In the span of a week, prosecutors failed to bring convictions in two high-profile cases in Los Angeles federal court. In the first, a jury acquitted Bobby Nuñez, a tow-truck driver who hooked an ICE vehicle and was charged with stealing government property. In the second, a judge dismissed the case against Carlitos Ricardo Parias, a TikToker who was facing assault and property damage charges after a confrontation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, due to concerns that officials had violated his civil rights. (In the October 21 confrontation, an ICE agent shot him.)

“These arrests are a form of retaliation by the government,” said Matthew Borden, an attorney representing protesters, journalists, and legal observers in a lawsuit against Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem stemming from protests in Southern California over the past year. “When you have a real judge and a real jury looking at the evidence, it just falls apart.”

The two cases come on the heels of a spate of failed federal charges prosecutors filed against protesters in Chicago, including one in which Border Patrol agents shot Miramar Martinez during a roadside confrontation in October and later charged her with assault. In November, a protester in Washington D.C. was acquitted after a two-day trial stemming from on assault charges he faced for throwing a sandwich at a border patrol agent.

“They’re moving at a pace that they’re not used to, and they’re not doing the legwork up front,” said Christopher Parente, a former federal prosecutor in Chicago representing Martinez, whose case was dismissed last month.

Federal court is typically not a friendly place for defendants. U.S. Attorneys are known for being choosy about the cases they bring, so cases that make it to a grand jury for indictment are often much more thoroughly vetted than those that might be brought before a state court. And faced with stiff penalties if convicted at trial, the vast majority of defendants opt for a plea deal.

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In the year leading up to September 30, according to numbers published by the federal judiciary September 30, 91 percent of cases— 75,151 out of 82,042 in total — ended with a guilty plea, and less than two percent ended in a guilty verdict at trial. In the same period, just over six percent of cases ended without a conviction, including 5,336 dismissals and 192 acquittals at trial.

“Usually, federal cases are built after long investigations, and then you indict,” Parente told The Intercept. “And this is kind of the opposite: It’s just very quick decisions that are being made on the word of your Border Patrol agents. And if they’re not credible — which in this case they weren’t — that’s going to cause huge problems.”

The Trump administration appears to have upended that practice as it struggles to control the narrative surrounding its unpopular immigration crackdown. In higher-profile confrontations between protesters and federal agents amid aggressive immigration enforcement actions in blue cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington D.C., federal officials have called defendants like Parias and Martinez “domestic terrorists” while seeking lesser charges.

Time and again, their cases have fallen apart.

In Chicago, on November 3, a judge dismissed charges against Cole Sheridan, a protester accused of attacking Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino after new video evidence undercut the government’s claims.

Days later, prosecutors asked a judge to dismiss their case against Martinez and her co-defendant, Anthony Ruiz, following the emergence of damning text messages by the agent who shot Martinez and other facts that might have damaged the state’s case, Parente said.

That same day, in Washington D.C., a jury acquitted Sean Dunn, the man accused of throwing a sandwich at a Border Patrol agent, following a farcical two-day trial in which the agent testified about feeling the impact through his tactical vest and smelling “the onions and mustard” on his clothes.

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The latest cases of Nuñez and Parias in Los Angeles add to the pattern.

In a scathing 28-page decision filed Saturday, Judge Fernando Manzano Olguin blasted the government for making it virtually impossible for his lawyers to meet with him at Adelanto, the privately run ICE facility where Parias was held after being released on bail from pre-trial custody.

“Here, defendant’s detention in Adelanto has effectively denied him access to his counsel for nearly the entire month preceding trial,” Olguin wrote, referring to the detention center at which Parias was held on an ICE detainer. “Mr. Parias is not ‘free’ to communicate with his attorneys by telephone.”

Olguin further ripped prosecutors for their belated production of evidence before affirming the defense team’s request for the charges to be thrown out with prejudice, thus barring the prosecution from refiling the charges.

Overall numbers for federal arrests of anti-ICE protesters were not immediately available, but the number of high-profile dismissals and acquittals of protesters in recent weeks stands in stark contrast to the usual win rate. In an email to The Intercept, a DOJ spokesperson laid the blame at the foot of “activist liberal judges,” and said agents and prosecutors are making quick decisions in the heat of the moment.

“The Department of Justice will continue to seek the most serious available charges against any individual who puts federal agents in harm’s way,” the spokeswoman wrote.

If the brass at the Department of Justice are feeling the heat, they won’t admit it. A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Los Angeles took a similar tack in response to questions regarding the dismissal of the charges against Parias.

“We strongly disagree with the court’s version of the facts as well as its legal conclusions. We are reviewing the court’s decision and we will determine our options for an appeal,” the spokesperson said in an email.

The acquittal of Nuñez, meanwhile, drew the ire of Stephen Miller, the anti-immigration zealot who is seen as the driving force behind the Trump Administration’s hardline policies.

“Another example of jury nullification in a blue city,” Miller wrote on X, referring to the practice of jurors intentionally tanking a criminal case regardless of the evidence. “The justice system depends on a jury of peers with a shared system of interests and values. Mass migration tribalizes the entire system.”

A spokesperson for the L.A. federal prosecutor’s office declined to comment on allegations of jury nullification in the tow-truck case, referring The Intercept to a post on X in which Bill Essayli, the first assistant U.S. attorney for the Central District of California appeared to suggest that the true goal of the charges against Nuñez was to keep him off the street amid ongoing immigration enforcement.

“The jury may have acquitted him, but guess what Bobby wasn’t doing the last few months while awaiting trial: obstructing our ICE agents,” Essayli wrote on December 22. “This defendant’s efforts were in vain, as our immigration enforcement operations were successful that day and every day since.”

In the long term, however, Parente warned that the result of such run-and-gun tactics by federal authorities could have ramifications well beyond the failure of a handful of cases.

“This could have a generational impact on the credibility of law enforcement,” Parente said. “They’re creating a culture of distrust.”

The post The Feds Keep Prosecuting Protesters Against ICE — and Losing appeared first on The Intercept.

The December 24 drone strike hit a dock that U.S. officials believe was used by members of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang. No people were on the dock at the time of the attack and no one was killed, according to the official. The details of the strike, which were first reported by CNN, offer a clearer picture of an attack first disclosed by President Donald Trump in a series of vague statements over several days.

“Now we’re going after the land,” Trump said during a Christmas Eve phone call to troops aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford, which is deployed to the Caribbean Sea as part of the campaign against Maduro. “They have a big plant or a big facility where the ships come from,” Trump then told John Catsimatidis, a billionaire and Trump donor who owns New York’s WABC radio station, on Friday. “Two nights ago, we knocked that out. We hit them very hard.”

On Monday, Trump provided more detail, explaining that the United States had “hit” an “implementation area” in Venezuela. “There was a major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs,” Trump told reporters at his residence in Mar-a-Lago, Florida. “That’s where they implement, and that is no longer around.”

Trump has publicly acknowledged he authorized CIA operations in Venezuela. Asked if the CIA had carried out the Christmas Eve attack, Trump said: “I don’t want to say that.”

The government official, who spoke with The Intercept on the condition of anonymity to discuss classified information, said they had been briefed on the CIA’s role in the attack.

A spokesperson writing from a CIA email and identified only as Ryan declined to comment on the Christmas Eve strike in an email to The Intercept.

“Days after it took place, the U.S. public is finally learning about a CIA airstrike on foreign soil for which there is no legal justification or congressional authorization. This is the lawless Trump administration in action,” Win Without War policy director Sam Ratner told The Intercept. “The only way forward is for Congress to stop Trump’s illegal strikes and hold those in the administration who have so flagrantly broken the law to account.”

The CIA regularly conducted drone strikes during the early years of the war on terror, beginning in Yemen in 2002 and in Pakistan in 2004. During the Obama administration, the U.S. military largely took over such attacks, and since then, the armed forces have conducted the overwhelming majority of drone strikes. Heavily armed MQ-9 Reaper drones have recently been spotted in the region as part of a ramp-up of U.S. forces.

The CIA also has a long tradition of fanning violence, fomenting regime change, and conducting acts of sabotage in Latin America. A 2023 analysis of the effects of CIA-sponsored regime change in five Latin American countries found the interventions caused “large declines in democracy scores, rule of law, freedom of speech, and civil liberties.”

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The United States has been attacking boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific since September, killing at least 107 civilians in 30 attacks. Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress, from both parties, have said the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.

The Intercept was the first outlet to report that the U.S. military killed survivors of the September 2 boat attack in a follow-up strike. That attack, Trump wrote at the time, killed “Tren de Aragua Narcoterrorists.” Most boat attacks since have targeted members or affiliates of unspecified “designated terrorist organizations,” but the CIA dock attack specifically aimed to weaken the Venezuelan gang, according to the U.S. official.

The Trump administration has made outlandish claims about Tren de Aragua throughout 2025. Earlier this year, the administration claimed the gang had invaded the United States, which it cited as justification to use the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to fast-track deportation of people the government says belong to the gang. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals eventually blocked the government from using the wartime law. “We conclude that the findings do not support that an invasion or a predatory incursion has occurred,” wrote Judge Leslie Southwick.

In September, Trump claimed that U.S. troops engaged in combat with members of Tren de Aragua on the streets of Washington, D.C., during the summer or early fall — an apparent fiction that the White House press office refuses to address.

While the Trump administration claims that Tren de Aragua is acting as “a de facto arm of” Maduro’s government, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence determined earlier this year that the “Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States.”

The U.S. also maintains that Tren de Aragua is both engaging in irregular warfare against and in a non-international armed conflict with the United States. These are, however, mutually exclusive designations which cannot occur simultaneously.

The Trump administration also claims that another criminal organization, Cártel de los Soles, is “headed by Nicolás Maduro and other high-ranking Venezuelan individuals,” despite little evidence that such a group exists. Maduro denies that he heads a cartel.

The Trump administration’s current campaign against Maduro is an extension of long-running efforts to topple the Venezuelan president which failed during Trump’s first term. Maduro and close allies were indicted in a New York federal court in 2020 on federal charges of narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine. Earlier this year, the U.S. doubled its reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest to $50 million.

Trump told Politico this month that Maduro’s “days are numbered.” When asked if he might order an invasion of Venezuela, Trump replied, “I wouldn’t say that one way or the other.”

Experts say that regime change in Venezuela would be complex and problematic. A 2023 study by the RAND Corporation warned that “overt military intervention in Venezuela is likely to become messy very quickly and is likely to become protracted.”

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The U.S. intervened to oust governments in Latin America a total of at least 41 times — about once every 28 months from 1898 to 1994 — including 17 cases of direct intervention by the U.S. armed forces, intelligence agencies, or locals employed by U.S. government agencies, according to ReVista, the Harvard Review of Latin America. Washington attempted at least 18 covert regime changes in the region during the Cold War alone, Foreign Affairs noted earlier this year, which included deposing nine governments that fell to military rulers in the 1960s, about one every 13 months.

In 1954, the U.S. helped overthrow Guatemala’s democratically elected government, ushering in a military junta that jailed political opponents, igniting an almost two-decade long civil war that killed hundreds of thousands of people. In 1973, a U.S.-backed coup in Chile, led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, ousted and led to the death of Salvador Allende, that country’s democratically elected president. A brutal, 17-year dictatorship marked by state torture, enforced disappearances, and killing followed, leaving a toll of more than 40,000 victims. In 1961, the U.S. also backed the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and fomented a coup in the Dominican Republic, which sparked years of unrest and U.S. election meddling. This, in turn, led to a 1965 invasion of the island nation by U.S. Marines. The U.S. also supported coups in Brazil in 1964, Bolivia in 1971, and funded the Contra rebels in Nicaragua throughout the 1980s. None of these interventions produced a stable, pro-American democracy and often, instead, installed authoritarian regimes that set off cycles of violence.

A 2025 study of all U.S.-led coups d’état and regime change operations from 1893 to 2011 found that that “while short-term strategic objectives were occasionally achieved, the majority of interventions resulted in regional instability, anti-American sentiment, and failed democratic transitions.” Earlier investigations have shown that foreign regime change schemes either fail to reduce or actually increase the likelihood of military disputes between interveners and targets; result in more human rights violations and declines in democracy; lead to a greater likelihood of civil war; and increase the chances of igniting an international armed conflict.

Even regime-change schemes that appeared successful at the time often sets off long-term blowback. The 1953 ouster of Iran’s Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh fueled anti-American sentiment that contributed to the 1979 revolution and set in motion decades of turmoil and conflict. America’s “mission accomplished” moment, just after the 2003 invasion of Iraq to remove autocrat Saddam Hussein from power devolved into a endless spiral of violence and suffering. That conflict — which eventually spilled into neighboring Syria — has killed more than half a million people directly, and three or four times that number due to indirect causes such as displacement, a lack of potable water, health care, and preventable diseases, according to calculations by Brown University’s Costs of War Project. The costs to U.S. taxpayers are expected to exceed $2.89 trillion by 2050.

The post CIA Was Behind Venezuela Drone Strike, Source Says appeared first on The Intercept.

The American Israel Public Affairs Committee waged a proud and public campaign to assert its dominance last cycle — sinking more than $100 million into the 2024 elections to oust critics of Israel from Congress. AIPAC spent more on elections that cycle than any other individual single-issue interest group; celebrated its super PAC, United Democracy Project, as “one of the largest bipartisan super PACs in America”; and took credit for endorsing 361 pro-Israel candidates who prevailed in hundreds of races.

That success met with public disgust with Israel’s genocide in Gaza and drove a massive backlash, fueling a growing movement to eradicate AIPAC’s influence and propel insurgent candidates to Congress on pledges to refuse the pro-Israel lobby’s support. Now, as the 2026 midterms approach, AIPAC and its preferred candidates have pulled back from the aggressive electoral strategy they pursued last time.

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None of this is to say that AIPAC is planning to let its influence slip away. While the group has not yet publicly endorsed any new candidates this cycle, there’s still time, and it’s working behind closed doors to boost its preferred candidates’ campaigns. Earlier this month, for example, AIPAC’s board president held a fundraiser for an Illinois House candidate who has said publicly that she isn’t seeking the group’s endorsement. In another district in the same state, AIPAC donors rallied around a real estate mogul’s congressional campaign.

The moves represent the latest in a series of strategic adaptations AIPAC has made in recent years while navigating a shifting political landscape on issues related to Israel.

“They are fully aware their brand is in the toilet,” said former Rep. Marie Newman, D-Ill., whom pro-Israel donors helped oust in 2022.

By this time last cycle, AIPAC had already endorsed most of its slate. But with a growing field of candidates running on rejecting AIPAC money and attacking those who take it, the group is returning to a quieter strategy that it used for years to build its influence.

“AIPAC is thought of toxically across the nation,” Newman said. “On doors, when you knock and go to canvasses and go to speaking engagements here, standard rank-and-file centrist Dems are like, ‘No, no more AIPAC and no more corporate PACs.’”

Merely rejecting AIPAC money will not be enough to serve as the new standard for progressive candidates for long, said Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace.

Swearing off the group’s cash “doesn’t mean anything,” on its own, Friedman said. “What is going to matter is where candidates, or incumbents who are trying to return to office, where they stand on issues. As it becomes clear that AIPAC is going to work around the ‘people don’t want to take our money’ and find other ways to support candidates, it’s really going to be a question of, where do people stand on what are in some ways litmus-test issues for AIPAC?”

California Gov. Gavin Newsom appears to have picked up on the anti-AIPAC trend. During a press tour as rumors swirl about a potential run for president, Newsom said earlier this month that he won’t take money from the group. In October, Newsom told the podcast Higher Learning, “I haven’t thought about AIPAC in — it’s interesting, you’re like the first to bring up AIPAC in years.”

Despite Newsom’s statements, his record on Israel policy leaves questions about how far he’d go to ally himself with the Palestinian cause. He’s celebrated accolades from far-right pro-Israel groups like the Anti-Defamation League, and his last two public statements on anniversaries of the October 7 attacks did not mention Palestinians killed. Newsom did not call for a ceasefire in Gaza until March 2024, after both President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris did so.

While some pro-Palestine advocates applauded Newsom for vetoing an online hate speech bill they said would have targeted politically protected speech, Newsom did not cite those concerns as part of his decision. California’s powerful tech industry had also hoped he would reject the bill.

Newsom is also facing criticism over a controversial bill he signed into law in October to address antisemitism in California schools, which a coalition of teachers associations, civil rights organizations, and interfaith groups argue would censor legitimate criticism of Israel and pro-Palestine voices. Opponents are suing to stop the law from going into effect on January 1.

Anticipating criticism, other candidates have kept their policy stances regarding Israel quiet. George Hornedo, who’s challenging Democratic Rep. André Carson in Indiana, had a secret pro-Israel policy page on his campaign website this summer that’s since been taken down. Hornedo has not said publicly whether or not he’ll take AIPAC money, but he told The Intercept that his campaign “rejects corporate PAC money.”

“I’m not coordinating with, nor am I relying on or seeking, financial intervention from national organizations in this race. This campaign is focused on building support directly here in Indianapolis, not inviting national groups to shape or define the race,” Hornedo said in a statement. “On Gaza, my position is straightforward. Gaza should be flooded with humanitarian aid and the U.S. should not provide offensive weapons to any country unless their use complies with international humanitarian law.”

“We’re seeing an uptick in Democrats who forswear AIPAC money because it’s become an electoral liability,” said Hamid Bendaas, communications director for the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project. “But it’s unclear if they will keep that standard by rejecting support from other organizations — chiefly but not limited to Democratic Majority for Israel — who have similar policy agendas to AIPAC, especially regarding more weapons to Israel.”

In its current approach, AIPAC has returned to a strategy in previous races when it funneled money to candidates through other vehicles to keep its name — and the criticism it’s increasingly drawing — out of the race. AIPAC donors have supported its picks by giving to other dark-money groups that outwardly have nothing to do with Israel policy, like the political action committee 314 Action, which helps elects scientists and last cycle flooded the campaign of Rep. Maxine Dexter, D-Ore. — whom AIPAC never formally endorsed.

“We know AIPAC knows their brand is toxic,” Newman said. “So much so, they are taking their brand out of campaigns and funneling their money through other PACs and donors such as 314 science, DMFI, several small PACs, and of course individual AIPAC members who give as a donor because the candidates can say they received money from donors, not AIPAC, to avoid association with AIPAC.”

AIPAC isn’t necessarily backing off under fire — it’s returning to the way it operated before it started spending directly on elections in the 2022 cycle.

Prior to launching its super PAC and regular affiliated PAC, AIPAC was active in politics for more than half a century, working quietly in the halls of Congress and around Washington, D.C., to establish one of the most successful lobbying apparatuses in the country. First launched as a machine to counter negative press coverage of Israel, AIPAC quickly expanded its focus to influencing U.S. policy toward Israel. It positioned itself as a key source of information on Middle East issues for members of Congress and built out regional offices across the country, energizing a network of local pro-Israel activists. AIPAC has routinely lobbied presidents and congressional offices, funded trips to Israel for members of Congress and hosted members to address its annual policy conference, extending its reach into the halls of power without touching electoral politics.

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The approach was hugely successful, allowing AIPAC to maintain the bipartisan pro-Israel consensus on the hill for decades. The group had long said it would never launch a PAC — but that changed as a growing number of candidates began running on criticizing unconditional U.S. military support for Israel in the late 2010s. AIPAC then began spending on campaigns, starting with funding ads from Democratic Majority for Israel, attacking Bernie Sanders in Nevada during his 2020 presidential primary campaign.

In 2021, the group launched AIPAC PAC, which allowed it to wade into congressional races; shortly after, it officially launched its super PAC, United Democracy Project. The group drew scrutiny in the 2022 cycle for endorsing 37 Republicans who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

“Clearly, AIPAC knows exactly how toxic they are to Democratic Party voters who see them as a right-wing extremist lobby, championing a right-wing agenda, and funded by right-wing megadonors trying to buy our elections,” said Justice Democrats spokesperson Usamah Andrabi. “Voters are not interested in politicians who say one thing to their constituents and another to billionaire Republican donors, but AIPAC excels at finding candidates eager to reject authenticity and embrace moral cowardice if it means a seat in Congress.”

The post AIPAC Is Retreating From Endorsements and Election Spending. It Won’t Give Up Its Influence. appeared first on The Intercept.

“They have a big plant or a big facility where the ships come from,” Trump told John Catsimatidis, a billionaire and Trump donor who owns New York’s WABC radio station, on Friday, seeming to reference a facility involved in the drug trade or boat building. “Two nights ago, we knocked that out. We hit them very hard.”

Trump initially did not provide further details about the supposed attack on the “big plant,” which if true would be the first known U.S. attack on Venezuelan soil.

On Monday, Trump said that the United States had “hit” an “implementation area” in Venezuela. “There was a major explosion in the dock area where they load the boats up with drugs,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago, Florida, residence. “That’s where they implement, and that is no longer around.”

It was not clear what target was hit nor which U.S. government agencies were involved. Asked if the CIA had carried out the attack, Trump said: “I don’t want to say that. I know exactly who it was but I don’t want to say who it was.”

Trump has publicly acknowledged he authorized CIA operations in Venezuela.

“We don’t have any guidance for you,” CIA spokesperson Lauren Camp told The Intercept.

During a Christmas Eve phone call to troops aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford, which is deployed to the Caribbean Sea as part of the campaign against Maduro, Trump seemed to reference the strike. “I’m tremendously grateful for the work that you’re doing to stop drug trafficking in our region,” he said. “Now we’re going after the land. The land is actually easier.”

One U.S. official who spoke with The Intercept on the condition of anonymity confirmed that the target was a “facility,” but would not disclose its location or if it was actually attacked by the U.S., much less destroyed. The official cast some doubt on Trump’s initial public statement. “That announcement was misleading,” said the official without providing any clarification.

There has been no public report of an attack from the Venezuelan government.

The Pentagon did not reply to repeated requests for comment on the strike. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt did not respond to a request for comment on the U.S. official’s contention that Trump’s claim was “misleading.”

If a strike did occur on December 24, it was the night before Trump attacked Nigeria. The president will have made war in Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, Yemen, and the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean in 2025, despite claiming to be a “peacemaker.”

The United States has been attacking boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific since September. U.S. forces have conducted almost 30 attacks that have killed more than 100 civilians.

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Experts in the laws of war and members of Congress say the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence. The summary executions are a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, in which law enforcement agencies arrested suspected drug smugglers.

During the summer, Trump signed a secret directive ordering the Pentagon to use military force against certain Latin American drug cartels. In August, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth signed an execute order, or EXORD, directing Special Operations forces to sink suspected drug smuggling boats, destroy their cargo, and kill their crews, according to government officials.

“Every time I knock out a boat, we save 25,000 American lives,” Trump claimed to Catsimatidis. The statement is untrue. Between May 2024 and April 2025, some 77,000 people died in the U.S. from drug overdoses. If Trump’s claim were accurate, the 30 attacks would have saved almost 10 times the number of lives lost to overdoses in the U.S. in a single year.

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles recently indicated that the boat strikes are specifically aimed at toppling Maduro. “He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle,” Wiles said.

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Upon entering office a second time, Trump renewed long-running efforts, which failed during his first term, to topple Maduro’s government. Maduro and several close allies were indicted in a New York federal court in 2020 on federal charges of narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine. Earlier this year, the U.S. doubled its reward for information leading to Maduro’s arrest to $50 million. (Meanwhile, Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, the right-wing former president of Honduras who had been convicted of drug trafficking.)

Trump told Politico that Maduro’s “days are numbered.” When asked if he might order an invasion of Venezuela, Trump replied, “I wouldn’t say that one way or the other.”

Since the summer, the Pentagon has built up a force of more than 15,000 troops in the Caribbean and the largest naval flotilla in the region since the Cold War. That contingent now includes 5,000 sailors aboard the Ford, the Navy’s newest and most powerful aircraft carrier, which has more than 75 attack, surveillance, and support aircraft.

Military contracting documents revealed by The Intercept show that the War Department has plans to feed a massive military presence in the Caribbean until almost to the end of Trump’s term in office — suggesting the recent influx of American troops to the region won’t end anytime soon.

In recent weeks, the War Department had specifically surged into the region air assets necessary for a sustained campaign of combat operations over hostile territory including F-35 fighters, EA-18G Growler electronic attack jets, KC-135 aerial refuelers, KC-46 tankers, HC-130J combat search and rescue planes, and HH-60W search and rescue helicopters.

“Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America. It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before,” Trump confusingly announced on his Truth Social platform earlier this month, without explaining how a naval armada can surround a country that is not an island. “I am ordering A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela.” The White House did not respond to a request for clarification.

The White House has ordered U.S. military forces to focus almost exclusively on enforcing a “quarantine” of Venezuelan oil for at least the next two months, a U.S. official told Reuters last week.

One former U.S. official with continued ties to the defense establishment speculated that the U.S. might be involved in a sabotage campaign in Venezuela, referencing past U.S. efforts in Latin America, specifically plans and operations to overthrow Fidel Castro before and after the CIA’s disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. He specifically mentioned the covert campaign of bombing Cuban sugar mills and burning cane fields, among other acts of sabotage.

The full extent of U.S. covert warfare in Cuba may never be known, but in the wake of the Bay of Pigs debacle, the Pentagon also began preparing top-secret plans. In the spring of 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff offered up a document titled “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba.” The top-secret memorandum describes U.S. plans to conduct false-flag operations to justify a U.S. invasion. These proposals included staging assassinations of Cubans living in the U.S.; developing a fake “Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area … and even in Washington”; a plot to “sink a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated)”; faking a Cuban air attack on a civilian jetliner filled with “college students”; and even staging a modern “Remember the Maine” incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters — and then blaming the incident on Cuban sabotage.

Update: December 29, 2025, 2:59 p.m. ET
This article was updated to include more recent comments from President Donald Trump, and a response from a CIA spokesperson.

The post Did Trump Just Confess to Attacking Venezuela? appeared first on The Intercept.

How many people will the Trump administration deport this year? Will Gaza suffer from mass famine? These are serious questions with lives at stake.

They’re also betting propositions that two buzzy startups will let you gamble on.

The 2018 legalization of sports betting gave rise to a host of apps making it ever easier to gamble on games. Kalshi and Polymarket offer that service, but also much more. They’ll take your bets, for instance, on the presidential and midterm elections, the next Israeli bombing campaign, or whether Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg will get divorced.

Tarek Mansour, the CEO of Kalshi, laid it out simply at a conference held by Citadel Securities in October. “The long-term vision,” Mansour said, “is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion.” It’s as dystopian as it sounds.

If you believe the hype, the promise of these companies isn’t in the money they take in as bookkeepers. They argue that the bets they collect offer a more accurate forecast of the future than traditional institutions. (In fact, they’ll tell you that you’re not betting at all but trading on futures contracts — a distinction that feels so tenuous it’s hard to justify with a full-throated explanation.)

This pitch has been especially enticing in the wake of the 2016 election, when polling missed the rise of Donald Trump, and its allure hasn’t faded as collective distrust of traditional institutions grows. But if the initial wave of social platforms — the Facebooks and Twitters of the world — fractured our sense of a shared reality, the predictive platforms are here to monetize the ruins.

Polymarket acknowledges the gravity of some of its more shocking propositions. It tells those who click on its more unsavory wagers: “The promise of prediction markets is to harness the wisdom of the crowd to create accurate, unbiased forecasts for the most important events to society. That ability is particularly invaluable in gut-wrenching times like today.” The app goes on say that “After discussing with those directly affected by the attacks, who had dozens of questions, we realized prediction markets could give them the answers they needed in ways TV news and 𝕏 could not.”

It might seem odd, then, that these very platforms have lately been signing deals to entrench themselves into mainstream news coverage. Earlier this month, Kalshi signed on as an exclusive partner to offer its betting wagers on CNN and CNBC. Polymarket signed a similar deal with Yahoo Finance last month. Time Magazine signed with a lesser known platform Galactic.

For publishers, prediction markets offer a salve for deteriorating trust in journalism. For betting markets, these partnerships could help legitimize an industry that was mostly illegal until a few months ago. The marriage of these two industries is perhaps best encapsulated by Time Magazine’s recent press release announcing its partnership with Galactic. Stuart Stott, CEO of Galactic, called the deal “a new normal for readers” that promises them “the opportunity to participate in where the future is going.” Time Magazine COO Mark Howard described the partnership as motivated by the company’s “ambition to continue to push the boundaries of traditional media to ensure our content and audience experience is compelling, accurate, and evolving.”

Set aside the extreme cynicism in the conceit that audiences need to bet on genocide in order to read about it — if accuracy and trust are a concern, these partnerships may end up doing the media more harm than good.

To understand why the prediction markets apps believe they’re a better forecaster of the future, one needs to understand their governing philosophy, the “wisdom of the crowd.” The theory goes: In a well-functioning market with a diverse group of participants, traders acting on different information and insights collectively arrive at the most accurate price — or, in this case, probability of an event happening. The market, in other words, will self-correct to the most accurate outcome.

Betting apps have at times delivered better accuracy than polling results. For example, while pollsters clocked last year’s presidential race as deadlocked in the days before the election, Polymarket gave Trump an edge at 58 percent.

But whether they are consistently better is a whole other story. Some initial analysis suggests that they might not be as accurate as these companies suggest. One study found that Kalshi’s political prediction markets beat chance 78 percent of the time during the final five weeks of the 2024 U.S. presidential campaign, compared with 67 percent accuracy on Polymarket. PredicIt — one of the older betting markets run by Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, that has more limits on how much money users can bet — came out on top at 93 percent. But even PredicIt got the 2016 election as wrong as the polls, and in the days preceding the last election suggested a slight edge for Kamala Harris that obviously didn’t materialize.

That same study found that when tracking the market for the same event, prediction markets often reacted in very different ways to the same information during the same time frame — something that wouldn’t happen if the markets were as efficient forecasters as its pushers suggest. “Markets are composed of humans, not omniscient rational forecasters,” the paper’s authors write.

One reason why Kalshi or Polymarket may struggle with accuracy hinges on who makes up the crowd. On November 6, 2024, in a rush of people collecting their post-election winnings, Kalshi saw a peak of around 400,000 users, and Polymarket counted about 100,000 less, according to a Fortune review; by June, their daily active user numbers had fallen over 90 percent to 27,000–32,000 and 5,000–10,000, respectively. While they don’t publish much information about their demographics, by some accounts their userbases tend to skew in the direction of crypto bros.

That can make these platforms just as inaccurate in edge cases, when they lack the requisite diversity to glean much wisdom about the real world. Consider the 2022 midterm elections: Up until election night, the major prediction markets “failed spectacularly” and “projected outcomes for key races that turned out to be completely wrong,” according to one expert analysis.

While polls are far from perfect, prediction markets are also more prone to manipulation than they’d have you believe. And this can give deep-pocketed political actors another vessel for information warfare.

Kalshi was even embroiled in a legal battle with federal regulators as recently as this summer for this very reason. In its brief, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission pointed toward a “spectacular manipulation” on Polymarket involving “a group of traders betting heavily on Vice President Harris.” “Unwitting participants may believe Kalshi’s contracts are less susceptible to manipulation or misinformation because they are on a regulated exchange, but this should heighten concern for the public interest, not allay it,” the CFTC continued.

One study found that trades intended to manipulate the market could have an impact as much as 60 days from the original trade. It also suggested the best way to game a prediction market was by making repeated bets of “varying sizes” on a single market to skew odds.

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According to the CFTC, when the agency brought up the possibility of this type of election interference, Kalshi argued the regulator could just use its enforcement authority against bad actors. But as the agency noted: “The CFTC cannot remediate damage to election integrity after the fact.” Despite these grave concerns, since Trump took office and has hired crypto insiders to oversee the CFTC, the agency has largely dropped lawsuits and investigations against Polymarket and Kalshi.

The major betting platforms have also aligned themselves with Trump’s inner orbit.

Both Polymarket and Kalshi count Donald Trump Jr. as an adviser. His venture capital firm has invested in Polymarket, whose founder Shayne Coplan has framed investigations against his company as politically motivated attacks by the outgoing Biden administration.

One doesn’t have to look far to see how the company’s positionality in the Trumpverse translated into what very well could be election interference. Shortly before election day in New York last month, Polymarket ran a questionable advertisement featuring an AI-generated Zohran Mamdani looking tearful with the headline: “BREAKING: Mamdani’s odds collapse in NYC Mayoral Election.” As this ad ran, however, Polymarket’s platform didn’t show Mamdani’s odds collapsing. Whether Polymarket intended to bait users into betting more, or to dissuade Mamdani voters ahead of Election Day, is unclear. What is clear is that for a platform partnering with a news organization, a commitment to veracity does not appear to be its first priority.

The first priority appears to be growing the number of customers. That’s likely why these betting apps are now trying to team up with major broadcasters and publications: Reporting shows that both Kalshi and Polymarket are losing bettors, which stands to hurt their bottom lines and make their predictions worse.

Whether deals between betting apps and news outlets will help either industry is an open question. But these partnerships may just end up worsening our crisis of trust in an already-fraught information environment.

The post These Apps Let You Bet on Deportations and Famine. Mainstream Media Is Eating It Up. appeared first on The Intercept.

The spring 2024 debate was over forcing the feds to get a warrant to search foreign communications for intelligence on Americans. Doing so would cost crucial time, Goldman said, citing his own tenure as a federal prosecutor.

“Based on that experience, I can say with confidence that requiring a warrant would render this program unusable and entirely worthless,” he said last year. “Even if it were possible, the time required to obtain a search warrant from a judge would frequently fail to meet the urgency posed by a terrorist or other national security threat.”

Goldman’s argument won the day.

Progressives had been rallying around the warrants provision but, under heavy pressure from the Biden administration, enough of them retracted their support and sided with Democrats like Goldman to doom the measure. It lost by a single vote.

With his election victory last November, Donald Trump would inherit the warrantless surveillance powers.

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The April 2024 vote still stings for civil liberties advocates, who thought they could count on progressives as they sought to build a bipartisan coalition with libertarian-minded Republicans. Now they are girding for another battle next April, when the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, is up for reauthorization.

The vote will happen in the middle of a primary season where many incumbents — including Goldman — are trying to burnish their progressive bona fides as they face challenges from the left. Already, some Democrats on a key committee are citing the Trump administration’s approach to privacy to explain their renewed support for a warrant provision.

Whether enough of them flip back could decide the future of one of the most controversial post-September 11 spying programs.

In a statement to The Intercept, Goldman did not commit to supporting a warrant requirement.

“Donald Trump’s blatant weaponization of the federal government makes accounting for potential abuses of power critically important,” Goldman said. “As we work through the FISA reauthorization process next year, I will be especially focused on those concerns, as I have been since Trump took office in January.”

Tie Goes to the Spy

The vote last year capped a monthslong period of intense lobbying pitting the Biden administration against privacy advocates.

Congress passed Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 2008 to give its legal blessing to a massive spying program the administration of George W. Bush had already launched without authorization.

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Under the law, the government was allowed to search through reams of surveillance conducted abroad for information on U.S. citizens and permanent residents. The Fourth Amendment did not apply, supporters of the law said, because those communications had been collected from wiretaps and hacks directed abroad by the cyber spies of the NSA.

Critics said that even surveillance directed abroad inevitably hoovers up the emails and text messages of Americans. The FBI, for example, conducted 200,000 “backdoor searches” of American communications in 2022 alone.

In a series of reauthorization battles, civil liberties advocates have squared off against administrations from both parties trying to force government agencies, including the FBI, to get a warrant before they rooted through foreign surveillance for information on Americans.

Advocates have won some procedural reforms but, on the biggest question of a warrant, they have fallen short every time. Last year, the House voted 212–212 on an amendment offered by a conservative Republican that would have added a warrant requirement. Under House rules, a tied vote fails.

The party breakdown showed how much surveillance scrambles typical partisan divides. Eighty-four Democrats and 128 Republicans voted for a warrant requirement, compared to 126 Democrats and 86 Republicans opposed.

Numerous Democrats flipped their vote at the last minute under heavy lobbying from the Biden administration, which took a traditional, centrist view of the need for expansive spying powers to ward off terrorists and other foreign foes.

“It was top-to-bottom — pretty much every single person in the Biden administration was lobbying pretty hard,” said Kia Hamadanchy, a senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. “There was a lot of fearmongering, which I don’t think was substantiated.”

Supporters of the Biden administration offered some cover to the lawmakers who switched their way by including modest, procedural reforms in the legislation.

The last-minute flippers included several members of the House Judiciary Committee, which traditionally has favored privacy protections more than members of the Intelligence Committee, who have overlapping jurisdiction over foreign surveillance.

It was hardly surprising that Democrats buckled under pressure from the Biden administration, but it was shortsighted, civil liberties advocates say.

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“In 2024, it was already clear that Donald Trump and the people around him might well return to power,” said Sean Vitka, executive director of the progressive group Demand Progress. “Some Democrats refused to install guardrails when they had the chance.”

Even worse from the perspective of civil liberties advocates, many Democrats voted to further expand the foreign spying law with a new provision that would allow the government to force “electronic communication service providers” — including, potentially, nonprofits, political campaigns, or news organizations — to help it spy.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., warned that that power will “inevitably be misused.”

House Judiciary Firms Up

With Trump in the White House, some of the Democrats who voted against a warrant provision seem to be warming up to the idea, according to their comments at a recent House Judiciary Committee hearing on FISA reform.

Several Democrats who advocates were counting on last time — including now-ranking member Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., who eventually voted against the warrant requirement — spoke in favor of passing further reforms next year.

Democrats at the hearing put the Section 702 program, named for the law that gives the surveillance power, in the larger context of the Trump administration’s erasure of privacy safeguards, including efforts to combine previously siloed Social Security, IRS, and student loan databases.

They also pointed out that, when it came to Section 702, Trump has gutted the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, and FBI Director Kash Patel has eliminated an office tasked with auditing the FBI’s use of the surveillance program.

Raskin said the results of a two-year “experiment” with modest FISA reforms have been “alarming.”

“For years, the leaders of this committee have warned of how executive branch surveillance powers could be abused by a president who didn’t care about protecting civil liberties, who used cutting-edge technology to spy on Americans, and who ignored basic principles of due process and constitutional freedom to achieve their own ends,” he said. “In 2025, we no longer have to wonder if we were right to worry.”

Rep. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., voted against a warrant requirement last year but spoke in broad favor of reforms at the hearing. His office did not comment on whether that includes a warrant requirement.

Moskowitz’s primary challenger Oliver Larkin, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, said in a statement that he supports forcing the government to get a warrant.

“Rep. Moskowitz has put civil society, political opponents, minority and undocumented communities, and journalists at risk of the Trump administration’s privacy abuses and political targeting of dissent,” Larkin said.

Another Judiciary Committee member who voted against a warrant requirement, Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., did not respond to a request for comment. His left-leaning primary challenger, Tennessee state Rep. Justin J. Pearson, said in a statement that he supports a warrant provision.

“Democrats should be opposed to warrantless government surveillance no matter which party the president represents,” he said. “It should not have taken Donald Trump’s second election for some members of our party to finally stand up for their constituents’ basic civil liberties.”

Will GOP Cave?

The problem for civil liberties advocates going into the April reauthorization is that they now face losing some of the Republicans who rallied to their side the last time.

“People tend to be more skeptical about executive authority when the president is a president from the different party,” Hamadanchy said.

They are also unclear on two key questions: Just how many Democrats will flip back, and where Trump will land on the issue.

Some Democrats seem to be holding firm on their opposition to a warrant requirement despite challenges from the left. During an April committee hearing, Goldman said the FISA debate “pales in comparison” to the privacy violations being committed under the auspices of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

Goldman, who is positioning himself as a progressive in his primary race, citing his support for the Green New Deal and Medicare for All, is facing a challenge from New York City Comptroller Brad Lander.

“Brad would vote to add a warrant requirement,” said a spokesperson for the Lander campaign. “The Trump administration’s abuse of power has highlighted the need for stronger 4th Amendment protections and now more than ever the House should take action to protect people’s privacy.”

Lander’s entry into New York’s 10th Congressional District race gives civil liberties advocates a vessel to challenge Goldman on the issue. Another Democrat who spoke on the House floor against the warrant requirement, Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., has not drawn a primary challenger yet.

Trump is a bigger enigma. In 2018, his first administration opposed a warrant requirement, but last year he briefly urged Republicans to “KILL FISA” — apparently because he confused the 702 surveillance program with another that was used to spy on an adviser to his 2016 presidential campaign.

In support of the current law, surveillance hawks will likely cite the findings of a recent report from the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General.

Based on internal oversight reports from the DOJ’s National Security Division, the inspector general said, “it appears that the FBI is no longer engaging in the widespread noncompliant querying of U.S. persons that was pervasive just a few years ago.”

The report came with a crucial caveat. The inspector general relied on the FBI’s audits rather than conducting its own reviews of agents’ searches. The April 2024 to April 2025 period the report covered also meant that it tracked only a few weeks of Patel’s tenure.

The post Dan Goldman Supported Warrantless Spying on Americans. Now His Primary Opponent Is Hitting Him for It. appeared first on The Intercept.

The review of Kelly’s comments has since blossomed into a full-scale inquiry. “Retired Captain Kelly is currently under investigation for serious allegations of misconduct,” a War Department spokesperson told me.

Kelly issued a statement after Hegseth’s office announced it was escalating its case. “It wasn’t enough for Donald Trump to say I should be hanged, which prompted death threats against me and my family. It wasn’t enough for Pete Hegseth to announce a sham investigation on social media. Now they are threatening everything I fought for and served for over 25 years in the U.S. Navy, all because I repeated something every service member is taught,” said Kelly. “It should send a shiver down the spine of every patriotic American that this President and Secretary of Defense would so corruptly abuse their power to come after me or anyone this way.”

That Hegseth is targeting a sitting senator is all but unheard of. But what most surprised me was his apparent willingness to recall a former member of the military for punishment. I was shocked because, for two decades, the Pentagon has failed to respond to questions about the potential recall of veterans accused of heinous illegality by Army investigators.

In the mid-2000s, I provided the Pentagon with the names of dozens of former service members implicated in crimes against civilians and prisoners during the Vietnam War: massacres, murders, assaults, and other atrocities. The Defense Department never recalled any to active duty. Years later, a defense official laughed when I asked if anyone even looked at the spreadsheet of names that I provided. In the wake of Hegseth’s threats against Kelly, I again asked his office if they want that list.

While working for the Los Angeles Times, I helped expose 320 atrocities that were substantiated by Army investigators, including seven mass killings from the 1960s and 1970s, in which at least 137 civilians died. This tally does not include the 1968 My Lai massacre during which U.S. troops slaughtered more than 500 Vietnamese civilians. The records chronicled 78 other attacks on noncombatants in which at least 57 were killed, 56 wounded, and 15 sexually assaulted; and 141 instances in which U.S. troops tortured civilian detainees or prisoners of war.

Murder, torture, rape, abuse, forced displacement, home burnings, specious arrests, and imprisonment without due process were a daily fact of life throughout the years of the American war in Vietnam. But the great majority of atrocities by U.S. troops never came to light — and almost never resulted in criminal investigations, much less courts-martial. These records — compiled in the early 1970s by a secret Pentagon task force known as the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group — represent some of the exceedingly rare instances that resulted in official inquiries.

Army criminal investigators determined that evidence against more than 200 soldiers accused of harming Vietnamese civilians or prisoners was strong enough to warrant charges, according to the records. These “founded” cases were referred to the soldiers’ superior officers for action. Ultimately, 57 of them were court-martialed, and just 23 were convicted.

Fourteen soldiers received prison sentences ranging from six months to 20 years, but most won significant reductions on appeal. The stiffest sentence went to a military intelligence interrogator convicted of committing indecent acts against a 13-year-old girl held in detention. He served seven months of a 20-year term, according to the files. Many substantiated cases were closed with a letter of reprimand, a fine, or, in more than half the cases, no action at all.

In the early 2000s, many veterans who had escaped justice were still alive, including members of Company B of the 1st Battalion, 35th Infantry, 4th Infantry Division. That unit committed a litany of atrocities, culminating in a massacre in a tiny hamlet in South Vietnam.

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On February 8, 1968, a medic, Jamie Henry, sat down to rest in a Vietnamese home, where he was joined by a radioman. On the radio, he heard 3rd Platoon leader Lt. Johnny Mack Carter report to Capt. Donald Reh that he had rounded up 19 civilians. Carter wanted to know what should be done with them. As Henry later told an army investigator: “The Captain asked him if he remembered the Op Order [Operation Order] that had come down from higher [command] that morning which was to kill anything that moves. The Captain repeated the order. He said that higher said to kill anything that moves.”

Hoping to intervene, Henry headed for Reh’s position. As he neared it, though, the young medic saw members of the unit drag a naked teenage girl out of a house and throw her into the throng of civilians, who had been gathered together in a group. Then, Henry said, four or five men around the civilians “opened fire and shot them. There was a lot of flesh and blood going around because the velocity of an M-16 at that close range does a lot of damage.”

Henry repeatedly reported the massacre, at peril to himself, and spent years attempting to expose the atrocities. Army investigators looked into the allegations for more than three years before closing the case and burying the files. They determined that evidence supported murder charges in five incidents against nine “subjects,” including Carter. Investigators concluded that there was not enough evidence to charge Reh with murder, because of conflicting accounts “as to the actual language” he used in giving the orders. But Reh could be charged with dereliction of duty for failing to investigate the killings, the report said. The military did not court-martial any members of the unit — either in the 1970s or the 2000s. Some are still alive today and could, theoretically, face some modicum of justice.

Hegseth has been on the hot seat since major media outlets picked up on The Intercept’s reporting of a double-tap strike that executed survivors of an attack on a supposed drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean in September. Military legal experts, lawmakers, and confidential sources within the government who spoke with The Intercept say Hegseth’s actions could result in the entire chain of command being investigated for a war crime or outright murder.

Hegseth said Kelly’s “conduct brings discredit upon the armed forces and will be addressed appropriately.” I asked Hegseth’s office if the crimes detailed in the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group’s files also brought “discredit upon the armed forces.” A spokesperson acknowledged that and other questions but offered no answers.

“Nick, we received your earlier message and haven’t forgotten about you,” she said last month. “Our response time is going to be delayed due to the Thanksgiving holiday weekend.” That response has, weeks later, still yet to arrive.

Hegseth has previously derided “academic rules of engagement which have been tying the hands of our warfighters for too long,” and, during President Donald Trump’s first term — before he became the Pentagon chief — successfully lobbied for pardons on behalf of soldiers convicted of crimes against noncombatants.

“This just shows their total distain for the rule of law,” Todd Huntley, who was an active-duty judge advocate for more than 23 years, serving as a legal adviser to Special Operations forces, said of Hegseth and Trump. “They view the law as a political tool to support their positions and help them get what they want.”

Hegseth took his post focusing on lethality at all costs, while gutting programs designed to protect civilians and firing the Air Force’s and Army’s top judge advocates general, or JAGs, in February to avoid “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.” Military operations under Hegseth have since killed civilians from Yemen to the Caribbean Sea.

The Former JAGs Working Group — an organization made up of former and retired military judge advocates which was founded in February — issued a statement condemning Hegseth’s order and the execution of it “to constitute war crimes, murder, or both.” The group also called out the war secretary for targeting Kelly. “The administration’s retaliation against Senator Kelly violates military law. We are confident the unlawful influence reflected in the press reports will ultimately disqualify all convening authorities except possibly the president himself from actually referring any case to a court-martial,” they wrote in a statement provided to The Intercept.

Huntley said the War Department wasn’t following its typical investigative process in its case against Kelly.

“There was no way that was unlawful. It doesn’t even come close to undermining good order and discipline of the military,” said Huntley. “Under normal circumstances, an investigating officer would be appointed. They’d look into it and then the report would come back, it would be reviewed by a JAG, and it would say there was nothing unlawful, no charges warranted. But these aren’t normal times.”

Huntley also noted that Kelly’s video was likely to sow confusion among low-ranking enlisted personnel and officers concerning determinations about whether an order is lawful.

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Huntley clarified that the Pentagon doesn’t have to bring Kelly back to active duty to charge him under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. “All that’s required is that you get permission of the service secretary. In this case, I’m guessing that Hegseth himself could probably give permission to do that,” he explained. When I asked why the War Department would have announced that it might recall Kelly despite not needing to do so, Huntley had a simple assessment: “Because they don’t know what the law is.”

Hegseth’s office and Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson failed to reply to repeated questions about the Vietnam-era personnel who might still be sanctioned for their crimes against Vietnamese civilians, as well as questions about the jeopardy troops today might be in for following Hegseth’s orders.

A Pentagon spokesperson also seemed to foreclose the release of additional information concerning the War Department’s persecution of Kelly. “Further official comments will be limited to preserve the integrity of the proceedings,” she said.

The post My Quest to Make the Pentagon Care About the Crimes It Covered Up appeared first on The Intercept.

The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund, a nonprofit best known for backing police facing legal consequences for their actions, plans to ask the federal government to use a provision previously used to probe police violations of civil rights to investigate the office of Fairfax County, Virginia, Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano over his handling of cases involving undocumented immigrants, Fox News reported.

The Trump administration recently put Descano in the spotlight when it attacked his office over claims that he dropped charges against a 23-year-old undocumented immigrant who was accused of killing a man the next day. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has also blamed former President Joe Biden’s administration for dismissing the man’s immigration proceedings and labeling him as “a non-enforcement priority.”

The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund is invoking the same provision of federal law that the Biden administration previously used to investigate police in Louisville, Kentucky, after they killed Breonna Taylor in 2020. The law calls for policing to abide by the Constitution and establishes procedures for when police display a “pattern or practice of conduct” that violates civil rights.

Now, the pro-police group wants to argue that prosecutors like Descano are discriminating against the public by favoring undocumented immigrants in prosecutorial decisions. The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund is effectively arguing that a pattern of leniency toward immigrants by Descano constitutes discrimination against American citizens.

“The MO of MAGA groups like LELDF is to partner with the Trump Administration to weaponize the justice system and go after people they don’t like — in this case, reform prosecutors they disagree with philosophically,” said Michael Collins, an independent consultant who works on prosecutorial reform.

“Laws designed to protect people’s rights and curb official misconduct shouldn’t be repurposed to target officials over policy differences or prosecutorial discretion,” Collins said. “This kind of legal warfare erodes trust in our justice system and undermines the very protections these laws were meant to uphold.”

Neither Descano nor the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund immediately responded to a request for comment.

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The Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund has made attacking elected prosecutors a cornerstone of its work in recent years. This year, the group released a report focusing on the Wren Collective, an organization that works with progressive prosecutors around the country, and claimed that left-wing donors like George Soros are controlling the group and corrupting the criminal justice system.

In Virginia, the group has been trying to remove Descano and another elected prosecutor in Arlington County, Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, since shortly after they first won office, though so far the police group has gotten little traction.

Descano has faced two efforts to launch recall elections against him, both organized by groups headed by Sean Kennedy, who directs policy for the Law Enforcement Legal Defense Fund and leads another group, Virginians for Safe Communities, which tried to launch a recall against Descano in 2021.

The LELDF spends about three-quarters of its program service budget on public and media relations, according to its most recent tax filing. About a quarter of its program service expenses goes toward legal defense for cops.

Republicans have also made Descano a target. Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares has repeatedly attacked Descano’s office for turning the county “into a safe haven for criminals and a nightmare for law-abiding families” and his handling of cases involving transgender defendants.

The post Cop Group Alleges “Discrimination” by Prosecutor for Being Too Nice to Immigrants appeared first on The Intercept.

“It made me physically nauseous,” said Democratic congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh, reflecting on the massive sums Democrats raised and spent on the 2024 presidential election, “thinking about how many people could be fed, or how many clinics could be funded, or how much student debt could be paid off.”

So after Abughazaleh announced her candidacy for a highly competitive primary in March, she transformed her campaign headquarters in Rogers Park — a lower-income neighborhood in Chicago’s North Side— into a mutual aid hub.

Situated at the front of her 9th Congressional District campaign office are rows of basics like diapers and winter clothes to medical supplies like Narcan. “We’ve also had people bring in stuff like nail polish,” said Abughazaleh, adding, “everyone deserves good things.” Anyone is welcome to come off the street, she explained, without checking for income or immigration status.

In addition to offering supplies while the office is open, the campaign also helps stock a community fridge available any time of day and hosts drives to collect specific supplies. A request for tampons for Chicago’s Period Collective, for example, resulted in a massive outpouring of support. “We ended up getting over 5,600, and my campaign manager’s car was just filled with tampons,” said Abughazaleh through laughter. “I wanted him to get pulled over so bad.”

The point here is to “show” the campaign’s values through providing for the community, rather than simply telling people why they should vote for her, said Abughazaleh.

“I grew up Republican,” she said, “and I can’t think of anything that would have made me be a Democrat faster — especially if it were today, when people have lost all faith in the political system — than people showing their values rather than just saying them.”

Abughazaleh faces off against a competitive field to replace retiring Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill. As of early November, 21 candidates had filed to run in Illinois’s 9th Congressional District — including a whopping 17 Democrats and four Republicans. The Democratic primary race will be held in March.

Abughazaleh, a former journalist with a large social media following, is ahead of the pack in conventional fundraising, and hopes that her “experimental” approach to campaigning will help pull her over the finish line. In fact, she thinks the Democratic establishment could learn a thing or two from her.

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In November, with SNAP benefits paused due to the government shutdown, Abughazaleh’s campaign donated $2,500 to the Niles Township Food Pantry.

“I can’t think of anything more convincing for voters, but also just the right thing to do during that period, and during all of this, than the Democratic Party using its immense resources to — with no strings attached — stock food banks, fund clinics, and make sure people have what they need,” she said.

“We don’t need to spend $20 million to make lefty Joe Rogan in a lab,” Abughazaleh added, in a nod to a strategic pitch Democratic operatives offered earlier this year. “We can spend $20 million on making sure kids have enough to eat, or making sure that parents have baby formula, or making sure that older folks are having meals actually delivered.”

Abughazaleh’s approach has not been without its detractors. On social media, some people have accused the campaign of attempting to buy votes by offering free food, water, and clothes, in the same place as advertisements for the candidate.

Accusations of “vote buying” are a serious risk for candidates implementing strategies like Abughazaleh’s, said Jessica Byrd, a political strategist who served as chief of staff for Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. “One accusation of buying votes, and your entire campaign is under a microscope. It slows you down, it makes you less effective, and then you have to spend money to defend yourself,” explained Byrd. “So it really is a risk.”

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Abughazaleh has already faced significant scrutiny in her race. In October, she was indicted along with five other activists on federal conspiracy charges over an Immigration and Customs Enforcement protest. She and her co-defendants are pleading not guilty.

“It’s incredible” that the Abughazaleh campaign is going ahead with its mutual aid efforts despite the reputational risks and associated costs, Byrd said. The Abrams campaign instituted a similar strategy in 2022, forming a program to connect Georgians with existing services, from legal support to food assistance. “We were barely out of COVID, and it was really clear that we couldn’t just ask for people’s votes,” said Byrd. “We actually needed to ask how everybody was doing.”

Byrd said she appreciated seeing another campaign focus on how they can help their constituents before coming into office.

“People are suffering deeply, deeply suffering,” said Byrd. “Every single person running, their constituents are looking at them saying, ‘How are you helping me right this moment, right now, not in the future, not when you get it through the legislature? How are you a hero right now?’ And it’s on all of us to figure out how we can serve people right this moment.”

From a political perspective, it’s hard to know whether this type of strategy will pay off in more votes. Andre Martin, who serves as Abughazaleh’s deputy campaign manager and runs the mutual aid operation, said while most of the items are donated, there’s still a cost associated with pulling something like this off.

“It’s really, really taxing. It’s not an easy thing. It takes a lot of our resources,” he said. “It’s not something that comes without cost to our ability to do more conventional organizing. We spend a lot of time helping folks.”

Part of that cost is spending a significant amount of time on compliance with campaign finance regulations. Abughazaleh told The Intercept that the campaign works with a compliance firm that carefully monitors the pools of resources being donated to, or by, the campaign’s mutual aid arm.

According to Martin, the purpose of the hub isn’t to actively campaign to people coming in for resources. “Sometimes people will ask because they see the signs,” he said, adding, “We are mostly just asking people if they need help, like, finding things on the shelves, navigating our sorting system, things like that. That’s the only information we solicit from them.”

However, Abughazaleh said canvassing isn’t the goal here. “I wanted to figure out the best way to use our funds to not just run a race, but also help the community,” she said, “because if every campaign did something like that, then every election would be a net benefit to the community, win or lose.”

The post Kat Abughazaleh Thinks Campaign Funds Should Help Feed People appeared first on The Intercept.

“Tonight, at my direction as Commander in Chief, the United States launched a powerful and deadly strike against ISIS Terrorist Scum in Northwest Nigeria, who have been targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians, at levels not seen for many years, and even Centuries!” Trump wrote Thursday on Truth Social.

Africa Command conducted the strikes in northwest Nigeria’s Sokoto State, according to the War Department. “The command’s initial assessment is that multiple ISIS terrorists were killed in the ISIS camps,” a Pentagon spokesperson told The Intercept.

Trump has spent the first year of his second term touting his efforts to end conflicts and claiming to be a “peacemaker” even as he has recently made war in Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean in 2025.

“I have previously warned these Terrorists that if they did not stop the slaughtering of Christians, there would be hell to pay, and tonight, there was,” wrote Trump. “The Department of War executed numerous perfect strikes, as only the United States is capable of doing.”

Over two terms, the Trump administration has repeatedly killed noncombatants, from Somalia to Yemen. Most recently, the Trump administration has been killing civilians in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean. The military has carried out 29 known attacks at sea since September, killing at least 105 civilians whom it claims are narco-terrorists.

The War Department did not reply to questions about the numbers of enemy forces and civilians killed in the Christmas attack in Nigeria. “Specific details about the operation will not be released in order to ensure operational security,” said the Pentagon spokesperson.

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In November, Trump ordered the Defense Department to prepare for a military intervention in Nigeria to protect Christians from attack by Islamic militants. War Secretary Pete Hegseth confirmed Thursday’s strikes in a post on social media, writing that the U.S. was “Grateful for Nigerian government support & cooperation.”

“U.S. Africa Command is working with Nigerian and regional partners to increase counterterrorism cooperation efforts related to on-going violence and threats against innocent lives,” said Gen. Dagvin Anderson, the chief of U.S. Africa Command.

The U.S. military has a long relationship with Nigeria and has played a role in airstrikes that have killed civilians. Between 2000 and 2022, the U.S. provided, facilitated, or approved more than $2 billion in security aid — including weapons and equipment sales — to Nigeria, according to a report by Brown University’s Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies and the Center for International Policy’s Security Assistance Monitor, a Washington think tank. This includes the delivery of 12 Super Tucano warplanes as part of a $593 million package, approved by the State Department in 2017, that also included bombs and rockets.

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Over that same period, hundreds of Nigerian airstrikes killed thousands of Nigerians. A 2017 attack on a displaced persons camp in Rann, Nigeria, killed more than 160 civilians, many of them children. A subsequent Intercept investigation revealed that the attack was referred to as an instance of “U.S.-Nigerian operations” in a formerly secret U.S. military document.

The post War on Christmas: Trump Announces Wave of Airstrikes Targeting ISIS Militants in Nigeria appeared first on The Intercept.

From the very beginning of the genocide, I barely left my room. Three waves of displacement defined my movements: the first, on October 17, 2023, took me to my sister Doaa’s house in Khan Younis for nearly a month and a half. The second led me to my other sister Tasneem’s home in Al-Zawayda for about a week. The third displacement brought me to Rafah, where I stayed from December 31, 2023, until May 6, 2024.

Returning after Israeli forces occupied Rafah felt miraculous — our house had somehow survived. Still, I remained confined to my room until the so-called end of the genocide on January 19. The brief second ceasefire allowed me to step out for the first time with my father on March 17.

We drove across Gaza in our beloved car, visiting every corner of our city and stopping to see all our relatives on my father’s side — my aunts, uncles, and cousins — before returning home at midnight, only for the genocide to resume two hours later. After that, the outside world became almost inaccessible once again; my only venture outside was to make a brief, necessary visit to the dentist on August 23.

During that relentless isolation, I turned inward, to writing, to studying, to memory, and to personal growth. Each became a quiet act of resistance, a way to resist suffocation, to exist when existence itself was under siege. I immersed myself completely, separating my world from the chaos beyond my walls. Reclaiming life became an internal struggle, a fight to preserve traces of normalcy in a reality determined to erase every trace of it.

On Friday, OCtober 17, my sisters arrived at our home: Doaa with her 1-year-old son, Hossam; and Tasneem with her children, Nour, 3 years old, and Ezz Aldin, a year and a half old. They stayed with us for a full week, which became one of the most beautiful and meaningful times I had had in years. I didn’t know at the time that these moments of peace and happiness wouldn’t last.

I especially cherished taking care of little Hossam, whom I had missed more than anyone. He is very attached to me and shows so much affection, and being with him reminded me of the warmth we had been deprived of for so long.

That gathering was only the second time our family had been together since the genocide separated us two years ago. That same week, my aunt arrived with her son and daughter and stayed overnight. We also invited my cousins Ahmed and Alaa — the only remaining members of their family, as the rest were martyred — and they spent the day with us.

But on October 19, as we were talking and catching up, the Israeli occupation launched airstrikes across the entire Gaza Strip, including in my neighborhood. Our neighbors’ house was bombed, and we were pushed apart again, despite apparently being under a “ceasefire.”

I tried to calm myself by holding on to one truth: My father, my mother, my brothers, and my sisters were safe. Nothing matters more than their safety — if they are well, everything else is too.

During a respite from Israel’s airstrikes, we spent the day at my maternal grandfather’s house. As soon as I stepped inside, I was overwhelmed by a flood of childhood memories. We hadn’t seen each other for nearly a year, but we were all longing for this reunion and the house was filled with laughter and hugs.

The day featured five carefully planned surprises organized by my Aunt Manar. She had moved to Egypt a year after the beginning of the genocide and hadn’t been able to return. My sisters and I were responsible for executing her plan. My aunt stayed in constant contact with us to make sure every detail was perfect.

Four of the surprises were for my cousins, the students: Mohammed (Tawjihi 2006), Malek (Tawjihi 2006), Yaman (Tawjihi 2007), and my sister Aya (Tawjihi 2007). The Tawjihi, or high school graduation, exams marked the culmination of 12 years of study. The 2006 and 2007 classes — students born in those years — had been delayed by the genocide, but despite the extraordinary circumstances, the Ministry of Education conducted online exams. Results for the 2006 generation were released, and after some time, the results for the 2007 generation were announced. The fifth surprise was for my sister Sojood, who was celebrating her graduation from the Islamic University with a degree in medicine.

Each gift package contained a variety of treats, carefully arranged on the table at my grandfather’s house. My grandfather’s wife also prepared popcorn, biscuits, tea, and other goodies.

We agreed we would all arrive together after the Asr prayer. The surprise went off perfectly, with each of our guests completely caught off guard by their packages of delicious food and treats. We captured their joy with photos and videos. We played graduation songs and my Aunt Manar joined us live via WhatsApp to witness the celebration.

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I realized that here in Gaza, we never stop striving to live, to move forward, to overcome the genocide imposed upon us by the Israeli occupation. We’ve survived in the face of the world’s silence and indifference. We truly are a people who deserve to live.

The next day, I finally met my close friend Lana, who had ranked first in the nation in the 2023 Tawjihi exams. Before the genocide, we had planned to celebrate together, but the attacks changed our plans. After two long years, we finally made our plan happen.

We’d spent countless hours talking online, but nothing can compare with face-to-face conversation. We agreed to meet in front of her house in Al-Zawayda, and from there we would find a ride to a newly opened restaurant called O2.

To our surprise, there were no cars available for hire. We were hesitant to use improvised local transport: donkey carts, horse-drawn wagons, and other options people had devised out of necessity. After a long wait, we finally found a car and rode together to the restaurant.

Once there, we ordered chicken calzones, vegetable pizza, Nutella crepes, Nutella luqaimat, and Pepsi, the only beverage available at the time due to the occupation’s tight control over imports. We were so absorbed in conversation that we barely touched the food. The waiter packaged it for us to take home.

After long playful arguments about who should pay, Lana surprised me — she’d already made arrangements for her cousin, who lives nearby, to cover the entire bill. I made her promise that next time she would let me pay.

Before leaving, we took photos together in the restaurant’s small photo corner, capturing the rare, happy reunion we’d been waiting for for two years.

By Maghrib, the evening prayer, it was time to return home. There was life in the streets, but I felt a nagging fear that it would all be ripped away again. With some difficulty, we found a small bus and made it back safely.

I realized how desperately I had needed this outing to start living my life again. After I posted an Instagram story about Lana and me, featuring moments from our day together, my friends — even those abroad — were envious that we’d had our first outing together, and they wanted to make their own plans with me.

I was interviewed about my experience as an exemplary student at the Islamic University of Gaza in October. I spoke in depth about my experience learning online in the midst of the genocide. I’m only 19, but I completed three years of academic work in just two years amid forced displacement, limited electricity and internet service, and the emotional toll wreaked by pain, grief, and loss. I also presented my creative output: 50 published articles, 30 poems, contributions to over 20 international platforms, and publishing a zine that collected together some of my works. My published work had reached readers all over the globe and major cities across them. It was my message to the Israeli occupation and the world that no matter what they do, they cannot kill our hope.

In late October, I spent the day with my childhood friend Aya Nasser. Our families had been close friends since long before we were born, and we grew up together. We also hadn’t seen each other in two years.

I traveled to her apartment after the Dhuhr prayer on difficult, unsafe streets without proper transportation. I eventually found a tuk-tuk for the rest of the journey and recorded a short video to calm my nerves.

Aya’s building contained many damaged apartments that were partially open to the air, which made me fear for my safety as I walked inside. Aya and her family greeted me warmly with hugs and kisses. She led me to her room, and we sat on her bed. We spent hours talking and sharing our experiences of the past two years. Our conversation felt healing in a way that sending messages back and forth could never replicate.

We drank cappuccinos, took photos, and discussed our shared love for documenting life’s precious moments. Later, Aya got dressed, and we went to a newly opened restaurant in Al-Nuseirat called Al-Asima, about 15 minutes from her home. The restaurant was elegant but sparsely occupied, probably because of its high prices. We sat on a couch and ordered chicken pizza, pineapple-melon juice, corn appetizers with mayonnaise, garlic sauce, ketchup, potatoes, peppers, and pickles.

Eating there felt like taking back life itself. For the past two years, this type of meal had been rare — either unavailable, prohibitively expensive, or too risky to reach. Our motto now was to enjoy life regardless of the cost. We laughed, spoke from the heart, and took photos and videos to preserve the moment.

As usual, we had playful debates over who should pay. We agreed to split the bill, but I seized the opportunity and paid for it myself. Afterward, we shopped at a nearby market before returning home.

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Only an hour later, the Israeli occupation broke the ceasefire, taking more than 100 lives. To this day, that was the last time I went out. After enduring two years of relentless genocide, I had allowed myself to hope — to live again, to laugh with friends, to savor fleeting moments of joy— only for death and destruction to strike once again. This is the reality of life in Gaza: Any effort you make to live an ordinary life might be cut off without warning, the smallest spark of happiness extinguished in a moment.

Even now, I refuse to give in to despair. I hold tightly to the moments that have reminded me of my life as it should be lived: laughing with my sisters, embracing my family, reconnecting with friends over a meal. These experiences are my refuge, proof that nothing in this world can outweigh family, friendship, and human connection.

As long as my loved ones remain safe, life moves forward and our spirit endures, no matter how fiercely the occupation seeks to erase us. They can try to steal our joy, but they can never take away our happy memories — or our will to live and be free.

The post Reuniting With Family in Gaza During the Break Between Bombings appeared first on The Intercept.

News coverage ranged from practical explainers on California’s death penalty to vulgar punditry casting more heat than light. True crime celebrity Nancy Grace fumed that Reiner showed “no remorse” during his brief courtroom appearance. Megyn Kelly mused, without shame or evidence, that Reiner might deploy the same “sympathy card” as the Menendez brothers, who, after killing their parents, accused their father of sexually abusing them as children.

If there was one thing most people seemed to agree on, however, it was that a death sentence is highly unlikely.

Reiner’s reported mental illness has already raised questions over his competency to stand trial. His lifelong struggle with addiction, which led to homelessness and more than a dozen stints in rehab, is the kind of mitigating evidence that could persuade a jury to show mercy — if not convince prosecutors to take death off the table altogether.

Then there’s the Reiner family, which has barely begun to grieve. The Reiners’ adult children — who have asked “for speculation to be tempered with compassion and humanity” — may likely push back against a decision to seek death, whether out of opposition to the death penalty, a desire to avoid the trauma and spectacle of a capital trial, or because they do not wish to lose another beloved family member to homicide, no matter how devastating his alleged actions.

So why did the Los Angeles County district attorney raise the possibility of a death sentence for Nick Reiner at a press conference just two days after his parents’ bodies were found?

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In a state that has not carried out an execution in 20 years, decisions to seek the death penalty amount to little more than political posturing. While nearly 600 people remain under a death sentence in the Golden State, a return to executions has never seemed more far-fetched. After Gov. Gavin Newsom imposed a moratorium in 2019, the death chamber at San Quentin was dismantled, and the condemned population transferred to prisons across the state.

While a new governor could conceivably lift the moratorium, any push to restart executions would take years. As one federal judge put it more than a decade ago, California’s death penalty remains a punishment “no rational jury or legislature could ever impose: life in prison, with the remote possibility of death.”

Yet there was District Attorney Nathan Hochman on December 16, standing somberly before the cameras in downtown LA to announce the charges that would make Reiner eligible for the ultimate punishment.

“No decision at this point has been made with respect to the death penalty,” Hochman added gravely, cautioning against speculation or rumor.

His decision would rely on the evidence and, at least in part, on input from the family of the victims.

He said, “We owe it to their memory to pursue justice and accountability for the lives that were taken.”

Reiners’ Activism

It is not overly speculative to say that Rob and Michele Reiner would have recoiled at the thought of the state seeking a death sentence in their name — let alone against their own son.

Their famed support of social justice causes included advocating for people in prison. Friends of Singer Reiner have recalled her recent focus on wrongful convictions and her regular conversations with Nanon Williams, a Texas man who faced the death penalty as a teenager before his sentence was reduced to life. One of Rob Reiner’s last production credits, “Lyrics From Lockdown,” a one-man show by the formerly incarcerated artist Bryonn Bain, centers in part on Williams’s story.

In a 2023 interview discussing the show, Reiner pointed to the racism at the heart of the criminal justice system, a topic he’d grappled with in his film “Ghosts of Mississippi.” He had brainstormed a potential documentary series, “Injustice for All,” he said, which would depict the ugly reality of the system: “It’s prosecutorial misconduct. It’s profiling.”

It was this very kind of systemic critique — rooted in decades of research and data — that had led former LA District Attorney George Gascón to halt death penalty prosecutions in Reiner’s home county a few years earlier. At a time when the death penalty had been on a long, slow decline, Los Angeles remained an outlier in sending people to death row — overwhelmingly people of color.

“The reality is the death penalty does not make us safer, it is racist, it’s morally untenable, it’s irreversible and expensive, and, beginning today, it’s off the table in LA County,” Gascón said at the time.

But electoral politics are quick to punish such attempts at reform — especially when they coincide with any uptick in crime.

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Gascón’s tenure overlapped with a rise in violent crime nationwide, a phenomenon tied to the pandemic but swiftly blamed on reform-minded prosecutors. While Gascón survived two recall attempts, the era of reform he sought to implement was short-lived. A crowded field of challengers lined up to replace him in 2024.

Hochman would win out by running a classic tough-on-crime campaign. Promising to rescue the city from a descent into crime-ridden dystopia, he vowed to revive the death penalty in LA as part of his “blueprint for justice,” a set of priorities primarily aimed at reversing his predecessor’s reforms. Never mind that the death penalty remained a failed public policy that did nothing to stop crime — and which California taxpayers had paid billions of dollars to maintain with little to show for it.

“Effective immediately,” Hochman declared months after taking office, “the prior administration’s extreme and categorical policy forbidding prosecutors from seeking the death penalty in any case is rescinded.”

It is against this backdrop that Hochman will now handle the prosecution of Nick Reiner.

Victims’ Families?

Just two weeks before the Reiners’ horrific murders, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California released a report assessing Hochman’s first year in office, decrying his “pattern of extreme and debunked approaches to crime.” At the top of the list was his decision to bring back the death penalty to LA County.

The report quoted a recent op-ed by veteran anti-death penalty activist and actor Mike Farrell, the board president of the California-based abolitionist group Death Penalty Focus.

“It’s incomprehensible that D.A. Hochman is once again pursuing the death penalty in Los Angeles, the county that has sent more people to California’s now-defunct death row than any other in the state,” Farrell wrote. Although Hochman often pointed to a pair of unsuccessful ballot initiatives that twice failed to repeal California’s death penalty, Angelenos voted in favor of the measures.

“So why,” Farrell asked, “would a responsible district attorney ignore the demonstrated will of the voters in the county he serves?”

Farrell also called out Hochman for refusing to meet with victims’ family members who oppose capital punishment. Although Hochman vowed to give families a voice in matters of crime and punishment, his conduct has left some families feeling betrayed.

Perhaps no family has been more vocal than the relatives of Lyle and Erik Menendez, who filed multiple complaints against Hochman for his conduct while he fought to block the brothers’ recent bid for release. Prior to Hochman’s election, the Menendez case had been reviewed by Gascón’s Resentencing Unit, ultimately persuading the DA to recommend that the brothers be resentenced after 35 years behind bars.

Hochman swiftly intervened, taking aggressive steps to keep the brothers in prison. In one subsequent letter, sent to the U.S. Attorney’s Civil Rights Division, a family member described a meeting between Hochman and more than 20 relatives, who urged the DA to reconsider his stance.

“In a tear-filled meeting, numerous family members shared the ongoing trauma and suffering we have endured for more than 30 years,” it read. “Instead of responding with compassion, acknowledgment, and support, DA Hochman proceeded to verbally and emotionally retraumatize the family by shaming us for allegedly not listening to his public press briefings.”

The Anti-Reformer

The ACLU report also shed light on Hochman’s disturbing attempts to undermine the Racial Justice Act, a landmark piece of criminal justice legislation allowing courts to reexamine death sentences rooted in racial bias. The law explicitly barred prosecutors from using animal imagery against defendants, a dehumanizing practice that has historically served as a racist dog whistle.

Yet Hochman went out of his way to defend a case where the prosecutor compared a defendant to a “Bengal tiger.” California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who defeated Hochman for the top statewide office in 2022, had acknowledged that the tiger reference was wrong and that the death sentence should be vacated. Hochman, though, wrote in an amicus brief to the court that Bonta’s “concession was not well taken, and this Court should reject it.”

It would be hard to imagine a more retrograde position than defending racist imagery in capital trials. Hochman not only vowed to uphold the Racial Justice Act upon taking office, but also used its existence as political cover to justify his pro-death penalty stance.

As the ACLU wrote, “D.A. Hochman’s arguments against the RJA attempt to weaken the very law he claims would safeguard his death penalty decisions from racial bias.”

One could argue that none of this is relevant to the case of Nick Reiner. As a white man from a wealthy family who has secured one of the country’s most high-profile defense attorneys, he has had privileges that are unheard of compared to most defendants who end up on death row.

And while mental illness or addiction may ultimately spare Reiner from a death sentence, the same cannot be said for countless people whose crimes were driven by demons like his.

This, of course, is precisely the problem. Reiner is still somebody’s son. The others are the “worst of the worst.”

Given their advocacy, Reiner’s parents would likely have been the first to acknowledge this. Prosecutors like Hochman, however, cannot afford to be so honest.

Whether or not he decides to seek a death sentence against Reiner, Hochman’s narrative about the death penalty is one of the oldest in electoral politics — a story cloaked in the language of justice, told for political gain.

The post Prosecutor Floating Death Penalty for Nick Reiner Knows It’s an Empty Threat appeared first on The Intercept.

By early October, however, with the enactment of President Donald Trump’s 20-point plan — which world leaders call a “ceasefire” or “peace plan,” despite ongoing Israeli violence in Gaza — such concern seemed to evaporate. Mounting international pressure was replaced with an eagerness from many governments, lawmakers, and institutions to return to the status quo.

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Exactly one week after the Gaza plan went into effect, EU parliamentarians tabled its proposals to sanction Israel over its human rights violations in Gaza. One month later, the German government, Israel’s second largest supplier of weapons, announced it would lift its arms embargo on its longtime ally; last week, Germany’s parliament approved a $3.5 billion deal to expand its missile defense systems to protect Israel. Earlier this month, Eurovision, the popular singing competition, cleared Israel to continue competing, despite pledges to boycott from Spain, Slovenia, the Netherlands, Ireland, and Iceland. The U.N. Security Council also authorized Trump’s plan, agreeing to help form a so-called International Stabilization Force.

In Congress, even as polls show most Americans disapprove of Israel’s military action in Gaza, lawmakers and advocates behind the Block the Bombs to Israel Act in Congress have struggled to build on its summertime momentum, garnering only two new co-sponsors since Trump declared he had achieved peace.

What happened?

“Now that there is technically a ‘ceasefire’ in place, that alone has had a big immobilizing effect on activists, advocates, and — I think more importantly — just the general public,” said Tariq Kenney-Shawa, a policy fellow at Al-Shabaka. Calls for a “ceasefire now” had a galvanizing effect for public pressure to end the killing — so the Gaza deal served as a release valve.

The Israeli military continues to violate the agreement, launching strikes into Gaza on a near-daily basis and continuing its partial, yet illegal blockade on humanitarian aid. The United States, for its part, has so far been unwilling to enforce the truce in any meaningful way beyond strongly worded letters.

Under the Gaza deal, gunfire and bombings have slowed but not ceased, with the Israeli military striking Gaza more than 350 times since, killing at least 394 people and wounding more than 1,000 others across the Strip, according to the Gaza Health Ministry and the United Nations. Israel continues to occupy 58 percent of the territory, establishing a largely imaginary yellow line within which the military demolishes buildings and civilian infrastructure and shoots Palestinians along the indefinite border — including two children, Fadi Abu Assi, 8, and Jumaa Abu Assi, 10, who were killed by an Israeli drone while gathering wood. The Israeli military also continues to launch daily attacks beyond the yellow line, including the assassination of Hamas commander Raed Saad on December 13, which drew the ire of the White House.

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In tandem with its ongoing strikes in Gaza, Israel launched a new military operation in the West Bank, raiding refugee camps, conducting mass arrests of Palestinian civilians, and killing unarmed individuals, including at least 14 children during confrontations with Israeli soldiers, according to Defense for Children International-Palestine. One boy, 13-year-old Aysam Jihad Labib Naser, died of tear gas inhalation one month after Israeli soldiers attacked him and his family while they were picking olives.

Trump’s Gaza plan “has given a convenient excuse to members of Congress to look away from the situation,” said Josh Ruebner, policy director at the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project. He supports the Block the Bombs bill, originally introduced by Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., in May, and acknowledged that it had stalled in recent months. “But the reality is that U.S. weapons are still being used on an almost daily basis by Israel to kill Palestinians.”

The Israeli government has allowed a trickle of aid into Gaza but continues to block most international and Palestinian aid groups from delivering supplies, a violation of both the 20-point plan and international law. Stuck at the border is $50 million worth of aid, such as food, maternal and newborn care supplies, much-needed treatments for malnutrition, and shelter goods.

On Friday, the global hunger monitor IPC declared Gaza is no longer experiencing famine, but warned the majority of Gazans still face “high levels of acute food insecurity.” Half a million people remain in “emergency” levels of acute malnutrition, risking death, the monitor said. Around 2,000 people are still experiencing famine conditions. Exacerbating the hunger crisis, winter storms blowing through the Strip have ripped through and flooded tent cities and war-torn homes where hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians were sheltering. At least 13 people have died as a result of the weather, according to Gaza health officials. Among them is one-month-old Saeed Eseid Abdeen, who died last week due to hypothermia.

As attention and outrage have waned, Israel and its defenders have attempted to regain control of the narrative that they have struggled to wield over the last two years of genocide.

At the Jewish Federations of North America conference in November, former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz blamed Israel’s losing public relations battle among young Americans on TikTok, which is “smashing our young people’s brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza.”

“And this is why so many of us can’t have a sane conversation with younger Jews,” said Hurwitz during a panel discussion in which she also blamed the backlash against Israel on backfiring Holocaust education. “Because anything we try to say to them, they are hearing it through this wall of carnage.”

Several weeks later, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — speaking at a conference hosted by the Israeli news outlet Israel Haymon, owned by right-wing, pro-Israel, pro-annexationist megadonor Miriam Adelson — also blamed young Americans’ concerns over Gaza on TikTok and social media, dismissing livestreamed genocidal violence as “pure propaganda” and as “threat to democracy.”

Hurwitz and Clinton failed to mention how such dismissals of Israel’s atrocities have been powered by massive crackdowns on the free speech rights of Palestine solidarity advocates in the U.S. and abroad — and how legitimate concerns for the safety of Jewish people have been weaponized to crack down on pro-Palestine speech.

After the mass shooting at a Hannukah event in Sydney, Australia’s Bondi Beach, where two gunmen killed 15 people, mostly Jewish festival goers, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu immediately seized on the moment to tie the violence to Australia’s recognition of Palestinian statehood earlier this year following widespread anti-genocide protests in the country. In a CBS Mornings segment covering the shooting, Israel’s former special envoy for combatting antisemitism Noa Tishby advocated for the adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism, which considers criticism of the state of Israel as antisemitic.

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Lawmakers in Australia’s New South Wales, where Bondi Beach is located, are now considering a ban on all protest for up to three months. In the United Kingdom, police agencies in London and Manchester responded last week to the Bondi Beach shooting by criminalizing the chant “globalize the intifada,” a call for popular resistance against Israel’s occupation of Palestinians, commonly misinterpreted to mean violence against Jewish people. The Trump administration, meanwhile, issued a travel ban on all Palestinian Authority passport holders, citing concern over “U.S.-designated terrorist groups operate actively in the West Bank or Gaza Strip.”

Despite the recent measures taken against the pro-Palestinian movement, Kenney-Shawa said he believes Israel and its backers will still fail in the long term to retake the narrative.

“They’re not going to be successful in restoring Israel to its former untouchability in U.S. politics — that train has left the station,” he said. “The Biden generation obviously grew up with all these myths about Israel and those myths were shattered by this generation who’s growing up with new facts about Israel, the reality of Israel.”

A growing body of polling shows Americans, mostly on the left but increasingly on the right, are beginning to reject the government’s special relationship with Israel — signaling a major role for such shifts in the upcoming midterms and the 2028 presidential election.

The Trump plan itself remains uncertain. Its second phase would see the disarmament of Hamas, though the Palestinian militant and political group has said it would only give up its weapons if there is a path toward Palestinian statehood. Israeli officials, however, continue to reject calls for a Palestinian state. Instead, Netanyahu’s cabinet has been open about its stated policy of totally erasing Palestinians from both Gaza and the West Bank in pursuit of forming “Greater Israel.”

Whether the rising awareness will amount to material improvement for the people of Palestine is also unclear. Some protesters aim to make their efforts tangible by interrupting the global supply chain of weapons sent to Israel, as new campaigns by the Palestine Youth Movement have sprouted at docks and warehouses in Oakland and New Jersey. In the United Kingdom, imprisoned Palestine Action members are undergoing a weekslong hunger strike; among their demands is the closure of Israeli arms manufacturer Elbit System’s factories in Britain. The Hind Rajab Foundation, meanwhile, continues to file legal complaints and investigation requests across the globe aiming to hold Israeli soldiers and commanders accountable for war crimes.

And in Congress, public pressure still seems to be having some influence on lawmakers. A recent resolution introduced by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., which recognizes “the genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza” and underlines the U.S. responsibility in upholding the Genocide Conventions, has drawn support from 20 other members of Congress — including Rep. Maxine Dexter, D-Ore., who was elected with significant support by pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC.

“I will not continue to willingly be part of that complicity,” Dexter said during her speech on the House floor to back the resolution. Dexter is one of several lawmakers who have altered their public stances on Israel after sustained protest from their constituents at town hall meetings and in front of their district offices.

“Public opinion has shifted in permanent and dramatic ways,” Ruebner, of the IMEU Policy Project, said. “People cannot unsee what they have seen over the past two years.”

The post International Pressure Was Building to Hold Israel Accountable. What Happened? appeared first on The Intercept.

In November, ICE launched a process to get private sector “skip tracing” services, where corporate investigators use digital snooping tools and on-the-ground surveillance to track immigrants in exchange for monetary bonuses. ICE procurement records indicate the agency will be targeting as many as 1.5 million immigrants in the U.S.

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Taken together, records show the 10 companies have made over $1 million to date — and stand to make over $1 billion by the contract’s end in 2027. Some of the companies’ roles in the bounty hunting program have been previously reported, including by The Intercept, but others — such as Bluehawk, EnProVera, and Gravitas — are being revealed here for the first time. (None of the 10 companies commented for this story.)

The bonanza for federal contractors comes as the Trump administration’s focus on deportations has led to a massive increase in ICE’s budget. The companies range from those with extensive experience doing intelligence work to those with more mundane government contracting experience, like finding janitors for federal agencies.

Among the companies poised to cash in on the bounty hunting program, the largest potential haul — over $365 million — could go to Capgemini Government Solutions, a McLean, Virginia-based federal consultancy that has a long track record working for the departments of Defense and Homeland Security, including providing intelligence services for ICE.

Florida-based Bluehawk LLC stands to reap the second largest payout from bounty hunting, at over $200 million. Bluehawk is a longtime contractor for the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence community, providing intelligence collection and analysis, as well as counterintelligence services.

In September, Bluehawk announced it was beginning counterintelligence work for the Department of Homeland Security. Like some of the other contractors tapped by ICE, the company is focusing on immigration after honing its capabilities doing war on terror-era military and intelligence operations. The company’s advisers include former Defense Intelligence Agency chief Ronald Burgess and Dell Dailey, a retired Army lieutenant general who ran U.S. Joint Special Operations Command following the September 11 attacks.

Government Support Services, a contractor that helps staff roles for janitors, groundskeepers, and security guards at agencies across the federal government, could make upward of $55 million on the bounty hunting program.

EnProVera, another company signed up for a contract on the bounty hunting program, also boasts a broad range of federal contracts. The company advertises a variety of intelligence-gathering and investigative services on its website, promoting its work with Customs and Border Protection.

EnProVera CEO Larry Grant’s past work experience includes “conducting clandestine overseas operations, authoring a highly classified study of a foreign nation’s technical capabilities,” and “architecting intelligence systems support to combat operations,” according to his biography page.

EnProVera could make nearly $3 million by the contract’s end.

Constellation Inc., which has previously landed administrative contracts across the Department of Homeland Security, is looking at a potential $58 million payday from bounty hunting.

SOS International, or SOSi, another experienced military contractor, landed a bounty hunting contract around when the program was revealed in November. SOSI’s skip-tracing work for the program, which was first reported by The Lever, could earn the firm up to $123 million. The company is a longtime military contractor whose past work spans operating a major military base in Iraq to operating overseas propaganda campaigns. SOSi’s website notes the company uses large language models in its government work.

Other firms have more traditional private investigative backgrounds.

Gravitas Investigations, which could make over $32 million through the bounty hunting contract, says it offers “comprehensive surveillance operations.” The company touts its skill at locating anyone using a combination of digital sleuthing and real-world tracking.

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“We go where your Subject goes,” its website says. “We follow on foot, in a vehicle, onto public property, and anywhere legal. Our surveillance operatives covertly document your Subject’s activities with a handheld, high-definition camcorders, and covert cameras.”

Gravitas says it makes extensive use of social media and other online data to pinpoint individuals on its customers’ behalf.

The company Fraud Inc. “strives to validate our clients’ suspicions,” according to its website, using a variety of public and private databases, social media digging, and video surveillance. “We also can obtain legally high-altitude video,” it boasts.

Among the more novel firms on the bounty hunting contract is AI Solutions 87, whose role was recently reported by 404 Media. The company is providing “AI agents” to ICE that it says can autonomously track “people of interest and map out their family and other associates more quickly.”

Perhaps the most provocative bounty hunting firm is BI Incorporated, an immigrant-tracking subsidiary of GEO Group, the for-profit prison giant whose fortunes have rapidly climbed following Trump’s reelection and the funding boom for deportation operations. With lucrative contracts for both hunting and imprisoning immigrants — its bounty hunting work could net $121 million by 2027 — GEO Group now stands to generate revenue through multiple stages of the administration’s ongoing deportation campaign.

The post 10 Companies Have Already Made $1 Million as ICE Bounty Hunters. We Found Them. appeared first on The Intercept.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the three-term Georgia representative, is leaving office in January, a decision that comes after a year of mounting tensions between her and President Donald Trump. The right-wing superstar has watched Trump’s popularity wane and has distanced herself from him and his administration. It appears she’s angling for something bigger than Congress — but what that is remains to be seen.

For some commentators eager for a return to the horse-race politics of a general election, Greene is positioning to run for president in 2028. Those rumors have been fueled by members of the right-wing firebrand’s camp, who have told reporters that the representative may well be considering a run. (There has also been reporting that Greene has told people she wants to run in 2028.)

Greene’s maneuvering could also be read as an effort to make herself the spiritual successor to her own brand of MAGA after Trump leaves office. The past six months have shown a different side of the representative in what looks like a calculated attempt to distance herself from the current leadership of a political ideology that’s not delivering for Americans — and alienating the general public.

The Georgia Republican is also embracing the non-interventionist side of the right while tailoring her language to a broader audience. In June, after Israel attacked Iran, and Trump eagerly joined in on attacking Iranian nuclear sites, Greene criticized the U.S. bombings as counter to the “America First” ideology that’s been central to MAGA for a decade. Greene railed against the trillions in U.S. debt and warned that pursuing war would only raise that number at the American people’s expense.

Her language could have come from Ron Paul, another hard-right anti-interventionist with similarly questionable views on race and social issues. “American troops have been killed and forever torn apart physically and mentally for regime change, foreign wars, and for military industrial base profits,” Greene said. “I’m sick of it.”

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In a neat turn of phrase, Greene framed war with Iran as not only a waste of money and resources but also as the administration taking its eye off the real threat: fentanyl and other drugs coming from Latin America. Where were the bombing campaigns on cartel targets, she asked, adding, “I don’t know anyone in America who has been the victim of a crime or killed by Iran, but I know many people who have been victims of crime committed by criminal illegal aliens or MURDERED by Cartel and Chinese fentanyl/drugs.”

By October, Greene had broken from the administration on an even more important issue: Israel’s genocide in Gaza. In an appearance that month on CNN — itself a sign of her moderating tone as she began to expand her appeal beyond hardcore MAGA supporter — Greene made the very basic point that the majority of the victims of Israel’s relentless bombing and starvation campaign were not “Hamas” but “literally women and children.”

“You can’t unsee the amount of pictures and videos of children that have been blown to pieces and they’re finding them dead in the rubble,” Greene said. “That isn’t — those aren’t actors, that isn’t fake war propaganda. It’s very real.”

This pivot has garnered her cachet and credibility with elements of the left, including with the co-founder of the activist group Code Pink, Medea Benjamin, who somewhat perplexingly called her a “strong anti war voice” in Congress and said she would “miss her.”

But her sympathy for the victims of U.S. weapons only went so far. After the administration instructed the military to target boats off the coast of Venezuela in a series of attacks that left dozens dead under questionable, at best, circumstances, Greene expressed her “full support” for the action.

The president’s irritation boiled over in a November post on his Truth Social site. The final straw seemed to be Greene’s calls to release the Epstein files, a clear challenge to the president’s attempts to downplay a story in which he’s a player. Trump called Greene “Wacky,” said she’s “gone Far Left,” and withdrew his support and endorsement of her, saying her anger was based on his refusal to back her for governor or the Senate in Georgia.

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Trump also accused Greene of complaining he doesn’t return her calls, saying, “with 219 Congressmen/women, 53 U.S. Senators, 24 Cabinet Members, almost 200 Countries, and an otherwise normal life to lead, I can’t take a ranting Lunatic’s call every day.”

On X, Greene retorted: “It’s astonishing really how hard he’s fighting to stop the Epstein files from coming out that he actually goes to this level.”

Not long after, she announced she’d be leaving Congress on January 6, 2026; by December, Greene rejected the predictable consequence of the boat strikes she had previously supported, calling for no war in Venezuela. She also reprimanded the president for his comments about the death of Hollywood director and Democratic activist Rob Reiner, saying it’s “incredibly difficult” for families with children experiencing mental health and addiction and they “should be met with empathy especially when it ends in murder.”

“This is a family tragedy, not about politics or political enemies,” Greene added.

Softening her profile is working. Greene is seen in some centrist circles as a conservative who’s seen the light. This crossover appeal can pay off, and it’s one tactic for conservatives, jaded by Trump, looking for a way to appeal to the broader public. Greene appeared on “The View,” the A+ daytime women’s talk show, where she called for decency in discourse, got the liberal crowd to applaud her, and prompted co-host Sunny Hostin to marvel at horseshoe theory: “I’m sitting here just stumped, because you are a very different person than I thought. You’ve gone so right, it’s like you’re on the left now.”

Despite laundering her reputation on certain issues for liberals, Greene has stayed true to her core principles of demonizing immigrants and maintaining a virulent anti-trans position, just last week introducing legislation to criminalize gender-affirming care for minors. The moderate pivot to addressing a general audience isn’t a wholesale reversal of her previous positions. She’s still America First but feels Trump has lost his way; she’s still a Christian nationalist, but believes Trump is not serving that purpose anymore.

Whether she runs for president in 2028, simply tries to take over the MAGA movement and control its direction, or does a secret third thing, Greene isn’t going to hand over control of the far right to Trump, whose decline is beginning to mirror his predecessor’s, or to his bench, which isn’t capable of challenging him or establishing themselves as their own candidates and political figures, without a fight. She’s in a unique position. The question remains: What’s she going to do with it?

The post Marjorie Taylor Greene Is Rebranding for the Post-MAGA Era. Centrists Are Falling for It. appeared first on The Intercept.

Minutes ticked by. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. As the men bobbed along, drifting with the current, for some 45 minutes, Adm. Frank Bradley — then the head of Joint Special Operations Command — sought guidance from his top legal adviser. At Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on September 2, he turned to Col. Cara Hamaguchi, the staff judge advocate at the secretive JSOC, The Intercept has learned.

Could the U.S. military legally attack them again?

How exactly she responded is not known. But Bradley, according to a lawmaker who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a classified briefing, said that the JSOC staff judge advocate deemed a follow-up strike lawful. In the briefing, Bradley said no one in the room voiced objections before the survivors were killed, according to the lawmaker.

Five people familiar with briefings given by Bradley, including the lawmaker who viewed the video, said that, logically, the survivors must have been waving at the U.S. aircraft flying above them. All interpreted the actions of the men as signaling for help, rescue, or surrender.

“Obviously, we don’t know what they were saying or thinking,” one of the sources said, “but any reasonable person would assume that they saw the aircraft and were signaling either: don’t shoot or help us.”

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Raising both hands is a universal sign of surrender for isolated members of armed forces. Under international law, those who surrender — like those who are shipwrecked – are considered hors de combat, the French term for those out of combat, and may not be attacked. The Pentagon’s Law of War Manual is explicit in this regard. “Persons who have been incapacitated by wounds, sickness, or shipwreck are in a helpless state, and it would be dishonorable and inhumane to make them the object of attack,” reads the guide.

But that’s not how Bradley — now the chief of Special Operations Command, or SOCOM — saw it. Bradley declined to comment to The Intercept, but a U.S. official familiar with his thinking said he did not perceive their waving to be a “two-arm surrender.”

Some 45 minutes after the men had been plunged into the water, a second missile screamed down from the sky on Bradley’s order. Two more missiles followed in rapid succession, sinking the remnants of the boat.

Nothing remained of the men.

Special Operations Command refused to make Hamaguchi available for an interview and declined to answer questions about Hamaguchi’s legal guidance or Bradley’s statements to the member of Congress.

“We are not going to comment on what Admiral Bradley told law makers in a classified hearing. He did inform them that during the strike he sought advice from his lawyer and then made a decision,” Col. Allie Weiskopf, the director of public affairs at Special Operations Command, told The Intercept. Multiple military officials attempted to dissuade The Intercept from naming Hamaguchi in this article, citing safety concerns.

Four former judge advocates — better known in the military as JAGs, as they are lawyers within the judge advocate general’s corps — blasted the supposed defense that the survivors’ waving hands did not constitute a two-arm surrender. Two used the word “ridiculous” to describe it.

“Waving is a way to attract attention. There was no need to kill them,” said Eugene Fidell, who served as a judge advocate in the Coast Guard and is now a senior research scholar at Yale Law School focused on military justice. “We don’t kill people who are doing this. We should have saved them. None of it makes any sense.”

The lawmaker who watched the video footage of the attack expressed skepticism about the U.S. official’s claim. “My impression is that these were two shipwrecked individuals,” they said after viewing the video. “I do think at least one of them used two arms.”

The Intercept was the first outlet to report that the U.S. military killed survivors of the September 2 boat strike in a follow-up attack. Since then, questions have swirled around the exact roles of President Donald Trump, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and Bradley in the operation, and how they arrived at the conclusion that their monthslong campaign of killings in the Caribbean and Pacific is lawful. Military and legal experts have said the strikes are tantamount to murder. But until now, less attention has been paid to the legal guidance Bradley sought.

The legal underpinnings for the campaign of extrajudicial killings that have so far taken the lives of at least 105 civilians began taking shape over the summer, when Trump signed a secret directive ordering the Pentagon to use military force against certain Latin American drug cartels.

A classified opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel claims that narcotics on supposed drug boats are lawful military targets because their cargo generates revenue for cartels whom the Trump administration claims are in a “non-international armed conflict” with the United States. Government officials told The Intercept that the memo was not actually signed by Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser until days after the September 2 attacks. Attached to that secret memo is a similarly secret list of designated terrorist organizations, or DTOs, and an annex containing pertinent findings from the U.S. intelligence community.

In August, Hegseth, the “target engagement authority,” signed an execute order, or EXORD, directing Special Operations forces to sink suspected drug smuggling boats, destroy their cargo, and kill their crews, according to government officials. Pentagon briefers have told U.S. officials that they do not need to positively identify all of those killed in strikes and only need to show a connection to a DTO or affiliate. Those sources say the affiliate label is “quite broad” and some of those killed may have only a tenuous link to a drug smuggling cartel.

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Hegseth gave the go-ahead order to Bradley, who presided over the September 2 mission from the JSOC joint operations center at Fort Bragg, according to four government sources. Present with him was Hamaguchi and other JSOC personnel, including his top deputies, and specialists in intelligence, targeting, and munitions. “I wish everybody could be in the room watching our professionals … Adm. Mitch Bradley and others at JSOC. … The deliberative process, the detail, the rigorous, the intel, the legal … that make sure that every one of those drug boats is tied to a designated terrorist organization,” said Hegseth later.

Before the initial strike, Bradley consulted with Hamaguchi, then gave the order to elite SEAL Team 6 operators to attack the four-engine speedboat, according to government sources. Some 45 minutes after that strike, Bradley issued the order for the follow-up attacks after again consulting with Hamaguchi.

Hamaguchi has been present in the JSOC war room for all the boat strikes, unless she delegated to a deputy, according to a SOCOM official. Most of the campaign has been conducted since Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga took command of JSOC in September.

During a recent briefing, Bradley explained that the JSOC staff judge advocate specifically said that the second strike on September 2 was lawful, according to the lawmaker. Bradley said that after initial debate, there was no dissent in the room before the follow-up strike that killed the survivors, that member of Congress told The Intercept.

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Trump posted edited footage of that strike on his Truth Social account on September 2. He wrote that the attack was conducted “on my Orders.” After the killings sparked a congressional firestorm, however, Trump and Hegseth distanced themselves from the attack on the survivors. “I wouldn’t have wanted that. Not a second strike,” said the president. The war secretary claimed that he “did not personally see survivors” amid the fire and smoke and had left the room before the second attack was ordered.

Bradley apparently has no reservations about having ordered the attacks. “He’s happy to take responsibility for those decisions,” a SOCOM official told The Intercept.

Hamaguchi, a former communications officer who served in the Army for nine years before she became a judge advocate, is well known within the small group of lawyers who advise special operations units. She was publicly identified as JSOC’s staff judge advocate in materials published by the U.S. Naval War College earlier this year.

Hamaguchi boasts an impeccable reputation according to seven former colleagues, who praised her as “sharp,” “smart,” and “a good person and attorney.” Only two years into her career as an attorney and days after being promoted to major, Hamaguchi found herself providing legal advice concerning a 16-count homicide in Afghanistan. Back in the U.S., she acted as a prosecutor at the sentencing proceedings of Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales. A military jury handed Bales the stiffest sentence possible for his massacre: life in prison without parole.

Most former colleagues of Hamaguchi who spoke with The Intercept expressed surprise or dismay at the prospect of her playing a role in the boat strikes.

It’s possible Hamaguchi voiced some objection or wrote a memorandum delineating her concerns about the September 2 attacks or subsequent strikes. “Without hearing directly from the JAG, it’s impossible to know to a certainty what she said or did,” said Todd Huntley, a former Navy judge advocate who served as a legal adviser on Joint Special Operations task forces conducting drone strikes in Afghanistan and elsewhere, and called Hamaguchi “fantastic, very smart, experienced and professional.”

JAGs are expected to speak up when they have legal concerns. But Huntley said that if someone repeatedly disputed the legal underpinnings of a monthslong campaign, they would not remain in that post long. “When the relationship between a commander and his JAG has broken down to the point where the commander no longer trusts or listens to the JAG’s advice, that JAG would typically be reassigned to a different unit or role within the command. Such a situation might arise if the JAG is seen as always saying ‘no’ to the commander,” he told The Intercept.

Former colleagues also told The Intercept that Hamaguchi is scheduled to retire when her JSOC tour ends in 2026 — but stressed her departure was not premature.

“I would be completely shocked if she thought these strikes were lawful,” said one former Defense Department colleague. “I’m sure she knows this is illegal. She knows that you can’t summarily execute criminal suspects in peacetime and can’t summarily execute criminal suspects during war. Any JAG worth their salt knows this.”

That colleague and four others said specifically that they were saddened to hear Hamaguchi was involved in attacks that all said were extrajudicial killings. Another former colleague said Hamaguchi had previously exhibited a “strong moral compass.” That person added: “I can’t tell you how sad this makes me.”

Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., the chair of the House Armed Services Committee, apparently called for a briefing by the judge advocate present with Bradley during the strike. “I want the lawyer there, too,” Rogers said earlier this month. Rogers’s office did not respond to questions by The Intercept about whether a briefing with Hamaguchi ever occurred.

Six other lawmakers or congressional staff said they were unaware of any briefings by Hamaguchi. Most did not know her by name.

Lawmakers are growing frustrated with what they describe as the War Department’s consistent failure to disclose key information about the attacks. “For months, in multiple briefings, the Department omitted the fact that there were two survivors in the initial September 2^nd strike,” said Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, last week. “We learned the circumstances of the strike from press reports.”

Reed called for the committee to be provided EXORDs; unedited video of all boat strikes; and all audio, transcripts, and chat logs of communications between commanders, aircraft, and others involved in the September 2 strike, among other pertinent information.

Since the execution of the men on September 2, the U.S. has appeared to refrain from killing survivors of subsequent boat strikes. Following an October 16 attack on a semisubmersible in the Caribbean Sea that killed two civilians, two other men were rescued by the U.S. and quickly repatriated to Colombia and Ecuador, respectively. Following three attacks on October 27 that killed 15 people aboard four separate boats, a survivor of a strike was spotted clinging to wreckage, and the U.S. alerted the Mexican Navy. Search teams did not find the man, and he is presumed dead.

“This tells you all you need to know,” said one government official briefed on the strikes. “They didn’t kill the later survivors because they know it was wrong. The first strike was obviously bad. They know it was not just immoral, it was illegal.”

The post U.S. Military Killed Boat Strike Survivors for Not Surrendering Correctly appeared first on The Intercept.

The media world is disgusted and indignant at CBS News’s new editor-in-chef Bari Weiss’s decision not to air a “60 Minutes” segment critical of the Trump administration’s deportation of Venezuelan migrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador. (In a now-deleted promo clip for the segment, the reporter said the migrants endured “four months of hell,” with one man saying, when asked if he thought he was going to die, “We thought we were already the living dead.”) According to a statement from CBS correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, the report had been internally reviewed and cleared by broadcaster’s legal and standards departments. It had also been heavily promoted on “60 Minutes”’ social media. But three hours before it was set to air, Weiss pulled the segment, citing the need for “additional reporting” and on-camera interviews with White House officials –– who had reportedly refused to comment for weeks.

This was, of course, an excuse that didn’t pass the most basic smell test. By all accounts, the piece had been thoroughly reported, and the idea that reporters need to secure on-camera interviews with government officials before reporting on government misdeeds effectively gives the administration veto power over CBS’s news reporting, as Alfonsi pointed out.

The outrage in the U.S. media has been swift and more than justified. But in the back and forth, some key context is being overlooked — context that might help clarify that as bleak as Weiss’s move is for the future of journalism, it is a perfect example of why Paramount’s new owner, David Ellison, hired her in the first place. Her job is to suck up to Trump, yes, but largely as a means –– not an end in and of itself. If Trump favors CBS and Paramount, it could undermine the pending Netflix–Warner Bros. Discovery merger, help Ellison take over WBD himself, and cement the Ellison family’s media concentration to further advance their business interests and their right-wing ideology. This is not just a matter of routine MAGA brain rot; there are material interests at work.

Unlike in traditional corporate media arrangements, Weiss reports directly to Ellison. Her role, from the onset, has been to police the CBS newsroom, an open acknowledgment that CBS News must reflect the ideological preferences of the Ellison family — namely, their fidelity to Israel and surveillance capitalism.

Despite efforts to paint Weiss as a “reporter” and her publication the Free Press as a “news outlet,” neither characterization is true. Weiss rose through the ranks as an opinion writer, going from Tablet to the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times to her own Silicon Valley-seeded and funded media property, the Free Press. Along the way, she never did anything, at least not with any degree of consistency, that could be seen as reporting.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with doing opinion writing and analysis (indeed, it’s what I do), but it in no way qualifies someone to run an ostensibly straight news organization, especially one the size of CBS News. Installing a leader like Weiss is what a company does when it’s attempting an ideological overhaul and gutting of a newsroom, not when they’re attempting to appeal to middle America or modestly counter an alleged liberal bias, as some claimed at the time.

Weiss built her brand going after the targets popular with her wealthy backers: supposedly “woke” college kids, trans people, and pro-Palestine voices, positioning her outlet as “Honest. Independent. Fearless” while carrying water for reactionary elites. Through that lens, Ellison’s decision to buy the Free Press earlier this year can best be seen not as a straight-forward business decision, but a commitment to a political project that would dovetail with the family’s broader ideological and business interests in surveillance and military technology.

A cursory look at the Free Press’s YouTube channel (Weiss’s closest analogue to running a TV news network) at the time of the purchase reveals a product of middling popularity. The site’s videos rarely rack up more than 200,000 views, and the channel does not crack the top 1,000 on YouTube. It’s true that the outlet’s Substack supposedly had 155,000 paid subscribers, but by no objective metric did this justify its eventual $150 million purchase price. The payment was for something much less direct, and much less unseemly: Weiss integrating her political project with CBS News to slowly turn the once-storied brand into a tabloid news channel for cheerleading Israel, U.S. military interests, and right-wing social causes. By associating a valued name in journalism with Ellison and Weiss’s agenda, their politics take on a sheen of credibility — a bargain that far exceeds any purchase price.

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Central to this agenda is steadfast support for Israel. Ellison and Weiss’s shared commitment to Israel is hard to overstate: Weiss began her career at Columbia attempting to get Palestinian academics fired, and throughout her career has prioritized the topic with consistency, vitriol, and vindictiveness. When Ellison’s bid to buy Paramount was announced in the summer of 2024, his company Skydance published a press release in The Jerusalem Post stating David Ellison “loves Israel,” has “Zionist values,” and “quietly donates quite a bit to the State of Israel and the IDF.” Larry Ellison, David’s father and the co-founder of Oracle, made what was the largest single private donation to the nonprofit Friends of the Israel Defense Forces in 2017.

One thing gumming up the works is that Paramount, by Ellison’s own admission, is simply the appetizer for their grand designs of concentrated media ownership, and the Ellisons will need the Trump Department of Justice to help expand their reach any further. While the straightforward narrative of “pro-Trump media defends Trump” is, strictly speaking, true, it misses the bigger picture. Indeed, to say that Weiss and Ellison are ideologically MAGA wouldn’t be entirely correct –– or at least be very incomplete. Weiss and the Free Press’s journalistic output has frequently been critical of Trump. Despite his father Larry being a long-time Republican megadonor, David Ellison has donated large sums to Democrats.

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In the relatively tight window of Trump’s second term –– which has been marked by outright venality, old-school personality politics, and a total abandonment of anti-trust law –– the Ellisons have an opportunity to consolidate unprecedented control of media into the hands of one company. First, they snatched up CBS News’s parent company, Paramount, earlier this year for the relatively bargain basement price of $8 billion, and now they’re setting their sights on the big prize of Warner Bros. Discovery. That company has made a deal with Netflix, currently valued at nearly $83 billion, but it could still very much fall apart if Trump decides it should during the anti-trust review process, and Larry Ellison isn’t letting go without a fight.

Trump has made his demand that “60 Minutes” be nice to him abundantly clear by criticizing the Ellisons, CBS News, and “60 Minutes” just days before Weiss pulled the Venezuelan migrant segment. It’s important to situate the latest capitulation to the ever-petulant Trump as part of a much broader media consolidation effort. Ellison senior just took control over TikTok, and Ellison the younger controlling CBS News and potentially CNN, HBO, and other influential Warner Bros. Discovery media properties gives them power to not just profit off of media concentration, but also to use this unprecedented megaphone to shape the news in a way that benefits Oracle’s interests, Israel, and beyond.

Their goal isn’t just to promote Trumpism –– this is a temporary necessity with a lot of obvious ideological overlap –– it’s to promote the Ellisons’ own agenda. To do this, and do this swiftly, David Ellison’s foot soldiers within these organizations, with Weiss leading the way, are going to have to move fast, break journalism norms, and potentially wreck the old models and brands of trust and credibility –– ideally before Trump leaves office or other media competitors manage to win his favor first. Weiss and Ellison’s interference into “60 Minutes” creates a de facto state media, but their burgeoning empire is about consolidating top-down oligarchical control over legacy media brands that will endure long after Trump fades into irrelevance.

The post Bari Weiss Is Doing Exactly What She Was Installed at CBS to Do appeared first on The Intercept.

The TikTok deal announced on Thursday poses a fundamental threat to free and honest discourse about Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Under the reported deal, the Chinese company that owns the short-video social media app, ByteDance, will transfer control of TikTok’s algorithm and other U.S. operations to a new consortium of investors led by the U.S. technology company Oracle. The long-gestating deal will give Oracle’s billionaire pro-Trump board members Larry Ellison and Safra Catz the power to impose their anti-Palestinian agenda over the content that TikTok users see.

Most mainstream U.S. media coverage of the TikTok deal has completely ignored the explicitly anti-Palestinian agenda of its biggest Western investors. TikTok has played a critical role in helping hundreds of millions of users see the ugly reality of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. But the Trump-favored billionaires who will take over TikTok’s U.S. operations have a documented agenda of both suppressing voices critical of Israel and supporting the very Israeli military that has killed so many Palestinian civilians. Without safeguards in place, TikTok’s U.S. operations could soon become an exercise in blocking users from seeing and reacting to the crimes against humanity perpetrated by a major U.S. ally.

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Ellison and Catz have a documented record of supporting Israel and its military. Ellison is a major donor to the Israeli military — in 2017, he donated $16.6 million to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, what was at the time the nonprofit’s largest single donation ever — as well as a close confidant of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Catz, who stepped down as Oracle’s CEO in September, has also been quite blunt about the company’s ideological agenda. The Israeli American billionaire said while unveiling a new Oracle data center in Jerusalem in 2021, “I love my employees, and if they don’t agree with our mission to support the State of Israel then maybe we aren’t the right company for them. Larry and I are publicly committed to Israel and devote personal time to the country, and no one should be surprised by that.” The Ellison family has also brought his pro-Israel agenda to CBS News, where Larry’s son, David Ellison, recently installed anti-Palestinian ideologue Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief.

TikTok played an important role in the sea change of U.S. opinion about Israel, particularly among young people. It’s why the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, the organization I work for, condemned the sale as a “desperate” attempt to silence young Americans.

What’s at stake is no less than whether or not U.S. voters will continue to be able to see what Israel’s military is doing to Palestinians. While many mainstream media outlets pushed coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza that was deferential to Israeli government talking points, TikTok users watched unfiltered videos of Israel’s horrific attacks on Palestinian civilians.

The effects are undeniable: A March Pew Research poll found Israel’s unfavorable rating among Republicans aged 18 to 49 had risen from 35 to 50 percent (among the same age group of Democrats, the country’s unfavorability also climbed almost 10 percentage points to 71 percent). A September New York Times/Siena University survey found 54 percent of Democrats said they sympathized more with the Palestinians, while only 13 percent expressed greater empathy for Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made it clear that he understands the consequences of access to unfiltered social media. He recently described the sale of TikTok as “the most important purchase happening. … I hope it goes through because it can be consequential.” Netanyahu, who faces an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in Gaza, sees control of TikTok as a part of Israel’s military strategy. “You have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefield, and one of the most important ones is social media,” he continued.

President Joe Biden signed legislation in 2024 mandating that ByteDance sell its U.S. operations. That law forced the sale of TikTok under threat of an outright ban, which briefly took effect in January 2025. The new “agreement,” which is reportedly set to close on January 22, will establish a new and separate TikTok joint venture that will control U.S. operations, U.S. user data, and the TikTok algorithm. Just over 80 percent of the new company, dubbed “TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC,” will reportedly be owned by investors that include Oracle, private equity group Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi-based MGX. ByteDance will retain a 19.9 percent share.

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The official arguments for forcing the sale focused on preventing Chinese government surveillance of TikTok users, but some elected U.S. officials were more honest. At a McCain Institute forum in May 2024, then-Sen. Mitt Romney said, “Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites — it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.”

That’s why advocates for human rights and a free press must work to challenge and reverse this government-sanctioned censorship effort. That means calling on both current and future members of Congress, as well as future White House administrations, to undo this dangerous media consolidation. The Ellison family’s control of TikTok, Paramount, and potentially other massive media properties in the future is a threat to free and open public discourse about U.S. foreign policy, particularly U.S. military support for Israel.

The work of chilling dissent has already been underway. Even before the 2024 law was passed, TikTok had begun taking steps to silence users who have criticized Israel. In July 2025, TikTok hired Erica Mindel, a former Israeli soldier with a documented record of anti-Palestinian politics, to police user speech on the platform. Given the Israeli military’s long record of propaganda, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, especially toward Palestinians, no former Israeli soldier should have been given the power to police TikTok users’ speech.

Even so, savvy social media users have long demonstrated an ability to organize and evade social media censorship, jumping from platform to platform regardless of what Western billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have tried to do. These challenges will continue in new forms, as demonstrated by the recently launched #TakeBackTikTok campaign. The campaign is pushing for a “user rebellion” in which American TikTok users challenge the Oracle takeover by flooding the platform with content in support of Palestinian liberation. Organizers began making their case last weekend with a massive projection onto Oracle’s U.K. offices.

This is a critical moment. The transfer of TikTok’s algorithm from ByteDance to Oracle would mean that TikTok’s content would move from being controlled by a company under the influence of a Chinese government committing genocide against Uyghurs to being controlled by U.S. investors who want to silence TikTok users’ opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Once billionaire anti-Palestinian investors and ideologues take control, TikTok users who are critical of Israel will need to fight even harder and more creatively to evade the suppression of free speech. Millions of U.S. citizens now support an end to unquestioned diplomatic and military support for Israel. Anti-Palestinian billionaires like Ellison and Catz know this full well, and it’s up to us to stand in the way of their efforts to subvert the will of the many.

Correction: December 21, 2025, 6:10 p.m. ET
This story previously stated that, under the deal, Oracle could now moderate the content that 2 billion users see, which is the number of TikTok users globally, rather than in the U.S. As the deal is not yet final, it remains to be seen how many users could be affected.

The post Anti-Palestinian Billionaires Can Now Control What TikTok Users See appeared first on The Intercept.

Lewis was shocked, she recalled in an interview with The Intercept, as were her colleagues and students. The school did not give any explanation for why they did not renew her contract. Unbeknownst to Lewis, the pro-Israel blacklist organization StopAntisemitism had recently launched an online campaign against her, framing her social media posts about the genocide in Gaza as “using her platform to spread vile antisemitic hate online.”

Lewis is one of at least 400 people StopAntisemitism has taken credit for getting ousted from their jobs in its online crusade, which has drawn widespread attention for targeting more prominent figures — including right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson, progressive actor-turned-activist Cynthia Nixon, and the popular children’s educator Rachel Accurso, known by her stage name Ms. Rachel. Lewis, without her own platform or mass audience, is one of only two recent StopAntisemitism targets pursuing active federal lawsuits against the blacklist organization.

“I really thought we had free speech and this wouldn’t be a problem — that’s what social media is for, is that you can vent,” Lewis told The Intercept. “It wasn’t like I was saying anything above and beyond what other critics of Israel were saying.”

She sued StopAntisemitism for defamation in an Oregon state court over the summer, and the case was elevated to federal court last month. Her suit faces long odds, legal experts told The Intercept, but serves as a rare chance to register public dissent in the courts against the group’s targeting.

Founded in 2018 by social media influencer Liora Reznichenko and funded by the California-based real estate millionaire Adam Milstein’s foundation, StopAntisemitism targets public figures and private individuals over their criticism of Israel or advocacy for Palestinian human rights — forming a single-issue Rolodex similar to Canary Mission. The blacklists supplement the fierce crackdowns and censorship against Palestine solidarity activism increasingly seen at schools across the U.S. since the outbreak of Israel’s war on Gaza.

StopAntisemitism elevated its own profile by targeting Accurso, who has used her platform to advocate for Palestinian children who have been killed, wounded, or starved by the Israeli military in Gaza, especially after she posted videos with a Palestinian 3-year-old who had lost her leg. In April, StopAntisemitism requested that the Department of Justice investigate her for alleged ties to Hamas, despite no evidence of such connections, and this month named her a finalist for “Antisemite of the Year,” on a list that also included Carlson and Nixon.

Accurso has faced an increase in online harassment, including physical threatening letters to her and her family members, she said in an Instagram post after StopAntisemitism released the “Antisemite” list. Her audience of nearly 5 million on Instagram and more than 18 million on YouTube has largely rallied around her — offering backing that hundreds of people like Lewis don’t have.

Reznichenko said that since October 7, 2023, her group has profiled 1,000 employees and students, often sharing their work or school information, encouraging their followers to contact their employers and at times calling for their firing, according to an October interview with the right-leaning Zionist media outlet Jewish News Syndicate.

When StopAntisemitism shared screenshots from Lewis’s personal Facebook page last August, it amplified the posts to a far larger audience than Lewis’s 2,000 Facebook friends. Lewis had criticized Israel’s apartheid rule over Palestinians, its genocide in Gaza, and Western support for the war. StopAntisemitism listed an email address for Valley Catholic School and encouraged its followers, who currently number more than 300,000 on X, to contact Lewis’s employer. “Warning to parents of students in Beaverton,” the post read. “Students at [Valley Catholic] are in grave danger under Sue Lewis.”

What followed was a flood of messages demanding her firing and a slew of personal attacks. “Their phones are ringing off the hook,” one user commented below the post, sharing the school’s phone number and listing school administrators’ names. “Keep trying.”

In one post highlighted by StopAntisemitism, Lewis reshared a statement pointing out the false reports of “babies beheaded” by Hamas and exaggerated claims of systemic rape to “mobilize Western support for the Palestinian genocide.” She had quipped in a separate post that Hamas would “wipe out Israel with their homemade bombs, small arms, hang gliders, grenades and sling shots,” and later clarified the post was sarcastic, given Israel’s clear military advantage thanks to billions of dollars’ worth of military aid each year from the U.S. and allied nations.

The following month, StopAntisemitism posted again: “Update: antisemite Sue Lewis is thankfully no longer teaching at Valley Catholic High School.”

In her lawsuit, Lewis is alleging that StopAntisemitism and Reznichenko defamed her, invaded her privacy, interfered with her work contract, and inflicted emotional distress.

Valley Catholic School did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

In court filings seeking an immediate dismissal, the organization has claimed its statements are true and protected by the First Amendment as opinion.

Groups like StopAntisemitism have free speech rights too, said Aaron Terr, an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, “even when it’s harsh, unfair, or deeply offensive.”

StopAntisemitism declined to comment on Lewis’s lawsuit and instead doubled down on its criticism of Accurso.

“Regarding Ms. Rachel, it is disturbing that the media continues to pretend she merely advocates for Palestinian children,” Reznichenko said in a statement to The Intercept, claiming that she attempted “to pass off pictures of children with birth defects as victims of Israeli aggression” and had inspired “an army of antisemitic lunatics” to make threats against the group.

A spokesperson for Accurso called Reznichenko’s accusations false and dangerous. In a statement, Accurso said that her “compassion and care for children doesn’t stop at any border” and that her advocacy for children in Gaza is no exception.

“I want every child to be fed, safe and able to attend school,” Accurso said. “I know that everyone benefits when we help children reach their full potential and grow into thriving, healthy adults. I also know that it’s not right for children to suffer like they are currently in Gaza, Sudan, the Congo and beyond.”

While her project’s main currency lies in the mass ire of social media, Reznichenko has also been a recurring guest on broadcast TV, including Jake Tapper’s CNN show, Fox News, and NewsNation. In a recent segment on Fox, she blamed the recent Bondi Beach mass shooting on the Palestinian liberation movement, calling for the deportation of “radicals” who want to “globalize the intifada,” a historical reference to Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation, often framed by pro-Israel advocates as a call for violence against Jews.

The Encino, California-based nonprofit Merona Leadership Foundation, of which Adam Milstein is president, paid Reznichenko $142,722 in 2023 while she worked for StopAntisemitism, according to the group’s tax filing. The foundation, which helps cover StopAntisemitism’s operating costs, serves as one vehicle for Milstein to support efforts to crush Palestinian solidarity work, as first reported by the Washington Post.

The Milstein Family Foundation, which Milstein operates with his wife Gila, helps fund the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, and its offshoot, Democratic Majority for Israel, as well as the right-wing think tank Heritage Foundation. Milstein, who pleaded guilty to tax evasion in 2008, has also been tied to blacklist group Canary Mission and has praised their work, but rejected claims that he funds the group. StopAntisemitism, however, is listed as among the Milstein foundation’s supported groups.

The Milsteins sit on the board of Impact Forum Foundation, a network of dozens of pro-Israel philanthropists who support nonprofits that include StopAntisemitism. The supported companies include media organizations such as Jewish News Syndicate, pro-Israel think tanks like Middle East Forum and Jewish Institute for National Security of America, and advocacy groups such as Students Supporting Israel, Parents Defending Education, and ELNET, which has described itself as the AIPAC of Europe. The network’s website said the coalition’s aims are to “fight antisemitism, strengthen the State of Israel, and advance the U.S. – Israel alliance.”

The Milsteins did not respond to a request for comment.

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Lewis’s lawsuit against StopAntisemitism represents a rare legal challenge against pro-Israel doxxing groups, and it faces long odds because of First Amendment protections. Former Cabrini University professor Kareem Tannous, a Palestinian American who lost his job in 2022 after StopAntisemitism blacklisted him over social media posts critical of Israel, sued the group for defamation but had his case dismissed when a federal judge in Pennsylvania found that StopAntisemitism’s statements were protected opinion.

A federal judge in Michigan made a similar free speech ruling in a lawsuit filed against StopAntisemitism in 2024 by a former University of Michigan hockey player, John Druskinis, who the group had falsely accused of painting a swastika on the sidewalk in front of the Jewish Resource Center when he had instead painted a male genitalia and a homophobic slur. Although the court upheld Druskinis’s defamation claim, he dropped his suit earlier this year.

Aside from Lewis’s suit, the only other active lawsuit against StopAntisemitism was filed by Abeer AbouYabis, a physician and former professor at Emory’s medical school, who was fired after the group doxxed her over a social media post expressing “hope” in a free Palestine and praising the “glory” of Palestinian “resistance fighters” on October 7.

Unlike previous lawsuits, AbouYabis, who is an Arab Palestinian and Muslim, alleges discrimination based on race, religion, and nationality, as well as retaliation allegations under the American Disabilities Act. In a 213-page complaint, AbouYabis alleged Emory fired her while she was on medical leave for post-traumatic stress disorder after 37 members of her family were killed in the first month of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. The suit, originally filed in May, names the school, the Milsteins, StopAntisemitism, and Canary Mission, accusing Emory of collaborating with the latter two to silence AbouYabis’s protected speech. In a motion to dismiss the lawsuit, attorneys for the Milsteins did not deny its financial support for StopAntisemitism, but said the couple cannot be held liable “for the acts of these third party websites.”

Central to Lewis’s complaint against StopAntisemitism is the group’s email campaign against Lewis as part of a series targeting educators called “Corrupting the Classroom,” in which they labeled her “a raging antisemite.” A link on the campaign’s site, which remains active, leads directly to a pre-written email message addressed to Valley Catholic School’s principal. The email calls Lewis “a grave threat to the safety and well-being of your students” whose “presence in the classroom cannot be tolerated” and called on the principal “to take immediate and decisive action to address this situation.” Lewis’s lawsuit frames the campaign’s message as “false and malicious statements” about her personal views on the Israeli government’s policies. The campaign, the suit alleges, is full of “mischaracterizations and distortions” of her social media posts.

In a motion to dismiss Lewis’s case, attorneys for the Reznichenko and the organization defended the “Corrupting the Classroom” campaign as having used Lewis’s own “quotes and screenshots from Plaintiff’s publicly available social media profile,” arguing that the group “simply framed them as an example of dangerous antisemitism, a conclusion StopAntisemitism is entitled to reach and express under the First Amendment” and Oregon law.

FIRE’s Terr, who is familiar with cases involving StopAntisemitism, said he agreed with the court’s previous decisions in other cases where judges ruled to protect StopAntisemitism’s free speech rights, even if he disagreed with the group’s tactics. It would be worse, he said, if the government could decide what speech is or is not acceptable.

The second Trump administration, however, has tested the limits of such constitutional protections by passing executive orders inspired by the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther, which aims to target the pro-Palestinian movement by accusing them of being Hamas supporters. The orders have only emboldened groups like StopAntisemitism.

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Earlier this year, the administration began detaining and attempting to deport high profile pro-Palestinian activists Mohsen Mahdawi, Rümeysa Öztürk, and Mahmoud Khalil — the latter of whom Reznichenko regularly attacks online. The right-wing Zionist group Betar has openly collaborated with the Trump administration, providing lists of pro-Palestine activists in the U.S. for deportation. StopAntisemitism has cheered on such deportation efforts. A Palestinian woman who joined a pro-Palestine protest in New York, Leqaa Kordia, has been in immigration detention since early March despite a judge twice ordering her release. The Trump administration and groups like StopAntisemitism have accused her of being a “pro-Hamas extremist” while failing to present evidence.

While Terr said StopAntisemitism is protected by the First Amendment, he criticized blacklist groups like StopAntisemitism for punishing people who say things the group disagrees with by “trying to inflict devastating consequences on people, like depriving them of their livelihoods,” which he said chills further speech.

“When an organization like Stop Anti-Semitism not only amplifies someone else’s social media posts to criticize their views, but also organizes a campaign to get them fired, it’s right to call that out as illiberal,” Terr said.

Calling out StopAntisemitism is perhaps the best recourse people have in seeking accountability, said Dylan Saba, an attorney at Palestine Legal, which has supported students and faculty who have been censored by schools due to their advocacy for Palestine.

“Because the speech protections are so strong, it’s really a situation in which sunlight is the best disinfectant,” Saba said. “The more that people understand who and what these organizations are, that there is this mass campaign to propagate smears and to stamp out any criticism of Zionism or criticism of U.S. support for Israel, the less effective those smears will be — especially as more people are becoming familiar with the issue of Palestine.”

Hundreds of comments by supporters of StopAntisemitism were leveled at Lewis, some of which her attorney described as as “violent and threatening” in court filings. They ranged from misogynist attacks to others calling for her to get a pager, referencing an attack in Lebanon in which the Israeli military detonated thousands of pagers and handheld walkie-talkies used by Hezbollah members, killing 42 people, including 12 civilians, and injuring more than 4,000 others. Another user suggested Lewis should be “teached” by Mossad, according to a police report she filed with the Portland Police Department last year, a reference to Israel’s intelligence agency, which has a long history of assassinating its political enemies.

Lewis said the attacks strained her marriage and her livelihood. She said she has retained some of her students for private lessons, teaching from her home studio, but she misses the camaraderie with her co-workers and helping build the school’s music program.

Lewis, who is self-funding her case through her savings and a GoFundMe, said she is motivated by the many students who have been blacklisted by the group and whose lives have been interrupted because of StopAntisemitism’s blacklist.

“I’m a teacher, that’s what I do — I try to help my students reach their full potential,” she said. “Their whole career could be just snuffed out, you know? They may never be able to work in their chosen field. They got student loan debt, they got to pay the rent.”

The post StopAntisemitism Takes Credit for Getting Hundreds Fired. A Music Teacher Is Suing. appeared first on The Intercept.

ICE has secured a deal with surveillance firm BI Incorporated as part of a new program, first reported in October by The Intercept, to use private bounty hunters to determine the locations of immigrants in exchange for monetary bonuses.

BI, which was acquired by the GEO Group in 2011, is one of several firms hired by ICE to provide “skip tracing” services, in which its teams of corporate investigators will use surveillance to track immigrants across the country to their homes and places of work so federal agents can easily swoop in and make arrests.

Records show ICE has already paid BI $1.6 million, with the potential for the contract to grow to as much as $121 million by the time it concludes in 2027.

ICE’s push to privatize its hunt for immigrants has drawn the scrutiny of Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., who warned it “invites the very abuses, secrecy, and corruption our founders sought to prevent.”

Neither BI Incorporated nor GEO Group immediately responded to a request for comment.

The deal illustrates a strategy of vertical integration within GEO Group, which has found a growing line of business operating for-profit immigration detention centers under the second Trump administration. In this case, the corporation stands to be paid by the federal government to both find immigrants and then to imprison them.

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Shares of GEO Group, which donated to both Trump’s reelection campaign and his inaugural fund, spiked following his 2024 victory. Trump’s return to office has proven fortuitous for GEO Group: The president’s “Big Beautiful Bill” earmarked $45 billion for jailing immigrants. “This is a unique moment in our company’s history,” GEO Group CEO J. David Donahue told investors in May, “and we believe we are well-positioned to meet this unprecedented opportunity.”

GEO Group has faced decades of criticism over alleged mismanagement of its facilities and claims of rampant abuse of inmates. In August, The Intercept reported the suicide of a Chinese immigrant held at a GEO Group-operated prison in Pennsylvania. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal complaint over the facility in July, criticizing “horrific conditions” at the prison, including repeated instances of medical neglect.

In 2023, GEO Group was hit by a class-action lawsuit alleging the “months-long poisoning” from a chemical disinfectant of more than 1,300 inmates at a California immigration detention center. In May, Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk, jailed for her criticism of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, alleged her GEO Group-managed jail delayed treatment while she experienced an asthma attack.

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The ICE contract record does not say whether BI would provide on-the-ground bounty hunting services, software-based investigative services, or a combination of both. ICE has previously told potential bounty hunting contractors, “It is dependent upon the vendor to complete the work required by contract,” but “Should a vendor choose to subcontract, that is at their discretion,” according to procurement correspondence reviewed by The Intercept.

BI has a long history in immigrant surveillance, having received hundreds of millions of dollars from the government to date through past contracts for ankle monitor-based tracking. The company specializes in remote surveillance and person-monitoring services, including sales of GPS bracelets and other tracking devices. “Location tracking enables individuals to work and live in the community while being monitored closely for curfews, movement, and more,” according to the company’s website. “BI offers ankle bracelet, wrist-worn, and mobile tracking solutions to meet the needs of varying risk levels.”

BI also touts its suite of software products, including case management applications for monitoring the movements of immigrants and other targets, as well as tools that allow agencies to chart a target’s “geographic and spatial location data” across Google Maps. It is unknown if the company has access to commercial mobile device locational data, or relies solely on body-mounted trackers.

But with many years of detailed GPS data pertaining to the every movement of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, BI and GEO Group hold a trove of locational information that would be of obvious value to the bounty hunting initiative.

In a November contracting document pertaining to the skip tracing effort, ICE told potential bounty hunting vendors they are “expected to provide their own internal skip tracing tools,” providing contractors with a great deal of latitude to employ surveillance products and techniques of their choosing. The document further noted that private ICE bounty hunters will not be provided credentials to identify them as agents of the government.

404 Media reported Thursday that ICE had also contracted with AI Solutions 87, “a company that makes ‘AI agents’ to rapidly track down targets.”

The post ICE Hires Immigrant Bounty Hunters From Private Prison Company GEO Group appeared first on The Intercept.