In a major report quietly issued by the federally funded Institute for Defense Analyses, researchers working for the Pentagon presented their findings, based on interviews with dozens of top drug traffickers incarcerated in the United States, on how to better disrupt transnational organized crime.

One top-line prescription: More “direct military action.”

The report, which was obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request and has never previously been made public, provides a window into the inner workings of major drug-trafficking networks. The report also shows the central role the Pentagon sees for itself in countering those networks at a time when the Trump administration is claiming broad war-making authorities and beginning to openly use the military to assassinate alleged smugglers.

An attorney whose client was interviewed by researchers working for the Pentagon told The Intercept that the report proves that the recent sidelining of counternarcotics police in favor of bloodshed at sea is what military insiders have wanted for years.

“There’s a huge difference between the Coast Guard or the Navy boarding what they suspect to be a boat with drugs coming into the United States, and prosecuting those people, and those people having lawyers and facing charges and appearing in court, and potentially going to prison if they’re convicted — and the summary execution of suspected drug dealers,” the lawyer said. “And now we’ve crossed that line.”

The report, issued in 2015, comes to light as the U.S. has deployed warships, fighter jets, spy planes, and thousands of sailors to the Caribbean Sea, and has carried out several high-profile strikes on small boats in international waters, mostly coming from Venezuela, a country whose leaders Trump officials decry as illegitimate.

The report shows glimmers of the mentality that Trump has made into policy with his tropical drone strikes, but the president has done little of what the Pentagon-funded researchers ultimately concluded would be the most effective means of taking on cartels: fighting corruption and arresting drug lords.

“Bad Guys”

The report is based on interviews with 62 drug-world figures, including 10 people described by the Drug Enforcement Administration as “leaders of the most prolific drug trafficking/money laundering organizations.” Supporting documents show that the idea of labeling drug gangs as foreign invaders and waging a literal war on them long predates Trump’s rise to power.

“The purpose of this research is to gain a better understanding of how transnational (worldwide) criminal organizations are structured,” researchers wrote in a 2010 memo to prospective interview subjects obtained by The Intercept. “The DoD believes this knowledge will benefit U.S. military forces who are actively involved in engaging insurgent groups that have similar ‘organized crime’ characteristics or connections.” (The Pentagon did not respond to requests for comment, and the Institute for Defense Analyses declined to comment.)

One of the report’s authors, a retired DEA chief and George W. Bush-era drug policy official named Joseph Keefe, told The Intercept that the project started in the thick of the Iraq War, when Keefe’s team saw Iraqi insurgents and drug cartels as similar organizations of “bad guys.”

“The bad guys, the Iraqis we were fighting, were similar to the bad guys Drug Enforcement fights,” he said. “It was trying to look at things through the bad guys’ mind. People don’t look at that often.”

Keefe said there is a role for the military in combating drug trafficking, but he criticized the new Trump policy of death from above.

“Working together is helpful,” he said, “but not killing everybody.”

Co-author William Simpkins, former acting administrator of the DEA, shared Keefe’s skepticism. Simpkins told The Intercept that, based on his more than three decades in drug enforcement, the people who cartels recruit for smuggling trips are by definition not high-ranking members of trafficking networks, and could even be forced to carry out the work.

“I remember in Florida there would be shrimp boat after shrimp boat after shrimp boat. The Coast Guard would make these seizures, and they’d turn them over to us,” he said.

“To me, blowing up that first boat is an extrajudicial killing — let’s face it.”

“Most of these mutts,” said Simpkins, referring to the smugglers with a slur, “even if they were members of that organization, they probably weren’t among the most important members.”

Attacking the boats, he argued, is not legal.

“To me, blowing up that first boat is an extrajudicial killing — let’s face it,” Simpkins said. “That’s why that term exists.”

“Kinetic” Targeting

In a 2013 slide presentation that was also obtained by The Intercept, the research team touted their interim findings to the Defense Department. Alongside anodyne recommendations such as supporting anti-corruption efforts abroad, the presenters made what appears to be a call for the military to assassinate cartel leaders.

Under the heading of “Direct Military Action Against Adversary Networks,” the authors propose “expanded targeting (kinetic and non-kinetic) of top lieutenants” in the cartel. It’s not clear from the document what exactly the line refers to.

Keefe, who is listed as an author on the final report but not the slide presentation, did not recall the reference to “kinetic targeting” of cartel lieutenants. Simpkins also said he was not familiar with the slide presentation. (Christopher Ploszaj, who is listed as an author of the slide deck and the lead on the report, has died; the second slide deck author was unreachable.)

Simpkins said that federal authorities have long collaborated with the military to interdict planes and boats smuggling drugs, but denied knowing of any past strikes on drug lords. He pointed out that even someone as notorious and violent as Pablo Escobar, who had blown up a plane with Americans aboard, was marked for arrest, not assassination, though he ultimately died in a gunfight with Colombian police.

The “targeting” recommendation does not appear in the final report, but the document does include passing mentions to “war gaming” and “operational planning.”

Instead, the report sticks mainly to advice grounded in what the traffickers themselves said is effective: treating drugs as a law enforcement problem. Still, the very existence of the document, compiling insights from convicted leaders of Mexican and Colombian cartels and Colombian paramilitaries, as well as money launderers, fixers, and a lone Al Qaeda member, suggests that the military has long been reluctant to leave anti-drug operations to the State Department or federal law enforcement agencies.

Before “Narcoterrorism”

Long before Trump made “narcoterrorism” a household word — and a justification for the use of military force against alleged drug-smuggling boats — the Defense Department research linked organized crime to the national security threat of terrorism.

The opening paragraph of the study accuses “transnational criminal organizations” of threatening state sovereignty by “facilitating insurgent and terrorist activity through illicit trade, or perpetuating acts of terrorism to create criminal enclaves within a state.”

Latin American history professor Alexander Aviña argued that this kind of rhetoric is meant to tee up military intervention.

“They’re trying to set up a solution,” he said. “And if you have a failed state or a captured state, then the solution, of course, is going to have to be military from the U.S. perspective.”

The report claims that 20 of 53 groups designated at the time as foreign terrorist organizations could be definitively tied to drug trafficking. For this conclusion, the authors rely on the 2011 congressional testimony of career DEA official Derek Maltz, a longtime advocate for the most hard-line anti-drug policies, including the designation of cartels as terrorist organizations. Maltz went on to serve as acting DEA head under Trump before retiring this year. Maltz praised the recent strikes on boats from Venezuela.

“I’m sure the terrorists will get the message soon and we will see a huge decrease in poison in our communities,” he wrote on X.

The authors of the Institute for Defense Analyses report, for their part, distinguish between violence involving cartels and that carried out by Muslim extremists — a distinction that is supported by interviews with incarcerated veterans of the drug trade. Mexican cartel members told researchers that they cared little about the politics of those they did business with, but they would not want the law enforcement scrutiny that would come with directly helping terror groups by, say, sneaking a high-level jihadist over the southern border.

War on Terror Impunity

In the decade since launching his presidential bid by saying Mexicans came to the U.S. “bringing drugs,” Trump has reportedly fixated on the idea of military strikes on drug labs, a tactic that has since become a matter of GOP doctrine. Republicans in Congress sought to authorize outright war on transnational gangs in Central and South America through legislation in 2023, without success. The key to going ahead has rested in large part on the term “narcoterrorist.”

“The idea of narco-terrorism has been a really powerful idea that the right has used against Latin America since the early to mid-1980s,” Aviña said. “And I feel like this report and everything that’s come since then is that kind of argument, but on steroids. The ground has been prepared for a while to link the war on drugs, to the war on migrants, to what used to be the waning part of the Cold War. It just got replaced after 2001 with the war on terror.”

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Bringing war on terror impunity to the drug war, Trump seems intent on cutting out the middleman. Rather than trying to jump through intelligence hoops to connect wholesale drug dealers to far-off Islamic extremists, the administration now argues that importing drugs to the U.S. is itself terrorism.

Trump’s lawyers have sought to justify not seeking input from Congress for the recent wave of deadly attacks by telling legislators that the strikes were against “designated terrorist organizations” and that the dead were combatants in a “noninternational armed conflict,” terms considered by critics to be legally meaningless. (With no Republican support, efforts to assert Congress’s war powers have failed.)

Trump officials have also begun using the “narcoterrorist” rhetoric when discussing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, justifying the potential use of force against his regime by saying that Maduro directs the drug trafficking efforts of gangs like Tren de Aragua, which Trump has designated as a terror group. U.S. intelligence findings, however, have undercut the assertions of links between Maduro and the gangs.

Referring to the second recent strike on a boat in the Caribbean, the president wrote on his Truth Social site on September 15, “This morning, on my Orders, U.S. Military Forces conducted a SECOND Kinetic Strike against positively identified, extraordinarily violent drug trafficking cartels and narcoterrorists.”

A Better Way?

Aerial footage of exploding dinghies may make for compelling social media fodder, but the top counternarcotics strategy recommended by the report is decidedly less dramatic.

Even as the report argues for a military role in the fight against drugs, the key conclusions drawn from the interviews place the centerpiece of effective counternarcotics policy elsewhere. All but one of the 62 interviewees told researchers that official corruption was the “most important factor for their organization’s success.”

Corruption in Colombia was described as so widespread and essential to drug operations that one drug organization reportedly employed a “corruption whip” in each chamber of Colombian Congress whose main job was to coordinate payments to politicians and track votes that could affect illicit business.

Other interviews yielded a rich menu of what bribes could by you: for $5-10 million, you could get a police or military official to assassinate a rival trafficker; for $100,000, one subject purchased information about extradition orders against him; and for a mere $10,000 the same trafficker acquired tips about upcoming raids on his facilities.

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In response, the report’s authors said that the U.S. should support anti-corruption efforts around the globe — which would be a major shift in American foreign policy. As the authors acknowledge in a footnote, instead of applying pressure to corrupt governments abroad, the U.S. often provides them with the most aid.

If the U.S. was tacitly supporting foreign corruption before, since Trump took office for the second time, the government has started actively looking the other way. His State Department ordered an end to reporting on international human rights abuses and corruption. He has partnered with autocratic leaders to fly immigrants to prisons in third countries. And he and his family have pursued a dizzying array of foreign real estate and crypto deals, with foreign governments and businesspeople openly buying access to the president.

Trump also suspended enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act for four months after taking office. Upon lifting the pause in June, Department of Justice leadership released guidelines stating that cartels would be the focus of corruption enforcement going forward, and investigations would no longer linger on what the administration described as the “generally accepted business courtesies” of legitimate corporations.

Even as he has ostensibly shifted the focus of anti-corruption enforcement to drug-trafficking, Trump seems to be putting the military at the forefront of a counternarcotics strategy in a way not seen since the U.S. invaded Panama in 1989.

For Simpkins, the report co-author, this approach is bound to fall short.

“As long as there’s demand, the supply is going to keep coming in.”

Reflecting on his long career at all levels of federal counternarcotics work, Simpkins said that striking drug boats might curb the use of boats for smuggling in the near term, but he doubts the U.S. will ever stop the flow of drugs without massive societal change to curb drug use.

“As long as there’s demand, the supply is going to keep coming in,” he said. “Locking everybody up hasn’t been able to solve it. Blowing up 11 people on a rickety, shitty boat isn’t going to solve it.”

The post Internal Report Shows the Military Always Wanted to Join the Drug War appeared first on The Intercept.

I’ve lived a lot of life but can’t say I’ve ever had the secretary of Homeland Security tweet a video of me before.

On March 14, a day before the story broke of an international student, Ranjani Srinivasan, a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University who fled from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to Canada, I received a call from a friend informing me that a video of me accompanying Srinivasan was released and being circulated online by Kristi Noem.

My body involuntarily began to tremble.

Despite my status as a natural-born American citizen and the fact that I had committed no crime, I envisioned a battalion of law enforcement officers dragging me from my apartment and forcing me into an unmarked vehicle, just as they had with Mahmoud Khalil six days before, and just as they have attempted to do with other students on Columbia’s campus.

I didn’t leave my apartment for four days.

Dismantling the American Dream

The chaos unfurling at Columbia is no longer about Palestine, Israel, or divestment. And insofar as it ever was, the administration’s ever-tightening grip on Columbia is not about antisemitism — and it is not at Harvard University, where the specter of antisemitism is being used to threaten funding there just as it was at Columbia.

It is about freedom of speech, immigration policy, constitutional equality, police, and control over people’s lives. The crackdown is a declaration about upward mobility and dictating what “opportunity” looks like for different people.

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This is about Donald Trump’s systematic and calculated dismantling of the American Dream, encapsulated in a singularly defining moment in American history. It’s about McCarthyist accusations of “antisemitism” being leveraged as a scapegoat to justify Trump’s ruthless and indiscriminate assault on international students.

With the administration now unleashing on Harvard and other schools sure to come soon, we are at a critical opportunity to come up for air and recognize that what is happening here under the auspices of rooting out “antisemitism” is, in fact, an assault on the American Dream. It’s a program that runs counter to the values and liberties Columbia, many other universities,  and the country as a whole espouse.

An Immigration Policy of Terrorism

Unlike other forms of violence, terrorism is a tactic intended to rupture society. It is the deliberate use of physical and narrative violence wielded against symbolic victims to coerce, intimidate, and hijack established institutions and policies. Terrorism triangulates violence by targeting innocent victims for the purpose of igniting mass hysteria and chronic fear.

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Those four days holed up in my apartment after Noem tweeted a video of me offered a visceral glimpse into the terror that international students at Columbia and beyond experience every day.

For Srinivasan, the line was much more direct: Noem exploited her terror as a marketing ploy to promote a new “self-deportation” app.

Referring to Srinivasan’s harried departure as a self-congratulatory gold star for a successful immigration policy — that is to say, the Trump administration’s immigration policy of terror.

This is the strategy of the federal government, abetted by Columbia, with its constant invocation of the specter of “antisemitism.”

Antisemitism at Columbia

Antisemitism at elite institutions is a very real and reprehensible problem. Yet accusations of “antisemitism” at Columbia now serve as a catch-all cudgel wielded to silence voices of dissent.

Most ironically, this weaponization of the accusation has led to the silencing of Jewish student voices, and disregard for the real issues Jewish students and faculty face.

The Jewish community at Columbia is a tremendous part of our diverse and inspiring, campus life. To use Jews as political pawns is antisemitic. To scapegoat and put a target on their backs is antisemitic.

For then–interim president Katrina Armstrong to offer empty platitudes about supposed values rather than acknowledging how her actions have vilified Jewish students is antisemitic.

To claim to protect Jewish students while withholding funding from their own research is antisemitic. For Trump to position himself as the arbiter of who gets to be Jewish is antisemitic.

This form of antisemitism uses the very real experiences of bigotry and racism hurled at our Jewish community as a tool to achieve its own financial interests and autocratic goals.

What is happening at Columbia is not and has never been about protecting our Jewish community.

The Antidote

I was asked to accompany Srinivasan just an hour before I needed to arrive at the airport. I went because she feared being disappeared, apprehended, or detained without anyone knowing where she was.

As a light-skinned U.S. citizen, I carry a learned confidence around authority and law enforcement. Yet, even with such a privilege, anxiety pulsed through my chest as our plane touched down in Canada.

I can’t adequately capture the relief that washed over me as Srinivasan passed through the immigration checkpoint unchallenged. And as I exhaled for the first time in what felt like days, my thoughts drifted to my own family’s story.

During World War II, my Chinese grandfather fled to the United States without “documentation.” Despite the barriers imposed by the Chinese Exclusion Act, he was drawn by the promise of the American Dream.

My mother’s family can be traced back to Peregrine White — the first child to be born aboard the Mayflower. These stories run deep in my veins, reflecting both the immigrant experience and the American journey. Together, they illuminate the essence of what we have come to recognize as the American Dream: struggle, sacrifice, and a conviction that the freedom our shores offer is for all.

The Trump administration’s tired strategy is to turn us as Americans against each other in a divisive zero-sum game — to pit Democrat against Republican, the “elite” against the working class, the Jewish community against those calling to end the Palestinian genocide, the immigrant against the citizen.

The antidote is already baked into our national creedos: “We the people.” This is not a description of adversaries. Each of us, immigrants included, are part of a rich and storied history of struggle, sacrifice, and self-determination.

If our democracy is to survive, it’s imperative that we reject the forces of autocracy that seek to divide us and remember that immigrants, perhaps more than anyone, are the lifeblood of the American Dream.

The post This Is Not About Antisemitism, Palestine, or Columbia. It’s Trump Dismantling the American Dream. appeared first on The Intercept.

Superior Farms processes between 15 and 20 percent of lambs killed for meat in the U.S. each year. Its vast Denver slaughterhouse, located for decades in the Globeville neighborhood — one of the poorest areas in the city, with over 90 percent Latino residents — advertises sustainable, locally sourced, halal-certified meat production and an employee-owned business model.

Now, though, animal rights advocates are trying to upend that carefully constructed image by releasing new disturbing footage, obtained surreptitiously on the slaughterhouse floor.

The investigators behind the exposé hope it will aid efforts to pass a ballot measure in next month’s election that would shutter the facility. Organizers with the grassroots group Pro-Animal Future managed to get the measure, which would ban slaughterhouses within city and county limits, on the city ballot.

Along with pointing to checkered labor and environmental records that have led to over $200,000 in fines for violations in the last decade, animal rights advocates want the revelations about the conditions at the slaughterhouse to encourage votes for the ballot initiative.

The slaughterhouse footage, captured in July and August by secret cameras snuck into the facility by anonymous members of the Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE, network, was made public on Wednesday in a report by the Animal Activist Legal Defense Project, or AALDP, at the University of Denver.

The videos may show a range of animal abuses, routine cruelties, and instances that legal experts with the AALDP say could violate animal cruelty and humane slaughter laws. (The DxE investigators work anonymously to avoid tangles with law enforcement for entering the slaughterhouse and filming without Superior Farms’ permission.)

Videos shared with The Intercept prior to the report’s public release show, among other scenes, lambs with their throats slit hanging upside down and thrashing on the slaughter line; one animal with an internal organ that has been torn inside-out and left dangling behind it as it heads to slaughter; injured lambs being led to slaughter; workers laughing, spanking animals, and engaging in simulated sex acts with nearby machinery as lambs are having their throats slit; and the apparent use of so-called Judas sheep — adult sheep kept alive at the facility and used to lead the young sheep to slaughter.

“In general, that’s what you can expect to see in a slaughterhouse,” said Eric Davis, a retired veterinarian at the University of California, Davis, School of Veterinary Medicine, who reviewed a video reel provided by the animal rights activists. “This one is on the edge of badness, but it’s not going to be that much better if it’s running well.”

If successful, the Denver ballot initiative, Ordinance 309, would end all these practices by prohibiting the construction or operation of slaughterhouses in the City and County of Denver.

“This election cycle, Denver has a rare opportunity to put an end to this practice on an industrial scale within our city.”

When reached for comment, a spokesperson for Superior Farms, Bob Mariano, questioned whether The Intercept had verified that the footage was from the Denver location on the dates claimed by DxE. The Intercept was able to verify the dates from the footage’s time stamp. The Animal Activist Legal Defense Project attested to the veracity of the location, and footage taken by the investigators outside the facility aligns with images on Google Maps. The Intercept shared still frames from the obtained footage with Superior Farms and asked the company to confirm whether it showed their Denver facility. At the time of publication, the company had declined to identify the facility.

“Every workday, over 1,000 baby sheep have their throats slit at Superior Farms,” one of the investigators from DxE, who did not give their name, said by email. “This election cycle, Denver has a rare opportunity to put an end to this practice on an industrial scale within our city.”

The Superior Farms slaughterhouse is the only one currently operating in Denver’s city limits, so would be the only plant affected by Ordinance 309’s passing. The decision could, however, have lasting and profound effects on the animal agriculture industry nationwide.

Kenny Rogers, a past president of the Colorado Livestock Association, which has teamed up with Superior and others to opposing the ballot measure, told Denver’s Westword weekly paper, “Essentially, that’s the jugular vein of the sheep industry here in the state.”

The Superior Farms spokesperson said the company opposed the ballot measure in a bid to save its employees’ livelihoods.

“The slaughterhouse ban on the ballot in Denver this November (Initiated Ordinance 309) unfairly targets a single employee-owned business and forces 160 employees out of a company they own,” said Mariano. “Banning a single Denver business won’t improve animal welfare, but it will have devastating consequences for our employee-owners and their families.”

Conditions for Animals

According to a memo from the AALDP, the video clips showing lambs that appear to raise their heads and thrash could be evidence that the animals are not fully unconscious.

Davis, the former UC-Davis veterinarian and former associate veterinarian with the school’s International Animal Welfare Training Institute, said it was difficult to ascertain from the video whether the animals are stunned prior to slaughter. Either way, he said, the thrashing from lambs after having their throats slit does not necessarily indicate consciousness — something that would violate standards for humane slaughter.

“I would expect fewer of them moving than are,” he said. “The fact that they’re moving does not allow me to prove that they’re conscious.”

In one case, where a lamb that appeared to have its throat cut lifted its head and opened its mouth, Davis said there were concerns about consciousness.

“That animal looks like it’s vocalizing,” Davis said. “Whatever was done to kill that animal, that animal is still alive, and probably conscious or partially so.”

“Whatever was done to kill that animal, that animal is still alive, and probably conscious or partially so.”

Guidelines produced by humane livestock treatment expert Temple Grandin for the American Meat Institute — whose successor group, the Meat Institute, is the largest donor to the campaign against the Denver initiative — say that the head and neck of a stunned animal can indicate insensibility.

“The legs may kick, but the head and neck must be loose and floppy like a rag,” Grandin — whom Mariano, the Superior Farms spokesperson, said consulted on upgrades at the Denver facility — writes in the guidelines. “A normal spasm may cause some neck flexing, generally to the side, but the neck should relax and the head should flop within about 20 seconds.”

In another clip, a lamb with a leg injury is seen being moved in a plastic sled and shoved into the slaughter line by workers. It then hobbles up the ramp to slaughter. Davis called the practices into question.

“If you get down to the way the sheep are handled, particularly with the fractured leg,” he said. “The personnel there are certainly rough with them, perhaps more so than they need to be.”

“Better” Jobs?

Animal rights advocates are hoping the facilities closure will set a precedent for other ballot measures around the country, while, owing to the scale of the Denver facility, also directly causing a dent in the animal agribusiness.

The ballot initiative found predictable opposition in the powerful animal agriculture industry. A committee opposing the measure has raised over $1 million from dozens of donors, including the American Sheep Industry Association, the National Pork Producers Council, and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. Superior Farms, headquartered in California, has donated over $160,000.

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Their message — the committee is called “Stop the Ban Protect Jobs” — has apparently found an audience. Local politicians and community members worried about job loss from the slaughterhouse’s potential closure have raised concerns that cannot be dismissed as mere vested business interests. If passed, the ban would see the loss of around 160 Superior Farms jobs as part of a 14-month closure schedule mandated by the measure.

One Colorado State University study claims there could be an overall loss of up to 2,700 jobs, after accounting for multiplier effects on the broader industry. The study authors acknowledged that their “working relationships with livestock producers, farmers, ranchers, and meat processors are significant, longstanding and valued” in their report’s preface, but added “we believe the conclusions of our analysis are independent, data-based and speak for themselves.” The study, however, has come in for criticism from animal rights advocates at Pro-Animal Future not only for industry ties, but also for its substance.

Meanwhile, the ballot measure itself acknowledges and seeks to counteract the potential job loss. Specific wording requires the city to prioritize residents whose employment is affected for workforce training or employment assistance programs, in part by drawing on the city’s $40 million Climate Protection Fund.

Mariano, the company spokesperson, questioned whether alternative forms of employment will work out. “What we know for sure is that 160 hard-working people will lose their jobs and the benefits their families rely on if the ban passes, and there are no guarantees at all, despite the claims of proponents, that these workers will be able to access any kind of program to help them get another job,” he said. “These workers like their jobs and have employee-ownership.”

In an agriculture trade publication, Council Member Darrell Watson, who represents Denver’s District 9 where Superior Farms is located, accused the ballot measure and its worker-related provision of “cynicism” for placing the burden of the plant’s 160 employees on the city.

Yet proponents of the measure say there is cynicism, too, in suggesting that industrialized meat production, with all its attendant harms, cannot be stopped because slaughterhouse jobs need to be preserved.

“Our vision isn’t about eliminating jobs; it’s about moving in the direction of better ones,” a spokesperson from Pro-Animal Future said by email. “Just as we transitioned from whale oil to electricity or from coal to renewable energy, we’re now recognizing the harms of industrial animal farming, and the need to evolve in a new direction. This type of transition never happens in isolation, but rather in the context of our broader economy where we also see a constant emergence of innovative sectors and new job opportunities.”

Employee Owners

Though opponents of Ordinance 309 have made the job losses a centerpiece of their campaign, the ballot measure’s proponents say it is not so clear that slaughterhouse jobs make for an ethical, community-minded workplace. Slaughter plant workers nationwide experience disproportionately high rates of serious mental health issues, including post-traumatic stress disorder. The jobs are also physically dangerous, with American slaughterhouse workers seeing an average of two amputations per week.

Superior Farms’ Denver facility itself has seen a handful of allegations about labor abuses. In the last decade, the plant has been fined $91,811, much of it an accumulation of small wage violations; some related to safety issues like missing stair railings; and one fine related to a failure to include hazardous chemicals in a regulatory form.  

There have also been other complaints. A Muslim employee at Superior Farms sued the company in 2021 alleging racial and religious discrimination after Black Muslim workers were, according to the suit, subject to racial slurs from co-workers and managers, and faced termination for refusing to fraudulently certify meat as halal. The former employee settled with the company on undisclosed terms in 2022. (“We strongly deny these allegations, and this case was settled and dismissed two years ago,” said Mariano, the Superior Farms spokesperson.)

Nonetheless, some Superior Farms employees are rallying to defend the plant and the industry.

“Superior Farms has opened doors not just for me, but for so many,” said Isabel Bautista, operations manager at the slaughterhouse, at a recent rally opposing the ballot measure. For Bautista, who has worked at the facility since 2000, the business is a family affair: her mother, brother, brother-in-law, and cousins have worked there at various points too.

“This job means financial security to me and my family,” Bautista told a trade publication, “but it’s also a job I love.”

“One in six of our staff have been with Superior for over ten years, and one in four have been here for more than five years,” said Mariano. “People who apply to work at the facility get the full tour so they can understand exactly what these jobs entail and see if they are comfortable doing this kind of work. The meat industry is not unique in facing challenges related to turnover.”

Long Odds

Ordinance 309 supporters face an uphill battle. Their opponents describe the ballot measure as an attack on local jobs, waged by outside special interest groups with dark money — allegations Pro-Animal Future reject as industry propaganda. The Denver Democratic Party announced its opposition to the initiative in late September. And several key unions like the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7 have come out against 309 too.

It would be a familiar pattern. Immediate economic concerns tend to win out over the promise of a better future with sacrifices today. The impulse is understandable, especially in the absence of sufficient municipal, state, and federal infrastructure and support for the swift transition of every imperiled worker into more sustainable jobs.

For the animal rights activists, though, failure to pass the Ordinance 309 would perpetuate cruel practices and unsustainable meat production. One of the undercover investigators, a Denver-based activist with DxE who gave their first name but requested anonymity to avoid law enforcement, told me that there are possible legal routes to explore relating to animal cruelty law violations exposed in their footage. Failing to ensure that animals are fully unconscious on a slaughter line, for example, is a violation of humane slaughter and animal cruelty laws.

The animal rights advocates, however, are less concerned with the potential violations of rules of the state or religions than they are with the suffering of the animals, captured in hours and hours of footage. And they hope the same suffering moves public opinion to support the facility’s shuttering.

“Every time the realities of factory farming and slaughterhouses are exposed, people are shocked and horrified by what is happening,” said Chris Carraway, staff attorney at the Animal Activist Legal Defense Project, which represents the undercover investigators. “Then, the news cycle moves on. But the horrors continue. It is clear there is no way to make slitting throats humane. We need to do more than expose these practices — we need to start putting an end to them, once and for all.”

The undercover investigator interviewed by The Intercept described themself as “an optimist” about people’s ability to empathize with the animals in their videos.

“I have that fundamental faith that Americans and human beings will be able to see cruelty and understand it as cruelty,” they said. “But I think that people changing their actual behaviors in life, and the reasons why they are slow or resist doing so, is much more complicated.”

The post Secret Recordings Show Ugly Conditions Ahead of Denver’s Slaughterhouse Ban Referendum appeared first on The Intercept.

Eventually, Freund found the source of the problem, which he subsequently posted to a security mailing list: He had discovered a backdoor in XZ Utils, a data compression utility used by a wide array of various Linux-based computer applications — a constellation of open-source software that, while often not consumer-facing, undergirds key computing and internet functions like secure communications between machines.

By inadvertently spotting the backdoor, which was buried deep in the code in binary test files, Freund averted a large-scale security catastrophe. Any machine running an operating system that included the backdoored utility and met the specifications laid out in the malicious code would have been vulnerable to compromise, allowing an attacker to potentially take control of the system.

The XZ backdoor was introduced by way of what is known as a software supply chain attack, which the National Counterintelligence and Security Center defines as “deliberate acts directed against the supply chains of software products themselves.” The attacks often employ complex ways of changing the source code of the programs, such as gaining unauthorized access to a developer’s system or through a malicious insider with legitimate access.

The malicious code in XZ Utils was introduced by a user calling themself Jia Tan, employing the handle JiaT75, according to Ars Technica and Wired. Tan had been a contributor to the XZ project since at least late 2021 and built trust with the community of developers working on it. Eventually, though the exact timeline is unclear, Tan ascended to being co-maintainer of the project, alongside the founder, Lasse Collin, allowing Tan to add code without needing the contributions to be approved. (Neither Tan nor Collin responded to requests for comment.)

The XZ backdoor betrays a sophisticated, meticulous operation. First, whoever led the attack identified a piece of software that would be embedded in a vast array of Linux operating systems. The development of this widely used technical utility was understaffed, with a single, core maintainer, Collin, who later conceded he was unable to maintain XZ, providing the opportunity for another developer to step in. Then, after cultivating Collin’s trust over a period of years, Tan injected a backdoor into the utility. All these moves were underlaid by a technical proficiency that ushered the creation and embedding of the actual backdoor code — a code sophisticated enough that analysis of its precise functionality and capability is still ongoing.

“The care taken to hide the exploits in binary test files as well as the sheer time taken to gain a reputation in the open-source project to later exploit it are abnormally sophisticated,” said Molly, a system administrator at Electronic Frontier Foundation who goes by a mononym. “However, there isn’t any indication yet whether this was state sponsored, a hacking group, a rogue developer, or any combination of the above.”

Tan’s elevation to being a co-maintainer mostly played out on an email group where code developers — in the open-source, collaborative spirit of the Linux family of operating systems — exchange ideas and strategize to build applications.

On one email list, Collin faced a raft of complaints. A group of users, relatively new to the project, had protested that Collin was falling behind and not making updates to the software quickly enough. He should, some of these users said, hand over control of the project; some explicitly called for the addition of another maintainer. Conceding that he could no longer devote enough attention to the project, Collin made Tan a co-maintainer.

The users involved in the complaints seemed to materialize from nowhere — posting their messages from what appear to be recently created Proton Mail accounts, then disappearing. Their entire online presence is related to these brief interactions on the mailing list dedicated to XZ; their only recorded interest is in quickly ushering along updates to the software.

Various U.S. intelligence agencies have recently expressed interest in addressing software supply chain attacks. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency jumped into action after Freund’s discovery, publishing an alert about the XZ backdoor on March 29, the same day Freund publicly posted about it.

Open-Source Players

In the open-source world of Linux programming — and in the development of XZ Utils — collaboration is carried out through email groups and code repositories. Tan posted on the listserv, chatted to Collin, and contributed code changes on the code repository Github, which is owned by Microsoft. GitHub has since disabled access to the XZ repository and disabled Tan’s account. (In February, The Intercept and other digital news firms sued Microsoft and its partner OpenAI for using their journalism without permission or credit.)

Several other figures on the email list participated in efforts — appearing to be diffuse but coinciding in their aims and timing — to install the new co-maintainer, sometimes particularly pushing for Tan.

Later, on a listserv dedicated to Debian, one of the more popular of the Linux family of operating systems, another group of users advocated for the backdoored version of XZ Utils to be included in the operating system’s distribution.

These dedicated groups played discrete roles: In one case, complaining about the lack of progress on XZ Utils and pushing for speedier updates by installing a new co-maintainer; and, in the other case, pushing for updated versions to be quickly and widely distributed.

“I think the multiple green accounts seeming to coordinate on specific goals at key times fits the pattern of using networks of sock accounts for social engineering that we’ve seen all over social media,” said Molly, the EFF system administrator. “It’s very possible that the rogue dev, hacking group, or state sponsor employed this tactic as part of their plan to introduce the back door. Of course, it’s also possible these are just coincidences.”

The pattern seems to fit what’s known in intelligence parlance as “persona management,” the practice of creating and subsequently maintaining multiple fictitious identities. A leaked document from the defense contractor HBGary Federal outlines the meticulousness that may go into maintaining these fictive personas, including creating an elaborate online footprint — something which was decidedly missing from the accounts involved in the XZ timeline.

While these other users employed different emails, in some cases they used providers that give clues as to when their accounts were created. When they used Proton Mail accounts, for instance, the encryption keys associated with these accounts were created on the same day, or mere days before, the users’ first posts to the email group. (Users, however, can also generate new keys, meaning the email addresses may have been older than their current keys.)

One of the earliest of these users on the list used the name Jigar Kumar. Kumar appears on the XZ development mailing list in April 2022, complaining that some features of the tool are confusing. Tan promptly responded to the comment. (Kumar did not respond to a request for comment.)

Kumar repeatedly popped up with subsequent complaints, sometimes building off others’ discontent. After Dennis Ens appeared on the same mailing list, Ens also complained about the lack of response to one of his messages. Collin acknowledged things were piling up and mentioned Tan had been helping him off list; he might soon have “a bigger role with XZ Utils.” (Ens did not respond to a request for comment.)

After another complaint from Kumar calling for a new maintainer, Collin responded: “I haven’t lost interest but my ability to care has been fairly limited mostly due to longterm mental health issues but also due to some other things. Recently I’ve worked off-list a bit with Jia Tan on XZ Utils and perhaps he will have a bigger role in the future, we’ll see.”

The pressure kept coming. “As I have hinted in earlier emails, Jia Tan may have a bigger role in the project in the future,” Collin responded after Ens suggested he hand off some responsibilities. “He has been helping a lot off-list and is practically a co-maintainer already. :-)”

Ens then went quiet for two years — reemerging around the time the bulk of the malicious backdoor code was installed in the XZ software. Ens kept urging ever quicker updates.

After Collin eventually made Tan a co-maintainer, there was a subsequent push to get XZ Utils — which by now had the backdoor — distributed widely. After first showing up on the XZ GitHub repository in June 2023, another figure calling themselves Hans Jansen went on this March to push for the new version of XZ to be included in Debian Linux. (Jansen did not respond to a request for comment.)

An employee at Red Hat, a software firm owned by IBM, which sponsors and helps maintain Fedora, another popular Linux operating system, described Tan trying to convince him to help add the compromised XZ Utils to Fedora.

These popular Linux operating systems account for millions of computer users — meaning that huge numbers of users would have been open to compromise if Freund, the developer, had not discovered the backdoor.

“While the possibility of socially engineering backdoors in critical software seems like an indictment of open-source projects, it’s not exclusive to open source and could happen anywhere,” said Molly. “In fact, the ability for the engineer to discover this backdoor before it was shipped was only possible due to the open nature of the project.”

The post The Other Players Who Helped (Almost) Make the World’s Biggest Backdoor Hack appeared first on The Intercept.

A report shared with The Intercept shines a light on one such campaign in action — and it appears to be reaching an especially large audience.

According to an Intercept review of investigations conducted by the tech watchdog group Reset, a network of 53 Facebook pages has been amplifying French-language videos promoting the Kremlin’s line on the war in Ukraine, starting in March. According to Reset, the pages share the common traits of “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” a term used by Meta, Facebook’s parent company, to describe when pages misrepresent themselves and work together in pursuit of specific political or financial goals. (Reset receives funding from Luminate, which was founded by Pierre and Pam Omidyar. The Intercept was founded by Pierre Omidyar and continues to receive funding from First Look Institute, which is supported by the Omidyar Group.)

Together, the accounts have a combined 4.3 million followers, more than that of similar high-profile networks in Africa such as “Russosphère,” a web of Francophone pages operating across social media platforms that was exposed earlier this year, as well as scores of pro-Russia pages shut down by Facebook in 2019 and 2020.

The report also comes amid warnings from employees that Meta’s plans to cut 10,000 jobs this year may hamper its ability to detect harmful false information spread unintentionally (misinformation) or intentionally (disinformation) on its platforms. In April, the company laid off “the majority” of its 50-person engineering team focused on misinformation. In May, a separate round of cuts hit business and tech divisions covering content moderation, while in July, it was reported that Meta quietly slashed jobs from teams investigating election disinformation and coordinated troll campaigns, heightening concerns around upcoming 2024 elections across the globe.

In addition to the job cuts, Meta critics have long claimed the company does not devote enough resources to monitoring content published in languages other than English, such as in sub-Saharan Africa — in other words, pages misrepresenting their identities to achieve common goals are more likely to go undetected. 

“African countries are not at all considered priority zones for geopolitical reasons, for resource-related reasons, but also because of the difficulties that can exist with [language barriers],” said Asma Mhalla, a French researcher specializing in tech and digital regulation.

Debates over content moderation are inherently complex — and particularly in the United States, with its deep attachment to freedom of speech. But advocates calling on Meta to beef up self-regulation point to the platform’s massive global reach, its role in public debate, and the consequences of allowing troll campaigns to act freely — with calls to take violence against certain groups and efforts to share false medical advice presenting fatal risks.

A Meta spokesperson said the company is committed to monitoring content in Africa and pointed to the company’s record of breaking up foreign influence campaigns in languages other than English, including in French-speaking Africa. Earlier this year, the firm shut down a group of accounts in Burkina Faso with 65,000 followers.

Pro-Russian content has flooded social media as African governments bolster links with the Kremlin and turn away from France, which finished a nearly decadelong counterterror military operation in the Sahel region last year. Burkina Faso’s new president has lauded Moscow as a “strategic ally,” while the Russia-linked Wagner Group provides security to the Central African Republic and new authorities in Mali. (The mercenary group’s founder Yevgeny Prigozhin also cheered last week’s coup d’état in Niger, whose deposed president was one of France’s last remaining allies in the region.) Tapping into deep-seated resentment against the former colonial authority, pro-Russia narratives on social media depict Vladimir Putin’s government as a friendly guarantor of national sovereignty. 

Russia is portraying itself as an inheritor of the Soviet Union’s anti-colonial past, said Kevin Limonier, a Slavic studies and geography professor at Paris 8 University who has written about Russia’s growing influence in sub-Saharan Africa. “The Russian media have known how to play on this mythology, on this anti-colonial nostalgia, and on this totally fantasized vision of the Soviet Union as the protector of colonized peoples.”

According to Limonier, the “conquest” of Ukraine has done little to detract from Russia’s anti-colonial image. “The underlying discourse linking radical pan-Africanists, the Kremlin, and Russian intellectuals close to the government is the notion that imperialism only exists if it’s Western,” he said.

At the heart of the network identified by Reset is Ebene Media, a Francophone news outlet based in Cameroon whose home page is littered with advertisements and formatting errors. While the main website features a mix of international news stories, its two Facebook pages, Ebene Media TV and Ebene Media TV+, have focused singularly on the war in Ukraine since January, regularly publishing videos one after the other sympathetic to the Russian cause and critical of Kyiv and its Western allies. 

Narrated with text-to-speech technology and interspersed with quotes, the clips are overlaid with footage from other sources, including from Russian state-funded media like RT and Sputnik. Among the headlines: “There is no space left to bury the soldiers killed by Zelenskyy”; “EU-Latin American summit: The worst has happened. Zelenskyy banned in Brussels”; and “Ukraine’s counteroffensive sours.”

While Ebene Media TV’s pages count only 20,000 followers, its videos have been amplified by multiple accounts. That includes “MR WolfSon,” a German-administered page with 302,000 followers that claims to be a journalist; “Lumière De L’info,” another German-administered page with 14,000 followers that purports to be a news site; and “Stéphane comédie Tv,” a “personal blog” administered from Cameroon and Côte d’Ivoire with 10,000 followers that has changed names multiple times since it was first launched as a comedy page in 2021. This week, “LEGEOGRAPHE221,” an account with 62,000 followers administered from Senegal, shared an Ebene clip on the coup in Niger claiming that French forces fired live ammunition into a crowd protesting outside the country’s embassy in the capital Niamey — an allegation denied by Paris. 

Not all the videos come from Ebene Media TV. The Cameroonian-administered “Infos Global” — an account with 285,000 followers launched last October as “Liberté Africaine” — has also shared clips originally broadcast on more reputable news outlets like France 24 that reflect positively on Russia’s war effort: for example, a discussion about Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s struggles to win support from African governments and outdated coverage about Russian tanks moving toward Kyiv. Like “Torche Mondial” (46,000 followers) and “Magasin de L’info” (17,000 followers), “Infos Global” also posts videos from Florian Philippot, a far-right French politician and former second-in-command of Marine Le Pen’s National Front who now leads a marginal party calling on France to leave the European Union. 

In addition to frequent name changes, many of the pages regularly repost each other’s content, boosting their collective reach. A few have identical usernames and share the same contact details. Many have gone dormant for weeks at a time, “possibly to avoid detection of the network,” according to Reset. Some have engaged in apparent baiting techniques, sharing apolitical memes and cartoons to generate attention before posting about the war in Ukraine. 

For instance, the page “Bãrøn,” which has 75,000 followers, was posting memes and crude sex jokes for much of the year, sometimes racking up hundreds of likes per post. Then in May, it shared a slew of videos from Ebene Media TV with titles like, “The United States is running out of money to continue supporting the Ukrainian army,” and “The Russian army is inflicting heavy losses on Ukrainian armed forces.” It has not posted since then. 

Stéphane Akoa, a political scientist and researcher in the Cameroonian capital of Yaoundé, said there is a broad audience receptive to the kinds of videos shared by Ebene Media TV, owing to France’s colonial history in the region. “The anti-French sentiment in Cameroon is very, very strong,” he said, “and so anything that can be said or done that would go against France or show one’s opposition to France, you’ll find a lot of Cameroonians willing to repeat it and share it.”

Cameroon’s government maintains friendly relations with France. But last April, it signed a military cooperation pact with Moscow, and, like many African nations, it did not vote to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at the United Nations. Contacted by phone, an official from the Russian Embassy in Cameroon referred The Intercept to email but did not respond to questions.

Since 2019, Meta has shut down multiple pro-Russia networks of “coordinated inauthentic behavior” targeting users in Africa. (It also shut down a pro-France network in December 2020, ahead of a crucial election in the Central African Republic.) Last month, France’s foreign ministry decried a video spread by a web of Facebook and Twitter accounts that accused Paris of ordering a fatal attack on Chinese nationals at a gold mine in the Central African Republic. And in February, the BBC and tech group Logically revealed a self-described Stalinist from Belgium was at the helm of “Russosphère”: a group of social media accounts praising Russian military operations in Ukraine and Africa, with over 80,000 followers.

It remains unclear who is behind Ebene Media TV or the broader network of pages identified by Reset. Contacted by email, Ebene Media did not respond to a request for comment. A man who responded to a phone number listed for “Monde Actu,” a page with 15,000 followers that shared videos from Ebene Media TV in April and May, told The Intercept that he managed the page from Cameroon but that he had lost his contract with Ebene Media TV and had stopped publishing its videos. He did not provide further details and ended the conversation.

Limonier, the Slavic studies and geography professor, stressed that it can be difficult to identify the people behind influence networks online. While the pages revolving around Ebene Media TV could be the product of a centralized strategy, Limonier said they could also be the working of a more diffuse, lower grade of actors that he calls “entrepreneurs of influence”: individuals taking initiative on their own in the hopes of winning attention or future rewards from the Russian government.

Lou Osborn, a researcher for the monitoring group All Eyes on Wagner, said the group of pages resembled previous pro-Russia influence campaigns in sub-Saharan Africa. Earlier this year, Osborn contributed to a report on Burkina Faso, documenting how a collection of Facebook pages promoted Russian interests in the country. While the report did not establish the identity of the network’s instigator, Osborn told The Intercept it was “highly likely” to have been ordered by the Wagner Group.

“One of the ways that Prigozhin’s organization works is by creating fake digital infrastructure on Facebook,” she said, referring to the leader of the Wagner Group, also indicted in the U.S. for interfering in the 2016 presidential election. “We also know that Prigozhin has worked in the African digital space using third parties, without direct links, but with companies or people that are based in Africa. … At the same time, it’s very hard to be able to say this or that page or this or that network on Facebook belongs to this organization and that this person is behind it.”

The Wagner Group did not respond to a request for comment.

The political effects of disinformation on social media can be notoriously hard to measure, but campaigns could find hospitable footholds in African countries facing political instability and various security threats. In any case, Mhalla, the tech researcher in France, stressed that architects of effective online influence campaigns understand the grievances of their audiences. “You need to tailor narratives and content based on your target,” she said. “A good disinformation campaign can’t just be built from scratch.”

Update: August 7, 2023
This article was updated to include information about Reset’s funding.

The post A Pro-Putin Facebook Network Is Pumping French-Language Propaganda Into Africa appeared first on The Intercept.

It has also put a spotlight on a race in Oregon that could prove pivotal. There, Democratic nominee Jamie McLeod-Skinner is locked in a tight battle with millionaire Lori Chavez-DeRemer for the 5th Congressional District, which stretches south and east from the Portland suburbs in Clackamas County to Deschutes County, which includes the rapidly growing and highly competitive city of Bend. McLeod-Skinner made national headlines earlier this year for defeating seven-term incumbent Kurt Schrader in a fiercely contested primary. Her win — the only success an insurgent candidate notched against a Democratic incumbent this cycle — was driven by a lopsided overperformance in Deschutes.

Schrader had been a member of the so-called Unbreakable Nine who organized against President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, and said in a private call with the dark-money sponsors of their operation, No Labels, that he hoped to kill it. National progressive groups as well as most of the local Democratic Party operations rallied behind McLeod-Skinner to knock out Schrader in May.

While the DCCC made an investment of just under $2 million dollars in the race, they came off the air in the final few weeks, and the leadership-aligned super political action committee, House Majority PAC, made the eyebrow-raising move to triage the race altogether. House Majority PAC communications director CJ Warnke declined to explain the reasoning behind the move at the time, but told The Intercept Friday that House Majority PAC “had to make strategic decisions across the country to build the most optimal path to Democratic success this cycle.”

“Our investments,” he continued, “made a major difference across the country and in Oregon, where we spent nearly $4 million for Congresswoman-elect Val Hoyle in OR-04 and State Rep. Andrea Salinas in OR-06 — who both faced an unprecedented amount of Republican spending this year.”

Of course, the fiasco in the neighboring 6th Congressional District also has House Majority PAC’s fingerprints all over it. There, progressive state representative Andrea Salinas entered the general election bruised from the most expensive primary contest in the nation after former cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried and House Majority PAC teamed up in an over $10 million failed attempt to anoint political newcomer and effective altruist Carrick Flynn as the nominee. The unorthodox partnership appeared to be the result of a quid pro quo, as Bankman-Fried contemporaneously donated $6 million to the committee. House Majority PAC spent $1 million on Flynn and ended up spending over $3.25 million of the remainder helping Salinas win the general election in a seat that was considered safe earlier in the cycle. The DCCC also spent $1.75 million boosting Salinas. (Bankman-Fried was worth billions of dollars at the time; as of now, he appears broke.)

Republicans, on the other hand, treated the race in Oregon’s 5th District as the toss-up it clearly was; they spent nearly $8 million in total — spending that ballooned all the way through Election Day.

That put Oregon’s 5th in the top 20 when it came to spending by House Republicans, while McLeod-Skinner was near the bottom for Democrats when it came to competitive races. Republicans also had more money to work with: Congressional Leadership Fund, the House Republican super PAC, had some $250 million to parcel out across the country, while the Democrats’ super PAC spent around $140 million. “The data just wasn’t there on that race,” argued one Democratic operative involved in the race. “Portland was also an incredibly expensive media market. I don’t know where you would have pulled the money from.” Of course, the cheaper Bend media market, in the southeastern part of the district, also went untapped.

While a handful of progressive organizations stepped in to alleviate some of the massive financial disparity — including a $1 million investment from Working Families Party that stretched across the primary and general — their limited resources meant McLeod-Skinner, who has long declined support from corporate-funded PACs, was left with an outside spending deficit of over $5 million. The progressive groups who worked to close that gap have been sharp in their criticism. “While they pumped last-minute money into the DCCC chair’s losing race in New York,” Indivisible national political director Dani Negrete told The Intercept, “Jamie has been holding on entirely based on her strength as a candidate and her grassroots support.”

The party’s underinvestment in McLeod-Skinner is reminiscent of Democrats’ decision to abandon progressive nominee Kara Eastman during her 2018 run against Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon. After Eastman won a stunning upset against the national party’s handpicked nominee, former representative Brad Ashford, Democrats’ national committees declined to spend significant money to help her in the general election, which she lost by just under 5,000 votes. When Eastman was renominated for the seat in 2020, the national party lent its support, but the damage was already done. Millions in unanswered ads from previous cycles had defined her image to the electorate, and Bacon, whose prior record was in step with harder line conservatives in his party, moderated his image substantially. He won by over 4 percentage points.

Despite the headwinds he faced this year, Bacon trounced moderate Democrat Tony Vargas, who ran with the early blessing of the national party, by a margin nearly identical to the margin he beat Eastman by in 2020 — demonstrating that progressive antipathy is unworkable as either a short-term or long-term strategy if national Democrats hope to wield power rather than appease wealthy donors.

Elected Democrats have heaped praise on outgoing DCCC Chair Maloney for the unexpectedly strong performance despite the steep losses the party suffered in Maloney’s own backyard. In a twist, the loss of Maloney’s own seat, in the suburban 17th District in New York, is being heralded as an act of self-sacrifice rather than evidence of a severe lapse in judgment.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., suggested Maloney should be lauded for his loss, on the grounds that it enabled victory elsewhere across the map. Former presidential contender and current Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., echoed that sentiment, declaring himself “first on the list” of Maloney fans for supposedly putting himself at risk for the sake of the party.

Our DCCC Chairman put himself at risk to support other congressional Democrats. Service before self— that’s leadership. Mark me first on the list of @spmaloney fans.

Thank you, Sean, for a decade of service and two years in the political trenches.

— Seth Moulton (@sethmoulton) November 10, 2022

Several of the Democratic seats that Republicans managed to pick up — including the Long Island-based 3rd and 4th districts, which Biden won by 8 and 15 points respectively — saw less than $3 million in investments by the DCCC and House Majority PAC. Those figures greatly lag the over $4 million in spending Maloney was able to marshal from new outside PACs in his ill-fated quest to hold a seat Biden won by over 10 points, according to a DailyKos calculation. In Long Island, Democrats were also hurt by the retirement of Rep. Tom Suozzi, and the redistricting process ordered by the Court of Appeals, which pushed the primary back to September, giving Democrats only two months to campaign for the general election.

Some races in California, where key elections hang in the balance, also saw Democrats outspent. In two particularly glaring examples, the party’s national committees invested a measly $23,000 in Christy Smith and an underwhelming $204,000 in Jay Chen: two Democratic nominees who challenged Republican incumbents in Democratic-leaning districts.

Smith said she has a “very narrow” path remaining, as ballots continued to be counted, but had no kind words for Washington Democrats. “They did more than give up on me,” she said, noting that the DCCC recruited a candidate to run against her in the primary, despite her having lost in 2020 by fewer than 350 votes. With the party machinery behind John Quaye Quartey, Smith’s fundraising capacity was suppressed, and she blew through her million dollars to win the primary, entering the general broke. The national party’s preferred candidate won just 4,037 votes in the primary. “That was also a waste of the $1 million in donor money he raised to get a single digit result. Two million dollars in Dem donor money wasted on a primary that they created,” Smith said. After that, the party walked away from the race.

And in neighboring Arizona, Democrat Kirsten Engel is defying expectations in her bid for the Tucson-based 6th Congressional District after receiving just over $70,000 in support from Democrats’ national committees — a paltry sum against an opponent who received nearly $5 million in support from equivalent Republican groups.

Both parties missed some of the close races. Nobody saw the challenge Democrat Adam Frisch would present to Rep. Lauren Boebert in Colorado, in a race still too close to call. And in California’s 41st District, neither national party invested in any serious way, with the race neck and neck as mail ballots are counted.

Editor’s Note: In September 2022, The Intercept received $500,000 from Sam Bankman-Fried’s foundation, Building a Stronger Future, as part of a $4 million grant to fund our pandemic prevention and biosafety coverage. That grant has been suspended. In keeping with our general practice, The Intercept disclosed the funding in subsequent reporting on Bankman-Fried’s political activities.

The post A Controversial Decision in Oregon Could Cost Democrats the House appeared first on The Intercept.