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After an ICE officer shot and killed a 25-year-old Colombian national this week in Biddeford, Maine, Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin reportedly told Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, that officers involved in the shooting were not wearing body cameras.

Yet the ICE officials who spoke with The Intercept, all of whom requested anonymity to protect their livelihoods, identified cameras among the equipment worn by two ICE officers nearby in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.

The body-worn devices were not designed solely to capture evidential video, and are used primarily as remote microphones for ICE officers’ radio communications. (ICE did not respond to a request for comment.)

ICE officials who spoke to The Intercept identified the accessories worn by ICE officers on the scene of the Maine shooting as Motorola SVX Video Remote Speaker Microphones, a wireless radio mic with one other important feature: a camera. (Motorola did not respond to a request to comment.)

Although the Motorola SVX worn by ICE officers are designed to work as body cameras, the ICE official said the function isn’t used.

“They have multiple functionalities,” one ICE official who identified the Motorola SVX at the scene in Maine told The Intercept. “However, we are currently only using them as mics because of the AXON contract.”

The Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s parent agency, purchases body-worn cameras through a contract with Axon, a law enforcement tech firm. (Axon did not respond to a request for comment.)

Another ICE official showed The Intercept where, on their own Motorola SVX, a cover can be attached to the top of the device where the camera lens is, comparing it to the tech worn by officers at the Maine shooting scene.

“This is where the cover clips over the camera lens,” the second ICE officer said. “Since the cameras don’t work they just leave the cover on.”

The SVX mics worn by ICE are designed to record internally, capable of storing over 100 hours of standard-definition video, according to Motorola promotional materials and a technical support line. The video-recording function on the SVX mic, however, requires a subscription.

No Bodycam Footage

Motorola is a giant in the world of government law enforcement and security work.

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According to a document published on the Department of Homeland Security’s website, ICE alone expects to spend more than $100 million on a six-year contract for Motorola’s line of APX Next All-Band Smart Radios and accessories, which would include the SVX mic.

The deadly ICE shooting of Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine stoked national outrage, coming on the heels of another fatal ICE shooting of Mexican immigrant Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston.

Neither man, according to news reports, had been the intended targets of the ICE arrest teams. And neither man’s death was captured by federal officers’ body-worn cameras, according to official reports.

Shortly after the Maine shooting, ICE ordered its officers in the field to halt nearly all traffic stops. After reports of the order emerged and Trump complained, border czar Tom Homan pivoted to say the ICE vehicle stops would continue.

Widely known today for its body cams, Axon used to be called Taser, named for the stun gun that built its reputation and which it still carries. The company does brisk business with ICE.

Last month, presidential financial disclosures raised eyebrows over an ICE public request for a $220 million stun gun contract that appeared tailor-made for Axon’s Tasers. Only two weeks before the request for information went out, according to the disclosures, President Donald Trump purchased as much as $5 million in shares from Axon.

During Trump’s winter immigration crackdown in Minnesota, ICE announced that it would be purchasing and distributing body cameras to every arrest team in the agency.

After the deaths of Durán Guerrero and Salgado Araujo over past week, however, the Trump administration said the distribution was incomplete.

“The body cameras have been ordered,” Homan, Trump’s border czar, said in a press conference. “There’s a deployment schedule on the books.”

The Homeland Security Department said that half of ICE field offices already had body-worn cameras and the rest were expected to get them in the next two months.

The new body cameras were funded through a $20 million congressional appropriation to expand ICE’s camera program, which includes contracts with Axon for the devices.

The post ICE Officers at Maine Shooting Scene Were Wearing Body Cameras. They Were Not Turned On. appeared first on The Intercept.

At least five of the candidates to replace Platner have come out in favor of abolishing or “dismantling” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement after federal agents gunned down Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine.

The scramble to denounce ICE by would-be Democratic Senate nominees came days ahead of a scheduled debate on Thursday evening, where the hopefuls will face off to make the case for why they should take on incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins.

Panagioti Tsolkas, a spokesperson for the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition, said he was “heartened” to see the outpouring of anger from candidates in the wake of the shooting, but cautioned that a sustained effort would be needed from Maine’s politicians.

“We want to see the state of Maine step up right now and take action on a full investigation and accountability in this killing,” Tsolkas said. “It’s gotta be more than lip service, and it has to be more than just showing up at the vigils when you have a chance to speak on stage.”

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Durán Guerrero died early Monday morning after an ICE agent shot the 25-year-old during a traffic stop targeting another man, according to a spokesperson for the agency.

Durán Guerrero’s father told a news station in his native Colombia that his son was in the country legally, according to a report in the New York Times, and worked two jobs as a food delivery driver and cleaner at a veterinary clinic. Durán Guerrero leaves behind a wife and 3-year-old daughter.

The killing sparked furious protests across the state and turned immigration enforcement into a centerpiece issue of Maine political chatter and the crowded mini-race, which kicked off last week and is set to culminate in a nominating convention in Bangor, Maine, on July 25. 

Platner — who dropped out of the race last week after allegations emerged that he had sexually assaulted a former girlfriend, which he denies — had also called for ICE to be abolished. In his July 10 letter removing himself from the race, he signed off by saying, “F*ck ICE.”

The unusual circumstances of Platner’s self-ejection from the race — despite the popularity of the movement that won him the primary in June — has set a curious political mood in Maine. Candidates seeking to replace him are hewing to his message while differentiating themselves from his scandal-plagued personal brand. 

With just days left to make their pitch to Mainers, many of the candidates to replace Platner veered toward the nearest solidarity rally or anti-ICE protest as news of the killing filtered out of Biddeford.

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The candidates calling for ICE to be abolished include Troy Jackson, a progressive from northern Maine who’s swept up a raft of endorsements from local politicians and labor groups despite an underwhelming showing in the recent gubernatorial primary; fellow gubernatorial also-ran Dr. Nirav Shah; social worker Paige Loud and former political operative and fundraiser Jordan Wood, both of whom ran in the Democratic primary for Maine’s 2nd Congressional District; and Dan Kleban, the founder of a beer company in Maine who threw his hat into the ring for the Senate race last week.

While most Democrats in Maine have been highly critical of ICE and President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda — especially in the wake of a surge of federal agents to the state in January — only Jackson and Loud appear to have called for the agency to be abolished prior to Monday’s shooting. With a majority of the candidates now declaring a full-throated commitment to scrapping ICE altogether, this week marked a sharp leftward shift in immigration discourse in Maine in the wake of Durán Guerrero’s killing.

Other candidates, while sharply criticizing ICE for the killing of Durán Guerrero, stopped short of calling for the agency to be abolished. Shenna Bellows, the current Maine secretary of state, spoke in Biddeford about having denied Border Patrol the use of undercover license plates in the state during the surge earlier this year. On X, she employed the slogan “ICE off our streets.”

The post Would-Be Platner Replacements in Maine Rally Around “Abolish ICE” (or Something Close) appeared first on The Intercept.

Crow — magnate of a Texas real estate empire, longtime Republican donor, and past dual citizen of St. Kitts and Nevis — has come under increased scrutiny in recent years after ProPublica reported that he financed luxury travel for and bought property from conservative Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who did not disclose the dealings. Crow also reportedly paid tuition for Thomas’s grandnephew at a private boarding school in Georgia. 

Crow did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the contribution to Fetterman’s campaign. 

Fetterman has drawn ire from his previous supporters and Democratic colleagues for what they’ve characterized as a stark shift in his ideological and policy stances since he was first elected to the Senate. That shift has attracted Republican donors who said they appreciated Fetterman’s vocal embrace of pro-Israel policies since entering office. A recent poll found that a majority of Democrats in Pennsylvania want Fetterman to leave the party, and that his approval rating is higher among Republicans than Democrats. Last week, Fetterman launched a bipartisan joint fundraising committee with Sen. Dave McCormick, R-Pa.

Crow contributed the FEC’s maximum of $7,000 to Fetterman’s campaign on June 30, less than a week before Fetterman’s new committee with McCormick, Common Ground PA, filed paperwork with the FEC. Crow is currently listed as the chair of the board of Crow Holdings. In the contribution to Fetterman’s campaign, Crow listed his employer as the Trammell Crow Company and his occupation as real estate developer, rather than head of Crow Holdings, as he’d listed in other FEC filings earlier this year. (Trammell Crow was Harlan Crow’s father.)

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Fetterman, who campaigned for Senate as a progressive and endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., for president in 2016, has faced criticism for breaking with his party and voting with Republicans on key issues from immigration to U.S. attacks on boats in international waters to the war with Iran, as well as also voting for nominees of President Donald Trump. Over the last two years, he’s seen an exodus of staffers, some of whom complained that they were “working on Israel all the time,” had donors request refunds, and brought registered Republicans into his fold. 

The right-wing megadonor has given sparingly to Democrats in previous cycles, with recipients including Rep. Jimmy Panetta, D-Calif.; Jared Golden, D-Maine.; and Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J. 

Fetterman’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 

The post Harlan Crow Maxed Out Campaign Donations to John Fetterman appeared first on The Intercept.

Under questioning from Democratic senators, Clayton, who currently serves as the top federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, defended the process that resulted in FBI agents showing up to the reporters’ homes to hand-deliver subpoenas seeking the source of disclosures about security flaws in the Qatari-donated new Air Force One jet.

Clayton declined to answer questions, however, on whether the White House or top officials at the Justice Department ordered him to send the subpoenas.

“I’m not going to get into the details,” Clayton said under questioning from Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo. “But what I can tell you is that we followed the procedures, and those procedures, for the reasons that I believe firmly and you believe — protecting the freedom of the press, being the least intrusive possible — require consultation.”

Clayton’s role in sending the subpoenas, which went out under his signature Friday shortly after FBI Director Kash Patel met with Trump, has emerged as a flashpoint in his nomination to replace Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence.

A press freedom advocate said he found Clayton’s testimony about the subpoenas to be “totally disingenuous” because Trump’s own subpoena guidelines say the government must exhaust other means of getting evidence before going to journalists.

“Yet these subpoenas were issued less than two days after the story came out, and just hours after Patel’s reported White House meeting with Trump,” Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said in an email. “All evidence points to Trump ordering this action for retribution because he’s embarrassed about the plane debacle, not because of anything to do with ‘national security.’”

Housing czar and Trump loyalist Bill Pulte is currently serving as the intelligence chief on a temporary basis, and some centrist Democrats have argued that Clayton should be swiftly confirmed to shut off Pulte’s access to classified information.

For Democrats on the intelligence committee, however, Clayton’s role in the subpoena to New York Times journalists suggested that he may be just as eager as Gabbard and Pulte to use the powers of public office to appease the president.

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Those concerns about the subpoenas dovetailed with worries about Clayton’s views on election fraud. Democratic senators repeatedly questioned Clayton on whether former President Joe Biden won the 2020 election, which has emerged as an important litmus test in light of Gabbard’s role in an ongoing administration effort to relitigate the president’s loss.

Clayton repeatedly confirmed the fact that Biden’s election was certified by Congress but declined to say whether he thought Biden actually won the race.

“Isn’t it humiliating to be unable to answer this question? To have to indulge the president’s delusions?” Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., said at one point. “Why can you not give it?”

On the subpoena issue, Clayton’s answers offered little new light on why the subpoenas were swiftly delivered to journalists. He repeatedly said that the subpoenas were the “least intrusive” means possible to discover the source of the New York Times’s reporting on the new Air Force One.

The reporting revealed that Trump was forced to use an older version of the presidential airplane on his return from a recent trip to Turkey because the new one lacked missile defense systems despite a pricey retrofit.

Administration officials reportedly asked the newspaper not to publish its report on the jet’s security flaws, but it went ahead. The Times and other outlets have reported that the White House ordered Patel, the FBI director, to oversee a probe into the leaks about the jets. Patel reportedly spent eight hours Friday at the White House overseeing the investigation.

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Under Justice Department policies, investigators seeking to subpoena journalists must receive approval from the attorney general, in this case Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who had his own, separate confirmation hearing on Wednesday. The government must first have made “all reasonable attempts” to obtain the information from alternative sources.

Press freedom groups have questioned whether the Justice Department really did try to discover the source of the Air Force One leaks. They also raised alarm bells about the FBI sending agents to deliver the subpoenas by hand, rather than going through the newspaper’s lawyers.

“The subpoenas were issued so closely after a very long meeting at the White House. There seemed to be an unnecessary urgency behind it,” said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. “Delivering it to a private home seems quite aggressive.”

Clayton, in his response, seemed to suggest that the White House was worried that following a more typical, slow-moving process would have resulted in the destruction of evidence.

“How quickly you would do something following the process depends on those facts and circumstances of the investigation including the potential spoliation of information, and the timeliness of the threat. I think I’m going to leave it at that,” Clayton said. “But this was a judgment, and it should always be a judgment, that is made collectively, that’s the way I look at these things.”

The White House declined to answer a question from The Intercept about whether Trump ordered the subpoenas in a statement sent Tuesday.

“Jay Clayton is a highly qualified legal expert who also possesses a significant degree of national security experience,” said Davis Ingle, a White House spokesperson. “He will undoubtedly do an excellent job in leading the Office of the Director of National Intelligence under President Trump, and the White House looks forward to his swift confirmation.”

Update: July 15, 2026, 2:00 p.m. ET
The article was updated with a statement from the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

The post Intel Pick Jay Clayton Won’t Tell Congress Whether Trump Ordered Subpoenas of NYT Journalists appeared first on The Intercept.

Marlene Galán-Woods, who was a registered Republican until 2018 and is the widow of the state’s former Republican attorney general, picked up the endorsement of the Democrats’ powerful House campaign arm in May, raising eyebrows in a cycle dominated by anti-establishment sentiment. One of the three main super PACs spending in the Democratic primary for Arizona’s 1st Congressional District is backing her, while another is touting businessman Jonathan Treble as “the only lifelong Democrat” in the race. All three PACs are opposing the district’s former Democratic nominee Amish Shah, whose critics say that he briefly registered as a Republican to vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican presidential primary. (Shah’s campaign said he thought it would help boost Hillary Clinton but added that he never publicly disclosed who he voted for, without denying the Trump vote.)

The finger-pointing in the toss-up district suggests that candidates are walking a line between touting their abilities to work with Republicans and distancing themselves from the GOP before Democratic voters pick their nominee next Tuesday. Democrats consider the district — which includes wealthy exurbs northeast of Phoenix whose residents are mostly white and around 20 percent Hispanic — an example of a true median among voters and a bellwether for other competitive races.

“It’s what I call the old playbook,” said Rick McCartney, another Democratic candidate in the race, referring to the Democrats’ choice of a former Republican to appeal to swing-district voters. McCartney, himself a former Republican who mentioned his own ability to work with all parties, said it’s reasonable for people to question whether they align with a party’s values, but it’s also reasonable for voters to want transparency. Navigating both can be tricky.

For Galán-Woods, the balancing act rests in part on her commitment to reproductive rights. Of just under $4 million in outside spending on the primary this cycle, more under $1.3 million came from Pro-Choice Majority Action, which formed in May and says it works to elect women who support abortion. The PAC is primarily funded by its affiliate, the Democratic group EDW Action Fund, which received $1 million from United Democracy Project — AIPAC’s affiliated super PAC — in the spring. The PAC for Democratic Majority for Israel also gave $37,750 to EDW Action in April.

Abortion is a critical issue in Arizona, where voters passed a constitutional amendment codifying it as a right in 2024. Galán-Woods’s major backers are a mix of the Democratic establishment, women’s rights organizations, and pro-Israel interests. In addition to Pro-Choice Majority Action and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which gave Galán-Woods its biggest investment on primary ads so far this cycle, she’s backed by EMILY’s List, Planned Parenthood Action Fund, the PAC for Democratic Majority for Israel, and BOLD PAC, the campaign arm for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

Lenny Young, a spokesperson for Pro-Choice Majority Action, said he wasn’t at liberty to discuss the group’s conversations with its partners, but it doesn’t pick candidates based on Israel policy. “Correlation is not causation,” Young said. “We support women. And our priority is women who can help us take back the majority.”

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“Marlene is a mother and a grandmother, who will never back down from defending reproductive freedom and stand up to any effort to strip away fundamental rights,” said EMILY’s List spokesperson Amelia Fox. Her critics point out that before she left the GOP in 2018 — saying it was “driven off a cliff” by President Donald Trump — Galán-Woods long voted for anti-abortion Republicans, including former Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, who signed into law several of the nation’s most extreme abortion bans in the early 2010s; former Arizona Sen. and presidential candidate John McCain; and former Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate Mitt Romney. 

Galán-Woods’s campaign declined to comment.

Treble’s deep-pocketed supporters, meanwhile, are lifting up the businessman as the only truly committed Democrat in the primary race. He’s backed by a super PAC called Crush MAGA, which has spent over half a million dollars opposing Shah and backing Treble, and says it’s focused on opposing Trump and his allies. 

“Jonathan Treble is the only lifelong Democrat in this race, and the candidate best prepared to win this critical seat in November,” Crush MAGA spokesperson Sophie Mestas told The Intercept. “Crush MAGA is committed to electing strong Democratic leaders who stand up to Trump, protect the right to vote, and defend our fundamental freedoms.”

But Crush MAGA, too, is an affiliate of a PAC that received $100,000 from AIPAC’s United Democracy Project. That group, Save Democracy PAC — which backs Democrats and says it wants to get big money out of politics and protect the right to vote — has used Crush MAGA as a vehicle to target progressive candidates in other primaries. Save Democracy PAC, also known as SD PAC, has given directly to Democratic candidates this cycle but has spent little so far on primaries. Most of its independent expenditures in previous cycles were made during the general election.

Treble, who did not respond to a request for comment, has said he launched his campaign to fight for Medicare for All after he almost died from a vascular brain growth two years ago. His critics have pointed out that he did not vote in recent elections and did not register in Arizona until 2025, after moving there in 2022. He runs a company that sells printers and coffee machines to offices and has self-funded his campaign to the tune of $2.3 million, making him the top fundraiser in the race with $4 million in total. Galán-Woods is in second with $2.2 million, followed by Shah with $1.8 million, and McCartney with $1.3 million.

The outside spender in the race isn’t explicitly backing any candidate. BOLD America — which was founded by former Congressional Hispanic Caucus members and supported New York Rep. Adriano Espaillat before he lost his primary last month to a democratic socialist challenger — has spent just under $1 million opposing Shah.

In May, BOLD America received $650,000 from UDP. 

In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for United Democracy Project said, “UDP has no involvement in any way in AZ-1.”

It’s been a tough midterm cycle for the Democratic establishment and some of the PACs that have emerged to prop it up. 

Pro-Choice Majority Action spent $1.5 million to help outgoing Rep. Diana DeGette’s campaign before she lost to democratic socialist Melat Kiros in the June primary in Denver, Colorado. It backed Jasmeet Bains, who lost to progressive Randy Villegas in California; Julie Johnson, who lost to Collin Allred in Texas; and Shannon Bird, who lost to Manny Rutinel in Colorado. Two more of its candidates — Connie Chan and Melissa Hernandez — came in second in their California primaries and are headed to runoff elections. 

Crush MAGA PAC has had more mixed results. In California, the group spent against Ammar Campa-Najjar and in favor of Lauren Babb Tomlinson, both of whom lost. In addition to spending against Shah, the group also launched ads last week against progressive Will Lawrence in Michigan that attacked him for having a savings account.

Despite the establishment’s blunders, in a race where so many candidates have dabbled in Republicanism, many were quick to assert their commitment to the Democratic Party line. McCartney, who has no known Super PAC support, was previously registered as a Republican but his campaign said he has supported Democratic presidential candidates from Bill Clinton to Kamala Harris. Shah’s campaign said he’s voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in every presidential election he’s voted in, since Clinton in 1996 — and supported the other Clinton in 2016, as was the goal of his alleged Trump primary vote.

Some Democratic voters, as McCartney pointed out, may still feel stung by a former Democratic Arizona senator.

“Particularly based on Kyrsten Sinema and how she went to Congress as a Democrat and walked out of there as an independent, I think people have every right to be focused on what it means to be a part of their party,” McCartney said. 

It’s unclear who’s likely to win next Tuesday’s primary: Galán-Woods has the establishment backing, Treble has the campaign cash, and Shah was up 22 percentage points in the only public poll released on the race back in February. (House Majority PAC declined to share information on any more recent polling.)

Shah was also the district’s Democratic nominee in 2024, when, as his spokesperson Colin Lauderdale pointed out, “the DCCC stayed out of the primary election and only endorsed Dr. Shah in the general election, when they were joined by several other Democratic PACs and organizations.” He lost by less than 4 percentage points to incumbent Rep. David Schweikert, who is now departing to run for governor, leaving the Republican nominee unknown, too.

Democrats haven’t won this seat since the Obama administration. McCartney, who held a fundraiser for Galán-Woods last cycle and worked to elect Shah after he won the primary, pointed to party leadership as responsible for the failure. 

“When the DCCC wants to come into this community and tell these voters who they should be focused on before they’ve even sat down and talked with somebody like me, it’s the old way of doing things, and people are tired of it,” he said. “It hasn’t worked for us, by the way.”

Update: July 15, 2026, 3:57 p.m. ET
This article was updated with new spending numbers from Pro-Choice Majority Action in a new filing Wednesday and to include a new comment from the Shah campaign.

The post Democrats Are Desperate to Flip an Arizona House Seat. They’re Rallying Around a Former Republican. appeared first on The Intercept.

The lawsuit, filed in a New York federal court by Democracy for the Arab World Now, or DAWN, and Taxpayer Alliance Against Genocide, seeks to reverse sanctions brought under Executive Order 14203.

The order, which President Donald Trump made in February 2025, grants the administration power to issue penalties against any person or group seeking to bring a case against the U.S. or its allies — namely Israel — before the International Criminal Court.

The plaintiffs, both of whom coordinate with international NGOs in an effort to hold the U.S. and Israel accountable for war crimes, are seeking a declaration that the ICC sanctions are in violation of their First Amendment rights because they create obstacles to free association. The lawsuit also asks for an injunction barring the Trump administration from using sanctions to stymie free speech.

Trump’s assault on the ICC — most recently including a vow to “dismantle” the court — has focused mostly on efforts to hold Israel accountable for war crimes. In November 2024, the court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, another Israeli official, and an official with the armed Palestinian group Hamas for activities during the time period of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

The White House executive order came down shortly after the arrest warrants were issued.

The rights groups’ lawsuit specifically highlights sanctions against Francesca Albanese, the U.N. official tasked with probing human rights violations in the occupied Palestinian territories, and three Palestinian nongovernmental organizations. According to the plaintiffs, the sanctions impinge on their First Amendment rights by preventing them from engaging in protected speech activities with Albanese and the NGOs.

“The Trump administration is using the blunt instrument of economic sanctions not only to punish human rights defenders but to police the political expression of millions of Americans,” said Omar Shakir, the executive director of DAWN, which was founded by journalist Jamal Khashoggi before his assassination by the Saudi government. “The government is violating the constitutional rights of American citizens in order to shield officials of a foreign government who have committed a genocide.”

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The defendants named in the suit are Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, and Brad Smith, the director of the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. (None of the American government officials immediately responded to requests for comment.)

Trump and his allies’ war on the international human rights community goes back years: In 2020, Trump issued sanctions against an ICC prosecutor after she called for an investigation into U.S. human rights abuses in Afghanistan.

Shortly after retaking the White House, Trump lifted Biden-era sanctions on Israeli settlers involved in violence against Palestinians and destruction of their property. Trump then issued Executive Order 14203, “Imposing Sanctions on the International Criminal Court,” which placed visa restrictions and financial penalties on individuals and groups seeking to help the ICC in any potential case against the U.S., Israel, or other allies.

Months later, the administration issued sanctions against Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur. Albanese was briefly removed from the sanctions list in May after a federal judge ruled that the sanctions violated her rights, but the Office of Foreign Assets Control, which administers U.S. sanctions, added her to the list again days later, according to Al Jazeera.

The Albanese sanctions were followed in September 2025 with an edict sanctioning three NGOs: Al Haq, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.

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In addition to penalizing Albanese and the NGOs, the sanctions bar any U.S. people or groups from engaging with them and make it a federal offense to receive or provide any “service” related to designated groups and people — an action the plaintiffs argue is in violation of their First Amendment rights.

The lawsuit comes at a moment of heightened attention to the sanctions against the ICC. Days before the lawsuit was filed, Rubio launched a broadside against the ICC in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece laying out a case for “dismantling” the court. Rubio specifically cited calls by DAWN for an investigation into potential war crimes in the U.S. bombing campaign against Iran.

“The ICC is backed and run by a powerful network of leftist nongovernment organizations, smug globalists, and hostile Third World governments united by their enmity toward the U.S.,” Rubio wrote. “Using all the tools at our government’s disposal, working beside every ally with whom we can make common cause, we will dismantle the ICC—brick by brick, if necessary.”

The timing of Rubio’s renewed attack on the ICC alongside the lawsuit appears to be a coincidence, but only serves to further underscore the stakes, according to Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man, a spokesperson for DAWN.

“The fact that he mentioned DAWN in his Wall Street Journal op-ed shows that the risk [of prosecution] to Americans is real,” Schaeffer Omer-Man told The Intercept. “But our primary goal is to get legal clarity that we can continue to have a working relationship with Francesca Albanese, and, equally if not more importantly, that we can resume working shoulder to shoulder with Palestinian civil society and human rights groups.”

The post Trump’s Sanctions Against the ICC Are Unconstitutional, Rights Groups Say appeared first on The Intercept.

Some key Democrats, however, have so far not committed to opposing President Donald Trump’s nominee for the nation’s top intelligence job.

Clayton, who serves as the top federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, signed the subpoenas sent Friday that targeted New York Times journalists for their reporting on serious security flaws in the Qatari-donated Air Force One jet.

Two Democrats on the intelligence committee did not indicate whether the subpoenas were a dealbreaker for Clayton’s nomination, which is set to be the subject of a Wednesday hearing.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the vice chair of the committee, has not said whether he intends to vote in favor of Clayton’s nomination. He previously praised Clayton for having the “right temperament” when Trump tapped him, but has said he still wants to press the prosecutor about whether he will use the DNI post to pursue Trump’s 2020 election obsession.

Asked for comment about the subpoenas Tuesday, Warner said he anticipated that Clayton would be quizzed about the matter during his hearing.

“I think it’s important that we stand up for the independence of the press,” he said.

When asked by The Intercept whether the subpoenas were disqualifying for Clayton’s nomination, fellow intelligence committee member Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., said, “I’ve got questions about it.”

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The cautious position staked out by the Democrats stood in sharp contrast to that of Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., the committee’s longest serving member and a frequent skeptic of the intelligence agencies when it comes to civil liberties. In a social media post Sunday, Wyden noted that federal agents hand-delivered some of the subpoenas to the reporters who co-authored the article.

“It seems Jay Clayton is up to his eyeballs in sending intimidation subpoenas to reporters and armed thugs to their homes,” Wyden said. “This is not acceptable in a DNI.”

Dems Pushing for Clayton

The subpoenas came at an awkward moment for some Democrats in Congress aligned with the intelligence community. Those Democrats, including Connecticut Rep. Jim Himes, the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, had hoped to swiftly confirm Clayton in order to cut short the temporary appointment of housing czar Bill Pulte as director of national intelligence.

Clayton was seen by Democrats such as Himes as an acceptable alternative to Pulte, who was handed the reins of the country’s intelligence apparatuses with a mandate from Trump to stoke baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

Some Democrats like Wyden, however, have noted that Clayton himself has also publicly indulged in election fraud conspiracy theories.

His role in the subpoenas should make him a non-starter for intelligence chief, a coalition of progressive groups including Indivisible and Reporters Without Borders said in a letter Monday.

“Members of Congress across the aisle have embraced Clayton as a more respectable option than Pulte and hope to see the nomination process quickly,” the groups said. “Measuring Clayton’s qualifications against Pulte’s rather than the demands of the office would be a detriment to national security.”

Caitlin Vogus, a senior adviser with Freedom of the Press Foundation, said intelligence committee members should grill Clayton over the subpoenas.

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This Is How Trump’s Department of Justice Spied on Journalists

“Anyone who hides behind fabricated ‘national security’ claims to demand journalists expose confidential sources can’t be trusted to lead America’s intelligence agencies,” Vogus said in a statement to The Intercept. “Senators should demand to know whether Clayton issued these outrageous subpoenas at the explicit behest of the White House, and whether he’d use similar tactics as DNI against journalists and whistleblowers who expose intelligence failures or abuses.”

The post Trump’s Intel Pick Played Key Role in NYT Subpoenas — But Some Democrats Still On the Fence appeared first on The Intercept.

The directive, handed down in at least three of ICE’s administrative regions Monday and effective immediately, came after a pair of killings in Texas and Maine by ICE agents that involved attempts to stop cars.

The ICE officers who spoke with The Intercept, who asked for anonymity to discuss internal orders, said the shift was meant to mitigate the chances of shootings like the ones that sparked outrage by taking the lives of two immigrants over the past week.

“We have been told to either grab them before they leave their parking spot, or follow them and arrest them where they stop (ie a gas station or place of work) to avoid these situations,” said an ICE official from the South.

“This shit isn’t normal,” the official said. “Whatever these chucklefucks did in Maine and Houston is serious.”

ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The five officials who spoke to The Intercept about the directive all hail from ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division, which carries out most of the federal government’s street immigration arrests. (ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations, the agency’s criminal investigative arm, did not receive a directive about vehicle stops, according to two special agents.)

The directive to ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, which was first reported by the New York Times, didn’t come down as written orders, two of the ICE officials told The Intercept.

Instead, said one of the ICE officials who works in the Mountain West region, the order came down through field office directors to avoid red tape associated with putting an official policy in place.

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Along with street arrests, vehicle stops had become go-to tactic for ICE in the second Trump administration, with ramped-up enforcement that has included crackdowns on large cities like Minneapolis. Under past administrations, including President Donald Trump’s first term, ICE relied mostly on transfers from local jails and prisons to satisfy its enforcement priorities.

The vehicle stops also contributed to a recent explosion of immigrant detentions, with ICE announcing roughly 10,000 arrests over a five-day period in late June 2026.

Ending the vehicle stops, said the ICE official based in the South, “definitely hinders enforcement.”

Killings in Vehicle Stops

In a recent period of less than a week, Mexican national Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was shot and killed by ICE officers in Houston and Colombian national Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero was shot and killed in Biddeford, Maine.

Details surrounding the shootings are still emerging, but Department of Homeland Security officials have said that neither Salgado Araujo nor Durán Guerrero were the intended targets of the ICE enforcement operations that claimed their lives. The officers involved in the shootings were not wearing body cameras in either case.

The killings sparked public outrage and probes at both the state and local levels.

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In addition to investigations by FBI and the Homeland Security Department’s Office of the Inspector General, Maine’s attorney general and the attorney general in Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston, launched investigations. Local police departments in both Maine and Texas are assisting with the investigations.

There are few precedents for ICE to cut off its enforcement division agencywide from using vehicle stops to make apprehensions.

As federal agents surged into mostly Democratic major cities, confrontations between ICE and demonstrators, activists, and immigrants led to violence — especially after the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti during ICE’s Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis over the winter.

The outrage over the shootings led to operational guidance emphasizing de-escalation and reducing confrontations during field operations, with several field offices even briefly suspending proactive street enforcement or vehicle-stop tactics following orders of ICE upper management.

Since Operation Metro Surge’s end in mid-February, ICE has focused on smaller, decentralized “at-large” enforcement operations under the leadership of new Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, a strategy that has allowed ICE to, until recently, operate with a lower profile, while maintaining previous arrest quotas.

The post ICE Orders an End to Vehicle Stops After Deadly Shootings by Federal Agents appeared first on The Intercept.

For the second time in a week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have shot a man dead. Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero, a 25-year-old father from Colombia, was driving slowly in Biddeford, Maine, when an agent shot into his vehicle.

As is now par for the course, ICE representatives are already lying about the incident. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin reportedly at first told Maine Sen. Angus King that the driver had attempted to use his car as a weapon — the same lie used to justify shooting 52-year-old Lorenzo Salgado Araujo dead just one week ago in Houston and Renee Good months before that. ICE has made the same bogus claim in a number of recorded incidents involving agents shooting into moving cars.

In a contradictory but equally baseless statement, the Department of Homeland Security claimed on X that the “vehicle attempted to flee the scene and, fearing for public safety, an officer discharged his weapon.” An eyewitness told reporters that before the victim died, his face covered in blood, he could be heard saying, “I tried to stop.”

Like Salgado Araujo in Texas last week, Durán Guerrero had not been the target of ICE operations. This is not to say that either death would be any more justified had ICE been seeking the men for arrest; no immigration violation should carry a death sentence. But both shootings highlight the agency’s pattern of violent racial profiling and reckless indifference to human life.

Thousands protested in Houston following Salgado Araujo’s killing. Immediately after news spread of the Maine shooting, protesters took to the streets and rushed to Republican Sen. Susan Collins’s Biddeford office. Collins cast a deciding vote in the Senate last month to deliver a staggering $70 billion in funding over three years to ICE and Border Patrol. “Vote her out,” the demonstrators chanted.

Every elected official who is complicit in this border regime should be ousted. It should be a minimum requirement for Democrats running for Congress that they commit to abolishing ICE. Wherever there is legislative, municipal, city, or local power to do so, political leaders must combat ICE with more than words or face organized pressure campaigns and removal.

Following the high-profile ICE killings of Good and Alex Pretti, two Minnesotans, in January, people took to the streets nationwide. Minneapolis residents responded with work stoppages, blockades, and powerful community resistance. The need to escalate organized resistance to ICE nationwide is again all too clear. Community mutual aid networks, neighborhood defenses, mass strikes, and major disruptive protests are as necessary as ever. But all such actions face the challenge of sustainability when opposing President Donald Trump’s endlessly resourced deportation machine.

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Durán Guerrero’s killing in Maine is the eighth fatal ICE shooting in Trump’s second term, according to The Trace. At least fifty-two people have died in ICE custody over that same period, which Human Rights Watch called a “soaring mortality rate.” Meanwhile, ICE is further scaling up its quotidian activities to serve Trump’s project of ethnic cleansing: In just five days at the end of June, ICE agents quietly made a reported 10,000 arrests.

The vile spectacle of city-based ICE surges, which were the agency’s calling card under former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, have given way to dispersed but constant round-ups. The terror for immigrant communities is no less acute; the difficulty when it comes to fighting back has only sharpened. It is high time that anti-ICE action receives more robust political and institutional support.

It is not sufficient, for example, for New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani to assert that the New York Police Department does not coordinate with ICE for deportation operations if the NYPD is dispatched to clear streets for ICE vehicles to travel through disruption-free. It is not enough to have a court order in place barring ICE from making arrests at New York City immigration courts if that order isn’t enforced. “Sanctuary city” has to be a label with meaning beyond Trump using it as a slur against blue cities. It’s a promise, one that must also entail taking action against the racist municipal policing under which immigrants suffer and antifascist organizing is targeted.

Houston Mayor John Whitmire vowed last week to “pursue an independent and transparent” local investigation into the ICE shooting in his city. He also said that the federal government has taken control of the evidence, making such an investigation extremely difficult. The idea that the federal government will hold its jackbooted thugs accountable is, of course, utterly laughable.

But so, too, is the idea that an investigation by Houston or Texas law enforcement will deliver justice to Salgado Araujo’s loved ones, let alone the millions of people whose lives are being destroyed by the American deportation machine. An independent investigation into ICE killings is not even the floor, it’s the basement.

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As the federal government expands extremist efforts to criminalize and imprison antifascist activists and ICE watchers as terrorists, political leaders — especially those who claim to represent so-called sanctuary cities — must step up to support and protect targeted organizers. It is a disgrace, albeit not a surprise, that Democratic leaders have not spoken out against the unprecedented, draconian sentences — ranging from 30 to 100 years in federal prison — handed down to eight people in Texas over an ICE detention center protest.

The struggle against Trump’s border regime will continue to be led by immigrant communities and their neighbors. The front-line work on the neighborhood level remains the most crucial — from street to street, workplace to workplace, building to building — and in collective efforts against detention centers and in the direct surveillance of and confrontation with ICE agents on the ground. No work of legislation or policy can supplant that. But as the stakes for taking part in anti-ICE work heighten, as immigrant round-ups grow and the death counts climb, it’s high time that Democrats join the work of abolishing ICE with everything at their disposal — or be replaced.

Update: July 16, 2026
The article and photo caption have been updated to reflect that Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero’s age was 25; several initial news stories listed him as 26 after the Colombian Embassy reported an erroneous age.

The post How ICE Arrests Went Quiet — and Got Even More Deadly appeared first on The Intercept.

The increase followed the collapse last week of the ceasefire with Iran amid tit-for-tat attacks between the countries.

As hostilities escalated, Iran called for revenge on the U.S. for killing Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at the outset of the war in February.

The numbers for both wounded and dead U.S. service members in the war increased on Monday, according to the Defense Department.

Iran claimed Sunday that it “demolished the U.S. Army’s surface-to-surface missile base” in Kuwait, killing three American military personnel.

U.S. Central Command responded: “There are zero reports of U.S. service member deaths or injuries in the region.”

On Monday, however, the Pentagon’s Iran war death toll, which was last updated Friday, went up by one.

Pentagon statistics show a sailor died in what was provisionally deemed a “non-hostile” fatality with a “pending” caveat, meaning it could later be revised to a hostile death.

It marks the first U.S. fatality on the Pentagon rolls since March. It was not immediately clear whether the new death listed occurred in Kuwait.

The U.S. Office of the Secretary of Defense, CENTCOM, and the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Ceasefire Collapse

Iran’s military said on Monday that it launched strikes aimed at American military targets in Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman. Hours before, U.S. forces attacked Iran in response to strikes on commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz.

President Donald Trump renewed his past protection-racket threats to seize the Strait and begin charging a 20 percent toll on all goods passing through it.

“We’re gonna keep the strait, and we’ll probably run it,” he said on Monday. “We’re gonna get paid for guarding it, a lot of money.”

Following a week of public funeral ceremonies for Khamenei, his son and successor Mojtaba Khamenei called for retribution for the late supreme leader’s assassination.

“We pledge that we will avenge your pure blood and the blood of all those martyred in these two wars from the criminal and disgraced killers,” he said. “This revenge is the demand of our nation, and it must certainly be carried out.”

In addition to killing Khamenei, Trump’s war on Iran has killed thousands of Iranian civilians, including more than 150 — most of them children — in an attack on an elementary school.

U.S. Death Toll

The official number of dead and wounded U.S. personnel stands at 428, a more than 11 percent increase since the first ceasefire between the U.S. and Iran was struck on April 8.

Reporting by The Intercept previously found that the Pentagon’s official count of dead and wounded personnel is a gross undercount, stemming from what one U.S. government official called a “casualty cover-up.” The Defense Casualty Analysis System, or DCAS, which tracks “deceased, wounded, ill or injured” service members for Congress and the president, is missing hundreds of known casualties.

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The number of casualties in the DCAS system fluctuates from time to time. On Monday, the number of U.S. deaths during Operation Epic Fury, the military’s name for the campaign in Iran, increased by one, to 14 total.

For a short time in May, however, the count was already at 14 before dropping back to 13, without explanation. Following the drop, DCAS listed 13 hostile and non-hostile U.S. deaths.

The Pentagon list of the dead is missing Maj. Sorffly Davius, a signals and communication officer with the New York Army National Guard who reportedly died of a sudden illness in Kuwait on March 6.

Davius’s death was widely acknowledged even as it was excluded from the official count. Rep. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., spoke about him during a memorial service and Gen. Dan Caine, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, publicly recognized Davius as a fallen service member.

Wounded U.S. Personnel

On Monday, the number of U.S. wounded from the Iran war rose by one, to 414.

Like the official U.S. death toll, it has fluctuated, rising from 385 to 428 during a pause in hostilities in April. Later that month, the number suddenly declined by 15 without public comment from the Defense Department, leading to questions about manipulation of the figures or incompetence at the Pentagon.

While DCAS provides a running tally of “non-hostile” deaths — meaning those who died from accidents or by illness — it doesn’t include “non-hostile” injuries.

The DCAS figures show that 65 Navy personnel have been wounded in action. More than 200 sailors injured during a fire aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford in March are, however, missing from the tally.

The post Iran Claims to Kill 3 U.S. Service Members in Kuwait appeared first on The Intercept.

The crypto industry is putting hopes for its revival in a long-awaited bill, under debate in the Senate, called the Clarity Act, which could open the doors to Wall Street investments.

But there is one thing ironically standing in its way: Trump’s giant crypto haul.

The naked self-enrichment has turned crypto into a prime example of presidential corruption.

The result is that even crypto’s most staunch Democratic allies will find it hard to back a crypto wishlist like the Clarity Act, which will need support from at least seven Senate Democrats to overcome a filibuster.

Take crypto stalwarts like centrist Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., the chair of the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, who issued a statement demanding that any crypto bill include ethics provisions to stop Trump’s crypto profiteering.

With the industry poised to spend tens of millions more on the midterm elections, however, Gillibrand and other centrist Democrats may yet be tempted to sign off on window dressing instead of a crackdown, said crypto critics.

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“Sen. Gillibrand and too many of her colleagues prioritize and spend enormous time pushing crypto’s special interest agenda, which is to get legitimized by the weakest possible law and regulated by the smallest, most underfunded, least capable, and most capture-able financial regulator,” Dennis Kelleher, the CEO of the nonprofit Better Markets, said in a statement last Monday. “That is presumably because the crypto industry has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in campaigns to buy friends and attempt to get crypto’s special interest agenda enacted.”

Gillibrand has dismissed those criticisms. In a statement of her own last week, she expressed her desire to both advance the bill and crack down on Trump.

“We cannot let self-dealing destroy an opportunity to strengthen consumer protections, crack down on illicit finance, and expand economic opportunity for the millions of Americans our financial system has left behind,” Gillibrand said. “The time to act is now — and that must include ethics reforms that prohibit members of Congress, the president, and their spouses from cashing in on their office.”

Declining Sector Hangs Hopes on Clarity Act

For crypto, the numbers are sobering. Bitcoin soared from roughly $60,000 just before Trump’s election to about twice that by October of last year. Since then, it and other digital assets have cratered. Bitcoin now trades back around $63,000 a token.

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The market’s gyrations did not stop Trump and his family members from profiting handsomely off the $TRUMP meme coin and other ventures. His roughly $1.4 billion of crypto profits last year meant that he cleared more than the largest publicly traded company in the industry, Coinbase, according to crypto commentator Scott Melker. The White House has defended Trump’s crypto windfall as legal, a point even his critics concede is likely true.

Crypto’s fortunes now appear to hinge largely on whether Congress passes the Clarity Act, which is intended to create an overall regulatory framework for the industry.

“If the bill passed, you would probably see a bump for the industry,” said Mark Hays, the associate director for cryptocurrency and financial technology at Americans for Financial Reform and Demand Progress. “So much of crypto rides on sentiment, and if the bill were passed and signed into law, you would likely see an increase in prices just based on that sentiment alone.”

One sign of how much of the industry is placing its bets on Congress came in a recent quarterly earnings call held by Coinbase. Analysts asked the company’s executives several times how the Clarity Act would affect their bottom line. The company’s executives said that it could mean that Wall Street, which has been reluctant to dive headlong into the industry, will finally start to spend on crypto.

Passing the law, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said, would “just unlock a lot of institutional capital that’ll flow into the space broadly.”

That is one of the outcomes that crypto skeptics fear most. If crypto becomes integrated with the economy rather than a speculative sideshow, they say, it risks taking down the entire system in a crash.

Democrats Holding the Keys

The only thing standing between crypto and its top priority are Senate Democrats. The House of Representatives, where crypto needs only a bare majority, already overwhelmingly passed last year a version of the Clarity Act with Democratic support. In the Senate, however, there are enough Democrats to block passage of the law with a filibuster. The question is whether they will.

Crypto needs to win over seven Democrats to beat a filibuster, or eight if Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., remains absent due to illness.

Progressives such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., have expressed broad concerns that the law could lead to the next financial crash. Centrists like Gillibrand, meanwhile, have voiced narrower concerns. One of their biggest hang-ups with the legislation, they say, is the question of whether it will rein in Trump’s crypto ventures.

Gillibrand occupies a powerful position in the party: She serves as the caucus’s top fundraiser as chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. And she has positioned herself as a leader in Clarity Act negotiations, despite not serving on the relevant committees.

Asked last month about the negotiations over the bill at the Aspen Ideas Festival — a cozy gathering of politicos and business executives in the Colorado mountain town — Gillibrand said she was working hard to overcome the ethics obstacle.

“We’re working hand in glove with Republicans,” Gillibrand said. “We’re negotiating with staff from the White House so that everyone is clear about what the bill is going to say, and we’re going to do our best to land that plane.”

Gillibrand’s public statements have repeatedly telegraphed her desire to see some version of the legislation passed. Gillibrand says it is urgent to get consumer protections on the books. Observers say the urgency may also be motivated by the industry’s massive campaign war chest.

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Over one-third of the corporate money spent on this year’s elections so far has come from the crypto industry, according to a recent report from the nonprofit watchdog group Public Citizen. That amounts to $189 million, including $82 million routed through a single industry super PAC called Fairshake, which is backed by Coinbase.

Rick Claypool, the research director for Public Citizen’s president’s office, said that as chair of the DSCC, Gillibrand is keenly aware of crypto’s campaign spending potential.

“I’m sure it’s top of mind,” Claypool told The Intercept. “Part of the whole goal of the corporate crypto spending is to make sure that lawmakers in general, but also in particular those who are in fundraising, leadership positions, think of the industry before they think of voters.”

Other Democrats tipped as maybes on the bill include Sen. Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland and Ruben Gallego of Arizona, who last month nudged other Democrats on the banking committee to vote for a draft of the bill, along with a swath of the caucus’s more centrist members.

What Ethics?

It’s unclear what sort of ethics restrictions Republicans and Democrats have been working on behind closed doors.

The final text of the bill has yet to drop, despite a promise from Bitcoin evangelist Sen. Cynthia Lummis, R-Wy., that it would be released over the July 4 weekend. The industry’s deadlines for passing the law keep slipping. Its best chance may be to secure passage before the Senate leaves August 10 for an extended period of work in their home states.

Hays said senators should ignore the industry’s artificial deadlines. His group recently released a poll suggesting that most voters are concerned about the crypto industry’s influence in Washington.

“Yes, Democrats are looking over their shoulder, but I think they should be reading the room and saying, ‘Wait a second, is this really a priority?’” Hays said. “Or, is this the kind of pay-to-play politics that have gotten so many voters frustrated in the first place?”

Correction: July 13, 2026, 8:59 a.m. ET
An earlier version of this article stated that Donald Trump disclosed his $1.4 billion in income from crypto last week; it was disclosed on June 30.

The post Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand Wants to Save Crypto — But Trump Windfall Is a Political Obstacle appeared first on The Intercept.

Documents obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that technology from the Virginia-based startup Anomaly 6 has been used to assist the “Anomalous Health Incidents Cross Functional Team,” the Pentagon’s official Havana syndrome investigatory task force. That group studies a cluster of strange symptoms claimed by personnel from U.S. spy agencies, the State Department, and elsewhere in the federal government.

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In 2022, The Intercept revealed that Anomaly 6 had used a provocative demonstration of its surveillance prowess in a closed-door business pitch. The company, which purchases bulk cellular location data harvested from millions of unwitting smartphone users around the world, showed a potential customer that its data stores were so vast and accurate that it could pinpoint the movements of employees of both the CIA and NSA, tracking them as they commuted between their homes and their respective agencies headquarters. It was a remarkable demonstration of the advanced capabilities of private sector surveillance brokers, who lean on unscrupulous smartphone apps and advertisers that indiscriminately share and sell users’ location data.

For any military, the appeal of this technology is obvious, and the Pentagon has used commercial device tracking for years. Although Anomaly 6 previously marketed its wares by showing how it could spy on fellow Americans, the pitch also showed how the company could track a foreign adversary’s naval assets abroad, for example.

It’s not clear on what basis the U.S. Air Force Concepts, Development, and Management Office chose Anomaly 6 for its Havana syndrome investigation; federal records note the contract is worth nearly $6 million and set to run through September.

Anomaly 6 and the Air Force did not respond to a request for comment.

The Air Force redacted most of the document before releasing it to The Intercept, providing only fragments of information about how Anomaly 6 is help investigate “anomalous health incidents.” The contract, described in public procurement records as Project Yellowfin, notes that the Anomalous Health Incidents Cross-Functional Team will make use of the company’s “expertise in location intelligence” to “identify actors and activities of interest,” and that the “Contractor shall produce data visualization products capable of being utilized as stand-alone brief materials by decision-makers and senior leaders. These products will enable briefers to highlight geographical distribution, temporal patterns, patterns of life, and interconnectivity of events and actors.”

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This reference to actors of interest may relate to the intensely held belief by Havana syndrome patients that their suffering is due to a covert energy-based attack by a foreign government. In its 2022 pitch, Anomaly 6 singled out its ability to track the movements of Chinese and Russian military personnel, both countries that have been implicated in hypothesized Havana syndrome schemes.

Last year, the U.S. intelligence community released a report that stated most of its constituent agencies believe it is highly unlikely the symptoms are the result of actions by a national adversary.

When asked if Anomaly 6 location data had been used to investigate this proposed nexus or contributed to the intelligence report, the Air Force did not respond. In February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the reorganization of the Anomalous Health Incidents Cross-Functional Team, now a division of the Office of the Undersecretary of War for Research and Engineering, helmed by former Uber executive Emil Michael. Michael’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

The post Company That Bragged It Could Track U.S. Spies Hired to Investigate “Havana Syndrome” appeared first on The Intercept.

In 2023, Israeli settlers took firearms and bulldozers to the village, destroying the school and other buildings and displacing dozens of Bedouin Palestinian residents from their homes. 

While standing amid the rubble, one of Khanna’s staffers spotted an Israeli settler wearing a large smile on his face with an assault rifle draped around his shoulder, peering at the group through a broken window.

Khanna and his small delegation of his staffer Cameron Kasky, their driver, and a security guard hurried back into their van, Khanna and Kasky, a Parkland school shooting survivor and former congressional candidate, said in interviews with The Intercept.   

Settlers had parked their car directly in front of them, blocking their exit along a narrow dirt road that juts from Highway 60 with rocky slopes and dry grass on both sides.

Over the next 75 to 90 minutes, Israeli settlers, who carried what appeared to be M4 assault rifles, intimidated and harassed Khanna and his group, who felt their fear rising from inside the van. The settlers proceeded to menace the Americans: They prevented the group from leaving the village, brandished their rifles, laughed and yelled taunts at the group, kicked the van’s tires, and wiped down the windows with their hands to gawk inside, recording the group and snapping photos. Khanna and Kasky said their security aide identified the men as members of the Hilltop Youth, an extremist settler group with a history of violent raids, which prompted more concern among the delegation. 

“It’s the most powerless I have felt,” Khanna told The Intercept. “They paraded around the van, laughing, smiling, brandishing the M4s. I have not been treated that way in any other country I’ve traveled to, including China. In any place that I have traveled, it’s the most arrogant and humiliating treatment of American citizens I have endured — I was quite shocked.”  

Two white pickup trucks later pulled up and out stepped more armed settlers, according to video and footage reviewed by The Intercept. Later, another vehicle arrived carrying a group of four men and women dressed in green military uniforms, which their security aide identified as Israeli military, Khanna and Kasky recalled. Rather than attempting to resolve the situation, the soldiers joined the group, laughing and talking with the settlers, and at one point, smoking cigarettes together, they said. 

Even after the security aide identified the group as an American delegation with a member of Congress, the settlers and soldiers did not budge. “The security person said this is the most concerned he’s ever been, and he’s done tours for decades,” Khanna recalled.

In response to a request for comment by The Intercept, the Israeli military acknowledged that “a report was received regarding Israeli civilians who were unlawfully blocking the vehicles of foreign nationals and members of the media.” The statement directly contradicted Khanna’s and Kasky’s account, with the military claiming soldiers had helped clear the group of settlers.

“Upon receiving the report, IDF troops were dispatched to the scene, quickly dispersed the Israeli civilians, and reopened the blocked road. The IDF soldiers operating in the area did not take part in blocking the road,” the military said, adding, “The identity of the armed individual is currently under review.”

Kasky, who joined Khanna’s office in January following his own visit to the West Bank and has been working with Khanna on his Israel and Palestine policy, said he was afraid the incident would turn more violent, recalling accounts of settler attacks.

“I was sitting there like, ‘Are the Hilltop Youth about to blow a bunch of holes in our vehicle?’” Kasky remembered saying to himself. “I’m a Jewish school shooting survivor, and I’m sitting here looking at Jewish kids who have the eyes of a school shooter. So it was a very surreal experience for me.” 

Harassment from Israeli settlers and military has long been a regular occurrence for Palestinians in the West Bank, who face severe restrictions on daily movement throughout the territory. Palestinians are subject to a military court system where the accused lack due process rights and thousands are imprisoned indefinitely, oftentimes without charge. Israeli forces and settlers have killed more than 1,100 Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7, 2023. That figure includes a growing number of Palestinian Americans and other American citizens.

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Harassment of foreign delegations in the West Bank is more rare. In September 2023, European Union diplomats reported harassment by Israeli settlers during a visit. In May 2025, Israeli soldiers fired warning shots toward a delegation of diplomats visiting Jenin, which included officials from the United Kingdom, France, Canada, and Ireland. The last reported instance of harassment toward an American delegation was in 2015, when settlers hurled rocks at diplomats investigating reports of settler attacks in the area.

Members of Congress have visited the West Bank in the past, but Khanna’s run-in with settlers is the first known instance of direct harassment by Israeli settlers toward a sitting U.S. lawmaker. 

During the incident, Khanna said he phoned an official in the U.S. Embassy, which urged the group not to escalate the situation. After more than an hour, the group of settlers and soldiers suddenly drove off. Shortly after, Israeli police arrived and instructed the group not to return under threat of arrest. 

“I thought to myself, if they can do this to an American member of Congress and to American citizens, imagine what life is like for ordinary Palestinians who do not have a national platform, who can’t just pick up the phone and call the American embassy,” Khanna said.

The recent trip wasn’t Khanna’s first visit to the West Bank. In 2022, Khanna joined a delegation of lawmakers, led by Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and visited with leaders in Israel and Palestinian leaders in Ramallah. Khanna’s remarks praising Israel’s tech industry drew criticism from pro-Palestine advocates, who at the time accused the lawmaker of using the visit as a “photo op” to “whitewash Israeli apartheid.”    

Khanna had long branded himself as an anti-war figure. In 2004, he ran an unsuccessful bid for Congress centered around his opposition to the Iraq War. And after being elected to Congress in 2016, Khanna would help spearhead an effort to halt U.S. military support to Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen’s civil war. 

Israel, however, remained a blindspot. But since the October 7 Hamas attacks and the start of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Khanna has evolved from a pro-Israel Democrat who regularly voted to send military aid to Israel into one of its staunchest opponents, especially as he gears up for a potential 2028 presidential run. 

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Khanna is a co-sponsor to the Block the Bombs bill and in April said he opposes the transfer of all U.S. arms — both offensive and so-called defensive weapons — to Israel. Last month, he attempted to strike a portion of the National Defense Authorization Act that seeks to codify Israel’s joint development of weapons with the U.S. and said he would also urge senators to oppose the pro-Israel proposal. Khanna is also a co-sponsor on the West Bank Violence Prevention Act, which seeks to codify sanctions on Israeli settlers, and in January, introduced a resolution opposing the expansion of settlements. In his war powers resolution against the Iran war, he said in June 2025, “U.S. involvement in Israel’s war with Iran is a red line.”

After the run-in with Israeli settlers, the congressman put a finer point on the need to stop arming Israel.

“We’re supplying them the M4s that they’re using to detain American citizens,” he said. “We’re supplying them the weapons that they’re using to kill Palestinian Americans. We’re supplying them the weapons that they’re using to commit terror on the Palestinian population in the West Bank.
It is simply inhumane, and the United States needs to not just sanction these extremist settlers — we need to demand that the IDF start to demolish the outposts in the West Bank.”

Khanna said he still differentiates between settler outposts and larger, long-standing Israeli settlement communities that function as suburban neighborhoods. While he believes outposts should be dismantled, he said the larger settlements should be subject to a land swap with Palestinians as part of a broader political deal to grant Palestinians sovereignty. Yet he still opposed the expansion of the larger settlements and said U.S. funds should not be used to construct such developments.

As Congress took its summer recess, Khanna took the three-day visit to the West Bank this week at Kasky’s urging. The American journalist Jasper Nathaniel, who extensively covers the West Bank and facilitated Kasky’s previous visit, had invited Khanna to visit and connected the group with local Palestinian residents, businesses, activists, and leaders. 

When Khanna and Kasky landed in Tel Aviv on Tuesday, Kasky said Israeli airport security took him to a back office where officers questioned him for 40 minutes while showing him a printed screenshot of his Twitter profile where he had previously written in his bio “Stop funding genocide” and a separate printout of a tweet by a pro-Israel user who had spotted Kasky at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport in December 2025. The officials continued to hold Kasky despite Khanna identifying him as a part of his office.

After his release, Kasky said he received notification that the Israeli government had revoked his travel visa.

“I’m probably never going to get into the country again,” he said.

During the wide-ranging trip, the delegation spoke with Palestinian shopkeepers in Hebron, who reported harassment from neighboring Israelis who from the upper floors hurled rotten vegetables and acid, and urinated on their stores below. Mayors of Bethlehem, Beit Sahour, and Beit Jala told Khanna of water shortages and the Israeli military-imposed restrictions on Palestinians from drilling new wells, while Israeli settlers enjoy unfettered access to water. Khanna met with the relatives of Amer Mohammad Saada Rabee, the 14-year-old Palestinian American from New Jersey who was shot and killed by Israeli soldiers in April. Other Palestinian residents, including American citizens, spoke of settlers destroying their cars and raiding their homes. The brother of Awdah Hathaleen, who was shot dead by the Israeli settler Yinon Levi in July 2025, told Khanna how he still sees Levi roam free as Israeli prosecutors mull whether to charge him. 

On Wednesday, the same day of the incident with Israeli settlers, Khanna’s group had been held up for more than an hour by Israeli officials in Masafer Yatta, where the Israeli government constructed a large metal gate on the only road in and out of the area. Khanna, who is Hindu and of Indian descent, said he has never been more acutely aware of his identity as when he was in Palestine, with Israeli guards constantly asking about his race and religion. 

Khanna — who is a ranking member of the House Armed Services subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Innovation Technology, and Information Systems — urged other members of Congress, especially other ranking members in foreign policy committees, to also visit the West Bank in Palestinian-led visits. 

He said he would raise the issue of the settler incident with the State Department and his colleagues in Congress.    

“I am convinced that the most pro-Israel candidate — who may dispute my characterization of genocide by legal means, who may disagree with me in my belief of a Palestinian state, who may argue with me about Israel taking preventive measures, in their view, to minimize civilian casualties — even such a person, if they spent one day in the West Bank,” Khanna said, “if they visited the Palestinians side of Hebron, if they visited Um al-Khair, if they visited Palestinian towns and villages in Areas A and B, if they saw the settler’s outpost, they would conclude that it is apartheid, that it is unjust, that it is a perversion of Judaism in any form of civilized human existence.” 

The post Armed Israeli Settlers Detained Ro Khanna. He Wants Their Illegal Outposts Demolished. appeared first on The Intercept.

Last spring, President Donald Trump issued the “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order, taking aim at federal parks, monuments, museums, and sites that have cast the United States’s “founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.” On the Fourth of July this year, the White House published its 162-page “Saving America’s Story,” attacking the Smithsonian Institution directly for “anti-white activism,” “illegal alien activism,” “transgender activism,” and more broadly for adopting “an ideological framework that no longer treats the American story as a shared national inheritance to be taught or celebrated, but as a political instrument to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.”

“We’re in this moment where we are fighting over how America tells its past,” journalist Rebecca Nagle tells The Intercept Briefing. “It can be scary in a moment when it feels like the stakes are really high to really interrogate the myths that we all carry, that we all hold about who our country is and where it started because it’s really tempting to want to think, ‘OK, if we just wind the clock back 10 years, if we just go back a few election cycles, we’ll be back to a democracy that’s strong, that’s stable, that’s solid, and we’ll all be fine.’ It’s much more scary to say, ‘Oh, actually, if we want to talk about where authoritarianism comes from in the United States, it’s actually at the foundation.’”

As the United States celebrates its 250th birthday this year, the Trump administration has been ramping up its efforts to erase not just the dark parts of U.S. history but also the contributions of basically anyone who isn’t a white, Christian man. That project has included taking concrete steps to remove all traces of the history of people who don’t fit that description, Black people, immigrants, civil rights advocates, women and gay and trans people — including the first people to live on this land: Native Americans.

This week on the podcast, Nagle speaks to host Akela Lacy about her new podcast series “First America,” which examines how Native people have been largely written out of the American story, and how that story informs the current political crisis in the U.S.

“One of the big claims that the series makes is that the foundation is in itself is a myth. Because at the same time that our founders were building a democracy, they were also building an empire. The way that you govern an empire, the way that you govern other people by force, is not democratic,” says Nagle, a citizen of Cherokee Nation. “This identity crisis we’re having around authoritarianism and democracy, and how could authoritarianism be sneaking into our democracy — what we argue is that it’s actually always been there.”

“A lot of what is happening now — it’s not new, it’s not un-American, it’s not unprecedented. Sometimes it’s not even unconstitutional! It’s actually just taking these parts of our government that for a long time most Americans didn’t know was there or didn’t really think about, and Trump is just pulling it into the center,” says Nagle. 

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept. 

The United States is celebrating its 250th birthday this year. 

President Donald Trump kicked off festivities by hosting a UFC cage match on the White House lawn to also celebrate his 80th birthday. 

[Horns playing]

CBS: President Trump and UFC President and CEO Dana White kicked off the historic event that started with the national anthem and a joint Air Force and Navy flyover.

VO: From the south lawn of the White House. 

[Clip ends]

AL: Then there was Trump’s two-week-long Great American State Fair in D.C., which aside from the Fourth of July, ended up being a giant bust. 

[Clips montage]

MS Now: Donald Trump’s long-awaited Freedom 250 Great American State Fair went off with a whimper this weekend with what looked like tens, dozens of people showing up for the event. 

FT: Donald Trump has said that this event is packed with happy people loving it, but it is 6 p.m. in the middle of the week, and there is hardly anyone here. 

MS Now: This was the scene on Tuesday when there were actually more people in the band on stage than there were in the crowd watching them.

AL: Meanwhile, the Trump administration has been ramping up its efforts to erase not just the dark parts of U.S. history, but also the contributions of basically anyone who isn’t a white, Christian man. That project has included taking concrete steps to remove all traces of the history of people who don’t fit that description: Black people, immigrants, civil rights advocates, women and gay and trans people — including the first people to live on this land: Native Americans.

After reviewing nearly 2,000 flagged materials from National Parks and Monuments, The Guardian found that one Trump executive order resulted in the targeted removal of signs about “Native American history, slavery, the climate crisis, and the civil rights movement.”   

Native American history is already poorly understood or misunderstood in the U.S. A new podcast series called “First America” examines how Native people have been largely written out of the American story. Host and creator Rebecca Nagle, a citizen of Cherokee Nation, argues our current political moment is 250 years in the making.

[Clip plays]

Actor: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

Nick Estes: The Declaration, which is full of these beautifully rendered sentences and paragraphs about Enlightenment ideals, does also have this darker history to it.

Actor: The merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare is undistinguished destruction of all ages …

Nick Estes: If we don’t understand the full context in which our nation was founded, we won’t understand the full context in which our nation now finds itself.

Rebecca Nagle: So, it’s been 250 years since 1776. How’s this democracy of ours going?

[Ambient sounds. Clip ends]

AL: Rebecca Nagle is an award-winning advocate and writer focused on advancing Native rights and ending violence against Native women. You might remember Nagle from her hit podcast “This Land,” which focused on treaty rights and tribal sovereignty in Oklahoma. She joins me now.

Rebecca Nagle, welcome to The Intercept Briefing. 

Rebecca Nagle: Thank you so much for having me.

AL: Before we jump in, I want to let our listeners know that we’re also going to drop the first episode of “First America” into our feed so you can listen.

Rebecca, you have a new podcast series out, called “First America.” In the first episode, you open with this scene where you and history professor Nick Estes visit Fort Snelling in Minnesota. It’s January 2026. Set the scene for us? Why did you start the series there?

RN: Nick is a citizen of the Lower Brule Sioux Tribe and a historian. We were visiting Fort Snelling, which was a concentration camp in the 1860s during the Dakota Wars.

Dakota families were held there as actually part of a broader effort to force all Dakota people to leave the state of Minnesota, and that effort included death marches, it included open-air prisons, it included mass executions. It was extremely violent. We were there, actually, really to just see how the site talked about it.

The site doesn’t really know, it seemed like, how to integrate the history. There’s this giant replica for it that school kids visit that’s mostly celebrating the military history of the site. Then in this sort of tucked away corner, if you walk down a long, snowy path, there’s a memorial to the victims of this chapter of genocide.

The history of the fort is not really integrated in the way that Minnesotans tell the history at that site. While we’re there that day, Nick got a call from his wife that ICE had just shot and killed someone; it was the day that ICE killed Renee Good. The next day, I was actually back at Fort Snelling — this time not to visit the historic fort, but actually for a protest.

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So where ICE is headquartered in Minneapolis is on the Fort Snelling campus. There’s the historic fort, but then there’s this broader Fort Snelling campus. ICE is there because it’s federal land, and it’s federal land because it was once a military reservation. So what you see is the federal government doing the same thing — rounding people up and detaining them — in the same place.

When I first started this project, I thought I was just making a history podcast. I thought I was talking about the founding and how Native people have been left out of that story and correcting the record. The project actually started as conversations between me and Nick about how Native people are left out of American history and the American story.

And then this thing kept happening where I would be somewhere learning about America’s past, and the same thing would happen in our present. What I realized is that this history — that as a country we don’t know how to talk about, that we haven’t reckoned with — the history that we keep in a memorial that’s tucked away in a corner, that history is why the present moment is happening.

AL: I also want to mention for our listeners, Nick Estes has written some really great reporting for The Intercept, which I encourage people to check out. 

We’re talking about your series a few days after the Fourth of July weekend, and the United States is still celebrating its 250-year birthday which dates back to, obviously, the Fourth of July signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, a document which you dive into in the podcast.

But I will quote for our listeners who might not have it on hand. The Declaration reads, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” while also describing Native Americans as “merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.”

It’s well known that this and many other contradictions exist in our founding document, but why was this important for you to underscore here? What does it tell us both about our history, but also about today?

Rebecca Nagle: One thing that is important is the meaning of the word “savages,” and what does it mean for our founders to call Native people savages?

We all know the part of the Declaration of Independence that we’re taught in school — that all men are created equal; life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. But alongside those Enlightenment ideals, the founders included really their deep hatred for Indigenous people. The word “savages” has a really specific meaning in the late 1700s, which is that there are societies and groups of people that are seen as civilized, as deserving of human rights, and then there are people that are something less than human, and those are savages.

It’s a term that at the time carries a lot of meaning, and the founders are saying, “We’re not going to extend these Enlightenment ideals to these Indigenous people, to these savages.” The other reason that it’s really important is because it was important to our founders, right?

This isn’t just a throwaway line in the Declaration of Independence. Many historians think that the Declaration of Independence has an order. A lot of people, we know the preamble, but we don’t actually know what the majority of the document is. So the majority of the document is just this long list of grievances, and it’s basically the founders’ reasons for why they’re rebelling against the Crown.

A simple way I like to explain it is that it’s almost like a breakup letter — at least like a bad breakup, where you tell the person everything that they did wrong. The founders are doing that to King George, where they’re just like, “And you were a jerk, and you left your laundry everywhere.” It’s kind of like that list.

A lot of historians think that that list has an order and that it starts with smaller things and then ends with the things that the founders were most upset about.

The last grievance — the 27th grievance — is this line about “merciless Indian savages,” and there’s a whole history to why that line is in the document.

That history tells us a different story than the one we’ve all grown up knowing: It was about taxation and representation, and this is why the Revolution happened. This is what the founders were fighting for. What we see in that last grievance and the history behind it is that actually one of the main motivating factors for the Revolution itself was hunger for more Indigenous land.

The colonists wanted to expand west. The king of England was telling them no. They were really angry about that. They did a lot of different things, but they also put that anger in the Declaration of Independence. To me, it just goes to how deeply Native people are erased from the American story. It’s not like you have to rifle through Thomas Jefferson’s personal papers to be like, “Oh, look here. He said here in this journal that he was mad about Indigenous people.” They put it right there in our country’s most famous document. But somehow as Americans, we don’t know this story.

AL: We’re talking about this in the U.S. particularly when it comes to the “founders.” As you mentioned, most people don’t know that the first president, George Washington, was a land speculator interested in seizing Indian land. Can you tell us a little bit more about that history?

RN: For people who don’t know, and it’s not just George Washington, a lot of the gentry men of this era —

AL: The good men.

RN: — are involved in this business called land speculation. Actually George Washington’s family did it. It was a pretty well-established practice. But basically what they would do is they would buy land that either England and then later the United States claimed in this racist, abstract way where they would sail somewhere and plant a flag and be like, “This is our land.” But it’s still governed and controlled on the ground by Indigenous people.

They would buy that land, and then like a modern-day real estate developer would flip it, they would flip it. Once Indigenous people were forced off that land, they would sell the land to settlers for a profit. Sometimes they would sell the land while Indigenous people were still living there.

What happened is in the 1760s, there was this Indigenous uprising where a group led by an Odawa chief named Pontiac sacked a bunch of British forts.

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So Britain, in a very loose way, claims all this land in the Great Lakes region. The way they claim that land on the ground is by having these forts; they’re these military outposts. And Indigenous nations sack a bunch of them.

The Crown is looking at fighting a very expensive war in North America. It’s just been fighting this big global war, sometimes called the French and Indian War, sometimes called the Seven Years’ War, and it’s broke — the Crown is broke. It doesn’t want to fight another war with Indigenous nations. What the Crown does is it makes this line, this proclamation, issues a royal proclamation, and that royal proclamation draws a line basically down the Appalachian Mountains, and it tells settlers, colonists: “You can live to the east of this line, but everything to the west is reserved for Indigenous nations.”

And what we have is George Washington telling his kinda business guy, “Hey, ignore the proclamation and continue to buy land and speculate in land west of the King’s boundary. We’re not going to follow this law.” We know that the elite didn’t like the Royal Proclamation of 1763, and it also upset regular folks too who felt entitled to more Indigenous land out west.

AL: You’re talking about this project as a way to correct the record, as you said, when it comes to U.S. history and Native peoples. It brings to mind another effort by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones who published “The 1619 Project,” recasting the way we understand how slavery shaped the founding of the country.

There was a massive backlash to that project. I’m curious, have you gotten any pushback on this series in that vein?

RN: Not to the extent that “The 1619 Project” did, by a long shot. 

AL: It would be hard to replicate that. 

RN: Yeah, I also just think we don’t have the visibility of The New York Times. It’s a different cultural moment. There have been a few right-wing websites that have criticized the podcast and perhaps there’ll be more. We’ll see what happens. 

What I will say, broadly speaking, is that we’re in this moment where we are fighting over how America tells its past. That fight is really important, which is also why projects like “The 1619 Project” are really important and are definitely an inspiration for the work we’re doing with First America.

But I think that the fight over who we are as a country, where we come from, how we started — that fight is so bitter because so much power flows from the stories that we tell ourselves. The stories that we tell ourselves as a country about who we are and where we come from, I believe, really shape public policy and public sentiment, and how we have these conversations around law, around equity, today.

What I will say as a Native person is what I often feel like I experience is both sides leaving us out. So we’re left out of the “America was great, 250, rah, rah, rah, the founders were perfect” version of the story, because obviously genocide doesn’t fit easily into that version. But we’re also left out of the more progressive side, too — things like the No Kings protest, or this idea of wanting to go back to this democratic foundation.

One of the big claims that the series makes is that the foundation is in itself is a myth. Because at the same time that our founders were building a democracy, they were also building an empire. The way that you govern an empire, the way that you govern other people by force, is not democratic. So this identity crisis we’re having around authoritarianism and democracy, and how could authoritarianism be sneaking into our democracy — what we argue is that it’s actually always been there. I don’t think people, on both sides of the aisle, I feel like most people aren’t having that conversation.

[Break]

AL: There are a lot of people — similar to the critics of “The 1619 Project” — there are a lot of people out there who might brush off efforts to look into the past, as you’ve mentioned, or say they’re not reflective of how much progress has been made since then on things like racial equality or civil rights.

As you’ve said, this is a history that is uncomfortable for people that they don’t want to talk about. But what’s your response to someone, including potentially people among our listeners, who might have that perspective?

RN: I’ll just give one example. So there’s been a lot of talk around presidential war powers and what power the president has to go to war, to bomb another country without congressional oversight.

There’s been a lot of moments of controversy in Trump’s second term: bombing boats in the Caribbean, abducting the leader of Venezuela, the war with Iran. A lot of people have said, “Oh, the president really shouldn’t be able to do this without congressional approval, without a formal declaration of war.”

The first undeclared war that the U.S. fought was fought under the George Washington administration in the late 1700s. It was a war with Indigenous nations. That war is not only precedent for why presidents can fight wars without congressional oversight, but is also why we have such a big military, is why we even have a central military. At first, we didn’t actually really have a big standing army, and the founders didn’t want one. It also is a big part of why the wars that the U.S. fight is plagued by human rights abuses.

So for people who want to say, in kind of a vague way of, “Oh, we shouldn’t be talking about history. We should be focused on the present” — I don’t think we can understand where we are as a country and how we got here without understanding where we came from. I actually think that so much of our current political crisis is from us not really knowing how our country started, and really what the full structure and character of our government is.

AL: On a similar note, you explore in the series how Native Americans have been erased and left out of the 250-year history of the United States. This has long been the case, as you lay out time and time again, absence in museums, cultural sites, National Parks, et cetera.

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Now we’re living under a president who wants to further erase that history. Why does Donald Trump want to try to further erase Native history, and what does he get out of it? What does anyone get out of that?

RN: I am not an expert in authoritarianism and fascism. We talk about it in relationship to colonialism in the podcast, but what I will say is that an important part of those types of leadership is having a very specific kind of national narrative.

What you see happening right now, whether it’s banning books, changing curriculum, taking down signs at National Parks, is really this effort to have a very specific type of image of the United States and a very specific kind of national narrative that aligns with people’s political goals.

It can be scary in a moment when it feels like the stakes are really high to really interrogate the myths that we all carry, that we all hold about who our country is and where it started because it’s really tempting to want to think, “OK, if we just wind the clock back 10 years, if we just go back a few election cycles, we’ll be back to a democracy that’s strong, that’s stable, that’s solid, and we’ll all be fine.

It’s much more scary to say, “Oh, actually, if we want to talk about where authoritarianism comes from in the United States, it’s actually at the foundation.” That’s really scary to think about, but it’s really important because if we don’t understand how deep it goes, we actually won’t be able to root it out.

It’ll be like chopping the head off of a weed; it’ll just grow back stronger. And I actually think we already saw that between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0. We did the thing where we all voted, Trump was out of office. It was really scary — didn’t look like maybe there would be a peaceful transition of power.

Then the second administration has actually been stronger than the first, and accomplished, I would say, more of their goals. It’s really important for us to get really specific if we want to defeat authoritarianism in America, for us to get really specific about where it comes from, and that process is going to be, for all of us, interrogating some of the myths that we hold about the United States and about U.S. democracy.

AL: Something that’s interesting about this is the question comes up, OK, what is so horrifying about conceding that the founders were calling Indian savages, viewing people as less than human, owning slaves, fighting to keep themselves in the same socioeconomic class at whatever cost? And part of it is potentially that if living in the U.S. today is a product of a document that was rooted in authoritarianism, then do we know what authoritarianism looks like?

Obviously, we didn’t stop it, right? Because we’re now in Trump 2.0, and I think that it’s like we can confront all of these other horrific things in the world day in and day out, like how is this still a conversation that we’re having?

RN: The story we’ve been told about American democracy, it has been ingrained in us so deeply. Then at the same time, the other thing that’s been ingrained in us so deeply is the erasure of the people that our government colonized. We erase what our government did to Native people. Where we do talk about it, it’s in passing mention.

We also erase what our government did to places like Guam and Puerto Rico and the Philippines. So we have this long history of our government ruling through force, like taking over other people’s land by usually through extreme violence and military control.

It’s not just that we did that and it went away — we built a government to do that. We built departments and secretaries and methods and technologies and got better at it as we did it more, really to pull it apart is to see that at the same time that our founders were building a Constitution for themselves, they called it an empire of liberty, but they were also building an empire and an arm of the American government that did not operate with elections, that did not operate through consent, that did not have due process or freedom of speech or freedom of religion.

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At different times in U.S. history, the U.S. federal government has controlled where Native people can live, where Native people can even move their bodies, how we raise our children, if we can have children, what languages we can speak, what religion we can practice, what food we can eat — all against our will. That’s not democracy. Again, you can call it colonialism, you can call it empire, but it’s government by force, which is also another way to say authoritarianism.

What we have to pull apart in this moment is understanding how deep that goes. This is really from the scholarship of a legal scholar that we talk to pretty extensively in the podcast named Maggie Blackhawk, who is at NYU and is Ojibwe.

But what we’re seeing in the present moment is these practices of our government around how much power the president has, how much power the courts have to intervene, that have built up over time. Now we have someone like Trump in office, and oops, we gave the president a ton of power over war when we were fighting Indigenous nations. We gave the president a ton of power over things like the military and foreign affairs.

A lot of what is happening now — it’s not new, it’s not un-American, it’s not unprecedented. Sometimes it’s not even unconstitutional! It’s actually just taking these parts of our government that for a long time most Americans didn’t know was there or didn’t really think about, and Trump is just pulling it into the center.

AL: You’ve given a couple of examples of this, but I wonder if you can zoom out a little bit and connect the dots a bit more on how, as you’ve put it, the specific Native part of our history helps to explain the current political crisis.

RN: Again, this is from the scholarship of Maggie Blackhawk, who’s Ojibwe and her work is amazing. 

I’ll tell a story. The same summer our founders were drafting the Constitution in Philadelphia; at the time New York is where Congress met, the Congress at the time. A bunch of people actually leave the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia so Congress can have a quorum in New York.

So you’ve got these two meetings happening at the same time. In New York, Congress passes the Northwest Ordinance to govern an area that’s like Ohio to Minnesota. It’s like the Great Lakes region. The founders actually call this area America’s first colony, and they’re going to govern it like a colony.

The person who oversees the colony is appointed, is not elected. There aren’t elections, even for the white people — it’s majority Native — but even for the white people who are living there, they don’t have elections. They don’t have a representative in Congress. It’s not democracy the way that we would think about it.

It’s top-down government. That’s how we’ve ruled every territory as we stretch from sea to shining sea, and then as we stretch from the Philippines and Guam and Puerto Rico, and as we governed big, huge swaths of area that way. This isn’t a small subset of the United States. Under Thomas Jefferson’s presidency, two-thirds of the land mass of the United States was governed by unelected appointed leaders.

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The way that we governed those areas built up certain practices. It’s a big legal term, it’s called plenary power. But it basically built up a stronger president. These are areas where the president could get away with a lot and kinda do what the president wanted. It’s an area where also the courts have this tradition of saying, “Ah, like this isn’t really our business. We’re not going to intervene. We’re going to defer.” There are also areas where constitutional rights don’t apply as much. Native people were the first example of that. We’re the first example where we developed some of these areas of laws, but then it’s been applied to other groups of people. It’s been applied to places like Puerto Rico and Guam; it’s been applied to immigrants. What we’re seeing right now is it getting applied to everybody.

The other thing that’s happening is that the Trump administration is pushing on some of these weaknesses in our democracy. You can see that in the controversy over war powers. You can see that in the birthright citizenship case. Even in the fund for like January 6th defendants, part of the precedent for that fund comes from settlement funds with tribes that had been established under previous presidents.

The way I think about it is what our government did to Native people, it set up these fault lines in our democracy, and what we’re living through right now is the earthquake — those fault lines moving everything around to where it feels like it’s going to fall apart. There are these very concrete ways — whether it’s birthright citizenship, detaining migrant families, the war in Iran, threatening to annex places like Greenland or Canada or Panama — that actually come from this long colonial history in the United States that I think as Americans we’re not used to seeing.

We have this knee-jerk reaction as a public of “This is unconstitutional. This is unprecedented. This is un-American.” You heard that a lot around the ICE surge in Minneapolis of “This is unprecedented.” It’s not the first time a president has sent federal troops to the land that is now Minnesota to round people up and remove them. We’ve actually done that before as a government, and we never went back and said, “Oops. That’s bad. We don’t want to do that. That is against our values as a democracy. That’s dangerous.” It’s no surprise that a lot of that history is repeating itself.

AL: You have alluded to your answer to this question several times already, but I’m going to ask you directly. Knowing that you are not an expert in authoritarianism, but you’ve raised the question in the podcast, are we really a democracy? Can you give us your answer?

RN: I think we’re both.

AL: Sorry, both meaning authoritarianism and democracy?

RN: Yeah! I think there’s parts of our government that are democratic, and I think there are parts of our government that are authoritarian. Like a lot of empires, we thought we could keep those things separate. That we could have colonialism over there, and democracy over here. That we could rule this group of people by force, and we could rule this group of people by consent. But history tells us that’s not how it works, and what we’re seeing right now is those things come together.

There’s this theory of where authoritarianism comes from that actually became popular at the end of World War II as a way to explain the rise of fascism in Europe. What theorists said is, why are you surprised about the violence and the horrors of World War II and Nazi Germany when Europe has been doing these things to colonized people across the globe? Germany committed genocide in Africa before it committed genocide in Europe.

This theory is called the boomerang of empire, and the idea, like in the way that you throw out a boomerang and it comes back to you, is that colonialism works the same way. We oftentimes think about colonialism as just impacting the people who are colonized. So we think of the terrible history of what our government did to Native people as just impacting Native people, that’s the bad thing that happened to Native Americans.

But it changed our government. It changed the structure of our government permanently, indelibly. What we’re seeing in this moment is those arms of our government that we thought could be authoritarian towards some people coming back home and coming back to impact everybody.

AL: Speaking of that, this is an apt transition.

I want to pivot to some current issues affecting Native communities. Donald Trump is pushing Republicans to pass the so-called SAVE Act, which even members of his party have said is dead on arrival. This is a bill to require people to prove their citizenship in order to vote, an extremely restrictive measure that’s being compared to the controversial Arizona “Show Me Your Papers” bill.

Speaker Mike Johnson announced on Sunday that the House would pass the SAVE Act “one more time” through budget reconciliation despite that process holding many potential pitfalls, even for his own caucus. If passed and enacted, even though it’s a long shot, how would this legislation impact Native voters?

RN: Not everybody has the kind of documentation that the bill would require. It requires people to have things like a birth certificate or a Social Security card. A lot of folks just don’t have those papers, and getting them isn’t always easy and is sometimes also very expensive.

AL: Apparently, there’s more than 21 million Americans who do not have either their birth certificate or passport. Apparently, there’s half of Americans who don’t have a passport.

RN: It’s important that Native people have access to the vote. It’s essential, and it’s something that Native people have been fighting for a very long time. There are also times that our ancestors were fighting not to be U.S. citizens, and there are times that citizenship was the carrot and the stick was assimilation. The promise of citizenship was used to take more land. So that’s how my great-grandfather became a U.S. citizen, through the privatization and then the eventual taking over of Native land — of Cherokee land — by white settlers.

When we think about the weaknesses of our democracy, we think that voting and inclusion and equality are how we fix those weaknesses. That doesn’t actually fix colonialism. If your government is an invading army, you don’t want to vote in the invading army’s next election if they just burned your village to the ground, right? You want them to leave your land. That’s the demand that generations of Native people made, was not for citizenship, was not for voting, but was for us to have our own land, our own territory, our sovereignty intact.

In this moment, the crisis that we’re facing, because it has these roots in colonialism, we have to think bigger than just, how do we protect the vote. We have to ask some of these harder questions like why does the president have so much power to bomb another country without more oversight? What are we doing when we bomb school children in another country? How can we call ourselves a democracy and do that, right? How are we holding people — who the only thing that they did is live in the United States without papers — how are we holding them without due process? Those are questions that we also have to ask.

That whole voting election thing isn’t the only thing that’s breaking down right now. And if we only have that conversation, we’re not going to catch some of these other problems, if that makes sense.

AL: Are there any other major takeaways from the reporting that you’ve done that you want to mention that I haven’t asked you about yet?

RN: One of the things we talk about in the podcast is the Revolutionary War itself. In the United States, we have this very neat and tidy way we like to talk about the war, where it’s the colonists against England. We get to be David, England is Goliath. They’re bigger, they’re more powerful, but we’re brave, and we fight hard, and we beat them.

That’s not the full story of the Revolutionary War because it was also a sprawling conflict over who would control land in North America. Indigenous nations fought on both sides of that conflict. Also to stake out their claim, the U.S. was willing to commit some very extreme acts of violence.

My own ancestors experienced scorched-earth campaigns from colonial militias in Cherokee Nation, where about half of Cherokee villages were burned to the ground. During one of those campaigns, the militias purposely waited until it was too late in the growing season for the corn to be replanted to then invade and burn the fields of corn to the ground so that people would starve. They burned food storage. They took time to chop down fruit orchards and destroy fruit orchards so even when people returned, we wouldn’t have our fruit trees and that source of food. That was how much they wanted to destroy our way of life. 

The Haudenosaunee was a powerful confederacy further to the north, in what is today New York state. Part of the confederacy sided with the British, and as punishment for that choice, George Washington ordered a scorched-earth campaign against the Haudenosaunee, which was later known as Sullivan’s campaign. That’s the name of the general who led it. 

The general took about a third of the Continental Army — this wasn’t some small campaign. It was a huge effort. They burned about 40 Haudenosaunee villages to the ground, and historians estimate that between direct killing, but then also exposure and malnutrition that winter, that about half of the population died. And so when we talk about the Revolutionary War, we really have to change the way that we tell the story of that war because it was also a campaign of genocide.

In the podcast, I talk about the history of that war, and then I’m trying to ask if this is how American democracy began, what does that mean? If this is the war that started our country, what does that even mean for our democracy? And where I get to is the stuff that we’ve been talking about, where a part of our government has always functioned through force and not elections and consent and due process and all these things that we hold dear. Oftentimes, that force was extreme violence because people don’t let you control their lives just because you ask nicely. You take over other people’s lands and territories, often only through extreme violence, and that’s how the U.S. government began.

AL: That is a fitting place to wrap up our conversation. Rebecca Nagle, thank you so much for joining us on The Intercept Briefing. We are excited to listen to the forthcoming episodes of “First America.”

RN: Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

AL: Is there an issue you’re concerned about and what to see more reporting on? Let us know. Email us at podcasts@theintercept.com or leave us a voicemail at 530-POD-CAST, that’s 530-763-2278.

That does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. William Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

This show and our reporting at The Intercept doesn’t exist without you. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. 

And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. And leave us a rating or a review, it helps other listeners find our reporting.

Until next time, I’m Akela Lacy.

The post Rebecca Nagle on the Boomerang of Empire  appeared first on The Intercept.

As of Friday, at least six candidates have officially declared that they will enter the race, with others still considering their options. All of them have been wary of aligning themselves too closely with Platner, who had already been plagued by scandal before being accused of rape by an ex-girlfriend. But they run the risk of alienating Platner’s energized base if they distance themselves too much from his policy commitments such as fighting military spending, ending the genocide in Gaza, advocating for Medicare for All, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and strengthening protections for unions.

In the running are at least six candidates, three of whom who lost in Maine’s Democratic gubernatorial primary in June. Former state Sen. Troy Jackson, whose gubernatorial campaign was endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was the first to enter the race. Next came Dr. Nirav Shah, who previously directed the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention, and Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows.

Brewery co-founder Dan Kleban, who dropped out of the Maine Democratic Senate primary and endorsed Gov. Janet Mills in October, also entered the race this week, as did social worker Paige Loud and former Capital Hill staffer Jordan Wood, both of whom lost the primary for Maine’s 2nd Congressional District.

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Of the first three candidates, Shah has faced the most skepticism of his progressive bona fides, despite what he says is his long-standing support for universal healthcare, dating back to his time as a public health official and his career as a doctor, and his stance against the genocide in Gaza, expressed during the gubernatorial campaign. His critics have painted his declarations of support for Medicare for All and focus on criticism of Israel amid his Senate launch as an effort to pivot to the left after taking a more measured approach as a candidate in the gubernatorial primary.

He told The Intercept that those criticisms are a mischaracterization of his record.

“Critics who are suggesting that this is a newfound policy position, they are putting politics over the facts,” Shah said.

Asked if he would echo Platner’s call to abolish ICE outright, Shah said the agency is “out of control” and “cannot continue to exist” in its current form. “Whether we reform ICE, whether we disband it and start from scratch, or whether we transfer their duties to CBP, ICE, as it currently is constituted, cannot continue to exist,” he said.

Like Shah, Jackson and Bellows are now doing their best to prove to Platner’s base that they will carry out his policy vision. 

While Platner was a vocal critic of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Jackson faced criticism for not mentioning Israel or Gaza in his Senate launch on Wednesday. But a day later, he issued a statement denouncing the genocide in Gaza as “unconscionable” and saying he would “never vote in favor of US taxpayer-funded military aid to Israel.”

Bellows, who differentiated herself from Shah on issues from labor to renter protections during the gubernatorial primary, has said she’s running on Medicare for All, workers’ rights, and to “protect our neighbors.” She and Jackson both criticized Shah’s gubernatorial campaign for ads backing his campaign run by a group pushing school voucher programs. Maine Education Association, a union of educators, endorsed all three candidates for governor but ranked Shah third.

After challenging Sen. Susan Collins in 2014 and losing by more than 35 percentage points, Bellows was elected to the state Senate in 2016. Bellows has previously led the ACLU of Maine as well as the Holocaust and Human Rights Center of Maine. She has not made many public comments on Israel, but signed a proclamation from Mills recognizing Israel’s 75th anniversary and its “friendship and cooperation” with the U.S. in April 2023. 

Shah has also faced claims that he’s taken money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, though the group does not spend in state-level races. He is endorsed by 314 Action, a group that backs candidates with a background in science, which took $1 million from the super PAC for AIPAC in 2024. On Friday, in response to claims that Shah had taken AIPAC money, 314 Action’s executive director said it hadn’t taken money from AIPAC this cycle and would not. He characterized the criticism as “worse than the MAGA scare tactics.” 

Shah told The Intercept he has never taken AIPAC money and would not accept it if offered. He also said that he would not support any form of military aid — offensive or defensive — to Israel. He also pointed to a digital ad his campaign ran toward the end of his gubernatorial primary that highlighted “standing against the genocide in Gaza.”

In a campaign kickoff on Thursday, Shah opened the event with remarks from two former Platner volunteers before highlighting what he said was “little daylight” between their platforms. He ended the event by telling a reporter he would not seek Platner’s endorsement. 

“I spent most of my life watching decisions get made by people who will never have to live with the consequences of them, and my generation is expected to just accept that,” said 18-year-old Liv Drewniak, co-founder of the group Midcoast Youth Activists and a former youth organizer and volunteer for Platner’s campaign. 

“I thought that my time of feeling powerless had come to an end when I started working with the Platner campaign, but the last few days of news have been heartbreaking, and I saw all the hard-fought and harder-won progress that I was so invested in crumble before me,” Drewniak said.

“But then I remembered why I was so excited for that change in the first place. It was never about one person. It was about a movement, a movement hand-built by the people of Maine. And that momentum has not stalled, and that energy will never fail. It will now have a new leader.”

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A senator from a different state weighed in on the new crop of candidates on Friday. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., said Shah should not be the nominee due to his handling of veterans’ health issues in her home state. Duckworth and her Senate colleague Dick Durbin called on Shah to resign in 2018 over his handling of a Legionnaires’ disease outbreak at a veterans’ facility.

Shah said the attack was “recycled” after his critics raised it during his gubernatorial primary campaign. He said he had addressed voters’ questions about the outbreak, and his campaign noted that Collins had complimented his response to the Covid-19 pandemic in Maine.

“I have deep respect for Senator Duckworth and the sacrifices she has made for our country. I’m the outsider in this race, and outsiders get attacked, so I want to speak directly to the people of Maine, because they’ve seen this playbook before,” Shah said in a statement to The Intercept.

“Voters can judge my record by this: a Democratic Presidential administration reviewed my record and then hired me to help lead the U.S. CDC. … Mainers made up their own minds and that’s why they gave me more first-choice votes than any other candidate in the gubernatorial primary.” 

“The people of Maine saw with their own eyes who I am during the pandemic, when I stood at that podium every day and told them the truth, even when it was hard,” he said. “I’d invite people to ask when Susan Collins last did the same. Every day Democrats spend attacking Democrats is another day Collins doesn’t have to answer for her record. I won’t take that bait, and I don’t believe Mainers will either.”

The Maine Democratic Party will hold a nominating convention to choose one candidate; it must submit its pick by July 27.

The post Maine Senate Candidates Claim They’re Just Like Platner — But Entirely Different appeared first on The Intercept.

“We, the undersigned, call on DSA candidates and elected officials to no longer contract or work with Morris Katz or Fight Agency, his political consulting firm,” the letter reads. 

Katz is not a member of DSA.

The letter also noted consultants at the agency like Rebecca Katz, who is not related to Morris, were also behind the campaign of Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., and said they continued to advise him even after he made a hard-right turn after entering the Senate.

Two sources with knowledge of the letter confirmed its authenticity.

“Morris Katz is one of the chief parties responsible for the catastrophic campaign of scandal-ridden Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner,” the letter says. “Billed as a top adviser to the campaign, Katz helped recruit Platner and supercharged his candidacy with slick video production, friendly media placements, and political connections.”

The letter circulated as pundits and observers pinned the failures of Platner’s campaign on Katz and others at Fight Agency, including Rebecca Katz. (A spokesperson for DSA’s national organization said they had not seen the letter. Neither Morris Katz nor Rebecca Katz immediately responded to requests for comment.)

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The agency is also currently working with Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who is not affiliated with DSA. The Democratic socialist group has reportedly shifted resources to Michigan, where DSA is backing congressional candidate Donavan McKinney.

Katz’s Timeline

In a statement posted to X on Thursday, Katz said, “As soon as the team became aware of the rape allegations against Graham Platner we advised he suspend his candidacy, and in the following days worked to wind down the campaign.” 

CNN said the Platner campaign first denied the allegation in response to questions after an interview with the accuser, Jenny Racicot, whose allegation was first reported by Politico. The DSA members’ letter disputed Katz’s account.

“According to reports, Katz and others on the campaign were aware of at least some of Platner’s disturbing history,” the letter reads. “Yet even as the scandals mounted, Katz continued to put the full weight of his consultancy behind Platner’s candidacy, foreclosing the possibility of replacing Platner with another candidate before the primary election. Katz also reportedly threatened a former Platner staffer for helping verify allegations and controversies surrounding the campaign.” 

The alleged threat, first reported by the Bangor Daily News, targeted a Platner campaign staffer who had publicized an earlier sexting scandal and later left the campaign over Platner’s controversial Reddit posts.

Progressive Defenders

Some Democrats and progressives have pushed back against the criticisms of Katz and Fight Agency, arguing that Democratic consultants who worked with candidates they knew faced credible allegations of sexual misconduct, like former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo or former Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif. — or even former President Joe Biden — did not face the same kind of blacklisting. 

“Did we go knives out for Eric Swalwell’s consultants?” said one progressive strategist who requested anonymity in order to speak freely.

Some of the moderate Democratic critics of Katz’s role in the Platner campaign worked for politicians with their own scandal-ridden histories.

“This is not a problem unique to the left,” the strategist said. “This comes down to holding candidates accountable, and I think it’s no surprise that the same consultants who have laundered even worse politicians through the Democratic Party are the loudest ones right now.”

“The political world is chock full of useless consultants. Nobody cares when they fuck up a race,” said another progressive strategist. “The knives are out for Morris and Fight, because they’re actually good at what they do.”

Fellow Traveler?

Fight Agency’s most notable work for a DSA candidate was creating ads for Zohran Mamdani’s successful run to become the mayor of New York City, a race where Katz served as a political adviser. Katz also worked on the campaign of state Assembly Member Claire Valdez, the DSA candidate who won a New York Democratic primary for a House seat last month.

In the wake of Platner’s downfall, the letter says, liberals and conservatives have tried to claim that Katz represents the left as a whole.

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The letter said, “Katz is linked in the mind of the media and political class to NYC-DSA,” the local chapter that boosted winning, Mamdani-backed congressional primary candidates like Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier.

The letter noted that such claims were bad for DSA, its candidates, and its movement. 

“Men like Platner must not represent the American Left, and those like Katz who push such candidates should have no role in our movement.”

“Our movement must be both ethical and strategic,” it says. “Katz has not shown an ability to be either. Any movement for democratic socialism in this country must be rooted in feminism and the multiracial working class, not archaic ideas of what constitutes a ‘worker.’ Allowing Katz an outsized influence in our movement undermines these ideals.”

Correction: July 10, 2026, 3:48 p.m. ET
A previous version of this article misstated the state where Abdul El-Sayed is a Democratic Senate candidate; it is Michigan, not Maine.

The post DSA Members Urge Campaigns to Ditch Platner Consultant Who Advised Mamdani appeared first on The Intercept.

On Thursday, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Population Affairs published an updated “notice of funding opportunity,” first announced in April, for service providers to apply for grants through Title X, a federal program that provides low and no-cost birth control and other sexual and reproductive health services to roughly 2.8 million people every year.

For months, the federal program had been plagued with uncertainty. Donald Trump eliminated Title X from his 2027 annual budget — and last year suddenly froze a large percentage of funds going to Title X recipients before eventually restoring the funding.

But when providers opened the funding notice in April, instead of being met with relief, many were horrified to discover that Health and Human Services had a new mission in mind for the only federal program dedicated to providing contraceptives: getting women to have more babies.

Grants funded through the program will help “build body literacy, address infertility, plan and space pregnancies and navigate reproductive health conditions such as endometriosis” and other conditions that affect infertility, the notice said. Contraceptives are hardly mentioned, except in a section on “overmedicalization,” which appears to commend the fact that “reports have shown a decrease in females’ current use of any contraception.”

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The notice is a part of a quiet, but significant, push to retool the Department of Health and Human Services into a weapon for a pronatalist movement seeped in the racist history of eugenics — which insists on the supposed biological superiority of white, straight, able-bodied people — and in the denial of women’s bodily autonomy and right to exist outside of motherhood.

Providers fighting back against the new requirements in court argue that this will further cede power over vulnerable communities’ health to far-right actors inside of the administration, like Assistant Secretary for Health Brian Christine, a former penile implant surgeon and anti-abortion crusader who is in charge of administering the Title X program. 

“I would characterize it as really a shift toward this Project 2025 MAHA vision of prioritizing having babies over reproductive autonomy,” said Amy Friedrich-Karnik, director of federal policy at the Guttmacher Institute, a sexual and reproductive health research organization, “and really undermining the program from top to bottom.”

The notice had previously included a pre-merits alignment review that would require all grantees to undergo an ideological audit by political appointees based on their commitment to the administration’s priorities, including ending diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and gender-affirming care — even though the statute explicitly requires grantees to promote health equity and provide care to transgender recipients. However, it was later updated to remove the alignment review.

Friedrich-Karnik and other sexual and reproductive health experts argue that under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., HHS is seeking to warp a public sexual health program to advance the goals of the administration’s allies in the pronatalist movement ahead of the November midterms. Pronatalists harbor close ties and, in some cases, overlap with white Christian nationalists who want not only for there to be more babies, but also more white babies. 

The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

The pronatalist movement in the United States is largely, but not exclusively, divided between two categories: traditional conservatives and tech eugenicists.

Tech pronatalists like Elon Musk, a former administration official who is arguably the most prominent member of the movement, advocate for having as many children as possible to create an “elite” human race with more “high-IQ” people. Unlike traditional pronatalist conservatives, best exemplified by Vice President JD Vance, whose focus rests more on the nuclear family and defending “traditional” gender roles, tech pronatalists emphasize the use of technology such as in vitro fertilization to have as many children as possible. 

While pronatalists are often not as explicit as avowed white nationalists about their desire for more white children, they often talk about “declining genetic quality” in “the West” and generally oppose immigration, even as they decry the falling birth rate and nearing population decline.

Trump, Vance, and Kennedy have all been closely aligned with the pronatalist movement. Kennedy has repeatedly opined about declining birth rates and teenage boys’ declining “sperm count”; Trump has anointed himself the “fertilization president,” despite the fact that his administration gutted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s IVF team; and in his first address as vice president, Vance declared: “I want more babies in the United States of America.” 

This month, “Trump Accounts” went into effect, providing children born between January 2025 and December 2028 with $1,000 in an effort to boost the population. The president also floated the idea of providing mothers who have six or more children with medals. (After several people noted that the Nazis had done the same thing, that idea seems to be dead in the water.)

But behind the push to have more kids, there is an anti-autonomy agenda at play, said Taylor St. Germain, interim co-executive director of Reproductive Equity Now. 

“This is a part of the MAHA movement that is really a veneer for an anti-abortion agenda and an anti-bodily-autonomy agenda,” said St. Germain.

In June, the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, which represents the majority of Title X providers, and others, sued to challenge the notice, arguing that the Trump administration was willfully violating the statute and attempting to rewrite the law through a grant notice.

“We believe that this is truly an attempt by the administration to hijack the program,” said Clare Coleman, president of the NFPRHA. 

Although the administration has removed the pre-merits review that would have given additional authority to political appointees to reject providers based on politics before even assessing their ability to provide quality care, there are still concerns about the types of providers who will be brought in to the program with Christine at the helm of the Office of Population Affairs.

Christine has a long history of staunch anti-abortion advocacy, including his support for the expansion of so-called crisis pregnancy centers, deceptively advertised clinics that aim to manipulate people out of receiving abortions. Christine has called the clinics “a model for a post-Roe world.”

The problem with having crisis pregnancy centers fill the gaps of service providers is that they are “not real medical clinics,” said Friedrich-Karnik. 

“They do not have the expertise to provide reproductive health care. They often oppose hormonal birth control methods, which is directly contrary to making sure that folks in Title X have access to the full range of contraceptive methods,” she said. 

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The fact that contraceptives are rarely mentioned in the notice is “a sign that they are decentering the statutory intent of the program,” said Coleman. 

“Congress intended this program to help equalize access to contraception,” said Coleman. “The only mention of contraception is that mention in the pejorative, and talking about overmedicalization and side effects, so we just see this as a real throwaway of what the program historically has been focused on and what Congress still intends the program to be focused on.” 

The funding announcement stands in stark contrast to how the Office of Population Affairs described the program less than two years ago. 

A 2024 OPA handbook reads that the family planning services delivered by the program include “contraceptive products and natural family planning methods for clients who want to prevent pregnancy and space births; pregnancy testing and counseling; assistance to achieve pregnancy; basic infertility services; sexually transmitted infection (STI) services; and other preconception health services.” 

While fertility is mentioned, the handbook is filled with references to contraceptives and other reproductive and sexual health services that have nothing to do with increasing the birth rate. 

“RFK Jr. is really using this to push an extremist agenda that prioritizes increasing births over ensuring people have the information and health care they need to make their own reproductive care decisions,” said St. Germain. 

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The attempts to rewrite the mandate at HHS to focus on pronatalism are not exclusively tied to Title X. In June, the administration announced a notice of funding opportunity for an existing program called the Embryo Adoption Awareness and Services program, which was created to help raise awareness of programs that allow people to receive other people’s unused embryos. In the notice, the agency described an embryo as “a child already in existence.”

“They have defined, for the first time, embryos as children who already exist and are in need of a family,” said Coleman, “advancing this argument for fetal personhood with a certain religious belief that sperm meets egg equals life.”

Coleman said what we are witnessing now is a ratcheting up of the pronatalist agenda, using methods like funding notices that are unlikely to draw much attention outside of conservative circles. 

“It’s sneaky,” she said, adding, “It’s quite unusual in my 17 years in this job to do a lot of calls with reporters about funding announcements.” 

The post The Trump Administration Is Overhauling Birth Control Access for the Pronatalist Movement appeared first on The Intercept.

I Would Have Thought You Mad

We’ve only recently passed the semiquincentennial of the United States of America. Two hundred and fifty years ago, at the moment of its founding, the U.S. was, of course, a slaveocracy. Of its founders, John Adams was essentially an oddball because he owned no slaves. But Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe did own people. So, give our current president Donald J. Trump some credit: At least he isn’t a slaveowner. But that’s about the best that can be said for him.

Once upon a time, if you had described our world to me, I would have thought you mad. Who could have imagined that Americans would reelect the man who shoved aside Montenegro’s Prime Minister Duško Marković in 2017 in what appeared to be an attempt to get to the front of a photo line (because who, in any circumstance, should be photographed more than him)? This is also the same tantrum-prone president who once threw his lunch, ketchup and all, at a White House wall after his attorney general made comments he didn’t like about the 2020 election. The president who, less than two years into his second term, kidnapped Venezuela’s head of state, tried to claim Greenland as the property of the US of A, prepared for a possible future war with Cuba, blown ships out of the water in a never-ending fashion in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, has conducted staggering numbers of airstrikes in Somalia, launched a would-be forever war with Iran (brilliantly crippling the global economy while he was at it), and … well, count on it, in the next two-plus years of Donald Trump’s America, there will surely be all too many more examples of unhinged behavior to cite. Honestly, a decade ago, I would have thought you were kidding.

So, what would those slave-owning Founding Fathers, memorialized on the Fourth of July just past, have thought about Trump? What would they have said about his boorish behavior, his toddler-esque tantrums, and his endless attacks and wars?

Perhaps those founders, were they alive today, would visit Trump at Mar-a-Lago and share a meal with the odd millionaire, billionaire, or trillionaire (although Elon Musk’s trillionaire status only lasted a couple of weeks!) lurking around the club. Or perhaps they would have been spotted on the White House lawn recently with Trump, first lady Melania, and the Trump kids, not to speak of a legion of blood-sport-loving billionaires watching a mixed martial arts spectacle in honor of Trump’s 250th birthday. (Oops, my mistake, Trump is just a youthful 80, which, when — or is it, if? — he finally leaves office, will make him our oldest president ever but hardly the oldest among the almost 200 world leaders of the present moment.)

Here’s a question that those Founding Fathers might ask about Donald Trump’s America: “What kind of -ocracy is the United States today?” And the answer, of course, would not be a democracy, or even a theocracy (though The Donald does love to be worshipped), but a Trumpocracy: a government of Trump, by Trump, and for Trump; a government dedicated to the enrichment of the president and his cronies. And it’s a vengeful one at that. After all, on Truth Social last year, he reposted an AI-generated video of former President Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office (as Trump looks on in glee) before he’s thrown into prison. A Black man seized (in a house built by slave labor, no less) and held in bondage is something of a nod to America’s past — and wouldn’t be unfamiliar to America’s founders.

But honestly, if you were to offer an account of Trump’s America to George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, what would either of them have thought? Can you even imagine their reaction? Their dismay? You found a country and just over 250 years later, you have Donald J. Trump running it into the ground. 

Perhaps if the Founding Fathers could do it all again, they might have chosen to remain a colony of the British king, George III (whom Donald Trump makes look remarkably good). 

Coming from a largely rural land, the founders would undoubtedly find it interesting that Trump’s long solid support in the heartland finally seems to be on the verge of collapse. But then, so much of his world (and sadly, ours, too) seems to be on the edge of ruin these days.

The founders might wonder if the United States could survive another two and a half years. Or if the world can? If, that is, he doesn’t try to remain in power. After claiming to have won the last three presidential elections, Trump asked an Iowan audience ominously: “Should we do it a fourth time?” (George Washington would no doubt be disturbed, having been committed to a two-term maximum.)

In two and a half years, much less six and a half, Trump is potentially all too capable of taking not just this country but also the planet down with him. And I’m not just thinking about his ability (if that’s faintly the word for it) with allies like Israel to turn parts of this world into hell zones of war. I’m thinking instead about the climate disaster to come (as my city recently hit the 100-degree mark on an early July day) and the president who has called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” and a “green scam,” and is prepared in his own fashion to heat this planet to the boiling point. Now, I’m sweating and, of course, with Donald Trump at the helm of state, it’s only going to get hotter, and hotter, and hotter.

The post A Government of Trump, by Trump, and for Trump appeared first on The Intercept.

The day Graham Platner became Maine’s Democratic Senate nominee, he spoke behind a podium bearing his indignant campaign slogan: “They don’t know Maine.” But when sexual assault allegations against the candidate broke this week, supporters and political allies in the state were left wondering instead if they ever really knew Platner — and uncertain about what’s next for the movement that rallied around him.

On Monday, Jenny Racicot alleged in a Politico article that a “deeply intoxicated” Platner broke into her home and raped her in late 2021, while the two were dating casually. In June, Platner faced claims from conservative activist Lyndsey Fifield that he was physically abusive toward her; on Tuesday, Fifield went on the record with the Washington Post to allege that during their relationship, Platner repeatedly removed condoms during sex without her consent.

The oyster farmer-turned-politician called Racicot’s allegations “false” and “categorically untrue” to Politico and deemed Fifield’s new allegation “categorically false and politically motivated” to the Post.

The revelations come on the heels of a long line of scandals that dogged Platner’s campaign, beginning in September 2025 with the revelation that he had a Totenkopf Nazi symbol tattoo from his time in the service. Maine voters and the state Democratic Party have had enough — and Platner’s chances appear to have run out.

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Still, the populist politics and campaign style the candidate espoused were highly effective in Maine. He relied on a simple message, delivered at town halls and meet-ups across the state. This retail politics allowed to weather earlier storms and, most importantly, to decisively beat his only serious challenger, 78-year-old Gov. Janet Mills, who chose to drop out of the race before the June primary election.

But while the message was effective, the cascading scandals that have derailed and effectively ended his campaign reveal a problem for progressives ascendant in the Democratic Party: vetting candidates. In June, the Wall Street Journal reported that Dan Moraff, who recruited Platner to run, spent $6,250 on an expedited risk-assessment memo.

Some centrist Democrats, like Center for American Progress CEO Neera Tanden, have seized on Platner’s fall as a chance to score political points against the left wing of the party on the heels of its high-profile election wins. In a post on X, Tanden smirked: “Say what you will, but the establishment vets candidates.” She did not, however, address the lack of vetting for establishment candidates like Eric Swalwell or the long list of losses for her wing of the party, showing that this back and forth is ultimately useless and counterproductive.

As CNN reported on Wednesday, Platner could drop out of the race as soon as this afternoon as pressure continues to mount from the Democratic Party and key allies. The campaign team — which includes wunderkind Morris Katz, the Gen Z political strategist who helped Mayor Zohran Mamdani win in New York last year — is reportedly attempting to negotiate Platner’s exit in exchange for some control over the selection of his replacement, although the state party said Tuesday the campaign should have “no role” in that process. On Wednesday afternoon, the campaign sent a poll to volunteers asking for feedback on next steps.

“We firmly believe that the supporters and volunteers who built this movement deserve to have a real role in any nomination process,” Ben Chin, Platner’s campaign manager, said in the Wednesday text blast.

Platner’s leverage shouldn’t be mistaken for having the support of a movement that has swiftly distanced itself from him. Almost every single one of his high-profile endorsers, from Bernie Sanders to the advocacy group MoveOn, have issued calls for Platner to leave the race. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee also said it would not spend money on ads in the race if Platner stays in. 

It’s far from out of the question for the left movement that backed his meteoric rise to have an outsized say in who takes his place, especially after the political message that Platner ran on resonated deeply with voters. 

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A reasonable path forward would involve Platner resigning before July 13 — the last day he can drop off the general election ticket — which would give state Democrats until July 27 to nominate a replacement. In a message to party committee members Tuesday, Maine Democratic Party Executive Director Devon Murphy-Anderson asked for patience. There’s no accepted process in place by law, but however the party proceeds, it “must reflect our Democratic values,” Murphy-Anderson wrote. “It should be open, inclusive, transparent, and fair.”

This is uncharted territory, but due to Maine’s ranked-choice voting system, there are a number of potential replacements who just spent months talking to voters for the governor’s race. Of the losing candidates, Nirav Shah, Troy Jackson, and Shenna Bellows are most likely to make a strong case for facing off against Sen. Susan Collins in the fall. 

Shah placed second in the final count to ultimate nominee Hannah Pingree but has work to do to appeal to the progressive Democratic base that propelled Platner to his dominant showing in the primary. It looks like he’s already making moves to position himself as a possible candidate, telling one user on X that he would vote against military aid to Israel and is calling the Gaza genocide a genocide.

Jackson, a former state Senate president, is widely seen as Platner’s most obvious successor and the progressive lane darling; he’s already filed paperwork to run in Platner’s place. But due to his closeness with Platner’s campaign, he will have to answer questions about what he knew about the allegations and when — as well as addressing a history that includes opposition to marriage equality and anti-abortion positions that, in fairness, he has done an admirable job of making up for in recent years. 

If the decision comes down to a mini-convention or a caucus, Bellows has a good shot. As Maine’s secretary of state, she has visibility and name recognition, she’s pushed back against Trump on the national stage, and she appeals to progressives and centrists alike. Her last time running for Senate, in 2014, resulted in a blow-out win for Collins by more than 35 percentage points; in order to make a strong case for her candidacy, Bellows will have to convince Democrats that this time would be different. 

Platner became a political sensation on the back of his ability to articulate a humane, progressive politics to the public. That political message, more than anything about the candidate, was the core to his appeal. For Maine Democrats, the mission is clear: They need to replace Platner with someone who can win. The key is to find a candidate who can embody the politics that lifted Platner to success while moving on from a figure who has lost the moral and ideological right to be that movement’s standard bearer. 

The post It’s Time for Maine to Ditch Platner — But Not the Politics That Won Over Voters appeared first on The Intercept.

Platner suspended his Senate campaign on Wednesday evening, and there is no clear alternative to his candidacy. His campaign’s swift downfall has presented Democrats and his primary supporters with several bad options: The party establishment could pick a candidate and inflame an already frustrated base that scoffed at its efforts to anoint Gov. Janet Mills as the nominee, or it could bend to Platner’s past demands and let him influence the selection of his successor.

In either case, a base already exhausted by months of Platner scandals is at risk of fracturing and failing to consolidate behind a potential replacement — and Democrats are at risk of once again losing a key seat they need to pick up for control of the Senate to Republican Sen. Susan Collins.

With so much blame and anger to go around, the fear of poisoning the selection process was on display in the anonymity of the Google Doc pushing Jackson, the Bernie Sanders-endorsed third-place candidate in Maine’s Democratic gubernatorial primary. Jackson, who has already been discussed in national progressive circles as a possible ideological successor to Platner, was first to file paperwork on Tuesday to take the candidate’s place. But the anonymous document, shared with The Intercept by a source who said its origin was unclear, was quick to distance him from Platner.

“In a state where Democrats have hemorrhaged rural support and where Collins has consistently overperformed, Platner has attempted to sell himself as the populist solution. Jackson doesn’t need to sell; his career tells the story,” it says, citing a claim from centrist writer Matthew Yglesias that Jackson is more genuine than Platner.

There are still Platner supporters — and one progressive political operative close to the Platner campaign, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized by his employer to discuss the race publicly, said they were divided in their reactions to the rape allegation against their once-powerful candidate.

“There are some people who just immediately decided that they believed his accuser and who feel very betrayed and are just like, ‘Fuck this guy, now we’re screwed,’” the operative said. “And then there are some people who don’t believe her, and there are some people who think that he can continue to run, and some people who think he should run as an independent.” 

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Platner announced he was dropping out of the race in an 11-minute video posted on X Wednesday evening. In it, he claimed the rape and sexual assault accusations against him were false and drummed up by an establishment leading a plot against his rise as an outsider in politics.

“I think it’s really important to understand why this is happening in the timeline,” Platner said, asserting that past scandals that dogged his campaign had broken at key political junctures. “There is a reason that this is happening now. I only have until July 13th until I am officially the nominee. This was the last week to try to get me off of the ballot. And that’s why this is occurring.”

The Maine Democratic Party announced that it would hold a nominating convention to pick Platner’s replacement, though its exact shape and timeline remain unclear.

The party has publicly feuded with Platner’s campaign, releasing a statement and an unusual video post on Tuesday saying that the campaign had tried “to put their thumb on the scale of what this process looks like,” after people close to Platner’s campaign told reporters that he would only drop out if he could ensure that the new candidate shared his ideological and policy stances.

In a mass text sent out before Platner dropped out on Wednesday, his campaign manager Ben Chin claimed that the campaign had been told it would have no role in helping to select a new candidate and that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee had sent staffers “to plan a potential nominating process behind closed doors.”

A DSCC spokesperson called the assertion “false” in a statement to The Intercept. “The Maine Democratic Party has made it clear that they are working to put forth an open process to select a nominee. Graham Platner — who was credibly accused of rape — needs to drop out immediately so that Maine Democrats can begin the process of fielding a new candidate and focus on defeating Susan Collins,” the spokesperson wrote.

Platner’s campaign did not immediately respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

Other potential picks being floated to replace Platner include Jackson’s Democratic gubernatorial opponents Dr. Nirav Shah, the former director of the Maine Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who came in second in the final round of ranked-choice voting in the June primary, and Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, who ranked fourth. 

A source familiar with the matter told The Intercept that outgoing Rep. Jared Golden, a Blue Dog Democrat who represents Maine’s Second Congressional District is not seeking reelection, had been getting calls about running, but on Tuesday night a spokesperson said he had removed his name from consideration.

The progressive political operative warned against the idea that a middle-of-the-road candidate like Golden would be the safest bet to replace Platner against Collins. A “generic Democrat,” the operative said, would find themselves up against a deceptively formidable incumbent, with little chance of mustering the energy that made Platner, for a time, such a threat to Collins.

“People always underestimate Susan Collins, and that’s why I think a lot of us in the progressive movement are saying that you have to give a reason for people to turn out, because turnout in the midterms is everything,” the operative said. “I think a lot of that’s coming from the national Democrats and national pundits who have no friggin’ clue about — I don’t know if I’d say popular — but about how entrenched she is in Maine politics.”

Shah said Tuesday that he had few details about what the state Democratic party plans to do. 

“This should be a process that is open, robust, and transparent, not something where the torch is handed from one person to another, because that will undermine faith in that nominee,” Shah told The Intercept. He said his campaign has not yet decided if he’ll file paperwork to enter the race, and that while he had received calls from hundreds of supporters urging him to jump in, he had not heard from any national Democrats.

Jackson, for his part, now has to toe the line between seizing the progressive mantle and being publicly tied to a candidate who lost massive public trust. In a statement Tuesday, he called the allegations against Platner “serious, credible, and deserving of full accountability,” and called on Platner to step down for the sake of the movement that supported him. Jackson did not address his own intention to run, but his spokesperson told The Intercept that he was the person to beat Collins.

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“Working Mainers need someone who will take on the wealthy and powerful and give them a voice in D.C. It is clear that Troy Jackson is that person,” said Christine Kirby, the spokesperson. “Since the recent news broke, Troy has been flooded with calls to run for U.S. Senate. He is clearly the strongest option to take on Susan Collins and has consistently won in deep-red Northern Maine.”

The document making the case in Jackson’s favor emphasized his appeal among working-class voters, whom Platner had tried to cultivate but lagged with compared to Collins in recent polling.

Platner reiterated his commitment to working-class politics and repeated his assertion that his campaign represented people who’d been locked out of the halls of power in his departure announcement on Wednesday.

“We live in a political system that is not built for normal people. It is a system that is built structurally to make sure that movements like ours cannot flourish,” Platner said. “That if they begin to succeed, they can be crushed.”

In a statement released before Platner suspended his campaign on Wednesday, the Maine Democratic Party’s executive director Devon Murphy-Anderson sought to thread the needle between castigating Platner and courting his voters.

“While we may be frustrated with Graham Platner’s continued efforts to manipulate this process, we are so thankful for his supporters and all of their efforts to defeat Susan Collins,” Murphy-Anderson wrote. “They are a vital part of our Party and deserve to participate in an open process to select Platner’s replacement.”

A new candidate has to be submitted to the Maine secretary of state by July 27 to qualify for the ballot.

In Shah’s view, anyone picked by Platner would be dragged down by his baggage, while anyone picked by the state party might not have buy-in from the base that Platner helped activate.

“If there is a torch-passing or anointments,” Shah said, “whoever that nominee is will be hobbled out of the gate.” 

Update: July 8, 2026, 8:55 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with news that Graham Platner has suspended his Senate campaign.

The post Graham Platner’s Exit From Senate Race Leaves Maine Dems “Hobbled” in Scramble for New Nominee appeared first on The Intercept.