intercept

EG’S

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4 26 INTERCEPT

DHS Launches Massive “Less Lethal” Chemical Weapons Buying Spree Sam Biddle

Federal agents’ indiscriminate use of tear gases and “less-lethal” projectiles has become a mainstay of protest crackdowns.

https://theintercept.com/2026/04/03/less-lethal-chemical-weapons-tear-gas-protests/)

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Fired After the Charlie Kirk Revenge Purge, They’re Still Unemployed

Jessica Washington

A year after his killing, people who lost their jobs for criticizing Charlie Kirk are still suffering under the erosion of free speech.

Read More →

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7 26 intercept

Rubio’s Paranoid Cuba Report Designed to “Justify a Military Attack on Cuba,” Says Democratic Rep.

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PRAIRIELAND 100 YRS TODD CHEER ; TERR ENHANCE AND MAT’L SUPPORT? ---- NOT USED IN JAN 6

DOX TRESPASS CAN BE USED

30 YRS CONSPIR FOR MOVING BOX OF ZINES, NOT AT NOISE PROTEST

ANTIFA TERROR

Prairieland Nine: Texas ICE Protesters Get Up to 100 Years in Prison as Trump Targets Anti-Fascists

Jun 25, 2026 Latest Shows

:{A group of anti-ICE protesters in Texas were sentenced to 30 to 100 years in jail on Tuesday, after federal prosecutors accused them of being an "antifa terror cell." The activists attended a protest outside the Prairieland ICE jail in Alvarado, Texas, on July 4 of last year, during which fireworks were set off and a police officer was shot and wounded. All nine defendants were found guilty after being tried before a federal judge in Texas.

Matt Sledge, political reporter for The Intercept, warns that "we just have to watch for this playbook to be applied elsewhere." "Now anyone engaged in basic protests with the wrong political beliefs can be labeled a domestic terrorist, when they have no intention of violence, not engaged in any violence, not interested in any violence," says Sufia Khalid, deputy director of the National Security Criminal Defense Center, who represents one of the Prairieland defendants.}:}:

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intercept gmail 2 12 26

Uptick in Abductions”: ICE Ramps Up Targeting of Minneapolis Legal Observers

Ryan Devereaux

In one 30-minute stretch, three legal observers were arrested — as Trump’s border czar Tom Homan calls on locals to “end the resistance.”

texas “Antifa Cell” Terror Trial Takes On Tough Questions About Guns at Protests Against ICE

Matt Sledge

After a cop got shot, Prairieland ICE protesters face terrorism charges. Will Alex Pretti’s killing sway the jury?

Google Fulfilled ICE Subpoena Demanding Student Journalist’s Bank and Credit Card Numbers

Jessica Washington

Amandla Thomas-Johnson didn’t know how much information ICE requested in a subpoena until months later. Google never gave him a chance to fight it.

Pam Bondi Is Pushing Death Sentences for People Spared by Her Predecessor

Liliana Segura

Trump’s AG is ramping up death penalty prosecutions, targeting defendants previously told they wouldn’t face execution.

By Slashing Foreign Aid, Trump Is Fueling the Spread of HIV in Uganda

Steven W. Thrasher, Afeef Nessouli

Reporting from Uganda, The Intercept saw how Trump’s effort to slash foreign aid is encouraging the transmission of HIV.

NY Democratic House Candidate Works for Palantir Partners Pushing AI Border Surveillance](https://join.theintercept.com/go/83981?t=25&utm_source=The+Intercept+Newsletter&utm_medium=email&akid=11984%2E2483502%2EKkmb4v)

Akela Lacy

A former Biden national security adviser hoping to unseat Mike Lawler consults for two defense tech firms that work with Palantir.

Read More → (https://join.theintercept.com/go/83981?t=26&utm_source=The+Intercept+Newsletter&utm_medium=email&akid=11984%2E2483502%2EKkmb4v)

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12 25

AL JA

Turtle Island Liberation Front quartet charged for California NYE bomb plot

*Pro-Palestine, antigovernment, anti-colonial group accused of targeting immigration agents and companies in ‘massive and horrific terror plot’.

First Assistant United States Attorney Bill Essayli, right, speaks at a news conference announcing the arrests [Damian Dovarganes/AP]

By News Agencies

Published On 16 Dec 202516 Dec 2025

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Federal authorities in the United States have arrested four members of an antigoverment left-wing group over an alleged bomb plot targeting immigration agents and companies, among others, in California, officials have said.

Announcing the arrests on Monday, US Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation had disrupted “a massive and horrific terror plot” being prepared by the Turtle Island Liberation Front.

“Bring Cases, Get Paid”

Since the September 11 attacks, the FBI has relied on informants to identify and build terrorism cases. The structure has created perverse incentives for potential informants. Their cooperation can get them out of criminal cases of their own and lead to handsome monetary compensation. The FBI’s call is simple: Bring cases, get paid.

Rick Smith, a security consultant and former FBI agent, said confidential sources are essential to investigative police work, but cautioned that they come with inherent baggage.

[

FBI Counterterrorism Informant Spent a Decade Committing Fraud](https://theintercept.com/2020/12/29/fbi-counterterrorism-informant-wire-fraud-scam/)

“They’re sources, they’re not ordinary citizens,” Smith said. “They have either been compromised in some way, or they’re going to be paid. Either way, they’ve got some sort of skin in the game. They’re getting something out of it.”

In the years after 2001 attacks, the FBI created a market for cases involving left-wing activists and Muslims. After the January 6 Capitol riot, the bureau made clear to informants that right-wing extremismwas a priority. Now, under the second Trump administration, the federal government’s focus is again turning to perceived left-wing extremism.

In September, days after the terror designation of antifa, Trump outlined his administration’s war on the left in a memo titled National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7, which called for the National Joint Terrorism Task Force to coordinate with local offices to investigate alleged federal crimes by political radicals. The head of the federal prosecutor’s office in Los Angeles said on Monday that the Turtle Island Liberation Front arrests stemmed from Trump’s executive order.

Post-9/11 Stings Targeted People Who Posed No Threat. They Remain in Prison.](https://theintercept.com/2021/08/29/duka-fort-dix-five-post-911-terror-stings/)

Key questions in the Turtle Island Liberation Front case, however, remain unanswered. It is still unclear how the FBI first identified the group or how long the informant had been embedded before the bomb plot emerged — a period defense attorneys say is central to any serious examination of entrapment, whereby defendants are coerced into crimes they would not otherwise commit, a frequent criticism of stings involving paid informants and undercover agents.

“The question that immediately popped into my mind was that: There’s a reference to a confidential human source, but there’s no indication of how that source came to be,” said Brad Crowder, an activist and union organizer who was convicted in a case of alleged violent protest plans that involved a confidential informant. “It’s not totally out of the realm of possibilities that this idea was planted or floated by whoever this confidential human source might be.”

Turtle Island Case

Despite comments from Attorney General Pam Bondi, Patel, and others characterizing the Turtle Island Liberation Front as a coherent group and a Signal chat called “Black Lotus” as an ultra-radical subset, there’s little evidence that any group by that name exists beyond a small digital footprint and a handful of attempts at organizing community events, including a self-defense workshop and a punk rock benefit show planned for February.

The Instagram page for the Turtle Island Liberation Front cited in the complaint had just over 1,000 followers as of Tuesday morning — after it was widely publicized — and its first post came in late July. The YouTube channel bearing the group’s name, which had just 18 subscribers as of Tuesday morning, was registered on July 17 and contains a single video posted on September 16.

Online, the group styled itself as radical and righteous. Its activists spoke in the language of solidarity with Palestinians and Indigenous people, railing against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and American power. On Instagram, they posted slogans and absolutes:

“Become a revolutionary.”

“America has always been the brutal evil monster that some of you don’t want to face.”

“Resistance is the deepest form of love.”

The informant did not, however, meet with the group on November 26 for its slogans.

According to the affidavit, the informant met up with Audrey Illeene Carroll, who went by the nickname Asiginaak. At the meeting, Carroll handed over eight pages covered with handwriting in blue ink. The document was titled “Operation Midnight Sun,” and laid out a plan to detonate backpack bombs at five separate locations on New Year’s Eve, when fireworks would mask the sound of explosions. The plan was unfinished. Beneath the list of targets were blank lines, marked: “add more if enough comrades.” (Carroll’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Over the following weeks, the plot advanced, according to court filings. A Signal group was created for, in the participants’ words, “everything radical,” including the bomb plan itself. On December 7, the supposed bomb plot expanded to include an undercover FBI agent. At that meeting, Carroll distributed pages describing how to build the bombs. She said she already had 13 PVC pipes cut to size and had ordered two five-pound bags of potassium nitrate from Amazon, believing naively that a burner account she set up was keeping her anonymous. Delivery was scheduled for December 11.

The FBI allowed the plan to progress, with both an informant and an undercover agent actively participating.

The FBI had visibility into nearly every part of the supply chain: chemicals ordered online and pistol primers purchased at a retail store. Agents could have intervened at any stage. They didn’t. Instead, the bureau allowed the plan to continue, with both an informant and an undercover agent actively participating in the conspiracy.

On December 12, the group drove into the desert with an aim of testing the bombs. They took two vehicles: the informant in one, the undercover agent in the other. Riding with the undercover agent was Zachary Aaron Page, who went by the nickname AK. He suggested using cigarettes as a delayed fuse. In the other car, Carroll told another member that the desert exercise was a dry run for the New Year’s Eve attack.

“What we’re doing will be considered a terrorist act,” she said, according to the affidavit.

At the site, they pitched tents and set up tables. They laid out PVC pipes, charcoal, sulfur, gasoline, string, cloth, and protective gear. As they began assembling the devices, the FBI moved in. Overhead, an FBI surveillance plane recorded the scene as agents took into custody four alleged members of the Turtle Island Liberation Front including Carroll and Page, along with Tina Lai and Dante Gaffield. (An attorney for Page declined to comment, and lawyers for Gaffield and Lai did not immediately respond.)

[

Read our complete coverage

Chilling Dissent](https://theintercept.com/collections/chilling-dissent/)

“Nonpartisan Incentive Structure”

Terrorism prosecutions built around confidential informants have long drawn criticism, particularly over the risk of entrapment.

For more than a decade, legal scholars have argued that while these cases often resemble classic government inducement, they rarely meet the legal standard for entrapment. Courts define predisposition so broadly that ideological sympathy or recorded rhetoric is treated as evidence of a preexisting willingness to commit violence — a framework that effectively shields government-manufactured plots from meaningful judicial scrutiny.

That concern surfaced starkly in a previous sting operation involving the so-called Newburgh Four, in which an aggressive and prolific FBI informant steered four poor Black men into a scheme to bomb synagogues and attack an Air Force base. Years later, a federal judge granted the men compassionate release, describing the case as an “FBI-orchestrated conspiracy.”

Because informants can be so instrumental in building cases, their use can be leveraged by authorities to focus resources on investigations with more political overtones.

Related}:

The Informant at the Heart of the Gretchen Whitmer Kidnapping Plot Was a Liability. So Federal Agents Shut Him Up.](https://theintercept.com/2024/03/06/gretchen-whitmer-kidnapping-informant/)

At times, the right has criticized the political nature of some cases. Among them was the case in which the FBI encouraged a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer — a sting that the FBI’s Patel and Bongino harshly criticized back when they spent their days attached to the microphones of right-wing podcasts.

“There is a nonpartisan incentive structure that has become overly reliant on these kinds of confidential human sources,” said Crowder.

Crowder knows better than most. In 2008, he and fellow activist David McKay were arrested and charged with plotting to use Molotov cocktails at the Republican National Convention in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Despite deciding not to follow through with the plan, both ultimately pleaded guilty, with Crowder sentenced to two years in prison and McKay to four.

Part of the playbook, Crowder said, is for an informant to exploit their targets’ “righteous anger.”

The case against Crowder and McKay case hinged on the work of an FBI informant, Brandon Darby, who had been a prominent activist in anarchist circles in Texas and Louisiana. Crowder and McKay looked up to Darby, viewing him as a mentor and someone they hoped to impress or convince of their radical bona fides. In interviews over the years, they’ve alleged that Darby — who now works at Breitbart — was instrumental to their decision to cross the line from protest to discussing something more violent.

Part of the playbook, Crowder said, is for an informant to exploit their targets’ “righteous anger” — in the case of the Turtle Bay Liberation Front, rights violations in Palestine and ICE actions in Los Angeles. From there, authorities take advantage of the allege plotters’ political immaturity, walking hand in hand with them as they cross the line from legal dissent into illegal conspiracy.

[

The FBI Paid a Violent Felon to Infiltrate Denver’s Racial Justice Movement](https://theintercept.com/2023/02/07/fbi-denver-racial-justice-protests-informant/)

The informant gets paid, the FBI gets a good headline that justifies their anti-terrorism budget, and the defendants are left to face the consequences, often without ever posing a real threat to public safety, Crowder said.

“On both sides you have a sort of momentum that develops,” Crowder said. “This ICE repression is crazy, and that feeds into a sort of hopelessness that drives a sort of nihilistic response that you see from people who have immature politics. And then that heartfelt but immature and irresponsible response plays into the incentive structure of the FBI.”

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EG 11 25

MAHA Slams “Corporate Capture” While Trump Strips Regulations

9 22 email

For nearly two years, The Intercept has been fighting an expensive legal battle to obtain 60,000 pages of public documents about pipeline giant Energy Transfer and TigerSwan, the private security firm that surveilled Indigenous-led activists who were brutally attacked protesting against the Dakota Access pipeline in 2017.

The law is on our side. We’ve won key rulings at the North Dakota Supreme Court. These documents should already be public.

But Energy Transfer continues to oppose the release of all the documents, and it’s hired one of the most famously combative law firms in the country: Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP.

The firm’s founder, Marc Kasowitz, has been described as the “toughest lawyer on Wall Street,” an “uberlitigator,” and “the Donald Trump of lawyering.”

In fact, according to public reports, Kasowitz and his firm represented Trump himself for over 15 years in countless legal fights from Atlantic City to the White House. Kasowitz has also represented the tobacco industry and corporate raider Carl Icahn. He even represented Bill O’Reilly after he was fired by Fox News for sexual harassment.

Now, with the nearly unlimited resources of an oil company behind it, Kasowitz Benson Torres is fighting our pipeline lawsuit tooth and nail.We won’t stop fighting for the truth, but we have to be prepared for whatever they throw at us — and as a nonprofit news outlet, we rely on reader donations as a key source of funding for our reporters and legal team

intercept 7 24

One Facebook Ad Promotes a For-Profit College; Another a State School. Which Ad Do Black Users See? Sam Biddle](https://theintercept.com/2024/06/04/facebook-ads-algorithm-for-profit-colleges/)

aha cf moral aspects of debt in graeber ilan ziv caplism

prison is state of exception

random intercept grab 921

FEDERAL PRISONS’ SWITCH TO SCANNING MAIL IS A SURVEILLANCE NIGHTMARE

Lauren Gill

One Bill in Texas Legislature Would Ease Extreme Heat in Texas Prisons. Another Makes It Worse.

Alleen Brown

Hurricane Ida Prison Evacuations in Louisiana Left People Without Medication in Bird-Infested Shelter

Alleen Brown

Conservatives Only Care About the Incarcerated When It Comes to the Capitol Rioters

Akela Lacy

an no twt lnx

Corporate media accused of 'cheerleading' US escalation in Ukraine

Jake Johnson and Common Dreams March 20, 2022

In the run-up to and during the Bush administration's catastrophic invasion of Iraq, corporate media outlets were accused of acting as stenographers for the White House, amplifying official justifications for the attack—which were lies—while stifling dissenting voices.

Today, having apparently learned no lessons—or the wrong ones—from Iraq, reporters for corporate newspapers and cable TV programs are yet again facing criticism for their coverage of a war, this time one in which the White House has vowed not to involve U.S. troops.

During briefings held at the White House over the past week as Russia ramped up its assault on Ukraine, correspondents have incessantly pushed Press Secretary Jen Psaki on President Joe Biden's refusal to escalate U.S. involvement in the war even further, questioning the administration's refusal to impose a no-fly zone and send MiG-29 fighter jets to Ukraine.

By contrast, very few questions have centered on the diplomatic talks between Russia and Ukraine and what the U.S. is doing to facilitate the ongoing negotiations.

"Even with this additional aid that you're providing today, it seems there are still other options on the table," ABC News correspondent Mary Bruce said during a press briefing Wednesday after President Joe Biden authorized another $800 million worth of weaponry for Ukraine, including drones and anti-aircraft systems.

"So why hold back?" Bruce asked. "Why not use every tool at your disposal now to spare additional lives?"

When Psaki outlined the slew of measures the U.S. has taken in concert with Western allies to cripple Russia's economy and bolster Ukraine's defenses—and noted there are additional steps the administration could take in the future—Bruce was not assuaged.

"But what are you waiting for?" she asked.

That line of questioning—highlighted by The Intercept in one of two video compilations of recent press briefings—encapsulated the approach much of the White House press corps has taken during the first three weeks of Russia's deadly assault on Ukraine.

In one exchange on Monday, a reporter suggested to Psaki that by refusing to send American troops into Ukraine and impose a no-fly zone—which experts agree would likely spark a full-blown war between the U.S. and Russia—the Biden administration is effectively "pushing these guys [Ukrainian soldiers] to commit suicide."

"Can you imagine if the press covered climate change like this?" The Intercept's Ryan Grim asked during a HillTV segment on Thursday. "Or the expiration of the child tax credit? Or the Saudi and UAE war on Yemen that has led to hundreds of thousands of deaths? Or the seizure of Afghanistan's central bank reserves?"

In his HillTV segment, Grim pointed to a striking back-and-forth in which Gray Television's White House correspondent Jon Decker pressed Psaki on why the Biden administration is not providing "more offensive weapons" to the Ukrainian military."If a Ukrainian military officer or someone who is enlisted has one of these weapons," said Decker, "they can take out a Russian military official of some sort with these weapons."

The White House press corps is hardly alone in its hawkish coverage of Russia's assault, which has killed at least 816 civilians and sparked a massive humanitarian crisis.

As Gideon Taaffe and Chloe Simon of Media Matters noted last week, "Both right-wing and mainstream cable news have featured commentary from hosts and guests pushing the idea of a NATO-imposed 'no-fly zone' over Ukraine, sometimes without providing important context about the possibility of escalation into a hot war with Russia."

"On March 4, Fox News contributor and retired Gen. Keith Kellogg pushed for a no-fly zone during an appearance on Fox News' America Reports, claiming that 'no plans are perfect, but there is a way to do and we should at least explore it,'" Taaffe and Simon observed. "On the March 6 edition of Meet the Press, NBC anchor Chuck Todd pressed Secretary of State Anthony Blinken on his hesitancy to execute a no-fly zone, saying, 'Why rule out the no-fly zone? Why not make Putin think it's possible?'"

"This eagerness to get into a war with Russia," the pair wrote, "seems to ignore the potentially devastating consequences of the U.S. initiating that escalation, which could include nuclear fallout."

In a Twitter post earlier this week, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo expressed a similar sentiment.

"Hopefully this will remain a matter of academic and media studies interest only," he wrote. "But it is worth considering why much of cable news has become nonstop cheerleading for the U.S. to declare war on Russia, often via a 'no-fly zone.'"

https://theintercept.com/2020/09/29/epa-white-house-pfas-pfoa-pfos/

the CHEMICALS ARE linked to cancer, reproductive and developmental harm, liver problems, and immune dysfunction. They stay in the body for years — and persist in the environment indefinitely. And they’ve contaminated thousands of sites around the country, including hundreds where the military used firefighting foam laced with the chemicals. Yet somehow the industrial compounds PFOS and PFOA —part of a family of chemicals called PFAS — are not hazardous, according to the Trump administration.

Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency promised to designate the two chemicals as hazardous substances more than two years ago. And staff completed its work on the policy change in September of last year, according to agency insiders. But the proposed change to the law, which would help hold polluters liable for billions of dollars of costs of cleaning up the toxic chemicals, has stalled at the White House.

At a summit on the PFAS chemicals held on May 22,2018, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt that the agency would designate PFOS and PFOA as “hazardous substances.” While seemingly a mere technical tweak, the change in the official categorization of the chemicals, which were used for nonstick coatings and in firefighting foam and have contaminated industrial areas and military sites, would help “to get accountability,” as Pruitt noted at the time.

“This administration hasn’t taken a single action to reduce the ongoing emissions of PFAS, to clean up legacy PFAS pollution or any take any meaningful action to require water utilities to take PFAS out of the drinking water,” said Scott Faber, senior vice president for government affairs at the Environmental Working Group. “The PFAS Action Plan was just a plan to plan.”Pruitt also said that the EPA would develop toxicity values for two other PFAS chemicals, GenX and PFBS, which were introduced as sustainable substitutes for PFOA and PFOS, respectively, but have since also been found to have contaminated water around the country and present many of the same healthdangers as the chemicals they replaced. The development of the GenX and PFBS values, a critical step toward regulating the chemicals, was already underway and “should be done by December of this year,” Pruitt said back in 2018.

While Pruitt resigned amid a swirl of ethical scandals three months after speaking at the summit, both commitments made it into the PFAS Action Plan, which the agency issued in February 2019 under the leadership of Pruitt’s successor, Andrew Wheeler. At the time of the plan’s release, the agency said that “EPA has already begun the regulatory development process for listing PFOA and PFOS as hazardous substances.” Wheeler described the 72-page document as “the most comprehensive cross-agency plan it has ever undertaken to address a chemical,” according to a CNNreport, which explained that action items were “expected to take months to implement."

yet almost two years later, the Trump administration has not finalized the hazardous substances designation for PFOA and PFOS, released the toxicity standards for the two chemicals, or taken several other steps promised in what it continues to tout as an aggressive plan to address PFAS pollution.

Asked about the delayed action on PFAS, a spokesperson for the EPA referred me to statements EPA administrator Wheeler made in a speech he delivered at the American Enterprise Institute last week. “The PFAS family of chemicals have been around since at least the 1950s and no administration ever took them on,” Wheeler said to the audience at the right-wing think tank. “In 2019 EPA took the historic step of creating a PFAS Action Plan that uses all our program offices to deal with this emerging chemical of concern.”

While several policy promises remain unfulfilled, some of the work necessary to make those changes was completed long ago, according former EPA staff members.

Jim Woolford, who was director of the EPA’s superfund program from 2006 until retiring in April, said that he and his colleagues began work on the rule that would have designated PFOS and PFOA as hazardous substances in the late spring of 2019. “I can’t tell you how many hours my staff put into that,” said Woolford, who described several months of late nights during which his team pulled together scientific research that provided the justification for the hazard designation and coordinated with other offices within the EPA. After several rounds of edits, his team handed in their final draft of the proposed regulation in September 2019.

“Then it just sat there,” said Woolford.

Aggressive Delays

While the Trump EPA has openly expressed its derision for climate protections, the agency has fashioned itself as aggressively leading the fight for PFAS-polluted communities across the country. Yet even as the Trump administration is racing to finish some of its work in other areas, it is slow-walking promised changes to clean up PFAS contamination, according to environmental advocates.

The designation of PFAS as hazardous substances is a central focus of their criticism because it would be hugely consequential for polluted communities that have been unable to get polluters to pay to clean up the chemicals left behind from firefighting foam and industrial processes. If a chemical is deemed hazardous, its discovery automatically triggers an investigation and possible cleanup. Despite the fact that PFAS have been shown to persist indefinitely in nature and to cause multiple diseases, including cancer, PFAS still lack the designation, which gives agencies discretion over whether or not to clean them up. Critically, the hazardous substance designation would permit polluted communities to sue for cleanup costs.

In Oscoda, Michigan, near the Wurtsmith Air Force Base, PFOS-laden foam floats on lakes, and the fish are too contaminated to eat. Yet the Air Force has argued that, because the chemical isn’t officially a hazardous substance, “the federal government is immune” from a state law that would have required them to clean up the highly polluted base to the state’s legal standard.

“DOD will just not comply with it,” said Anthony Spaniola, an attorney and activist with Need Our Water in Oscoda. While Spaniola waits for the EPA to make good on its pledge to designate PFOA and PFOS as hazardous, he has been trying to devise other strategies to compel the military to clean up the pollution. “But even when the Air Force treats you like dirt, suing them is really difficult,” he said. “And every time we think we find a new legal avenue, it always leads back to the hazardous substances designation. We just can’t get past it.”...

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/jared-kushner-gets-the-scorched-earth-treatment-on-msnbc-as-the-man-whos-failed-at-everything/

no lnx

Jared Kushner gets the scorched earth treatment on MSNBC as the ‘man who’s failed at everything’

Written by Matthew Chapman / Raw Story April 4, 2020

On MSNBC Saturday, Intercept reporter Mehdi Hasan slammed President Donald Trump for mismanaging the coronavirus pandemic — and particularly for putting his son-in-law Jared Kushner at the forefront of the effort.

“I think it’s very unified leadership. They’re all unified in their ignorance and their denialism and their callousness,” said Hasan, speaking with host Ali Velshi. “They all have the same approach, which is just to play it down, which is to pretend things are getting better, which is to turn this into a partisan political crisis where states like Florida that voted for Donald Trump get resources and states that didn’t vote for him like New York or Colorado or Maine don’t get the same level of resources.”

“What we’re seeing right now, real time, is a kakistocracy,” continued Hasan. “Government by the worst people. Kakistocrats. Led from the top by Donald J. Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner. On what planet is Jared Kushner put in charge of the White House’s response to the coronavirus? This is a man who’s failed at everything he’s touched … he’s failed to run a New York newspaper, he’s failed in the property business his criminal father gifted to him, failed at trying to bring peace to the Middle East. And now failing at trying to handle this major public health crisis which he’s not qualified to handle.”

“You mentioned the quote from him and Donald Trump saying, these are our ventilators, this is the federal government’s stockpile, this is for ourselves,” added Hasan. “Who are the ours? Who are the ourselves? If the federal government doesn’t stand up for the 50 states of the United States, who does it stand up for? It’s bizarre, the level of incompetence, the indifference — it’s completely crazy!”

Watch below:

“What we’re seeing right now in real time is a kakistocracy. Government by the worst people! Kakistocrats…on what planet is Jared Kushner put in charge of the White House response to the coronavirus? This is a man who has failed at everything he’s touched” – me on @MSNBC today: pic.twitter.com/V1FniQ0uaQ

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) April 4, 202

https://theintercept.com/2019/12/28/the-intercept-2019-environment/

https://theintercept.com/2019/07/20/plastics-industry-plastic-recycling/

https://theintercept.com/2019/10/18/coca-cola-recycling-plastics-pollution/

part of https://theintercept.com/collections/bad-chemistry/ series

https://theintercept.com/2019/09/22/puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-disaster-relief/

https://theintercept.com/2019/10/03/climate-change-migration-militarization-arizona/

https://theintercept.com/2019/02/08/us-mexico-border-journalists-harassment/

extensive border coverage

THE SHAPE OF the Trump administration’s approach to policing immigration is at this point familiar. Since January 2017, federal agents and officers have been under orders to enforce a harsh interpretation of immigration laws without restraint. The result has most infamously manifested in the forced separation of immigrant parents from their children and, more recently, a series of horrific reports detailing conditions in border-area detention centers.

Though undocumented people have always been the core target of this campaign, the blast radius of the government’s hyper-politicized crackdown has steadily expanded over the years. A new report published by Amnesty International on Tuesday details a two-yearlong attack on human rights defenders, attorneys, and journalists working along the U.S.-Mexico border, calling out a pattern of escalating enforcement in violation of domestic and international law.

:{:{Read Our Complete Coverage:(style="box-sizing:border-box;font-weight:normal;display:block;letter-spacing:0px;margin-bottom:5px;text-transform:capitalize"):}::{The War on Immigrants:(style="box-sizing:border-box;display:block"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;width:420px;float:left;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0px;max-width:420px"):}:

The U.S. “government has executed an unlawful and politically motivated campaign of intimidation, threats, harassment, and criminal investigations against people who defend the human rights of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers,” the report said, adding that both the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice “have increasingly misused and leveraged the criminal justice system to deter and punish those individuals for challenging — or even simply documenting — the systematic human rights violations by US authorities against migrants and asylum seekers.”

Brian Griffey, a lead researcher on the report, wrote to The Intercept: “These attacks on human rights defenders are an integral part of the Trump administration’s broader campaign of human rights violations against people seeking asylum on the U.S.-Mexico border.”

“The Trump administration’s contempt for lawyers, journalists, and good Samaritans shows its greater contempt for the rule of law and the judiciary, as it continues to apply human rights-violating policies broadly and as quickly as it can, to do maximum damage to vulnerable communities,” before courts are able to rein them in and restore order, he added.

Based on nearly two dozen interviews, the report drew on dozens of cases in Texas, Arizona, and California from 2018 to 2019, in which immigration advocates, attorneys, and journalists were targeted by law enforcement with actions ranging from surveillance and prolonged detention to the charging of serious felonies. The human rights organization argued that by unlawfully choking off asylum access at ports of entry and dumping asylum seekers who have made it to U.S. soil back into dangerous Mexican border towns, U.S. officials and their Mexican counterparts first manufactured a crisis, then criminalized the civilian response to it.

“By discriminatorily targeting human rights defenders — most of them US citizens — based solely on their political or other opinions, speech and activities, the Trump administration has violated international law, the US Constitution, US laws, and corresponding DHS policies that acknowledge those legally binding civil liberties protections,” the report said.

Amnesty specifically pointed to violations of “freedom of expression; right to privacy; equality under the law; and freedom from discrimination, including on the basis of political or other opinion” by U.S. law enforcement under international law. In the domestic context, the organization said the administration’s crackdown violated “constitutional guarantees of freedom of speech under the First Amendment; and equal protection under the law, without discrimination, under the Fourteenth Amendment.”

Two episodes documented by Amnesty, and previously exposed by The Intercept, have emerged as the clearest examples of law enforcement targeting people whose work does not align with the Trump administration’s border and immigration agenda: an expansive, binational, multi-agency, intelligence-gathering operation focused on migrant caravan-related advocacy and journalism in the Tijuana-San Diego area, and the criminal prosecution of nine human aid volunteers working with migrants crossing the Arizona desert. In both cases, Amnesty found that law enforcement leaned heavily on a portion of the U.S. criminal code — known as 1324 — to justify its targeting of advocates in the borderlands. Noting that “a federal appellate court struck down the human smuggling crime being applied by DHS to justify its politically motivated surveillance,” Griffey, the Amnesty researcher, said the “laws being applied by US authorities are vague and inconsistent with international standards.”

The best known Trump administration smuggling prosecution is the case of Scott Warren, an Arizona-based humanitarian aid volunteer who was arrested in January 2018and accused of providing two undocumented men with food, water, and a place to sleep over two days. Charged with two counts of harboring and one count of conspiracy, Warren faced up to 20 years in prison. In June, a federal judge declared a mistrial in Warren’s case.

Describing his arrest as a “retaliatory attack” — Warren was arrested hours after a group he volunteers with published a report implicating the Border Patrol in the destruction of thousands of gallons of water left for migrants in the desert — Amnesty spearheaded an international campaign calling for the charges against Warren to be dropped.

“If Dr. Warren were convicted and imprisoned on these absurd charges, Amnesty International would recognize him as a prisoner of conscience — detained for his volunteer activities motivated by humanitarian principles and his religious beliefs — and would continue to campaign for his immediate and unconditional release, and for his criminal record to be expunged,” the report noted.

Warren and his attorneys, along with the government’s prosecutors, were back in court Tuesday, just as the Amnesty report was made public.

Two DHS officials who spoke to Amnesty on the condition of anonymity questioned the propriety of using smuggling statutes against individuals involved in humanitarian aid or asylum advocacy. In May, The Intercept reported on the case of Ana Adlerstein, who was detained by Customs and Border Protection officials and threatened with smuggling charges after she accompanied an asylum seeker to an Arizona port of entry. “That’s not the purpose of 1324, and no US Attorney would prosecute that,” a CBP investigator told Amnesty. “The purpose of that is if 10 people sneak across the border, and there’s someone waiting on the other side with a car.”

https://theintercept.com/2019/06/12/darkmatter-uae-hack-intercept/

619

This week, The Intercept and The Intercept Brasil published a series of articles that sent shockwaves through Brazil and the world. We revealed grossly unethical conduct by the prosecutors and judge behind the criminal conviction of Brazil’s former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

These immensely powerful figures who spent years insisting that they were apolitical anti-corruption crusaders had, in fact, secretly worked together to undermine Lula’s right to a fair trial and convict him so he could not run in last year’s presidential election. Their actions helped lay the path for Jair Bolsonaro, an extreme right-wing authoritarian, to become president. The judge went on to become Bolsonaro’s justice minister.

Until The Intercept reported on this massive archive of leaked materials — private chats, audio recordings, videos, and other documentation provided by an anonymous source — this politicized abuse of prosecutorial and judicial power could not be proven. Now, Bolsonaro’s most popular minister is on the ropes, and influential voices are calling for him to be fired.

https://theintercept.com/2019/06/09/brazil-archive-operation-car-wash

INTERCEPT BRASIL today published three explosive exposésshowing highly controversial, politicized, and legally dubious internal discussions and secret actions by the Operation Car Wash anti-corruption task force of prosecutors, led by the chief prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol, along with then-Judge Sergio Moro, now the powerful and internationally celebrated justice minister for Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

These stories are based on a massive archive of previously undisclosed materials — including private chats, audio recordings, videos, photos, court proceedings, and other documentation — provided to us by an anonymous source. They reveal serious wrongdoing, unethical behavior, and systematic deceit about which the public, both in Brazil and internationally, has the right to know.

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These three articles were published today in The Intercept Brasil in Portuguese, and we have synthesized them into two English-language articles for The Intercept. Given the size and global influence of Brazil under the new Bolsonaro government, these stories are of great significance to an international audience.

This is merely the beginning of what we intend to be an ongoing journalistic investigation, using this massive archive of material, into the Car Wash corruption probe; Moro’s actions when he was a judge and those of the prosecutor Dallagnol; and the conduct of numerous individuals who continue to wield great political and economic power both inside Brazil and in other countries.

Beyond the inherent political, economic, and environmental importance of Brazil under Bolsonaro, the significance of these revelations arises from the incomparably consequential actions of the yearslong Car Wash corruption probe. That sweeping scandal implicated numerous leading political figures, oligarchs, Bolsonaro’s predecessor as president, and even foreign leaders in corruption prosecutions.

Most importantly, Car Wash was the investigative saga that led to the imprisonment of former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva last year. Lula’s conviction by Moro, once it was quickly affirmed by an appellate court, rendered him ineligible to run for president at a time when all polls showed that Lula — who was twice elected president by large margins in 2002 and in 2006 before being term-limited out of office in 2010 with an 87 percent approval rating — was the frontrunner in the 2018 presidential race. Lula’s exclusion from the election, based on Moro’s finding of guilt, was a key episode that paved the way for Bolsonaro’s election victory.

Perhaps most remarkably, after Bolsonaro won the presidency, he created a new position of unprecedented authority, referred to by Brazilians as “super justice minister,” to oversee an agency with consolidated powers over law enforcement, surveillance, and investigation previously interspersed among multiple ministries. Bolsonaro created that position for the benefit of the very judge who found Lula guilty, Sergio Moro, and it is the position Moro now occupies. In other words, Moro now wields immense police and surveillance powers in Brazil — courtesy of a president who was elected only after Moro, while he was a judge, rendered Bolsonaro’s key adversary ineligible to run against him.

The Car Wash prosecutors and Moro have been highly controversial in Brazil and internationally — heralded by many as anti-corruption heroes and accused by others of being clandestine right-wing ideologues masquerading as apolitical law enforcers. Their critics have insisted that they have abused and exploited their law enforcement powers with the politicized goal of preventing Lula from returning to the presidency and destroying his leftist Workers’ Party, or the PT. Moro and the prosecutors have, with equal vehemence, denied that they have any political allegiances or objectives and have said they are simply trying to cleanse Brazil of corruption.

But, until now, the Car Wash prosecutors and Moro have carried out their work largely in secret, preventing the public from evaluating the validity of the accusations against them and the truth of their denials. That’s what makes this new archive so journalistically valuable: For the first time, the public will learn what these judges and prosecutors were saying and doing when they thought nobody was listening.

Today’s articles show, among other things, that the Car Wash prosecutors spoke openly of their desire to prevent the PT from winning the election and took steps to carry out that agenda, and that Moro secretly and unethically collaborated with the Car Wash prosecutors to help design the case against Lula despite serious internal doubts about the evidence supporting the accusations, only for him to then pretend to be its neutral adjudicator.

...

https://www.alternet.org/most-important-surveillance-story-you-will-see-years-report-reveals-how-att-buildings-serve-secret

jake johnson

"The most important surveillance story you will see for years just went online, revealing how AT&T became the internet's biggest enemy, secretly collaborating against its customers and partners to destroy your privacy."

That was how whistleblower and privacy advocate Edward Snowden reacted to the publication of an explosive story by The Intercept on Monday, which reveals for the first time how "fortress-like" AT&T buildings located in eight major American cities have played a central role in a massive National Security Agency (NSA) spying program "that has for years monitored billions of emails, phone calls, and online chats passing across U.S. territory."

"It's eye-opening and ominous the extent to which this is happening right here on American soil," Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, told The Intercept in an interview. "It puts a face on surveillance that we could never think of before in terms of actual buildings and actual facilities in our own cities, in our own backyards.. The Intercept's detailed report—based on a large body of evidence that includes public records, classified NSA documents, and interviews with former AT&T employees—shows how the telecom giant has willingly helped the NSA collect the data of its own customers and those of other companies, thanks to its "unique relationships with other phone and internet providers."

According to Intercept reporters Ryan Gallagher and Henrik Moltke, who bylined Monday's story, eight AT&T facilities—known as "peering sites"—in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. "serve a specific function, processing AT&T customers' data and also carrying large quantities of data from other internet providers."

"The eight locations are featured on a top-secret NSA map, which depicts U.S. facilities that the agency relies upon for one of its largest surveillance programs, code-named FAIRVIEW," Gallagher and Moltke write. "AT&T is the only company involved in FAIRVIEW, which was first established in 1985, according to NSA documents, and involves tapping into international telecommunications cables, routers, and switches."

The report continues:

In 2003, the NSA launched new internet mass surveillance methods, which were pioneered under the FAIRVIEW program. The methods were used by the agency to collect—within a few months—some 400 billion records about people's internet communications and activity, the New York Timespreviously reported. FAIRVIEW was also forwarding more than one million emails every day to a "keyword selection system" at the NSA's Fort Meade headquarters.

Central to the internet spying are eight "peering link router complex" sites, which are pinpointed on the top-secret NSA map. The locations of the sites mirror maps of AT&T’s networks, obtained by The Intercept from public records

.

Fight for the Future (FFTF), an open internet advocacy group, reacted with alarm to The Intercept's reporting on Monday, writing on Twitter, "AT&T has bent over backwards to help the U.S. government spy on essentially all internet traffic."

"Giant telecom companies aren't just "anti-consumer," they're actively helping authoritarian governments and pushing for policies that endanger free expression," FFTF concluded.

https://theintercept.com/2017/02/14/the-leakers-who-exposed-gen-flynns-lie-committed-serious-and-wholly-justified-felonies/

TRUMP’S NATIONAL security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, was forced to resign on Monday night as a result of getting caught lying about whether he discussed sanctions in a December telephone call with a Russian diplomat. The only reason the public learned about Flynn’s lie is because someone inside the U.S. government violated the criminal law by leaking the contents of Flynn’s intercepted communications.

In the spectrum of crimes involving the leaking of classified information, publicly revealing the contents of SIGINT — signals intelligence — is one of the most serious felonies. Journalists (and all other nongovernmental citizens) can be prosecuted under federal law for disclosing classified information only under the narrowest circumstances; reflecting how serious SIGINT is considered to be, one of those circumstances includes leaking the contents of intercepted communications, as defined this way by 18 § 798 of the U.S. Code:

Whoever knowingly and willfully communicates … or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes … any classified information … obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the communications of any foreign government … shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

That Flynn lied about what he said to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak was first revealed by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who has built his career on repeating what his CIA sources tell him. In his January 12 column, Ignatius wrote: “According to a senior U.S. government official, Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the hacking.”

That “senior U.S. government official” committed a serious felony by leaking to Ignatius the communication activities of Flynn. Similar and even more extreme crimes were committed by what the Washington Post called “nine current and former officials, who were in senior positions at multiple agencies at the time of the calls,” who told the paper for its February 9 article that “Flynn privately discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with that country’s ambassador to the United States during the month before President Trump took office, contrary to public assertions by Trump officials.” The New York Times, also citing anonymous U.S. officials, provided even more details about the contents of Flynn’s telephone calls.

That all of these officials committed major crimes can hardly be disputed. In January, CNN reported that Flynn’s calls with the Russians “were captured by routine U.S. eavesdropping targeting the Russian diplomats.” That means that the contents of those calls were “obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the communications of [a] foreign government,” which in turn means that anyone who discloses them — or reports them to the public — is guilty of a felony under the statute.

Yet very few people are calling for a criminal investigation or the prosecution of these leakers, nor demanding the leakers step forward and “face the music” — for very good reason: The officials leaking this information acted justifiably, despite the fact that they violated the law. That’s because the leaks revealed that a high government official, Gen. Flynn, blatantly lied to the public about a material matter — his conversations with Russian diplomats — and the public has the absolute right to know this.

This episode underscores a critical point: The mere fact that an act is illegal does not mean it is unjust or even deserving of punishment. Oftentimes, the most just acts are precisely the ones that the law prohibits.

That’s particularly true of whistleblowers — i.e., those who reveal information the law makes it a crime to reveal, when doing so is the only way to demonstrate to the public that powerful officials are acting wrongfully or deceitfully. In those cases, we should cheer those who do it even though they are undertaking exactly those actions that the criminal law prohibits.

This Flynn episode underscores another critical point: The motives of leakers are irrelevant. It’s very possible — indeed, likely — that the leakers here were not acting with benevolent motives. Nobody with a straight face can claim that lying to the public is regarded in official Washington as some sort of mortal sin; if anything, the contrary is true: It’s seen as a job requirement.

Moreover, Gen. Flynn has many enemies throughout the intelligence and defense community. The same is true, of course, of Donald Trump; recall that just a few weeks ago, Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer warned Trump that he was being “really dumb” to criticize the intelligence community because “they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

It’s very possible — I’d say likely — that the motive here was vindictive rather than noble. Whatever else is true, this is a case where the intelligence community, through strategic (and illegal) leaks, destroyed one of its primary adversaries in the Trump White House.

But no matter. What matters is not the motive of the leaker but the effects of the leak. Any leak that results in the exposure of high-level wrongdoing — as this one did — should be praised, not scorned and punished.

IT IS, OF COURSE, bizarre to watch this principle now so widely celebrated. Over the last eight years, President Obama implemented the most vindictive and aggressive war on whistleblowers in all of U.S. history. As Leonard Downie, one of the editors at the Washington Post during the Watergate investigation, put it in a special report: “The [Obama] administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration.”

It’s hard to put into words how strange it is to watch the very same people — from both parties, across the ideological spectrum — who called for the heads of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Tom Drake, and so many other Obama-era leakers today heap praise on those who leaked the highly sensitive, classified SIGINT information that brought down Gen. Flynn.

It’s even more surreal to watch Democrats act as though lying to the public is some grave firing offense when President Obama’s top national security official, James Clapper, got caught red-handed not only lying to the public but also to Congress — about a domestic surveillance program that courts ruled was illegal. And despite the fact that lying to Congress is a felony, he kept his job until the very last day of the Obama presidency.

But this is how political power and the addled partisan brain in D.C. functions. Those in power always regard leaks as a heinous crime, while those out of power regard them as a noble act. They seamlessly shift sides as their position in D.C. changes.

Indeed, while Democrats have suddenly re-discovered the virtues of illegal leaking, Trump-supporting Republicans are insisting that the only thing that matters is rooting out the criminal leakers. Fox News host Steve Doocey and right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham today both demanded to know why the leakers weren’t being hunted, while congressional Republicans are vowing investigations to find the leakers. And Trump himself today — echoing Obama-era Democrats — said that “the real story” isn’t the lies told by his national security adviser but rather the fact that someone leaked information exposing them:

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The real story here is why are there so many illegal leaks coming out of Washington? Will these leaks be happening as I deal on N.Korea etc?

6:28 AM - 14 Feb 2017

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But this is just the tawdry, craven game of Washington. People with no actual beliefs shamelessly take diametrically opposite views on fundamental political questions based exclusively on whether it helps or hurts their leaders. Thus, the very same Democrats who just three months ago viewed illegal leaking as a grave sin today view it as an act of heroic #Resistance.

What matters far more than this lowly and empty game-playing is the principle that is so vividly apparent here. Given the extreme secrecy powers that have arisen under the war on terror, one of the very few ways that the public has left for learning about what its government officials do is illegal leaking. As Trevor Timm notes, numerous leaks have already achieved great good in the three short weeks that Trump has been president.

Leaks are illegal and hated by those in power (and their followers) precisely because political officials want to hide evidence of their own wrongdoing, and want to be able to lie to the public with impunity and without detection. That’s the same reason the rest of us should celebrate such illegal leaks and protect those who undertake them, often at great risk to their own interests, so that we can be informed about the real actions of those who wield the greatest power. That principle does not change based upon which political party controls the White House.

* * * * *

From the creation of The Intercept during the Obama presidency through to today under Trump, a central principle of The Intercept — a key reason it was created — was to enable whistleblowing and report on leaks in the public interest. As our pinned article on our front page says: “If You See Something, Leak Something,” with instructions on how to do that as safely as possible.