In the immediate wake of the incident, city council members introduced a motion to give $1 million to several Jewish security organizations that would expand their work around Jewish schools, religious institutions, and neighborhoods. 

Magen Am, a nonprofit that runs armed patrol services and firearm training programs for the Jewish community, was named as the recipient of $350,000 in the motion. The group is largely made up of former Israeli soldiers, along with U.S. military veterans, according to the group’s website and social media posts, and was founded by a former MMA fighter with ties to the National Rifle Association. The majority of the former Israel Defense Forces soldiers in the group are “lone soldiers,” according to several reports, the term for individuals with no direct ties to the state of Israel who immigrated there to serve in the nation’s military.

The city council has since introduced a new motion, which would give $2 million to various faith groups that want to hire additional security and does not mention Magen Am or any recipients by name. But LA activists are still concerned that city funds will go to an armed group with hard-line political stances.

“The fact that Magen Am was even named in that original motion as a recipient of money, that exposes the intention,” said Miguel Camnitzer, an activist with Jewish Voice for Peace. The group is alarmed that city leaders are choosing to fund individuals who served a military that commits ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza and the West Bank. 

“It’s the same military that’s enacting this genocide, and we’re going to have them patrolling our streets with guns seems wild to me,” Camnitzer said. The group also notes that the new motion does not include any provisions for keeping the recipients of city money accountable to the public interest. “We’re talking about essentially a private militia that can use force and detain people, and has no accountability.”

Magen Am’s director for its veterans program, Leibel Mangel, who served in the IDF’s counterterrorism unit during the 2014 Gaza War, flew to Israel in the days following October 7 to join the conflict, according to a post on Instagram. He shared in a podcast interview that he was stationed with other reservists along Israel’s southern border with Gaza, and later, in the West Bank, “protecting communities there, trying to put a dent in Hamas infrastructure.” One post showed him carrying an assault rifle and looking out into a desert with the caption, “Their spilled blood will be avenged.”

Magen Am lists former U.S. Navy SEAL Jason Pike as a firearms trainer on its website. Advocates with Jewish Voice for Peace were troubled by Pike’s online presence, which was filled with violent, homophobic, transphobic, and extremist military content. 

In one post on his public Instagram account, which has nearly 15,000 followers, Pike shared a video showing him waterboarding his son, a torture practice widely utilized by the U.S. government on its detainees during interrogations. Using the torture method to train U.S. military soldiers was banned in 2007 by the Justice Department because it “provided no instructional or training benefit to the student.” Pike captioned the video, which drew nearly 800 likes, with the hashtags “mindgames” and “trainyourbrain.” 

In December, Pike posted a video purporting to show an Israeli soldier repeatedly slapping a blindfolded Palestinian man. Pike captioned the post by dismissing “Rules of Engagement” in war and wrote, “the crap we do is far worse … I know from first hand experience.” The former Navy SEAL added, “The truth would utterly put many of us under the prison.”

A separate post shared last month seemed to condone comments made by a U.S. veteran who threatened to shoot at anti-Trump protesters at a Veterans Day Parade and “wipe them all out.” Pike wrote he felt the nation was headed to where “we will be forced to do a reset,” referring to the veteran’s violent threats, and that the only thing that holds him back from doing so “is God Himself.”

Also on his Instagram account, Pike shared a transphobic meme that misrepresented a “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” song, a common reference by anti-trans groups. And in his podcast, Pike labeled homosexuality “a sin” that would keep people from heaven.

Mangel and Pike did not respond to requests for comment.

“An organization that thinks it’s appropriate to have that be one of their instructors who is going to then teach other people how to patrol our streets is really scary,” said Camnitzer, who is gay and whose father escaped Nazi Germany with his family in 1939. “The fact that then our city would think it’s appropriate to hire an organization that has those people among their staff is really concerning.” 

Magen Am leadership did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The city council offices that introduced the motions did not respond to requests for comment. LA’s city council is currently on summer recess but is expected to vote on the motion when their session resumes later this month.

The push to fund security firms for Jewish communities emerged in late June, when a group of protesters made up of a coalition of Jewish and Palestinian advocates, including members of Jewish Voice For Peace, lined the outside of the Adas Torah synagogue in LA. They were there to oppose a real estate event taking place inside the house of worship, in which companies marketed the sale of properties in both Israel and in West Bank settlements considered illegal under international law.

The demonstrators were met with opposition from pro-Israel counterprotesters, whose agitation led to several fights, multiple injuries, and a couple of arrests, authorities said at the time.

Councilmember Katy Yaroslavksy, whose district includes the Pico-Robertson neighborhood where the protest took place, almost immediately started calling for armed guards to prevent future incidents. 

Later that week, Yaroslavsky and Councilmember Bob Blumenfield introduced the first motion, which would set aside $400,000 for the Jewish Federation, $250,000 for Jewish Community Foundation, and $350,000 for Magen Am. Nationally, Jewish leaders used the LA synagogue incident as a rallying cry to call for more funding for increased security. Religious organizations are able to apply for federal funding through the Nonprofit Security Grant Program, which got a $40 million boost in California in April.

“The threats are real and the fear of a proxy war for what is happening in the Middle East spilling onto our streets here in LA is real,” said Yaroslavsky at a July 2 council meeting. Her comments were met with a wave of “boos” from Jewish and Palestinian advocates who packed the council chambers to oppose the motion.

At the meeting, a Palestinian teenager who was at the synagogue protest told the council that she was attacked and harassed by pro-Israel agitators who followed her to her car and, after she got inside, went on to bang on her windows, blocking her from leaving.  

Magen Am’s armed units were present at the real estate event. The group admitted in a statement they were unable to control the crowd during the protest and misrepresented the demonstration, referring to it as “pro-Hamas protest.” The group was also present at the pro-Palestine student encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles, where a group of dozens of counterprotesters who support Israel attacked students, leading to at least 15 injuries, according to campus officials. 

Jewish Voice for Peace feared that funding a pro-Israel group would only embolden violent agitators who align with the same pro-Israel leanings.    

“I’m just looking at the types of people that work at this organization, and I’m thinking, not only are they not going to keep me safe, but these are the types of people that generally put me in extreme danger,” Camnitzer said. “So who is the city trying to keep safe?” 

The post LA City Council Considers Funding Former IDF Soldiers to Patrol Its Streets appeared first on The Intercept.

“Everybody’s making a hard turn for ‘Fuck off Jew.’ It’s a hard right turn,” Fuentes says, laughing. The line is a reference to “Heck Off, Commie,” a far-right YouTube show run by one of Fuentes’s competitors. The crowd eats it up, chanting back “Fuck off Jew, fuck off Jew.” Fuentes shakes his head, grinning. “No, but that’s only a joke!”

He then gets serious, turning to former President Donald Trump’s support of Israel. The issue has always been a point of contention for Fuentes and has only intensified since October 7. Trump used to be their voice, Fuentes says, but now he seems more concerned with Israel. “I don’t know about you guys, but when he goes up there and says, ‘We’re gonna throw out all the anti-Israel protesters,’ that’s not my voice,” Fuentes says, referring to Trump’s promise to deport any foreign students participating in pro-Palestine protests on college campuses.

“You know that I am your voice,” Fuentes reassures them. “So in the spirit of me being your voice, I want you to raise your right hand, and repeat after me: ‘I solemnly swear that I will put America First and I will put Israel last every single time, because Christ is our king.’”

As he pauses for the audience response, people hold their right hands up as though they are taking a pledge. One man extends his arm into a Sieg Heil, giving Fuentes the Nazi-era salute as he repeats the words. Some people drop their hands early, perhaps noticing the salute, or maybe just tired of the position. But others slowly stretch their arms out too. By the end of the pledge, several people have made Sieg Heils.

“Because Christ is our king.”

Welcome to the fourth America First Political Action Conference.

Mainstreaming Extremism

Detroit is probably not the place you would expect to find a Republican convention, but that’s exactly where Turning Point USA chose to hold the People’s Convention in June. Founded by Charlie Kirk in 2012, Turning Point USA is an ostensibly mainstream youth-oriented conservative organization that has shifted into solidly MAGA territory. While TPUSA started as a network of conservative clubs on college campuses, it now includes high school chapters, a faith group, and a 501(c)(4) political nonprofit. The latter entity, Turning Point Action, is the arm responsible for the annual conference — and it is also boosting Trump 2024’s campaign. TPA is planning to spend $108 million on get-out-the-vote efforts in Michigan, Arizona, and Wisconsin. Turning Point Action also has a sizable footprint at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, this week, taking over an entire restaurant within the secured perimeter for what it dubbed the Turning Point RNC Headquarters.

Fuentes has piggybacked off of the Republican conference circuit for years, holding his increasingly explicitly white nationalist America First Political Action Conference near the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, and Turning Point USA. He has been banned from events hosted by both organizations, and for good reason. Fuentes has openly praised Hitler, suggested he would like to marry a 16-year-old girl, and clearly stated that he does not want Jewish people in government. But having his own conference in such close proximity to mainstream events allows for a built-in audience — and the chance to recruit new, sympathetic followers.

For a time, association with Fuentes was enough to tank a career in politics. TPUSA used to make an effort to maintain a distance from him, even severing ties with an influencer after she appeared in a photo with Fuentes. On the first day of the TPUSA conference, Fuentes showed up knowing he would be kicked out. Wearing a red hoodie, sunglasses, and ill-fitting jeans, he led a small group of young men into the convention center. Once inside, attendees broke out in applause and chants of “groyper, groyper,” the name Fuentes fans have given themselves. Security quickly showed up and escorted Fuentes out.

The process is tradition at this point. The man who escorted Fuentes out had done so in the past at TPUSA events in other cities. Something different, though, was Fuentes’s posse’s lack of effort to conceal their identities or their status as TPUSA attendees. Some of the men who followed Fuentes into the convention were known figures. MMA fighter turned right-wing poster Jake Shields was in the mix, as were streamers from Fuentes’s livestreaming platform. But one lower-profile man hung close to Fuentes, only obscuring his face with sunglasses: Alec Beaton, the youth chair for the St. Clair County, Michigan, GOP. Like many of the men in the group, Beaton had a Turning Point badge around his neck. While TPUSA still does not directly associate with Fuentes, its conference attendees openly hanging out with him suggests that its hard line has changed. (Shields later told me that he had come out “because I had a pass for Nick,” and that he returned to the conference the next day. TPUSA did not respond to my request for comment, nor did Beaton.)

It’s possible the groypers’ confidence was brought on by the political connections Fuentes has managed to make within the GOP. In November 2022, he accompanied hip-hop artist Kanye West to dinner at Mar-a-Lago with Trump. In October of last year, Fuentes met with former Texas state Rep. Jonathan Stickland for nearly seven hours. Stickland was the head of both a well-connected consulting firm and a political action committee that distributed money largely from Tim Dunn, one of the biggest conservative donors in Texas. The Republican Party of Texas was briefly thrown into disarray; some wanted to outright ban party-affiliated groups from associating with Fuentes. The movement ultimately failed, and the PAC and consulting firm emerged from the kerfuffle largely free of any consequences. A new spinoff PAC, Texans United for a Conservative Majority, brought in $3.75 million from Dunn in a three-month period earlier this year. While Stickland is unaffiliated with that PAC, he has launched a new firm with help from a senior Texas GOP official.

“I don’t think Fuentes is the kiss of death that people think he is,” said Shane Burley, co-author of the book “Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide To Fighting Antisemitism.” “The world of these online influencers who say outlandish things has moved mainstream. You’re more likely to be around extreme voices and not have to take responsibility for it.”

A Hostile Reception

Fuentes planned to hold his fourth rendition of AFPAC alongside the People’s Convention in Detroit at the Russell Industrial Center. The day before his conference, the Russell Industrial Center told Fuentes it would not host the event. The venue told the Detroit Free Press that it was tricked by AFPAC, stating it would never have agreed to host the group, which had reserved the space through a third party. When Fuentes didn’t leave, the staff called the police, who sided with the venue. Fuentes said he planned to sue.

Fuentes did not tell would-be attendees that the venue was in jeopardy, leaving them in the dark. He would later claim, in tweets and during a livestream, that he was busy looking for a new place to hold the conference. Regardless of the reason, his silence meant that on the day of AFPAC, groups of men wearing suits and blue America First hats were stuck wandering around downtown Detroit, asking one another if they had any idea where or when AFPAC would be.

After some friends and I called around to different venues, I eventually figured out where at least some AFPAC attendees would be going. An employee of Detroit’s Siren Hotel confirmed on the phone that the hotel’s Ash Bar restaurant was hosting AFPAC’s smaller VIP dinner. Fuentes, meanwhile, was preparing to come clean to his supporters: AFPAC IV was canceled. Shortly after, Ash Bar canceled the VIP dinner too. The Siren Hotel later denied that the dinner was planned for its venue and did not respond to my follow-up questions about the event.

Compared to the other cities that have held AFPAC, it seemed Detroit was particularly hostile to Fuentes’s ideas. The groups of would-be attendees, some of whom had made clear on social media they weren’t thrilled about coming to Detroit to begin with, were now without any plans at all. They managed to all find each other and march around the city a bit, before reconvening for an impromptu rally in front of a hotel across from the convention center.

Even though Trump was still inside TPUSA giving his speech and Fuentes himself was nowhere to be found, a sizable crowd had gathered by the time I showed up. I was a little worried that I would face a hostile reception. Some of the men who were taking charge of the rally knew me from my year undercover in the far right, or from my reporting that followed. Others might have known me because Fuentes has ranted about me on his show in the past.

Right away, I spotted Paul Ingrassia, an attorney who sits on the board for the New York Young Republican Club. Ingrassia works for the National Constitutional Law Union, an organization that aims to be a right-wing version of the ACLU. Both groups have ties to Trump, who recorded a video testimonial for the NCLU’s fundraiser a few months ago and was the keynote speaker at NYYRC’s annual gala in 2023, where he thanked Ingrassia for his support. Ingrassia refers to himself as Trump’s favorite Substacker, spends time in Mar-a-Lago, and pals around with Roger Stone. This week, he was in Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention.

Ingrassia and I both stood near the raised platform in the concrete courtyard of the hotel that was being used as a makeshift stage. A few of Fuentes’s friends and streamers were speaking, presumably hoping to ramp up enough energy to draw Fuentes in. Unfortunately for them, the wind was working against them, making it difficult to hear. After 15 minutes of straining to hear, someone announced that Fuentes was on the way. Chants of “We want Nick” and “groyper, groyper” broke out.

When I reached out to Ingrassia to ask about his decision to attend the rally, he accused me of stalking him, made a barely veiled threat to sue me, and declared, “As a matter of best practices, to the extent you publish anything using my name, you have a duty to reprint my statement in full.” (I don’t, and I won’t.) Ingrassia said “it looked like a prayer vigil or some type of protest” and claimed he “walked past there for maybe 5 minutes out of curiosity … there was a lot of confusion, it was impossible to avoid if you were heading on foot in that direction.”

I replied with photos and video showing that not only had he stood directly in front of me for nearly 20 minutes listening to inflammatory speeches about making America a Christian nation; how unfair it was that Turning Point had banned Fuentes; and that “the Jews” controlled what Charlie Kirk does; but also that he had moved through the crowd and to the very front when Fuentes arrived. I pointed out that Fuentes and Ingrassia follow each other on X, so he must have known who Fuentes was. Instead of responding to this factual record of the rally, Ingrassia blocked me on X, ending our conversation. 

When Fuentes showed up, he commandeered the rooftop of the hotel, with his posse guarding the steps up. The group was steadily growing as TPUSA attendees exited Trump’s speech.

“Henry Ford was a genius,” Fuentes shouted into his megaphone, before bemoaning Ford’s “cancellation” for his intense antisemitism. “But Henry Ford is a great patriot, and his activism in exposing the influence of the Zionist movement and the Jewish mafia in the United States was an act of patriotism that we are all grateful for.”

“I freaking love Hitler!” one of Fuentes’s friends on the rooftop shouted.

A sea of maskless groypers stood staring up at Fuentes. Some of the men near me had Turning Point USA badges around their necks. Not long ago, it would have been unthinkable for credentialed TPUSA attendees to be in the middle of this crowd. Now, it hardly seemed to matter.

“Astonishingly Self-Assured”

The crowd thinned out shortly after Fuentes’s speech. After facing two cancellations, it seemed like the night was over for the groypers. It didn’t take long for them to start posting that the left could not keep them down, though. They had found another venue: Exodos Rooftop.

Fortunately for me, the bar next to Exodos Rooftop had couches out front, giving a direct view at anyone who entered or exited the club. I bought a drink and had a seat, waiting to see who would try to walk by. I figured I would be sitting there a while before they left, but within minutes groypers started to file out.

Inside the venue, there had been several increasingly bigoted speeches, according to videos that were posted online and my interview with a reporter who was in attendance. Jared Taylor, who organizes the white nationalist American Renaissance conference, talked about making America a white country. (He did not respond to my email about the event.) By the time Fuentes spoke, the antisemitic chants were too much. The staff, unaware who they had given the space to, turned the music up over their voices, drowning out the speeches. (The club did not respond to requests for comment.)

The crowd grew angry, and a groyper threw a drink at security. Conservative social media influencer Joey Mannarino got in the face of a bouncer and screamed “Fuck you!”, video from that night shows. (Mannarino later told me that he “arrived late” and “didn’t really get to see any of the speeches.” Mannarino, who is mutuals with Fuentes on X, also said, “I don’t know much about his ‘reputation’ because he’s so hard to watch due to social media banning him I haven’t ever had the chance to really see much of what he has to say.”)

The crowd joined in, chanting “Fuck you!” Finally, Sneako, a misogynist, pro-Hitler streamer and ally of white nationalism, reached up and knocked the bouncer’s hat off, another video shows. (Sneako, who is Black, did not respond to my request for comment.) In an instant, the bouncer raised his fist and dove through the air, punching Sneako in the face and breaking one of his teeth in half. The party was finally over.

As they trickled out, I saw Mark Ivanyo, the executive director of Republicans for National Renewal. RNR is a populist organization that often tables at TPUSA and CPAC (in both the U.S. and Hungary). It is known for its parties that show off how well connected its members are. Ivanyo spoke at CPAC Hungary earlier this year and recently was elected to be an at-large delegate for Texas at the Republican National Convention. Ivanyo had been slated to be a featured VIP guest at AFPAC. The conference’s social media team had tweeted a flier advertising his appearance, before quickly taking it down.

“Mark! Mark Ivanyo!” I yelled out, trying to get his attention, but to no avail. Ivanyo seemed to be ignoring me. When I later contacted him to ask about his attendance at the rooftop gathering, and his briefly advertised appearance as a VIP guest, he told me he was no longer an RNC delegate due to a “scheduling conflict,” offering no corroboration for this claim. He asked for evidence of my allegations, though he did not reply after I sent him photos, videos, and a screenshot of the tweet promoting his appearance.

A few days later, I ran into Ivanyo in Milwaukee at the RNC, where he refused to look at me or acknowledge my questions in person. While the Republican Party of Texas did not respond to my email asking if Ivanyo had been replaced as a delegate, he has been in photos posted to social media showing him with the Texas delegation on the convention floor.

Back in Detroit, Lauren Witzke, the Delaware GOP’s 2020 candidate for Senate, also appeared in videos from the event. She has boosted the baseless QAnon conspiracy and believes that Jewish people should not be in positions of power in our government. There was also Juliana Lombard, a VIP guest of the People’s Convention, and NYYRC’s former socials chair. In video of Fuentes’s speech, Lombard can be seen watching the show from a balcony, while the crowd below her chants “Fuck off Jew.” Lombard is currently running for a municipal office as a Republican in Hudson County, New Jersey. (She didn’t respond to my messages asking about her attendance.)

At previous AFPACs, attendees have adhered to strict rules about taking photos or video, but this year, footage from even the “private” event was readily shared all over social media. “They seem astonishingly self-assured about making their connections explicit,” said David Neiwert, a researcher, author, and journalist who has tracked the far right for years. “They deeply believe Trump will win and they will be in charge, so it makes sense to them to just make it a known reality.”

The post I Watched Groypers Descend on Detroit — Where They Were No Longer Pariahs Among Mainstream Republicans appeared first on The Intercept.

Miller’s group, America First Legal Foundation, was one of the first organizations to jump ship from the Project 2025 advisory board. Last week, America First Legal asked to be removed from the Project 2025 advisory board webpage. The organization was part of Project 2025 since at least June 2022, when the Heritage Foundation first announced the advisory board’s formation.

America First Legal staff were deeply involved in writing and editing the Project 2025 playbook. Its vice president and general counsel, Gene Hamilton, drafted an entire chapter about the Justice Department, which proposes launching a “campaign” to criminalize mailing abortion pills. In a footnote, Hamilton thanked “the staff at America First Legal Foundation,” who he wrote deserved “special mention for their assistance while juggling other responsibilities.” 

Last summer, in a podcast with Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, Hamilton said that one thing that makes Project 2025 special is the vast coalition of conservative groups that came together to craft it. 

“What is so great about this book, and this chapter, and this whole initiative that Heritage is leading,” Hamilton said, “is that we have a coalition of organizations and individuals coming together to say: ‘These are the things, these are the bare minimum things that we expect you to do in this next conservative administration.’”

The Project 2025 playbook list of contributors includes three other America First attorneys: senior vice president Reed Rubinstein, legislative counsel John Zadrozny, and legal counsel Michael Ding, who also co-taught a module in Project 2025’s training academy. 

America First Legal did not respond to questions about why it asked to be removed from the Project 2025 advisory board despite its prior participation.

As of Tuesday afternoon, Americans United for Life, an anti-abortion group, and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a Michigan think tank, were among the more than 100 groups listed on the Project 2025 website as part of its advisory board. By Wednesday, Americans United for Life and the Mackinac Center had vanished. 

Both organizations were relatively recent additions to the Project 2025 coalition. The Heritage Foundation announced they had joined in February 2024, several months after the massive playbook was released.

Neither organization would elaborate as to why it had joined the Project 2025 board in the first place or why it was exiting it now.

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On Abortion, J.D. Vance Is the Bridge Between Trump and Project 2025

“Americans United for Life has always sought to maintain a non-partisan stance,” said John Mize, chief executive officer at Americans United for Life, in an emailed statement. The group’s current pinned tweet on X thanks J.D. Vance for his contributions “to the pro-life movement,” and the Project 2025 playbook’s anti-abortion proposals seem to align with its philosophy and goals. 

“Going forward into the heart of this election season, we believe we can be most effective in our mission if we maintain this posture,” Mize said. “Of course, we will continue to partner with the Heritage Foundation as opportunity allows, knowing they share our profound commitment to the Life issue.”

A spokesperson said the Mackinac Center had “offered a few recommendations on energy and labor issues” to Project 2025, but that “Project 2025 contains some ideas we do not endorse and others outside of our scope.”

“Because of that, we requested that our name be removed,” said Holly Wetzel, public relations director at the Mackinac Center. 

Wetzel did not respond to questions about which parts of Project 2025 the Mackinac Center did not endorse and whether the think tank read the playbook before joining the advisory board.

The Heritage Foundation did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment about these defections from Project 2025. 

The post Conservative Organizations Are Quietly Scurrying Away From Project 2025  appeared first on The Intercept.

In the lead-up to the Republican convention, many credulously lauded Trump for “softening” or “moderating” the GOP platform on the issue, despite the fact that the platform proposes fetuses and embryos already have full constitutional rights.

Trump said that Project 2025 went “way too far” on abortion in a Fox News interview filmed over the weekend in Mar-a-Lago, prior to the attempt on his life. But just hours after the interview aired on Monday morning, Trump announced his pick for running mate: Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, a man with a recent history of strong opposition to abortion whose selection was celebrated by anti-abortion groups like Students for Life Action.

In the past 48 hours, Vance has tried to backpedal on his abortion stances, including by scrubbing an “END ABORTION” section on his Senate campaign website, which now redirects to a fundraising page for the Trump-Vance ticket. Until he got the nod, this site succinctly distilled Vance’s “100 percent pro-life” views:

Eliminating abortion is first and foremost about protecting the unborn, but it’s also about making our society more pro-child and pro-family. The historic Dobbs decision puts this new era of society into motion, one that prioritizes family and the sanctity of all life.

Vance’s views on abortion thus track with one of Project 2025’s most basic proposals: that “the Dobbs decision is just the beginning.” Between Trump’s platform, Vance’s track record, and Vance’s ties to those leading Project 2025, the Trump campaign’s attempts to distinguish their own platform from the Project 2025 anti-abortion agenda are growing increasingly implausible.

Fetuses and the 14th Amendment

In past presidential election cycles, the GOP platform devoted multiple pages to various anti-abortion proposals, including appointing Supreme Court justices to overturn Roe v. Wade and enacting a national ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, which Trump advocated when the House passed such a ban in 2017.

The concept of fetal personhood — that fetuses and embryos should have the same constitutional rights as people — has long been at the heart of the GOP’s anti-abortion plank. But past platforms envisioned passing a “human life amendment” to the Constitution and related legislation.

When the Republican National Committee unveiled the draft platform last week, it had just four sentences on abortion. Since the national 20-week ban was dropped, many commentators interpreted the platform as softening the party’s stance on abortion.

Abortion opponents, however, celebrated one sentence, in particular, which was approved by a voice vote of GOP delegates on Monday: “We believe that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees that no person can be denied Life or Liberty without Due Process, and that the States are, therefore, free to pass Laws protecting those Rights.”

Far from moderating on abortion, the GOP platform now suggests that fetuses and embryos already have full constitutional rights — without the need for any new laws or amendments. This aligns neatly with Project 2025’s roadmap and Vance’s views. 

Notably, the platform refers to the constitutional rights of the “person” under the 14th Amendment, rather than the rights of the “unborn,” as prior platforms phrased it.

“To people in the know, the reference to every person being entitled to due process will bring to mind the idea of fetal personhood and suggest that the GOP will pursue it,” Mary Ziegler, a legal historian, wrote on X after the draft platform came out.

Plenty of anti-abortion organizations certainly read it that way and thus endorsed the revised language. 

“It is important that the GOP reaffirmed its commitment to protect unborn life today through the 14th Amendment,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of SBA Pro-Life America, in a statement.

“The most significant contribution that the GOP platform makes for LIFE comes in celebrating the fact that the 14th Amendment ‘guarantees’ legal protection for the preborn,” said Students for Life Action’s Kristan Hawkins in a similarly triumphant statement.

“It is proper and good to recognize every life, including those in the womb, share the distinct protections gained by those that have given so much and found as a guarantee within the 14th Amendment of the Constitution,” Americans United for Life wrote in its analysis of the draft platform.

As Erika Bachiochi, a fellow at the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center think tank argued in the wake of the Dobbs decision, getting courts to recognize fetuses as full “persons” under the law and Constitution is “the movement’s ultimate — if elusive — goal.”

“The Republican party has now decided that the Constitution already protects fetal personhood,” said Elizabeth Sepper, a University of Texas law professor who studies reproductive rights and religion. “They’re going to take the view that fetuses have full constitutional rights.”

“The RNC platform attempting to walk back its extremist positions on abortion is irrelevant,” said Sabrina Talukder, director of the Women’s Initiative at Center for American Progress Action, “because Project 2025 will ensure abortion is banned everywhere.”

Both Sepper and Talukder pointed to a ruling in February from the Alabama state Supreme Court as an example of the fetal personhood legal strategy in action. The Alabama court ruled frozen embryos created through in vitro fertilization were “children” under a 19th-century wrongful death statute, and it cited the Dobbs decision for the idea that “unborn children” have “civil rights.”

Trump-Vance on Project 2025 and Abortion

In his Fox News interview, Trump said abortion “will never be a federal issue again.” But if, as the GOP platform suggests, fetuses and embryos already have constitutional rights, the federal government arguably has a mandate to protect those rights and restrict abortion. And Project 2025 lays out a road map to doing so using federal regulatory processes.

The Trump campaign has tried to distance itself from the entire Project 2025 manifesto, while the Biden campaign quickly labeled Trump and Vance “the Project 2025 ticket.” The playbook was drafted and edited by many in Trump’s camp, including numerous former Trump administration officials.

Before getting the nod from Trump, Vance told Newsmax that he had “reviewed a lot of” Project 2025 and found a mix of “good ideas” plus “some things I disagree with,” without further specifying which were good and bad. 

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In the foreword to the 900-page playbook, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts urges the “next conservative administration” to “work with Congress to enact the most robust protections for the unborn that Congress will support while deploying existing federal powers to protect innocent life.”

When Vance was selected as Trump’s running mate, Roberts called him a “good friend” that he was “privately really rooting for.” Earlier this year, Roberts said Vance was “absolutely going to be one of the leaders — if not the leader — of our movement.”

Vance is also a member of the Teneo Network, an invite-only conservative social group which is on the Project 2025 advisory board. In a private speech to Teneo members in 2021, Vance praised recently enacted abortion restrictions in Texas — S.B. 8, the abortion “bounty hunter law” — despite “the legal technicalities about whether that law is ultimately going to survive legal challenges.”

The “existing federal powers” available to restrict abortion, according to Project 2025’s more detailed chapters, include the Comstock Act, a sweepingly broad anti-vice law passed in 1873 that bans mailing materials “for producing abortion, or for any indecent or immoral purpose.” The Biden Justice Department has interpreted the Comstock Act to prohibit mailing abortion-related materials only when the sender knows they will be used for an illegal abortion, but this interpretation is not binding on future administrations.

Last year, a coalition of Republican attorneys general letters sent letters to CVS and Walgreens warning that sending abortion pills by mail violates the Comstock Act. One of the architects of the conservative legal strategy against abortion, Jonathan Mitchell, told the New York Times that he hopes Trump and anti-abortion groups would “keep their mouths shut as much as possible” about the Comstock Act until the election.

Project 2025 invokes the Comstock Act in the same way, in two chapters drafted by former Trump administration officials. The Justice Department chapter proposes “a campaign to enforce the criminal prohibitions” in the Comstock Act “against providers and distributors of abortion pills.”

“Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs, there is now no federal prohibition on the enforcement of this statute,” writes Gene Hamilton, vice president and general counsel of America First Legal, who drafted the Justice Department chapter and served in the Trump DOJ. “The Department of Justice in the next conservative Administration should therefore announce its intent to enforce federal law against providers and distributors of such pills.”

“Project 2025 is an authoritarian playbook to push a radical extremist agenda and outlines ways to create a backdoor national abortion ban by misapplying the Comstock Act,” Talukder, of the Center for American Progress, told The Intercept, “bypassing having to pass a national abortion ban in Congress or through an executive order.”

The Trump campaign and Vance’s office did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about their views on using the Comstock Act to restrict abortion pills.

The Project 2025 chapter about the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the Food and Drug Administration, also cites the Comstock Act. The FDA should stop “promoting or approving mail-order abortions in violation of long-standing federal laws that prohibit the mailing and interstate carriage of abortion drugs,” according to Roger Severino, who wrote the chapter and served as the HHS head of civil rights enforcement under Trump.

Severino also argues that the FDA should “reverse its approval” of abortion medications like mifepristone, and that one morning-after emergency contraceptive, Ella, should be removed from mandatory insurance coverage because it is a “potential abortifacient.” In a post to X, Project 2025 claimed the manifesto “says nothing about banning or restricting contraception.”

The Trump campaign and Vance’s office did not respond to The Intercept’s questions about mifepristone and Ella.

Earlier this month, Vance caught flak from anti-abortion groups for saying he supported the Supreme Court’s decision dismissing a court challenge to the FDA’s approval of mifepristone. Once Trump chose Vance as his VP pick, however, other abortion opponents downplayed the remark as part of a “left-leaning gotcha interview” on “Meet The Press” and thus insufficient to draw “too broad a conclusion about Vance’s abortion advocacy.”

But in his Teneo speech in 2021, Vance made his “abortion advocacy” clear. Praising Texas S.B. 8 — which prohibits abortions as early as six weeks, when the embryo is the size of a pea — Vance called it “a law that protects the rights of the unborn.” Like Project 2025 and the GOP platform, Vance believes fetuses and embryos already have rights that need protecting.

The post On Abortion, J.D. Vance Is the Bridge Between Trump and Project 2025 appeared first on The Intercept.

Marvin Risen, my father’s brother, died long before I was born. He was an FBI agent in Nashville and was killed in a plane crash in 1943.

But decades later, when I was growing up, something about Marvin’s death still troubled my family.

My parents often talked about how they had never been given any answers about Marvin’s death, and that led them to speculate wildly, trying to connect the dots. They openly questioned whether he had been the victim of wartime sabotage. His plane crashed in the middle of World War II, and his Nashville FBI office was not far from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, then home to a critical part of the Manhattan Project: America’s top-secret program to build an atomic bomb before Nazi Germany. They sometimes wondered whether spies had blown up Marvin’s plane because he had uncovered an atomic espionage ring.

It wasn’t until this year — more than 80 years after my uncle’s death — that the full story of Marvin Risen and the Federal Bureau of Investigation would finally be resolved. But even then, the FBI’s painful treatment of our family would leave an open, unhealed wound.

In hindsight, I see that my parents long, failed struggle to grasp the truth about Marvin’s death wasn’t their fault. It was the result of the FBI’s callous handling of Marvin’s case — and many others like it. When my uncle was killed, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover was at the height of his power, and he ran the FBI like a dictatorship. The bureau was a cult of personality built around Hoover; he served a total of 48 years in his post, first as director of the FBI’s predecessor, the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigations, and then as director of the FBI from its renaming in 1935 until his death in 1972.

Hoover accumulated power in part through his legendary ability to manipulate the press to propagandize and glorify the FBI. He created a mythic origin story for the FBI built around its manhunts and gun battles with Depression-era gangsters like John Dillinger; FBI agents killed in shootouts with gangsters became Hoover’s martyrs. But that meant that FBI agents like Marvin, who died in accidents or from illnesses, were largely ignored by Hoover’s FBI — even if their deaths were work-related.

On October 15, 1943, American Airlines Flight 63 crashed in rural Tennessee, killing all 11 people on board, including Marvin. The aircraft crashed soon after taking off from Nashville for a short flight to Memphis. Records show that, not long after leaving Nashville, the pilot radioed to air traffic control asking for permission to climb to 8,000 feet, possibly in an effort to find a band of warmer air to get rid of ice clinging to the wings and propellers, according to a later federal investigation by the Civil Aeronautics Board, which then regulated commercial aviation. But as the plane gained altitude, ice continued to build, making it impossible to control.

The plane rapidly lost altitude and crashed into a wooded hill near Centerville, about 60 miles from Nashville. The area was so remote that the crash site wasn’t discovered until the next morning by a farmer, who then drove 3 miles to the town of Wrigley, where he could get a phone to call officials in Nashville. In its 1945 final report on the crash, the Civil Aeronautics Board was critical of American Airlines for allowing the plane to fly without deicing equipment; American had removed the equipment in the summer and had not yet reinstalled the gear for the fall and winter. The crash was caused by the “inability of the aircraft to gain or maintain altitude due to carburetor ice or propeller ice or wing ice or some combination of those icing conditions while over terrain and in weather unsuitable for an emergency landing,” the report stated. The agency’s report said that if the weather conditions on the route were known by the airline, that “should have precluded the dispatch of the flight in an aircraft not equipped with wing or propeller deicing equipment.” 

The plane nosedived into the ground, leaving a crash scene so horrific that none of the bodies could be easily identified. It was so terrible that Ernest Gann, an American Airlines pilot and author, wrote about the crash in his acclaimed 1961 memoir on the dangerous early days of aviation, “Fate is the Hunter,” which was turned into a movie in 1964.

Marvin Risen could only be identified by his official FBI briefcase. He was just 27 when he died. He had been with the FBI since 1939.

After I grew up and became a reporter, my family’s questions about what had happened to my uncle remained unanswered. As a journalist covering intelligence and national security issues, I frequently reported on stories involving the FBI, and that experience taught me that it was not surprising that the bureau had failed my family. The FBI was insular and slow to change, and many aspects of the FBI’s culture still bore the imprint of J. Edgar Hoover long after his death. 

So in the 1990s, I decided to take the initiative and find out what I could about Marvin Risen and the FBI. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI for Marvin’s personnel file. After a three-year wait, a huge package from the FBI arrived at my home, filled with hundreds of pages of ancient letters and memos documenting my uncle’s life and death. The files taught me things I didn’t know about my family; they revealed that my father was interviewed by the FBI when the bureau was considering hiring his brother. The files also showed that before he was promoted to special agent, Marvin started out working in the FBI’s fingerprinting unit, and later served as a tour guide at FBI headquarters in Washington.

But the most significant discovery in the files came from internal FBI memos that described the way in which the FBI handled Marvin’s death. 

The files showed that immediately after the plane crash, Hoover took a personal interest in Marvin’s case. Phone calls, telegrams, and internal FBI communications flew back and forth between Hoover and the FBI agents in Nashville and on the scene of the crash; it was clear Hoover had some of the same suspicions about the cause of the crash that later bedeviled my parents. Hoover wanted to know whether the crash was an act of sabotage, designed to kill an FBI agent. Adding to the intrigue was the fact that Blan Maxwell, the speaker of the Tennessee state Senate, was one of the other passengers who died. At the time, Maxwell was widely considered the leading candidate to become the next governor of Tennessee. Prentice Cooper, the governor at the time, was one of the first officials on the crash scene, mingling with the FBI agents who were scouring the site.  

But the FBI quickly determined that the crash was just an accident. Once the FBI concluded that the plane was not downed by sabotage, Hoover lost interest. There was no drama in Marvin Risen’s death that Hoover could use to glorify the FBI. The files show that the FBI’s interest quickly shifted to finding Marvin’s FBI badge and gun amid the wreckage. When his gun was found, it was badly damaged from the crash.  

The files also revealed that Hoover and Clyde Tolson, his right-hand man and possibly his lover, personally decided not to include Marvin Risen on the FBI Wall of Honor, which listed the FBI’s valiant dead, the agents killed in the line of duty.   

The files reveal that Tolson was named by Hoover to be the chair of the committee set up to decide who was — and who wasn’t — included on the Wall of Honor. Hoover and Tolson wanted to reserve the Wall of Honor for agents killed in gun battles with gangsters and spies. The files included memos and messages between Hoover and Tolson showing that the pair decided that an accidental plane crash didn’t qualify as dying in the line of duty. They rejected Marvin Risen from consideration for the Wall of Honor, even though he was traveling in the line of duty when he died. He had been on his way to Memphis to meet with federal prosecutors about a bank robbery case. He wasn’t hot on the trail of an atomic spy ring or some other glamorous case. Yet he was involved in the kind of criminal investigation that made up much of the FBI’s day-to-day work.

At the time of his death in October 1943, Marvin Risen had one son, Daniel, and his wife, Mary Emily, was pregnant with their second son. In April 1944, she gave birth to Marvin Patrick Risen, who became known as Pat. 

Marvin’s wife, suddenly a widow in her mid-20s with two small children, was left to pick up the pieces after the shattering death of her husband. Yet the most that Hoover did to help was to offer her a secretarial job at the FBI’s headquarters, which would have required her to move from Nashville to Washington. She rejected the offer.

Later, two of Marvin’s sisters went to FBI headquarters in Washington to try to talk to Hoover about Marvin’s case. Hoover refused to come out of his office to meet with them, leaving them waiting — and insulted.

Marvin’s wife later remarried another agent in the FBI’s Nashville office, but both her sons kept Risen as their last name.

Daniel died by suicide when he was a young man. Pat Risen lived until 2022 and had two sons, Clay Risen and Michael Risen. Clay and I both worked at the New York Times together for many years; he continues to write for the Times and is the author of several books. His brother Michael is the associate head of school at the Norwood School, a private school in the Washington area.  

Out of the blue this spring, the FBI contacted Michael Risen: The bureau wanted to talk about his grandfather.

Decades after Marvin Risen’s death, the FBI had finally changed the Hoover-era standards for determining who should be included on the Wall of Honor. A review of old files on agents who had died in the line of duty but had been rejected by Hoover and Tolson had turned up Marvin’s case.

More than 80 years after his death, Marvin Risen was finally going up on the FBI’s Wall of Honor. 

Thomas Cottone, a retired FBI agent, said in an interview that he discovered Marvin’s case while going through old issues of an internal FBI newsletter, which contained an article about the plane crash. Cottone was already pushing the bureau to include the names of several other agents who had died in accidents while on duty, and so he began to advocate for Marvin as well.

One reason the FBI may have finally changed the qualifications for the Wall of Honor is that a number of FBI employees have died in recent years from cancer and other health complications resulting from exposure to toxins while serving at Ground Zero in New York and at the Pentagon after 9/11. Several employees who died after working at Ground Zero and the Pentagon in what were clearly work-related deaths have now been added to the wall; they would almost certainly not have been included under the old Hoover-era standards. 

In May, the FBI held a ceremony at its headquarters — which is named for J. Edgar Hoover — honoring Marvin Risen and seven others whose names have just been added to the wall. 

FBI Director Christopher Wray spoke at the event, and several members of my family attended. I was not one of them.

I couldn’t bring myself to attend the ceremony. I have my own personal history with the FBI, and that experience has been painful and complicated.

Related

My Life as a New York Times Reporter in the Shadow of the War on Terror

During my time as a national security journalist, the FBI has over the years spied on me, sought to discredit me and my reporting, and even tried to help the Justice Department put me in prison as part of a long government campaign to silence me through the use of draconian leak investigations into my stories. At one time, there were FBI agents assigned to two separate federal grand jury investigations into my work. They pulled my life apart, sifting through my private data while subpoenaing and forcing testimony from many of my sources. They even spied on my children; they thought they had uncovered a big secret about me when they discovered that I had sent a wire transfer to Europe. It was actually money for my son, who was then on a study abroad program. 

Even as the FBI was investigating me, I had to continue to deal with the bureau as a reporter. I frequently went to FBI headquarters for interviews for new stories while I was still the subject of leak investigations related to earlier coverage. But I was always suspicious that the FBI was using the interviews at the Hoover building to try to get me to say something incriminating in connection with one of their leak investigations — or simply to intimidate me. 

For one story about the government’s counterterrorism operations, I went to FBI headquarters for an interview and was ushered into a windowless conference room where seven FBI agents were waiting for me. None of them would give me their names or talk to me at all. After I explained to them what I knew about the story I was working on, they all just sat and stared at me, not saying a word, refusing to comment or answer any questions. 

The FBI’s campaign of intimidation against me reached its peak when the bureau sent a team of agents to Europe to try to ambush a meeting I had scheduled with a source. The FBI found out about the meeting in advance from an informant who the FBI used to gather information about me. At the last minute, the ambush was averted when the FBI’s informant had a change of heart and tipped me off.

I haven’t forgotten.

I am prepared to go to FBI headquarters when it is required for my work as a journalist. But I didn’t want to go for a celebration, no matter how long overdue.

I believe that Marvin Risen would understand. 

The post My Family’s Long and Painful Relationship With the FBI appeared first on The Intercept.

News of the leadership vacuum comes as experts and officials call for investigations into the communications failures between local, state, and federal agents that allowed a shooter to hit Trump, kill one rally attendee and injure at least two others.

Former Butler Township Police Department Chief John Hays retired last month, both Hays and a department administrator told The Intercept. There is no acting chief, but Lieutenant Matthew Pearson is the current head of the department. The department, which employs around 20 people, did not immediately respond to a request for further information about the absence of a chief. 

Amid reports that Secret Service agents manning the event were asleep, negligent, or both, the lack of communication between various local, state, and federal agencies likely placed disproportionate responsibility on local police, said Jeffrey Fagan, a professor at Columbia University Law School who studies policing.

“Local cops were left to shoulder the burden of security without much help from any federal agency, whether Secret Service or the FBI or anyone else,” he said. “They should have yelled for help, and so should the county government leaders.” 

The shooting has raised new questions in the debate over police funding, gun control, and how well officers can be expected to handle active shooters, regardless of resources and training. 

Similar questions plagued officials in the wake of the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, after police on the scene refused to enter the building, even after receiving training, first reported by The Intercept, to put themselves in harm’s way to stop active shooters,

A head of department would normally take ultimate responsibility for answering such questions. Uvalde schools police chief Pete Arredondo was recently indicted for his actions on the day, including the failure to follow the training.

“There should have been a protocol in place for coordination between the acting head of the local police and the federal agencies,” said Fagan. “Or the County Executive and that person’s designee. But it’s nuts for the Secret Service to delegate any aspect of presidential or former presidential security to the local police regardless.”

Law enforcement agencies’ failures on Saturday undermines the notion of perfect security, said Alex Vitale, professor and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College at the City University of New York. 

“There is no world where if we just assign enough police, we will eliminate all risk,” Vitale said. 

Why and how there was a profound breakdown in communication between local police and state and federal agents needs scrutiny, Vitale added. It appears that local police were made aware of the shooter, took some inadequate action to neutralize the shooter, but did not successfully communicate to the Secret Service, he said, and the Secret Service may not have communicated their plans clearly to local police. 

“A breakdown in communication could be because of inadequate command and control procedures at the local police level.”

“Did the local police fail to make certain kinds of procedures or equipment available to their officers to ensure this communication?” Vitale said. “Or was it just in the heat of the moment, local cops thought they could handle it without bothering the Secret Service, and clearly they couldn’t handle it? We’d want to know who’s in charge of the local police and what the plan of the day was.”

“A breakdown in communication could be because of inadequate command and control procedures at the local police level.”

Blame Game

The tiny Butler Township Police Department was one of several law enforcement agencies on the grounds at the rally on Saturday where 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks killed one attendee and injured at least two other people.

Secret Service agents were also on the scene and their failure to prevent the shooting has prompted calls for an investigation into the agency. 

With accusations flying, experts and responding agents have pointed the finger at each other. 

Butler County Sheriff Michael Slupe described the response to the shooting as a security failure, but did not blame any single agency. He also defended a Butler Township police officer who encountered Crooks just before the shooting took place and retreated after he pointed his rifle at him. (The sheriff’s office and Butler Township Board of Commissioners President Jim Lokhaiser Jr. did not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

Reached for comment, former Butler Township Police Chief John Hays said his last day at the department was June 14. “I really don’t have much information other than what I’m reading in the paper or hearing on the news,” he said. 

Local police, Vitale said, should not be the only ones bearing blame for the communication breakdown. Instead of trying to pinpoint responsibility, he said, the broader problem lies in the idea that policing is politically neutral and that it can produce perfect public safety. 

“The fear of risk is weaponized by those who want to both gain political advantage by promising a risk-free future that they know they can’t deliver on,” Vitale said. “Those folks will weaponize the security apparatus to serve their political interests rather than producing any true, broad-based security for people.” 

“Those security services,” he said, “their first overriding job will be the neutralization of their political enemies, whether it’s grassroots movements, or whatever.”

Pennsylvania lawmakers have long stymied legislation to strengthen gun laws in the state, even while decrying gun violence. Earlier this year, state lawmakers fought a ban on the gun used in the assassination attempt. 

In Congress, Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Penn., who represents the district, has voted against efforts to pass an assault weapons ban. (Kelly did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) 

The Butler County Sheriff’s office is currently advertising a basic handgun safety class and services to apply for or renew licenses to carry concealed firearms. According to its website, the office was accepting applications to carry weapons on the day of the shooting.

The post The Local Police Department Responding to Trump Shooting Has No Chief appeared first on The Intercept.

To rule as she did, Cannon had to sidestep longstanding Supreme Court precedent about independent prosecutors, which she decided was not precedent at all but instead mere “dictum” that need not be followed. This was precisely the path outlined by conservative Justice Clarence Thomas earlier this month in a decision regarding Trump’s prosecution for his role in the January 6 insurrection, where the constitutionality of the special counsel’s appointment was not even at issue. 

None of the other Supreme Court justices signed onto Thomas’s concurring opinion, but Cannon cited it three times. 

“Justice Thomas’s ‘Cannon-currence’ worked,” law professor Leah Litman tweeted after Cannon’s ruling came out. “In the Trump immunity case, Justice Thomas wrote separately to suggest the special counsel was unlawfully appointed; the reasoning laid out the roadmap for this (wrong) result/decision.” 

In United States v. Nixon, a 1973 decision, the Supreme Court rejected former President Richard Nixon’s attempts to stonewall a grand jury investigation into the Watergate break-in. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Nixon had to comply with the subpoena of a special prosecutor, who had been appointed in compliance with the Constitution, federal law, and regulation. 

For decades, the Nixon ruling has been understood to affirm the constitutionality of independent prosecutors and special counsel who are appointed by the attorney general to handle certain politically sensitive cases. In 2019, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals reaffirmed this understanding when it shot down a challenge to Robert Mueller’s appointment to investigate Russia’s attempts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

The D.C. Circuit specifically rejected arguments that a key section in the Nixon decision was “dictum.”

Earlier this month, however, Justice Thomas went out of his way to endorse that theory. 

The Supreme Court immunity case stemmed from the separate investigation into Trump’s involvement in the January 6 insurrection. In that case, Trump argued he was completely immune from prosecution, but he did not challenge Jack Smith’s appointment as special counsel. 

Still, at oral argument in April, Justice Thomas asked about the appointment issue. 

“Did you, in this litigation, challenge the appointment of special counsel?” he asked Trump’s attorneys, who confirmed that they had raised it in the classified documents case but not in the January 6 prosecution.

On July 1, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled Trump had presumptive immunity for any “official acts” he took in the lead up to the insurrection. Writing only for himself, Justice Thomas issued a concurring opinion “to highlight another way in which this prosecution may violate our constitutional structure.” 

“If this unprecedented prosecution is to proceed, it must be conducted by someone duly authorized to do so by the American people,” Thomas wrote in his concurrence. “The lower courts should thus answer these essential questions concerning the Special Counsel’s appointment before proceeding.”

Thomas laid out his concerns about the constitutionality of special counsel like Smith, and he took a swipe at the Nixon decision as giving only “passing reference” to relevant statutes while providing “no analysis of those provisions’ text.”

In her decision on Monday, Cannon followed Thomas’s analysis, which no other conservative Supreme Court justice joined, while dismissing the D.C. Circuit’s unanimous determination that Nixon remained binding precedent.

Thomas “laid the table and Judge Cannon took a seat,” law professor Melissa Murray tweeted on Monday.  

The post How Clarence Thomas Cleared Trump’s Path in Classified Docs Case appeared first on The Intercept.

A bipartisan sampling of the world’s greatest perpetrators and enablers of political violence has rushed to condemn political violence following the shooting attempt on former President Donald Trump on Saturday.

Politicians swiftly coalesced around the language of “political violence,” rather than terrorism, to describe the assassination attempt, carried out by Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was shot dead at the Western Pennsylvania rally. Taken together, the outpourings of condemnations betray a clear agreement on what constitutes political violence, and in whose hands the monopoly on violence should remain.

“The idea that there’s political violence … in America like this, is just unheard of, it’s just not appropriate,” said President Joe Biden, the backer of Israel’s genocidal war against Palestine, with a death toll that researchers believe could reach 186,000 Palestinians. Biden’s narrower point was correct, though: Deadly attacks on the American ruling class are vanishingly rare these days. Political violence that is not “like this” — the political violence of organized abandonment, poverty, militarized borders, police brutality, incarceration, and deportation — is commonplace.

“Everybody must condemn it,” Biden said of the assassination attempt.

And condemn it, most everyone in the Democratic political establishment has: “Political violence is absolutely unacceptable,” wrote Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., on X. “There is absolutely no place for political violence in our democracy,” tweeted former President Barack Obama, who oversaw war efforts and military strikes against Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan with massive civilian death tolls; Obama added that we should “use this moment to recommit ourselves to civility and respect in our politics.” “There is no place for political violence, including the horrific incident we just witnessed in Pennsylvania,” wrote Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.

The chorus of condemnation was predictable and not in itself a problem: There’s nothing wrong with desiring a world without stochastic assassination attempts, even against political opponents. But when you have Israel’s minister of foreign affairs, Israel Katz of the fascistic ruling Likud Party, tweeting, “Violence can never ever be part of politics,” the very concept of “political violence” is evacuated of meaning.

The problem is not so much one of hypocrisy or insincerity — vices so common in politics that they hardly merit mention. The issue, rather, is what picture of “political violence” this messaging serves: To say that “political violence” has “no place” in a society organized by political violence at home and abroad is to acquiesce to the normalization of that violence, so long as it is state and capitalist monopolized.

As author Ben Ehrenreich noted on X, “There is no place for political violence against rich, white men. It is antithetical to everything America stands for.”

Related

Will This Make Trump More Popular?

Trump and his Republican Party will no doubt remain committed to a political imaginary of apocalyptic race war and paranoid tribalism, which the assassination attempt will likely only feed. Democrats are welcome to perform civility toward the man who has consistently called for their violent overthrow, but they cannot help themselves to the pretense that their well wishes to Trump actually constitute calls for an end to political violence.

Democratic leaders will call for civility and continue to fill the coffers of police departments nationwide, while sending billions of condition-free dollars and bombs to Israel. Within the U.S., these condemnations of political violence now set the scene for even greater violent repression and policing of protest movements and dissent.

“We will not tolerate this attack from the left,” said Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., who was present at the rally. Little is known about the suspected gunman’s ideology; he was reportedly a registered Republican who once donated to a Democratic PAC on Biden’s inauguration day.

Other Republicans meanwhile blamed Democrats for simply telling the truth about Trump’s far-right extremism. “Today is not just some isolated incident,” Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance wrote on X. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

If centrist Democrats stating the obvious about Trump can be slammed by Republicans as irresponsible, it bodes ill for any actual leftists organizing against fascist forces going forward — especially at a time when left-wing and pro-Palestinian protest movements are readily criminalized by both Democratic and Republican leaders. This is what peace means in a world where the only event to invoke a bipartisan chorus decrying “violence” is an attack on a fascistic former (and potentially future) world leader.

The post The Only Kind of “Political Violence” All U.S. Politicians Oppose appeared first on The Intercept.

The extent of any injuries sustained by Trump remain unclear; a campaign spokesperson issued a statement saying the former president “is fine and is being checked out at a local medical facility.” It is unclear how the incident might affect his campaign, but given historical precedent, his popularity is likely to benefit.

Assassination attempts targeting populist leaders have had a track record in the past of boosting their public appeal.

In the months after he was shot in the leg at a political rally, former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan saw support for his party grow as the public came to view him as a solitary figure battling a corrupt establishment.

Brazilian strongman Jair Bolsonaro was stabbed at an event in 2018, before going on to win elections boosted by the support of voters who saw him as surviving an attempted murder by their ideological enemies.

President Ronald Reagan likewise benefited from public sympathy and support after an attempted assassination — support which helped him push through a raft of controversial economic policies that would define the country for decades to come. 

Scholars have warned of an apparent increase in political assassinations in recent years, after a number of foiled and successful attempts targeting officials in the U.S. and abroad. Following the killing of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in 2022, the national security publication War on the Rocks blamed the possible increase in attacks on “accelerationists” seeking to drive social conflict through destabilizing political institutions.

In the aftermath of the apparent shooting at his campaign rally, an image of a blood-streaked Trump raising his fist to the crowd began spreading virally on social media, including among supporters who lauded his defiance. The world awaits more details on Trump’s condition and what exactly took place in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday. It will also be watching what this moment means for Trump’s popularity and the 2024 election.

The post Will This Make Trump More Popular? appeared first on The Intercept.

The university recently deposed tenured law professor Katherine Franke as part of an investigation stemming from an interview she gave to “Democracy Now!” in January. During that interview, Franke was asked about allegations that two students who had previously served in the Israeli army had sprayed a chemical at their classmates at an on-campus rally for Gaza.

Franke, who has worked at the school for decades, responded by linking the incident to a documented pattern of on-campus harassment that Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim students have alleged for years.

“Columbia has a program with older students from other countries, including Israel,” Franke said, referring to the school’s General Studies program. “It’s something that many of us were concerned about because so many of those Israeli students who then come to the campus are coming right out of their military service. And they’ve been known to harass Palestinian and other students on our campus, and it’s something the university has not taken seriously in the past.”

The remarks set off a firestorm, with commentators suggesting that Franke was calling to ban all Israeli students from campus. Within a few days of the interview, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz published an article titled “Columbia University Pushes Back Against Professor Who Vilified Israeli Students,” citing a statement from the university affirming its support for Israeli students. 

By February 13, Franke was notified of a complaint against her based on the interview, filed by two law school professors who alleged violations of university discrimination policy. Online, supporters of Israel continued to misconstrue Franke’s statements, while a Republican lawmaker asked University President Minouche Shafik about Franke during an April hearing about campus antisemitism. 

Columbia refused to answer The Intercept’s questions on the pending investigation, but referred to its equal opportunity and affirmative action policies and procedures. The document lists a range of possible disciplinary action, including probation, administrative leave or suspension, and dismissal or restriction from employment. 

Related

University Professors Are Losing Their Jobs Over “New McCarthyism” on Gaza

Franke is one of several Columbia staff to face investigation — many of whom have defended Palestinian rights — while the House Committee on Education and the Workforce continues to apply pressure on the school. Recently, three deans were placed on indefinite leave for exchanging text messages the university says “touched on ancient antisemitic tropes.” Professors elsewhere across the country have had their livelihoods imperiled upon speaking out in defense of Palestinians.

“What’s of greatest concern is not really my 20-year-plus career at Columbia, but what this says about peaceful protest on our campuses, around the lives and dignity of Palestinians,” Franke said in an interview with The Intercept.

“What’s happening to me is happening to our students, it’s happened to people on many other campuses. And it’s, to me, shocking at a place like Columbia — which prides itself on being a home for, if not only tolerating, maybe welcoming student engagement with public events or public affairs like the crisis in the Middle East,” she continued. “And yet they’re punishing me and others for standing up for our students who I think are engaging in appropriate protest.”

Franke’s career as a lawyer and legal scholar has focused on gender and sexuality law, and she has also done human rights work focused on Israel’s occupation of Palestine. In 2018, Israel deported Franke upon her arrival in the country to take part in a human rights delegation. As Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza has roiled the Columbia campus, Franke has defended students speaking out on behalf of Palestinians or criticizing the Israeli government. She has also been unabashed in her criticism of the university administration’s response to student protests.

In its statement to Haaretz on the heels of Franke’s “Democracy Now!” interview, a university spokesperson said, “We are disheartened to see some members of our community and beyond use this moment to spread antisemitism, Islamophobia, bigotry against Palestinians and Israelis. Especially at a time of pain and anger, we must avoid language that vilifies, threatens, or stereotypes entire groups of people. It is antithetical to Columbia’s values and can lead to acts of harassment or violence.”

As the controversy persisted ahead of the April congressional hearing, Franke reached out to Shafik through another senior administrator to relay her concerns. (Franke said she did so because she had been unable to get Shafik to meet with her or respond to her efforts to connect). In an email that she asked the administrator to forward to Shafik, she rebutted the misinformation that had circulated about her interview and reiterated that she wasn’t calling to ban Israeli students from campus. 

Rather, she wrote, she was voicing concern “about students coming onto our campus who have just completed their military service in Israel – the transition to civilian life – after having been taught that Palestinians are evil and want to kill Israelis/Jews – can be a rough one for some people.”

Franke said she never heard from Shafik about the email.

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She was right to be on guard. At the April 17 hearing, Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., asked Shafik what she was doing about Franke, who, Stefanik falsely claimed, said “all Israeli students who have served in the IDF are dangerous and shouldn’t be on campus.”

“I agree with you that those comments are completely unacceptable and discriminatory,” Shafik said, accepting Stefanik’s framing. “I think she will be finding a way to clarify her position.” The president added that “a very senior person in the administration” spoke to Franke, who said the comments were not what she intended to say.

While Shafik’s comments indicated knowledge of Franke’s interaction with the senior administrator, the president misconstrued the core point of Franke’s outreach: She didn’t mean those “unacceptable” comments because she did not say them.

Shafik’s office did not respond to The Intercept’s questions.

As part of the school’s investigatory process, the university deposed Franke for a couple of hours on June 13. The deposition was handled by outside investigators at the insistence of Franke and her lawyer, who argued that she had been prejudged by the school’s president. 

“It seemed clear to me that they had made their mind up already, coming into the deposition, that I was generalizing in a way that would make people who served in the IDF or Israelis feel bad, and so there’s a very good chance that they will fire me,” Franke said. She said that the person who deposed her seemed to be trying to goad her into agreeing with the premise of the violations alleged, asking questions like, “You can understand that somebody might hear what you said and take it as discriminatory?”

Franke is expecting a decision any day now. She was told the university would make a decision in a matter of weeks. 

“Today, it’s Palestine. Tomorrow could be abortion. It could be, you know, criticizing the Trump administration. It could be climate change,” Franke said. “I feel like it’s Palestine today, but what’s at stake here is something much larger, of the imposition of a kind of orthodoxy around a very contested political concept or context.” 

The post Columbia Law Professor Smeared by Israel Supporters Could Lose Her Job appeared first on The Intercept.

“We’re here today because Russia … attacked a children’s hospital,” Thomas-Greenfield said. “Even uttering that phrase sends a chill down my spine.”

Thomas-Greenfield went on to list a string of Russian attacks on other Ukrainian hospitals throughout the war. She described Russia’s aggression as a “campaign of terror” and labeled its attacks on civilian infrastructure as violations of international law. Representatives of other countries, such as the United Kingdom and France, echoed Thomas-Greenfield’s denunciations. (Russia’s ambassador denied responsibility for the Monday bombing.)

The moral clarity of her comments was striking to observers and experts of international law, who contrasted it to U.S. rhetoric and actions concerning Israel. The U.S. has stood by Israel militarily and diplomatically as it has consistently attacked civilian infrastructure, such as hospitals and schools, in Gaza since October 7, in a brutal campaign that the International Court of Justice has deemed a plausible genocide. 

“I’m very glad the U.S. is coming out and so vocally condemning all of those actions,” said Jessica Peake, an international law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, referring to Thomas-Greenfield’s comments toward Russia. “But at the same time, we don’t get any language anywhere near as strong as that when we’re talking about Palestinian hospitals, or Palestinian schools, or Palestinian children.”

A Very Stark Difference

The U.N. Security Council’s near-unanimous criticism of Russia this week mirrored another moment from earlier this year, with one stark difference: the U.S. response. 

The council met on April 5, just days after Israel bombed a convoy of aid workers with World Central Kitchen, and following the end of Israel’s siege of Al-Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital, during which the Israeli military killed 400 Palestinians. Council members took turns condemning the attacks, urged Israel to do a better job at protecting aid workers and civilian infrastructure, and called the attacks “clear violations of international humanitarian law.” 

The U.S. joined the calls for protections of aid workers. But it also withheld any criticism of the Al-Shifa Hospital attack, and instead shifted the blame to Hamas. “We must not ignore how Hamas’s actions have put humanitarian personnel at risk,” said U.S. Ambassador Robert Wood. “Tunneling under and storing weapons in hospitals is a violation of the laws of war, and we condemn it.”

The differing and uneven responses from the U.S. toward the wars in Ukraine and Gaza has long been a point of criticism from those pushing for peace in both contexts.

Nate Evans, a spokesperson for Thomas-Greenfield, told The Intercept that the ambassador “has condemned loss of Palestinian civilian lives many, many times in the Security Council,” while adding that the conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine are “two very different wars.” Evans noted that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked,” while Israel launched its assault in response to Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel.

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State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller on Monday similarly contrasted the two wars, asserting that the Ukrainian military isn’t “headquartering itself in hospitals, under hospitals, in other civilian sites, in apartment buildings,” but accused Hamas of doing so. The U.S. has consistently repeated Israel’s refrain that Hamas is using hospitals for military operations, a claim for which neither party has provided credible evidence. Israel’s war has decimated Gaza’s medical sector and killed more than 200 medical and humanitarian workers, the most ever recorded for a conflict in a single year, according to the U.N.

There are indeed significant differences between the circumstances surrounding the wars, including, significantly, that Russia is a longtime U.S. adversary while Israel is one of its closest allies and a recipient of billions of dollars in military aid each year. 

But there are also clear parallels in human rights abuses and violations of international law in each respective war, said Peake, who called the U.S. government’s handling of the conflicts “hypocritical.” 

“What we see from the U.S. is a very stark difference in how they are choosing to handle its involvement in pushing for an end to those conflicts,” said Peake, who is also assistant director of UCLA’s Promise Institute for Human Rights.

“On the one hand, you have the U.S., in Russia and Ukraine, playing a very central role within international efforts for seeking an end to the conflict and also accountability,” she said. “And in the case of Gaza, it’s vetoing resolutions, it’s watering down statements that are put out by U.N. bodies. The U.S. is acting to have those statements be softer to make Israel appear a more reasonable party.”

Hiding Behind Diplomacy

Since Israel’s invasion of Gaza, the U.S. has vetoed three separate U.N. Security Council resolutions that would have called for a humanitarian pause or immediate ceasefire. In contrast, the U.S. has backed similar peace resolutions for Ukraine, many of which were in turn vetoed by Russia.

In March, the Security Council managed to pass a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire. But the U.S. abstained from the vote because “certain key edits were ignored,” such as a request to add condemnation of Hamas, Thomas-Greenfield said at the time. 

U.S. officials have said they opposed ceasefire resolutions because they failed to stand by Israel’s apparent right to defend itself and argued diplomatic approaches would be more effective than public censures. And the U.S. continues to point to its leading role in brokering a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas as proof that it is serious about ending the conflict in Gaza. 

But even as negotiations continue, Israel is ramping up its bombardment in Gaza, focusing most recently on Gaza City, where Israeli forces on Wednesday ordered the evacuation of Palestinian civilians. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to insist that the war must continue until Hamas is destroyed, an implausible condition. 

This week, Israeli strikes have killed dozens, including a school near Khan Younis in southern Gaza, where at least 27 people were killed, mostly women and children, according to reports citing Palestinian medics. And over the weekend, separate Israeli strikes at other schools in Gaza City and a U.N.-run school in Nuseirat, killed 20 others. Strikes also hit a home in Deir al-Balah, which was inside Israel’s “humanitarian safe zone” where Palestinians have been told to flee, the Associated Press reported. 

The U.S. has yet to condemn the recent spate of attacks. On Wednesday, however, the Biden administration agreed to send hundreds of 500-pound bombs to Israel, the AP reported. The U.S. previously withheld the munitions in May as Israel readied for an assault on Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of civilians were sheltering.

“It’s really just not enough to say ‘We’re pursuing diplomacy’ when we’re talking about any level of civilian casualties, but particularly when we’re talking about almost 10 percent of the population of Gaza,” Peake said, referencing a recent report from The Lancet, one of the world’s leading medical journals, which issued a “conservative estimate” that the Gaza death toll is 186,000.

“If Biden picked up the phone to Netanyahu this afternoon and said, ‘We’re cutting off your weapon supply,’ that would bring it to a close,” Peake said. “If the U.S. said, ‘We’re cutting off funding to Israel until there’s a ceasefire,’ that would end this conflict.”

The post Russia Attacks Hospitals in Ukraine. Israel Does the Same in Gaza. The U.S. Response Couldn’t Be More Different. appeared first on The Intercept.

Immediately following the surprise victory of left party coalition New Popular Front in France’s parliamentary elections last week, Jean-Luc Mélenchon — the leftist leader of the bloc’s largest party, France Unbowed — vowed to see France “recognize the Palestinian state as soon as possible.”

France’s far-right National Rally party, alongside conservative centrists, had spent weeks painting the left’s support of Palestine as an electoral poisoned pill. In attacks all too familiar in the U.S., they conflated anti-Zionism with antisemitism, slamming Israel’s critics as antisemites. Israeli officials explicitly backed the far-right party. In this last election, at least, it didn’t work to prevent left-wing success.

In Britain, too, the centrist Labour Party’s landslide victory was tempered in five constituencies, where independent candidates with pro-Palestinian platforms defeated Labour candidates. Labour’s former leader, Jeremy Corbyn, won his North Islington, London, seat with ease; Corbyn was famously ousted from Labour when the party’s conservative wing and British media weaponized charges of antisemitism against the party’s left flank.

If there’s a lesson to be learned in the U.S. from the success of pro-Palestinian candidates in France and Britain, we can be grimly sure that no Democrat in November’s presidential election will learn it. President Joe Biden’s unfettered support of Israel and its genocidal Gaza war is not only a gross moral failure but also an electoral risk, particularly in crucial swing-state Michigan and for young voters in general. But his campaign refuses to change course on the issue. Even if the senescent president is replaced as the Democratic nominee, there’s scant chance that any successor will embrace a platform of Palestinian solidarity or even robust ceasefire demands. This, despite the fact that 77 percent of Democratic voters and two-thirds of voters in the U.S. support a permanent ceasefire.

The French and British results should, or at least could, however, be a lesson for left-wing Democrats to continue to fight against the vicious efforts of groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, to crush Palestine-supportive candidates. This is especially important following the defeat of progressive Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., after pro-Israel groups poured an unprecedented $15 million into the primary race to unseat the pro-Palestine incumbent.

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The astroturfed campaign against Bowman should not be heeded as a warning by progressive Democrats to abandon support for Palestine, or to temper their opposition to Israel’s Gaza onslaught. Rather, it should be a jolt to redouble organizing efforts in a united front against AIPAC’s interventions. Top Democrats did little to defend Bowman against the well-funded attack. It is somewhat encouraging that members of the Democratic mainstream have put more support behind AIPAC’s next target, Missouri Rep. Cori Bush, for her primary next month; this support should be stronger still.

The French example is instructive here: Only through a highly strategic coalition of center-to-left candidates have the far right been kept from parliamentary leadership. Centrists did not throw their coalition partners on the left under the bus for their support for Palestine. The bloc can hardly be compared to the Democratic Party with its conservative, pro-Israel mainstream. Yet Democrats face a similar challenge: Win the trust of vast numbers of Muslim and Arab voters and young people, or stand with AIPAC — a lobby that has no problem raising millions for the Republican extreme right. 

It would go too far to say the recent French and British election results speak to the unambiguous popularity of Palestinian solidarity — too many variables were at play in both instances to draw simple conclusions. In Britain, desire to unseat the ruinous Conservative Party drove support for new Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s uninspiring Labour. In France, strategic coordination between the center and left in the election’s second round was key. The New Popular Front is a fraught coalition, and internal disagreements over Israel, among other issues, will no doubt threaten its fragile cohesion. The bloc also did not win an absolute majority, despite winning the largest number of seats, and thus faces huge roadblocks to pushing through its political program. Remaining a united front is the only chance the left parties have — and that means support for Palestine cannot be pushed aside.

This is, of course, a vile state of affairs that requires an appeal to realpolitik to see candidates stand against genocide, occupation, and apartheid. Since the need to stop Israel’s intolerable war remains as urgent as ever, however, the fact that support for Palestine can be shown as helpful, rather than harmful, to electoral success is worth stressing. At the very least, leftist candidates and leaders in France and Britain like Mélenchon and Corbyn have modeled powerful examples for U.S. progressives: In the face of bad-faith attacks, and even party expulsions, aimed a quashing support for Palestine, they remained steadfast on the right side of history.

The post Supporting Palestine Helped the Left Win in France and Britain. Will Democrats Learn From It? appeared first on The Intercept.

“Closeted Furries will be presented to the world for the degenerate perverts they are,” Howell told one of SiegedSec’s leaders, who goes by the handle “vio.” “Your means are miniscule compared to mine. You now can either turn yourself in or you can cooperate.”

Howell, who confirmed the chat logs were accurate to the Daily Dot, is the executive director for the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project and a former Trump administration official. SiegedSec also provided screenshots of the discussion to The Intercept.

Howell started the conversation with questions about why SiegedSec targeted the Heritage Foundation. “What is that you are seeking or threatening?” he asked vio.

“We want to make a message and shine light on who exactly supports the Heritage Foundation,” vio responded. “We dont [sic] want anything more than that, not money and not fame. We’re strongly against Project 2025 and everything the Heritage Foundation stands for.”

When it posted a small cache of Heritage Foundation files on Tuesday, SiegedSec said it was part of a campaign against organizations that oppose trans rights. On Wednesday, a Heritage spokesperson told The Intercept that the foundation’s own systems were not breached, and that SiegedSec “stumbled upon a two-year-old archive of the Daily Signal website that was available on a public-facing website owned by a contractor.”

“The story of a ‘hack’ is a false narrative and exaggeration by a group of criminal trolls trying to get attention,” said Noah​​​​ Weinrich, the Heritage Foundation’s public relations director. 

Hack or not, Howell told vio that the Heritage Foundation was working with the FBI to identify the members of SiegedSec, including through a “2702 order,” likely a reference to a type of administrative subpoena. Howell included a screenshot of vio’s public bitcoin wallet. 

“Are you aware that you won’t be able to wear a furry tiger costume when you’re getting pounded in the ass in the federal prison I put you in next year?” Howell wrote.

When vio threatened to dox Howell and share such “unprofessional language from an executive director,” Howell pushed it further. “Please share widely,” Howell wrote. “I hope the word spreads as fast as the STDs do in your degenerate furry community.”

An hour after posting the chat logs on its Telegram channel, SiegedSec announced it was disbanding “for our own mental health, the stress of mass publicity, and to avoid the eye of the FBI.”

The Heritage Foundation declined to comment about the exchange between SiegedSec and Howell.

The post “Gay Furry Hackers” Feud With Heritage Foundation Exec appeared first on The Intercept.

At least four members of the Squad have expressed support for Biden since the first presidential debate. Two have enthusiastically backed him, including Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., reiterated that Biden was the nominee and said questions to the contrary were “losing the plot.” Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., said she and Biden were facing the same fight against extremist Republicans. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., have also affirmed their support.

The boost from progressives comes even as former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Wednesday that Biden was running out of time to decide whether to stay in the race. 

It has left media outlets asking why the Squad among all Democrats is backing Biden “so forcefully”?

But not all progressives are lining up behind Biden. Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., one of the most vocal members criticizing U.S. military support for the war on Gaza, has said she will not endorse the president for reelection. And last week, Rep. Summer Lee, D-Penn., said that if Biden decided to step down, she would support Vice President Kamala Harris as the party’s nominee.

Progressives in Washington insisted that members of the Squad and their staffs were not frustrated with each other over how each member approached questions about Biden. They explained the division as merely a difference in messaging between political allies. 

Two sources who work closely with Squad offices said progressive efforts to boost Biden had less to do with him as the presidential candidate and more to do with protecting their own political futures.

No progressive members have explicitly called on Biden to drop out of the race.

Shortly after the debate, observers criticized Squad members for not immediately joining calls from at least 10 Democrats in nine states, including a slew of moderates, for Biden to step down. Progressives waited to see how the fallout would play out after the debate and over the July 4 holiday weekend. 

There wasn’t a specific plan for how the Squad would respond, and there was no coordination with offices that wanted to stay silent, sources said. Some strategists questioned whether progressives calling on Biden to step down would have had the opposite effect and if it was more effective to have moderate Democrats make the case instead. But as members faced mounting questions from the media, different members took more deliberate stances in support of the president.

One progressive strategist who spoke with The Intercept on the condition of anonymity in order to speak freely said there were pragmatic reasons for each member’s decision to speak out or keep quiet on Biden. “There is a divide between the most progressive members who feel like they need to show fealty for self-preservation or for future ambition and those who are willing to just hang back and not offer support because they don’t need anything,” said the strategist, who is in regular communication with Squad members’ staff. 

Several Squad members have so far managed to stay silent on the Biden question.

There wasn’t a specific plan for how the Squad would respond, and there was no coordination with offices that wanted to stay silent, sources said.

Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, has not weighed in on whether Biden should stay in the race. He is reportedly eyeing a run for chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus next year, which makes it less likely that he would take a vocal stance against Biden. Casar’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Rep. Delia Ramirez, who says she has been focused on making sure that former President Donald Trump doesn’t win reelection, is not taking a position on Biden’s campaign. “At the moment, Congresswoman Ramirez is not commenting on the issue,” communications director Jowen Ortiz Cintrón said in a statement to The Intercept. 

Rep. Jamaal Bowman, who lost his reelection last month, has not spoken out about Biden’s campaign. His office did not respond to a request for comment. 

The offices of Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Pressley, Bush, and Jayapal did not respond to a request for comment. Tlaib’s office declined to comment. Lee’s office directed questions about her position to her full interview with WESA. 

Squad members had previously led a solid block of opposition to Biden’s funding for Israel’s war on Gaza. Those efforts have slowly given way to support for his campaign among some members as the presidential election looms nearer, leaving Tlaib as one of the lone voices withholding her endorsement over Biden’s support for Israel. Even before the debate, Omar reiterated her support for Biden despite his handling of Gaza. 

Sanders backed Biden in an interview over the weekend. On Monday, Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, and Pressley joined him. Ocasio-Cortez told reporters at the Capitol that she had spoken with Biden, that he was not leaving the race, and that she would continue to support him as the nominee. The same day, Omar reiterated her support for Biden and called him “the best president of my lifetime.” Pressley said Biden was the nominee, “and I think we’re losing the plot here.” 

On Tuesday, Bush compared her reelection fight to Biden’s and said the party should unite to defeat extremist Republicans. Bush’s office did not respond to a request for comment. 

Jayapal also expressed support for Biden but said she was “listening carefully” to members in a statement on Monday. Jayapal said she would continue working to ensure that Democrats defeated Trump in November. 

Jayapal’s statement avoided taking a definitive stance on Biden’s campaign and invited criticism that progressives have diluted what was once a strong opposition to Biden’s policy toward Israel. After Jayapal faced intense blowback for calling Israel a “racist state,” she has since affirmed her support of funding for Israel’s Iron Dome, along with Ocasio-Cortez, who has also been campaigning for Biden. 

The post Even Centrists Are Questioning Biden. But the Squad Is Divided. appeared first on The Intercept.

The basic inanity underscores the malign interest driving one of two major American political parties: $300 million of donations to lawmakers from energy and natural resource interest groups (namely, fossil fuel companies) since 1990 — more than double the amount directed to Democrats during that same period.

On Monday, the Republican National Convention announced its platform, which affirmed that the party is wholly Donald Trump’s. “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” the 16-page document’s headline read. 

The document paid no mind to environmental protection, never mind the 130 million Americans currently trudging through oppressive heat. But it did call to “BUILD A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD OVER OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY,” a reference to Israel’s U.S.-funded defense system, and to “CARRY OUT THE LARGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY.”

That the Trump-led, Republican agenda doesn’t mention “climate” is not surprising. In his first term, the former president overturned some 100 environmental regulations, pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Agreement, and weakened the Environmental Protection Agency. In April, Trump reportedly promised oil tycoons that he would reverse some of Joe Biden’s climate policies in exchange for a $1 billion campaign contribution. Meanwhile, three of his Supreme Court justices just helped corporate America get even further off the hook from having to respect environmental regulation by overturning the Chevron doctrine, a decades-old legal precedent that directed courts to defer to federal agencies’ interpretation of unambiguous statues. 

“Trump can’t mention it because every last one of his policies would make it worse. He’s essentially running on heating the planet even more,” Bill McKibben, environmentalist and founder of climate groups Third Act and 350.org, told The Intercept.

In an exchange with a young climate activist on the day the GOP’s platform was released, Republican Sen. Katie Britt — framed by the party as “America’s mom” before her memorable “State of the Union” response speech — embodied her party’s dismissive response to the burning of our planet.

“Oh you, look at how dishonest that was. You asked if you could take a selfie and now you’re asking questions,” Britt said to a voter who asked her about money she receives from the oil and gas lobby. Britt proceeded to ask what the voter’s issue was with “Big Oil.”

“I think that the climate crisis is here and getting worse, and you’re being funded by the people who are making that happen,” the activist said.

The senator from Alabama responded evasively, seeming to cheer on more toxic drilling. “Listen, we’ve got to be not only energy independent, but energy dominant. We do it better than anybody.”

Britt did not respond to questions about her plan to address climate change and environmental protection, or about the $197,037 she has received from the oil and gas industries since joining Congress in 2022.

It’s not as if modern Republicans have not engaged with climate. In 2021, Rep. John Curtis, R-Utah, launched the Conservative Climate Caucus in 2021 to educate Republicans on climate policies and legislation. “Don’t be too tough on us, but watch us. I am totally ready to be judged a year from on how much impact we’ve had on the debate,” he said at the time of the group’s founding. 

As it turns out, the effort, which has received favorable media coverage since its inception, has not had much tangible impact. The group’s members have attacked environmental regulations, undermined or simply refused to vote for bills like the Inflation Reduction Act, and taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from the fossil fuel industry.

The post GOP Platform Doesn’t Mention the Word “Climate” Once — Even After Hottest Year on Record appeared first on The Intercept.

Project 2025 is spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation in partnership with dozens of right-wing advocacy organizations. It has two main components: First, a 900-page manifesto with a wish list for the first 180 days of the “next conservative administration,” including to further restrict abortion access and “dismantle the administrative state.” The second component is an application-only recruitment effort to ensure the administration is quickly staffed with loyalists.  

On Friday, Trump disavowed Project 2025 in a post to Truth Social, his social media platform, saying he found unspecified parts of the project “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” 

“I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal,” Trump wrote. “Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

Trump’s vague disavowal of Project 2025 came a few days after Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, made inflammatory statements about a coming “second American Revolution” that would be “bloodless” “if the left allows it to be.”

“As we’ve been saying for more than two years now, Project 2025 does not speak for any candidate or campaign,” the Project 2025 account said in a statement on X. “But it is ultimately up to that president, who we believe will be President Trump, to decide which recommendations to implement.”

Despite Trump’s claims to have “nothing to do with” Project 2025, his administration and campaign personnel contributed to the project, including Karoline Leavitt, his campaign’s national press secretary, as the Biden campaign quickly pointed out on X. 

Former Trump administration officials wrote and edited massive chunks of the manifesto. One of its two primary editors, Paul Dans, who directs the Heritage Foundation’s 2025 Presidential Transition Project, served as the White House liaison for the U.S. Office of Personnel Management during the Trump administration, among other positions. 

Former Trump administration officials wrote and edited massive chunks of the manifesto.

Rick Dearborn, who was briefly Trump’s deputy chief of staff, wrote the White House chapter. Russ Vought, Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, wrote the chapter on OMB and similar executive offices. 

Gene Hamilton, who served in the Trump Justice Department and is now the vice president and general counsel of America First Legal, wrote the DOJ chapter. Similarly, the chapter on the Department of Homeland Security was written by Ken Cuccinelli, who held multiple positions in Trump’s DHS. The list of Project 2025 playbook contributors includes former Trump administration officials from the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Commerce, and Department of Defense, among other departments and agencies. 

Peter Navarro — who advised Trump’s 2016 campaign, served as director of the Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy, and recently reported to prison for refusing to cooperate with a congressional inquiry into the January 6 insurrection — drafted a chapter on trade policy.

People close to Trump also contributed to the Project 2025’s effort to recruit conservatives for administration positions, including appearances in promos and training videos. 

Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, is featured in a promotional video for the Project 2025 academy, along with Stephen Miller and other former Trump administration officials. According to the Project 2025 recruitment website, “The Presidential Administration Academy is a one-of-a-kind educational and skill-building program designed to prepare and equip future political appointees now to be ready on Day One of the next conservative Administration.”

According to the academy syllabus, Leavitt also co-teaches a video module in the academy titled, “The Art of Professionalism.” 

“I appeared in a video for Heritage the year before I started working on the Trump campaign,” Leavitt told The Intercept when asked how the Trump campaign could claim ignorance of Project 2025. Referring to Trump’s campaign platform, she said: “Agenda 47 is the only official policy agenda of the President Trump and our campaign.”

Other former Trump administration officials listed on the Project 2025 academy syllabus include Dearborn, Roger Severino, Hugh Fike, and Bethany Kozma. 

The post Trump’s Camp Says It Has Nothing to Do With Project 2025 Manifesto — Aside From Writing It appeared first on The Intercept.

“I think it would be a big mistake for the Democratic Party to switch gears but stay the course on this particular issue that has galvanized so many people in an unprecedented way in the primaries and who continue showing up and trying to advocate to be heard in a system that is continuing, they feel, to ignore them,” said Halah Ahmad, a policy analyst and spokesperson with Listen to Wisconsin, the state’s “uninstructed” campaign. 

“They should let that policy die with this administration and move towards being a party that stands by its actual values,” Ahmad continued, “which are meant to be anti-war and pro-peace and pro-human rights and international law — which is in direct contrast to everything a Trump candidacy stands for.”

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1 in 5 Wisconsin Democrats Said Gaza War Will Impact Their Primary Vote

The anti-war movement to vote “uncommitted” instead of supporting Biden took off earlier this year ahead of Michigan’s Democratic primary in February. Advocates for the protest vote later launched chapters in other critical swing states including Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and have netted more than half a million votes in more than a dozen primaries. The movement has garnered support for at least 25 delegates at the upcoming Democratic National Convention. 

Activists from around the country told The Intercept that they will advocate for an anti-war agenda at the convention in August and withhold their vote in November unless an adequate candidate steps up, listing policy priorities such as support for a permanent ceasefire and standing up to the pro-Israel lobby as it intervenes in Democratic primaries. Even as the Biden campaign insists that he will not step aside, many Democrats appear to be lining up behind Vice President Kamala Harris as an alternative candidate, with some Democratic governors being floated as well. 

“My No. 1 criteria for any candidate is opposing the genocide in Gaza.”

“My No. 1 criteria for any candidate is opposing the genocide in Gaza,” said Saad Farooq, an uncommitted voter in Massachusetts. Farooq said it was unlikely that the Democratic National Committee would select any candidate who took a stance against Israel’s ongoing war and that he would support Green Party candidate Jill Stein if she were to appear on the ballot in Massachusetts. 

Cole Sandick, who left his primary ballot in New York blank, said his apprehension over supporting Biden stemmed completely from his handling of the war on Gaza. “The rest of his presidency has been imperfect but better than I thought it was going to be, and I was fully on board to vote for him prior to October 7,” Sandick wrote. “Really all I want from an alternative candidate is simply *some* moderation on this issue. Some commitment to a ceasefire, some recognition of the carnage that’s taken place. Some concern for the civil liberties being ripped away from all those like me who dissent and protest.”

Sandick said he would support Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer or Harris. “Nominating Biden at this point is a death sentence.” 

Shaneez Hameed, an uncommitted voter in California, also said that the war in Gaza is a red line for him as a voter. 

“Any new candidate will have to do something about stopping the genocide in Palestine and also be open to making changes with the supreme Court and filibuster,” Hameed wrote. “Or else, nothing changes and there is no point in voting.” 

He mentioned Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who has called for a ceasefire in Gaza, as a candidate who might fit the bill, but conceded that there is no “realistic chance of him being nominated.” Hameed said he wasn’t familiar with Harris’s policies, “but if she even entertains the idea of a ceasefire, I will vote.”

Harris, for her part, reportedly pushed the White House to be more sympathetic toward Palestinian suffering in public statements about the war. In March, Harris delivered a speech that symbolized a U.S. escalation, as she more forcefully called for an “immediate ceasefire” and urged Israel to do more to increase the flow of aid to Gaza. “No excuses,” she said. Even then, reports surfaced that National Security Council officials had watered down parts of her speech. 

“We have to have a goal that we start working on right now, for peace and for an equal measure of security for Israelis and Palestinians,” Harris said later that month. “Palestinians have a right to self-determination; they have a right to dignity, and we’re going to have to work on that.”

For some activists, Harris’s association with Biden makes her candidacy a nonstarter. Mohamed Hussein, an uncommitted voter in Minnesota, said that he didn’t want to see anyone from the current administration replace Biden. “I would have no faith in them to speak up when they can’t even speak up to the obvious circus going on,” he said. “I would question their ability to handle difficult situations and decisions because it seems like no one in the administration is pulling the alarm on the embarrassing situation.” 

Harris is “guilty by association,” Hussein wrote. “In my eyes, she’s either ok with Biden running as president again or she’s not able to talk him out of it. Both are bad qualities in a president.”

Hussein added that he was interested in a governor possibly replacing Biden on the Democratic ticket because they might be less tied to D.C. politics. “I feel like they’re less likely to be influenced by people in Washington,” he said. 

Will Dawson, an uncommitted voter in Washington, D.C., named several factors that could get him to switch his vote from the Green Party’s Stein to another politician. First on his list is a promise to call for an immediate ceasefire and fighting the influence of the pro-Israel lobby and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Congress. 

“This candidate would also ideally work toward pulling further away from the Israeli colonial project over time, with the goal being repealing our absurd financial support, ending the foreign interest agency of AIPAC, and pushing for a nation-wide boycott a la [South Africa] during their apartheid,” Dawson wrote. 

The candidate would also have to push to reform the Supreme Court, he added. “The candidate would have to promise to both push for justice impeachment, and expand the courts,” Dawson said.“If a replacement candidate met both of these requirements, I would absolutely consider switching my vote from Jill Stein. Hell, I might even knock doors/canvass for them!”  

As uncommitted voters list their conditions, concerns around backing a candidate who supports Israel’s war are spreading to others within the Democratic Party apparatus. One DNC delegate, who was granted anonymity to speak freely, told The Intercept that they have been experiencing reservations as a delegate due to Biden’s unrelenting support for Israel. “Do I really want to, you know, even in any way, whether it’s symbolic or not, contribute to Biden being our nominee? And I struggled, because it’s — do I want to vote for someone who’s supporting a genocide? No.”

The post Whether It’s Biden or Someone Else, Gaza Remains Top Priority for “Uncommitted” Voters appeared first on The Intercept.

Team Biden would have you believe that the poll shows that he has the best chance at beating Trump. Yet if the poll is meant to answer the question of which Democrat would fare best against Trump, the answer, evidently, is nearly anyone else. 

The post-debate Data for Progress poll tested the odds of eight Democrats who have been floated as possible alternatives to Biden, including Vice President Kamala Harris and multiple Democratic governors. Biden’s self-proclaimed advantage is tempered by the lack of name recognition — so far — for the other options. Aside from Harris, prospective voters were so unfamiliar with these Democratic leaders that between 39 and 71 percent of respondents said they hadn’t heard enough about them to have an opinion. Even so, each potential candidate performed the same or even better than Biden.

For instance, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is losing to Trump by 2 points, compared to Biden’s 3 — despite the fact that 56 percent of voters do not know enough about her to share any particular opinion. Others, like Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, like Biden, trail Trump by 3, despite having little name recognition. Harris had the same result as Biden.

Since the poll results come without any concentrated campaign by any of the officials, they can be read as a reflection of floors rather than ceilings for each of the alternative Democrats. Given mass voter discontent with the choice between Trump and Biden, the polling suggests that voters could readily get behind someone else. 

A Reuters poll conducted as far back as January found that about half of Democrats and 75 percent of independents thought Biden should not run for president again; it also found that 31 percent of Republicans and 63 percent of independents said Trump shouldn’t run again. A NewsNation poll conducted around the same time found that 59 percent of Americans wouldn’t be enthusiastic about a Biden-Trump rematch. The trend has continued in recent polling: A post-debate USA Today poll found that 41 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of independents wanted Biden replaced, with 63 percent of independents wanting Trump replaced. A CBS poll similarly found nearly half of Democrats want Biden to step aside.

The poll reflects floors, rather than ceilings, for the alternative Democrats.

In the aftermath of the debate, a CNN poll found 75 percent of all voters thought Democrats would have a better chance at winning the election with someone other than Biden at the top of the ticket. It suggested Whitmer, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg were all doing slightly better than the presiden, with Harris within the margin of error of Trump. (Harris’s net-approval rating average is also 9 points better than Biden’s).

This polling suggests there are substantial numbers of disenchanted Democrats, independents, and even Republicans who could be enthused by an alternative, while those still standing by Biden are just as likely to support any Democratic alternative to Trump. A Democratic presidential campaign that’s been shedding support could instead be one that’s gaining momentum.

In nearly every way, Biden is carrying baggage that no alternative Democrat would inherit. Aside from a five-day stretch, Biden has trailed Trump in national polling averages for the better part of the campaign. Trump’s margin widened again after last week’s debate. Biden has been underperforming Democratic Senate candidates in a range of states, including ones he will need to win in 2024, such as Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, and even Ohio. Post-debate polls show Biden sinking in these states and even bringing others like New Hampshire and New Mexico into play. His approval rating is about the lowest it’s ever been during his presidency, at a net negative of 19.

And it’s not just the polling. Biden has faced a historic protest vote campaign in the form of the Uncommitted movement, which has netted hundreds of thousands of votes nationwide, including in key battleground states, expressing discontent with Biden’s almost-unconditional support for Israel’s war on Gaza. His handling of the war has also birthed a historic nationwide movement of campus and community protests that could continue into the fall. 

With concerns surrounding his age and mental fitness hanging over his campaign, one fact bears acknowledgment: Biden is not getting any younger.

Efforts to challenge Biden earlier in the cycle did not take off — in part because the political establishment had put up a united front around Biden. But even as Biden’s advisers try to tamp down concerns, the list of people who have expressed concern about Biden’s performance or suggested he step aside in order to maximize the odds of beating Trump range only grows. They range from Never Trump Republicans Bill Kristol and Sarah Longwell and hosts of the former Obama staffer-led “Pod Save America,” to Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse and Rep. Gabe Amo, to the editorial boards of the Chicago Tribune, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and the New York Times, former Obama Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, and several Democratic members of Congress and committee leaders nationwide — including former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.

On Tuesday, Rep. Lloyd Doggett became the first sitting Democratic member of Congress to call on Biden to step aside. 

For now, the possible alternative candidates have stayed quiet and reiterated their support for Biden. Whitmer reportedly called a senior Biden campaign official to express that she hated she was being floated as a possible replacement, while also sharing concern about how much more difficult the campaign will now be for Biden. She later released a statement affirming her “100 percent” support for Biden’s fight against Trump.

Newsom, who one California columnist has described as “waiting in the wings,” maintained his tune as an avid Biden surrogate even while being swarmed by reporters after the debate. On Thursday night, he expressed his “disgust” at Trump’s debate performance and his pride in Biden on the substance. 

If the president is meant to be a messenger for the wider governing structure he represents, Biden, as evidenced by his debate performance, falls short. While Trump spouted lies and racist remarks like clockwork, Biden fumbled to not only respond to those comments, but even to maintain a coherent positive message. If the president is meant to actively craft and execute responsive policy, just look to Biden’s remarkable intransigence in supporting Israel’s war or his timidness in the face of an out-of-control and unaccountable Supreme Court as signs of a political and an electoral liability. If the role of a president is some combination of both, Biden’s recent record appears all the worse.

Despite their hesitance to jump in, alternative candidates have the possibility to not only more effectively contrast themselves against Trump — but also against Biden’s inability to do so. And in a race in which the American public is disenchanted not just with Biden, but with Trump too, the question is whether other Democrats have a better chance than the incumbent against someone who ought to be among the most beatable candidates in presidential election history.

After all, Trump is now the first former president to be a convicted felon and still faces several other criminal proceedings. He appointed three of the Supreme Court justices who not only helped overturn decades-old abortion rights in the U.S., but recently freed corporate America from regulation and ruled that homeless people can be considered criminals for sleeping outside, while crime-committing presidents can be immune from prosecution for nearly any misdeed. He is the face of a movement that sought to overturn an election, that has pursued book bans and mass deportations and infringements on people’s abilities to love whoever they do.

In 2020, Biden had the benefit of challenging a historically unpopular incumbent and garnering the volunteer energy to do so, and still, he won narrowly. If he takes seriously his own warnings of what dangers Trump’s re-ascendance may unleash, he would act accordingly. By every single metric, he is faring much worse in 2024 than he did four years ago, while those same factors suggest nearly any prominent Democratic alternative could perform better.

The post Every Democrat Other Than Joe Biden Is Unburdened by What Has Been appeared first on The Intercept.

What’s remarkable about the Missouri race is that the Republican incumbent, Andrew Bailey, is also an archconservative star-in-the-making, with endorsements from the National Rifle Association, top Missouri lawmakers, and state law enforcement unions. 

Despite Bailey’s deeply conservative agenda and rhetoric, Leo is helping bankroll a primary challenge.

Since his appointment in 2023, Bailey has sued the Biden administration over student loan cancellation, protections for transgender students, and federal officials’ efforts to influence social media content moderation practices around Covid-19. 

This isn’t enough for Leo. Despite Bailey’s deeply conservative agenda and rhetoric, Leo is helping bankroll a primary challenge that’s pitting national rightwing donors against wealthy conservative Missourians. The primary will be held on August 6. 

Leo’s Largesse vs. Old Beer Money 

Campaign finance disclosures show that Leo and his allies have underwritten much of Scharf’s bid to be the next state attorney. 

The Concord Fund, one of Leo’s dark-money organizations, has given $3.5 million so far to two pro-Scharf PACs: $500,000 to Defend Missouri last year, plus another $3 million to Club for Growth Action Missouri so far in 2024. (One of these $1 million checks was initially misreported as coming from Leo personally, rather than from the Concord Fund.) 

Republican megadonor Paul Singer — a hedge fund billionaire and fishing buddy of Justice Samuel Alito who is closely aligned with Leo — has chipped in another $1.5 million to support Scharf, also via Club for Growth Action. Singer and his firm are based in West Palm Beach, Florida.   

To try to keep up with this flood of national money to a state primary, the main committee supporting Bailey — Liberty and Justice PAC — has turned primarily to wealthy Missourians. These include the heir to the Anheuser-Busch beer fortune, August A. Busch III, who has given $200,000 in the past two years. Mike and Carolyn Rayner, a retired couple that are part of the family that owns Cargill, have given more than $1 million to Liberty and Justice PAC over this period. Another wealthy couple, Rex and Jeanne Sinquefield, gave $500,000, and a Kansas City law firm, Ketchmark & McCreight, gave more than $230,000.

As of April 1, Liberty and Justice PAC had just under $2 million in the bank, and Club for Growth Action had just under $2.2 million. Since then, Bailey’s mostly local highrollers have contributed around $750,000, compared to the $3.4 million that Club for Growth Action got in just two checks from Singer and the Concord Fund.

Bailey has been unable to unlock one crucial war chest: the Republican Attorneys General Association, a collective of his conservative counterparts in 27 other states. In the Louisiana attorney general race last year, RAGA spent $1.8 million to support the winner, Elizabeth Murrill. 

In his brief time as a RAGA member, Bailey has led various coalition efforts, including letters warning CVS and Walgreens in 2023 that sending abortion pills by mail would violate the Comstock Act. He has also led group briefs to the Supreme Court, including in the mifepristone case and the challenges to Texas and Florida laws regulating social media platforms. 

Still, RAGA — to which Leo’s Concord Fund is a top contributor and which is also a client of Leo’s consulting firm, CRC Advisors — has not backed Bailey. So far, RAGA has not made a formal endorsement in the race, though its executive director actually donated a small amount to Scharf’s campaign. Last September, Missouri Gov. Mike Parsons, who appointed Bailey, wrote a letter to RAGA complaining about its “unprecedented and deeply concerning” lack of support for an incumbent. 

RAGA and Bailey’s campaign did not respond to The Intercept’s questions, including whether Leo’s support for Scharf impacted RAGA’s decision not to back Bailey.

Longstanding Ties

Scharf has a longstanding relationship with Leo and the Concord Fund, which was previously called the Judicial Crisis Network. 

Scharf’s campaign website emphasizes that he “played an instrumental role” in building “the most conservative Supreme Court in almost a century” by helping with the confirmation battles over Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.  

For both confirmations, Scharf would have worked closely with Leo, who was the Trump administration’s “court whisperer.” 

Kavanaugh’s confirmation took place in the summer and fall of 2018. During this period, Scharf was a consultant for the Judicial Crisis Network, according to profiles when Scharf first announced his candidacy. (Scharf’s LinkedIn profile indicates he was a self-employed “consultant” and “portfolio manager” for an undisclosed “private foundation” at the time.) 

Scharf joined CRC Advisors in January 2020, around the same time that Leo announced he was stepping down as executive vice president of the Federalist Society to join the firm. 

In September 2020, Scharf joined the Justice Department, where he served as nominations counsel at the Office of Legal Policy, according to his LinkedIn. The same month, Trump nominated Barrett to fill the seat of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. 

Since Scharf left the Justice Department for private practice, he continued working alongside Leo as part of the membership committee for Teneo, a private network for conservatives that Leo chairs.  

Leo and others at CRC Advisors were early backers of Scharf’s campaign. Leo gave $2,650 to Scharf in December 2022, as did the CEO of CRC Advisors, Greg Mueller, and its president, Jonathan Bunch, who is also a trustee of Leo’s primary dark-money vehicle the Marble Freedom Trust.

The firm’s chief financial officer, Neil Corkery — who is listed as the keeper of records for multiple Leo-linked groups, including the Marble Freedom Trust, Rule of Law Trust, the 85 Fund, and the defunct BH Fund — chipped in $1,000 to Scharf’s campaign in February 2023. The same month, Corkery’s wife, Ann, who works for the 85 Fund, also contributed $1,000.

A handful of lower-ranking CRC Advisors employees also contributed to Scharf’s campaign since 2022. 

As observers of the race have pointed out, there is almost no daylight between Scharf and Bailey when it comes to campaign issues. But only one of them has Leo’s blessing and the cash that comes with it. 

The post Missouri’s Attorney General Isn’t MAGA Enough for Leonard Leo  appeared first on The Intercept.

Monday’s Supreme Court ruling granting far-reaching presidential immunity gives the lie to decades of right-wing propaganda about the real purpose of the long conservative campaign to take over the court.

Generations of conservative pseudointellectuals have argued that the mission of the Federalist Society, the powerful conservative legal group that has seeded the Supreme Court with its zombie-like members, was to bring the court back to its original mandate under the Constitution. The right-wing pundits who promoted the Federalist Society were always a little vague on what their version of “originalism” really entailed, which led to widespread suspicions that it just meant whatever was politically beneficial to conservatives.

The ruling on presidential immunity is just the latest piece of evidence that shows that originalism was just a confidence game by the right to gain power. The court’s conservative majority has revealed itself to be a corrupt political machine with both short- and long-term goals. Today, the court is determined to protect Donald Trump and the Republican Party; longer-term, its mandate is to protect and defend the powers of those who will enable white minority rule in America for years to come.

The court’s immunity ruling is nearly a blank check for Donald Trump.

The court’s immunity ruling is nearly a blank check for Trump, a brazen attempt to protect him from his ongoing criminal cases and to grant him virtually unlimited power if he gets back into the White House. With its ruling, the Supreme Court’s right-wing block has made it clear: They are tired of democracy. The justices want a dictator.

But they only want a right-wing dictator. It is not hard to imagine how differently the justices would have ruled if the question of presidential immunity had come before them in a case involving a Democratic president. 

The right-wing court is engaged in a radical revolution, and its objective is to rewrite modern American history. Through their rulings, the conservative justices are revealing what the American right has until recently tried to keep quiet, which is that the right doesn’t accept any of the major changes that have happened in American society since World War II. They have in their minds a fantasy version of 1940s America, even though almost none of them were alive at the time. What they yearn for is a nation before integration and civil rights, before women’s rights and reproductive rights, before gay rights, before the modern expansions of free speech and press freedom. Above all, they want a return to a less diverse America, a nation in which white male power was unquestioned. They want it so badly that they are willing to abandon democracy to get it. 

The radicalized court, with the Federalist Society’s approval, are in the process of demolishing the landmark Supreme Court rulings of the post-World War II era.

In order to get confirmed, Trump’s appointees to the court lied to the Senate by claiming that they saw Roe v. Wade as settled law; they ripped it up as soon as they consolidated their power on the court. In quick succession, they have gone after voting rights, affirmative action, gun control, environmental regulations, while sending out the word that now is a good time for conservative lawyers to bring their most extreme lawsuits to the court in order to create more right-wing precedents. This court could ban access to contraceptives next; another target could be a reversal on the legalization of gay marriage. The court is now so radical that it would not be surprising to see it go after Brown versus Board of Education, the historic Supreme Court ruling that declared that separate but equal schools were unconstitutional and which helped formed the basis for integration.

This court will be remembered like the justices behind the Dredd Scott decision, the worst ruling by the Supreme Court in American history. Their robes don’t hide their naked grab for political power.      

The post The Supreme Court Wants a Dictator appeared first on The Intercept.