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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Last night, Donald Trump took the stage and announced in a bizarre, rambling speech what he framed as a gift to America’s troops: a one-time, $1,776 “warrior dividend,” a $1,776 payment pitched as gratitude for service members and veterans. Wrapped in Revolutionary War imagery and just in time for the holidays, the promise was sold as proof that Trump takes care of our warriors. But beneath the applause and bunting, the announcement amounted to another empty, Trump-branded PR exercise.

In reality, what Trump sold as a Christmas “warrior dividend” wasn’t a new benefit at all. As Politico reported, the money came from a military housing stipend Congress had already approved months earlier to address lagging quality-of-life conditions for service members. Under Trump, that benefit was simply rebranded, repackaged, and redelivered — not as a right earned through service, but as a personal gift bestowed from above.

Among veterans, the reaction was sharper — and darker. Former service members joked the dividend felt like a “steak and lobster deployment dinner,” the old military omen: When leadership suddenly splurges, bad news usually follows. Combat veteran and military accountability activist Greg Stoker summed it up more bluntly on Instagram, calling the announcement “corny as hell,” a sentiment echoed across veteran circles who’ve learned to distrust flashy gestures that arrive just before cuts, purges, or new demands.

That context matters. Trump’s sudden burst of generosity comes after years of deliberate harm to veterans, military families, and the institutions meant to support them. Set against that record, the “warrior dividend” isn’t gratitude — it’s the latest insult. For $1,776, a number that barely covers a month’s rent in much of the country, Trump seems to believe he can purchase loyalty, silence dissent, and paper over structural harm.

“Suckers”

This indifference isn’t an abstraction. Last week on Capitol Hill, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem assured lawmakers that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has “not deported” military veterans. As she spoke, an Army veteran appeared on screen from exile. Sae Joon Park, a Purple Heart recipient wounded in combat, had been deported to South Korea after nearly 50 years in the United States, ordered to self-deport over decades-old drug charges tied to his post-traumatic stress disorder. As Noem offered perfunctory thanks for his service and claimed her hands were tied, Rep. Seth Magaziner, D-R.I., cut in: Park had taken two bullets for his country — would the administration help him come home? Noem promised only to “look at his case.” The lie had already been exposed.

Park’s case is not an anomaly. Under Trump, military service has offered little protection from detention or deportation. During his first term, immigration authorities placed at least 250 veterans into removal proceedings and deported 92 of them, many of whom have service-connected trauma from their time in combat. Among them was Miguel Perez Jr., an Army veteran who served two tours in Afghanistan before being deported to Mexico. Just last month, Jose Barco, a Purple Heart recipient wounded in Iraq, was deported from a detention center in Arizona at 4 a.m.

Treating war heroes as disposable reflects how Trump fundamentally understands the military. He does not treat the military as a civic institution bound by mutual obligation or constitutional restraint. He treats it as a coercive instrument — a disciplined force that can be displayed, redirected, or withdrawn depending on political need. Loyalty, in this framework, is not owed to the Constitution but to the ruler. Compliance is rewarded with praise; independence is punished with humiliation or exile. In Trump’s worldview, soldiers are not citizens who serve; they are assets to be deployed, threatened, or discarded. That calculus explains everything from the casual talk of executing generals, to the weaponization of National Guard deployments, to the ease with which veterans are deported or fired, to reportedly calling troops “suckers.”

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Beyond the rhetoric, Trump’s policies have inflicted concrete harm on veterans. His administration is gutting the Department of Veterans Affairs, planning to eliminate more than 70,000 jobs and roll staffing back to pre-2019 levels. Hundreds of VA clinicians warned Congress that the cuts threaten veterans’ health care nationwide. Internal data show the VA has already lost more than 600 doctors and nearly 2,000 nurses, while appointment wait times creep upward. One Democratic member of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee summed it up as “a full-scale, no-holds-barred assault on veterans.” Trump’s answer has been privatization — diverting billions to for-profit providers and pushing veterans toward telehealth stopgaps or long drives to private clinics as the VA’s capacity erodes.

The ideology behind these cuts has been stated plainly. “DEI is dead,” said Trump’s handpicked “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth — as if staffing, access, and continuity of care were political indulgences rather than lifelines. In practice, that posture means fewer PTSD counselors, fewer clinicians in rural hospitals, and fewer staff processing disability claims and GI Bill benefits. The result is predictable: a growing population of veterans left to navigate trauma and bureaucracy alone, after the country that sent them to war decides it is finished paying its share.

That assault on the VA is part of Trump’s broader purge of the federal workforce — a purge that disproportionately harms veterans. Roughly 1 in 4 federal civilian employees is a veteran, and nearly 900,000 veterans and military spouses work in federal jobs. In less than a year, 100,000 federal workers were pushed out through firings or “buyouts.” Now entire agencies face decimation under Trump’s so-called Schedule F plan, aiming to liquidate government “waste” — and with it, the livelihoods of those veteran employees. Each statistic is a human story: an Air Force veteran and sole breadwinner losing her second career just months in; a disabled Navy veteran in tears after being canned from the Department of Education. “He said he wanted to make the country great again… but this is not making it great, said Cynthia Williams, an Army vet in Michigan who lost her federal job. For veterans who once believed Trump’s promises, these actions feel like a stab in the back. As one discarded veteran bluntly put it: “I feel like I got a big F-you from the American people, and I feel betrayed.”

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For veterans who are Black, brown, women, or LGBTQ+, Trump’s proposition is not merely that their service is inconvenient or expendable. It is that it never counted in the first place. His project is not just exclusion but erasure — a form of historical revisionism designed to strip these service members of visibility, lineage, and moral claim. If their stories are removed from the record, then their sacrifices become debatable, their demands for care sound excessive, and their request for a share of the American promise can be dismissed as entitlement rather than earned right.

At Trump’s direction, the Pentagon has even undertaken an effort to purge tens of thousands of websites, images, and historical materials that document the contributions of Black, Brown, women, and LGBTQ service members, framing them as “DEI” content rather than military history. Displays honoring Black soldiers have been removed from U.S. military cemeteries overseas, including exhibits acknowledging the segregation-era troops who fought and died for freedoms they were denied at home. Even the legacy of the Tuskegee Airmen — among the most celebrated units in American military history — was briefly scrubbed from Air Force training materials before public backlash forced a reversal. This is what Trump means when his administration declares “DEI is dead.” It is not about bureaucratic language. It is about narrowing who gets remembered as having served — and, by extension, who is allowed to ask this country for anything in return.

Toy Soldiers

Trump’s indifference does not begin once the uniform comes off. It begins with those still wearing it — active-duty service members and their families — who have been reduced to bargaining chips and props under Trump’s command.

When partisan warfare in Washington led to a budget standoff, Trump gleefully held American soldiers, sailors, and Marines hostage. During the government shutdown, military paychecks nearly ground to a halt, and the administration allowed some non-active personnel to go unpaid until the government reopened. The uncertainty sent military families into a panic. By October 2025, the shutdown was in its fourth week, and families on bases across America were lining up at food banks to feed their kids. The Armed Services YMCA reported surges in demand of 30 to 75 percent at its food pantries near installations. Imagine serving on active duty in the world’s largest and most expensive military, only to find yourself, in uniform, accepting donated groceries to stave off hunger. “When you see service members raising their hands saying, ‘I need food,’ it is surprising and shocking,” one nonprofit leader said.

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And when Washington’s games moved from budget brinkmanship to political theater, the military itself became part of the set. There is a difference between commanding an army and staging one. In 2025, National Guard units were mobilized not for disaster response or defense, but for optics — summoned to pad out a presidential military parade in Washington, a spectacle to coincide with the president’s 79th birthday. Additional troops were mustered away from their families and deployed into Democratic-led cities under vague claims of restoring “law and order,” in what was clearly a politically calculated show of force. What followed looked less like security than improvisation: Troops idled without clear objectives, reduced to crowd control, traffic duty, or cleanup work. In Washington, Guard members deployed under these domestic orders were exposed to street-level violence, which culminated in a November shooting that killed one service member and critically wounded another. The symbolism was Trump’s. The risk was theirs.

The Price of Betrayal

At its core, this is a breach of covenant. Military service rests on a simple, fragile exchange: Service members accept extraordinary risk on behalf of the state, and in return the state assumes an enduring obligation to care for them — in life, in injury, and in the aftermath. When that obligation is hollowed out or treated as optional, the consequences are not symbolic. They become structural. A nation that fails to keep faith with those who serve eventually finds itself without people willing to serve when it matters most.

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The cumulative effect on morale is corrosive. When service becomes conditional and disposable, the damage shows up in lives lost and ranks hollowed out. Rates of veteran suicide remain staggeringly high, with the VA reporting more than 6,300 veteran deaths by suicide in the most recent annual data, a rate significantly higher than the civilian population. Active-duty deaths have risen as well: The Pentagon recorded more than 520 suicides among service members in 2023, many of them involving troops who had never faced direct combat. Instead, they faced the psychological barrage of financial stress, legal and administrative woes, relationship strain. These deaths are not the byproduct of battlefield loss. They reflect something deeper — a system that repeatedly fails to care for people after it has extracted their labor, discipline, and risk.

That erosion of trust now shows up in force readiness. The U.S. military missed its recruitment targets by more than 41,000 recruits in fiscal year 2023, forcing reductions in force structure and long-term planning. While enlistment numbers ticked upward in 2024 and 2025, independent fact-checkers have shown that those gains began before Trump’s return and do not reverse the broader, decadeslong decline in enlistment or eligibility. Young Americans are watching how veterans are treated — deported, fired, denied care, pushed toward food banks — and drawing their own conclusions.

When you set aside Trump’s checks, this is how he really regards the military. Not just insult, but attrition. Not just cruelty, but vulnerability. An all-volunteer force depends on belief — that service will be rewarded with dignity, care, and reciprocity. When that belief collapses, the consequences are measured in empty billets and early graves. Trump doesn’t care if you served. And more young Americans, seeing the discarded generation before them, are quietly deciding they don’t want to be “suckers,” either.

The post The “Warrior Dividend” Is Trump’s Latest PR Stunt to Act Like He Cares About the Troops appeared first on The Intercept.

In November, in the wake of the release of tens of thousands of new documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, New York Times columnist David Brooks announced his intention to sit this one out.

In a column titled “The Epstein Story? Count Me Out,” Brooks, a mainstay of the anti-Trump center-right, dismissed the furor over Epstein as an extension of QAnon, the far-right conspiracy cult that emerged during the first Trump administration and centered around increasingly deranged myths around a pedophile cabal that supposedly ran the world. The case was like catnip to QAnon types, Brooks argued, because it revealed that a powerful, well-connected financier really was engaged in sex-trafficking.

Brooks didn’t mention that he had not only met Epstein in the past, but also attended a dinner alongside the infamous sex trafficker in 2011.

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The connection was only revealed Thursday when photos of Brooks at an event with Epstein emerged as part of a release of a new tranche of documents by the Democratic members of the House Committee on Oversight, which has been investigating the Epstein saga and has access to reams of documents handed over by the estate of the late pedophile.

It was not immediately clear when or where the event took place, but a spokesperson for the Times told The Intercept that it was a “widely-attended dinner” in 2011 that Brooks attended in the normal course of his journalistic duties. Brooks did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“As a journalist, David Brooks regularly attends events to speak with noted and important business leaders to inform his columns, which is exactly what happened at this 2011 event,” Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha wrote. “Mr. Brooks had no contact with him before or after this single attendance at a widely-attended dinner.”

Brooks is not the first Timesman to appear prominently in the recent disclosures around Epstein. In November, when the GOP-controlled Oversight Committee dumped thousands of documents gleaned from an email inbox belonging to Epstein, it revealed new depths to the relationship between Epstein and Landon Thomas Jr., a former Times reporter who was fired in 2018 after it emerged that he’d solicited a donation to a charity from Epstein. Thomas, a business reporter, appeared in numerous emails with Epstein in which Epstein teased information he said he had regarding Donald Trump. Those tips were not made public, and neither Thomas nor the Times have commented on why he did not appear to have reported them out.

Thursday’s release of documents also included a number of photos of prominent thinkers and political operatives known to be in Epstein’s orbit in later years, including the leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky and the right-wing provocateur and erstwhile Trump confidant Steven K. Bannon.

The photos came out just a day ahead of the deadline for the release of the so-called Epstein Files by the Department of Justice, which is mandated by congressional Epstein Files Act to drop documents related to its investigations into Epstein on Friday.

“The Epstein case is precious to the QAnon types because here, in fact, was a part of the American elite that really was running a sex abuse ring,” Brooks wrote in his November column. “So, of course, they leap to the conclusion that Epstein was a typical member of the American establishment, not an outlier. It’s grooming and sex trafficking all the way down.”

A spokesperson for the Democratic members of the Oversight Committee did not immediately respond to a request for clarification about the details of the photos, but according to Politico, the Epstein estate provided the images without context after a subpoena.

The post NY Times’ David Brooks Said There’s Too Much Focus on Jeffrey Epstein. Here He Is Hanging With Epstein. appeared first on The Intercept.

Democrats sponsoring the measures were able to peel off only two Republicans on the first vote and three on the second as the GOP rallied around the White House.

On Tuesday, Trump announced a partial blockade — considered an act of war in international law — against Venezuela after weeks of threatening military action.

The votes Wednesday may have been lawmakers’ last chance to push back on Trump before Congress’s end-of-year break. A vote on a bipartisan measure in the Senate blocking land strikes is pending.

The House voted 216-210 against the drug boats measure and 213-211 against the land strikes measure. Both would have required Trump to seek congressional authorization for further attacks.

The lead sponsor of the measure blocking an attack on Venezuela, Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., said Trump seemed to be rushing headlong into a war without making the case for it.

“Americans do not want another Iraq. If we intensify hostilities in Venezuela, we have no idea what we’re walking into,” McGovern said. “At least George Bush had the decency to come to Congress for approval in 2002. Don’t the American people deserve that respect today?”

Bush in 2002 sought and received a formal authorization for his attack on Iraq. Without taking any similar steps, Trump has massed thousands of American service members in the Caribbean without formal approval.

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Rumors began to swirl in right-wing circles before the vote that Trump would use a Wednesday evening televised address to announce U.S. attacks targeted directly at Venezuela — strikes that could be salvos in a regime-change war against President Nicolás Maduro.

In the absence of outreach from the White House, Democrats forced votes to block unauthorized strikes on both the boats and Venezuelan land under the War Powers Resolution, a 1973 law meant to limit the power of U.S. presidents to wage war without congressional approval.

Trans-Partisan or Not?

Earlier attempts in the Senate to stop both the drug boat strikes and an attack on Venezuela under the war powers law have failed on mostly party-line votes. Wednesday represented the first instance that representatives have faced similar questions, making it a key public test.

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The vote on a measure banning attacks on alleged drug boats came first. From the start, it was poised to earn less support from Republicans, whose base widely supports the strikes at sea. Few GOP lawmakers wavered despite renewed criticism of the Trump administration over a second attack, first reported by The Intercept, that killed the survivors of an initial strike on an alleged drug boat on September 2.

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Brian Mast, R-Fla., argued Wednesday that Trump has the legal authority to act against the “imminent threat” of illegal drugs.

“Every drug boat sunk is literally drugs not coming to the United States of America,” he said. “Democrats are putting forward a resolution to say the president cannot do anything about MS-13 or Tren de Aragua” — two Latin American gangs frequently invoked by drug war hawks — “and every other cartel. That is giving aid and comfort to narco-terrorism.”

The debate grew heated at one point, with Mast suggesting that Foreign Affairs ranking member Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., did not care about the nearly 200 overdoses in his district last year.

In response, Meeks noted that Venezuela is not a major source of the drug that has driven the overdose crisis, fentanyl. He also asked over and over again why Trump had pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted of drug trafficking, as well as the founder of the darknet drug network Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht.

“I’m still waiting to hear why major drug dealers — two major drug dealers — were pardoned by the president of the United States. I’ll wait,” Meeks said at one point, taking a long pause. “Nothing?”

Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Don Bacon, R-Neb., were the only Republicans to vote in favor of halting the boat strikes. Democratic Reps. Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, who represent Texas districts near the southern border, broke with their party to vote against it.

Land Attack?

The other measure, blocking attacks on Venezuelan land without approval from Congress, seemed poised to draw more GOP support. Massie and Bacon co-sponsored the proposal.

The White House has failed to ask Congress for a declaration of war as the Constitution requires, Massie told his colleagues.

“Do we want a miniature Afghanistan in the Western hemisphere? If that cost is acceptable to this Congress, we should vote on it, as the voice of the people, and in accordance with our Constitution,” Massie said.

Advocates’ hope for a cross-partisan coalition between Democrats and MAGA Republicans opposed to regime-change wars was dashed, however, under pressure from GOP leaders who said the measures were nothing more than a swipe at Trump.

“This resolution reads as if Maduro wrote it himself. It gives a narco-terrorist dictator a free pass to keep trafficking drugs,” Mast said of McGovern’s measure. “Because it appears Democrats hate President Trump more than they love America.”

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Ultimately, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia was the only other Republican who joined Massie and Bacon to vote in favor of the measure. Cuellar was the only Democrat to vote against it.

The votes came a day after Trump announced a blockade of Venezuela, which depends on trade using sanctioned oil tankers for a large share of its revenue.

Blockades are acts of war, according to the Center for International Policy, a left-leaning think tank.

“Trump was elected on a promise to end wars, not start them,” Matt Duss, the center’s executive vice-president, said in a statement. “Not only is he breaking that promise, his aggression toward Venezuela echoes the worst moments of American imperialist violence and domination in Latin America. We should be moving away from that history, not rebooting it.”

The post Congress Squanders Last Chance to Block Venezuela War Before Going on Vacation appeared first on The Intercept.

Olivia Nuzzi’s world is populated by beasts, and by monsters.

“American Canto” opens with cockroaches, and a call from The Politician. “The Politician” is the tiring epithet Nuzzi uses throughout her memoir to reference Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the man with whom the whole world now knows she had some degree of affair. It ends with a red-tailed hawk and a drone, a juxtaposition that underscores the degree to which the journalist’s life is now mediated by public interest in what was once private. In the 300-page course of “Canto,” birds of all feathers appear: the ravens Kennedy takes an interest in befriending (or subjugating), turkeys, swallows, cardinals, owls. President Donald Trump, the “character” Nuzzi has spent one-third of her time on Earth serving as “witness” to as a vocation, is “sophisticated” but still an “animal.” (He is also, I’m sorry to say, described in the phrase “a Gemini nation under a Gemini ruler.”)

What feels undebatable, in what’s likely been a mad-dash Washington parlor game of decoding all the unnamed characters, is that Kennedy is one of the book’s monsters. He is also, variously, a bull and a lion. We learn Kennedy in his human form is often shirtless. He was the “hunter” (“Like all men but more so,” we read, mouths agape), and she was the prey. We know this because of an extended metaphor that begins with considering a baby bird pushed from a nest — Nuzzi recounts, briefly, her difficult relationship with an alcoholic and mentally ill mother — then “swallowed up by some kind of monster” where “in her first and final act, she had made the monster stronger.” Nuzzi means to tell us that she was the woman consumed, first by love, and then by a nation of gawkers who still can’t look away.

“I’m annoyed that I had to learn about any of this crap,” comedian Adam Friedland tells Nuzzi in an interview for his eponymous show released to his subscribers on Tuesday night. Friedland, who often serves as a conduit for his audience’s own reactions, does seem actually annoyed, as I often felt while reading this book.

“I’m sorry,” Nuzzi replies, looking genuinely apologetic and mildly uncomfortable.

There’s real insight to be gleaned about how the former New York magazine journalist allowed herself to be used by a political project working to turn back the clock on scientific progress by decades and result in more dead children, but that’s not why Nuzzi is apologizing, or even writing this book. The greatest failing of “American Canto” is its inability to look too far outside itself. The revelations we’re meant to believe that Nuzzi has been to hell and back to earn are gossamer-thin and so lightly worn, they float in on the Santa Ana winds and just as abruptly vanish, uninterrogated. She often punctuates sentences, offset by commas, with the phrases “I think” or “I suppose,” lest we get the idea that she’s holding onto anything too tightly.

Crucially, all this thinking about our messed-up country is only of interest because it has forcefully and publicly intersected with the author’s personal life. In this way, it is perhaps the purest version of a Washington memoir yet, one that pretends to be about America and about politics and our twisted state of play but is really an exercise in the writer gesturing at these things with no appreciation for the real stakes of every policy decision made by this administration for real people. It’s all just a “kaleidoscopic” — Nuzzi’s repeated word choice — backdrop for the media to use in a clever lede before getting back to who’s up and who’s down and who’s interesting.

To emphasize this weightlessness, the author goes to great pains to remind us that, for all its flaws, such as electing an authoritarian with fascist ambitions not once but twice, she loves this country. (In the author’s note that opens the book, Nuzzi proclaims the book is “about love … and about love of country.”) There is plentiful red, white, and blue. Mentions of the flag are so numerous that I had to switch pens while underlining them. There are bullets and guns, including the loaded one that Nuzzi comes to keep on her nightstand. There is much discussion of God (Nuzzi, like Kennedy, was raised Catholic). Just a couple pages in, there is JonBenét Ramsey — another beautiful blonde, Nuzzi seems to be saying, who became, against her will, an avatar for a greater spiritual rot at the core of American culture.

Like at least a few great writers before her, Nuzzi fled the East Coast for Los Angeles (specifically Malibu, where she is surrounded by both literal and metaphorical fires) after news of the affair broke. Once there, she compares herself to the Black Dahlia, drained of blood for an eager nation to see as she’s bafflingly, symbolically hoisted above the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

There is mercifully little Ryan Lizza, the journalist Nuzzi refers to as “the man I did not marry,” who has proven she dodged a bullet by recounting his side of the story on his Substack (where, cleverly if cravenly, the first installment was free to draw readers in and subsequent numbered chapters have been paywalled). In the Friedland interview, Nuzzi denies Lizza’s allegations that she covered up information about the Trump assassination attempt and that she caught and killed stories damaging to Kennedy. When the host presses her about why she won’t sue her ex for defamation, Nuzzi points out that he rarely appears in the book, saying, “Like, I forgot him,” which is actually a pretty good burn. Lizza, who was fired from The New Yorker for “improper sexual conduct” (which he denies), has been let off in this saga far too easily; for all his yammering now, he did precious little to intervene when it actually might have mattered — say, during Kennedy’s confirmation hearing.

When Nuzzi dares to engage with substantive politics, it’s in careful, distant terms. By my count, there was one mention of Gaza, in a headline — “Mayhem in Gaza” — which she recounts only to give us a sense of time and of place. (It’s worth noting that in the selected headline, “mayhem” reduces the genocide in Gaza to something like a natural disaster.) She witnesses a pickup truck (Real America!) covered in Make America Great Again stickers; she sees protesters holding signs that read “STOP ARMING ISRAEL.” Nuzzi flattens it all. “The discourse, right and left, is filled with people remarking,” she writes, affecting a detached tone that sounds like a discount Joan Didion. In another section, Nuzzi pictures herself being (metaphorically) hit in a drone strike, which feels, to put it mildly, a bit lacking in self-awareness in the year 2025.

It’s all sound and fury, and to the chronicler of it all, it signifies absolutely nothing.

Tellingly, one of Nuzzi’s monsters doesn’t come off all that badly. She quotes her own phone and in-person conversations with Trump at great length (one unbroken monologue lasts an entire page). After all, the now-two-time president was her beat, and with their fates intertwined, she has reaped the professional rewards. She calls him “tyrannical” with “authoritarian fantasies,” and concedes that she was “sometimes fooled” by the “skilled practitioners” of MAGA. But Trump comes off in “American Canto” as slightly, if not dramatically, more interior than we’ve come to expect. I was darkly surprised by the billionaire musing that “illegal immigrants saved my life,” because without them, he wouldn’t have been able to ride their suffering all the way to the White House.

Trump, like Nuzzi, was for a time kicked out of his position of power, and in those four years of Joe Biden was put through a criminal trial in New York. (There has been no indication that he spent his time in exile reading Dante or the King James Bible, as Nuzzi apparently did.) Outside the courthouse, early in the book, Nuzzi watches a man self-immolate and spends the rest of the day with the taste of his burning flesh in her mouth. She doesn’t name him until nearly 200 pages in, instead opting for terms like “the boy who missed his mother and could no longer bear to be here.” Nuzzi bemoans that the TV cameras, once they learn the self-immolation is unrelated to the president or his policies, turn away from the scene. The observation turns her into yet another bystander in her own story, rather than a powerful journalist who made coverage decisions and chose the words she used to describe our world every day. She could have helped shape a different history by reporting with moral conviction about the events happening before her eyes, but instead, she looked around for someone, anyone, and was left wanting.

The post Olivia Nuzzi Is Completely Oblivious appeared first on The Intercept.

AIPAC board president Michael Tuchin hosted a private fundraiser for Fine on Monday at his Los Angeles law office, where an Intercept reporter was turned away in the building’s front lobby. “The Intercept should not be here at all,” said a building security guard, relaying a message from fundraiser organizers.

Three people entering the Century City high-rise office, however, confirmed that they were there to attend the Fine fundraiser. An attendee wearing a pin with adjoining U.S. and Israeli flags said she was there for the event and was whisked away by building security when asked why she supported Fine.

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After spending years exerting largely unchecked influence over elected U.S. officials, AIPAC appears to be putting more distance between itself and several of its preferred candidates this midterm cycle amid public outrage over Israel’s genocide in Gaza — and as a growing slate of progressive candidates position themselves explicitly against the group. But AIPAC and the broader pro-Israel lobby are still working to shape the next Congress to preserve the U.S.’s diplomatic alliance with Israel and maintain the steady flow of weapons shipments.

The day Fine entered the race in May, Jewish Insider reported that she had met with pro-Israel lobbying groups including AIPAC and Democratic Majority for Israel. The groups did not support Schakowsky, who was instead backed by the more centrist pro-Israel group J Street during her career — meaning the 14-term congresswoman’s retirement represented an opportunity for the lobby to install a more hard-line supporter of Israel.

Fine’s campaign, AIPAC, and Tuchin did not respond to a request for comment.

Fine is running in a crowded Democratic primary field that includes Kat Abughazaleh, a Palestinian American activist who has made her opposition to AIPAC spending and Israel’s genocide a central plank of her campaign; Daniel Biss, the current mayor of Evanston, Illinois; and Bushra Amiwala, a local school board member and activist. Abughazaleh and Biss led the pack in fundraising as of September, according to Federal Election Commission filings, pulling in $1.5 million and $1.3 million respectively. Amiwala has raised $642,000.

Fine had raised just over $660,000 by the same deadline — about half of it from close to 300 donors who AIPAC appears to have directed to her campaign, as the local outlet Evanston Now reported in October. The group sent at least two fundraising emails urging donors in its network to support Fine, after which AIPAC donors poured more than $300,000 into her campaign.

It’s not the first time the group has taken such an approach this cycle, including in Illinois. In the state’s 7th Congressional District, where Democratic Rep. Danny Davis is retiring, AIPAC hasn’t endorsed a replacement — but its donors are funding real estate mogul Jason Friedman, The Intercept reported.

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When asked about meeting with AIPAC prior to entering the race, Fine played down her support from the group, telling the university newspaper Loyola Phoenix in October that she was not pursuing its endorsement.

“Senator Fine has not received and is not seeking endorsement from J Street, AIPAC, or any Jewish organization,” her campaign said at the time. “She’s deeply aware of the diversity of political views in the Jewish community and in this district at large. The Senator’s priority is to represent all constituents, bridge divisions, continue standing up against antisemitism wherever it may appear, and continue to represent all members of her district.”

The post AIPAC Head Hosts Fundraiser for House Candidate Who Swears AIPAC Isn’t Backing Her appeared first on The Intercept.

The findings show it’s not just left-leaning voters who now object to Israel’s war on Gaza — a growing share of Republicans are souring on the U.S. government’s unconditional support of Israel as well. That creates an opportunity for Democrats who want to flip Republican seats in upcoming elections, said Margaret DeReus, executive director of the IMEU Policy Project.

“Democratic leadership has so far refused to acknowledge Israel’s growing unpopularity with voters and offer voters a real alternative, the same disastrous mistake they made in 2024,” DeReus said. “If Democratic leadership can summon the political will to call for an end of weapons to Israel so those billions can be reinvested in the programs Americans need, our polling finds it won’t just boost support with the Democratic base — it will persuade Republican voters to cross over as well.”

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It depends in part on which Republicans a Democratic candidate wants to court. Similar to trends seen among Democratic voters about a decade ago, the Republican opposition contains a notable age gap: Among Republicans ages 18 to 44, the new IMEU poll said, support for a candidate who favors reducing arms transfers to Israel jumps to a majority, 51 percent.

The poll was taken from a sample of 1,287 self-identified Republicans who YouGov surveyed online in November. With a 3 percent margin of error, the results are consistent with findings from an August Quinnipiac University poll that found more than a third of Republicans oppose sending more military aid to Israel, and an October Pew Research Center poll finding that as many 41 percent of Republicans have an unfavorable view of Israel, a jump from 27 percent only three years ago. A Gallup poll in July showed that a majority of all Americans — 54 percent — disapprove of Israel’s military actions in Gaza, a new high in dissatisfaction.

As the 2026 congressional primaries draw near, the Democratic Party is continuing to grapple with how to respond to mounting pressure to support Palestine among its voter base. Some Democratic candidates have sworn off support from conservative pro-Israel groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee after previously receiving funding, and are committing to a House bill that would block offensive weapons transfers to Israel; others remain committed to the pro-Israel cause.

Asked if they would rather support a Republican or Democratic candidate running on identical pro-Israel messages — that Israel should “do whatever its leaders say is necessary to defend itself” and that “the United States should always be there to provide weapons and logistical support to Israel when its leaders ask” — only 4 percent of the polled Republicans said they would vote for the Democrat.

But asked to pick between the pro-Israel Republican or a Democratic candidate whose priority is to “focus on Americans first, by ensuring our tax dollars are used to bring down prices here instead of paying for weapons and support for wealthy nations like Israel,” 17 percent of Republicans flipped left and said they would rather vote for a Democrat critical of Israel.

DeReus interpreted the results as indicative of frustration with President Donald Trump.

“Americans of all backgrounds are confounded that President Trump always finds billions of dollars to fund Israel’s attacks on Palestinians, while saying there’s not enough money to fund affordable healthcare for Americans,” she said.

The IMEU poll also found that among Republican voters, more than a third said they would rather support a Republican primary congressional candidate who rejected money from AIPAC, compared to 19 percent support for a candidate who accepts AIPAC donations.

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When asked specifically about U.S.-funded weapons deals with Israel, Republican voters signaled significant disapproval. The arms transfers between the two countries operate within a Memorandum of Understanding signed in 2016 by then-President Barack Obama that expires in 2028. Last month, Axios reported that Israel is seeking a new 20-year MOU with the Trump administration, committing about $4 billion to Israel each year. The proposal reportedly asks for a reduction in the amount of money used for direct military aid with plans to instead spend such money on defense-related research, a possible concession to growing frustrations with Israel among Trump’s base, especially as the economy worsens.

The IMEU poll confirms some of that frustration, showing that 42 percent of Republican voters want the current U.S.–Israel military MOU to lapse in 2028 rather than renewing another 10-year agreement. Disapproval for the 20-year agreement slightly increases to 43 percent. A majority of Republicans below the age of 44 opposed a 10- or 20-year agreement, at 53 percent and 51 percent, respectively.

Amid Israel’s war on Gaza, former President Joe Biden approved a 2024 emergency bill sending $14.1 billion in military aid to Israel, in addition to the ongoing MOU. A new congressional defense bill released last week, which asks for a record $901 billion, also includes carveouts for the U.S. to fill any of Israel’s gaps in military aid created by arms embargoes by other nations, such as Spain, Italy, and Japan, according to a Zeteo report.

Some on the left who support Palestinian human rights are beginning to capitalize on their overlap with conservatives — like Code Pink founder Medea Benjamin, who last week met with far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., who is resigning in January and has been seen as an avatar for growing dissatisfaction toward U.S. support for Israel among Trump’s supporters.

That’s not to say right-wing criticism of pro-Israel spending is necessarily born out of concern for Palestinian people. The strain of conservatism that gave rise to Greene and other “America first” Republicans relies on a nationalist logic that privileges U.S. citizens above all other people, and right-wing criticism of Israel often peddles in antisemitic tropes. The influential right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson has criticized U.S. support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza — and recently drew criticism for platforming Nick Fuentes, a white nationalist who often spews antisemitic beliefs.

Brett Cooper, another popular conservative personality and regular Fox News contributor, attempted to untangle this concern in a recent interview on NPR. When host Steve Inskeep asked Cooper whether she agreed with Fuentes’s peddling of an antisemitic idea that the U.S. is run by “Jewish gangsters,” Cooper, 24, said she rejected Fuentes’s antisemitic claim and instead insisted her generation’s concern with Israel had more to do with spending priorities in a struggling U.S. economy.

“Young people’s biggest concern right now, both sides of the aisle, is the economy — we are concerned about being able to buy homes, we are concerned about affordability,” Cooper said. “And so when we see the news, when we see how much money is being sent overseas, to Ukraine, to Israel … my generation is concerned, we are upset.”

The post Republicans Are Splitting Over Israel. Will Democrats Take Advantage? appeared first on The Intercept.

The total number of people killed in the antisemitic Bondi Beach massacre was still not known when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the opportunity to blame Australia’s mere recognition of a Palestinian state.

Two gunmen, father and son Sajid and Naveed Akram, carried out the shooting, which targeted a Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, and left 15 victims dead. People of conscience from all faiths have spoken out to condemn the slaughter, to express solidarity with Jewish communities, and to forcefully denounce antisemitism.

Netanyahu and his cheerleaders, meanwhile, have once again chosen the despicable path of weaponizing antisemitism to ensure and legitimize Palestinian suffering.

Netanyahu’s comments come as no surprise. They are just his latest vile affront to Jewish lives, using threats to our safety to guarantee that Palestinians can have none.

Beyond the clear fact that the Bondi shooters targeted Jews on a Jewish holiday — the very definition of an antisemitic attack — we currently know almost nothing about these men. The idea that their actions justify the continued oppression of Palestinians should be rejected outright.

That didn’t stop Netanyahu’s most ardent American supporters from jumping to reiterate his message.

The first New York Times opinion piece to be published in the massacre’s wake came from Israel apologist Bret Stephens, with a column titled “Bondi Beach is What ‘Globalize the Intifada’ Looks Like.” Stephens wrote that the shooting constitutes the “real-world consequences” of “literalists” responding to chants like “globalize the intifada,” “resistance is justified,” and “by any means necessary.”

The point is obvious: to make sure that Palestinians remain eternally in stateless subjugation and to give Israel a free hand to violate their rights — including by committing a genocide like the one unfolding in Gaza today.

It’s all done in the name of fighting antisemitism by conflating the worst kinds of violent anti-Jewish bigotry, like what we saw in Bondi Beach, with any criticisms of Israel and its actions. To so much as say Palestinians ought to have basic human rights, in this view, becomes a deadly attack on Jewish safety.

There’s a profound irony here. Like many thousands of Jewish people around the world, I do feel less safe precisely because the Israeli government is carrying out a genocide in our names, associating Jewish identity with ethno-nationalist brutality. It is antisemitic to blame all Jews for Israel’s actions; it is therefore also antisemitic — and produces more antisemitism — for Israel to claim to act for all Jews.

As Netanyahu’s response to the Bondi massacre again makes clear, his interest is not in Jewish safety. Jewish fear, directed into anti-Palestinian, anti-Muslim animus, is far more useful to his government’s project of ethnic cleansing.

In his Sunday statement, the Israeli prime minister said he had earlier this year told Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, “Your call for a Palestinian state pours fuel on the antisemitic fire.” Australia, alongside nations including the United Kingdom, Canada, and France, moved to recognize Palestinian statehood in September at the United Nations; 159 countries now recognize Palestine.

On Monday, Albanese rightly rejected Netanyahu’s effort to link this recognition to the antisemitic attack. “I do not accept this connection,” Albanese said, calling the suggestion “an unfounded and dangerous shortcut.”

Stephens, for his part, begins his New York Times column by praising the bravery of local shopkeeper Ahmed al-Ahmed, who risked his own life to single-handedly disarm one of the Bondi attackers.

“That act of bravery not only saved lives,” Stephens wrote, “it also served as an essential reminder that humanity can always transcend cultural and religious boundaries.”

The columnist then spends the rest of the short article blaming, without grounds, the Palestinian solidarity movement for “Jewish blood.”

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Leaving aside the fact that Stephens knows next to nothing about the shooters, the extreme perniciousness of his conclusion goes beyond an issue of ignorance.

His message is of a piece with Netanyahu’s. He is saying that you cannot call for Palestinian liberation, or the end to Israel’s apartheid regime, without de facto calling for the killing of Jews.

The only option, according to this line of thinking, is to be silent and let Palestinian oppression continue. It’s a disgusting zero sum logic — not to mention an insult to the victims of antisemitism.

The post NY Times’ Bret Stephens Blames Palestine Freedom Movement for Bondi Beach Shooting appeared first on The Intercept.

The European Leadership Network, or ELNET, takes elected officials on networking trips to Israel, hosts events with members of European parliaments, and lobbies on foreign policy issues — much like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee operates in the U.S. Its co-founder, Raanan Eliaz, is a former AIPAC consultant and alumnus of the Israeli prime minister’s office. The group credits itself for key pro-Israel foreign policy decisions, including getting Germany to approve a $3.5 billion deal to purchase Israeli drones and rockets, the largest in Israel’s history. Since the October 7 attacks in Israel — and amid two years of genocide in Gaza — ELNET has broken fundraising records.

Funding ELNET’s work are more than 100 U.S. foundations, nonprofits, trusts, and charitable giving organizations that have poured at least $11 million into the group’s U.S. arm since 2022, an analysis by The Intercept found. This is the first major analysis of how U.S. donors are fueling the pro-Israel machine in Europe, exporting the same tactics that have for years helped AIPAC crush concern for Palestinians in the halls of power and advance unchecked support for Israel.

ELNET is smaller than AIPAC, but it operates in a smaller market, feeding a steady stream of pro-Israel material to European parliamentarians. While the U.S. gives more financial and military support to Israel than any country in the world, the European Union is Israel’s biggest trading partner — and holds critical sway over whether global political consensus stays on Israel’s side. Amid public outcry and cracks in European support over Israel’s genocide in Gaza, ELNET sees its work as more essential than ever.

“ELNET states clearly that their role is to legitimize and deepen economic ties with Israel, at a time when international law tells us we should be sanctioning Israel and sever trade ties,” said European Parliament member Lynn Boylan, an Irish representative from the Sinn Féin party. “As an EU lawmaker, I am very concerned that U.S. groups are seemingly successfully able to determine EU policy on Israel.”

Friends of ELNET, the group’s U.S. nonprofit arm, transfers almost all of its revenue to ELNET’s chapters around the globe. It raised more than $9.1 million in 2023, the last year for which its tax forms are publicly available, up from $7 million in 2022 and more than double its revenue from 2018.

The U.S. arm is chaired by Larry Hochberg, a Chicago philanthropist and former AIPAC national director who sits on the board of the nonprofit group Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. Its president is David Siegel, previously an Israeli diplomat, an AIPAC legislative writer, and an IDF officer. ELNET’s U.S. board members include donors who have given more than $170,000 to AIPAC; its super PAC, United Democracy Project; and the related pro-Israel group DMFI PAC since 2021. One of those board members, Jerry Rosenberg, is a member of AIPAC’s exclusive major-donor Minyan Club, according to his ELNET bio. European media have also reported on a handful of ELNET donors who have also supported President Donald Trump.

Top U.S. donors to Friends of ELNET include the William Davidson Foundation, founded by the late Michigan businessman, which has given $800,000 to the group since 2022; the Newton and Rochelle Becker Charitable Trust, founded by the couple to work toward “ensuring the future of the Jewish people and the State of Israel,” which gave just under half a million dollars in 2023; and the Ocean State Job Lot Charitable Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the northeastern chain of discount retail stores, which gave $445,000 in 2022. Representatives for the foundations did not respond to requests for comment.

Other major donors include the Joseph and Bessie Feinberg Foundation, the family foundation for ELNET U.S. board member Joseph Feinberg; the National Philanthropic Trust; and the Diane and Guilford Glazer Foundation, each of which have given $675,000, $560,000, and $430,000 respectively since 2022. Jewish Federations in Palm Beach, Miami, Chicago, Atlanta, and San Francisco have given $443,000 altogether since 2022.

Those dollars have powered ELNET in its advocacy to transfer two drones to the IDF, cut off funding to the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, and push a EU resolution affirming Israel’s right to self-defense and calling for the eradication of Hamas.

Boylan, who chairs the European Parliament Delegation for relations with Palestine, told The Intercept that she was alarmed by the role U.S. donors are playing in lobbying European governments to back Israel.

“While it is not surprising that U.S. donors are funneling millions to influence EU policy on Israel, this demonstrates just how much European institutions are out of touch with their own citizens on the genocide in Gaza,” Boylan said.

“As more U.S. politicians refuse to accept money from warmongering groups like AIPAC, U.S donors appear to be increasingly sending more donations abroad in an attempt to curry support for the Israeli military across Europe,” said Beth Miller, political director for Jewish Voice for Peace Action. “It’s shameful that so many here in the U.S. play a key role in the ongoing apartheid and genocide against Palestinians.”

Many of the U.S. institutions directed funds to Friends of ELNET through donor-advised funds, or DAFs, which let donors make tax-exempt contributions through an intermediary and give them the choice to remain anonymous. DAFs aren’t allowed to contribute to lobbying efforts, but there are many ways around that prohibition, said Bella DeVaan, associate director of the charity reform initiative at the progressive think tank Institute for Policy Studies.

“It’s a way to rinse your name off of any kind of donation that could be perceived as controversial or something that you just want to keep anonymous publicly,” DeVaan said. DAFs also confer significant benefits for donors looking to reduce their tax burden.

The National Philanthropic Trust, the Jewish Community Foundation of San Diego, and the Jewish Federation of Atlanta all directed money to ELNET through DAFs. That’s not uncommon: A July report from the Institute for Policy Studies found that donors disproportionately use DAFs more than other funding sources for political giving.

“When you involve the sort of shell-game capacity of DAFs, it can become really difficult to trace direct impact,” DeVaan said. “That can really manifest in a lot of political consequences that I think the average taxpayer would not like to know that they’re subsidizing, because of the tax breaks that charitable givers get for their gifts.”

DeVaan said it was concerning that donors are using DAFs to support international lobbying efforts. Critics of Israel’s genocide in Gaza have called on institutions to clarify ethical guidelines around DAF distributions amid concerns about funding groups linked to the Israeli military. Pro-Israel advocates have also criticized DAF distributions to Palestine solidarity groups.

“No matter what kind of lobbying it is, at home or abroad, these implications are really concerning. For every gift an ultra-rich person gives to charity, the average taxpayer is chipping in an estimated 74 cents on the dollar,” said DeVaan. “Do we want to give people a tax break to amplify their influence around the world? I don’t think most people would agree with that.”

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Many of the same groups funneling money to ELNET’s U.S. nonprofit arm have also given to other pro-Israel organizations. Six foundations that have given more than $570,000 to Friends of ELNET since 2022 have given $344,800 to AIPAC over the same period. Donors to Friends of ELNET have also given more than $37.8 million to AIPAC’s educational arm, the American Israel Education Foundation, which sponsors trips to Israel for members of Congress. Michael Leffell, an investment firm founder and AIPAC donor whose foundation gave $50,000 to Friends of ELNET in 2017, has given $1.5 million to United Democracy Project since 2022. More than 50 ELNET donors have given $11.6 million to the Central Fund of Israel and $8.9 million to the Jewish National Fund since 2022 — both of which fund Israeli settler groups in the West Bank, where settlers have ramped up attacks on Palestinians since the October 7 attacks.

Friends of ELNET did not respond to a request for comment.

Thousands of Europeans protest each week to pressure their officials to stop the genocide in Gaza. “Their concerns are ignored in favour of organisations specifically established to defend Israel at all costs,” said Boylan.

“Aligning With the U.S. in Support of Israel”

After October 7, ELNET set to work arranging screenings of the attacks in European parliaments and embarking on a campaign that would rapidly elevate the group’s profile in the next two years. The group has arranged meetings between members and families of Israeli hostages, taken some 300 policymakers and opinion leaders on trips to Israel, and celebrated what it describes as its successful influence on European policy.

“Europe aligning with the U.S. in support of Israel is a monumental achievement and a reflection of ELNET’s critical work,” the group wrote in an October 2023 fundraising appeal to support “emergency solidarity missions” to Israel from European countries including France, Germany, the U.K., and Italy. “ELNET’s priority is to ensure that the unprecedented European military and diplomatic support for Israel remains strong for the duration of the war until Hamas is eradicated.”

Among its accomplishments since October 7, ELNET has pointed to its work to get European countries to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which defines criticisms of Israel as antisemitic, push European states to crack down on pro-Palestine protesters and ban certain protests, and secure the historic defense deal between Israel and Germany.

In its latest annual report from 2023, ELNET highlighted its work to pass the defense deal for Germany to purchase the Arrow 3 missile defense system, developed by Israel and the U.S. “ELNET arranged for German political leaders and officials to meet with Israeli officials and thus advance the requisite research and dialogue to consummate this historic deal,” the group wrote.

Eleven days after the October 7 attacks, ELNET brought a group of survivors to speak to members of the European Parliament, a lawmaking body for the EU. The next day, the European Parliament passed a resolution that called for a “humanitarian pause” in Gaza and for Hamas to be “eliminated.”

“Each ELNET office served as a conduit of factual and credible information to parliamentarians and policymakers across Europe by providing firsthand information about what happened on October 7,” the report read. “The day after ELNET brought Israeli survivors to speak at the European Parliament, an unprecedented resolution was passed backing Israel’s right to self-defense and calling for the elimination of Hamas.”

The group boasts a network of thousands of European and Israeli officials in its orbit and has chapters around the world including the U.K., Germany, France, Italy, and offices for Central and Eastern Europe and the EU & NATO. Friends of ELNET sends millions to ELNET’s global chapters each year — climbing from $2.4 million in 2020 to more than $6 million in 2023.

Varying financial reporting requirements across Europe make it difficult to account completely for ELNET’s global financial portfolio. Friends of ELNET conducts much of the fundraising for the group’s global chapters, but it’s not clear how much funding those chapters raise on their own. ELNET Germany recently announced it was launching its own Friends of ELNET Germany chapter. A 2023 filing with the transparency body for the EU lists Friends of ELNET as the only source of funding for ELNET’s chapter registered in Brussels. ELNET’s chapters for the EU & NATO and Germany did not respond to requests for comment.

Speaking to The Intercept, Boylan raised concerns about ELNET’s work to expand Israel’s arms industry ties to the Israeli military.

“It is also concerning that an organization who holds ‘strategic dialogues’ chaired by individuals formerly in IDF leadership positions are allowed to have any role in determining EU policy,” Boylan said, referring to former chairs of an ELNET forum that organizes “high-level strategic dialogues” between Europe and Israel. She said she would follow up with the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Parliament, about U.S. donors backing ELNET’s work pushing pro-Israel policies in Europe.

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Critics and journalists have also raised questions about how much money ELNET has received from the Israeli government, which reimbursed ELNET for a lobbying event last month at the French Parliament, the French outlet Mediapart reported. Elnet’s leadership and board members also have ties to the Israeli government and include two former advisers to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Before Friends of ELNET launched in 2012, ELNET received funding from the pro-Israel advocacy group StandWithUs, which has long been active in policing criticism of Israel on college campuses. StandWithUs transferred just under $1 million in assets to Friends of ELNET to launch the nonprofit in 2012.

While ELNET leaders have pointed to AIPAC as a model, Eliaz, Elnet’s co-founder, envisioned something with a much lower profile that didn’t carry strings attached to well-known U.S. donors. Since he left the group in 2017, ELNET’s U.S. support has almost doubled.

ELNET’s policy goals from its last annual report include continuing to expand the IHRA definition of antisemitism, working to “counter Israel’s delegitimization at the UN,” opposing the International Criminal Court investigation of Israel, and continuing its campaign against UNRWA, which Israel shut down in January.

“Judeo-Christian Civilization”

ELNET’s communications signal that it’s looking for ways to exploit a growing rift between the U.S. and Europe under Trump to Israel’s advantage, including seizing on the wave of anti-immigrant political parties in Europe.

In a February newsletter, a truncated version of which was posted to the Times of Israel as a blog, ELNET-Israel CEO Emmanuel Navon, previously a senior fellow at a right-wing Israeli think tank, wrote that a “widening gap” between the U.S. and Europe on Israel made ELNET’s job harder. But it wasn’t all bad news: The tension also afforded a new “diplomatic opportunity for Israel in Europe” amid the rise of “European parties with Trumpian sympathies and pro-Israel credentials.” Navon stepped down as ELNET-Israel CEO in March, but he still works closely with the group and supports Elnet’s work in France. He did not respond to a request for comment.

In his newsletter, Navon referenced a February speech by Vice President JD Vance to the Munich Security Conference in which the latter lambasted European leaders on issues from free speech to migration.

“As a non-partisan and apolitical NGO, ELNET cannot and must not take a public stance on government policies. But it should be aware of the current Zeitgeist and of its potential for Israel’s relations with Europe,” Navon wrote, including expanding markets for Israel’s defense industry. Then, he quoted Vance, who had asked: “What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important?”

“This is a question to which Israel has a clear answer,” Navon wrote. “The core values of the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian civilization, of which Israel is a pillar. It turns out that more and more European voters agree with that answer.”

The production of this investigation was supported by a grant from the Investigative Journalism for Europe (IJ4EU) fund.

The post Meet the U.S. Donors Funding ELNET, the AIPAC of Europe appeared first on The Intercept.

The welcome was so warm it could’ve been the first day of school for a new class of kindergarteners, and with the so-called reporters’ level of skepticism for the administration, they might as well have been.

“I would also like to take a moment today to welcome all of you here to the Pentagon briefing room as official new members of the Pentagon press corps. We’re glad to have you,” Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson said in her December 2 briefing. “This is the beginning of a new era.”

Wilson also said that “legacy media chose to self-deport from this building,” a cute way of noting that dozens of news organizations — among them the New York Times, the Washington Post, the major broadcast news outlets, and even Fox News and Newsmax — gave up their press passes rather than sign on to the administration’s blatantly anti-First Amendment set of rules for reporting on Pete Hegseth’s Department of War. Among those rules was a provision allowing journalists to be expelled for reporting on anything, whether classified or unclassified, not approved for official release.

To test-drive the absurdity of this new “press corps,” Wilson granted the second question of the “new era” to disgraced former congressman Matt Gaetz, once Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general and now a host on the feverishly pro-Trump One America News Network. Gaetz, who was wearing a rather dated performance fleece jacket embroidered with “Representative Matt Gaetz,” asked two questions about regime change in Venezuela, a policy the administration is actively fomenting as it carries out strikes on boats it claims are carrying “narcoterrorists” smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean.

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The substance of the questions mattered less than the opening they provided for Wilson to parrot the administration’s line on these strikes: “Every single person who we have hit thus far who is in a drug boat carrying narcotics to the United States is a narcoterrorist. Our intelligence has confirmed that.” Somewhat puzzlingly, Wilson also said the Department of War is “a planning organization” with “a contingency plan for everything.”

There was no further follow-up from the member of the “press” whom the House Ethics Committee found engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl in 2017. (Gaetz has denied wrongdoing.)

Since the briefing took place just days after the killing of a member of the National Guard blocks from the White House, multiple members of the Pentagon’s new Fourth Estate asked weighty questions in the wake of the tragedy, including whether the service member would receive a medal for distinguished service or a military burial at Arlington National Cemetery. (Both are TBD.)

It wasn’t all softball questions, but every assembled member served their purpose by running interference for the administration in general and Hegseth in particular. One interlocutor, following up on a question about selling weapons to Qatar despite its ties to the Muslim Brotherhood from the indefatigable Laura Loomer, asked without a hint of irony whether the U.S. would be “reassessing our relationship with Israel” over Israeli media reports that the country’s government “funded Hamas.”

Without missing a beat, the War Department flak replied that that would be a “better question for the State Department” and moved right along.

Another member of the press corps asked whether any actual drugs have been recovered from these alleged drug-smuggling boats that the U.S. military has been drone striking — twice, in one case — a question well worth asking, and one that’s almost certainly being posed by the deposed mainstream journalists now reporting on the Pentagon from outside its walls. Wilson, standing in for the U.S. government, responded by essentially asking that we trust her, trust the intelligence, and trust that Hegseth’s War Department is telling the truth. The matter was, once again, closed.

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Along with Loomer, a noted Trump sycophant and conspiracy theorist, I spotted “Pizzagate” promoter Jack Posobiec, who asked about Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, and Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe in the assembled crowd. In a video of the briefing, an open laptop in one member of the “new” media’s lap was emblazoned with stickers that read “feminine, not feminist” and “homemaking is hot.” A statement from the department trumpeting news of the new corps features an interviewer in front of a backdrop emblazoned with logos for “LindellTV,” the media venture by MyPillow founder Mike Lindell — who is now running for governor of Minnesota. (LindellTV’s IMDB page describes the programming as: “Aging man with many internet connectivity issues, screaming into his cell phone, has discussions with a tired looking news anchor,” although it’s not clear whether that’s the official network tagline.)

The Pentagon press corps has always been a gilded cage — a perch for big-name reporters who want a plush-sounding posting without too much hassle. The most essential, critical reporting never comes from briefings, where reporters sit with their mouths open like baby birds looking up for a news morsel from their press secretary mother. But like with so many things under Trump, by giving up on any semblance of respecting norms, he’s revealed how neutered the institution was to begin with. Critical reporting on the War Department has, and will, continue, even without reporters in the physical building. It’s worth asking if they should ever go back.

The post The Brand-New Pentagon Press Corps Is Gaga for Hegseth appeared first on The Intercept.

Now, more than 80 years of precedent may be coming to an end.

On Thursday, lawmakers in the House approved a “pilot program” in the pending Pentagon budget bill that could eventually open the door to sending billions to big contractors, while providing what critics say would be little benefit to the military.

The provision, which appeared in the budget bill after a closed-door session overseen by top lawmakers, would allow contractors to claim reimbursement for the interest they pay on debt they take on to build weapons and other gadgets for the armed services.

The technical-sounding change has such serious implications for the budget that the Pentagon itself warned against it two years ago.

One big defense contractor alone, Lockheed Martin, reported having more than $17.8 billion in outstanding interest payments last year, said Julia Gledhill, an analyst at the nonprofit Stimson Center.

“The fact that we are even exploring this question is a little crazy in terms of financial risk for the government,” Gledhill said.

Gledhill said even some Capitol Hill staffers were “scandalized” to see the provision in the final bill, which will likely be approved by the Senate next week.

Pilot to Where?

For most companies, paying interest on a loan they take out from the bank is a cost of doing business. The pilot program buried in the budget bill, however, is one of many ways in which the federal government would give defense contractors special treatment.

Contractors can already receive reimbursements from the Defense Department for the cost of research and development. Under the terms of the legislation, they would also be allowed to receive reimbursements for “financing costs incurred for a covered activity.”

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The legislation leaves it up to the Pentagon to design the program. While it’s billed as a pilot, there is no hard spending cap in the pending legislation. The total amount dedicated to the program would be determined by the House and Senate appropriations committees.

The bill tasks the Defense Department with releasing a report in February 2028 on how well the pilot program worked. As approved by Congress, however, the bill does not explain what metrics, if any, the Pentagon is supposed to use to evaluate the program.

“I don’t see any clear parameters for what success looks like,” Gledhill said. “Are there new entrants? Are we building weapons production capacity? Or are new entrants on the way?”

The chairs and ranking members of the House and Senate armed services committees who oversaw the closed-door conference process that produced the final draft of the National Defense Authorization Act did not respond to requests for comment.

In a document posted online, the committee leaders said that similar provisions were included in House and Senate drafts of the bill.

Big Spending at Stake

The switch to covering financing costs seems to be in line with a larger push this year to shake up the defense industry in light of lessons learned from Russia’s brutal war on Ukraine and fears of competition with China.

“The generous view of this provision is: Look, we have industrial capacity constraints and perhaps if we make borrowing essentially free, then maybe — big maybe — contractors will invest in capacity,” Gledhill said.

She is skeptical that will happen, and the Pentagon itself was dubious in a 2023 study conducted by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment. The Pentagon found that policy change might even supercharge the phenomenon of big defense contractors using taxpayer dollars for stock buybacks instead of research and development.

“Higher interest rates or increased borrowing only increase Revenue and Profits further,” the report found. “This creates the real risk of a ‘moral hazard’ as it pertains to interest.”

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The sums at stake are enormous. The “five primes” — the big defense contractors who claim the lion’s share of Pentagon contracts — each reported spending massive amounts of money on interest payments last year. The companies all disclose their debt loads in slightly different ways in their annual reports, but the scale is nonetheless massive in each case.

Lockheed Martin said it had $17.8 billion in outstanding interest payments.

RTX, formerly known as Raytheon, said it had $23.3 billion in future interest on long-term debt.

Northrop Grumman paid $475 million on interest payments in 2024, and General Dynamics, for its part, paid $385 million.

Meanwhile, Boeing said that it had $38.3 billion in long-term interest on debt. The company did not break down specifically how much of that debt related to its defense business, which accounted for 36.5 percent of its revenue in 2024.

Along with the “five primes,” Silicon Valley firms such as Anduril and Palantir are increasingly moving into defense contracting.

It’s unlikely that the contractors’ interest payments would ever be fully reimbursed by the Defense Department, Gledhill said, but even getting a fraction covered would amount to a huge giveaway.

She said, “I don’t think a single dollar should go toward interest payments for contractors.”

The post Lawmakers Pave the Way to Billions in Handouts for Weapons Makers That the Pentagon Itself Opposed appeared first on The Intercept.

Pressed repeatedly by a top Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee about antifa’s size and location, the operations director of the FBI’s national security division didn’t have answers.

At one point, the FBI’s Michael Glasheen fumbled with his hands as he tried to find an answer for the question from Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss.

“Well, the investigations are active,” Glasheen said.

Glasheen’s comments came three months after President Donald Trump proclaimed that antifa is a “major terror organization,” even though it the broad political movement does not have a hierarchy or leadership.

Trump followed his designation with a presidential memo on September 25 directing the FBI-led Joint Terrorism Task Forces to investigate and prosecute antifascists and other adherents of “anti-Americanism.”

The formless nature of the antifascist movement, however, appears to have flummoxed the FBI as it attempts to carry out Trump’s orders.

Glasheen called antifa “our primary concern right now” and called it “the most immediate, violent threat” from domestic terrorists. That led Thompson to ask him where antifa is located and how many members it has.

“We are building out the infrastructure right now,” Glasheen said.

“So what does that mean?” Thompson shot back. “I’m just — we’re trying to get the information. You said antifa is a terrorist organization. Tell us, as a committee, how did you come to that? Where do they exist? How many members do they have in the United States as of right now?”

“Well, that’s very fluid,” Glasheen said. “It’s ongoing for us to understand that. The same, no different than Al Qaeda or ISIS.”

Glasheen visibly struggled to answer the question before saying that the FBI’s investigations were “active.”

Glasheen is a veteran FBI official who was appointed to serve as the Terrorist Screening Center director under the Biden administration in 2023 and selected by current FBI Director Kash Patel as one of the agency’s five operations directors earlier this year.

The FBI’s shift to focusing on alleged left-wing violence comes despite researchers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies finding that despite an increase this year, it remains “much lower than historical levels of violence carried out by right-wing and jihadist attackers.”

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Trump has long obsessed over the “threat” that antifa poses to the U.S. His fixation appears to have been supercharged by the September 10 slaying of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk in Utah, allegedly by a shooter who engraved one unused bullet with the words “Hey fascist! catch!”

That helped spur Trump administration officials to launch an extensive search for links between the alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, and domestic or foreign groups that so far has produced no arrests.

The post How Many Members Does Antifa Have? Where Is Its Headquarters? The FBI Has No Answers. appeared first on The Intercept.

Durham County Commissioner Nida Allam is preparing for a rematch against Rep. Valerie Foushee, D-N.C., for the 4th Congressional District seat she lost by nine points in 2022. This time, the Israel lobby’s potential influence has shifted: Feeling the pressure from activists and constituents, Foushee has said she won’t accept money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Allam, who launched her campaign Thursday with the backing of the progressive group Justice Democrats, told The Intercept that wouldn’t be a shift for her.

“I’ve never accepted corporate PAC or dark money, special interest group money, or pro Israel lobby group money,” said Allam, whose 2020 election to the county commission made her the first Muslim woman elected to public office in North Carolina.

The country’s top pro-Israel lobbying groups and the crypto industry spent heavily to help Foushee beat Allam in 2022, when they competed in the race for the seat vacated by former Rep. David Price, D-N.C. AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, and DMFI PAC, another pro-Israel group with ties to AIPAC, spent just under $2.5 million backing Foushee that year. The PAC funded by convicted crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried also spent more than $1 million backing Foushee.

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After nearly two years of pressure from activists in North Carolina enraged by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Foushee announced in August that she would not accept AIPAC money in 2026, joining a growing list of candidates swearing off AIPAC money in the face of a new wave of progressive challengers.

This time, if pro-Israel and crypto groups spend in the race, it’s on Foushee to respond, Allam said.

“If they decide to spend in this, then it comes down to Valerie Foushee to answer, is she going to stand by the promise and commitment she made to not accept accept AIPAC and pro-Israel lobby money?” Allam said. “This district deserves someone who is going to be a champion for working families, and you can’t be that when you’re taking the money from the same corporate PAC donors that are funding Republicans who are killing Medicare for all, who are killing an increased minimum wage.”

“You can look at my record to show that I am not just paying lip service to our shared progressive values but instead working to advance legislation like the ICE Badge Visibility Act, the Dignity for Detained Immigrants Act, and the Block the Bombs Act,” Foushee said in a statement to The Intercept, noting that she had been endorsed by North Carolina governor Josh Stein and former governor Roy Cooper. “I am ensuring the people of NC-04 have a voice in Washington by voting against the National Defense Authorization Act, the Republican Continuing Resolution, and the Big Ugly Bill that prioritized tax breaks for the wealthy over the needs of working families.”

Allam, who helped lead Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign in North Carolina, is the seventh candidate Justice Democrats are backing so far this cycle. The group — which previously recruited progressive stars including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. — is endorsing candidates challenging incumbents next year in Michigan, California, New York, Tennessee, Missouri, and Colorado. Justice Democrats is taking a more aggressive approach to primaries this cycle after only endorsing its incumbents last year and losing two major seats to pro-Israel spending. The group plans to launch at least nine more candidates by January, The Intercept reported.

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Allam unveiled her campaign with other endorsements from independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sunrise Movement, the Working Families Party, and Leaders We Deserve, a PAC launched by progressive organizers David Hogg and Kevin Lata in 2023 to back congressional candidates under the age of 35. She said she sees the local impacts of the Trump administration on working families every day in her work as a Durham County commissioner.

“What I’m hearing from our residents every single day is that they don’t feel that they have a champion or someone who is standing up and fighting for them at the federal level, and someone who is advocating for working families,” she said. “This is the safest blue district in North Carolina and this is an opportunity for us as a Democratic Party to have someone elected who is going to be championing the issues for working families — like Medicare for All, a Green New Deal — and has a track record of getting things done at the local level.”

Allam is rejecting corporate PAC money and running on taking on billionaires and fighting Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has been carrying out raids and arresting residents in the district. She’s also supporting a Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and ending military aid to Israel. She began considering a run for office after a man murdered her friends in the 2015 Chapel Hill shootings.

Small dollar donors powered Allam’s 2022 campaign, when she raised $1.2 million with an average donation of $30. She’s aiming to replicate that strategy this cycle, she said.

“Trump is testing the waters in every way possible,” Allam said. “The only way that we’re going to be able to effectively fight back against Trump is by passing the Voting Rights Act, is by taking big corporate money out of our elections, by ending Citizens United. Because they’re the same ones who are fighting against our democracy.”

In its release announcing Allam’s campaign on Thursday, Justice Democrats criticized Foushee for taking money from corporate interests, including defense contractors who have profited from the genocides in Gaza and Sudan. “In the face of rising healthcare costs, creeping authoritarianism, and ICE raids, and the highest number of federal funding cuts of any district in the country, leadership that only shows up to make excuses won’t cut it anymore,” the group wrote.

Foushee served in the North Carolina state legislature for more than two decades before being elected to Congress in 2022. She first campaigned for Congress on expanding the Affordable Care Act and moving toward Medicare for All, passing public campaign financing and the Voting Rights Act, and a $15 minimum wage. Since entering Congress in 2023, Foushee has sponsored bills to conduct research on gun violence prevention, to expand diversity in research for artificial intelligence, establish a rebate for environmental roof installations, and support historically Black colleges and universities.

“I am proud of the legislation I have supported, the votes I have taken, and the services my office has provided to constituents,” Foushee said.

Foushee’s evolving stance on some Israel issues reflects a broader shift among Democrats under pressure from organizers and constituents.

Amid rising public outrage over the influence of AIPAC in congressional elections in recent years, Foushee faced growing criticism and protests in the district over her refusal to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and her support from the lobbying group. After organizers tried to meet with her and held a demonstration blocking traffic on a freeway in the district, she signed onto a 2023 letter calling for a ceasefire but did not publicize her support for the letter or comment on it publicly, The News & Observer reported.

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At a town hall in August, an attendee asked Foushee if she regretted taking AIPAC money. In response, she said she would no longer accept money from the group. Three days later, she co-sponsored Illinois Rep. Delia Ramirez’s Block the Bombs to Israel Act to limit the transfer of defensive weapons to Israel.

“We cannot allow AIPAC and these corporate billionaires to scare us into silence,” Allam said. “It’s actually our mandate to take them on directly, especially now as they’re losing their sway in the Democratic Party.”

Update: December 11, 2025, 1:06 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with a statement from Rep. Valerie Foushee.

The post AIPAC Spent Millions to Keep Her Out of Congress. Now, She Sees an Opening.  appeared first on The Intercept.

Ten residents from four working-class neighborhoods controlled by MS-13, including volunteer election workers and local journalists, told The Intercept they saw firsthand gang members giving residents an ultimatum to vote for the Trump-endorsed conservative candidate or face consequences. Six other sources with knowledge of the intimidation — including government officials, human rights investigators, and people with direct personal contact with gangs — corroborated their testimony. Gang members drove voters to the polls in MS-13-controlled mototaxi businesses, three sources said, and threatened to kill street-level activists for the left-leaning Liberty and Refoundation, or LIBRE, party if they were seen bringing supporters to the polls. Two witnesses told The Intercept they saw members of MS-13 checking people’s ballots inside polling sites, as did a caller to the national emergency help line.

“A lot of people for LIBRE didn’t go to vote because the gangsters had threatened to kill them,” a resident of San Pedro Sula, the second-largest city in Honduras, told The Intercept. Mareros, as the gang members are known, intimidated voters into casting their ballots for Nasry “Tito” Asfura, known as Papi a la Órden or “Daddy at your service.” Multiple residents of San Pedro Sula alleged they were also directed to vote for a mayoral candidate from the centrist Liberal Party.

Miroslava Cerpas, the leader of the Honduran national emergency call system, provided The Intercept with four audio files of 911 calls in which callers reported that gang members had threatened to murder residents if they voted for LIBRE. A lead investigator for an internationally recognized Honduran human rights NGO, who spoke anonymously with The Intercept to disclose sensitive information from a soon-to-be published report on the election, said they are investigating gang intimidation in Tegucigalpa and the Sula Valley “based on direct contact with victims of threats by gangs.”

“People linked to MS-13 were working to take people to the voting stations to vote for Asfura, telling them if they didn’t vote, there would be consequences,” the investigator told The Intercept. They said they received six complaints from three colonias in the capital of Tegucigalpa and three in the Sula Valley, where voters said members of MS-13 had threatened to kill those who openly voted for the ruling left LIBRE party or brought party representatives to the polls. The three people in the Sula Valley, the investigator said, received an audio file on WhatsApp in which a voice warns that those who vote for LIBRE “have three days to leave the area,” and “If you don’t follow the order, we’re going to kill your families, even your dogs. We don’t want absolutely anyone to vote for LIBRE. We’re going to be sending people to monitor who is going to vote and who followed the order. Whoever tries to challenge the order, you know what will happen.”

The MS-13 interference took place as the U.S. president, who has obsessed over the gang since his first term, extended an interventionist hand over the elections. On November 28, Trump threatened to cut off aid to Honduras if voters didn’t elect Asfura while simultaneously announcing a pardon for Asfura’s ally and fellow party member Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras convicted in the U.S. on drug trafficking and weapons charges last year.

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“If Tito Asfura wins for President of Honduras, because the United States has so much confidence in him, his Policies, and what he will do for the Great People of Honduras, we will be very supportive,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “If he doesn’t win, the United States will not be throwing good money after bad, because a wrong Leader can only bring catastrophic results to a country, no matter which country it is.”

The election remains undecided over a week after the fact: Asfura holds a narrow lead over centrist Liberal Party candidate Salvador Nasralla, while Rixi Moncada, the LIBRE party candidate, remains in a distant third. As people await the final results, one San Pedro Sula resident said, “there’s been a tense calm.”

It’s unlikely the MS-13 interference led to LIBRE’s loss, since the ruling party had already suffered a significant drop in popularity after a lack of change, continued violence, and corruption scandals under four years of President Xiomara Castro. But the LIBRE government pointed to a raft of other electoral irregularities, and a preliminary European Union electoral mission report recognized that the election was carried out amid “intimidation, defamation campaigns, institutional weakness, and disinformation,” though it ignored LIBRE’s accusations of “fraud.” The Honduran attorney general announced their own investigation into irregularities in the election last week, and on Monday, two representatives for the National Electoral Council informed Hondurans that the electronic voting system wasn’t updated for over 48 hours over the weekend, while results are still being finalized.

“There is clear and resounding evidence that this electoral process was coerced by organized crime groups,” said Cerpas, who is a member of the LIBRE party, “pushing the people to vote for Nasry Asfura and intimidating anyone who wanted to vote for Rixi Moncada.”

Gerardo Torres, the vice chancellor of foreign relations for the LIBRE government, told The Intercept via phone that manipulation of elections by maras is a well-established practice — but that the timing of the threats was alarming given Trump’s simultaneous pardoning of Hernández and endorsement of Asfura. “When, a day before the elections, the president of the United States announces the liberation of Hernández, and then automatically there is a surge in activity and intimidation by MS-13,” Torres said, it suggests that the gang members see the return of the former president as “an opportunity to change their situation and launch a coordinated offensive.”

“It would seem like the U.S. is favoring, for ideological reasons, a narco-state to prevent the left from returning to power,” he said.

The White House, Asfura, and the National Party did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

All witnesses who alleged election interference have been granted anonymity to protect them from targeting by MS-13.

“They Control These Colonias”

Bumping over potholed dirt roads on the outskirts of San Pedro Sula the day before the presidential election, a motorcycle taxi driver informed their passenger of MS-13’s latest ultimatum: The mototaxis “were strictly prohibited from bringing people from LIBRE to the voting stations on election day,” recalled the passenger. “Only people for the National Party or the Liberal Party — but for LIBRE, no one, no one, not even flags were allowed.”

Gangs like MS-13 “control the whole area of Cortés,” the passenger said, referring to their home department. “Total subjugation.”

The gang members closely monitor the movements of those within their territories, in many cases by co-opting or controlling mototaxi services to keep track of who comes and goes. Three other sources in San Pedro Sula and one in Tegucigalpa confirmed MS-13’s co-optation of mototaxis in the area; another source with direct, yearslong contact with gang members on the north coast of Honduras confirmed that MS-13 was pushing residents in their territories of San Pedro Sula to vote for Asfura by the same means. When members of MS-13 passed through Cortés warning that those who voted for LIBRE “had three days to leave,” the mototaxi passenger said, residents surrounded by years of killings, massacres, and disappearances by the gang knew what might await them if they defied.

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MS-13 was formed in the 1980s in Los Angeles, California, among refugees of the Salvadoran civil war who the George H.W. Bush administration then deported en masse to Central America. In the ’90s, local gangs of displaced urban Hondurans morphed with the Salvadoran franchise. Over the years, the Mara Salvatrucha, which MS stands for, evolved into a sophisticated criminal enterprise: first as street-level drug dealers, then extortionists, assassins for hire, and cocaine transporters who have been documented working in league with high-level traffickers and state officials for at least two decades.

If Honduras has been a home turf of gangs, the country is also an anchor for U.S. power in the region, hosting the second-largest U.S. military base in Latin America and a laboratory for radical experiments in libertarian far-right “private cities.” In 2009, the Honduran military carried out a coup under the passive watch of U.S. authorities, ousting then-President Manuel Zelaya, a centrist and husband of current President Xiomara Castro. The homicide rate skyrocketed, turning the country into the world’s most violent, per U.S. State Department rankings, by the 2010s.

The chaos gave rise to ex-president Hernández, whom U.S. prosecutors later accused of turning Honduras into a “cocaine superhighway” as he directed the country’s military, police, and judiciary to protect drug traffickers. Last week, Hernández was released from a West Virginia prison after a pardon from Trump, and on Monday, the Honduran attorney general announced an international warrant for his arrest.

As Honduran voters processed the latest cycle of U.S. influence over their politics, the more immediate menace at the polls extended to the local level. “Gangsters were going from house to house to tell people to vote for Papi [Asfura] and el Pollo,” said a San Pedro Sula resident who volunteered at a voting booth on election day, referring to the city’s mayor, Roberto Contreras of the Liberal Party. Two other sources in the city, and one government source in Tegucigalpa, also said gang members were backing Contreras.

“The team of Mayor Roberto Contreras categorically rejects any insinuation of pacts with criminal structures,” said a representative for the mayor in a statement to The Intercept. “Any narrative that tries to tie [support for Contreras] with Maras or gangs lacks base, and looks to distract attention from the principal message: the population went to vote freely, without pressure and with the hope of a better future.”

Gang intimidation of voters isn’t new in Honduras, where, within territories zealously guarded and warred over by heavily armed gangs, even the threat for residents to vote for certain candidates is enough to steer an election in their district. “Remember that they control these colonias,” said one of the San Pedro Sula residents. “And given the fact that they have a lot of presence, they tell the people that they’re going to vote for so-and-so, and the majority follow the orders.”

The human rights lawyer Victor Fernández, who ran for mayor of San Pedro Sula as an independent candidate but didn’t get on the general election ballot, said he and his supporters also experienced intimidation from MS-13 during his campaign. After his own race was over, he said he continued to see indications of gang intervention in the presidential campaign for months leading up to election day.

“Both before and during the elections on November 30, gangsters operating here in the Sula Valley exercised their pressure over the election,” he said, explaining this conclusion was drawn from “recurring” testimonies with residents of multiple neighborhoods. “The great violent proposal that people have confirmed is that gang members told them they couldn’t go vote for LIBRE, and that whoever did so would have to confront [the gang] structure.”

“Vamos a votar por Papi a la Órden”

Minutes after submitting a highly publicized complaint to the Public Ministry on Monday, Cerpas, of the National Emergency call system, told The Intercept that her office received 892 verified complaints of electoral violations on election day. “In those calls,” she said, “there was a significant group of reports regarding intimidation and threats by criminal groups.”

Four audio recordings of residents calling the emergency hotline, which Cerpas shared with The Intercept, reflect the wider accusation that mareros used murderous intimidation tactics to prevent people from voting for LIBRE and vote, instead, for Asfura.

In one of the files, a woman calling from Tegucigalpa tells the operator that members of MS-13 had “threatened to kill” anyone who voted for LIBRE while posing as election observers at the voting center. “They’re outside the voting center, they’re outside and inside,” she says, referring to members of MS-13, her voice trembling. “I entered, and they told me, ‘If you vote for LIBRE, we’ll kill you and your whole fucking family.’”

For days before the election, a resident from a rural region of the country, whose time in a maximum-security prison called La Tolva put him in yearslong proximity to gang members, had received messages from friends and family members living in Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula. They all reported a variation of the same story: Gang members on mototaxis informing everyone in their colonias, “Vamos a votar por Papi a la Órden.” (“We’re going to vote for” Asfura.)

A former mid-level bureaucrat for the LIBRE government told The Intercept that, during the lead-up to the election, “LIBRE activists who promoted the vote … were intimidated by members of gangs so that they would cease pushing for the vote for LIBRE.” The former official didn’t specify the gangs, though they said the intimidation took place in three separate neighborhoods.

“All day, the muchachos [gang members] were going around and taking photos of the coordinators,” read messages from local organizers shared with The Intercept. The gang members “said that they needed to close themselves in their houses.”

Testimony at Hernández’s trial indicated that members of MS-13 were subcontracted as early as 2004 through the corrupt, U.S.-allied police commander Juan Carlos “El Tigre” Bonilla to provide security for caravans of cocaine alongside soldiers. Evidence presented in the trial of Midence Oquelí Martínez Turcios, a former Honduran soldier and longtime congressional deputy for the Liberal Party who was convicted of drug trafficking charges last week, revealed that he trained sicarios for MS-13 to carry out high-level assassinations on behalf of the drug trafficking clan known as the Cachiros. Testifying at Hernández’s 2024 trial, the imprisoned Cachiros leader claimed to have paid $250,000 in protection money to the former president.

Trump wiped away Hernández’s conviction, calling it political theater, but he sees MS-13’s sicarios in a different light. To Trump, the gangsters are human “animals,” their gang a “menace” that “violated our borders” in an “infestation” — justifying militarized crackdowns on caravans of Hondurans fleeing violence under Hernández and the categorization of the gang as a foreign terrorist organization. Announcing the designation in February, a White House press release reads: “MS-13 uses public displays of violence to obtain and control territory and manipulate the electoral process in El Salvador.”

“It’s known that MS-13 will do vote buying,” the investigator examining voter intimidation said. “This is a recurring practice. But we used to think this was just to influence the mayors, not the presidency.”

In El Salvador, gangs like MS-13 have intervened in favor of another Trump ally, Nayib Bukele, whose government has been embroiled by scandal over alleged collusion with MS-13 and other gangs — meaning that the in Honduras wasn’t the first time that the same candidate Trump endorsed was promoted by a gang he now designates a terrorist organization.

For Cerpas, the coincidence of that voter intimidation with Hernández’s release is cause for alarm. “The people in Honduras are afraid,” she said, “because organized crime has been emboldened by the pardon of Juan Orlando Hernández.”

Correction: December 10, 2025

This story previously stated that Victor Fernández lost a primary race for mayor of San Pedro Sula. He collected signatures for the general election but electoral authorities rejected his candidacy, which prevented him from appearing on the ballot.

The post MS-13 and Trump Backed the Same Presidential Candidate in Honduras appeared first on The Intercept.