading the Future, which was bankrolled by the president of OpenAI and its investors. A rival super PAC network, Public First, launched months later with the goal of countering Leading the Future’s influence. Its donors include Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who gave $1 million. Anthropic has also given a nonprofit associated with Public First millions of dollars, while stipulating that the money cannot be used on elections. Public First says that it supports tighter regulations than its rival.

The two networks plowed $50.7 million into the primaries, campaign finance records show. Most of that money was spent on primary races where the outcome was in doubt, driven by an eye-popping $21.3 million the networks spent on supporting or opposing a single congressional candidate, Alex Bores, in the Democratic primary for New York’s 12th Congressional District.

Bores, a New York State Assembly member, attracted the ire of those in the industry who favor a laissez-faire approach by authoring an AI regulation bill in the state legislature.

Leading the Future succeeded in defeating Bores, who lost to his State Assembly colleague Micah Lasher in June. But the group drew intense blowback in the process. Many observers suggested Leading the Future’s spending had boosted Bores rather than hurt him, because it gave him a chance to position himself as a foe of the AI industry — while also benefiting from a PAC aligned with the Public First network.

“Down to the wire, they were sweating,” Bores told The Intercept, referring to Leading the Future. “I think people who have been in politics for a while will realize that their spending really served to elevate the issue of AI.”

Leading the Future did not respond to a request for comment.

After wading into contested primary elections, the two leading AI super PAC networks have held back from spending on competitive general elections — even though they have plenty of money in the bank.

Until a few days ago, Public First had spent nothing on general election races. Leading the Future has spent only $7.4 million on general election races as of October 26, according to the FEC data, despite having $34 million in cash on hand across its network as of its most recent report.

Only 31 percent of that total has gone toward competitive races, as measured by the independent analytics website FiftyPlusOne. The only reason Leading the Future has spent money on competitive general election races at all is because it’s backing U.S. Sen. Darline Graham, R-S.C., who filled the seat of her late brother Lindsey Graham and is now facing an unexpectedly fierce challenge from a Democrat to win a full term in ruby-red South Carolina.

“They are not going to have an impact on the balance of power in Congress,” said Shaunna Thomas, one of the founders of Guardrails Alliance, another new super PAC set up to counter Leading the Future’s influence. “They are spending money on candidates who they think will protect their ability to control if and how they are regulated.”

Public First has only recently started spending a relatively small sum on a handful of general election races. The spending had amounted to $1.1 million as of the morning of October 26, according to processed FEC data.

Asked for comment on how its strategy has changed since the primaries, a Public First spokesperson said that it was still trying to support “strong advocates for AI regulation.”

“Public First was founded as a counterweight to Leading the Future, and that fight looks very different today. Leading the Future is going dark. Its biggest backers are walking away,” said Anthony Rivera-Rodriguez, the spokesperson.

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Into that gap have stepped new groups pushing for tougher AI regulation such as the Guardrails Alliance, which bills itself as a grassroots alternative to corporate-backed super PACs. It is funded in large part by Silicon Valley tech workers but has taken a more aggressive stance against “tech oligarchs.” Guardrails has spent about $2 million thus far and reported having $1.2 million on hand as of October 14.

About three-quarters of voters are less likely to support a candidate they know has received support from an AI super PAC, according to a Data for Progress poll of more than 3,000 likely voters in Iowa, Michigan, and Ohio commissioned by Guardrails. Voters were more concerned about spending from AI companies than from crypto companies or AIPAC.

The dislike for data centers and AI cuts across party lines. In Michigan’s purple 7th Congressional District, Democratic candidate Will Lawrence has seized on data centers as one of his leading issues.

“The politics of this are terrible. Eighty percent of everybody is against it, whether you’re a Democrat, independent, or Republican,” he told supporters at a recent town hall.

Notably, neither of the super PAC networks has intervened in Lawrence’s race, despite it being one of the closest in the nation. (Lawrence’s campaign has pointed out that Elon Musk, who leads AI company xAI, has spent against Lawrence via his America PAC.)

There are emerging signs that the big AI super PAC networks are changing tactics in response to that public distaste. Public First’s dark-money affiliate donated $3 million since August to a preexisting super PAC supporting California state Sen. Scott Wiener, one of two Democrats vying to replace retiring Rep. Nancy Pelosi in California.

Leading the Future, meanwhile, gave a $500,000 donation on October 9 to a pro-data center nonprofit called Build American AI.

AI super PAC critics are also watching to see what Leading the Future will do, given its large war chest.

“I think they are going to continue to spend. I think they are going to try to do more and more spending that isn’t as easily tracked, because they are such political dead weight,” said Bores.

Delaware Corporations

When single-issue super PACs know their issue is unpopular, they use vague names, “pop-up” affiliates, and other dubious tactics to hide their activities from voters.

Add another one to the list: Leading the Future has routed more than $30 million of spending through newly minted Delaware corporations, blocking transparency during an election that has been defined by voter backlash against the industry.

Those apparent shell corporations have accounted for the lion’s share of the largest artificial intelligence super PAC network’s expenses during this year’s election.

The practice is a flagrant violation of Federal Election Commission guidelines that require campaign organizations to disclose which consultants, pollsters, and advertisers they are paying, a campaign watchdog alleged in a complaint filed in May.

There may be little recourse for observers worried about the lack of transparency for now, however. The FEC is short of the quorum that would allow it to take action on complaints such as the one filed by the Campaign Legal Center. (Leading the Future, which did not respond to a request for comment, has previously defended its tactics as legal in a statement to Wired.)

The Leading the Future network was funded in large part by an executive at or investors in OpenAI, one of the world’s largest AI companies. (In 2024, The Intercept sued OpenAI in federal court over the company’s use of copyrighted articles to train its chatbot ChatGPT. The case is ongoing.)

Company president Greg Brockman and his wife, Anna Brockman, donated $25 million to the network last year. When it came time to spend that money, the Leading the Future network leaned on two affiliate super PACs, one for Democratic candidates called Think Big and the other for Republican candidates called American Mission.

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That is a typical tactic of the new breed of single-issue super PACs popularized by the crypto industry. Campaign finance reform advocates say it may help obscure the origin of campaign ads from voters but does not run afoul of any laws itself.

What those super PACs did next raised red flags for watchdogs, however. Since December, American Mission has reported spending $17.4 million through a Delaware-incorporated limited liability corporation called Summit Ridge Media Group, on services ranging from media placement to ad production to consulting.

Think Big has spent $21.3 million through a different Delaware corporation, Lantern Production Consultants, on a similarly wide range of expenses.

The grab bag of expenses is a giveaway that the super PACs are likely using the newly created corporations to hide their true vendors, according to Shanna Ports, a senior legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center.

“There’s no way of knowing what is motivating this arrangement — but I know there is backlash to AI. It is possible that the vendors who are working with American Mission and Think Big don’t want to be identified in FEC reports,” Ports said.

Thomas, of the rival super PAC Guardrails Alliance, told The Intercept she thinks the network is obscuring its spending because a lax regulatory approach has become “politically toxic.”

“Their donors don’t want to be associated, their candidates don’t want their support, and their vendors don’t want to be associated,” Thomas said. “If you were public, you are running away. If you are not, you are interested in not being exposed.”

This story was supported by a grant from the Tarbell Center for AI Journalism.

The post AI Tried to Buy the Midterms — Then the Lobby Learned Everyone Hates AI appeared first on The Intercept.

Officials in the state have prepared for months against the possibility of election interference from federal officials, and the state remains on high alert in the run-up to the general election on November 3.

Training materials for law enforcement officials in the state, obtained by The Intercept through a public records request, were updated this year for the elections to include explicit references to federal statutes barring armed federal agents from polling sites. 

In an interview with the New York Times this week, Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows said the inclusion of such references was a direct defense in response to the fearmongering around election integrity from President Donald Trump and his administration.

“This is the first time ever that we have had to engage in scenario planning to safeguard against potential federal interference in elections,” Bellows said. “It seems like the federal government is now adversarial to the states.”

Bellows’s office offered up the training slideshow, which cites a U.S. law that bars armed civil or military officers from posting at voting sites, to law enforcement personnel in the run-up to Maine’s primary election in June and again in the lead-up to the general election on November 5.

Nationwide, Democratic officials have expressed fears that the Trump Administration might weaponize U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement or other federal agencies to undermine the rights of voters. In New York, state Attorney General Letitia James issued a reminder to voters that federal officials may not “police the polls,” and the Arkansas chapter of the NAACP called out the assignment of federal election monitors to two counties in the state as potential intimidation.

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The Trump administration, meanwhile, has sounded the alarm about the alleged scourge of non-citizens on the voter rolls, sending agents from the FBI and ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations division to probe alleged fraud. A handful of people in California, New York, and North Carolina have been indicted for allegedly voting as non-citizens, but a review of similar cases by the Washington Post found that such cases were often the result of honest mistakes.

In Maine, worries about federal interventions at polling places flared when — following a slew of social media videos from Trump allies suggesting that fraud is already taking place among the state’s Somali American community — a local outlet reported that the Department of Justice would be sending election monitors to the state.

Jon Fetherston, a journalist with the far-right Maine Wire, which is funded by conservative megadonor Leonard Leo, was seen following people in and around an early voting site at Lewiston City Hall and aggressively questioning them. (The Maine Wire did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Critics said the moves were tantamount to voter harassment, but Maine Wire editor-in-chief Steve Robinson later defended them as an act of election transparency. Robinson, who has led a crusade against what he alleges to be a network of fraud in the state’s Somali American community, questioned the role of interpreters tasked with helping “jobless Somali bums” cast their ballots.

In the wake of the Maine Wire controversy in Lewiston, Bellows confirmed to the Maine Morning Star that a wave of federal election monitors would be headed to polling sites in Lewiston and Portland.

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The Department of Justice on Tuesday confirmed to The Intercept that it intends to send election monitors to Maine for Election Day, but did not elaborate or respond to specific questions about where the monitors were to be sent. 

“We will have around 1,000 monitors in counties throughout the United States, but we will not share the full list until Election Day,” a Justice Department spokesperson told The Intercept in an email Tuesday. “All monitors must meet the same legal and ethical requirements, including that they not interfere with the voting process. Every monitor has the same role: observe for potential violations of federal law and report concerns to the Department, which the Department will review after Election Day and act where appropriate.”

Robinson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Collins Takes Right-Wing Bait

With Maine a key battleground state for control of Congress — Democratic challenger Troy Jackson is seeking to topple long-serving GOP Sen. Susan Collins, and the Democratic House candidate Matt Dunlap is seeking to best former Gov. Paul LePage in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District — temperatures are running high in the state.

Progressives in Maine worry that even without a robust federal presence at voting places — whether monitors are armed or not — activist campaigns like the one undertaken by the Maine Wire journalists could pose a potential threat to voters’ rights.

“Basically, if you were walking into City Hall and you were Black, you could expect to have this guy come up to you with his phone and ask you all sorts of rude and obviously racist questions,” said Ben Chin, co-director of the progressive Maine People’s Alliance. “We’re trying to encourage everyone to come out to vote, but it makes sense why that might give people pause. You hear a guy like that is outside a polling location, it’s reasonable to wonder, ‘Should I go down there right now?’”

In a statement to The Intercept, Bellows said the state and the city of Lewiston were taking steps to ensure that voters could cast a ballot free of harassment.

“We have received complaints about the intrusive filming, photography, and harassment of voters in the City of Lewiston by political operatives,” Bellows told The Intercept in a statement. “All voters should be able to exercise their right to vote without feeling watched, questioned, or harassed, and we take these allegations seriously, particularly when it appears that voters were targeted for no other reason than their race or ethnicity. We understand the City of Lewiston has taken steps to address the problem, and we will continue to monitor the situation.”

Collins, meanwhile, took the Maine Wire’s reporting seriously after Fetherston asked the senator at a campaign event about the role of interpreters, which he and the Maine Wire cast as “electioneering.”

“I’m unaware of those allegations, but certainly only Americans should be voting in American elections,” Collins said. “And it is troubling to me if people are being accompanied into voting booths and handling ballots in a way that is not sanctioned by law.”

The post Trump Vows to Send Election “Monitors” to Maine After Far-Right Conspiracies Spread appeared first on The Intercept.

The Limits of American Might

The failure of Tel Aviv and Washington to achieve their war aims in Iran has resulted in the most dramatic American retreat from a region since the U.S. flight from Vietnam in 1975. This startling American defeat — after a generation of forever war failures and stalemates — has been thrown into broad relief by the resumption of another regional conflict that has received far less attention than the Trump administration’s sputtering war with Tehran. This fall, the forces that most Americans know as “the Houthis” have conducted a blitzkrieg in their native Yemen and have been pummeling Saudi Arabia’s aviation and energy infrastructure with missiles and drones. In doing so, they have put a spotlight on the limits of American power, and the shrinking U.S. military footprint, in the Middle East. 

The long-standing conflict between Saudi Arabia and northern Yemen’s Ansarullah, or “Helpers of God,” led by the Houthi clan, heated up again in July 2026, when Saudi Arabia struck Sanaa International Airport to prevent a Houthi delegation from landing on its return from the funeral in Iran for slain Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Ansarullah government launched its own attacks and, in October, managed briefly to close Saudi Arabia’s own airport. The renewed war has now expanded into a regional conflict, with Pakistan, Türkiye, and, recently, Egypt pledging to defend the kingdom from attack, though none of these regional powers appear eager to conduct operations in Yemen itself. Notably absent from the current conflict is Saudi Arabia’s most powerful ally, the United States, since President Donald Trump has repeatedly declined to intervene on behalf of his Saudi allies.

The typical U.S. press framing of Ansarullah as an “Iran-backed militia” is inaccurate, since the movement has local, Arab nationalist reasons for its actions and is a full-scale government that rules some 80 percent of Yemen’s population. Still, it does receive surreptitious technical and military support from Iran, though nothing like the hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of high-tech armaments — from kits turning 2,000-pound “dumb” bombs into precision munitions to advanced air-to-air missiles — that the U.S. provides the Saudis. Ironically, Trump’s war on Iran, fought in conjunction with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, weakened the Saudis and exposed their vulnerabilities to military attack by Iranian drones and missiles, impelling them to seek a symbolic win over a less formidable enemy in neighboring Yemen. But the weaknesses exposed by Iran’s drones helped encourage a vigorous Ansarullah rejoinder.

The Incredible Shrinking Superpower

The American refusal to join Saudi Arabia’s war signals a profound degradation in U.S. capabilities and standing in the Middle East. The U.S. military had, for decades, dominated the region from a network of about 20 major bases. The U.S. Navy operated out of the headquarters of the Fifth Fleet in Manama, Bahrain. The U.S. Air Force flew missions from the massive al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, which housed 10,000 U.S. personnel. Thousands of ground troops were barracked in Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan. The Pentagon admitted that “Iranian strikes damaged and destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and Jordan during the conflict. In addition, dozens of U.S. aircraft were destroyed or damaged during OEF.”

The naval base at Manama, one of America’s most important naval facilities and headquarters of the Navy’s Fifth Fleet, was destroyed by Iranian strikes. (Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao admitted last month that Iran “blew the hell out of Bahrain.”) The loss of Manama led to supply shortages and poor morale aboard the USS Lincoln and other ships patrolling the Strait of Hormuz, bedeviling Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth.

The CIA offices at the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh were annihilated. Iran struck al-Udeid’s evacuated Combined Air Operations Center in Qatar, from which the Pentagon had directed its strikes on enemies as diverse as the Taliban and ISIL over recent decades, and rendered this facility inoperable. All U.S. troops were also withdrawn from Iraq, a process accelerated by the inability of U.S. missile interceptors to protect them from attacks by Iran and allied Shiite militias there.

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Iran’s deployment of swarms of Shahed drones caused the United States and Israel to use up much of their stock of interceptors, which are time-consuming and expensive to replace. A basic Shahed costs as little as $20,000, though new hardened versions are more expensive — whereas a Patriot interceptor costs $4 million. One reason the Trump administration may be reluctant to intervene in Yemen is that if the U.S. cannot fly missions from al-Udeid, and cannot be sure any new fighter-jet fleets stationed in the region will be safe from Iran, given the paucity of interceptors, the Pentagon will have a limited ability to rescue any U.S. pilots shot down over Yemen.

America’s Profound Weakness in the Middle East 

Saudi Arabia launched a war against the ascendant Ansarullah in 2015 when the latter staged a coup in the capital of Sanaa. The Ansarullah movement is rooted in Yemen’s Zaidi Shiism, though it is more radical than traditional Zaidism. (Zaidi Shiism differs substantially from Iranian Shiism, having no ayatollahs and having relatively good relations with Sunnis.)

About a third of Yemenis are Zaidis, who predominate in the north of the country, and many have long resented the dominance of their politics and culture by neighboring, oil-rich, Sunni Saudi Arabia, whose official ideology is hard-line Wahhabism, a puritanical form of Islam that insists on a literal interpretation of the Quran. Wahhabi proselytizing among the Shia enraged the Houthi clan and their followers began rebelling against the government of military dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2004. But when he was deposed by popular demonstrations during the Arab Spring in 2012, Saleh gradually allied with the Houthis, and by 2015 about half the Yemeni military rallied to their side, along with some major Sunni tribes.

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In response to the Houthis’ rise, a Saudi-led coalition that included the United Arab Emirates began bombing Yemen in 2015. Until 2022, the U.S, then militarily dominant in the region, provided the Saudis with strategic advice, weaponry, and in-air refueling for their fighter jets in the Yemen war, though Riyadh’s tendency to bomb civilian infrastructure rather than confining themselves to military targets caused tension between the two allies. While the Saudis and their coalition pushed the Houthis out of much of the south of the country, including Aden, they were unable to dislodge them from the north. The Saudis implicitly acknowledged their failure with a United Nations-brokered truce in April 2022, which largely held until this past summer.

The Forever Wars Effect

America’s forever wars against Middle Eastern countries that decline to accept the Israel project or American corporate neocolonialism helped reignite the Saudi–Yemeni conflict. Iran is the last major state in the region that rejects Israel and is off-limits to U.S. corporate investment, a stance that inspires much of Washington’s animus. Netanyahu was therefore easily able to persuade Trump, as a privileged visitor to the White House Situation Room, to attack Iran in February.

The glib expectation of Netanyahu and of his Mossad chief at that time, David Barnea, that the Islamic Republic would crumble if Israel murdered Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and around 50 other high-ranking regime figures proved wishful thinking. The notion that Iran was vulnerable to a tightened petroleum blockade was turned on its head by the hard-liners who ascended to power after Khamenei’s death. Largely veterans of the grueling eight-year Iran–Iraq War of the 1980s, the country’s new leaders pursued a policy of “de-basing” toward the United States, taking out its main regional military facilities.

In addition, Iran launched precision strikes at the energy facilities of their Arab Gulf neighbors who had hosted those American bases. They struck Kuwait’s national petroleum company and its fields and refineries. They took out 17 percent of the production of Qatar’s Ras Laffan natural gas facility, even though Doha had good relations with Tehran and had mediated for Iran. Tehran also struck ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz, using missiles and drones, scaring the major shipping insurers into withdrawing their contracts. Few shipping magnates would risk cargoes worth billions of dollars without insurance.

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Iran threw the world into an energy crisis reminiscent of the 1970s, which would have been even more devastating had China not released oil from its vast private and public petroleum reserves and cut its oil imports from 11.5 million barrels a day to under 9 million barrels a day, a move partially enabled by its turn to electric vehicles, which saved it 1.5 million barrels a day. High gasoline and diesel prices hurt Asia more than the United States, but prices rose globally. A third of the world’s helium, essential for cooling computer chips in the production process, comes from the Gulf, and that supply was also interrupted, increasing the price of electronics.

By successfully striking Saudi Arabia, Iran demonstrated that the kingdom’s ability to protect itself is imperfect and its infrastructure is vulnerable. By blockading the Strait of Hormuz in a way that the United States had difficulty undoing, Iran demonstrated the vulnerability of key world maritime arteries, something Ansarullah had already highlighted by striking at shipping in the Red Sea to protest the Gaza genocide. 

Blockade for Blockade

When the Saudis bombed Sanaa’s airport in July 2026, Ansarullah’s leadership appears to have decided that Riyadh posed an ongoing existential danger to their state and sought to strangle the Yemeni economy, just as Israel had done to Gaza. Moreover, they sensed that the kingdom could be rolled back in the wake of the failure of the Israeli–U.S. war on Iran. Just as Iran had weakened the Gulf Arab states with its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the Houthis believed they could seriously degrade the Saudi economy by blocking Riyadh’s shipping through the Bab al-Mandab, “the Strait of Tears,” between the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden.

Saudi exports through the Strait of Hormuz had fallen substantially. The kingdom did, however, have an escape valve: its East-West pipeline to Yanbu on the Red Sea. Ships loading at Yanbu then headed for Saudi Arabia’s major Asian markets through the Bab al-Mandab. If Ansarullah could make the tanker captains fearful of this transit, they could reduce Saudi Arabia’s income even further. The Houthi spokesperson, Muhammad Abd al-Salam, warned that the prohibition of Saudi shipping was only the first step in a tit-for-tat strategy of “blockade for blockade.” The idea wasn’t original. The Saudis and the U.S. had often attempted to blockade petroleum imports to northern Yemen during the seven-year Saudi–Yemeni War.

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In the subsequent three months, Ansarullah deployed missiles and drones constructed from Iranian models by military engineers trained by the old nationalist government of Ali Abdullah Saleh, many of whom had joined the Ansarullah military, in what has been called a Yemeni “military industrial complex.”

Just as the kingdom’s interceptors had proven unable to prevent Iranian strikes on targets such as the CIA section of the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, they sometimes failed to halt the barrage of Yemeni missiles and drones. Refineries and oil installations, even the headquarters of the state oil giant, Saudi Aramco, in Dhahran, were hit. In October, Ansarullah closed Riyadh’s International Airport, just as the Saudis had attempted to close that of Sanaa in July. Ansarullah also surged out of their mountain strongholds and made a major push to Yemen’s southwest coast, taking the strategic port of Mocha overlooking the Bab al-Mandab. They also moved on Taiz, an inland industrial city of nearly 1 million inhabitants, one of the last major population centers not already under their control, in a campaign that tested the ability of the small Saudi-backed government of Rashad al-Alimi in Aden to resist it.

Highlanders and Oil Sheikhs

Just as the Vietnam War was one conflict among many fought in the Third World during the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, so the Saudi–Yemeni War of 2026 is part of the larger struggle between the U.S. and Israel and Iran. Still, just as Vietnam was more about Vietnamese anticolonialism, nationalism, and sovereignty than about Communism and the ownership of the means of production, so the Saudi–Yemeni War is about Yemeni autonomy more than it is about the loose Houthi alliance with Iran. The conflict is not primarily between Zaidism and Wahhabism, though religious tensions are part of the story, but is far more rooted in a struggle between desperately poor Yemeni highlanders and fabulously wealthy Saudi sheikhs.

The plutocratic Saudi ruling elite is closely tied to Washington and has secret dealings with the Israelis, with whom it shares a distrust of the poverty-stricken Palestinian resistance, and views Ansarullah as cat’s paws of Iran in the Arabian Peninsula and as radical republicans trying to overthrow the region’s oil monarchies in favor of populism. For its part, Ansarullah are Arab nationalists, anti-American, and seek to use oil resources for populist purposes. And they have been willing to attack Israel to defend the Palestinians of Gaza from genocide.

Last week, Ansarullah battered targets across Saudi Arabia, prompting a further pullback from the region by Washington. The Yemeni forces attacked King Fahd International Airport in Dammam. An Ansarullah spokesperson said the group also targeted the Saudi defense ministry in the capital, Riyadh, along with an Aramco site in Yanbu, and an airport in the southern city of Abha. Reports also emerged of an attack on another Aramco oil field.

“Houthis have increasingly engaged in hostilities against Saudi Arabia, including attacks on civilian airports and other critical infrastructure,” wrote State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott in an October 21 post on X, after the wave of attacks, ordering “non-emergency U.S. government employees and their family members” out of Saudi Arabia.

It’s just the latest evidence of the most significant regional retreat by the U.S. in half a century and evidence of profound American military decline. The outcome of their war with the Saudis will not determine the issue of the U.S.–Israeli contest with Iran, but the very ability of Ansarullah to prosecute it points to the profound weakening of the American posture in the Middle East.

The post The Incredible Shrinking Superpower appeared first on The Intercept.

Grissett was stunned. He later summed up his reaction: “Vindication.”

McCrory was 26 years old when he was accused of brutally killing his wife in the small town of Andalusia. He insisted he was innocent — and Grissett believed him. There was no evidence connecting McCrory to the crime; prosecutors seized on a supposed bite mark found on his wife’s body, which a state expert claimed to match to McCrory’s teeth.

Grissett was never convinced by the so-called bite mark. At McCrory’s 1985 trial, he said, Grissett’s own dentist sat through the expert testimony and found it preposterous. “He says, ‘There’s no way that guy can say that,’ Grissett recalled. “I mean, anybody with common sense would know that.”

In a September 21 ruling describing the case against McCrory as “thin,” Trump-appointed Judge R. Austin Huffaker Jr., zeroed in on this junk forensic science. Not only would the alleged bite mark not be allowed into evidence today, Huffaker wrote, bite-mark analysis itself “is grossly unreliable and unsupported by relevant scientific bodies. It amounts to nothing more than rank speculation.”

Unless the state moves to retry him within the next six months, Huffaker concluded, McCrory must be released from prison.

The ruling was not only momentous for McCrory, who has insisted on his innocence for more than four decades, but it also marked a new victory in the long legal battle against junk forensics — and the discredited discipline of bite-mark analysis specifically.

Yet more than a month after the decision, McCrory remains behind bars with no sense of when he might walk out. Although his lawyers asked the court to free him on bond pending the state’s decision to release or retry him, the Alabama attorney general’s office filed a motion last week asking Huffaker to reconsider his order overturning the conviction. The state’s appeals will likely drag out McCrory’s ordeal through the holidays and into next year.

In a statement, McCrory’s current legal team praised Huffaker’s “explicit acknowledgment that criminal convictions based on discredited bitemark evidence cannot stand.” Mark Loudon-Brown, senior attorney at the Southern Center for Human Rights, and Chris Fabricant, director of strategic litigation for the Innocence Project, said they are “grateful for the decision and look forward to continuing our fight to bring Mr. McCrory home.”

In 2022, The Intercept published a lengthy investigation into McCrory’s case, detailing the flaws in the state’s conviction. The case attracted additional media coverage, highlighting the problem of junk forensic science. Despite the glaring problems with the evidence against McCrory, Alabama courts have routinely rejected his appeals and in 2023, the state’s parole board denied McCrory release.

Julie Bond McCrory’s body was found inside her home in Andalusia on May 31, 1985. Her head was bashed in, and she’d been repeatedly stabbed in the chest. The couple’s son Chad, then 3 years old, was found unharmed in his bed. Police quickly pointed to McCrory as their only suspect: He and Julie were separated, and McCrory had been having an affair. At trial, the theory seemed to be that he’d savagely murdered Julie to be free from her.

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The police investigation was cursory at best. Detectives found no physical evidence to connect McCrory to the bloody crime. Meanwhile, they ignored some evidence altogether, including two windows in Julie’s bedroom that were found open, but which investigators failed to dust for fingerprints. Police also failed to consider an alternate suspect, a man who worked at an excavating company bordering the McCrorys’ backyard and who, just weeks after Julie’s murder, committed a home invasion rape of another local woman. He was convicted and sent to prison for that crime. 

Ultimately, the state latched onto a single piece of physical evidence against McCrory: a pair of small indentations on the back of Julie’s right arm, which prosecutors concluded was a bite mark made by McCrory’s teeth.

To sell this theory, the state employed famed forensic dentist Richard Souviron, a star prosecution witness in the recent and sensational trial of serial killer Ted Bundy. Although Souviron initially said he couldn’t definitively link the two marks on Julie’s arm to McCrory’s teeth, at trial he was unequivocal that they matched.

Bite-mark analysis is based on a two-pronged foundation. First, that the shape and arrangement of our teeth are unique, like DNA, and second, that skin is a suitable substrate for recording this uniqueness. As it turns out, there’s no science backing either assertion. In fact, research into the discipline has routinely found the opposite — that human dentition is not unique and that skin, with its malleability, is a terrible medium for accurately recording any injury. This makes bite-mark analysis a random and entirely speculative practice.

Still, after taking center stage at the Bundy trial, bite-mark analysis took off in the 1980s and ’90s and, despite not having any basis in actual science, made its way into courtrooms around the country, turning forensic dentists like Souviron into newsmaking, swashbuckling crime fighters.

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In the years that followed, however, bite-mark analysis was increasingly called into question and ultimately exposed as junk science, a subjective pattern-matching practice that has led to dozens of wrongful convictions. At least four of those, including McCrory’s, are cases in which Souviron served as the prosecution’s expert.

In 2019, Souviron recanted his testimony in McCrory’s case, providing an affidavit to Fabricant and Loudon-Brown, who presented it at a 2021 evidentiary hearing in Andalusia. “As a forensic odontologist I no longer believe the individualized teeth marks comparison testimony I offered in his case was reliable or proper,” Souviron wrote. “I no longer believe, as I did at the time of trial, that there is a valid scientific basis for concluding that the injury found on the skin of the victim in this case, assuming that the injury is in fact teeth marks, could be ‘matched’ or otherwise connected to a specific individual, such as Mr. McCrory.”

Despite the fact that their key witness had disavowed the evidence they used to send McCrory to prison for life, prosecutors fought to preserve their conviction. At the 2021 hearing, they insisted that McCrory was guilty, based on the same evidence they presented at trial. They recast the supposed bite mark as “teeth marks,” implying that, while bite-mark analysis may be discredited, the study of “teeth marks” is a separate and valid discipline. Even if Souviron had not testified for the state, they argued, jurors could have looked at photos of the marks on Julie’s body and the dental molds taken from McCrory and decided for themselves that McCrory inflicted the wounds.

Covington County Circuit Court Judge Lex Short, who presided over the hearing, agreed with the prosecutor. So did the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals, which upheld his ruling in favor of the state. But Huffaker did not.

Huffaker took exception to the notion that analyzing “teeth marks” is somehow separate from bite-mark analysis. It is clear, he wrote, “that bitemark identification is based on analysis of individual teeth markings.”

But “most importantly, the state court unreasonably determined that, even without Dr. Souviron’s expert testimony, a reasonable jury could compare the bitemark evidence with McCrory’s dentition themselves and find that it belonged to McCrory,” Huffaker wrote. “This finding blinks reality in light of the evidence presented by McCrory at the postconviction evidentiary hearing.” In a footnote, he added that “if an expert could not testify about bitemark identification because it is junk science, a jury should not have been allowed to consider it either.”

McCrory is not the only person who is still fighting for his freedom decades after being convicted based on discredited junk science. Last year, Chris Duncan was declared innocent nearly 30 years after being sent to Louisiana’s death row based on bogus bite-mark evidence. He was released one day before Thanksgiving. In his case, a video showed the state’s supposed bite-mark expert manufacturing the evidence that was used to convict Duncan.

As in McCrory’s case, Louisiana prosecutors have nevertheless continued to insist their case against Duncan is solid. And as in McCrory’s case, this has not gone over well with some judges. Earlier this year, Louisiana Supreme Court Chief Judge John Weimer wrote that bite-mark evidence “should be discarded and no longer have a place in the realm of forensic science.”

“Long ago, some who were thought to have the best and brightest minds of that time endorsed ‘trial by water’ as a means of determining a person’s guilt or innocence. We now look back at those practices as asinine and absurd, since those who fell victim to those practices often did not survive, regardless of whether they were found guilty or innocent,” Weimer wrote. “Thankfully, as scientific knowledge evolved, there was a realization that these practices had no basis whatsoever in logic, reason, or the search for truth, and the practices were discarded.”

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As the holidays approach, McCrory’s family remains hopeful that he will soon walk out of prison. His son Chad, who is now in his 40s, has attended a dozen parole hearings with the hope of one day seeing his father released.

Grissett, McCrory’s former lawyer, reached out to Chad to share his hope that McCrory will finally come home. While memories have faded in the tight-knit community of Andalusia, many people remember McCrory’s case, he said.

“Everybody sees this was junk science,” Grissett said. “You don’t have to be a scientist to understand that.”

It’s “sad that it’s taken this long,” Grissett said. It haunts him that “somebody’s still out there who murdered this lady. And I’m afraid that they’re not gonna look into that.”

The post Prosecutors Want to Keep a Man in Prison for His Wife’s Murder — Despite Judge Saying Their Evidence is Junk appeared first on The Intercept.

“I never thought about leaving the country,” Flávio Bolsonaro, a Brazilian senator and son of the deposed, disgraced leader, told his 16 million Instagram followers on Monday. It was the day after he lost the presidential election to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva by a margin of more than 4 million votes. 

Flávio promised to stay in Brazil to “organize the opposition” during Lula’s next term. 

“I’m the last obstacle to the Workers’ Party’s plan to destroy the country,” Flávio warned, referring to the party of Lula, who defeated his father four years earlier.

A few hours later, he left his mansion in Brasilia and sought asylum in the U.S. The Trump State Department told The Associated Press that it will grant him and his family visas.

“I didn’t take ​sides, but it looked like another rigged election,” President Donald Trump told reporters on Monday, echoing Flávio’s election night talking points without providing any credible evidence that casts doubt on Lula’s come-from-behind victory — even as Flávio’s own party put out a statement acknowledging the results later that day.

It is no coincidence that the Trumps and the Bolsonaros are so fond of each other. Their modus operandi is nearly identical. 

Both wrap themselves in the rhetoric of patriotism and moral righteousness, while treating their political offices as personal get-rich-quick schemes. And, when their lies finally catch up with them, you can be sure that they will jump ship to save themselves first and abandon their followers.

The affinities become obvious when you watch Bolsonaro, his failsons, and co-conspirators all end up in Trump’s America, where Flávio is about to join his brother, and in the denialism and violence that follow their failures.

Coups and Flight Risks

Flávio Bolsonaro’s election denial and hasty escape are his version of Trump’s infamous January 6 speech: Rile up the troops to do your dirty work and get the hell out of the way.

It’s not the first time a Bolsonaro ran this playbook. After Jair Bolsonaro became the first modern Brazilian president to lose a reelection bid, he refused to attend the January 2023 inauguration ceremony. Instead, he also fled to the U.S., staying in a Minions-themed children’s bedroom in the Orlando, Florida, home of retired UFC fighter José Aldo.

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A week later, on January 8, the ex-president’s allies laid siege to the capital, Brasília, vandalizing Congress, the presidential palace, and the Supreme Court, as foot soldiers in a larger coup plotted to overthrow the Lula government. Nearly four decades of Brazilian democracy was only spared when key military leaders blinked before they could finish the job.

Jair Bolsonaro eventually returned to Brazil and was sentenced to 27 years in prison for leading the plot, which included a plan to assassinate Lula, Vice President Geraldo Alckmin, and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes. Allies, including top military brass, were also convicted. Jair remains under house arrest — widely thought to be pinning his hopes for freedom on a Flávio presidency that wasn’t to be.

Flávio, however, will not be lonely in the States. His brother, former Brazilian Congress member Eduardo Bolsonaro, just received green cards for his family and is living in a $1.2 million McMansion in Southlake, Texas, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, as we revealed in The Intercept Brasil earlier this year. Eduardo, who is a regular on the Trumpworld circuit, was sentenced in absentia to four years and two months in prison for lobbying the U.S. government to interfere in his father’s trial. 

Flávio, too, seems poised to receive news of his own prison sentence while sitting on a couch in a Texas suburb. In May, our reporting at The Intercept Brasil put the first nail in the coffin of his presidential campaign when we published chat logs and audio recordings of the senator negotiating $24 million — and being wired $10 million — from disgraced billionaire banker Daniel Vorcaro, who is a sort of Brazilian cross between Charles Ponzi and Jeffrey Epstein. 

The payments, wired to a U.S. account, were supposedly meant to finance “Dark Horse,” a biopic about Jair Bolsonaro starring Jim Caviezel. Brazilian Federal Police, though, have already poked holes in Flávio’s story as they investigate whether the money was actually used to bankroll Eduardo’s treasonous lobbying of the Trump administration to sanction Brazil and help his brother’s electoral chances. 

Flávio is also being investigated for his alleged ties to a billion-dollar money-laundering scheme through an online betting company run by Willer Tomaz. The two are not only close friends but also business partners. Flávio even had unfettered access to one of Tomaz’s offshore bank accounts. You will not be surprised to learn that Tomaz left Brazil in August and is now living in Miami.

Police argued that, after losing the election, Flávio would pose a flight risk, especially in light of his closest associates’ recent actions. They asked the Brazilian Supreme Court to order Flávio to turn over his passport, which is permitted under Brazilian law. A top justice granted the request and, when the deadline passed, canceled the senator’s travel documents. 

By then, Flávio was already on his way to the U.S.

The post The Bolsonaro Family Playbook: Lose, Cry Fraud, and Run to Trump’s America appeared first on The Intercept.

San Francisco resident John Hering has sunk more than $1.25 million into an effort to defeat Marissa Roy, a deputy attorney general at the California Department of Justice endorsed by the LA chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, and to support John McKinney, a county prosecutor running an uphill general election campaign. It’s a heavy injection of cash from a single individual in a local race for a little-known office, but it pales in comparison to Hering’s private-sector spending: In 2022, his investment firm Vy Capital pumped $700 million into Musk’s takeover of the company then known as Twitter and $300 million into his tunnel-construction Boring Company.

A co-founder of the cybersecurity company Lookout, Hering is spending in line with the tech industry in which he’s long been invested. While the city attorney’s office is commonly used as the city’s defense against litigious residents, the office also carries the power to mold legislation, enforce state law, such as labor protections, and take on corporations and the federal government in court. Roy has vowed to wield the office’s regulatory muscle against corporations — including Big Tech.

“Monopolies and Big Tech are things that [Roy] sees as an opportunity to wage battle against,” said former LA City Councilmember Mike Bonin, who has not endorsed either candidate. “If I were Big Tech, I would certainly think, ‘OK, well, this is someone who is a potential threat.’”

Hering, who did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment, is part of a group of tech titans backing McKinney. Others include the founders of Ring, Tinder, and Boingo, and investors in Anthropic, Anduril, and SpaceX, who have collectively put more than $1.9 million into pro-McKinney committees. A group called “Committee to Expand the Middle Class Candidate” — backed by the property rental tech giant Airbnb — donated an additional $4.2 million to a committee supporting McKinney.

To help get McKinney through the June primary election, Hering and fellow tech investor Diego Berdakin poured more than $1 million into another committee. Over the past month, Hering’s general-election spending group, Neighbors for John McKinney, has been paying for TV and online ads and mailers that play up McKinney as “a lifelong Democrat” and “100% anti-MAGA.” 

The same can hardly be said for the group’s top funder.

After giving to Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential bid and Democratic candidates like Beto O’Rourke, Hering donated $41,300 to the Republican National Committee and $500,000 to Musk’s America PAC in 2024 to support Donald Trump’s run for president. He has publicly praised Musk’s chaotic purge of the federal government through his so-called Department of Government Efficiency program and called the world’s richest man an “American hero” for offering to pay TSA salaries during the spring government shutdown. In 2025, Hering and Ring founder Jamie Siminoff, who has also donated to Neighbors for John McKinney, attended a White House dinner where Trump hosted dozens of high-profile Silicon Valley figures. The pro-McKinney group is also funded by billionaires Rick Caruso, a failed LA mayoral candidate, and Ron Burkle, a Democratic megadonor.

Earlier this cycle, Hering, who listed San Francisco as his residence in campaign finance documents, also waded into the LA mayoral election — boosting right-wing reality star Spencer Pratt.

Tech industry spending in LA’s elections arrives amid a midterm cycle where Big Tech and artificial intelligence have doled out millions of dollars to exert influence in congressional and state races across the U.S. as lawmakers grapple with how to regulate the industries. Musk, for example, has dropped more than $442 million into the midterms, including more than $70 million in his political action committee, America PAC, in October alone. And in state Assembly and Senate races across California, tech and AI executives have spent more than $29 million, according to Tech Equity Action, a political nonprofit that lobbies to craft tech-related legislation while advocating for workers’ rights.

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California Gov. Gavin Newsom gave big AI companies a scare last month, when he signed a slate of bills protecting workers from AI overreach, like limiting its use to terminate or discipline workers, banning employers from using AI to surveil employees in bathrooms, and assuring that human healthcare workers will have the final say on patient care decisions. 

The tech industry had fought hard to kill the bills, and while Newsom did offer the industry some concessions, labor organizers say the new laws offer them an opportunity to expand local worker protections, too. 

In LA, Roy has said she would use the city attorney’s office to fight for workers against losses in potential wages, promising that she would go after “large corporations and big tech companies” that “misclassify workers as independent contractors to avoid paying them minimum wage and providing benefits,” according to her campaign website. She also spoke against companies who are increasingly using automation “to evade regulations and eliminate jobs.”

Tech leaders may view a city attorney with an appetite for regulation as “existential to their business model,” said Brian Justie, a researcher at the UCLA Labor Center who was part of the coalition that pushed for the bills. 

“What happens in California sets a precedent and serves as a blueprint for the rest of the country,” Justie said. “And so if you’re a Big Tech, you really need to have a certain outcome come to pass here to avoid ripple effects elsewhere.” 

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For his part, McKinney has blasted Roy for her desire to “turn the city attorney’s office into the country’s largest public interest law firm” as out of touch with what LA voters want. However, voters across the U.S. have increasingly expressed opposition to the expansion of artificial intelligence and the construction of data centers. Roy’s campaign has shown a willingness to lend an ear to growing AI anxieties.

“Billionaires don’t want to answer to the working people, consumers, and communities they exploit,” Roy said in a statement to The Intercept. “But as Los Angeles’ City Attorney, I intend to hold them, their corporations, and the MAGA Republicans that permit their behavior accountable — that’s why they’re spending on someone who won’t.”

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

Ads put out by Neighbors for John McKinney assert that McKinney would “take on crooked landlords.” The committee’s website said he would fight for tenant’s “legal protections” against things like “illegal eviction.” But among the committee’s biggest funders is the Santa Monica-based real estate firm, Douglas Emmett Properties, which attempted to carry out one of the largest mass evictions in LA history until it was overruled by a judge. Douglas Emmett donated $250,000 to Neighbors for John McKinney in late September.

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Neighbors for John McKinney has also funded attack ads against Roy that paint her as an inexperienced attorney who is weak on crime and has “extreme DSA” positions. The ads cite an article by the conservative California Post, a West Coast spinoff of the New York tabloid, that claimed she had supported a freeze on prosecuting misdemeanors, which she denies.

McKinney campaigns in the mold of law-and-order candidates, pledging to address homelessness and public safety by prosecuting misdemeanors, touting closer relationships with police, and promising to revive a neighborhood prosecutor program. Other California tech-supported efforts have echoed the same — like when tech leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area fueled a successful effort to oust progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin. 

But the LA city attorney’s office holds limited criminal enforcement power, Bonin pointed out. He suspects the tech investment in the LA race is more concerned with potential civil litigation, and he thinks that if voters make that connection, it could spell an issue for the campaign.

“Voters are concerned about Big Tech, they’re certainly concerned about AI, they’re concerned about the influence of — I don’t think you can describe it any other way — 21st-century robber barons,” said Bonin, who now runs the Pat Brown Institute for Public Affairs at California State University, Los Angeles. “Income inequality is a big issue in Los Angeles, so if they make the connection that this funding is symbolic of the agenda that McKinney will pursue … then it becomes more of an issue.” 

Roxana Tynan, senior advisor of the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, called the amount of Big Tech money being spent in the race “outrageous.” As she and other labor rights groups gear up for a fight for more worker AI protections in LA — like expanding safeguards to include temporary and gig workers, and banning employers from using AI software to collect sensitive worker information — she said she hoped people would follow the money being poured into the race and the influence that a few figures look to exert on the city.

“These are people who really believe that not only can they buy elections,” Tynan said, “but that they deserve to buy elections.”

Correction: October 29, 2026
This story has been updated to correct Roxana Tynan’s title.

The post The Elon Musk Funder Trying to Sway the Race for LA’s Top Lawyer appeared first on The Intercept.

The fear is mounting after a series recent attacks and threats against ground targets, including the destruction of key bases in the Middle East by Iran, plots against mega-bases in Europe, including to U.S. bombers at a British air base, and a Russian campaign that damaged European military facilities, according to two government officials.

While the Pentagon is notorious for inflating threats to press for additional funding, the officials stressed that the anxiety is real, not invented. Despite the U.S. military’s enormous budget, they say, the United States now finds itself scrambling strengthen its fortifications, protect its costly equipment, and recall personnel from some locations.

“Now all the world knows what the SecDef should have,” said one of the officials.

Foreign adversaries have taken notice of Iran’s ability to defeat U.S. air defenses using missiles and drones, they said. The officials drew specific attention to Tehran’s ability to damage or destroy bases that have been the key to U.S. power-projection and war-making for decades in the Middle East.

An Iranian missile and drone attack on February 28 destroyed Navy facilities in Manama, Bahrain, the region’s most critical logistics hub. The Combined Air Operations Center at Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, was severely damaged by Iranian missiles early in the war, rendering it inoperable. Both were recently attacked again, raising questions about whether either will ever be rebuilt. The destruction of these bases has fundamentally altered America’s future force posture in the region, according to the officials. One of them called it a “seismic shift.”

On Friday, the Trump administration leaked highly classified intelligence to Fox News and Axios suggesting Iran has “substantially increased” efforts to target U.S. diplomats and other officials in the Middle East and beyond. The October 23 memo claimed that “the lethal plotting efforts by the Iranians against U.S. citizens have reached advanced stages.” A U.S. official confirmed the accuracy of the intelligence but questioned the motives of the “official leak,” suggesting it’s part of a case being built to justify renewing the failed war.

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The leak came as the State Department ordered a further reduction in staff at multiple diplomatic posts across the Middle East, including in Jordan, Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. One of the officials said the move “definitely” spoke to America’s inability to defend its assets overseas. Those fears now extend to the United States, according to the officials.

Last month, buried in an unhinged address to troops in which he attacked the press and those within the military he calls beardos, weirdos, and wimps, self-styled War Secretary Pete Hegseth tacitly acknowledged the vulnerability of U.S. domestic bases, noting that the Pentagon was now “hardening every installation on American soil” against “sabotage and drones.” And last week, the Pentagon quietly began seeking advice on new ways to protect bases by using innovative advanced materials, camouflaging facilities, obscuring their thermal and electromagnetic signatures, hiding them underground, and making them more resilient in the face of successful attack by adversaries, according to a special notice issued by a top Pentagon official.

As the Pentagon refines this “base of the future” concept, Iran is teasing a “war of the future” effort that builds on its successes in throttling the Strait of Hormuz, regionalizing the war, and battering U.S. bases, according to Mahdi Mohammadi, a senior adviser to Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the lead negotiator and speaker of Parliament. “The second generation of surprises will be on their way; at the time and place of our choosing, in the manner we have devised, and with the creativity that only our unparalleled fighters can muster,” he wrote on X, teasing how Iran would respond if America ramps up the war.

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Iran’s successful attacks on U.S. bases have added to the growing realization that foreign adversaries, proxies, terror groups, and lone wolf actors can use low-cost, easily obtained drones to attack the military bases, aircraft, and military personnel of the U.S. and its allies.

While Iran dominated the headlines for months, officials became increasingly worried about danger from Russian attacks. “When do we stop calling it gray zone?” asked a third official briefed on the intelligence, referring to a Russian drone attack on a massive air freighter, used to carry military assistance to Ukraine, at Leipzig/Halle Airport in Germany in August. One drone hit the cargo plane but failed to explode, another struck a different aircraft, and a third was found near the airport. “That’s what Putin always does. He keeps testing us, pushing us, to see how far he can go,” said the official. That official and another said that the intelligence proved there was “no question” that Russia was behind the operations. Russia has denied responsibility.

The August drone attack was part of a monthslong campaign of nonstop sabotage, cyberattacks, and psychological operations against NATO nations. “These were happening in sequence from earlier in the year, through August, through September and they didn’t show any signs of stopping,” said the third official. But the attacks slowed or stopped after President Donald Trump announced earlier this month that the United States would buy Russian diesel in an effort to bring down fuel prices before the midterm elections and called on Ukraine to stop striking oil Russian refineries.

The officials noted that Pentagon leadership has been slow to respond to the changing nature of warfare, specifically drawing attention to tactics honed by Ukraine in its war with Russia. Earlier this month, for example, intelligence suggested that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was planning a complex drone attack on U.S. B-1 bombers used to attack Iran, and U.S. personnel at Royal Air Force Fairford air base. The plot, they said, was to launch small drones from just beyond the bases’ fenceline, attacking the supersonic bombers, which were not in hardened shelters but in the open on the tarmac. They noted that the plot appeared to be patterned on a Ukrainian attack, dubbed Operation Spider’s Web, against Russia last year. The plot so unnerved top military officials that the bombers were flown out while some aerial refueling aircraft were still being deployed to support their panicked flights back to the U.S. In addition to RAF Fairford, U.S. officials referenced additional threats against other bases in Europe, including Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

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Last August, Hegseth established Joint Interagency Task Force 401 to deliver “C-sUAS” or counter-small unmanned aircraft system “capabilities to America’s warfighters, [to] defeat adversary threats, and promote sovereignty over national airspace.” But an inspector general report from January said “immediate attention” was required to protect the most critical bases in the U.S. against drones and noted that Pentagon “documents contradict one another and do not speak to certain aspects of C-UAS authorities and capabilities.” The IG found also that key “military installations, government-owned, contractor-operated facilities, and contractor-owned, contractor-operated facilities conducting critical missions” were not even designated for protection.

In March, small drones flew over Louisiana’s Barksdale Air Force Base, the home of Global Strike Command which oversees America’s bomber fleet and its intercontinental-ballistic missiles. And the IG report mentions “10 DoD installations and activities where Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) incursions have occurred.”

Late last month, the Air Force awarded a contract for counter-drone systems for Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey. The military has also been looking into drone-killing technologies to defend Yokota Air Base in Tokyo, Japan; Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota; Battle Creek Air National Guard Base in Michigan; and Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, among other facilities.

Two of the officials suggested that new Pentagon plans for military base modernization are rooted in an uneasy acknowledgment that U.S. outposts around the world — including within the continental United States — are increasingly vulnerable to complex and asymmetric attacks. A recent Pentagon inspector general report revealed Iranian strikes “damaged and destroyed hundreds of buildings and structures at U.S. bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman, and Jordan during the conflict.” 

Hegseth’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment by The Intercept.

One U.S. official told The Intercept that the cost of repairing and rebuilding these Middle East outposts could be “upwards of $50 million,” but said the “real cost” might be “far higher.” The Pentagon, however, refuses to disclose the price tag of the damage, which has only been shared in a classified briefing.

“The American people deserve to know the full cost of the Trump administration’s unauthorized war against Iran. Even if DoD has not yet determined which facilities it is planning to rebuild, disclosing these costs represents the bare minimum transparency DoD owes the public,” wrote Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumentha, Mazie Hirono, Tammy Duckworth, and Gary Peters in a recent letter to Adm. Brad Cooper, the chief of Central Command. CENTCOM did not reply to a request from The Intercept for the total cost.

Last week, the Pentagon quietly began seeking information for “near-term” procurement and long-term modernization strategies to “move past traditional ‘pour-concrete-and-hope’ hardening” of its facilities and increase the “survivability of these installations under kinetic and multi-domain threats,” according to a special notice from the office of Dale R. Marks, the assistant secretary of war for energy, installations, and environment.

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Following the destruction of NSA Manama and Al Udeid Air Base, the Pentagon is seeking ways to promote “operational capability and survivability under kinetic impact,” by employing decentralized energy grids, “autonomous backup utility systems,” innovative base layouts, and modular structures. Recognizing the need to “protect assets and personnel from kinetic impacts, thermal effects, and blast overpressures,” the military is looking at ways to harden facilities. This means employing advanced construction methods involving metamaterials designed for surviving air attack, energy-dissipating composites, self-healing materials, and “novel concrete formulations.” 

The U.S. is also seeking ways to lower the profile or conceal the location of its bases through technological means. This includes camouflaging facilities and integrating them into the natural environment to make them more difficult to spot, masking their thermal and electromagnetic signatures, and creating decoy structures to draw fire. 

Beyond the use of “terrain-integrated facility design,” the U.S. is also seeking to take its most sensitive facilities deep below ground. Increased vulnerabilities to aerial attack have led to a reemergence and increased reliance on subterranean warfare in the Russia–Ukraine war, harkening back to World War I trench warfare and the use of massive underground tunnel networks and bases by Vietnamese forces in the American war.

Iran, for its part, uses underground facilities to shield its missile and nuclear programs. The Pentagon, according to the documents, is interested in new methods of “high-speed tunneling,” the rapid creation of protected caverns, and “shock-isolated underground structural design[s].”

Last week’s quiet plea from the Pentagon follows an announcement by Hegseth of a FORTRESS America initiative that he calls a “national insurance policy for the American homeland.” One former Pentagon analyst, however, said it sounded more like “cutting America and Americans loose” in the event of a major conflagration, tying it to Hegseth’s belief that the military is a warrior elite superior to civilians.

“Every major military installation in America is going to generate its own power. Independent of the civilian grid. If an adversary takes down the grid by cyberattack, by sabotage, by any means, our bases stay lit. Our aircraft keep flying. Our command centers never go dark,” said Hegseth, explaining the FORTRESS concept. “We are building long overdue strategic reserves deep enough to fight through disruption. Think munitions. Fuel. Medicine. Blood. Deep enough that if the world’s supply lines break, and in a real war, they are going to break — America keeps fighting anyway.”

The former advisor said that Hegseth’s plan appeared to send a message to 99 percent of the American public: “It sounds as if he is saying to people ‘fuck off and you’re on your own.’”

The post Pentagon Fears Drone Attacks on U.S. and Foreign Bases appeared first on The Intercept.

Bankrolling Empire

During the Cold War, the Subic Bay Naval Base in the Philippines was a key enabler of U.S. military operations in the Pacific and beyond. It served as a critical support facility for the U.S. war in Vietnam and a transit point for U.S. weapons destined for American military personnel in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. That all changed in June of that year, when the Philippine Congress, under pressure from a grassroots anti-bases movement, refused to renew the lease for Subic Bay and other U.S. outposts in that nation.

After the closing of U.S. bases, military relations between the U.S. and the Philippines were conducted indirectly through arms transfers, joint training exercises, and deployments of Special Operations forces to aid Philippine counterinsurgency efforts, rather than by the permanent presence of tens of thousands of troops. The relationship was codified in 1999, when Washington and Manila entered into a Visiting Forces Agreement, which eased the movement of U.S. troops and equipment in and out of the Philippines and put U.S. personnel in the country under the jurisdiction of U.S. rather than Philippine authorities.

But now Subic Bay is back in play as part of a new expansion of the U.S. military presence in the Philippines. And this time around, private capital is financing these empire games.

Military Might Versus Human Rights

The long-standing U.S. military ties with the Philippines have come at a high price for the residents of that nation. Washington’s military and economic interests there have prompted it to look the other way as repressive leaders like Ferdinand Marcos and Rodrigo Duterte engaged in systematic human rights abuses against their own people.

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To its credit, the Reagan administration eventually cut ties with Marcos — who was overthrown through peaceful protests known as the “People Power” revolt in 1986 — throwing its support behind his democratically elected opponent, Corazon Aquino. But there was no such shift with respect to Duterte, whose regime ruled the Philippines from 2016 to 2022, and engaged in extrajudicial killings of thousands of Filipinos, including journalists and land reform activists, all under the guise of a “war on drugs.” Duterte is now under indictment by the International Criminal Court, which has cited him for “the crimes against humanity of murder and attempted murder.”

While Marcos and his family fled the Philippines in the 1980s, his son — Ferdinand Marcos Jr. — returned and, in 2022, won the presidency in a landslide, in part by promising to continue some of the strongman policies introduced by Duterte. According to Human Rights Watch, since the younger Marcos took office:

Serious human rights violations have continued in the country largely unabated, including arbitrary arrests, extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances by security forces. The murderous ‘war on drugs’ has continued, though with fewer killings. Leftist civil society activists, journalists, environmentalists, Indigenous leaders, trade unionists, and left-wing politicians remain under serious, at times deadly, threat.

During the Biden presidency, the U.S. expanded a 2014 pact — the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement — which gave the U.S. military access to five major sites in the Philippines. In 2023, the number of bases was expanded to nine. The State Department has described the scope of the EDCA as authorizing “U.S. forces access to agreed locations in the Philippines on a rotational basis, for security cooperation exercises, joint and combined military training activities, and humanitarian assistance and disaster relief activities.” That official summary fails to admit the real reason for the signing of the EDCA: to give the U.S. access to territory that can be used in a future war with China.

The Privatization of Subic Bay

Building on his predecessor’s enhanced cooperation with the Philippines, President Donald Trump, who had been a staunch Duterte supporter, has pursued even tighter ties with Marcos’s government. This has been driven, in significant part, by the desire to use the Philippines as a platform for potential U.S. military interventions in the Pacific region and further economic penetration of Asia.

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As part of the accelerating security partnership between the U.S. and the Philippines, military activities at Subic Bay have resumed. But this time, formal access has been secured by a private investment firm, Cerberus Capital Management, which controls the area through a 50-year lease granted through collaboration with a Philippine company, Agila.

A report by the New York Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines, a member of the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines, summarized current activities at Subic Bay:

In mid-2025, the U.S. Congress approved a plan to build a forward operating base and ammunition production facility in Subic Bay. It is projected to be the world’s largest weapons hub. … The shipyard [is home to] HD Hyundai Heavy Industries, deep sea fiber optic data cables manufacturer Sub Com, defense contractor V2X and the Philippine Navy, which operates a portion of the facility.

Cerberus has strong ties to the Trump administration, first and foremost through its founder, Stephen Feinberg, who is deputy secretary of the Department of War, second in command at the Pentagon behind Pete Hegseth. In that role, Feinberg oversees the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital, which makes loans to military tech companies, many of which are current or former Cerberus clients.

Feinberg “earned” his position the old-fashioned way — by giving millions to Rebuilding America Now, a super PAC devoted to supporting Trump, and hosting a $50,000-a-plate fundraiser, the proceeds of which also went to support candidate Trump in 2016.

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Bloomberg News has identified four other former Cerberus executives now in key positions at the Pentagon: David Lorch, director of the OSC; George Kollitides, a special government employee who is simultaneously a director of D. Boral Acquisition, a company that brokers mergers and acquisitions in the weapons sector; and senior Pentagon advisers John Gallagher and Tom Rakusan.

On the other side of the revolving door, Cerberus has hired major Republican figures like former Treasury Secretary John Snow and former Vice President Dan Quayle, who serves as chair of the company’s global investment unit. Given these connections, the Pentagon is all-in behind Cerberus’s activities in the Philippines. But this has prompted a backlash. Activists in the Philippines and beyond are speaking out against the role of Cerberus, calling for public pension funds to withdraw their investments in the company for underwriting the militarization of the Philippines.

Another important avenue of increased cooperation between the U.S. and the Marcos government is the Philippines’ participation in Pax Silica, a U.S.-initiated cartel that the State Department describes as its “flagship effort on AI and supply chain security, advancing new economic security consensus among allies and trusted partners.” And by “supply chain security,” the declaration primarily means “reducing dependence on China” for critical minerals needed to feed and sustain the computing power now central to the Pentagon and the U.S. arms industry.

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In addition to the Philippines, there are 24 other participants in Pax Silica, including two other key Asian partners, India and Japan, as well as Taiwan, which is an associate member of the cartel. Jacob Helberg, a former adviser to military tech giant Palantir who now serves as the State Department’s point person on Pax Silica, has stressed that the initiative goes well beyond just securing the supply of specific critical resources. “If the 20th century ran on oil and steel, the 21st century runs on [computing power] and the minerals that feed it,” he said. “This declaration [announcing Pax Silica] hails a new economic security consensus ensuring aligned partners build the AI ecosystem of tomorrow — from energy and critical minerals to high-end manufacturing models.”

The China Syndrome

Although it supplies many other benefits to U.S. corporations and America’s national security state, the enhanced effort to bring the Philippines more securely into the U.S. military, political and economic orbit is all rationalized as moves toward reining in China’s economic and military power and garnering Manila’s support in a possible war between China and the U.S.

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The policy of economic warfare and aggressively preparing for a military conflict with China could not be more misguided. The oft-cited “need” to posture U.S. forces to do battle with China over Taiwan ignores the fact that there are diplomatic means of preventing such a conflict.

What is needed is a joint understanding on the status of Taiwan. For over 40 years, peace in the Taiwan Strait has been maintained through the U.S.–China agreement that Washington will not take steps toward recognizing Taiwan as an independent state and China would agree not to resolve the issue of Taiwan by force — the so-called “One China” policy. That agreement has been weakened by actions taken during both the Biden and Trump administrations. The simplest and best way for Washington and Beijing to avoid a war over Taiwan would be to revert to the “One China” policy.

China does not pose a direct military threat to the United States. Its last major war was its invasion of Vietnam in 1979, a conflict in which its troops were badly beaten by battle-hardened Vietnamese forces. The U.S. also spends almost three times as much on its military as China does, and is far ahead of Beijing in numbers of advanced combat aircraft, naval firepower, and nuclear weapons.

In areas where China might be a peer competitor with the U.S. military, like AI-driven weapons, there need to be some rules of the road on how such systems can be used. Using trade wars and military buildups as the primary U.S. tool for influencing China simply will not work. The likely result of persisting in such an approach will be a dangerous arms race and an increased risk of outright war.

A more productive approach to U.S.–China relations would be to seriously explore cooperation on central issues like arms control, addressing the climate crisis, and stabilizing the global economy. There would still be a U.S. military strategy for the Asia–Pacific region, but it should be genuinely defensive in nature, a posture that could save hundreds of billions of dollars in the years to come.

Pursuing a more balanced policy toward China would open the way to developing more equal, less exploitative relations with the Philippines and other nations in the Pacific, and it would allow Washington to finally take a genuine interest in promoting human rights and opposing repression as central pillars of U.S. international relations.

At a time when armed conflict and threats of war are the bedrock of U.S. policy, from the Western Hemisphere to the Middle East, a shift toward diplomacy seems daunting. But it is the only way forward if we want to move toward a more peaceful world where no one nation or group of nations dominates, and where corporations aren’t bending foreign and domestic policies to their will.

The post Bankrolling American Empire in the Philippines appeared first on The Intercept.

It was the last time anyone would hear from her. When Resendiz’s friend arrived at the barracks 15 minutes later, the pair was nowhere to be found.

“The Navy failed her,” Resendiz’s mother, Esmerelda Castle, told The Intercept. After her daughter’s disappearance, friends and family spent a week scrambling to find Resendiz. Castle found the Navy’s reports in that time unclear, delayed, or downright false.

A first-of-its-kind Intercept investigation has found critical shortcomings in the U.S. military’s procedures for documenting and preserving records of homicides that result from domestic abuse, including intimate partner violence. The Pentagon’s mandated reports to Congress appear to substantially undercount these killings, omitting nearly half of cases.

In the six years before Copeland’s murder of Resendiz, the Pentagon recorded 41 domestic abuse-related homicides committed by service members. The Intercept identified nearly twice as many: at least 73 potential cases involving 79 victims — almost all of them women — during the same period. Reports for fiscal year 2025, when Resendiz was murdered, are due in November.

The Intercept examined publicly available news articles, obituaries, court records, memorials, and other data to investigate the specifics behind the Defense Department’s numbers. Reporters also used data obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request on Army noncombat fatalities to match names, because some news coverage did not mention the victims’ and alleged perpetrators’ military service.

A killing qualified for the dataset if it occurred in fiscal years 2019 to 2024; if the perpetrator was a member of the military at the time of the crime; and if the case involved a homicide. The database only includes cases where a victim of the violence had dated or was in a romantic relationship with the suspected perpetrator, and it includes multiple women living abroad who were foreign citizens dating American troops.

In the fiscal years since the second Trump administration took power, The Intercept found at least 10 service women or women working for the Defense Department have died from intimate partner and domestic violence, six of them killed by male co-workers. An additional 10 civilian women have been killed by male military personnel in intimate partner violence-related homicides during the same period.

A Pentagon spokesperson acknowledged The Intercept’s queries about the discrepancy in homicide rates but did not respond to detailed questions before publication.

“At this moment in our country’s history, I am afraid these numbers are going to increase even further,” said Jacquelyn Campbell, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Nursing who has been studying domestic violence in the military for decades. “We need primary prevention for everyone in the military and their partners.”

The findings come in the wake of President Donald Trump’s August announcement of a Military Spouse Commission, led by Jennifer Hegseth, the wife of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and other high-level military leaders. The commission’s mandate is to guide policy around issues affecting military families. Though intimate partner violence and spousal abuse have concerned military family advocates for decades and thousands of new cases are reported each year, the commission does not mention the issue as one of its areas of focus.

The Navy and DoD have said in public statements and communication with members of Congress and Castle that while “proper procedures were followed” following the death of Resendiz, they have identified several processes that require further review.

“What Are the Statistics?”

Copeland killed Resendiz on May 29, 2025. In the days after Resendiz’s disappearance, her friends filed missing person reports and called Castle in Texas, who in turn called the Navy. None of them knew that Resendiz was dead.

The Navy’s official timeline of events says it did not start investigating her disappearance as a crime until a missing person’s report was filed on the 31st, and that Castle did not reach out until that day. Phone records she shared with The Intercept and members of Congress show she started calling on the 29th.

“I was told she was found, and that the original missing person’s report was exaggerated,” Castle recalled. “I didn’t think for a second that the Navy would lie to me.

Technically, Resendiz had been found — a Navy chief searching for her had seen Resendiz’s body packed under the covers in Copeland’s bed around 10 a.m. on the day of her disappearance. They assumed she was asleep, according to evidence later revealed during trial. But as Castle tells it — including in a congressional inquiry she wrote requesting a deeper investigation— a Navy chief claimed on the phone to have spoken to her daughter in Copeland’s room.

She had been dead for hours.

“He had Angie wrapped up in a blanket on his bed,” said Castle. “It was against policy for her to be in the barracks. And they just turned their backs and left.”

Intimate partner violence in the military has long been a problem with unclear signs of progress. Killings in the 1990s on bases such as Fort Campbell made national headlines, leading Congress to establish the Defense Task Force on Domestic Violence in 2000.

Campbell, the nursing professor, was part of the effort, which issued over 200 suggestions for improvement by 2003. “Most of the recommendations we made a long time ago were never implemented,” she said. For one, she’d repeatedly requested better recordkeeping.

“One of the things I kept asking was, ‘What are the statistics on intimate partner homicide in the military?’ We could never get them,” Campbell said. “And in the military’s suicide reports, you cannot determine how many suicides were part of homicide–suicides, where a service member killed a civilian wife or partner before killing himself.”

This lack of clarity sounded familiar to Priscilla Rodriguez, who spent 10 years in the Marine Corps before working in strategic communications for the Navy.

Rodriguez experienced domestic violence that met the Defense Department’s criteria from her husband, an active-duty Marine at the time, according to documents reviewed by The Intercept. Her husband pleaded guilty to misdemeanor child abuse in civilian courts, and military legal authorities recommended domestic violence charges. “The command chose not to pursue military legal action,” Rodriguez said.

The Intercept’s analysis of the rates of domestic abuse reported in Pentagon data found intimate partner violence among married military couples was at least four times higher than the civilian rate. The Pentagon does not report the rate of abuse involving unmarried intimate partners, like Resendiz and Copeland.

Gaps like these make it difficult to have a thorough reckoning of the problem’s scale. “When accountability is inconsistent,” Rodriguez said, “it sends a message that abuse can and will remain hidden.”

“I Knew My Kid Was Not Coming Back”

Copeland kept Resendiz’s corpse hidden in his barracks room for four days, until June 2, 2025, when he put her body into a duffel bag and dumped it in a wooded area behind a nearby elementary school.

By then, he was being questioned by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service on her whereabouts, and Castle was still wondering about her daughter’s safety. She’d asked naval authorities to have her daughter give her a call, and when it never came, she contacted the base again.

A Navy official suggested her daughter may have gone AWOL.

“I didn’t believe that,” Castle said. “My kid is scared to miss work. She won’t take off.”

Castle flew to Virginia herself.

Resendiz had been dead for a week. Castle felt she wasn’t getting the information she needed after the Navy and local authorities had put out a statewide missing person’s alert. She requested that she be let into her daughter’s barracks room.

“I didn’t want anyone else touching her stuff,” Castle said. “It was how she left it. There was still paint out; she had started painting again. Her yoga mat was still out. She had planned on returning. I knew my kid was not coming back.”

She spent two more days in Virginia searching for her daughter, talking to local news, and asking naval authorities to give more updates.

“They didn’t declare her AWOL or dead,” Castle said. “They said she was duty status unknown. I was worried they were going to wash their hands of her.”

On June 7, Castle flew back to Texas. Police found Resendiz’s body in the duffel bag two days later.

A History of Violence

Jermiah Copeland was convicted of Resendiz’s murder on June 8, 2026. According to evidence entered into court records in his murder trial, he had also been accused of two instances of domestic violence, three sexual assaults, indecent recordings, and other crimes from during and before his Navy service.

“He had a history of violence against women starting in high school,” Castle said. “And was still allowed to join with the charges against him. Then he was accused of raping another service member, and he was transferred. There were no safeguards in place at the new command.”

The absence of safeguards against intimate partner violence in the military is part of a broader set of structural and cultural failings, experts told The Intercept.

“There are many disincentives for a couple, particularly when one or both partners are on active duty, to seek help,” Campbell said. “Active-duty women who were being abused told us: ‘If my commanding officer knew, I would never get the next promotion.’ There is considerable stigma, even for the victim. That makes the violence much more likely to escalate and makes it more likely that we eventually end up with homicides.”

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Research indicates that the military’s hypermasculine culture and systematic mistreatment of women play a role in the increased risks of intimate partner violence. Some studies suggest that veterans offend at higher rates than those on active duty.

A previous Intercept investigation found active-duty Army women were more likely to be killed by fellow service members than by enemy combatants and had a higher per capita risk of homicide than their fellow male soldiers between the years 2011 and 2025.

More than 70 percent of the victims had an intimate relationship with the perpetrator at some point. Army women faced an intimate partner homicide rate at least three times higher than women nationally; controlling for those killed by service men and male veterans alone, it was double.

The military’s systems for identifying and responding to abuse, meanwhile, have come under repeated scrutiny. A 2021 Government Accountability Office report found the department “has not collected and reported accurate data for all domestic abuse allegations received,” leaving it unable to assess the scope of alleged abuse.

The same can be said for homicides.

Almost a third of the 79 victims The Intercept found were killed in murder–suicides. Firearms were used in over two-thirds of the fatalities. Twenty-five of the victims were service members. Multiple homicides involved corollary victims who were not partners, including children, who research shows make up a sizable amount of intimate partner violence-related deaths.

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In response to The Intercept’s questions, the Department of Defense stated that data in its domestic abuse reports does not constitute estimates, as it is only using aggregated data from the Family Advocacy Program Central Registry, a database run by the DoD. It further stated it did not have any more information to share on the matter.

“Right now, unless an incident is reported to the Family Advocacy Program,” said Campbell, “nobody knows about it. Those reports are only the tip of the iceberg.”

Data tracking failures have had deadly consequences. The Air Force failed to submit the criminal history of a former service member convicted of assaulting his wife and stepson to a federal database that could have prevented him from purchasing firearms. In 2017, he killed 26 people in Sutherland Springs, Texas.

When Rodriguez reported her own abuse to the DoD, she felt that they didn’t consider the previous information they had available. Installation-level committees review reported allegations and determine whether they meet criteria to be input into the central registry. But the process is plagued with issues, experts who spoke to the Intercept revealed, from investigation procedures to data tracking.

“I was terrified to disclose the full extent of the abuse I was experiencing,” Rodriguez said. “What stands out to me now is that the Family Advocacy Program already had access to my husband’s history. Given that history, I believe the conversation should have been much broader than simply asking whether I wanted to report anything. I left that initial interaction without understanding what support existed or how I could safely leave.”

While navigating her own case, Rodriguez was also watching the same problem surface through her communications work for the Navy.

“Headlines I monitored involved active duty and Marine veterans accused of intimate partner homicide,” Rodriguez said. “At the same time, I reviewed serious incident reports that were elevated to senior leadership. … The narrative often indicated that intimate partner violence or domestic violence was a contributing or co-occurring factor.”

Navy criminal investigative data showed domestic violence-related deaths increasing as Rodriguez was trying to raise the issue in 2022. She tried to compile domestic violence awareness resources, but she recalled being told the need wasn’t there.

“I was told there was ‘no demand signal,’” Rodriguez said. “It felt completely disconnected from the reality my family and so many others were living.”

Castle feels that the knowledge of Copeland’s history of abuse could have saved her daughter’s life.

“No one knew anything about him,” Castle said. “The leadership created an environment that allowed him to harm women.”

Winnable Cases

Since her daughter’s murder, Castle has been at work pushing the Navy and Defense Department to strengthen their responses to intimate partner violence. Her work led to the Navy changing its policies in July on how it transfers sailors with allegations of sexual violence.

Her wins, including potential plans by the Navy to change how it classifies missing sailors, are the latest in a long string of limited efforts toward progress.

“Records are important,” said Castle. “With my daughter, they didn’t want to classify her case properly at first. For the military, if something isn’t in a database, it doesn’t exist.”

Following the high-profile 2020 murder of Army Spc. Vanessa Guillén at Fort Hood — and two years after domestic violence became classified as a crime under the Uniform Code of Military Justice — Congress gave independent military prosecutors the power to decide which cases to bring to trial.

Domestic violence prosecutions climbed, with charges brought in 359 cases last year alone, up from dozens of cases four years earlier. But Pentagon data identified at least 25,000 intimate partner and spouse abuse victims, and 37,000 cases, from 2021 to 2024.

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And while domestic violence prosecutions increased, military prosecutions of sexual assault — often related to intimate partner violence — fell by almost 60 percent in the past five years, based on data from its annual sexual assault prevention reports. A 20 percent drop occurred from 2024–2025 alone, and The Intercept’s analysis of military court data shows the trend is continuing into 2026.

“In the Pete Hegseth era, sexual assault prosecutions have dropped significantly. Domestic violence is essentially filling that gap,” said Paul Newell, an Army veteran and activist who tracks military suicide, sexual assault, and domestic violence while engaging with members of Congress on the issue.

Newell thinks the trial counsel’s office is “going for what they feel are stronger, more winnable cases,” he said. “They’ll tell you that their conviction rates at trial are still high, which shows that really, they’re just getting rid of the bad cases,” he said. “But we’re not down 60 percent in sexual assaults happening.”

The Pentagon stated in response to The Intercept’s questions that it does not have any additional information to share on why prosecution rates for certain crimes are dropping.

The Intercept also discovered preferential treatment in trial outcomes: Analyzing over 650 military court cases with guilty verdicts from 2021 on, reporters found less senior Navy, Marine, and Army service members had higher chances of losing their benefits and received more jail time after being convicted for domestic violence. Senior ranks closest to retirement received the best conviction outcomes, even compared to those of the same rank as them who had fewer years in service.

Newell feels that these discrepancies give perpetrators increased power over their victims. “The justice system should not take time in service into consideration since that’s prioritizing the perpetrator. If the punishment for domestic violence is a discharge where you lose benefits, it should be applied equally.”

In April, Hegseth directed installation commanders to allow service members to request permission to carry privately owned firearms on bases while off duty. He framed the change as a way to protect service members from attacks on military installations.

Campbell disagrees.

“I have reviewed far too many domestic violence homicide records,” Campbell said. “It is clear to me that, in many cases, there might have been a fight, and somebody might have been hit, but nobody would have died if there had not been a gun right there.”

Rodriguez, who is now studying public health, is calling for recurring anonymous surveys using specific questions to measure the prevalence of intimate partner violence, standardized tracking, independent evaluation, and public reporting.

Castle is still mourning her daughter and still pushing the Navy to reveal the full details about the investigation into her death. To add to the insult, she remembered the shock she felt late last June, when the Navy sent Resendiz home to Texas in a casket. Naval officials had told Castle that everything was taken care of, she recalled, including cleaning the body.

The Navy acknowledges that it failed to clearly inform Castle of her daughter’s true state. She was returned to Texas in decay, her body crawling with maggots.

“There’s nothing that can be done for her,” said Castle. “That’s injustice, and that’s what drives me. None of these women volunteered to be violated in this way.”

How we analyzed the data

Reporters searched through multiple databases to identify the number of potential victims of intimate partner violence, using definitions provided by health and policy research alongside government organizations, comparing it to the last six years of available DoD reporting from 2019 through 2024. The case of a U.S. Air Force airman who kidnapped and murdered a Mennonite woman in 2020 didn’t meet criteria because evidence revealed no previous or current relationship. The case of a soldier who was convicted a year later of the murder of a woman in Texas did, as evidence indicated they had a relationship before the woman’s death.

Cases were broken down by the year of the offense, gender of the alleged perpetrator and victim, and branch of the perpetrator and victim, if applicable.

To analyze court data, reporters from The Intercept pulled all court cases pertaining to domestic violence from the years 2021 to 2026 from the websites of the Air Force, Navy/Marines, and U.S. Army. Navy/Marine data was only available starting in 2021.

Data included the offense type, rank of the accused, and whether the cases ended in acquittal, dismissal, or conviction. For those convicted, the analysis included the amount of jail time given and whether offenders received a punitive discharge, which costs them military retirement and other benefits.

Retirement eligibility was calculated based on pay information provided in court documents, which in the military is based on years served. Air Force data could not be used for this analysis due to a lack of documentation and apparent discrepancies between the number of cases reported to Congress and those available on the Air Force portal.

To obtain the number of cases the DoD is prosecuting for sexual assault, reporters utilized Annex B of the DoD’s Annual Report on Sexual Assault in the Military to calculate the number of unrestricted reports made to military authorities and the amount sent to the military justice system to begin the judicial process. 

The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline offers 24-hour support for those experiencing suicidal thoughts or for those close to them, by chat, text, or telephone. Service members can dial 988 and press 1 to reach the Military and Veterans Crisis Line. Support is free and confidential.

The post Pentagon Records Missed Almost Half of Troops’ Domestic Abuse Killings appeared first on The Intercept.

Hegseth announced the creation of a new Office of Religious Affairs on September 30, vowing that the office would give members of the armed forces’ chaplain corps access to him without “bureaucratic dilution.” It coincides with his openly Christian “Send Me” campaign, an online propaganda effort that the Pentagon launched over the summer promoting a biblical phrase widely understood as a vow to accept a divine mission.

“We should not be in the business of wrapping the state’s mission in one particular religion,” an active-duty Army captain serving as a non-Christian chaplain told The Intercept. But as Hegseth’s Pentagon increasingly pushes Christianity, the chaplain, who was granted anonymity because he feared retaliation from the Defense Department, said he and other non-Christian chaplains worry the new religious affairs office will be used to do just that.

Hegseth’s body bears an assortment of Christian and Crusader imagery, including a Jerusalem cross across his chest and the Latin phrase “Deus vult,” or “God wills it,” on his bicep — a battle cry associated with the medieval Crusades that has since been adopted by far-right extremists. His forearm bears a cross and sword referencing Matthew 10:34, in which Jesus declares that he came not to bring peace but a sword, alongside the Hebrew name for Jesus. In 2021, a fellow National Guard member flagged Hegseth as a potential security threat over his Deus vult tattoo, before Hegseth was removed from an assignment protecting Joe Biden’s inauguration.

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As defense secretary, Hegseth has frequently turned to messaging that centers religion and vengeance while promoting the U.S. and Israel’s unpopular war in Iran. His “Send Me” campaign is built around Isaiah 6:8, a biblical verse commonly invoked by Christians as a call to serve God. During his 9/11 speech last month at the Pentagon, Hegseth said the “struggle against evil” that followed the attacks continues today and “will continue until Judgment Day,” before turning to the current war with Iran.

“Using specific scriptural language for a military campaign inappropriately frames state-sanctioned armed conflict and government service as a Christian religious crusade,” the chaplain said. “Once a mission is declared God’s will, every act inside it is sanctified in advance.”

The new Office of Religious Affairs, the chaplain said, could entrench this dynamic. While the Pentagon memo establishing the office says it cannot compel religious participation or diminish the free-exercise rights of service members of any faith or no faith, the office’s director will report directly to Hegseth and the deputy defense secretary, oversee the Armed Forces Chaplains Board, and work with the civilian religious organizations that endorse military chaplains. The office will also oversee efforts to assess spiritual fitness, spiritual readiness, and spiritual resilience across the force. This consolidated control, the chaplain warned, may make it difficult to maintain pluralism among the chaplain corps.

“Our chaplain corps must serve [non-Christian service members], not just the soldiers that share a faith with the SecDef,” the Army chaplain said. While it’s too early to know what that authority will mean for non-Christian chaplains, he wondered how it might change the ranks of the chaplaincy itself.

“Will this group begin accepting fewer and fewer non-Christian chaplains into our ranks?” he said. “Will we begin seeing fewer and fewer non-Christian chaplains be chosen for promotions?”

The concerns extend beyond the active-duty chaplain. Rev. Dr. Rebekah Savage, a former military chaplain who now helps oversee the Unitarian Universalist Association’s endorsement of clergy serving as military chaplains, said the organization was not consulted before the office was established.

“I am deeply concerned about how this office will serve the religious needs of the members of the service,” she said. “I can’t speak for others who are a part of the chaplaincy corps, but I know I am not alone.”

In response to questions about the new office from The Intercept, Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson wrote in a statement that the department “protects the constitutional right of every service member and civilian employee to practice their faith without coercion or discrimination. This is why Secretary Hegseth recently established the Office of Religious Affairs.” She said that prayer services and religious activities are always voluntary.

“The Christian faith is woven deeply into the fabric of our nation and shared by America’s wartime leaders like President George Washington, who prayed for his troops at Valley Forge, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who gifted Bibles to America soldiers during WW2 and encouraged them to read it,” Wilson added. “Despite the Left’s efforts to remove our Christian heritage from our great nation, Secretary Hegseth is among those who embrace it.”

In August, when “SEND ME” could still be dismissed as a string of social media posts, the Pentagon repeatedly declined to explain what the phrase meant or whether it represented a broader communications strategy.

As scholars of religion previously explained to The Intercept, the Pentagon’s use of the passage strips away part of the biblical story. Isaiah is not being sent to destroy God’s enemies; he is being sent to preach a warning to his own people. And the commission ends not in military triumph, but judgment. Cities are left empty, the land is devastated, and God’s own people suffer the destruction.

“Secretary Hegseth’s Send Me Tour is a military outreach and recruitment initiative focused on recognizing the Americans who volunteer to serve,” Wilson added in her statement. “We are grateful for the Americans—past, present, and future–who have raised their right hand and said, ‘Send Me.'”

Questions about the Pentagon’s treatment of minority religious traditions predate the new office.

In June, Savage joined 10 other religious endorsers in a letter to Hegseth objecting to revisions to the military’s Religious Affiliations Code list. The signatories said the changes removed or obscured the identities of several religious communities, including Unitarian Universalists, historically Black churches, and Wiccan and Pagan practitioners.

The endorsers warned that the changes could affect religious accommodations, access to clergy, and the distribution of chaplaincy resources.

“Classification is resource allocation,” they wrote.

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Savage said the earlier changes, combined with the establishment of the Office of Religious Affairs, “calls the Department’s commitment to meeting the spiritual needs of all of its members into question.”

The active-duty Army chaplain questioned how the office’s stated religious-freedom protections would work in practice under a defense secretary who has increasingly incorporated Christian scripture into his public messaging.

“What oversight will exist to prevent religious bias?” he said. “When investments are made, will they be defining spiritual fitness by Christian, or by more pluralistic metrics?”

The same concerns extend to money. The office’s funding priorities include faith-based home school support for military families, faith-based suicide-reduction programs, and contracts with faith-based organizations.

“Will the Humanists, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and other groups receive an equal, commensurate amount of support and funding for such programs?” the Army chaplain said. “Or will all or most of the funding go to Christian based organizations?”

Beyond institutional support, the chaplain said the Pentagon’s religious messaging could interfere with one of the central responsibilities of his profession: helping service members navigate questions of conscience, morality, and killing.

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In reporting for Task & Purpose last month, this reporter examined how Army chaplains were preparing to address the moral and spiritual consequences of artificial intelligence in warfare. As one scholar of military ethics pointed out, moral injury can arise when service members feel responsible for actions that violate their values, even when they have little meaningful control over those decisions.

The Army chaplain raised a related concern: What happens when the military itself invokes religious authority to justify its mission?

“If my role as a chaplain is to advise soldiers and commanders of issues of morality and ethics, what can I say to them now?” he said. “How can I advise a commander on doing moral and ethical actions if the state has announced that their god has ordained their war?”

For service members who do not share the religious beliefs invoked by military leadership, the Army chaplain said, that tension could be especially difficult to reconcile.

“What can I say to a non-Christian soldier who is being ordered to kill his fellow man or risk dying himself for a god he does not believe in?” he said. “What do I tell a soldier who believes an action is immoral, but also believes that God commanded it?”

The post Hegseth Built a New Pentagon Office for Religion. Military Religious Leaders Wish He Hadn’t. appeared first on The Intercept.

The PUMA spirit is back. The 2008 Democratic Party protest movement, inflamed by what Hillary Clinton supporters viewed as Barack Obama stealing the nomination from their primary candidate, scorned his general election campaign and embraced the mantra “Party Unity, My Ass.” 

This time, that energy is aimed at the candidates preferred by the Democratic Socialists of America.  

DSA-aligned progressives have won a number of party primaries and are set to help Democrats take the majority in Congress. But once in power, they’re likely to make demands — the kinds of demands that could upend decades of carefully crafted donor-friendly policymaking. 

For moderate Democrats, “party unity” is only a goal worth pursuing to bully the left wing of the party to fall in line with their preferred candidate. When it’s on them to step up and vote for someone who might have different goals, that’s another story completely, and some centrists are even hoping for Republicans to win the House this November if the alternative is an empowered DSA Democratic wing. 

James Carville, the fossilized Cajun strategist who was part of exactly one successful national political campaign, Bill Clinton’s 1992 White House victory, said on The Bulwark podcast last Sunday that he’d prefer a tight GOP hold on Congress over a narrow Democratic majority. 

“I would be disappointed if it comes in at 225 House seats,” Carville told host Bill Kristol. “I would rather the Republicans keep the House by five than the Democrats to win by five, because, if that happens, they’re hostage to the DSA.”

To his credit, Kristol — who, in a sign of how people can change when they know which way the wind is blowing, spent the PUMA moment promoting Sarah Palin but is now a self-proclaimed Democrat — pushed back, saying he’d rather win. 

Carville is the first of his cohort to explicitly call for a GOP victory rather than the left flank of the party getting more power, but he’s not the only centrist deprioritizing his party’s prospects in November.

Maine Gov. Janet Mills has yet to endorse the Democratic Party’s Senate nominee, Troy Jackson, after she lost to now-disgraced Graham Platner. (Mills and Jackson have a long and bitter history from state government, which may be playing a role here.) 

Perhaps most consequentially, in Michigan, Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed has faced an uphill battle since winning his party’s grueling primary. He’s now focused on winning in the general election and becoming the first Muslim U.S. senator, but resistance to his candidacy remains a concern.

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Much of the difficulty has come from members of his own party and other liberals. Their antipathy toward a candidate whose positions aren’t so out of step with other members of the caucus has raised questions about what exactly is so objectionable about him. El-Sayed may skew to the progressive side of the party, but he’s not a socialist and not a member of the DSA; his positions on domestic policy should place him companionably among the likes of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s wing. 

Until recently, most of the anger after El-Sayed’s primary in early August was confined to X and occasional cable news hits. 

That changed on October 16, when two Michigan Democratic Party power players, David Kramer and Lon Johnson, urged voters in a Detroit News op-ed to leave El-Sayed’s place on the ballot blank — effectively handing the Senate seat over to Republican Mike Rogers, an election denier and a lockstep Trump ally. 

The piece tied El-Sayed to extreme elements of Islam and suggested his opposition to Israel’s genocide, war crimes, and occupation was based in hatred for the Jewish diaspora.

“Our gravest concerns involve El-Sayed’s associations with figures who have excused or minimized terrorism, his reluctance to unequivocally condemn dangerous rhetoric, and his support of extreme policies,” Kramer and Johnson wrote. “At a time of rising antisemitism, Democrats deserve leadership that unequivocally rejects rhetoric threatening Jewish communities.”

Comedian Mike Drucker accurately described on Tuesday the centrist rejection of El-Sayed as less “blue no matter who” and more “blue unless brown.”

But Democratic leaders like Carville, Kramer, Johnson, and others are panicked beyond their obvious Islamophobia — they can see the writing on the wall goes well past Michigan. It’s a full-on existential crisis.

Former Intercept writer Jon Schwarz once opined on what he termed the iron law of institutions: “The people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself.” 

What we’re seeing now is the iron law’s white blood cells fighting a threat they don’t believe can be easily assimilated into the existing power structure. It’s a danger to their status and power.

Their attacks on the left are going to backfire, leaving the Democrats’ centrist wing even less empowered than before. 

That outcome is ideal for the party, the base, and the country. For centrists, it’s a disaster — but if the way to stop their coming irrelevance is to vote for a progressive American Muslim who opposes genocide, they’re incapable of taking that step. 

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Ultimately, all their griping may not matter. El-Sayed is regularly polling slightly ahead of Rogers, and 95 percent of Michigan Democrats said they intend to vote for him. Much like Jackson in Maine, should he win, El-Sayed will be even less beholden to the elements of the party power structure who are so desperately trying to prove he needs them, rather than the other way around.

The post The Spirit of “Party Unity, My Ass” Is Back and Coming for the DSA (and El-Sayed) appeared first on The Intercept.

The videos, provided to The Intercept in response to a public records request, come on the heels of leaked footage that exposed how a needlessly aggressive and reckless police confrontation of two suspected shoplifters led to 1-year-old Kohen Wiley’s violent death in his mother’s arms.

While the newly released videos include redacted versions of the previously leaked footage — including body camera footage for some of the officers, as well as Walmart surveillance video — the new footage reveals for the first time the body camera video belonging to the Senatobia police officer who fired the shots that killed Kohen Wiley: Sgt. Hunter Foster.

While the state concluded that the shooting was “justified” based on a probe by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, the videos show how police escalated a non-life-threatening situation — one that could have ended with a mere shoplifting charge — by pursuing Kohen’s mother, Vel’lesiya Wiley, and the driver, Latoya Ferrell, after they ran from the store and tried to drive away.

Foster’s body camera footage makes clear that he positioned himself in front of the vehicle, aimed his gun at the car, and fired the fatal shot into the passenger side window after the car was moving past him and posed no threat.

This is consistent with the conclusions of Dr. Roger Mitchell, a forensic pathologist hired by Kohen Wiley’s family, who determined in June that the fatal bullet was most likely fired into the side window, entering his small body on his right side and exiting his left.

The release also includes a 10-page, heavily redacted investigative report by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, which the state attorney general relied upon in concluding that the shooting was justified.

The report’s narrative is misleading: Its only description of the shooting is that one officer “discharged his firearm” after the car “sped toward the officers.” The report does not discuss the fact that the firing officer was beside the car when he first fired, which is clear in Foster’s body camera footage. The report also redacts Kohen Wiley’s cause of death.

Foster resigned from the Senatobia police department on Wednesday. Afterward, Foster’s lawyer told CNN, “The driver of the vehicle was attempting to kill those 5 officers, and Hunter Foster had no choice but to discharge his weapon.” (Neither Foster nor his lawyer responded to The Intercept’s requests for comment.)

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Residents of Senatobia had called for months for the body camera footage and Walmart surveillance videos to be released. After the state attorney general announced that the police had been cleared, a spokesperson for the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, which houses the state’s Bureau of Investigations, told The Intercept that the videos would be released after the family had a chance to watch them.

Instead, as with the attorney general’s announcement, the family first saw the leaked videos on social media. By the time Kohen Wiley’s parents and grandparents met with state officials to view the videos on Thursday morning, most of the footage had been circulated online. At a press conference on Thursday afternoon, Kohen’s maternal grandmother, Veronica Roberson, called it “a slap in the face.”

Roberson said she’d been haunted by the word “justified” all week, slamming the idea that Foster fired the lethal shots because he feared for his life.

“You shot my grandbaby from the side of the car,” she said. “How are you in danger?”

“Get the Car!”

The incident began with what appeared to be a routine occurrence in retail outlets all over the country: a shoplifting allegation.

The earliest footage is from a Walmart security camera. An apparent Walmart employee dressed in a black hoodie is stationed by the store entrance when Wiley and Ferrell approach, carrying a child and a box of diapers. They pause at the door and appear to have a brief exchange with the Walmart employee before breaking into a run toward the parking lot.

In body camera footage, which begins moments later, the staffer in the hoodie appears in the doorway of a small security room, where other Walmart employees, three Senatobia police officers, and two Tate County sheriff’s deputies are gathered around a pair of computer monitors. According to the MBI report, the officers had been called to the store in response to a complaint that a man was sexually harassing customers.

The employee in the hoodie tells the cops and Walmart staffers that two people are running and gestures toward the store entrance.

Moments later, the five officers dash from the room and out into the parking lot, running toward a gray sedan. A sheriff’s deputy reaches the driver’s side door and puts his hand on the hood of the car while someone yells “stop.” The car backs up and starts to turn, but hits a parked SUV. Someone yells, “Stop the car!”

As the officers continue to run toward the car, it begins to move forward. At one point, two officers are directly in front of the vehicle, including Foster, the police sergeant identified as the shooter, who aims his gun at the front windshield.

The car starts to turn left, away from the three officers on the vehicle’s right side, and either narrowly misses or grazes Foster, who stumbles to the passenger side and aims his gun at the window. He then appears to fire three shots in rapid succession.

As the car pulls away, the officers continue their pursuit.

“Get the car! Get the car! Get the car!” one of them yells.

The gray sedan pauses briefly before taking off again.

The records released by state officials do not include any footage of what happened after the officers return to their vehicles. But the leaked footage, which was compiled into a nearly 7-minute long video, shows Foster pacing next to a police vehicle outside the nearby Highland Hills Medical Center an hour and 20 minutes after the shooting.

“I didn’t even see a fucking baby in her lap,” Foster says.

His colleague responds that nobody else did either: “All I saw was two females in the car.”

Reckless and Aggressive

As the leaked video began to circulate on social media on Tuesday, much of the attention focused on the moment the car moved toward Foster.

The Senatobia Police Department claimed from the start that the car drove toward officers and nearly hit one, suggesting the shots were fired in self-defense. Darkhorse Press, the independent Mississippi outlet that first published the leaked footage, even stated in a headline that the car “actually hit at least two officers.”

Among those who have repeated a version of this story is Republican Gov. Tate Reeves, who said the driver tried to “run over the policeman,” despite admitting that he had not actually watched the footage.

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What the videos show is that the police officers themselves needlessly escalated a shoplifting incident into the scenario that they claim put them at risk. Almost immediately after being informed that two people were “running,” the five armed officers sprinted out to the parking lot, surrounded the car, and, at various points in the confrontation, drew their guns. They also positioned themselves in a way that cut off any escape route for the driver.

These are reckless, aggressive tactics in response to a minor shoplifting charge. They also violate best practices in policing.

Most departments today prohibit officers from standing in front of the possible escape route of a car when someone inside is suspected of only minor offenses. Many also require officers to get out of the way of a vehicle if it drives toward them. While most departments authorize a police officer to use deadly force if they “reasonably” believe it’s necessary to protect their or others’ lives, this generally does not excuse using lethal force if the “reasonable” fear arose from a cop’s own violation of department policy.

Policies and best practices, however, don’t establish the bounds of legal liability; they are related but separate. Under the landmark Supreme Court case Tennessee v. Garner, a police officer can use deadly force if he “has a good-faith belief that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.” The law is less clear about criminal liability when an officer’s own illegal or ill-advised actions caused the circumstances that led him to fear for his safety.

Other examples of self-defense law hold people criminally liable if their own actions put them in harm’s way. In general, those cases indicate that a person can’t argue self-defense after killing someone if they instigated the altercation that led to the killing — even if it was reasonable to deploy lethal force when they did.

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By that standard, if an officer puts themselves in the path of a moving vehicle, they shouldn’t be able to justify lethal force by claiming to fear for their life because the vehicle was about to hit them. The law, however, isn’t crystal clear on this, and there’s at least some indication that the current Supreme Court may adopt a more lenient standard for police officers.

Moving Vehicle

Most police departments prohibit officers from shooting into moving vehicles unless someone inside poses a direct threat to the safety of others unrelated to use of the vehicle itself — for instance, if the person is armed and shooting at people. The reason is simple: Killing the driver of a moving car does not stop the car and can therefore exacerbate threats to public safety.

Like many other departments, the Senatobia police department’s policy contains vague language warning officers that firing into moving vehicles is dangerous to bystanders and unlikely to stop a car; it reads more like guidance than prohibition. One portion of the policy, however, is much clearer: Officers “will not” discharge firearms into a fleeing vehicle — with “will not” underlined for emphasis.

It seems clear from the leaked footage that Ferrell, the driver, maneuvered the car in what appeared to be an attempt to flee rather than to kill or injure officers. The video shows her at first trying to reverse away from police. After striking the SUV, however, she then appears to try to drive around and then between the officers. She then strikes another car while trying to drive away.

Foster’s actions aren’t consistent with any reasonable concept of self-defense. Footage shows that he fired at least three shots into the passenger side of the car. This was already apparent in the leaked body camera footage. It’s even clearer in the newly released video from Foster’s camera. By the time he fires the first of the three shots, he is clearly beside — not in front of — the car. By the time he fires the last shot, the car has passed him.

Even if Foster wanted to claim that he fired to disable the driver — and, again, his own department firmly prohibits shooting at a fleeing car — he fired through the passenger side window. He did so despite being told that there were two people inside, which means that whatever the driver was doing, he was also putting the other person at risk. 

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Trust What You Can See With Your Own Eyes

Ultimately, the videos depict a driver showing far more awareness for the officers’ safety from behind the wheel than Foster showed for the occupants of the car — or the surrounding bystanders.

Police policies should reflect how people behave in the real world, and people accused of stealing tend to flee. For armed officers to quickly escalate a shoplifting allegation puts everyone nearby at risk. Amid the frenzied response from the cops, Ferrell struck two other cars while attempting to escape. Anyone in or near those cars could have been injured or killed. Foster also fired his gun in a crowded parking lot. That, too, could have resulted in additional death or injury.

The police had other options. They could easily have written down the car’s license plate or obtained the plate number from the numerous surveillance tools at their disposal: their body camera footage, Walmart security footage, or one of the many Flock cameras nearby.

If they had to arrest the women, they could have done so later, at home and under less duress. They may not have caught Wiley or Ferrell red-handed with the alleged stolen goods, theoretically making a shoplifting prosecution more difficult. Creating an obstacle to prosecuting a shoplifting case, however, should be an easy tradeoff for not putting lives at risk.

Walmart’s Role

Finally, the leaked video footage raises important questions about Walmart’s role in Kohen Wiley’s death. The company has yet to publicly comment about the incident — and has not responded to repeated inquiries from The Intercept.

When the Walmart employee in the hoodie entered the room where officers were viewing security monitors, he told them that two people were fleeing the store. He did not say that one of them had a baby in her arms, even though surveillance footage showed Wiley carrying Kohen as she passed him. This would prove consequential, as Foster said in video footage that he had no idea there was a baby in the car.

Does Walmart policy require staff to tell police when a suspected shoplifter is accompanied by children? And how often does Walmart call on police for such minor crimes?

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This isn’t the first time aggressive policing of shoplifting at a Walmart has resulted in the death of an unarmed person. Earlier this year, deputies shot suspected shoplifters in two separate incidents at Walmarts in Florida. When police tackled a fleeing shoplifter in Anchorage, Alaska, recently, he pulled a gun and shot two officers before they returned fire, killing him.

Over the last 10 years, police have also shot suspected shoplifters at Walmarts in Miami; Decatur and San Antonio, Texas; Tempe, Arizona; Colorado Springs, Colorado; Chester, South Carolina; and Lake Forest, California. Most of the suspects were armed, but gunfire erupted only after police confronted them for shoplifting.

Walmart seems to have wavered over the years between aggressive crackdowns on suspected shoplifters and more lenient policies that factor in whether the suspect has been accused before, the necessity of the items they’re accused of stealing, and the value of the stolen goods.

Like many national retailers, the company’s policy when it comes to its own employees is to avoid confrontations with suspected shoplifters. A previous lawsuit revealed that the company’s stated policy as of 2010 was “PUT PEOPLE FIRST” (all caps in original) and prioritized “the physical well-being of suspects, customers and Walmart associates.”

That policy means little if the store simply outsources enforcement to police who take a far more aggressive approach. Walmart itself has also been criticized by police groups, who claim that cost-saving reductions in staff have made the store a more attractive target for shoplifting, which then leads to more calls to police.

And in Senatobia, the last high-profile incident of police violence before Kohen Wiley was killed took place in 2025 — at the same Walmart parking lot.

Even the best policing policies are useless if they aren’t enforced. And officers are rarely prosecuted, period. Foster’s resignation is at least some form of accountability, but the insistence from state officials that police did nothing wrong means there will be little to stop similar killings from happening again.

This week, residents of Senatobia returned to the Walmart for a vigil in honor of Kohen Wiley, in the same place where a makeshift shrine once stood. A community gathering has also been scheduled next weekend to mark what would have been his second birthday.

At the press conference Thursday, family and activists vowed to keep fighting for justice. As with so much police violence, however, the most pressing question isn’t whether Foster himself is punished. It’s whether we’re willing to tolerate more deaths like that of Kohen Wiley — whether Senatobia, Walmart, and the state of Mississippi will do anything to make clear that a 1-year-old’s life is more important than a pack of diapers.

The post Bodycam: Cop Was Not in Danger When He Fired Shots That Killed 1-Year-Old Kohen Wiley appeared first on The Intercept.

For decades, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich has been sounding the alarm about rising inequality and the concentration of power in America. Having served in three presidential administrations, he’s become one of the loudest and clearest voices challenging Democrats for their failures in the Trump era.

Reich joins Intercept Briefing host Akela Lacy for a live conversation about the most pressing issues this midterm season. He is the author of numerous books, including his memoir “Coming Up Short,” out in paperback now. His media company, Inequality Media, has also made a timely new documentary, called “The Work in Progress,” exploring how everyday Americans across the country are navigating our democracy in these times.

Transcript coming soon.

The post The Intercept Live in Conversation With Robert Reich appeared first on The Intercept.

When it was founded a year ago, news reports suggested that Fellowship PAC would concentrate on supporting Republicans.

Since June, however, the only candidates Fellowship PAC has spent on have been Democrats, including those who have criticized the president’s meme coin, and it is getting help from a former Trump administration official’s company.

Fellowship PAC funneled $600,000 since this summer through a firm co-founded by former Trump crypto adviser Bo Hines to help reelect Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York; Rep. Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire; and Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia. The Democrats are considered crypto allies, and none of them are facing competitive elections this fall.

All those advertising dollars have been spent through a vendor called Nxum Group, which was co-founded by Hines, a former Republican congressional candidate and Trump administration official.

Hines did not return a request for comment, and it is not known whether he has personally been involved in the Nxum Group’s work on behalf of Fellowship PAC. In congressional races in 2022 and 2024, he presented himself as a Trump-loving MAGA acolyte.

There is a thick web of ties between Hines, Fellowship PAC, and one of the biggest players in the crypto industry, a stablecoin company called Tether.

Before Trump’s election, Hines was involved in promoting a Trump-themed meme coin that made a handful of investors millions before plummeting in value. After Trump’s election, the president tapped Hines to serve as the head of the White House Council of Advisers on Digital Assets. In that role, Hines helped pass a law that created stablecoin regulations that benefited Tether.

As Hines served in the Trump administration, Tether was paying money to the firm that Hines co-owned, Nxum Group, according to a report last week in the Wall Street Journal. Nxum Group told the news outlet that Hines had no involvement in the company’s business dealings with Tether during that time. Hines said in a June 2025 ethics disclosure that he had only a “passive investment interest” in the company.

Hines left the Trump administration in August 2025 and, a month later, Tether announced that he would serve as the CEO of its U.S. branch.

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Tether also has ties to Fellowship PAC. The newly created Fellowship PAC received a $10 million donation in January from Tether’s U.S. banking firm, Cantor Fitzgerald. In April, Fellowship PAC announced that Tether’s vice president of regulatory affairs would serve as its chair.

Although it launched with a splash last year by claiming that it had a $100 million war chest, the PAC has never reported as much as that in official campaign finance disclosures. The PAC’s last receipt was in January, and its cash on hand dwindled to $250,000 as of October 14.

Throughout the midterm elections, Fellowship PAC has leaned heavily on Nxum Group to spend advertising dollars on various congressional races.

Fellowship PAC spent exclusively on Republicans until its first expenditure on behalf of a Democrat, Torres, in June. That spending coincided with public polls showing increasingly dismal fortunes for Republicans in the midterm elections. Since then, the PAC has spent exclusively on Democratic candidates.

Torres’s and Warner’s campaigns did not respond to requests for comment. Goodlander’s campaign said she had nothing to do with the $150,000 that Fellowship PAC spent on digital advertising in her race. The money, the PAC disclosed in filings, had been routed through Nxum Group on August 31.

“Congresswoman Goodlander has been one of the strongest advocates in Congress for cracking down on Big Tech and crypto profiteering and getting dark money out of politics,” her campaign said in a statement. “Like all campaigns, we’re legally barred from coordinating with outside groups like these, so you’d need to ask them why they’re spending in this race.”

The PAC did not return a request for comment.

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Goodlander, Torres, and Warner are all rated as strong supporters of the crypto industry on an industry scorecard. Still, all three have been critical of Trump’s personal dealings in the industry though his $TRUMP meme coin, which has helped make him $1.4 billion from crypto ventures.

Warner recently ran an ad of his own attacking Trump over the meme coin.

“That’s not governing. It’s grifting,” the Democratic senator said. “The corruption needs to stop.”

The post Giant Crypto Super PAC Funnels Big Money to Former Trump Official’s Firm to Support… Democrats? appeared first on The Intercept.

Brazilians will head to the polls on Sunday in one of the most consequential presidential elections of the last decade. The run-off election will determine the future of the largest democracy in Latin America and the fate of the Amazon rainforest.

Incumbent President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is facing off against Flávio Bolsonaro, the son of former President Jair Bolsonaro. The elder Bolsonaro is currently on house arrest for his role in a failed 2023 military coup that intended to assassinate Lula, his vice president, and a Supreme Court justice. Despite his father’s attempted coup, Flavio Bolsonaro is currently the frontrunner, after coming out slightly ahead in the first round of voting.

“If they don’t win this election, then not only is Jair going to stay in jail, most likely, but Eduardo, Flávio’s brother and Jair’s son, who is in self-exile in the U.S., he has a multiyear prison sentence for his actions in the U.S. lobbying against Brazil’s foreign interests. He’s not going to be able to go home if they lose this election,” says Andrew Fishman, a Rio de Janeiro-based investigative journalist. “So they’re really just willing to do whatever they can to make sure that they win because this is their only get-out-of-jail-free card.”

Sound familiar? This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington speaks with Fishman, president and co-founder of The Intercept Brasil, about what’s at stake for Brazil and the planet in Sunday’s election.

“It’s a global election. The voters in Brazil will be deciding the future of humanity,” Fishman tells The Intercept. Jair Bolsonaro oversaw significant deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, leaving the ecological and climate linchpin in danger of becoming a “savanna.” Now, he argues, his son can finish the job. “You’re going to have an international migration crisis,” says Fishman. “It’s really self-defeating because the cattle ranchers are his base. They are the ones that are wanting to do the things that will end their future profitability — the future existence of their business.”

President Donald Trump has taken a particular interest in the race, as he seeks to expand U.S. influence and control across the Western Hemisphere. “Brazil — as the biggest economy, the biggest country, the most powerful entity in the hemisphere besides the United States — if Brazil falls, then the rest falls in line,” says Fishman. “But if Brazil remains as this big island of resistance in the middle of the continent, it really messes up [the Trump administration’s] plans, doesn’t it?”

Big Tech is also looming large over the race. “There’s all these pieces of circumstantial evidence that suggest that Meta is interfering in this election, and they have every incentive to do so. They will have a much better regulatory environment if Flávio wins because of Flávio’s submissiveness to U.S. interests and his willingness to play ball with whatever Trump tells him to,” adds Fishman.

In a request for comment, Meta said, “Meta applies the same rules to every candidate, every party and every political viewpoint in Brazil, as we do in elections around the world. We do not suppress content to disadvantage one side, and we do not give preferential treatment to any side. Each of the incidents cited by Lula’s campaign has a straightforward, documented explanation. … Brazilian voters deserve facts, not a political narrative built by combining unrelated technical issues. Meta will continue to enforce its rules, comply with Brazilian electoral law, fix mistakes when they occur and provide a level playing field for everyone who uses our services.”

As U.S. leaders attempt to mold Brazil into a satellite state, Fishman argues the United States is slowly becoming more and more like its southern neighbor.

“It’s not that Brazil is becoming more like the United States, it’s that the United States is becoming more like Brazil,” says Fishman. “You have just shrinking spheres of democracy while oligarchs have increasing power and control and are able to do what they want and insist on decisions for the country that are bad for all of the society and the people, but good for their individual interests.” 

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

Transcript

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

Akela Lacy: I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept. Jessie, what do our listeners need to know about this week?

JW: I’ve been following a pretty disturbing story that’s actually centered on a campaign ad. Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy released what I would argue is the ugliest campaign ad of a dark season. That is, of course, a season of campaign ads filled with Islamophobic, transphobic, sexist rhetoric, and racist rhetoric as well. But in the ad, the mother of Democratic candidate Amy Acton accuses her daughter of being a liar, claiming “she’s lied her whole life.”

 Now, what makes this really dark is that Acton was removed from her mother’s care at 12 years old, after she alleges she was raped by her mother’s then-40-year-old husband. 

AL: That’s horrible. Has Acton responded? 

JW: Acton responded to the attack ad saying, “My brother Phil and I endured abuse, hunger, and neglect. We were often kept in a dark basement, were frequent-fliers with child protective services, and lived in fear of our birth mother’s violent and erratic temper. I’ve always known that she was deeply sick and unwell, and it’s sad to see Vivek Ramaswamy exploit her all for his own political gain.”

 This is one, as I’ve said, of the darkest campaign ads in a really horrifying season of campaign ads. 

Akela, I know you’ve been tracking another big election story this week on a beat you’ve covered for a really long time, and that’s [American Israel Public Affairs Committee].

AL: So we have been covering extensively the way that AIPAC’s strategy has changed over the last few election cycles since they started spending directly on campaigns.

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If you’ve been following our reporting, you know that we’ve written a lot about both their super PAC, United Democracy Project, and this shell PAC strategy where there were a number of different groups that popped up throughout the midterm season, took money from AIPAC, spent against candidates that AIPAC didn’t like, and then — per filings that came out this week — shut down and gave all their money back to AIPAC. 

So the idea being that, they had been trying to shield what was an increasingly toxic reputation amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza from creating backlash against their activity in these races. 

Jewish Insider scooped on Wednesday that AIPAC announced that it will no longer endorse candidates or give PAC contributions through its AIPAC PAC. Now, this doesn’t mean that they will stop spending on elections. Their super PAC, United Democracy Project, will continue to spend, as it has been pouring record amounts of money into various races. But this is getting a lot of attention, both from the left and I would say from the center. 

The left, Justice Democrats in particular, and candidates who are no longer in Congress, but I saw Jamaal Bowman talking about this, saying that this is the culmination of the fight that the left has been putting up against AIPAC in elections. I don’t know that I would categorize this as a win necessarily, considering that the super PAC seems like it’s going to continue to spend a lot of money. But that was the big news in my campaign finance world this week. 

JW: You’ve done a lot of really interesting coverage of how AIPAC is moving their money around through these different PACs and trying to get around the fact that people really dislike AIPAC, and that it has really tarnished the reputation of candidates who take this money. Obviously, this is a maneuver to get rid of the reputational harm of AIPAC money while still giving people AIPAC money. 

I’ve actually been tracking a story completely off our election cycle, and that’s what’s going on in France. I know we touched on that a couple weeks ago but, really, these protests have taken on another life.

 For those who don’t know, in France, there were these protests that were initially launched by students primarily in the suburbs concerned about educational inequality. This meant staffing shortages and poor facilities. But it has exploded into a nationwide uprising about the cost of living and broader economic inequality. 

Now, perhaps unsurprisingly, and not to bring it too quickly back to the U.S., but President Donald Trump has used this as an opportunity to rail against immigrants. So despite the fact that there is zero indication any of the violence has been spurred on by immigrants. At a campaign rally on Monday, he told the crowd, “If Europe doesn’t close its borders and bring the criminals out, like the people that are protesting, Europe is finished.”

 So yeah, that’s just one other example of how Donald Trump has inserted himself into international politics.

AL: Trump has also inserted himself into politics in a different region in the world. We have the Brazilian elections for president heading to a runoff this week. I know you spoke, Jessie, to Andrew Fishman, an investigative reporter and president and co-founder of The Intercept Brasil, about those elections.

JW:  It’s a really interesting election with a ton of parallels to the political situation in the United States, as well as, as you’ve pointed out, a ton of influence from the United States. On Sunday, Brazil will have a run-off presidential election that will determine the future of not only Latin America’s largest democracy, but also — and this is really important — the fate of the Amazon rainforest, and one could argue, the planet. 

This is the first presidential election since former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro was imprisoned on house arrest in an attempted military coup, a sentence that his son, the current frontrunner, Flávio Bolsonaro has promised to overturn.

 I talked to Andrew about the media landscape, the history of military leadership, and the outside influences that have made this a tight race, despite the fact that the perceived frontrunner is running on freeing the man who attempted a coup years prior.

President Luiz Inácio Lula de Silva is running for reelection. He’s accused both President Donald Trump and Meta of attempting to sway the election in favor of Flávio Bolsonaro. 

The Intercept reached out to Meta for comment, and Meta denied interfering in the election process, saying they do not suppress content to disadvantage one side or give preferential treatment to the other.

But this is a really interesting conversation with Andrew, and I’m excited for people to get to hear it.

AL: As am I. Let’s hear it. 

JW: Andrew, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Andrew Fishman: Hi, thanks for having me. 

JW: On Sunday, Brazilians will head to the polls in a runoff presidential election between right-wing senator Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former President Jair Bolsonaro, and incumbent left-wing President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to determine the leadership of Latin America’s largest democracy and biggest economy.

Now, this is the first presidential election since former President Jair Bolsonaro’s supporters stormed the Capitol in 2023 and attempted to overturn the election results. Now, Flávio Bolsonaro, his son and ally, is widely considered to be the frontrunner after coming out slightly ahead in the first round of voting.

But as of Tuesday, his lead in the polls has been narrowing. Andrew, big picture, what are the major issues at play in this election on Sunday? 

AF: If you want to be really direct about it, it’s the future of humanity.

You have one candidate who’s been responsible for record reductions of deforestation in the Amazon; and you have another one who’s saying, let’s chop it all down, and farmers should be able to do whatever they want on their land.

And under his father’s leadership, deforestation in the Amazon soared, as in the other regions in the area. Scientists think that there’s a major tipping point that we could be on the cusp of, that if we were to reach that, the Amazon will turn into a savanna. There would be no going back from that.

If that were to happen, all of the rain in South America comes from the Amazon, basically. [That would affect] the cattle ranching that’s doing the deforestation, no more of the soy that’s doing the deforestation — people would have trouble feeding themselves. São Paulo would probably run out of water, which it has done in the past.

It’s very precarious. So you would be having mass refugee influxes, migrations. I really do think that this election is on that scale; it’s a global election. The voters in Brazil will be deciding the future of humanity, very possibly. 

JW: To your point, his father, former President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration oversaw significant deforestation of the rainforest, which houses 10 percent of all [known] species on Earth, and his son appears to be moving in that same direction.

Flávio told reporters in August that he did not believe in climate change and that “the best way to address environmental issues is what we did during the Bolsonaro administration,” referring, of course, to the senior Bolsonaro’s administration.

What is at stake for climate change when we’re talking about this massive deforestation that could potentially be happening if Flávio wins?

AF: Every ecosystem in South America is interconnected and in the world. If the Amazon collapses and turns into savanna and the rainfall stops, and you have this massive drying out of the continent — which is one of the major exporters of food in the world — you’re going to have all of those issues locally, and that’s going to impact local markets and everything. You’re going to have an international migration crisis.

But on top of that, we have no idea what the ecological knock-on effects of that could be. With that, we could be having a more rapid increase in polar ice cap melting. With the temperatures increasing, it could be exacerbating the death of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current, which is the thing that would put Europe back into an ice age. It’s very possible that’s already happening right now.

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We’re at this really tenuous moment for the climate, for the Earth, for humanity. And you have a candidate that says very proudly [he] doesn’t believe in any of that and wants to slash all mechanisms that are used to have more responsible management of land and prevent this massive catastrophe in just this proudly Luddite sort of way.

It’s really self-defeating because the cattle ranchers are his base. They are the ones that are wanting to do the things that will end their future profitability — the future existence of their business. It’s really self-defeating in this way for the Brazilians, and these very short-term benefits for massive long-term costs.

There’s estimates that the impact that the Amazon has for the global economy is in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year, and that benefit is far larger than the profits that they get out of these extractive industries that they do with farming and mining. It’s really hard to overstate the potential impacts that this could have.

JW: Is that urgency resonating with voters? 

AF: Absolutely not. That is not what people are voting about, unfortunately. It’s what the people living in the heavy agricultural regions — where their local economy depends on that — they’re voting for Flávio for that reason. But the people who are voting against him, yes, there’s many people that care about the Amazon and want to preserve it, but it’s not the issue that’s being discussed day to day on TV, in the news, on the streets.

People are talking more about more human issues of corruption and who has better communication, security, economics. They’re not talking about the Amazon, unfortunately. 

JW: That’s hardly surprising in the U.S. context, which I’m a little bit more acquainted with. Certainly climate, the environment, have never been top issues for voters, even if they’ve resonated more so with young people.

I did want to talk about another issue in the election, and that is the fate of Jair Bolsonaro. His son, Flávio Bolsonaro, has promised to free him. Jair Bolsonaro has been imprisoned on house arrest since 2025 for plotting a military coup. How is that particular campaign promise landing with the electorate in Brazil, and are you at all surprised by the public’s response?

AF: It’s very clear that for the Bolsonaros, this is an all-or-nothing for them. If they don’t win this election, then not only is Jair going to stay in jail, most likely, but Eduardo, Flávio’s brother and Jair’s son, who is in self-exile in the U.S., he has a multiyear prison sentence for his actions in the U.S. lobbying against Brazil’s foreign interests. He’s not going to be able to go home if they lose this election. 

For them, it’s been very clear, and they’ve even said it in moments, that’s what this is about for them: their ability to get their father out of prison and to get themselves off the hook. Also, if you’re elected president, the investigations on things you did before you got elected, they go away.

So then Flávio’s off the hook, and he’s so wrapped up in so many different schemes and accusations and active investigations, some of which that we have revealed, including U.S. and abroad and offshore bank accounts and money laundering and potential connections to organized crime and militias. So they’re really just willing to do whatever they can to make sure that they win because this is their only get-out-of-jail-free card. To do that, they’re going to completely change the structure of the Supreme Court, and they’ll be able to put in a majority even without impeachment. They already have the Senate and the lower house of Congress.

They would control all of the executive branch. They have the majority of governorships that are in their coalition, and they run the local police. And the executive has control over the federal police and all the investigative and regulatory agencies. So they would have just absolute lockstep control over every branch of government federally and most of local government as well.

It would be a democratically elected coup. 

JW: And voters, do they care about that? Do they care about the preservation of democracy? Is this ranking as a top election issue? 

AF: It’s always double speak, right? Both sides say that they’re preserving democracy. The Bolsonaristas say that Lula and the Supreme Court are running a judicial dictatorship right now because they were getting censored and put in jail for actively plotting a coup, which included active planning to assassinate Lula after he was elected, his vice president after he was elected, and a member of the Supreme Court. So that’s what they’re [Jair Bolsonaro and military officials] in jail for. That’s why they were getting pushback, and they’re saying that having the pushback against that is a dictatorship. 

In the meantime, you have the Lulistas who are saying that what the Bolsonaros want to do is a coup because they actively have said year after year, over and over again, “We want a coup. We love the military dictatorship. The military dictatorship was great! When we were torturing everybody, that was good.” Jair said, “When I’m elected, we’re going to take a machine gun and shoot down all of the leftists, the petistas, the Workers’ Party [Partido dos Trabalhadores] supporters.”

Remember that the military government was going alive and strong into the ’80s. It happened in ’64, and it went through the ’80s. So it’s very recent.

The people that are in his orbit, they were actually part of the military coup government until very recently. And I think that Lula supporters are very, very concerned about this. They really do care.

The Bolsonarista supporters, which are about 30 percent lockstep — same as it is in the U.S. with Trump — they’re just in their own information ecosystem, and they want Bolsonaro to win. It doesn’t matter, and anything that he does is good because it’s him.

It’s not, there are people that support the Workers’ Party, and there are people that support Bolsonaro. The Bolsonaro movement is essentially anti Workers’ Party, anti-petismo. The Bolsonaros have been seen as the greatest vehicle for getting rid of the Workers’ Party, which has been so hard to do because they’ve been so popular because of all the policies they’ve put into place over the years.

But you’ve had the media saying for 30 years now, just drilling it in, that the PT [Partido dos Trabalhadores] equals corruption, the PT invented corruption. The PT is everything that is bad in Brazil, and anything that is not the PT is everything that is good in Brazil. You’ve had a generation of this narrative being repeated over and over in all these different instances that it’s really hard to shake.

JW: Could you talk more about that legacy of military leadership in Brazil, and for Brazilians, how they feel about it on the day to day? I recognize that it’s a very large country, as we’ve mentioned multiple times. I assume not everyone feels the same way, but I am curious about that legacy and how people respond to it.

AF: Brazil has been a country of negotiated solutions. So when they were the last in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery in 1888, it was not some sort of civil war or uprising. It was a negotiation: “OK, I think it’s time that we do this, but let’s just make sure that everyone that did own slaves is in the best possible situation, and let’s make sure that we have some sort of semi-slavery going on afterwards.”

It was really the same thing with the dictatorship. It was a moment where the economy was going into the can. It was very unpopular. It wasn’t having the economic glory years of before, and so they said, “All right, we’ll step back. We’ll let you run some elections, but we’re going to make sure that we’re never held accountable, that we’re able to continue exercising power in the way we want.”

As part of that, they were able to help control the narrative. So during the military dictatorship, there was an impression — and it continues today — that there wasn’t corruption. The reason why they had that impression, it was actually very corrupt, very corrupt. But the impression exists because there was censorship of the media, so the corruption that existed just wasn’t exposed.

When the Lula government came into power the first time in the early 2000s, they started making the federal police stronger. They made the judiciary stronger and more independent. They increased the ability of the federal government to investigate and uphold the rule of law. As a result of that, many corruption schemes started coming out of the woodwork that were legacy of the military leadership. 

It was called a civil military dictatorship, technically, in Brazil, because it was the business elite together with the military that did the coup and ran everything.

So that business elite didn’t change. It’s still the same families. They were running the same corruption schemes back then. They were running it through re-democratization. Whether it’s a right-wing government or a left-wing government in power, they’re making sure that their interests are being served. That corruption is just this constant throughline. People don’t really see that because that’s not how it’s presented in the media and in the day-to-day in communications.

I know for a fact that there’s lots of people that really want us to go back to the dictatorship. There are people that really want us to go back to the monarchy because they see it as a better, simpler time when things were the way that they should be. Everyone was in the right place and things were safer and everything was just better, this idealized past, “Make Brazil Great Again” sort of thing. How far back do you want to go? 

Then there are the people that, like Dilma Rousseff, who was the successor to Lula after a second term — who fought against the dictatorship — that are currently active in politics, that are still around, and they were tortured. Their friends were murdered. They know exactly what a dictatorship means and what it means for people like them, anyone that stands against those entrenched powers of the old elites that go back for centuries.

That’s why you have a lot of older voters tend to vote PT [Workers’ Party] because they came up with the workers’ struggle with re-democratization. They understand what that means. It’s this interesting dynamic now where you have more younger people that are starting to tip more to the right because they don’t have this memory.

They don’t remember what it was like in the ’80s in the northeast when there was water shortages and food shortages, and the standard of living was so much lower. You have this new narrative being rewritten in real time online.

JW: The parallels to the United States and Brazil are just incredibly striking in what you’re saying. This kind of the “Make America Great Again” movement and the Make Brazil Great Again, even if they’re not using those exact same phrases. There are just so many points of similarity, especially with what we’ve seen with youth even in the United States, some of whom have taken a rightward tilt.

I want to get into the relationship between Brazil and the U.S. because that’s obviously been such a big issue in this election. In a Lula ad earlier this month, his campaign called Flávio Bolsonaro Trump’s candidate, arguing that, “What Trump wants is to colonize Brazil, take our riches, steal our future, and leave us in the dust.”

Now, this comes after President Lula confirmed that Brazil denied visas to two U.S. officials over election interference concerns. The State Department has denied any claims of election meddling, telling reporters, “Any insinuation of a ‘ploy’ to undermine a democratic nation’s election is a baseless lie.”

Andrew, is there any evidence that the Trump administration is attempting to sway this election? Does it veer into election interference as we generally understand it? 

AF: The answer is oh God, yes. So much so it’s overwhelming. Overwhelming evidence, and it’s the same thing they’ve been doing across the region, which is why there’s been this rightward swing in elections across Latin America.

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That’s why they’re so interested in Brazil right now because Brazil — as the biggest economy, the biggest country, the most powerful entity in the hemisphere besides the United States — if Brazil falls, then the rest falls in line.

But if Brazil remains as this big island of resistance in the middle of the continent, it really messes up their plans, doesn’t it? The interference has been done on many levels. The reality is that we don’t know the full extent of it, and we won’t know the full extent of it for years. We’re still learning about things that happened in 1964 with the U.S. role in the coup.

There’s dirty tricks happening that’s being run through intelligence agencies. That’s absolutely positive. There’s very, very strong signs that they’re using U.S. companies, Big Techs like Meta, who’s been getting a lot of attention — a lot of flak — lately because of clear signs that its algorithm is favoring Bolsonaro and suppressing Lula.

Multiple instances that they even admit happens, “Oh, but no, but it was just a mistake. It was just a mistake.” Meta and the Big Techs in the U.S., they’re really concerned about what a Lula government could do for their profits. Maybe Lula wants to have more sovereignty and control over what they’re doing.

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The Brazilian government doesn’t even know how much money they make in Brazil, the Big Techs. They just know how much money they send out through the tax bills that they pay and the money they send out of the country. The Big Techs in the U.S. are really concerned about getting their access on rare earths and on lithium reserves, which Brazil has the largest deposits of rare earths after China. This whole trade war with China, Brazil becomes much more important. It’s a huge market.

So you have one candidate that is just completely submissive — like painfully, embarrassingly submissive — to U.S. interests. So much so that one of his former closest allies, a general, Santos Cruz, who’s a very famous well-known general, he came out recently and said, “I’m a conservative. I’m right-wing. This is not conservatism. This is not right wing. This is just ‘voluntary submissiveness.’”

They’re just absolutely scamming Brazilians with this level of supplicancy that we’ve never seen before, that the military dictatorship even didn’t do, which was hand in glove with the U.S. interests. This is completely next level, and it’s something that obviously the left is very concerned about. 

But people like Santos Cruz, Brazilians that actually believe in Brazilian sovereignty, and that it’s important for Brazil to be able to pursue its own interests rather than the interests of foreign powers — they’re very concerned about that, which is, some segments of the elite. 

Whenever you have a submissive local government in an imperialist relationship, there are people that benefit. There are local people that will get special contracts, that will get special treatment. They’ll be able to crush their enemies through these relationships. And that’s what they’re doing in Bolivia and in Peru and in Ecuador right now.

What they did in Venezuela, where they just came in and took all of the oil and said, “All right. We’re going to take 90 percent of the oil profits, and we’ll give you a couple billion a year.” People are seeing this in Brazil. They see what Trump has done. And they’re still saying, “Well, we like Bolsonaro, so we’re going with Bolsonaro. I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

It’s a massive issue, and I really, I don’t think we know how bad it will be and how submissive they’ll be this time around. Because it always is the case that, with right-wing authoritarian governments, it’s the second term where they really take off whatever mask was left and decide, “We have a mandate and we can do whatever we want.”

You saw it in the U.S. with Trump. They saw it in Turkey with Erdoğan. They saw it in Hungary with Orbán. They saw it in India with Modi. This is what always happens. It’s the second term where they say, “OK. We showed them who we are, and everyone said it’s fine.” They’re able to smoke out all of their rivals in the first term. They map them out, and so when the second time comes around, it’s just bang, bang, bang. Let’s get rid of them. Let’s maximize our power and do whatever we want. 

The result’s not going to be positive for Brazil. That’s the thing: If I were a Brazilian billionaire — which I am not — it would be in my personal interest for Brazil to follow the economic path that the Lula government is following, much more than what Bolsonaro is proposing.

Lula’s not some left-wing radical. He’s center-right. He was left, then he became center-left, and he’s moving ever more to the right. This last election, his vice presidential candidate was his former presidential rival, the center-right guy. They’re very much doing what the big banks want. They’re helping the big agro get what they want. They give tons of subsidies to major industries. But the thing that they do, they take a little bit of that money, and they spread it around to the poorest people with public services with access to education, with some cash transfers. We’re talking about 60 bucks or 80 bucks a month to families, and that is what is making the economy grow. Because if you don’t have consumers in your economy, and you have domestic industries you’re trying to build, then no one’s going to buy the things. Your employees can’t buy the things.

That’s intolerable to some people in Brazil, and they can’t see that it benefits their own economic interests.

You’re in this kind of crazy situation where it doesn’t really make sense what they’re doing. And they saw it happen with Bolsonaro, with Jair! They all supported him, and then he crashed the economy. Then they all went back to Lula begrudgingly and said, “OK, we’re going to support you in ’22 because things aren’t going very well.”

Then Lula turned it around immediately, and now they’re forgetting again and going back to Bolsonaro. Logically, it doesn’t make sense. It’s more psychological. Freud has to explain what’s going on.

JW: Again, the parallels between the United States and Brazil are very apparent in terms of some of those economic choices. You’ve already gone over what the U.S. wants to gain from involvement in this election. But there’s another foreign power that’s also interested in the election. Flávio Bolsonaro has been cozying up to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, obviously in stark contrast to President Lula, who’s been an ardent supporter of the Palestinians. What would a Flávio Bolsonaro presidency look like for Brazil’s stance towards Israel? 

AF: You can’t say that Lula has been the heroic savior, but he has made statements saying, “This is a genocide. This is very bad. This shouldn’t happen.”

At the same time, he’s allowed Petrobras to ship petroleum products to the Israeli government that are being used in the genocide. He’s allowed one of the major steel manufacturers to ship steel and ore to the Israeli weapons companies that are using it to build rifles and bombs to use in Gaza.

It’s not like you’re dealing with the leader of BDS [Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement] versus Netanyahu’s best friend. It’s a run-of-the-mill European-style center-left social democrat leader that’s kinda disappointing on this issue, versus someone that just wants to be absolutely submissive to everything that Israel wants and does and just completely supports it.

Again, you said, there’s so many parallels to the U.S. The parallels in Brazil, why does this make sense? Why would they care about supporting Israel? Why would this be something that they would want to put their name on, like these horrible scenes that people have been seeing for years online?

Everyone’s seeing it. Why would they want to support it? They kind of want to do the same thing in Brazil. One of the things that Jair always complains about is that he’s jealous of the U.S. because their cavalry was more effective at exterminating the Indigenous population than the Brazilian cavalry was. They’re upset that they have these relatively small numbers of Indigenous people that have claims to these massive swaths of land, much of which in the Amazon, that they want to get their hands on so they can cut down the trees and throw cows in and do mining. So a colonial–settler project that involves extermination of the Indigenous population to benefit their economy.

That’s what Israel’s doing, and that’s what they want to do in Brazil: “Why don’t you give me all the fun, fancy tools of espionage and surveillance and war and suppression that you guys have developed and honed in Israel for the last decades, and let me get my hands on them too so I can do the same thing back here.”

I think that’s one of the main reasons ideologically. Plus the whole political, evangelical right-wing movement, which was a concerted project by the CIA to implant in Latin America, bringing in prosperity gospel to get rid of the Catholic Church and all their support of left and workers movements.

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This is all very well documented, that they brought it in because it’s more individualist ideology, and that individualist ideology also includes the idea that all the Jews need to go to Israel for the reckoning.

There are a ton of parallels between Brazil and the U.S., and that’s because almost all of the worst ideas in the United States have been intentionally exported to Brazil as a way to make Brazil a worse country that’s more in line with U.S. interests. 

That includes healthcare companies. The U.S. model of healthcare. They have free, independent public healthcare in Brazil called SUS [Sistema Único de Saúde]. It’s an incredible system that’s very popular. They want to privatize it. They want to get rid of it to create more profit. Prosperity gospel with all this right-wing ideological movements, they love it.

The NRA sent lobbyists down in 2002 to Brazil to work with the right-wing movements to say, “This is the game plan for how you create a gun movement in Brazil.” And what happened? It manifests itself in the Jair Bolsonaro administration, where they just opened up the floodgates for access to guns, increasing the number of guns you have, the type of guns that you could have, the number of bullets you could have, and getting rid of anything that could help prevent organized crime from getting massive amounts of assault rifles and unmarked bullets they can use in crimes. Under Bolsonaro, that’s one of the things that spread more than ever.

There’s all these little levers that they’re really just doing copy and paste, and we’ve seen these alliances with JD Vance and the Rockbridge [Network], which is a group that he created before he was vice president with a bunch of Peter Thiel and other billionaires in the U.S. They’ve created a subsidiary in Korea and now one in Brazil that they were using to do the same sort of alignment with the local elites that they did before, in the lead-up to the ’64 coup. I can go on for hours about all the different connections and ties. 

JW: To your point, you’ve talked about how this is much bigger than just Brazil.

To me, the “Donroe Doctrine” is hanging over all of this. Last November, President Donald Trump released what he described as a corollary to the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, the “Donroe Doctrine,” which effectively calls for the U.S. to take an aggressive interventionist stance in Latin America under the guise of protecting the United States’ national security and economic interests in the region.

Andrew, from your perspective, what more should we understand about what the United States is doing in Brazil and kind of the wider context of the Trump administration’s actions in Latin America over the last two years? 

AF: It’s pretty simple. They are fighting the Cold War against China in Latin America, just like they used to do against the Soviets. As part of that war, they are aligning with far-right upstart leaders that are seen as anti-establishment, even though they’re usually tied to billionaires or even billionaires themselves, like in Ecuador.

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There’s this weird coincidence with all of them that they almost all have connections to organized drug trafficking. They’re almost all known drug smugglers or connected to them or have some sort of financial relations. While they’re doing that, they’re arguing that “We are working together with these local governments in South and Latin America to fight drug trafficking,” which is obviously a farce.

That’s what they did in Ecuador. The president of Ecuador, Noboa, he’s the son of a banana dynasty that does a lot of exporting bananas, and in those crates of bananas, they’ve also been known to export a lot of kilos of cocaine. Their allies in Colombia have always been this way, and the things that they’re doing in Bolivia, it’s the exact same thing. The [Bolivian] attorney general who was trying to push back against the corruption of this right-wing government that has allied with Trump, well Trump and Rubio came in and said listen, you need to go after this attorney general and get rid of him. So he was arrested because he was going after their allies.

They don’t care about drug trafficking, obviously. The U.S. government never cared about drugs. It’s always been a weapon or a tool for them. So they’re aligning with these people to create this lockstep union that they’re calling the “Shield of the Americas.” It’s this new alliance that they’re using instead of the existing, the U.N. or other mechanisms. They’re creating all their own, just like they did with the “Board of Peace.” They’re working to make sure that those economies just stay in their sphere of influence just a little bit longer. 

They know that China’s winning. China is the main trade partner with all of these countries now. They’re Brazil’s biggest trade partner. The United States cannot absorb all of the exports that Brazil produces that goes to China. They’re not going to get Brazil to stop trading with China or stop having relations with China. They compete on corn and ethanol and soy exports. They can’t absorb what China’s buying.

They’re really just trying to buy a little bit more time as their empire is slowly waning, but at the cost of what? At the cost of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of lives? It’s not clear what the indirect results of this will be. At the cost of destroying the democratic institutions in these countries that are already, many of them struggling and teetering, and potentially at the cost of massive ecological devastation, as would be the case in the collapse of the Amazon under a Bolsonaro government?

It’s uplifting, right? 

JW: Very uplifting. That is my first word that comes to mind. You’ve pointed out everything that Donald Trump is doing, but we also know that tech oligarchs are involved as well. Tech tycoons like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have taken a massive interest in Latin American politics.

What impact do you think that is having on the rightward shift we’re seeing throughout the Americas? 

AF: Oh, big time. Big time. I think the biggest tycoon that’s most in the news lately is Mark Zuckerberg. He’s the guy who runs Meta. Something like 99 percent of people in Brazil use WhatsApp as their primary form of communication. 

The idea of sending a text message in Brazil is like, “What are you, some sort of barbarian? What decade is this?” People only use WhatsApp. And for a lot of people, you get a cheap phone, and you get a prepaid phone plan because they didn’t have net neutrality like it was passed in the U.S. It’ll come with free credits for WhatsApp and Facebook, and it’ll come preinstalled on the phone even, and it’s part of the plan.

So for a lot of people, Facebook for many years and WhatsApp were the internet. Now Instagram as well. Instagram is really the main tool of political communication at this point. As we know, [it is] highly censored. You guys saw recently at the No Kings protests what Meta can do if it just decides to suddenly have a technical error that they fail to fix for eight hours.

That’s what they’ve been doing in Brazil for months now. So you have a young right-wing member of Congress named Nikolas Ferreira. He comes from a right-wing evangelical church, and he’s very charismatic, and he’s really good on social media, and he’s got something like 22 million followers or something. Brazil has 214 million people.

When Lula was having this dispute a year or two ago with foreign tech interests, including Meta’s interests, Nikolas Ferreira planted this fake news that Lula was trying to tax the main financial instrument that people use called Pix. It’s this free instant cash transfers that you can do that’s created by the central bank, and everyone loves it. Trump hates it because it competes against Mastercard and Visa.

So [Ferreira] created this fake news that what Lula was trying to do was tax all transactions and so therefore you were just going to get taxed even more, and you, the poor working man, was going to get screwed. In reality, there was no tax involved, and it was an anti-money laundering initiative that any transactions over 1,000 reais [Editor’s note: 5,000 Brazilian reais] would be immediately reported so they can trace questions of money laundering, which is a huge problem in Brazil.

That video was seen, the last time I checked, over 300 million times in a country that has 214 million people, and not all of them are on Instagram. That’s just Instagram — not including the other social networks. And in the last few weeks of the election, Nikolas Ferreira’s account has had greater engagement and views than every global celebrity you can name. I don’t know the exact numbers off the top of my head, but three times more than Beyoncé. Just think of the most famous person that you can think of in the world and their account, and Nikolas Ferreira — who you hadn’t heard of until I said his name just now — is crushing them.

That’s being seen as probable algorithmic manipulation by Meta in favor of the right-wing movement. OK, that’s one example, we don’t have access to the algorithm, we can’t be sure about that. Well. if you go onto the Meta’s AI in WhatsApp, and you say, “Create me a political poster for Flávio, vote Flávio,” it’ll do vote Flávio, and they’ll use his election number, 22.

And you say, “Vote for a capybara, vote for a flamingo,” They’ll say, “Vote 22.” They’ll use Flávio’s number. And then if you say, “Do another poster, but say vote Lula,” it’ll say, “We can’t do that. That’s an election interference, and we’re not allowed to do that.” And say you just did it for Flávio,” and then the AI will be like, “Oh, you’re right. That’s a mistake.” But then it keeps happening, and it’s been happening for weeks now. People have been pointing it out for weeks. 

They blocked Lula’s Meta account from being able to run paid ads like 10 days before the first round of the elections. They said, oh, that was a mistake. It was my bad. Lots of left-wing accounts have seen these weird number shifts.

So they’ll have, let’s say, 20,000 comments, but it’ll say zero shares, or the views will go down to zero, or people have been talking about, “My engagement just has been completely in the tank since this election has started.” Not everybody, but some people. 

There’s all these pieces of circumstantial evidence that suggest that Meta is interfering in this election, and they have every incentive to do so. They will have a much better regulatory environment if Flávio wins because of Flávio’s submissiveness to U.S. interests and his willingness to play ball with whatever Trump tells him to.

So that’s just one case. That’s just Mark Zuckerberg.

JW: Cutting in here, from the future. After our conversation with Andrew. We requested comment from Meta who sent a lengthy response, but in summary, they said, “Each of the incidents cited by Lula’s campaign has a straightforward, documented explanation. … None reflects political targeting. None reflects manipulated distribution. None reflects an effort to influence the election.”

Meta said Lula’s campaign ad account was disabled for one hour by mistake, not for political reasons. The company also claimed that issues with ad creation and video view count were global errors, and not politically motivated. 

On Monday, a Brazilian court gave Meta 24 hours to prove that it was not favoring Flávio Bolsonaro over President Lula in its feeds, or it would face an escalating fine. This comes after that same judge ruled that while he could not find evidence of deliberate interference, the company had 24 hours to prove that the issues affecting the Lula campaign were solved and would not reoccur. 

OK, now back to Andrew. 

AF: Elon’s coming down here. Peter Thiel was just down in Argentina to hang out with Javier Milei, who’s the president who’s been destroying the economy and businesses are shuttering, unemployment’s up, costs of living have gone through the roof, but he’s this anarcho-capitalist, hyper-libertarian that’s just been cutting everything with a literal chainsaw. He came on stage with a chainsaw saying, just like Elon Musk did, I’m going to cut through all the regulations and the red tape.

That’s what they want, and Flávio Bolsonaro said, I’m going to do that. I want to follow the Milei model. In the last debate that they had, the first debate, which was just the other night, Lula asked Flávio about this: Are you going to be Milei?

He was just sort of refusing to answer the question. Eventually OK, what model are you going to follow? [Lula] said, I’m going to follow the Lula model, the one that I’ve been doing that’s been working. What are you going to do? Answer the question. But, outside of that debate, [Flávio] had been saying that he loves Milei.

Milei gave him an official endorsement, just like Benjamin Netanyahu did an official endorsement for Flávio, which is something that doesn’t happen in international relations. Foreign leaders just as a matter of course don’t endorse a candidate in a foreign election. So they’re being very overt in this, and they’re all working together with their billionaire buddies who have controls over huge levers of power in Brazil because of how Big Techs work in the world.

That’s one of the main issues for leftist voters in Brazil right now. They want sovereignty for their country. They want Brazil to be able to govern Brazil under Brazilian law and have control over Brazil to serve Brazilian interests.

Flávio Bolsonaro does not care about that. Trump and Musk and Zuckerberg do not want that because it would be a limitation on their ability to exert power in Brazil and in the world. They don’t want it to be a model for the rest of the world. 

JW: Listening to everything you’re saying, obviously, we’re not going to fix the issue of tech oligarchs meddling in foreign elections by Sunday. But are there any final thoughts that you have just about this election? 

AF: I would say that this election is so important and relevant for the United States and for the world. For many years, there’s been this concept called the Brazilification of the United States.

Brazil wants to become, or, people that vote for Flávio at least, they want Brazil to become the United States. They see the U.S. as the country where everything works, where everything is perfect and goes well, and they don’t see all the bad stuff that listeners and readers of The Intercept know all about far too well.

But in reality, it’s not that Brazil is becoming more like the United States, it’s that the United States is becoming more like Brazil.

The middle class is getting squeezed and disappearing. In Brazil, 90 percent of the country makes $1,200 or less a month. The middle class would be considered extremely poor by U.S. standards, and what it does exist of a U.S.-style middle class is just teeny-tiny. You have just shrinking spheres of democracy, while oligarchs have increasing power and control and are able to do what they want and insist on decisions for the country that are bad for the society, bad for all of the society and the people, but good for their individual interests.

It’s just this more polarized, divided, K-shape economies, what you guys call it in the U.S. That’s where things are going. So you should really pay attention to this Brazilian election because the things that are happening here and the things that are going to happen in the next few days are very likely to be happening in the United States in the near future, if they’re not already happening.

JW: The Brazilification of the United States is a really good way to put it. I think so often people in the U.S., and, I can include myself, we think about the impact that the United States has on other countries, but we rarely think about the mutual shared relationships and larger shared ideas that people have between countries, between continents. So I think that’s a really good point. 

We’re going to have to leave it there, but Andrew, thank you so much for joining me on The Intercept Briefing. You can find more of Andrew Fishman’s reporting at The Intercept Brasil. 

AF: Thank you. Keep up the good work.

JW: That does it for this episode. 

We want to hear from you. Tell us what you’re following or want to see more coverage of. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com or leave us a voice mail at 530-POD-CAST that’s 530-763-2278

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Jordan Uhl is our social media producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. 

Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

This show and our reporting at The Intercept do not 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 find our reporting.

Until next time, I’m Jessica Washington. 

The post The Stakes of Brazil’s Presidential Election  appeared first on The Intercept.

The October 8 shooting of Oscar Belgal by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in front of his 5-year-old son in Manhattan forced into the open a question that had been on many New Yorkers’ minds: What would the New York Police Department do when ICE broke the “rule of law” in the city, and how would Mayor Zohran Mamdani, the person who has the power to hire and fire the NYPD commissioner, respond? 

Shortly after the shooting, Mamdani addressed the incident with an appropriate amount of outrage, declaring ICE “rotten to its core,” and calling for the department to be abolished. His frustration was visible, but he was much less expressive when it came to his appraisal of the city’s response to the situation. He had nothing substantive to discuss with respect to his police department’s involvement, despite NYPD officers arriving on the scene only to find unidentified ICE agents holding guns, wearing plain clothes and disguises and masks, in apparent violation of federal laws requiring identification. (A recently passed New York state law prohibiting federal agents from wearing masks and other face coverings was temporarily blocked by a judge.) NYPD officers applied first aid and transported Belgal to NewYork-Presbyterian Allen hospital.

According to many eyewitness accounts and widely circulated video, members of the NYPD appeared to assist ICE agents by forcefully helping with crowd control — at one point, an NYPD officer shoved congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier, whom Mamdani personally stumped for, to the ground. Later, NYPD cleared a path for federal agents to whisk Belgal away from the hospital to a federal detention facility downtown. 

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After the shooting, the Democratic Socialists of America, several legislators, and Avila Chevalier all called on Mamdani to fire NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch and demanded the mayor uphold his campaign pledge to disband the NYPD’s infamous Strategic Response Group. Mamdani repeatedly refused to fire Tisch but said he was reviewing the 24-hour period around the shooting. When asked directly about Avila Chevalier being thrown to the ground, the mayor called it unacceptable, saying, “That is not something I will look to justify.” He reminded New Yorkers to be patient with efforts to reform the NYPD, ordered a review of the department’s use-of-force policies, and added funding for the inspector general’s office. But once again, he stood by his commissioner, citing “her record of uprooting corruption from the upper echelons of the NYPD while lowering crime across our city.”

Noticeably absent from any of Mamdani’s public remarks about the NYPD or Tisch was any public acknowledgment of the NYPD officers in relation to ICE agents during the Belgal incident.

Federal and city law enforcement occupy similar spaces but never really interact with each other. Mamdani made no mention of the ways in which the actions of federal agents put pressure on the NYPD as mediators — the primary function of police — to liaise in moments of conflict.

The NYPD typically relishes this role, which is why the department consumes so much of New York’s budget and shuns any attempts to redirect funds to other services that might reduce the need for police mediation to begin with. ICE forces local police to make choices in policy and in practice about how to deal with violent (often illegal) immigration operations.

If the NYPD believes itself to be the thin blue line, on which side of order and chaos do New York’s force and Mamdani believe these federal outside agitators to be?

This omission — or evasion, depending on how you look at it — of this predicament is strange considering Mamdani’s willingness to speak with moral clarity about even the most contentious issues and confront them head-on. It’s also bizarre considering his penchant for weaving shared experiences together and for putting the lived experiences of New Yorkers front and center.

On the campaign trail, one of Mamdani’s most alluring traits was his ability to speak to the actual problems of everyday residents. It wasn’t just because he possessed once-in-a-generation oratory skills; candidate Zohran achieved this because, as a proud democratic socialist, there was an analysis — an explanation of the material conditions of life — baked into his politics. His rhetoric seemed in line with, or at least not alienated from (see: establishment Democrats), how fast reality was moving and how it was impacting the lives of everyday New Yorkers.

When it comes to ICE, however, Mayor Mamdani’s rhetoric and policies haven’t always aligned, which has opened him up to questions about the kind of mayor he really is. On one hand, he has shown that he will speak out against Trump’s fascist and inhumane immigration efforts. On the other hand, Mamdani hasn’t moved with the same level of force as his words. Many have pointed out that Mamdani seems to be engaging in realpolitik in an effort to get his extensive progressive agenda passed. It’s certainly not easy to bring the machine of the New York government up to speed while also being transparent about the ways in which he is moving the needle. But that’s exactly what he was elected to do.

Had Mamdani got into office and done nothing different than previous mayors — or even been exceptionally corrupt, pro-cop, and willing to help the Trump administration like predecessor Eric Adams — he might have been able to avoid his current moment of reckoning. But his administration’s genuine efforts on immigration set into motion a future where the NYPD and ICE would come into conflict.

One of Mamdani’s first moves as mayor was to take stock of how the city’s many agencies were upholding existing sanctuary city laws. In February 2026, he signed Executive Order 13, his first major order pertaining to immigration, to create the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs and establish baseline guidance, such as explicitly prohibiting ICE and other non-local law enforcement agencies from using city-owned garages and vacant lots. Crucially, EO 13 also required an audit of several agencies, including NYPD, to review their immigration-related policies.

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NYPD already has a problematic history dealing with immigration enforcement. During the Adams administration, there were documented cases where the NYPD assisted or collaborated with immigration enforcement, sometimes in accordance with NYPD policies. A December 2025 report by Jocelyn Strauber, then-commissioner of the New York City Department of Investigation, found at least one incident in which “an officer violated local law by providing assistance to federal authorities in connection with enforcement of the federal civil immigration law,” as well as evidence that NYPD did “not fully comply with documentation and reporting requirements concerning requests for assistance with federal civil immigration enforcement.” The report also found that there were numerous examples of NYPD policies and practices that elevated the “risk of improper information sharing or assistance to federal authorities for purposes of civil immigration enforcement.”

The resulting audit, which was released on May 22 by Mamdani’s deputy mayor, built on those findings and recommended NYPD (and other city agencies) update its reporting requirements. But the audit also left a lot of open questions, which numerous legal advocates attested to, about areas in which NYPD protocols and policies keep avenues open to potentially collaborate with ICE. The NYPD was “not being held to a high standard of accountability or scrutiny for collusion,” the audit found, and there were significant “gaps” in documenting potential violations of department policies. The question of what the city and its mayor could do to ensure compliance also remained unanswered.

Sanctuary laws prohibit using city resources for immigration enforcement, and a January 2025 NYPD internal memo specifically barring officers from facilitating street closures to enable immigration enforcement seemed to solidify that directive. But several high-profile incidents involving the NYPD have tested the department’s compliance with sanctuary laws. In October 2025, before Mamdani was elected, during an immigration raid in Chinatown, eyewitnesses and viral videos showed NYPD officers establishing perimeters to create a path for federal law enforcement agents. In another instance in May 2026, ICE reportedly “dragged” a Nigerian immigrant out of a Brooklyn hospital after agents used force in his arrest; NYPD officers brutalized and arrested numerous protesters and cleared debris from the road to enable ICE to escape the crowds and abscond with their target.

Both of these incidents happened under the watch of Tisch, who has insisted again and again that the department follows all sanctuary laws. When asked about the Brooklyn incident, Mamdani insisted NYPD was responding to 911 calls about the protest, not helping ICE. “Our laws leave nothing, no room for interpretation about the fact that our NYPD will not participate in civil immigration enforcement,” he said. NYPD told the Guardian US: “Upon arrival, officers observed numerous individuals acting in a disorderly manner, obstructing vehicular traffic, and blocking emergency entrances and exits at Wyckoff Heights medical center.” 

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When the NYPD arrives at an ICE raid or at a protest against an immigration abduction, what are officers supposed to do? On this point, NYPD and Mamdani have offered little clarity. But October 8 doesn’t pass the smell test for anyone who lives in overpoliced neighborhoods or closely observes the activity of police and their behavior.

NYPD officers were responding to an unrelated call nearby when they heard the report of shots fired. When they arrived, they encountered several men in various forms of attire, including some in construction-style vests, face masks, and at least one carrying a long gun, which officer body camera footage released by the Department confirms. The official account of the NYPD’s interaction offers no mention of ICE. There are no additional insights or explanations of department protocol that might shed light on how officers are supposed to act given the circumstances. Curiously, what those officers thought when they encountered several masked men with guns, and the conversations that took place between the ICE agents and the police, is a mystery, too. All we know is that officers agreed at some point that the NYPD would place Belgal in a vehicle, apply aid, and take him to the hospital. 

Since that evening, Mayor Mamdani has stood firm in his condemnation of ICE and their operations. “We will not normalize ICE’s viciousness,” he said, calling for the agency to be abolished. That’s the least he could say to reassure New Yorkers he understands the stakes they feel in their bones already. The shooting of Oscar Belgal and his subsequent inhumane treatment — his lawyers say Belgal is still in solitary confinement with a bullet in his neck — is a reminder of how normalizing ICE operations in New York City is already well underway. 

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There have been more lower-profile ICE sightings and kidnappings, which echoes what has been the case in other parts of the country. What Mamdani will do to bring the city’s response into alignment with the needs of New Yorkers in this moment still remains an open question, including clarifying the NYPD’s role in the city’s ongoing fight against the Trump administration’s gestapo tactics.

If this month’s incident offered a lesson for Mamdani, it is that clearly articulating what is right is a full-time job that requires an unwavering willingness to confront reality. It’s not enough to say the thing on one issue — calling a genocide by its name, publicly dragging FIFA for pandering to wealthy elites, or deriding the inhumane practices of slumlords — but not stand on business when it comes to the reality that New Yorkers are seeing on their own streets. 

Sometimes, an actual seismic event can reveal what needs to be done and that there are alternatives that may not have been fully realized before. Hope isn’t lost. There is still time for Mamdani to update his analysis. But in this moment, the mayor must make a choice: renew his commitment to the truth, or be defined by its absence. 

The post Mamdani’s High-Wire Balancing Act Between ICE and NYPD Can’t Last appeared first on The Intercept.

Disenchanted and disturbed by Google’s military contracts with the U.S. and Israel, Liguori says she could no longer stand working at a company that was going to help kill people or help build technology that “automatically makes it easier to escalate the brutality of war.”

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Liguori joined DeepMind in 2023 and began working on AI systems aimed at more efficiently routing power through the electrical grid, a peacetime engineering problem. But as she learned of Google’s Project Nimbus contract, which furnishes Israel’s military and top weapons manufacturers with a suite of advanced artificial intelligence tools, she began to question her role in the company, and the company’s role in the world. The day after Google announced its classified military AI contract with the Pentagon in April, Liguori staged a personal sick-out, using a combination of sick leave and holiday time off to cease her work.

In a letter she sent internally informing DeepMind and her colleagues of her resignation, Liguori urged them to “stay human” in the face of military work. “I no longer believe that our technology will have a net positive impact on society. I think there’s a fantasy world where AI can help decarbonize grids, cut waste, protect ecosystems, and benefit humanity,” she wrote. “But it’s not this world, and it’s not this type of general purpose AI we are racing to develop. Racing to deploy agentic AI in this society and historical moment is a terrible idea, and will definitely be a net evil.”

The Intercept spoke to Liguori, an Italian national living in London, where DeepMind is headquartered, about how she came to view her employer as dangerously powerful. During a series of interviews by phone and via text, which have been edited and condensed for length and clarity, she explained her moral opposition to military work, the role of unionization in dissent, and what hope engineers and scientists might have for influencing their companies.

What was it about DeepMind that made you want to work there?

I had a high opinion of DeepMind; it was a dream company. It had this aura of being a research-oriented place where you could sit close not just to computer scientists, but real scientists and researchers and people with backgrounds in biology, in physics, in mathematics, in ecology, in anthropology.

You joined in 2023, by which point the company had already been involved in Project Nimbus. Were you aware of that project at the time?

Not really. The first year when I joined, I was very new and very isolated in my team. Google DeepMind is a huge company and if you’re not in the right channels, you end up being very siloed. I didn’t know about Project Nimbus, but when the Gaza war escalated, I discovered it. I immediately looked for some internal resistance movement to join, but I didn’t find anything.

I discovered [Google employee advocacy group] No Tech for Apartheid, but I thought it was mainly a U.S. organization. I didn’t know how to connect with colleagues that share concerns, so the only thing that I did was buy a Palestine hoodie and go to the office with that.

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In the summer of 2024, I went on maternity leave because my daughter was born, and during maternity leave I was watching news from Gaza every day. I was really suffering experiencing maternity and watching a livestreamed genocide, and every time I was thinking of my company’s complicity in that. I thought about not coming back to work at all.

When I was due to come back, I met a colleague that had basically taken my role in my team before maternity leave, and they were actually leaving for ethical reasons. They put me in contact with the union movement and No Tech for Apartheid. And so I found other colleagues fighting against this.

How and when did you learn of the company’s contracts with the U.S. military?

By the time they started engaging with the U.S. Department of War, [Editor’s note: July 2025] I was already involved in activism. By this winter we saw the GenAI.mil contract materializing, and for me, this was a very clear indication of the company’s intentions. At the same time Google ramped up the security level authorization for Cloud: IL6, which is the level required to handle classified workloads.

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The combination of the two — signing this non-classified deal with the Department of War, and ramping up security level — really meant that we wanted to use AI for war, on the battlefield. Even if the internal narrative was, “No, don’t worry, it’s just for administrative purposes, just to process documents.”

What was happening internally?

Internally there was a lot of conversation in specific channels where people were complaining, but leadership never really answered anything. I had some of my posts deleted.

What had you written, and did you ever get any sort of answer as to why this stuff was deleted?

I had several posts deleted because they contained the word “genocide,” and I was told that genocide is an intrinsically violent word, and so I was violating internal policies. Even when my posts weren’t deleted, I often had conversations with my manager and HR telling me that my tone was not appropriate because I was too aggressive and that I should raise my concerns in different ways.

They basically wanted us to send [internal HR] tickets to raise our concerns. The problem is that when you do that, you receive semi-automated answers with absolutely no content, nobody is engaged on the concern you have raised. There’s no discussion at all, you don’t even interact with a human. It’s a lot of administrative and bureaucratic steps you have to follow to raise concerns. What I wanted was discussion and what I wanted was very clear answers from leadership.

They tell you this is not the place to raise concerns, try to go through this other channel. This is the common technique. They always tell you to do something else, try to make you tired, and you will never get an answer.

[Editor’s note: The Intercept asked Google about Liguori’s criticism of both the contract and how discussion is handled internally. Spokesperson Tom Hewett responded: “We work with public sector organisations worldwide and follow a consistent process for reviewing and entering these contracts, including compliance with our acceptable use policies and AI principles. We also have dedicated channels for employees to safely raise any concerns – ranging from business ethics to misconduct – and have strict workplace policies in place to prevent retaliation of any kind.”]

I think the reason why you would be opposed to Project Nimbus is pretty straightforward: genocide. What were your specific concerns about or opposition to the Department of War contract?

I’m against the use of AI for targeting and in warfare in general, not only for autonomous weapons. I’m against AI for war, and I don’t think a commercial company like Google should have anything to do with that.

AI for targeting is very dangerous; it creates a system where it’s easier to escalate the brutality of war. The first problem is the opacity introduced in the definition of targets and the dehumanization that follows. In principle, if you have to define targets, if you want to define Hamas combatants, you have to think what it actually means and come up with a definition.

But with these systems, you can bypass the definition. The system itself comes out with a definition. You don’t even question it, you just blindly rely on the definition as the ultimate truth. The person just becomes a set of aggregated data points. All individuality is lost, all humanity is lost in in this process.

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It becomes a system that dehumanizes people. It becomes a rubber stamp because the human brain cannot process all this information. You keep a person that formally approves it, but they don’t, they cannot, meaningfully evaluate the output. This links to the accountability gap: Everyone in the kill chain can plausibly say that they didn’t decide.

What did you do to protest the Department of War contract internally?

Mainly messaging on corporate channels to inform colleagues, and speaking with them in person. I tried to channel the widespread dissatisfaction and indignation over the contract into the collective movement we are building, into our union effort. [Editor’s note: DeepMind employees voted to unionize in May.] Many people still don’t know there are other colleagues organizing against these contracts and for a more ethical Google DeepMind.

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When you are alone and you lose faith in your company, and you stop believing your work makes a positive difference, you can only become disillusioned and frustrated, and you ultimately end in acceptance and cynicism, or you leave. Finding you are not alone, and joining a collective movement, gives a much better option. It gave me the strength to stay, at least for a year.

I also co-organized a demonstration in February in front of the office. The scope was broader than just the Department of War, but the December GenAI.mil launch had given me a deep sense of urgency, and that’s why I organized the demonstration. I knew something like the classified deal was coming, and I knew this meant legitimizing Nimbus-style collaborations to become the standard. The demonstration was for Gaza and for any use of AI in war. We had banners with “No AI in the kill chain” and “No Gemini for Genocide.”

Has your work as a research engineer contributed to your concerns about this technology being used to kill? How has your technical knowledge informed your opposition?

Understanding how these systems work makes it easier to see where the problem is. Understanding statistical aggregation, and how easy it is to just delegate responsibility, delegate decision-making, makes a difference. But I think it’s more important to do some philosophical reasoning here.

Do you have concerns about the reliability of the technology?

I am concerned about unreliability. But I don’t think you should ever look at unreliability separate from a discussion of why AI in warfare is wrong by itself.

A lot of the time what I hear is a focus on error, for example, the Minab school attack. If we focus only on the error, we are basically saying that if there was no error, these systems for automated targeting are OK.

Were there people within Deep Mind who were supportive of this contract or military work generally?

Yes, it was actually a very debated topic. I think there is broad consensus on the Anthropic red lines, which are fully autonomous weapons and mass surveillance.

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But on whether to use AI for military purposes, this is a much more debated topic, and a lot of people buy the narrative of us-versus-them: That we need to defend ourselves against Russia, against China, and so on.

What was your thought process on deciding to leave the company over this?

It was a very challenging year. I came back as a new mom with a full-time job, a baby to handle, I had some health issues, and I was committing to activism basically on the side. Many people told me, you can slow down, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t stay in the company and just go on with business as usual. I really felt we needed to stop the Department of War contract because I perceive that contract as normalizing what happened in Gaza — the kind of tech-powered, AI-powered, brutal war that was tested in Gaza was getting approved to become the standard of war.

I don’t think petitions have a great effect in general. The [DeepMind] petition summarized my disillusionment from us not having done more during the year to prevent this from happening. For me, really, we should have gone on strike this year. We should have stopped working.

In the U.S., there is a lot of defense of these contracts on the basis that it’s important for national security. That might be persuasive if you’re American. But Americans are a pretty small minority on the planet. I’m curious what your perspective is on that kind of rationale as someone who lives in another country, who is a citizen of another country.

There’s been discussion about that as well. A lot of Europeans were actually scared of that, because the current Trump administration is not very friendly even to Europeans. What feels like national security for U.S., people feels like a threat for Europeans.

Are you aware of other colleagues at DeepMind who are going to follow what you’re doing and quit?

Some have quit already, some publicly and some silently. There have been many people leaving because of ethical reasons. Not all of them publicized it.

Do you think it’s possible for workers to change something like the Pentagon contract? What is the worker movement inside Google/DeepMind missing that would allow for that kind of change?

I think it’s possible, but it requires a real commitment and readiness to take some risk. Ultimately, I think we need a workforce ready to strike to oppose these contracts. Currently, many people are too scared to even express an opinion publicly. The company was very effective at creating a pervasive sense of fear, which induces self-censorship.

What I tried to show my colleagues this year was exactly that the boundaries we perceive and we retreat behind are not the real boundaries — that we can speak out and keep our jobs. Most of the times the reaction is intimidation in meetings, mentions of policy violations, but nothing else follows. Obviously, there are some boundaries, but they are much farther then the perceived ones.

I also took a day off and demonstrated in front of the office in February, together with University College London BDS [Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement] staff and a few other colleagues. I faced literally no consequences for that because it’s a trade union activity in my spare time, and in the U.K., we are protected for such an action. This can be a form of soft strike.

As I write in my letter, if we fail to challenge these restrictions, we internalize them and become diminished versions of ourselves. And I think that in an era of increasing surveillance and authoritarianism, that’s something to reflect on. I have felt much freer since I found the courage to speak out and take some risks. It’s empowering. Fighting this fear is a big part of our task in the union movement we are trying to create in Google DeepMind.

The next step would be a real strike. I always tell my union friends that if I see any Google workers strike, I can die happy.

The post Google DeepMind Engineer Resigns in Protest of Pentagon Contract appeared first on The Intercept.

In his second term, President Donald Trump has routinely cast Somalia as lawless and Somalis as violent. Meanwhile, his administration has, largely without public knowledge, killed hundreds of people in Somalia, claiming they belong to terror groups. Trump personally ordered the death of a Somali man within days of regaining the White House, according to his counterterrorism czar Sebastian Gorka. The administration claimed, without offering any evidence, that the man was connected with the Islamic State terror group. Trump has sought to do the same with Omar.

Homeland Security agents raided Omar’s Washington, D.C., home last Monday, three weeks before the midterms, in which she is seeking reelection. The Trump administration reportedly launched the investigation to build a case to strip Omar of her U.S. citizenship and ultimately deport her. (Omar fled war in Somalia with her family when she was 8 years old, later immigrated to the U.S. as a refugee, and became a citizen in 2000.) The administration has also issued more than a dozen subpoenas, including to some of Omar’s relatives. On Monday, conservative media outlets reported that federal prosecutors obtained Omar’s DNA as part of their investigation.

“This is what happens in a dictatorship. The leader identifies his political, ethnic and religious enemies, and his agents scramble to do his bidding and make him happy,” Zaynab Mohamed, a Somali immigrant who represents Minneapolis in Minnesota’s state Senate, told The Intercept. “Representative Omar is the latest subject where Trump identifies the target and his minions go looking for a crime. The cases always fall apart, and this one will, too.” 

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Trump claimed not to have ordered the raid, but throughout his second term, his Justice Department has repeatedly targeted his political enemies — from New York’s attorney general, to the former head of the FBI, to members of the Federal Reserve. “I think she’s a terrible person, but that’s really up to the DOJ,” Trump said to reporters. “I have nothing to do with it.”

Omar called it “an attempt to target political enemies and weaponize federal law enforcement.” She added: “For ten years, Trump has targeted me with baseless lies and smear campaigns. This is just the latest escalation in his campaign of political intimidation.” Omar’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment from The Intercept.

With the Somali community, Trump found a target that he could attack with Islamophobic, racist, and xenophobic rhetoric, without incurring much mainstream backlash, said Jaylani Hussein, the executive director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

“As immigrants, Muslims, and — most importantly — Black people, it’s the trifecta,” he told The Intercept. “None of us expected the scale and level of the vitriol. But despite this, it’s at the point that the traditional media almost ignore the attacks on the Somali-American community because it’s not a large constituency. Trump says these things, and people just move on.”

Trump’s War on Somalia

Over the last decade, Trump has overseen the killing of as many as 1,500 Somalis in more than 400 attacks, according to a count by New America, a D.C.-based think tank. During his second term alone, the Trump administration has conducted more than 200 airstrikes in Somalia, including close to 90 this year, claiming to target terrorists.

The U.S. military has been at war in Somalia for almost a quarter-century, conducting air attacks and commando raids aimed at the terrorist group al-Shabab as well as the Islamic State group, while the CIA and special operators created local proxy forces to conduct low-profile operations on behalf of America. At the same time, the U.S. has provided Somalia with billions of dollars in counterterrorism assistance.

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U.S. attacks in Somalia have skyrocketed during Trump’s terms in office. From 2007 to 2017, under the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the U.S. military carried out 59 declared airstrikes in Somalia. The Biden administration conducted 51 declared strikes over four years. During Trump’s six years in office, the U.S. has launched more than 400 attacks against purported militants.

The U.S. rarely offers any evidence that those killed are members of terrorist groups, much less leaders. A New America analysis found militant leaders comprised just 1.7 percent of those killed. Africa Command refused to provide requested evidence that any of those killed in airstrikes in Somalia this year were militants. “All U.S. strikes in Somalia are conducted in close coordination partners [sic] against designated terror groups,” an AFRICOM spokesperson told The Intercept by email.

“Trump has conducted more drone strikes in Somalia than Bush, Obama, and Biden combined. And so many civilians have died,” historian Elizabeth Schmidt, the author of “Foreign Intervention in Africa After the Cold War: Sovereignty, Responsibility, and the War on Terror,” told The Intercept. “They were often just young men living in an area where it was easy to label them jihadis. And it turns out they had nothing to do with terrorism.” 

The U.S. claims that it has only killed six civilians over almost two decades of war in Somalia. A count by the airstrike monitoring group Airwars put the number at as much as 2,600 percent higher. A 2023 investigation by The Intercept determined, for example, that a drone attack in Somalia during Trump’s first term killed at least three, and possibly five, civilians, including 22-year-old Luul Dahir Mohamed and her 4-year-old daughter Mariam Shilow Muse. At the time of the attack, the U.S. announced it had killed “five terrorists” and that “no civilians were killed in this airstrike.” 

Trump calls Somalia a “third-world” or “fourth-world nation,” says that it “stinks,” and disparaged Somalis who come to the U.S., saying “we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.”

His most xenophobic consigliere also claims Somalia is responsible for violence that has caused people to flee the country. “The entire Somali refugee program is predicated on a lie,” wrote Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, late last year. “Destroying your own country does not give you the right to become a citizen in ours.” But this faux history disregards America’s decadeslong role in fomenting violence in Somalia and destabilizing the country.

A casualty of the Cold War geopolitics that led to widespread conflict, political repression, and millions of deaths across the developing world, Somalia has experienced persistent political instability and strife since the late 1960s. In recent decades, the country has suffered civil war, famine, droughts, a longtime al-Shabab insurgency, and persistent humanitarian crises.

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Over the last quarter century, the U.S. has intensified conflict in Somalia through direct attacks; training, funding, and running proxy forces; and funneling in weapons and other military assistance to one side of a civil war. As early as 2007, the Pentagon was aware that there were fundamental flaws with U.S. military operations in the Horn of Africa, and Somalia devolved into another forever war stalemate. This has continued, despite the record number of airstrikes in Somalia under Trump.

Before Trump took office, in 2016, Islamist militants in Somalia killed 4,281 people, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution. By August, this year’s total hit 6,731 deaths, a 57 percent increase. An analysis by the Costs of War project at Brown University found that instead of eliminating militant groups, the U.S. counterterrorism campaign in Somalia was “ensuring that the conflict continues in perpetuity.” An AFRICOM spokesperson said the command’s “operational focus remains on working with partners to degrade terrorist organizations to create the space required for Somali-led governance and stability.” But Trump claims Somalia has no government, no military, and is “not even a country.”

The Intercept interviewed people displaced by the forever war in a camp on the outskirts of Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu, in 2023. “We had to leave because of the drought and the conflict,” a mother of seven told this reporter. She was one of more than a dozen women from the Lower Shabelle region of southwest Somalia who spoke to The Intercept after fleeing the front lines of an offensive by the U.S.-backed Somali government against al-Shabab. Since Trump first took office, the number of Somalis forced from their homes has almost doubled from 2.4 million to 4.4 million.

“I don’t think most Americans realize that the presence of Somalis in the U.S. has a lot to do with U.S. wars in Somalia. U.S. military intervention made a bad situation worse. This led to a surge of refugees and asylum-seekers to the U.S.,” said Schmidt. “They weren’t coming because they wanted a better job. It’s because they feared for their lives and their children’s lives.”

During Trump’s first term, his administration acknowledged “the ongoing armed conflict” as a reason to extend temporary protected status — which grants legal status, work authorization, and protection from deportation — to Somalis in the U.S., noting the security situation was “fragile and volatile, with ongoing armed conflict among government forces, clan militias, African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) troops, and al-Shabaab.”

Bringing the War Home

Despite the increase in violence, according to Pentagon statistics, the administration terminated Somalia’s TPS designation earlier this year. More than 1,000 Somali asylum-seekers have been ordered deported since February; more than half the deportation orders involve Somalis living in Minnesota, a nearly tenfold increase from 2025, according to a Minnesota Star Tribune investigation.

About 84,000 of the 260,000 people of Somali descent in the U.S. live in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area, according to the Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey. The overwhelming majority are American citizens. Almost 58 percent were born in the U.S. and 87 percent of foreign-born Somalis are naturalized citizens.

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The administration targeted that Somali community during a violent immigration crackdown in and around Minneapolis known as “Operation Metro Surge” during late 2025 and early 2026. “I don’t want them in our country,” Trump said in December 2025. The next month, he said: “Every one of them should be forced to leave this country, including Ilhan Omar.”

During Metro Surge, federal agents shot and killed protesters Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti. They, like Omar and hundreds of drone strike victims in Somalia, were labeled as terrorists by the administration without providing evidence.

During Trump’s second term, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have also arrested hundreds of Somali people, with reports of assault and mistreatment at the hands of federal agents.

Trump recently seemed to call for vigilante violence and threatened to back it with federal force. “The once Great State of Minnesota is being taken over by Somali Immigrants,” Trump posted on Truth Social earlier this month. “The Somalians should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing. They view you as weak and stupid people. Fight back Minnesota, fight back! If you need, the Federal Government will come to your rescue.” The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Hussein, of CAIR-MN, said Trump’s rhetoric was endangering the Somali community. “Every few weeks, he’s literally going on a tirade. And I don’t think he’s ever spoken about other people the same way. He literally put out the message saying, ‘go fight them. I’ll come and help’ on social media,” he told The Intercept. “We’ve seen bullying. We’ve dealt with harassment. We’ve have some assaults.”

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Trump has routinely demonized Somalis by tying the broader community to a high-profile fraud case: the alleged theft of $250 million from a pandemic-era program that provided food for children. The former leader of Feeding Our Future, the nonprofit at the center of the case, is white, although most of the defendants in the related cases are of Somali descent. “The Somalians, they’re crooked as hell,” Trump ranted at a Cabinet meeting in May, with the administration offering escalating and unverified claims, including reference to a “$19 billion Somali fraud scandal.” 

The Trump administration’s effort to denaturalize and deport Omar is part of a broader push to strip naturalized Americans of their citizenship, with those of Somali descent specifically singled out. “I would do it in a heartbeat if they were dishonest,” Trump said in an Oval Office interview earlier this year. “I think that many of the people that came in from Somalia, they hate our country.”

Trump’s border czar Tom Homan said on Saturday that he had been “told they have a strong case” against Omar. “Of course, if you lie during the naturalization process, there is a process to denaturalize somebody. We’ve done it before,” he told Fox News. The rarely used denaturalization statute has been most famously employed to strip citizenship from Nazi war criminals, like John Demjanjuk, a former death camp guard and retired U.S. autoworker convicted on 28,060 counts of being an accessory to murder.

Mohamed, who in 2022 became the first Somali woman elected to the Minnesota Senate, called out Trump’s push to expel Omar as a grave threat to the country. “If the president can threaten to denaturalize and deport a member of Congress, no one is safe,” she told The Intercept. “This is a test of our democracy, and even Republicans should be speaking out about it. If we don’t defend the rights of Ilhan Omar, Somali-Americans, immigrants, and Trump’s political targets, we lose everything.”

The post Trump’s Obsession With Somalia Isn’t Just Racist. It’s Been Lethal. appeared first on The Intercept.

On Monday, Senatobia residents got their answer: Officials plan to do nothing. “In this incident, the Attorney General’s Office found the use of force was justified,” Republican Mississippi AG Lynn Fitch announced in a three-sentence news release posted on her official website.

The announcement was met with anguish and outrage from people inside and outside the state. The Mississippi Legislative Black Caucus demanded more information. “Kohen Wiley was a baby,” said state Rep. Kabir Karriem, who chairs the MLBC. “He posed no threat. He deserved protection, and he deserved a future. His family is owed more than a conclusion. … Announcing that a review is complete does not fulfill the responsibility to explain how a police encounter ended with a baby dead.”

The attorney general’s decision followed a probe into the case by the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, which was “responsible for conducting a thorough and impartial investigation,” as Mississippi Department of Public Safety Press Secretary Alex Gibert wrote to The Intercept on Tuesday. The email said that the probe “remains open and active.” But in a subsequent phone call, Gibert said that the investigation “involving the officer is closed.”

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Gibert reiterated what the agency has previously said: that body camera footage and other investigative materials will be made available through public records requests. But she added that nothing will be released until after officials meet with Kohen’s family. “We are meeting with the family later this week,” she said.

As recently as Monday, however, the family maintained they had received no communication from the state. Kohen’s grandmother, Veronica Roberson, told Mississippi Today that she found out about the attorney general’s decision on Facebook and that no one had reached out. The outlet also reported last month that, although the investigation was complete and on the attorney general’s desk as of mid-September, no one had interviewed Kohen’s mother, Vel’lesiya Wiley, who was holding her child in her lap when he was shot dead by police. This called into question whether the investigation is as “thorough” as authorities have claimed. Asked by The Intercept whether the MBI investigation sought to interview Wiley, Gibert said she could not comment.

The man who killed Baby Kohen, as the child is now known, was identified by the press as Senatobia Police Sgt. Hunter Foster, who fired his gun into the car where Wiley was riding in the passenger’s seat on June 14. The exact circumstances that led to the shooting remain murky. Police said that officers responded to a shoplifting call at the Walmart; a two-page incident log released to The Intercept via a public records request contained no information about the shooting but noted that the items allegedly stolen were baby clothes and a pack of Pampers.

In a video posted on social media shortly after her child was killed, Wiley said she got into the passenger’s seat of the Ford Fusion after the driver, Latoya Ferrell, was stopped on her way out of the store. Police accused the women of trying to flee; according to Wiley, when she saw officers approach with guns drawn, she said, “I raised my baby up” to warn that he was in the car. Then the police shot him. Ferrell was also struck and was hospitalized, but survived.

The Senatobia Police Department immediately claimed that the car drove toward police, almost hitting them — an account swiftly echoed by the Mississippi Department of Public Safety. But to date, officials have released no evidence to support this account. Civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who took the family’s case, hired an outside pathologist to do an external examination of the child and to review visual evidence. The medical examiner concluded, based on the appearance of the injuries and path of the fatal bullet, that the officer shot the baby from the side of the car, undermining the police’s version of events.

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The announcement by the attorney general has renewed long-standing calls for video to be released. In a press conference held earlier this month, local activist Patrick Lumumba of the Senatobia Committee for Accountability and Transparency accused the state of tailoring its investigation to support a lie — that Wiley and Ferrell deliberately sought to strike Foster with the car.

“If video footage would prove that, they would have released it the next day,” he said.

The killing of Kohen Wiley drew national attention to Senatobia, a small city just south of Memphis, Tennessee. City leaders mostly refused to address the killing, save for a brief, scripted video released by Senatobia Mayor Greg Graves a few days after the shooting. By the time Kohen’s family laid him to rest in late June, the police narrative had prompted many inside and outside Senatobia to blame Kohen’s mother for his death, with rumors suggesting that, rather than charge the police officer, authorities would charge the mother and driver.

The child’s death followed years of warnings by Black residents over the police’s treatment of adults and children alike. Among the string of high-profile incidents was the jailing of a 10-year-old boy for public urination, as well as the violent arrest of two sisters, 13 and 14, outside a public housing complex. According to the girls and their mother, then-police chief Richard Chandler personally ordered one of the girls to “get your Black ass out of the road” before forcing her to the ground. And on Mother’s Day 2025 — in the same Walmart parking lot where Kohen Wiley would be shot dead — a female officer forced a woman out of her car in front of her young children for sitting in a handicapped parking space.

In the summer of 2025, the Senatobia Board of Aldermen dismissed Chandler, replacing him with interim police chief Harold Vanderford, a move aimed at restoring trust, as one alderman put it. But the killing of Kohen Wiley revealed that, in reality, nothing had changed.

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Residents of Senatobia, including one former law enforcement officer, told The Intercept that the institutional culture brought by Chandler remained entrenched, with Senatobia officers showing disdain and disregard for the community. City records also showed that the chief had pushed the city to adopt new ordinances that would bring in revenue for the police department, while expanding punishment for misdemeanors like loitering.

At several board of alderman meetings over the summer, Lumumba and other activists reminded city leaders that they’d warned officials about the danger posed to Black residents by Senatobia police. At the same time, Mississippi Today revealed evidence that Foster had a history of racist remarks. Just days before he shot Kohen Wiley, Foster was accused of making racist comments to a Black colleague, who later left the police department. Foster is still on the force, on paid leave.

Then, in late August, Mississippi Today exposed racist text messages sent by Vanderford himself. The text messages dated back to the summer of 2025 and contained more than a dozen uses of the N-word. City leadership initially tried to sweep the scandal under the rug: Vanderford claimed that the messages were created by AI and, after a closed-door meeting, the mayor and members of Senatobia’s board of aldermen announced that Vanderford would stay on. But individual aldermen pushed back publicly. On September 1, Vanderford tried to resign, only for the board to announce that they had voted to fire him. Vanderford was replaced by a Black woman, Senatobia Police Lieutenant Angelica Maze.

In a statement accepting the appointment as interim chief on September 5, Maze did what the police department had previously failed to do: express “heartfelt condolences to Kohen Wiley’s family and to everyone in the community who has been affected by this tragic loss.”

In another statement on Monday, after the attorney general announced the use of force was justified, Maze acknowledged that the community “may have questions, concerns, and strong emotions, and we respect everyone’s right to express their views peacefully.”

With the body camera footage likely to be released within the next several days, a new round of waiting begins in Senatobia. In the meantime, the Senatobia Committee for Accountability and Transparency released a statement on social media.

“This was never just a news story for us. It was personal – many of us are residents of Senatobia and parents of vulnerable children. … We are also human beings who need time to grieve, reflect, and process everything that has transpired.”

The post Kohen Wiley’s Family Says Investigators Didn’t Contact Them Before Concluding Cops Did No Wrong appeared first on The Intercept.