These are some of the extraordinary claims made to Congress by Maj. David Grusch, a 36-year-old retired Air Force intelligence officer who also served as an adviser to the Pentagon’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena task force. Last month, the House Oversight Committee opened an investigation after Grusch claimed he was retaliated against for blowing the whistle on the U.S. government’s alleged UAP recovery program.

Security clearances of the sort Grusch has held are subject to strict requirements, including regarding psychological episodes and substance issues. Grusch has used his high-level clearance to shore up his credibility, telling the committee: “I was cleared to literally all relevant compartments and in a position of extreme trust in both my military and civilian capacities.”

But police records obtained by The Intercept under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act reveal that on October 1, 2018, Grusch was committed to a mental health facility based in part on a report that he “made a suicidal statement” after Grusch’s wife told him he was an alcoholic and suggested that he get help.

“Husband asked [complainant] to kill him,” a police incident report produced by the Loudoun County sheriff states. “He is very angry guns are locked up.”

Grusch did not respond to a request for comment emailed via his lawyer or to a voicemail left on his phone. But on Tuesday evening, Ross Coulthart, an Australian independent journalist who covers UFOs and has interviewed Grusch, posted a statement attributed to Grusch on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

“It has come to my attention that The Intercept intends to publish an article about two incidents in 2014 and 2018 that highlights previous personal struggles I had with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Grief and Depression,” the statement reads. “As I stated under oath in my congressional testimony, over 40 credentialed intelligence and military personnel provided myself and my colleagues the information I transmitted to the Intelligence Community Inspector General (ICIG) and I took the leadership role to represent the concerns of these distinguished and patriotic individuals.”

Grusch’s wife, Jessica Grusch, did not respond to several requests for comment.

A former colleague of Grusch’s expressed shock that he retained his clearance after the 2014 incident, which was also documented in public records obtained by The Intercept.

“I think it’s like any insular group: Once you’re in, they generally protect their own,” said the former colleague, who asked not to be named because they feared professional reprisals.

The former colleague said that the 2014 incident was known to Grusch’s superiors, a claim that Coulthart appeared to confirm in an interview on NewsNation, a subscription television network owned by Nexstar Media.

“The intelligence community and the Defense Department clearly accepted there was no issue because he was allowed to keep his security clearance,” Coulthart told Chris Cuomo Tuesday night.

“Waiting for You to Kill Me”

On the evening of October 1, 2018, Grusch’s wife contacted the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office to report that Grusch “was drunk” and suicidal, according to the incident report.

“She told him that he was an alcoholic and that he needed to get help,” according to a narrative account from the sheriff’s office. “He replied, ‘I’ve just been waiting for you to kill me.’”

Though the names are redacted, the documents describe a husband and wife at a home that Grusch and his wife owned at the time, according to Loudoun County records. The property has since been sold. The incident report also describes the subject as “Air International Guard” and previously Active Duty Air Force; Grusch served in the Air Force and the Air National Guard.

The man “could be violent, very strong,” the report notes, adding that he might be suffering from PTSD. “Sometimes makes these threats when drunk,” the report continues. “Has never harmed himself.”

The narrative case report describes law enforcement officers detaining Grusch under an emergency custody order and taking him to a local emergency room, where a mental health specialist decided to ask a magistrate to issue a temporary detention order. Based on the order, an officer transferred Grusch to Loudoun Adult Medical Psychiatric Services, an inpatient program in the Inova Loudoun Cornwall Medical Campus in Leesburg.

A separate police report dated October 13, 2014, describes a similar incident: a 27-year-old male “threatening suicide” at a property that county records show was owned at the time by Grusch and his ex-wife, Kendall McMurray. That property has since been sold. The report notes that “he is violent” and “has access to a weapon.”

McMurray did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Reps. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., and Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., attend the House Oversight and Accountability Subcommittee on National Security, the Border, and Foreign Affairs hearing titled “Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena: Implications on National Security, Public Safety, and Government Transparency,” in the Rayburn Building in Washington, D.C., on July 26, 2023.

Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images

Public Law Enforcement Records

Two Republican members of the House Oversight Committee, Reps. Anna Paulina Luna and Tim Burchett, were tasked with organizing the July 26 hearing after Grusch’s whistleblower claims became public. Not all House Republicans are supportive of the effort. Rep. Mike Turner, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, has taken a dim view of Grusch’s claims.

“Every decade there’s been individuals who’ve said the United States has such pieces of unidentified flying objects that are from outer space,” Turner said. “There’s no evidence of this and certainly it would be quite a conspiracy for this to be maintained, especially at this level.”

Grusch emerged as the hearing’s star witness, but his evidence was largely secondhand: When asked, Grusch said he hasn’t seen any of the recovered alien vehicles or bodies himself. While two former Navy fighter pilots alleged unidentified aerial phenomena, neither said anything about their provenance. Grusch was alone among the witnesses in attributing them to extraterrestrials.

“My testimony is based on information I have been given by individuals with a longstanding track record of legitimacy,” Grusch said in his opening statement.

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Shortly after The Intercept reached out to Grusch for comment for this story, Coulthart went on Cuomo’s show and said that The Intercept was planning to publish “confidential medical records” about Grusch that had been leaked by the intelligence community. Coulthart, an ardent defender of Grusch, told NewsNation that “Grusch believes the government may now be behind an effort to release his medical records in an effort to smear his credibility.”

“This is a document that would be, if the media had done the right thing, it would be in his police department file, in the file in the county sheriff’s office,” Coulthart said in his interview with Cuomo. “But Dave has checked today, because he assumed that the journalist had done his homework and just asked the local sheriff for the files. The sheriff has confirmed it did not come from him. The only other place that had this information is the intelligence community, Dave’s personal files inside the intelligence community, where quite properly, when anybody is security assist, things like this have to be looked at, and somebody inside the intelligence community leaked it.”

Coulthart went on to compare the purported leak to Richard Nixon’s attempts to discredit Daniel Ellsberg, who shared the Pentagon Papers with the New York Times.

“I think there should be an inquiry into the circumstances of how sensitive records pertaining to a decorated combat veteran’s file found their way to a journalist not through the proper channels,” Coulthart said. “This could’ve been requested under FOI, as is normal, but the county sheriff has confirmed that did not happen.”

In an interview Wednesday morning, Burchett repeated the false claim that Grusch’s medical records had been leaked, going as far as to say that “someone needs to lose their job.”

The records were not confidential, medical, nor leaked. They are publicly available law enforcement records obtained under a routine Virginia FOIA request to the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office and provided by the office’s FOIA coordinator. Copies of The Intercept’s correspondence with the sheriff’s office are being published with this story.

In a clip from a previous interview with Coulthart that was included in Tuesday’s Cuomo segment, Grusch suggested that his struggle with PTSD was behind him.

“I served in Afghanistan and I had a friend that committed suicide after I got back,” Grusch told Coulthart. “I dealt with that for a couple years and I’m proud as a veteran not to become a statistic. Totally took care of that issue in my life and it doesn’t affect me anymore.”

Echoes of Roswell

Coulthart’s comments would not be the first instance of misinformed media coverage of Grusch’s case. The law firm representing Grusch, Compass Rose Legal Group, issued a statement in June warning of “misstatements” in media reporting about the nature of their representation of Grusch, which they stressed was “narrowly scoped.”

“The whistleblower disclosure did not speak to the specifics of the alleged classified information that Mr. Grusch has now publicly characterized, and the substance of that information has always been outside of the scope of Compass Rose’s representation,” the statement says. “Compass Rose took no position and takes no position on the contents of the withheld information.”

Grusch’s ability to keep his security clearance appears to contrast with the government’s treatment of other employees. Shortly after President Joe Biden’s inauguration, for example, dozens of White House staffers were reportedly denied clearances for past marijuana use — including in states where it was legal.

In June, technology website The Debrief first reported on Grusch’s whistleblower disclosure, casting him as a “decorated former combat officer” — a phrase echoed repeatedly by Coulthart.

“I’d like to point out that finding a decorated veteran who believes all sorts of insane conspiracy theories is not remarkable,” cracked Jack Murphy, a former Army Ranger turned journalist. “I know many, and some would love it if I wrote stories about George Soros, JFK, etc.”

The Debrief article was co-authored by Leslie Kean, whose 2017 New York Times article helped drive much of the current wave of interest in UAPs. 

The Defense Department has flatly denied possessing “any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently,” Pentagon spokesperson Sue Gough has said.

“The recent UFO hearing is an embarrassment to everyone involved,” Steven Aftergood, a longtime critic of government secrecy and former director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy, told The Intercept. “It’s a symptom of the broader degradation of congressional discourse: by providing a forum for preposterous claims and failing to challenge them, the House committee makes legitimate oversight more difficult.”

During the committee hearing, Luna referenced the 1947 discovery of mysterious aerial debris in the desert in Roswell, New Mexico, as evidence of long-standing contact with UFOs. Jesse A. Marcel, a military intelligence officer — and, like Grusch, an Air Force major at the time — said that the debris was extraterrestrial in nature, but it later became clear that it was actually the remains of a weather balloon designed to detect atmospheric conditions indicative of Russian nuclear testing.

For many years, the Pentagon refused to explain the weather balloon’s true purpose due to its highly classified nature as part of Project Mogul, a top-secret Air Force program designed to detect Soviet bomb tests. Many took the secrecy, which was indeed excessive, to mean that the government must be covering up the existence of extraterrestrial aircraft.

Aftergood said the misconception at the heart of the recent House hearing is similar to the legends that grew out of the events in Roswell: “The embarrassment of the House hearings stems not so much from the issue itself but from the failure to distinguish what is real from what is fantasy.”

The post UFO Whistleblower Kept Security Clearance After Psychiatric Detention appeared first on The Intercept.

Students and others attend a “walkout to learn” rally to protest Florida education policies outside Orlando City Hall on April 21, 2023, in Orlando, Fla.

Photo: Paul Hennessy/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

In their latest absurd and overreaching attempt to stomp out gender nonconformity, Florida Republicans have found a new tactic: nicknames. If a child in Florida’s Orange County Public Schools system wants to use a name that deviates in any way from their legal name, they must now submit a signed parental permission form.

According to a memo released Monday, the new rule, while transparently targeted at trans kids, applies to all students, including cis students using common nicknames.

“As an example, if the student is named Robert, but likes to be called the nickname Rob, the form must be filled out authorizing teachers and other personnel to call Robert the nickname Rob,” the new guidelines state.

Such are the extremities to which far-right school boards are willing to go to oppress young trans people.

If a cis boy with the legal name Robert can’t be called Rob in school without parental permission, then neither could a trans girl called Roberta. Even if Roberta could obtain parental permission to use her chosen name, Florida law ensures that the school is still free to misgender her.

“Under the recently adopted House Bill 1069, the teacher or other personnel may elect not to utilize the pronoun ‘she/her’ when referring to Roberta,” notes the school board memo. If parents fail to serve Republicans as a disciplining force against gender nonconformity, the GOP passion for parental rights flies out the window.          

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Orange County is not the first public school system to introduce a guideline around students’ chosen names. In total, however, the school board’s new rules comprise some of the most extreme and comprehensive anti-trans policies of any public institution in the country — the fruits of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s radically reactionary takeover of education policy. Like most astroturfed assaults on trans existence in recent years, the Orange County rules combine a vile mixture of banned and coerced speech; fixations on bathrooms and genitalia; threats of harsh penalties and vigilante enforcement; and profoundly selective invocations of parental rights.

As Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern noted on Twitter, these anti-trans rules were introduced during a “SEVERE teacher shortage,” as the Orange County Public School system has been “chronically unable to retain teachers year-to-year.” Facing hundreds of vacancies, the school board nonetheless prioritized new guidelines that would either drive out or repel trans and trans-supportive teachers and staff.

These policies are grimly predictable for a school board infiltrated by the far-right extremist group Moms for Liberty, as Orange County and other Florida districts were last year. When it comes to names and pronouns, however, the new rules go particularly far: Teachers — adult workers — must use pronouns and titles that align with their assigned sex at birth, according to Monday’s memo. The guidance brings the school board’s policy into alignment with a vile Florida law, which was passed in May.

This detail bears repeating, as it crystallizes Republicans’ selective approach to free speech: Teachers are not required to use their trans students’ chosen pronouns, but trans teachers are expressly forbidden from using the pronouns that align with their gender. The policy appears to stand in direct violation of the First Amendment, as well as the Supreme Court’s Bostock decision, which protects LGBTQ+ workers from discrimination.

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The fact that the rules for students’ chosen names apply to both cis and trans children may at first appear as merely a cynical ploy to avoid legal challenges, as anti-trans laws have consistently been blocked in federal courts in recent months. No one truly believes a teacher will face disciplinary consequences for calling a cis boy Rob without a form from his parents. Any such rules will be selectively enforced to attack gender nonconformity.

The blanket name change rule is no doubt a legal fig leaf, but it nonetheless reveals that gender conformity requires expansive authoritarian enforcement far beyond the policing of trans and queer communities and individuals.

An education policy committed to trans eliminationism must also insist that all children be held in disciplined stasis.

This is not to relativize the suffering inflicted on trans students through such rules. Enforcing the use of trans kids’ deadnames is a violence; enforcing the use of legal names for cis children doesn’t come close, but it remains a significant denial of autonomy.

To insist on gender conformity requires broad social control; an education policy committed to trans eliminationism must also insist that all children be held in disciplined stasis. That’s a feature of the far-right agenda, not a bug.

Thankfully, hundreds of thousands of students have protested and continue to protest school board meetings, staging walkouts against anti-trans laws and policies, including in Orange County. They will not be readily controlled — they will use each other’s names.

The post Targeting Trans Kids, Florida School Board Requires Parental Approval for Nicknames appeared first on The Intercept.

The meeting, between the Pakistani ambassador to the United States and two State Department officials, has been the subject of intense scrutiny, controversy, and speculation in Pakistan over the past year and a half, as supporters of Khan and his military and civilian opponents jockeyed for power. The political struggle escalated on August 5 when Khan was sentenced to three years in prison on corruption charges and taken into custody for the second time since his ouster. Khan’s defenders dismiss the charges as baseless. The sentence also blocks Khan, Pakistan’s most popular politician, from contesting elections expected in Pakistan later this year.

One month after the meeting with U.S. officials documented in the leaked Pakistani government document, a no-confidence vote was held in Parliament, leading to Khan’s removal from power. The vote is believed to have been organized with the backing of Pakistan’s powerful military. Since that time, Khan and his supporters have been engaged in a struggle with the military and its civilian allies, whom Khan claims engineered his removal from power at the request of the U.S.

The text of the Pakistani cable, produced from the meeting by the ambassador and transmitted to Pakistan, has not previously been published. The cable, known internally as a “cypher,” reveals both the carrots and the sticks that the State Department deployed in its push against Khan, promising warmer relations if Khan was removed, and isolation if he was not.

The document, labeled “Secret,” includes an account of the meeting between State Department officials, including Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu, and Asad Majeed Khan, who at the time was Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S.

The document was provided to The Intercept by an anonymous source in the Pakistani military who said that they had no ties to Imran Khan or Khan’s party. The Intercept is publishing the body of the cable below, correcting minor typos in the text because such details can be used to watermark documents and track their dissemination.

The cable reveals both the carrots and the sticks that the State Department deployed in its push against Prime Minister Imran Khan.

The contents of the document obtained by The Intercept are consistent with reporting in the Pakistani newspaper Dawn and elsewhere describing the circumstances of the meeting and details in the cable itself, including in the classification markings omitted from The Intercept’s presentation. The dynamics of the relationship between Pakistan and the U.S. described in the cable were subsequently borne out by events. In the cable, the U.S. objects to Khan’s foreign policy on the Ukraine war. Those positions were quickly reversed after his removal, which was followed, as promised in the meeting, by a warming between the U.S. and Pakistan.

The diplomatic meeting came two weeks after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which launched as Khan was en route to Moscow, a visit that infuriated Washington.

On March 2, just days before the meeting, Lu had been questioned at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing over the neutrality of India, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan in the Ukraine conflict. In response to a question from Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., about a recent decision by Pakistan to abstain from a United Nations resolution condemning Russia’s role in the conflict, Lu said, “Prime Minister Khan has recently visited Moscow, and so I think we are trying to figure out how to engage specifically with the Prime Minister following that decision.” Van Hollen appeared to be indignant that officials from the State Department were not in communication with Khan about the issue.

The day before the meeting, Khan addressed a rally and responded directly to European calls that Pakistan rally behind Ukraine. “Are we your slaves?” Khan thundered to the crowd. “What do you think of us? That we are your slaves and that we will do whatever you ask of us?” he asked. “We are friends of Russia, and we are also friends of the United States. We are friends of China and Europe. We are not part of any alliance.”

In the meeting, according to the document, Lu spoke in forthright terms about Washington’s displeasure with Pakistan’s stance in the conflict. The document quotes Lu saying that “people here and in Europe are quite concerned about why Pakistan is taking such an aggressively neutral position (on Ukraine), if such a position is even possible. It does not seem such a neutral stand to us.” Lu added that he had held internal discussions with the U.S. National Security Council and that “it seems quite clear that this is the Prime Minister’s policy.”

Lu then bluntly raises the issue of a no-confidence vote: “I think if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington because the Russia visit is being looked at as a decision by the Prime Minister,” Lu said, according to the document. “Otherwise,” he continued, “I think it will be tough going ahead.”

Lu warned that if the situation wasn’t resolved, Pakistan would be marginalized by its Western allies. “I cannot tell how this will be seen by Europe but I suspect their reaction will be similar,” Lu said, adding that Khan could face “isolation” by Europe and the U.S. should he remain in office.

Asked about quotes from Lu in the Pakistani cable, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said, “Nothing in these purported comments shows the United States taking a position on who the leader of Pakistan should be.” Miller said he would not comment on private diplomatic discussions. 

The Pakistani ambassador responded by expressing frustration with the lack of engagement from U.S. leadership: “This reluctance had created a perception in Pakistan that we were being ignored or even taken for granted. There was also a feeling that while the U.S. expected Pakistan’s support on all issues that were important to the U.S., it did not reciprocate.”

“There was also a feeling that while the U.S. expected Pakistan’s support on all issues that were important to the U.S., it did not reciprocate.”

The discussion concluded, according to the document, with the Pakistani ambassador expressing his hope that the issue of the Russia-Ukraine war would not “impact our bilateral ties.” Lu told him that the damage was real but not fatal, and with Khan gone, the relationship could go back to normal. “I would argue that it has already created a dent in the relationship from our perspective,” Lu said, again raising the “political situation” in Pakistan. “Let us wait for a few days to see whether the political situation changes, which would mean that we would not have a big disagreement about this issue and the dent would go away very quickly. Otherwise, we will have to confront this issue head on and decide how to manage it.”

The day after the meeting, on March 8, Khan’s opponents in Parliament moved forward with a key procedural step toward the no-confidence vote.

“Khan’s fate wasn’t sealed at the time that this meeting took place, but it was tenuous,” said Arif Rafiq, a non-resident scholar at the Middle East Institute and specialist on Pakistan. “What you have here is the Biden administration sending a message to the people that they saw as Pakistan’s real rulers, signaling to them that things will better if he is removed from power.”

The Intercept has made extensive efforts to authenticate the document. Given the security climate in Pakistan, independent confirmation from sources in the Pakistani government was not possible. The Pakistan Embassy in Washington, D.C., did not respond to a request for comment.

Miller, the State Department spokesperson, said, “We had expressed concern about the visit of then-PM Khan to Moscow on the day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and have communicated that opposition both publicly and privately.” He added that “allegations that the United States interfered in internal decisions about the leadership of Pakistan are false. They have always been false, and they continue to be.” 

Left/Top: Donald Lu, a diplomat in service and assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs, waves toward media personnel upon his arrival at Tribhuvan International Airport on July 14, 2023, in Kathmandu, Nepal. Right/Bottom: Pakistani Foreign Secretary Asad Majeed Khan is seen in Ankara, Turkey, on July 6, 2023. Photos: Photo: Abhishek Maharjan/Sipa via AP Images (left); Ozge Elif Kizil/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images (right)

American Denials

The State Department has previously and on repeated occasions denied that Lu urged the Pakistani government to oust the prime minister. On April 8, 2022, after Khan alleged there was a cable proving his claim of U.S. interference, State Department spokesperson Jalina Porter was asked about its veracity. “Let me just say very bluntly there is absolutely no truth to these allegations,” Porter said.

In early June 2023, Khan sat for an interview with The Intercept and again repeated the allegation. The State Department at the time referred to previous denials in response to a request for comment.

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Khan has not backed off, and the State Department again denied the charge throughout June and July, at least three times in press conferences and again in a speech by a deputy assistant secretary of state for Pakistan, who referred to the claims as “propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation.” On the latest occasion, Miller, the State Department spokesperson, ridiculed the question. “I feel like I need to bring just a sign that I can hold up in response to this question and say that that allegation is not true,” Miller said, laughing and drawing cackles from the press. “I don’t know how many times I can say it. … The United States does not have a position on one political candidate or party versus another in Pakistan or any other country.”

While the drama over the cable has played out in public and in the press, the Pakistani military has launched an unprecedented assault on Pakistani civil society to silence whatever dissent and free expression had previously existed in the country.

In recent months, the military-led government cracked down not just on dissidents but also on suspected leakers inside its own institutions, passing a law last week that authorizes warrantless searches and lengthy jail terms for whistleblowers. Shaken by the public display of support for Khan — expressed in a series of mass protests and riots this May — the military has also enshrined authoritarian powers for itself that drastically reduce civil liberties, criminalize criticism of the military, expand the institution’s already expansive role in the country’s economy, and give military leaders a permanent veto over political and civil affairs.

These sweeping attacks on democracy passed largely unremarked upon by U.S. officials. In late July, the head of U.S. Central Command, Gen. Michael Kurilla, visited Pakistan, then issued a statement saying his visit had been focused on “strengthening the military-to-military relations,” while making no mention of the political situation in the country. This summer, Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, attempted to add a measure to the National Defense Authorization Act directing the State Department to examine democratic backsliding in Pakistan, but it was denied a vote on the House floor.

In a press briefing on Monday, in response to a question about whether Khan received a fair trial, Miller, the State Department spokesperson, said, “We believe that is an internal matter for Pakistan.”

Political Chaos

Khan’s removal from power after falling out with the Pakistani military, the same institution believed to have engineered his political rise, has thrown the nation of 230 million into political and economic turmoil. Protests against Khan’s dismissal and suppression of his party have swept the country and paralyzed its institutions, while Pakistan’s current leaders struggle to confront an economic crisis triggered in part by the impact of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on global energy prices. The present chaos has resulted in staggering rates of inflation and capital flight from the country.

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In addition to the worsening situation for ordinary citizens, a regime of extreme censorship has also been put in place at the direction of the Pakistani military, with news outlets effectively barred from even mentioning Khan’s name, as The Intercept previously reported. Thousands of members of civil society, mostly supporters of Khan, have been detained by the military, a crackdown that intensified after Khan was arrested earlier this year and held in custody for four days, sparking nationwide protests. Credible reports have emerged of torture by security forces, with reports of several deaths in custody.

The crackdown on Pakistan’s once-rambunctious press has taken a particularly dark turn. Arshad Sharif, a prominent Pakistani journalist who fled the country, was shot to death in Nairobi last October under circumstances that remain disputed. Another well-known journalist, Imran Riaz Khan, was detained by security forces at an airport this May and has not been seen since. Both had been reporting on the secret cable, which has taken on nearly mythical status in Pakistan, and had been among a handful of journalists briefed on its contents before Khan’s ouster. These attacks on the press have created a climate of fear that has made reporting on the document by reporters and institutions inside Pakistan effectively impossible.

Last November, Khan himself was subject to an attempted assassination when he was shot at a political rally, in an attack that wounded him and killed one of his supporters. His imprisonment has been widely viewed within Pakistan, including among many critics of his government, as an attempt by the military to stop his party from contesting upcoming elections. Polls show that were he allowed to participate in the vote, Khan would likely win.

“Khan was convicted on flimsy charges following a trial where his defense was not even allowed to produce witnesses. He had previously survived an assassination attempt, had a journalist aligned with him murdered, and has seen thousands of his supporters imprisoned. While the Biden administration has said that human rights will be at the forefront of their foreign policy, they are now looking away as Pakistan moves toward becoming a full-fledged military dictatorship,” said Rafiq, the Middle East Institute scholar. “This is ultimately about the Pakistani military using outside forces as a means to preserve their hegemony over the country. Every time there is a grand geopolitical rivalry, whether it is the Cold War, or the war on terror, they know how to manipulate the U.S. in their favor.”

Khan’s repeated references to the cable itself have contributed to his legal troubles, with prosecutors launching a separate investigation into whether he violated state secrets laws by discussing it.

Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf party activists and supporters of former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan clash with police during a protest against the arrest of their leader in Peshawar on May 10, 2023.

Photo: Hussain Ali/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

Democracy and the Military

For years, the U.S. government’s patronage relationship with the Pakistani military, which has long acted as the real powerbroker in the country’s politics, has been seen by many Pakistanis as an impenetrable obstacle to the country’s ability to grow its economy, combat endemic corruption, and pursue a constructive foreign policy. The sense that Pakistan has lacked meaningful independence because of this relationship — which, despite trappings of democracy, has made the military an untouchable force in domestic politics — makes the charge of U.S. involvement in the removal of a popular prime minister even more incendiary.

The Intercept’s source, who had access to the document as a member of the military, spoke of their growing disillusionment with the country’s military leadership, the impact on the military’s morale following its involvement in the political fight against Khan, the exploitation of the memory of dead service members for political purposes in recent military propaganda, and widespread public disenchantment with the armed forces amid the crackdown. They believe the military is pushing Pakistan toward a crisis similar to the one in 1971 that led to the secession of Bangladesh.

The source added that they hoped the leaked document would finally confirm what ordinary people, as well as the rank and file of the armed forces, had long suspected about the Pakistani military and force a reckoning within the institution.

This June, amid the crackdown by the military on Khan’s political party, Khan’s former top bureaucrat, Principal Secretary Azam Khan, was arrested and detained for a month. While in detention, Azam Khan reportedly issued a statement recorded in front of a member of the judiciary saying that the cable was indeed real, but that the former prime minister had exaggerated its contents for political gain.

A month after the meeting described in the cable, and just days before Khan was removed from office, then-Pakistan army chief Qamar Bajwa publicly broke with Khan’s neutrality and gave a speech calling the Russian invasion a “huge tragedy” and criticizing Russia. The remarks aligned the public picture with Lu’s private observation, recorded in the cable, that Pakistan’s neutrality was the policy of Khan, but not of the military.

Pakistan’s foreign policy has changed significantly since Khan’s removal, with Pakistan tilting more clearly toward the U.S. and European side in the Ukraine conflict. Abandoning its posture of neutrality, Pakistan has now emerged as a supplier of arms to the Ukrainian military; images of Pakistan-produced shells and ammunition regularly turn up on battlefield footage. In an interview earlier this year, a European Union official confirmed Pakistani military backing to Ukraine. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s foreign minister traveled to Pakistan this July in a visit widely presumed to be about military cooperation, but publicly described as focusing on trade, education, and environmental issues.

This realignment toward the U.S. has appeared to provide dividends to the Pakistani military. On August 3, a Pakistani newspaper reported that Parliament had approved the signing of a defense pact with the U.S. covering “joint exercises, operations, training, basing and equipment.” The agreement was intended to replace a previous 15-year deal between the two countries that expired in 2020.

Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan leaves after appearing at the Supreme Court in Islamabad on July 26, 2023.

Photo: Aamir Qureshi AFP via Getty Images

Pakistani “Assessment”

Lu’s blunt comments on Pakistan’s internal domestic politics raised alarms on the Pakistani side. In a brief “assessment” section at the bottom of the report, the document states: “Don could not have conveyed such a strong demarche without the express approval of the White House, to which he referred repeatedly. Clearly, Don spoke out of turn on Pakistan’s internal political process.” The cable concludes with a recommendation “to seriously reflect on this and consider making an appropriate demarche to the U.S. Cd’ A a.i in Islamabad” — a reference to the chargé d’affaires ad interim, effectively the acting head of a diplomatic mission when its accredited head is absent. A diplomatic protest was later issued by Khan’s government.

On March 27, 2022, the same month as the Lu meeting, Khan spoke publicly about the cable, waving a folded copy of it in the air at a rally. He also reportedly briefed a national security meeting with the heads of Pakistan’s various security agencies on its contents.

It is not clear what happened in Pakistan-U.S. communications during the weeks that followed the meeting reported in the cable. By the following month, however, the political winds had shifted. On April 10, Khan was ousted in a no-confidence vote.

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The new prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, eventually confirmed the existence of the cable and acknowledged that some of the message conveyed by Lu was inappropriate. He has said that Pakistan had formally complained but cautioned that the cable did not confirm Khan’s broader claims.

Khan has suggested repeatedly in public that the top-secret cable showed that the U.S. had directed his removal from power, but subsequently revised his assessment as he urged the U.S. to condemn human rights abuses against his supporters. The U.S., he told The Intercept in a June interview, may have urged his ouster, but only did so because it was manipulated by the military.

The disclosure of the full body of the cable, over a year after Khan was deposed and following his arrest, will finally allow the competing claims to be evaluated. On balance, the text of the cypher strongly suggests that the U.S. encouraged Khan’s removal. According to the cable, while Lu did not directly order Khan to be taken out of office, he said that Pakistan would suffer severe consequences, including international isolation, if Khan were to stay on as prime minister, while simultaneously hinting at rewards for his removal. The remarks appear to have been taken as a signal for the Pakistani military to act.

In addition to his other legal problems, Khan himself has continued to be targeted over the handling of the secret cable by the new government. Late last month, Interior Minister Rana Sanaullah said that Khan would be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act in connection with the cable. “Khan has hatched a conspiracy against the state’s interests and a case will be initiated against him on behalf of the state for the violation of the Official Secrets Act by exposing a confidential cipher communication from a diplomatic mission,” Sanaullah said.

Khan has now joined a long list of Pakistani politicians who failed to finish their term in office after running afoul of the military. As quoted in the cypher, Khan was being personally blamed by the U.S., according to Lu, for Pakistan’s policy of nonalignment during the Ukraine conflict. The vote of no confidence and its implications for the future of U.S.-Pakistan ties loomed large throughout the conversation.

“Honestly,” Lu is quoted as saying in the document, referring to the prospect of Khan staying in office, “I think isolation of the Prime Minister will become very strong from Europe and the United States.”

March 7, 2022 Pakistani Diplomatic Cypher (Transcription)

The Intercept is publishing the body of the cable below, correcting minor typos in the text because such details can be used to watermark documents and track their dissemination. The Intercept has removed classification markings and numerical elements that could be used for tracking purposes. Labeled “Secret,” the cable includes an account of the meeting between State Department officials, including Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of South and Central Asian Affairs Donald Lu, and Asad Majeed Khan, who at the time was Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S.

I had a luncheon meeting today with Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia, Donald Lu. He was accompanied by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Les Viguerie. DCM, DA and Counsellor Qasim joined me.

At the outset, Don referred to Pakistan’s position on the Ukraine crisis and said that “people here and in Europe are quite concerned about why Pakistan is taking such an aggressively neutral position (on Ukraine), if such a position is even possible. It does not seem such a neutral stand to us.” He shared that in his discussions with the NSC, “it seems quite clear that this is the Prime Minister’s policy.” He continued that he was of the view that this was “tied to the current political dramas in Islamabad that he (Prime Minister) needs and is trying to show a public face.” I replied that this was not a correct reading of the situation as Pakistan’s position on Ukraine was a result of intense interagency consultations. Pakistan had never resorted to conducting diplomacy in public sphere. The Prime Minister’s remarks during a political rally were in reaction to the public letter by European Ambassadors in Islamabad which was against diplomatic etiquette and protocol. Any political leader, whether in Pakistan or the U.S., would be constrained to give a public reply in such a situation.

I asked Don if the reason for a strong U.S. reaction was Pakistan’s abstention in the voting in the UNGA. He categorically replied in the negative and said that it was due to the Prime Minister’s visit to Moscow. He said that “I think if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington because the Russia visit is being looked at as a decision by the Prime Minister. Otherwise, I think it will be tough going ahead.” He paused and then said “I cannot tell how this will be seen by Europe but I suspect their reaction will be similar.” He then said that “honestly I think isolation of the Prime Minister will become very strong from Europe and the United States.” Don further commented that it seemed that the Prime Minister’s visit to Moscow was planned during the Beijing Olympics and there was an attempt by the Prime Minister to meet Putin which was not successful and then this idea was hatched that he would go to Moscow.

I told Don that this was a completely misinformed and wrong perception. The visit to Moscow had been in the works for at least few years and was the result of a deliberative institutional process. I stressed that when the Prime Minister was flying to Moscow, Russian invasion of Ukraine had not started and there was still hope for a peaceful resolution. I also pointed out that leaders of European countries were also traveling to Moscow around the same time. Don interjected that “those visits were specifically for seeking resolution of the Ukraine standoff while the Prime Minister’s visit was for bilateral economic reasons.” I drew his attention to the fact that the Prime Minister clearly regretted the situation while being in Moscow and had hoped for diplomacy to work. The Prime Minister’s visit, I stressed, was purely in the bilateral context and should not be seen either as a condonation or endorsement of Russia’s action against Ukraine. I said that our position is dictated by our desire to keep the channels of communication with all sides open. Our subsequent statements at the UN and by our Spokesperson spelled that out clearly, while reaffirming our commitment to the principle of UN Charter, non-use or threat of use of force, sovereignty and territorial integrity of States, and pacific settlement of disputes.

I also told Don that Pakistan was worried of how the Ukraine crisis would play out in the context of Afghanistan. We had paid a very high price due to the long-term impact of this conflict. Our priority was to have peace and stability in Afghanistan, for which it was imperative to have cooperation and coordination with all major powers, including Russia. From this perspective as well, keeping the channels of communication open was essential. This factor was also dictating our position on the Ukraine crisis. On my reference to the upcoming Extended Troika meeting in Beijing, Don replied that there were still ongoing discussions in Washington on whether the U.S. should attend the Extended Troika meeting or the upcoming Antalya meeting on Afghanistan with Russian representatives in attendance, as the U.S. focus right now was to discuss only Ukraine with Russia. I replied that this was exactly what we were afraid of. We did not want the Ukraine crisis to divert focus away from Afghanistan. Don did not comment.

I told Don that just like him, I would also convey our perspective in a forthright manner. I said that over the past one year, we had been consistently sensing reluctance on the part of the U.S. leadership to engage with our leadership. This reluctance had created a perception in Pakistan that we were being ignored and even taken for granted. There was also a feeling that while the U.S. expected Pakistan’s support on all issues that were important to the U.S., it did not reciprocate and we do not see much U.S. support on issues of concern for Pakistan, particularly on Kashmir. I said that it was extremely important to have functioning channels of communication at the highest level to remove such perception. I also said that we were surprised that if our position on the Ukraine crisis was so important for the U.S., why the U.S. had not engaged with us at the top leadership level prior to the Moscow visit and even when the UN was scheduled to vote. (The State Department had raised it at the DCM level.) Pakistan valued continued high-level engagement and for this reason the Foreign Minister sought to speak with Secretary Blinken to personally explain Pakistan’s position and perspective on the Ukraine crisis. The call has not materialized yet. Don replied that the thinking in Washington was that given the current political turmoil in Pakistan, this was not the right time for such engagement and it could wait till the political situation in Pakistan settled down.

I reiterated our position that countries should not be made to choose sides in a complex situation like the Ukraine crisis and stressed the need for having active bilateral communications at the political leadership level. Don replied that “you have conveyed your position clearly and I will take it back to my leadership.”

I also told Don that we had seen his defence of the Indian position on the Ukraine crisis during the recently held Senate Sub-Committee hearing on U.S.-India relations. It seemed that the U.S. was applying different criteria for India and Pakistan. Don responded that the U.S. lawmakers’ strong feelings about India’s abstentions in the UNSC and UNGA came out clearly during the hearing. I said that from the hearing, it appeared that the U.S. expected more from India than Pakistan, yet it appeared to be more concerned about Pakistan’s position. Don was evasive and responded that Washington looked at the U.S.-India relationship very much through the lens of what was happening in China. He added that while India had a close relationship with Moscow, “I think we will actually see a change in India’s policy once all Indian students are out of Ukraine.”

I expressed the hope that the issue of the Prime Minister’s visit to Russia will not impact our bilateral ties. Don replied that “I would argue that it has already created a dent in the relationship from our perspective. Let us wait for a few days to see whether the political situation changes, which would mean that we would not have a big disagreement about this issue and the dent would go away very quickly. Otherwise, we will have to confront this issue head on and decide how to manage it.”

We also discussed Afghanistan and other issues pertaining to bilateral ties. A separate communication follows on that part of our conversation.

Assessment

Don could not have conveyed such a strong demarche without the express approval of the White House, to which he referred repeatedly. Clearly, Don spoke out of turn on Pakistan’s internal political process. We need to seriously reflect on this and consider making an appropriate demarche to the U.S. Cd’ A a.i in Islamabad.

The post Secret Pakistan Cable Documents U.S. Pressure to Remove Imran Khan appeared first on The Intercept.

But his greatest challenge came six months later, when the Taliban seized back control of Afghanistan, two years ago this month. Since then, the Taliban have shut down the attorney general’s office and freed thousands of people who had been locked up, sending many former prosecutors into hiding. Targeted by the people they helped convict, some 29 prosecutors have been killed in the last two years, including three in the last two weeks.

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“They were released,” said Hamidi, referring to scores of individuals his office had prosecuted, including many Taliban members, “and they are looking to find the prosecutors who tried them.”

All along, Hamidi has been trying to help his former colleagues; last month, with the U.S. Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, or APA-US, he helped launch the “Prosecutors for Prosecutors” campaign, which aims to get 1,500 Afghan prosecutors and their families to safety. APA-US and its Afghan counterpart, now operating in exile, have partnered with a number of organizations to raise $15 million to fund nongovernmental organizations that can relocate them to safe countries. Their partners include Jewish Humanitarian Response, the International Association of Prosecutors, and No One Left Behind, as well as a number of local district attorneys across the U.S.

“They stood for law and justice in Afghanistan for the past 20 years, shoulder to shoulder with the international community, with the people of Afghanistan, with the government of Afghanistan,” Hamidi told The Intercept. “Withdrawal from Afghanistan shouldn’t be a withdrawal from all promises, all ethical obligations, human rights obligations.”

More than 1.6 million Afghans fled the country in the last two years, with more than 100,000 resettling in the U.S. In the chaotic weeks following the dramatic collapse of the former Afghan government, foreign states and international organizations helped evacuate Afghans they had worked with, prioritizing those they deemed at the highest risk, including women activists, human rights defenders, and members of the former government and military.

No such priority group was carved out for Afghan prosecutors, who also did not qualify for the State Department’s Special Immigrant Visa program, reserved for Afghans who had been employed by the U.S. government. While some prosecutors were able to flee through personal connections, thousands were left behind.

There was “no plan” by U.S. officials to get prosecutors to safety, Hamidi said, even as they had been targets of attacks for years. “They knew many people like prosecutors would be in danger. And there was no plan or program to provide them any opportunity to be included in any of these categories, SIV, P-1, P-2,” he said, referring to priority refugee status for certain categories of vulnerable Afghans.

That makes no sense to David LaBahn, president of APA-US, which had helped train Afghan prosecutors. “Here are the prosecutors who put terrorists and drug smugglers in prison — who have now been released from prison — and because they didn’t have a government contracting card, they are at the bottom of the list,” LaBahn told The Intercept. “It defies all logic.

“They’re being hunted right now,” he added. “People who are begging for their lives and who feel completely deserted.”

Afghan Attorney General Mohammad Farid Hamidi takes part in a petitioners’ meeting at the attorney general’s office in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Oct. 2, 2017.

Photo: Wakil Kohsar/AFP via Getty Images

An Ongoing Emergency

Hamidi was in the U.S. when Kabul fell. He immediately knew that years of his work would be wiped out, that he wouldn’t be able to return home, and that the lives of thousands of his colleagues were at risk. As soon as the Taliban seized the capital, he started writing to all the international agencies that had worked alongside his office over the years, including the United Nations and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

USAID and the U.S. Embassy in Kabul had funded his office’s initiative to train 250 female prosecutors, but now that those women were in hiding, he heard nothing from them. “They financed this program, and we implemented it. I sent letters to USAID and mentioned this, but no response,” he said. “The U.S. government, U.S. entities, the U.S. people — they have a responsibility to support the people of Afghanistan and those people who are at risk and in danger because of their work, because of their dedication to law and justice.”

The U.S. government, he stressed, did “nothing” for them.

That’s despite the fact that Afghan prosecutors had been responsible for jailing thousands of Taliban members, as well as narcotraffickers and members of other extremist groups and organized crime networks who helped fund the Taliban insurgency. Hamidi said that some 50,000 Taliban and Islamic State members were imprisoned between 2001 and 2021. “The fight against terrorism was in two main areas: One was in the battlefield, and the other was when the Taliban were arrested and handed over to the attorney general’s office for investigation,” he said. “Many ministers, commanders, governors who are now holding positions of power in the country were in jail at a time or another.”

Asked about Hamidi’s outreach to the U.S. government, a spokesperson for the State Department wrote in an email to The Intercept that “the Biden-Harris Administration continues to demonstrate its commitment to the brave Afghans who stood side-by-side with the United States over the past two decades.” The spokesperson added that the agency “does not comment on who is in the refugee processing pipeline due to privacy and protection reasons” but that the resettlement of eligible Afghans is one of its “top priorities.” USAID did not respond to a request for comment.

Over the last two years, the plight of Afghans in the country and outside has largely fallen off the news cycle as fatigue and new conflicts have replaced global shock at the country’s unraveling. That indifference stands in stark contrast with the sense of emergency that still dominates countless Afghans’ lives. APA-US continues to field desperate requests for help from dozens of former prosecutors still in Afghanistan. Through its Afghan counterpart, the group compiled a verified list of 3,850 former prosecutors and other staff and shared it with U.S. officials. But because there’s no visa path available to them in the U.S., the groups are looking to fund private efforts to relocate the prosecutors and help them secure employment. Already, some U.S.-based prosecutors have answered the call, promising help with relocation efforts and jobs for Afghan prosecutors arriving in the U.S.

“People are being killed, and there appears to be no action, or limited action, by those who should be acting.”

For the time being, LaBahn stresses, the need is urgent and short-term.

“People are being killed, and there appears to be no action, or limited action, by those who should be acting,” he said. “What we’re trying to do right now is just get people to safety, get them food, and get them housing, and then we can worry about the process of what country will ultimately protect them.”

The scene after gunmen fatally shot two Afghan women judges working for the Supreme Court, in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Jan. 17, 2021.

Photo: Wakil Kohsar/AFP via Getty Images

One Prosecutor’s Escape

Najia Mahmodi was one of the women Hamidi hired into the attorney general’s office. She was born before the U.S. toppled the Taliban in 2001 and remembers seeing them beat women in the street when she was a child. But she was part of a generation of Afghan women who grew up during a time of opportunity. She received a law degree from the American University of Afghanistan. While a student, she survived a Taliban attack that killed 16 of her classmates. Later, she became chief prosecutor for crimes against women and survived other attacks near the prosecutor’s office. Her role involved investigating crimes such as rape, battery, forced marriage, and prohibiting a woman or girl from going to school or work. Many of those offenses were criminalized under the U.S.-backed former Afghan government, and the Taliban rescinded the laws when it returned to power.

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As the Taliban seized province after province two summers ago, Mahmodi’s 3-year-old son would greet her when she came home from work with updates on which part of the country had fallen. Her friends and family urged her to leave Afghanistan, knowing she would be an immediate target. She delivered her second child, a daughter, just as the Taliban advanced on Kabul, choosing to have an early C-section because she wasn’t sure she would be able to access a hospital when the time came. Thousands of the men her office had helped convict were being freed, and she began to have nightmares about them.

On August 15, she went into hiding. For 10 days, she tried to make sure her toddler wouldn’t be too loud because she feared being discovered and handed to the Taliban. Meanwhile, she reached out to all her foreign contacts for help. Eventually, she got a call back and was told to head to the airport immediately, instructed to wave her phone at U.S. Special Forces so they would recognize her. Her contact told her that the soldiers would shoot toward the crowd to disperse those around her but that she should not run and keep walking toward them.

Hours later, she was in Qatar with her children; she eventually resettled in the U.S., where she is enrolled to start a master’s in law program in the fall.

After leaving, she was able to rile up international support to get some of her colleagues from the elimination of violence against women division of the attorney general’s office moved to Pakistan through a private sponsorship. But only women benefited from that initiative, and many more remain in Afghanistan. They are struggling to survive without jobs in a country where more than 15 million people are currently facing food insecurity. Passports are hard to obtain, particularly for those who are trying to hide their identity.

“They are in constant fear for their lives,” Mahmodi said. “They are a target.”

The post As the Taliban Hunts Prosecutors, Afghan and U.S. Lawyers Team Up to Bring Their Colleagues to Safety appeared first on The Intercept.

DeSantis created the unit in April 2022 amid a broader Republican push to sow distrust in the electoral system by spreading false claims of voter fraud. But since its inception, the office has consistently fallen short of its staffing goals. An ABC affiliate reported that only three of 15 positions had been filled by January. 

The current vacant roles include a senior attorney, assistant director, and four government operations consultants. The office is also hiring for a program director, after Republican political operative Brooke Renney vacated the position less than a year after she was hired. Florida Department of State spokesperson Natalie Meiner said Renney completed her assignments and took a job in the Department of State’s information technology division. She added that the office is currently advertising positions but did not clarify if the department still hopes to achieve its previously stated personnel numbers. 

People are reluctant to join the office because there’s a public sense that it’s unnecessary, said Cecile M. Scoon, co-president of the League of Women Voters of Florida. State attorneys and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement previously handled cases of alleged voter fraud, which remain exceedingly rare. “The way it was presented would make most reasonable and rational people hesitate to be a part of that,” Scoon said. 

“Qualified people — regardless of political affiliation — do not want to be affiliated with fringe conspiracies about our elections.”

The unit has also drawn criticism from voting rights advocates, who say it is an attempt to discourage people of color from casting their ballots. 

“This office was created in a partisan attempt to further unfounded allegations of widespread voter fraud, a claim often used to attack ballot access of Black and brown voters,” said Estee Konor, associate director of litigation at Demos, a think tank that works on issues related to racial justice. “Qualified people — regardless of political affiliation — do not want to be affiliated with fringe conspiracies about our elections.” 

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The Office of Election Crimes and Security announced its first major set of arrests last August, when 20 people were charged with third-degree felonies for voting in the 2020 election, despite having disqualifying felony convictions. Many of those arrested said they had received their voter registration cards and thought they were eligible to vote.

The defendants — more than half of whom were Black — faced up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine. At least seven cases have resulted in convictions, and four were dismissed because of jurisdictional issues, though the state has appealed several of the court orders. In February, lawmakers passed a law attempting to circumvent those jurisdictional issues. At least 11 of the cases remain open, pending, or in appeal.

Some of voters’ confusion stemmed from the legislative battle over a 2018 Florida ballot referendum, which had restored voting rights to people with felony convictions after they completed parole or probation. The measure would not have applied to those arrested last August, as it excluded people convicted of murder or a felony sex offense and was largely gutted by Republicans in 2019. Nevertheless, an attorney for one woman said she thought the law included her.

“You put SWAT teams out with helicopters to arrest grandfathers? Pull them out with their pajamas, don’t even let them get dressed?” Scoon said. “That was ugly. That was harsh and totally unnecessary. And then you find out many of these people were told by state authorities that they could vote. That doesn’t put a very good taste in your mouth.” 

The state hasn’t shown the same aggression toward everyone it’s charged with voting-related crimes.

The state hasn’t shown the same aggression toward everyone it’s charged with voting-related crimes, Scoon said. At least four residents in The Villages, a retirement community in central Florida that is a Republican stronghold, were also arrested and charged with voter fraud in 2021. The cases were resolved in pretrial intervention deals. One defendant took a civics class and did community service to avoid a public record of the arrest or charges. All of the Villages residents arrested for voter fraud are white. 

“These same prosecutors went to the heavily-Republican villages and made plea deals with several more conservative citizens,” Scoon said. “Nobody was dragged out in their pajamas and humiliated. Those that are aware of these discrepancies, honestly, who wants to be a part of that?”

A total of at least 26 people have been arrested for voting offenses as of January, according to a report from the election crimes office. The office received more than 2,000 complaints and shared information with law enforcement for the criminal investigation of roughly 1,100 people — a mere fraction of the 11.1 million Floridians who voted in the 2020 election alone. 

In May, Florida lawmakers increased the Office of Election Crimes and Security’s budget from $1.1 million to $1.4 million. That money could be spent on other critical issues in Florida, Scoon noted. “We know that schools don’t have nurses, we know that places are dilapidated, state hospitals are missing staff,” she said. “There are real needs in our state.” 

Scoon added that’s part of why the office hasn’t filled its roster. “You want to be useful in life, and life’s short.” 

The post DeSantis Still Can’t Find Enough Employees for His Voter Fraud Crackdown appeared first on The Intercept.

It was still dark outside when Umar Khalid sat down to make the farewell video. He had stayed up all night at a close friend’s apartment, where he had just celebrated his 33rd birthday, blowing out candles and cutting a chocolate cake. Now he sat on the couch stiff with tension, dark circles under his eyes, his face tinged a sickly yellow. He had been smoking nonstop for hours and eaten so little that he was feeling unwell. His friend was seated on the ground nearby, his phone ready to record.

“If you’re watching this video,” Khalid said, “it means that I’ve been arrested.”

It was September 2020, on a hot, stuffy morning in Delhi. Seven months earlier, in late February, a wave of sectarian violence had ripped through the Indian capital. Amid mass demonstrations against a restrictive citizenship law that targeted Muslims, a mob goaded by a local leader clashed with Muslims in the area. Over the next four days, violence swept through predominantly Muslim neighborhoods; at least 53 people were killed and 14 mosques gutted.

The timing was noteworthy: U.S. President Donald Trump arrived in India to meet with Prime Minister Narendra Modi the day after the riots erupted. While Trump and Modi hugged and lavished each other with praise, Delhi’s northeastern district burned.

As the violence unspooled, Khalid was halfway across the country in the eastern state of Bihar. He was headlining a protest where he told the audience seated cross-legged before him that many Hindu supremacists “have nurtured the dream that Muslims will leave the country, that they will go to Pakistan.”

“They have spread hate to make it happen. They have nothing but hate. But we will respond with love,” he said. “They are trying to provoke us. They are trying to start a riot. They are saying, ‘Shoot them.’ What are we saying? We are saying, ‘There is no better place in the world than India.’”

The secular activist rose to national prominence giving powerful speeches criticizing Modi and his far-right political party for leading a campaign of repression previously unseen in independent India. Khalid has compared Modi to India’s British colonizers, whose centuries-long stranglehold was enabled by policies that pitted religious and ethnic groups against each other, fueling mutual suspicion and resentment. A target of the Modi government since he was a university student, Khalid was now among the leaders of a broad-based movement that had emerged to protest the prime minister’s anti-Muslim policies — and the government was eager to squash its momentum.

Khalid was among the leaders of a broad-based movement that had emerged to protest Modi’s anti-Muslim policies — and the government was eager to squash its momentum.

In March, Amit Malviya, the social media chief of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party, tweeted a video of a speech Khalid had given ahead of Trump’s visit in which he urged protesters to fill the streets and tell the U.S. president that Modi was dividing India and mocking Gandhian values of nonviolence. Malviya described Khalid’s audience as “largely Muslim.”

“Was the violence in Delhi planned weeks in advance by the Tukde Tukde gang?” he wrote on Twitter, using a pejorative to refer to the BJP’s political critics. This single tweet was turned from a question into a statement and reported as fact by cable news channels aligned with Modi. It soon became the basis for accusing Khalid of masterminding the riots.

The Covid-19 outbreak and the government’s nationwide lockdown forced an end to the demonstrations, as well as Khalid’s speeches at protest sites. Exhausted, Khalid and his partner of 10 years, Banojyotsna Lahiri, went to visit her family and unwind.

In April, while Indians were ordered to stay in their homes, the Delhi police began arresting student leaders and activists who had participated in the citizenship protests, charging over a dozen high-profile activists with a slew of offenses, including murder, sedition, and, not long after, terrorism. News of the arrests put Khalid on edge. Lahiri recalled, “There was crazy tension in the air.”

In August, Khalid received a phone call from the Delhi police. The summons was couched as a request for help with the police’s investigation into the riots, but Khalid knew his turn had come.

Over the next few weeks, Khalid was called in twice for questioning. He knew the interrogations weren’t intended to establish the facts; they were a sham to make it seem as if the officials were doing their job. He was fully aware of how this would end.

He decided to record the video, telling his close friend to release it at a press conference when the police finally made their move.

“They are silencing me,” Khalid said, staring into the smartphone camera. “They are putting me behind bars. But they also want to imprison you — with lies. They want to frighten you into silence. I’d like to end with an appeal: Don’t be afraid. Raise your voice up against injustice.”

Three days later, on September 13, the police called Khalid to the office of the city’s counterterrorism unit. This time, they didn’t let him leave. Nearly three years on, he remains in jail without a trial date.

The Modi government has made a habit of hounding anyone who criticizes the prime minister’s efforts to transform the world’s largest democracy into a majoritarian police state. Since Modi came to power in 2014, his government has wielded the law to target every kind of critic on every platform, from students expressing opinions on social media to human rights activists investigating atrocities. In March 2023, a court in Gujarat — where Modi was born and had a long political career before becoming prime minister — convicted the leader of India’s main opposition party, Rahul Gandhi, of defaming Modi. The decision led to Gandhi’s disqualification as a member of Parliament and jeopardized his eligibility to contest Modi in national elections next year. Though the Indian Supreme Court has since suspended the conviction, the move was the clearest sign yet that India is now an elected autocracy.

A Muslim woman cries in a makeshift camp as she talks about her ordeal after a wave of sectarian violence targeting Muslims ripped through Delhi’s northeastern district, on March 1, 2020.

Photo: Yawar Nazir/Getty Images

Two decades-old laws have been Modi’s favorites for suppressing dissent and removing his critics from public life: the colonial-era sedition law and the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, a so-called anti-terror law. Khalid is among the few Indians who have been charged under both.

Between 2014 and 2020, more than 7,000 people were charged with sedition, according to a database published by Indian news site Article 14. The UAPA accounted for more than 8,000 arrests between 2015 and 2020, according to a study by the Indian human rights nonprofit People’s Union for Civil Liberties.

“These laws were already on the books — what we are seeing now is malice,” said journalist Aakar Patel. “This is a government that has weaponized the legal system to ensure that dissent is curbed through jail.”

“This is a government that has weaponized the legal system to ensure that dissent is curbed through jail.”

When I visited Delhi late last year, even mere conversations about the state — or “the regime,” as many called the Modi government — were steeped in fear. People wanted to communicate with me through secure messaging apps. When we met, it was at places such as a park at dusk, where they could not be recognized or overheard. A transcriptionist based in India later declined to work on this piece for fear of being implicated in journalism that was critical of the government. The culture of pluralistic debate that inspired economist Amartya Sen to coin the term “the argumentative Indian” has been all but wiped out.

Despite India’s divisive and unstable political environment, Modi remains very popular among voters and is almost certain to win a third term next year. The BJP has spent hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money to build a cult of personality around him. His face is everywhere, from front-page newspaper ads to Covid vaccination certificates. A satellite launched into space in 2021 carried a photo of Modi. Despite being only 5 feet, 7 inches tall, Modi towers over the Indian people in giant cardboard cutouts that have popped up all over the country.

The purpose of this symbolism is not lost on Indians. It is a loyalty test. Long after Independence Day last August, gas stations, homes, and even street vendors in Delhi continued to fly the Indian tricolor. One woman told me that as a personal act of resistance, she had decided not to display the flag. Then she heard that gangs of Hindu vigilantes were roving the area, noting down the names and addresses of those who refused to fall in line. She went up to her terrace and raised her flag.

Umar Khalid’s father, Syed Qasim Rasool Ilyas, and his mother, Sabiha Khanam, sit for a portrait in their home in Delhi, on July 3, 2023.

Photo: Sanna Irshad Mattoo for The Intercept

Growing Up Muslim in India

Last fall, two years after Khalid was arrested, I spent time with his family in Delhi. Their elegant apartment was full of books and photographs. A maid worked in the open-plan kitchen while one of Khalid’s younger sisters chatted with a cousin. His father, Syed Qasim Rasool Ilyas, brought out a tray filled with snacks and served tea. At first, Khalid’s parents were politely reserved. But when his mother, Sabiha Khanam, a soft-spoken woman who wears a hijab, sat down next to me, she planted her feet firmly on the ground as though determined not to hold back.

“My son had a bright future,” she said. “He could have moved abroad, bought a nice house, a nice car. It was all within his grasp. But he said, ‘I only want to live in India.’” She shook her head. “And he’s the one they call a terrorist?”

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Khanam’s parents moved from the North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh to Delhi when she was a child; she grew up among a large extended family helmed by her father, a sales tax officer with the city government. Ilyas came from an activist family: His paternal grandfather had been a freedom fighter with the Muslim League and after independence joined the Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, a movement to establish Islamic fundamentalism in India that later moderated its views because they were so unpopular among Indian Muslims. Khanam and Ilyas met as members of Students’ Islamic Movement of India, or SIMI, launched in 1977 to offer Muslims moral support and camaraderie in a nation that was often openly antagonistic toward them.

Sabiha Khanam holds a photo of her son Umar Khalid as a child.

Photo: Sanna Irshad Mattoo for The Intercept

The friction around the acceptance of Muslims as Indian can be traced back to the Partition of 1947 and the division of British India along religious lines: Hindu- and Sikh-majority regions remained inside independent India, while Pakistan was created as a homeland for Muslims. Though 35 million Muslims chose to stay in India, the Hindu supremacist groups that mushroomed in the run-up to Partition — namely the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideology’s mothership and the world’s largest volunteer paramilitary force, which Modi joined as a child — viewed them as an even greater threat after the subcontinent was split.

Since then, despite being India’s largest minority religious group, the country’s more than 200 million Muslims have been systematically underrepresented and discriminated against in virtually every area of public life, from education to employment to housing. SIMI impressed upon members the need to uplift the community through education and job training; the group came to be known for its cadre of educated Muslims, including Ilyas, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry.

By the time Ilyas became SIMI’s national president in the 1980s, Khanam was in charge of the Delhi women’s wing. “When it was time to marry,” Ilyas told me, “I wanted someone related to the movement. So I married her.” Was it a love marriage? I asked. “No, no,” he replied, looking offended. “Not at all.” Khanam burst out laughing. “Not for me either,” she said.

When their first child was born in 1987, Ilyas and Khanam named him after their favorite religious figures: the second caliph Umar ibn Al-Khattab, who is regarded as the father of Islamic jurisprudence, and the seventh-century military commander Khalid ibn al-Walid. Khanam took her son everywhere she went, including to religious gatherings.

To his parents’ disappointment, Khalid showed no interest in Islam. In his late teens, he declared himself an atheist. If Khalid had a religion, it was cricket. His dream was to play for India, like his hero Irfan Pathan. Khalid was an all-rounder with a special gift for fast bowling, and he gained a reputation for trash-talking opponents. Doted on by his family, the eldest child and only boy out of six kids, Khalid grew up self-confident and resilient. But starting in his late teens, he became preoccupied with the abject state of his neighborhood. 

Khalid’s home was in Zakir Nagar, a Muslim area of the capital known for being overcrowded and unsanitary. Dangerous coils of electric wires hung over the streets, and the pungent combination of sewage, livestock, and exhaust fumes lent the area its signature smell. “We [can’t] get pizzas delivered, you don’t get internet, you don’t get home loans,” a teenage Khalid had said about his neighborhood in a student documentary.

“He’d look at his classmates and think, ‘These people are from the same social class, so why do I live in a ghetto?’”

“He’d look at his classmates and think, ‘These people are from the same social class, so why do I live in a ghetto?’” said Anirban Bhattacharya, the friend in whose apartment Khalid recorded his farewell video. Khalid would come to realize that even privileged Muslims would rather raise their families in a ghetto than in a religiously mixed area, where their Hindu neighbors might turn on them.

Umar Khalid’s close friend, Anirban Bhattacharya, at his office in Delhi, on July 3, 2023.

Photo: Sanna Irshad Mattoo for The Intercept

Khalid’s political consciousness developed as he grew into adulthood. In 2008, when he was 21 and studying history at Delhi University, a police inspector and two young Muslim students who police described as terrorists were killed in a shootout near where Khalid grew up. The Batla House encounter — named for the area where the incident took place — remains controversial. Police have used so-called encounters to mask extrajudicial killings and support official narratives about threats to national security, including in Kashmir, where Indian security forces frequently claim they’re defending themselves in gun fights that kill civilians active in the region’s independence movement.

The police used the Batla House encounter to increase surveillance of Muslims in the area; stop-and-frisk became routine. For Khalid, it was a seminal moment in his understanding of how security agencies violently target Muslims, regardless of whether they commit a crime.

“I could see how deeply the injustice had affected him. He insisted on being present when the students’ last rites were carried out.”

“I was in the kitchen, and he came over and rested his head on my shoulder,” Khanam told me. “I could see how deeply the injustice had affected him. He insisted on being present when the students’ last rites were carried out.”

The stereotyping and ostracization of Indian Muslims had increased since September 11. Days after the attacks, U.S. President George W. Bush told a joint session of Congress, “Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Eager to please a powerful ally, and with its own ax to grind, the Indian government, which was then also run by the BJP, banned SIMI, declaring it a terrorist organization.

Ilyas and Khanam had long left SIMI. In 1985, Ilyas started working for a media company; Khanam launched a boutique selling hijabs and organized literacy classes for adults from disadvantaged backgrounds. But the stigma of having once belonged to SIMI haunted the couple: The anti-terror law the BJP used to crush SIMI was the same one that, years later, it would deploy against Khalid.

Graffiti that reads “Free Umar Khalid” on Jawaharlal Nehru University’s campus. Khalid was a doctoral student at JNU when he was arrested for sedition in 2016.

Photo: Sanna Irshad Mattoo for The Intercept

Modi’s Reign of Terror

The Indian government’s determination to stamp out terrorism didn’t extend to Hindus, and by the early 2000s, Hindu extremist groups had been linked to numerous deadly attacks on Muslims, including the bombing of a train connecting India to Pakistan, a blast at Mecca Masjid in Hyderabad, and another blast at a mosque near Mumbai at the end of Ramadan.

The most notorious episode of Hindu terror in India’s recent history occurred under Modi’s watch in 2002, when he was chief minister of the state of Gujarat. After a train full of Hindu pilgrims caught fire, killing 59 people, Modi declared the incident a “terrorist attack” and had the charred bodies put on display at the state capital. According to Human Rights Watch, Hindu mobs immediately responded to the dog whistle with a frenzy of bloodletting that lasted three days and left at least 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, dead as police either stood by or participated in the violence. Despite accusations of complicity from several domestic and international human rights groups, Modi was reelected in a landslide victory later that year and became Gujarat’s longest-serving chief minister.

In 2005, after an investigation by the Indian government concluded that the train fire was an accident, the U.S. State Department denied Modi a visa to speak at Madison Square Garden in New York under a law that prohibits the entry of foreigners who have committed “particularly severe violations of religious freedom.” The Obama administration lifted the ban after Modi became prime minister.

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As India’s top elected official, Modi has harnessed the country’s already rampant anti-Muslim bigotry and weaponized the law to reward his acolytes and punish his detractors. The Modi government has empowered local right-wing officials and Hindu vigilantes to make life for many Indian Muslims not just difficult, but unbearable. Muslims have faced economic boycotts of their businesses and bulldozers destroying their homes after officials arbitrarily deem them illegal constructions. Several states have adopted laws that target Muslims, including criminalizing the slaughter of cows, possession of beef, and interfaith marriage.

Few Hindu vigilantes who have lynched dozens of Muslims have been arrested — even though many of these crimes were committed in public, captured on video, and shared online.

“Towards what end?” said Patel, the journalist. “Exclusion. Apartheid. To say, ‘We don’t want you.’ This is ideological. [Hindu supremacists] genuinely hate these people.”

Even punishments for past wrongdoing can be reversed at the government’s whim when the victims are Muslim. In August 2022, 11 Hindu men convicted of gang-raping their Muslim neighbor during the Gujarat riots walked free after an intervention from the government. Bilkis Bano was five months pregnant at the time of the attack. The men killed her 3-year-old daughter by smashing her head to the ground, as well as 14 other family members, including female relatives who were also sexually assaulted. They had been sentenced to life in prison, but a review committee decided to release them. A BJP politician on the committee told an Indian news outlet that the men were “honest people. … Their behavior in prison and the behavior of their family is very good.”

Modi has harnessed the country’s already rampant anti-Muslim bigotry and weaponized the law to reward his acolytes and punish his detractors.

In a statement released by her lawyer, Bano said the decision left her “bereft.” “I trusted the highest courts in our land. I trusted the system, and I was learning slowly to live with my trauma,” she said. “The release of these convicts has taken from me my peace and shaken my faith in justice.”

From the bold-faced discrimination and subjugation of Muslims emerged a vocal opposition to Modi and his Hindu supremacist agenda. In response, the government has used a legal dragnet to sweep up his critics and stifle dissent.

When it was first passed in 1967, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act was only applicable to organizations; the Islamic State and Al Qaeda were later banned under the law. When Modi came to power, his government amended the UAPA so individuals could be accused of terrorism and detained for up to six months without formal charges.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and U.S. President Donald Trump wave at the crowd during the “Namaste Trump” rally at Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Stadium in Motera, on the outskirts of Ahmedabad, Gujarat, on Feb. 24, 2020.

Photo: Money Sharma/AFP via Getty Images

“Every country has counterterror laws, but the UAPA does not meet international standards,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division. “Is Umar Khalid really comparable to the 9/11 terrorists? And if not, the government is undermining the entire principle of a legislation that is meant to protect the public from extremely brutal acts.”

Like Khalid, many Indians who have been charged under the UAPA are public figures who have spoken out against injustice and command widespread respect for their work. Stan Swamy, an 84-year-old Jesuit priest with Parkinson’s disease, was among 16 prominent human rights activists arrested on terrorism charges in 2018, accused of engaging in a Maoist plot to assassinate Modi. Swamy had moved to a remote area of eastern India about three decades earlier to live among Indigenous communities under threat from mining corporations, including Adani Group — owned by billionaire coal tycoon and Modi confidante Gautam Adani — that was permitted by the government to expand its mining operations on Indigenous forest land.

In prison, Swamy was deprived of a straw and sipper he needed to drink water. His requests for bail on medical grounds were denied multiple times. When he died of cardiac arrest in 2021, he was still awaiting trial. A U.S.-based digital forensics firm later found that the computers owned by Swamy and at least two other activists had been infiltrated by a hacker who planted evidence that was used to arrest them.

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When courts do grant bail in UAPA cases, it is under conditions that force once outspoken activists to exist as half-citizens. Safoora Zargar, one of the student leaders arrested after the citizenship protests, was granted bail two months later because she was pregnant. However, she was forbidden to leave Delhi without permission from the court and had to call the investigating officer on her case every two weeks. Zargar told me that her lawyers advised her not to speak publicly “just to be on the safe side.” Though she hasn’t given speeches since her release, she still attends protests and is active on social media, a decision she said she makes at “great personal risk.”

Modi’s critics have also been charged under an anti-sedition law introduced during British rule to imprison freedom fighters, including Mahatma Gandhi. According to Article 14’s database, from 2010 to 2021, 149 people were charged with sedition for making “critical and/or derogatory” remarks against Modi; the maximum penalty is life in prison.

Notably, young people are the most vulnerable to sedition charges. From 2015 to 2020, most of the people arrested for violating this law were under the age of 30.

“By crushing students of any sort, the government is stifling the political future of the country,” said Ganguly, “because from these students will emerge a democratic space with a variety of political opinions and a diversity of political thought that will enrich any democratic process.”

“By crushing students of any sort, the government is stifling the political future of the country.”

Last year, in response to nine petitions challenging its constitutionality, the Supreme Court suspended the law, asking the government to stop issuing sedition charges or punishing those already charged while the terms of the law are reassessed. The Law Commission of India, which is under the government’s purview, has argued not only that the sedition law should be reinstated, but also that the punishment should be more severe.

Despite the high-profile nature of many of the arrests, they rarely result in widespread protest, in part because the arrests are often the culmination of a media campaign in which government critics are vilified as anti-Indian. By the time these dissidents are imprisoned, the tide of public opinion may have turned against them.

Indians are so consumed by Modi’s brand of politics that they overlook the lack of jobs for young people and any real hope of a promising future, Harsh Mander, a human rights advocate who himself has been targeted by the government, told me. “They are persuaded by the idea of scapegoats, and they are willing to accept anything — hunger, joblessness, even bodies decimated by Covid floating down the Ganges — because they are preoccupied by something else: hatred.”

Khalid became one of Modi’s targets in 2016, when he and a group of fellow graduate students who had spent most of their adult lives with their noses stuck in books were branded enemies of the state.

Umar Khalid marches under heavy police protection during a peaceful demonstration in Delhi, on March 30, 2016.

Photo: Arun Sharma/Hindustan Times via Getty Images

“Creating a Witch Hunt”

I met Khalid in May 2016 while reporting on the events that had led to his arrest and those of other student organizers accused of sedition at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. Khalid, who had recently been released after nearly a month in jail, invited me to tea at the same outdoor café where, three months earlier, he and other students had held a vigil for a Kashmiri man accused of terrorism and hanged after a botched trial — an annual demonstration that the media blew up overnight into a national news story.

The JNU campus — like cinemas, malls, and other public venues in Delhi — had private security personnel at the entrance. When I arrived, there were also police officers in their trademark khaki uniforms, extra security introduced after the vigil. The air buzzed with the sound of walkie-talkies.

Once through the gates, I was transported from the crowded street full of potholes to broad, spotless vistas, lush greenery, and the unvarnished brick structures that the architect CP Kukreja had left exposed to match the red soil upon which they were built.

It was morning, and the café was full of students. Khalid was sitting at a table talking to a friend. He wore a kurta with jeans and stout sandals, a shawl thrown around his neck and shoulders. Though he appeared gaunt, Khalid was full of energy, his eyes intent, his speech fast. Between his fingers rested a Navy Cut cigarette, his favorite brand, which he bought in packs and smoked one after the other.

Khalid was working on his history Ph.D. at JNU, a liberal arts institution known for fiery intellectuals who have gone on to mold global ways of thinking, becoming political leaders, Nobel Prize winners, and renowned novelists. Here, Khalid was introduced to the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vladimir Lenin, and Leo Tolstoy, and studied Karl Marx, whose vision for a stateless, classless society he came to believe was the best solution for a country as unequal as India. Khalid’s doctoral research focused on an Indigenous community’s struggle to maintain control over their land. He was so sure he wouldn’t leave India that he had never applied for a passport.

To some at JNU, Khalid’s ideas sounded like loony leftism. But his restless optimism, inquiring mind, and activist spirit made him popular and easy to get along with. He loved films and pestered friends to watch them with him, offering a play by play. He was also known as a prankster with what some have fondly described as “a cringeworthy sense of humor.”

To some at JNU, Khalid’s ideas sounded like loony leftism. But his restless optimism, inquiring mind, and activist spirit made him popular and easy to get along with.

“In the milieu in which I’ve grown up, I’ve known people who have been arrested on false charges,” he told me during our meeting, referring to people he’d met through his parents’ activism. “I know of people who have been brutally tortured or forced to sign false confessions or spend years in prison before being acquitted of all charges. I only spent 24 days in jail. That’s nothing compared to some.”

On the evening of February 9, 2016, Khalid, Bhattacharya, and other students marked the 2013 execution of a Kashmiri shopkeeper, Muhammad Afzal Guru. Though he had denied aiding the 2001 attack on India’s Parliament that killed nine people, Afzal Guru was sentenced to death based on what novelist and activist Arundhati Roy described as a “pile of lies and fabricated evidence.” For many, including the JNU students, Afzal Guru’s case represented a confluence of injustices: the use of capital punishment, the unfair treatment of Muslims by India’s criminal justice system, and state repression of Kashmiris. Past events to commemorate him had been held on campus without incident, so the students were taken aback when a TV crew showed up.

Members of Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad also came out. Since Modi’s election, ABVP and other Hindu supremacist student groups have increasingly acted as proxies for the BJP on college campuses. They rejected the existence of caste-based discrimination and used claims of “Hinduphobia” to deflect criticism. A month before the JNU event, members of ABVP at the University of Hyderabad had targeted a doctoral student who was Dalit, a member of India’s lowest and most disadvantaged caste. Rohith Vemula was subsequently suspended for fighting caste discrimination on campus; after the university upheld the decision, he hanged himself.

Arundhati Roy demands the release of JNU students Umar Khalid and Anirban Bhattacharya on March 15, 2016, in Delhi.

Photo: Vipin Kumar/Hindustan Times via Getty Images

At JNU, ABVP had prevented the screenings of two documentaries critical of the BJP. But among most students, the group wasn’t despised so much as dismissed for being on the wrong side of history. Khalid referred to ABVP’s joint secretary as bhai, or brother. Another member of the group was Khalid’s neighbor, and Khalid often stopped by his place to bum a cigarette or a lighter.

At the event commemorating Afzal Guru, ABVP members heckled the organizers. “He who speaks of Afzal will die Afzal’s death,” they shouted.

The students replied with a call-and-response chant borrowed from India’s feminist movement: “What do we want?” “Freedom from hunger! Freedom from casteism!”

The scene was chaotic, but no one was hurt, and by the time the students were back in their rooms, many had already chalked up the evening as just another unpleasant encounter with India’s emboldened right wing.

The next day, however, #shutdownJNU was trending on Twitter. Confident that they had nothing to hide, Khalid and other student organizers responded to media requests for interviews. This proved a costly mistake. That evening, Khalid appeared on Times Now, a cable news channel known for its right-wing bias, as part of a panel discussion about the vigil.

“You are more dangerous to this country than Maoist terrorists,” screamed Arnab Goswami, the channel’s editor-in-chief at the time. “Someone is going to name you as anti-national, and I’m naming you as anti-national tonight.” Khalid, struggling to get a word in over Goswami’s berating, responded with a bewildered smile.

Over the next few hours, other cable channels adopted the same rhetoric, describing the students as pro-Pakistan and secessionist while running clips from the event on a loop. Khalid, with his Muslim name, was singled out. The channels labeled him the event’s “mastermind” — foreshadowing the accusations that would lead to his imprisonment years later — and falsely claimed that he had visited Pakistan. They called him a sympathizer of Jaish-e-Mohammed, a militant group listed by the U.S. Treasury Department as a terrorist organization, an accusation the media claimed was based on an Indian government report. The government later denied the report’s existence, but none of the news outlets issued a retraction.

“The regime wants to portray young Muslims as people influenced by Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Muslim fundamentalism,” Shuddhabrata Sengupta, an artist and writer who is a close friend of Khalid’s, told me. “By selecting Umar for persecution, the government sent out a signal to people like him.”

Within days, Modi’s home minister, the cabinet official responsible for national security, tweeted that he had ordered Delhi police to “take strong action against the anti-India elements” at JNU. The rhetoric ignited a public frenzy. Mobs of furious people converged outside the university gates, where they had to be held back by riot police. Fearing they would be lynched, Khalid, Bhattacharya, and other students fled the campus.

The mainstream media’s dependence on state support has enabled the Modi government to put political pressure on journalists, and as a result, most news outlets have yielded their independence. Veteran journalist Ravish Kumar — who coined the term “Godi media,” or lapdog media, to describe pro-Modi news outlets — has direct experience of what happens when news outlets resist falling in line. NDTV, where Kumar worked as managing editor, was subject to repeated raids by the income tax department before Adani, the billionaire businessman, bought the channel last November. On the day the buyout was made public, Kumar resigned.

“I’ve never seen TV used so successfully to whip up mass hysteria.”

As the mobs hunting the JNU students spread across the city and beyond, Kumar watched from the window of his apartment. “The atmosphere was terrifying,” he told me. “I’ve never seen TV used so successfully to whip up mass hysteria.” The next day, Kumar ran a black screen on his prime-time show, telling viewers, “This darkness is the picture of television today.”

The police issued wanted notices and warned border authorities not to let the students leave the country. On February 23, Khalid and Bhattacharya returned to campus prepared to be arrested. Bhattacharya referred to what happened next as being “pulled into a social experiment.”

The Delhi police charged Khalid, Bhattacharya, and three other students with sedition. Bhattacharya, an upper-caste Hindu, told me that prison authorities were baffled by his presence: “Khalid getting embroiled in these things one can understand, but why are you here, Bhattacharya sahib?”

Anirban Bhattacharya when he was a student at JNU, on April 26, 2016, in Delhi.

Photo: Vipin Kumar/Hindustan Times via Getty Images

Prison guards never spared an opportunity to taunt Khalid: “If you have to fight, why don’t you fight for reform in Islam?” He distracted himself in jail by rereading a favorite book that Lahiri, his partner, brought him on a visit, Roy’s “The God of Small Things.”

When the two friends were released on bail nearly four weeks later, the JNU administration fined them for holding the vigil. Most of their fellow students, however, welcomed them back as heroes, a response observers declared a “Student Spring.”

On the night of his release, Khalid gave a speech attended by thousands of people at an open-air courtyard christened Freedom Square.

“Friends,” Khalid said when the cheers died down, “I don’t know how to put my feelings into words. Things happened so fast that even now I haven’t been able to make sense of them. I think about them every day and wonder, ‘What happened?’” The crowd roared. Khalid took a beat and switched from English to Hindi, his tone becoming serious.

“But the one thing that’s crystal clear,” he said, “is that if the government, the RSS thought that by profiling some of us, by creating a witch hunt, that they could break us and destroy our movement and unity and courage, well, they were delusional. Today, as I stand before you, I feel even stronger than I did, and this is a huge victory for our fight.” 

“What do we want?” he shouted. “Freedom!” the crowd screamed back.

“It was very clear that students would play a vital role against the authoritarian regime,” Bhattacharya told me. “And it was evident from the way the government moved that they believed the attack on JNU was going to silence students in this country for some time to come.” But for Khalid, this was only the beginning.

As we chatted at the café a few months after his release, Khalid was constantly interrupted by well-wishers. He politely stopped talking to respond to the “hellos” and “how are yous.” I got the feeling that after the initial shock had worn off, Khalid had accepted that his life would be very different — and that he would embrace his new role as an act of citizenship.

“People are listening to us,” he told me. “Our task is to foreground questions that haven’t been highlighted.” His immediate goal, he said, was to bring together students, activists, Indigenous communities, and trade unions in a broad-based “anti-fascist front.” For a moment before the pandemic hit, his vision of popular resistance became a reality. But it cost him his freedom.

A boy plays with birds in Shaheen Bagh, a majority Muslim neighborhood in Delhi, on July 3, 2023.

Photo: Sanna Irshad Mattoo for The Intercept

“How Much Has the Country Changed?”

Khalid’s powerful campus speeches gained national attention, and soon, he was getting invited to share his message all over the country.

But some were bent on keeping Khalid from the podium. On August 13, 2018, while he and Lahiri were waiting for chai at a tea stall outside Delhi’s Constitution Club where he was scheduled to speak, a tall, beefy man lunged at Khalid and threw him to the ground. Lahiri and some others hurled themselves at the assailant, but he shrugged them off and pointed a gun straight at Khalid. “The man’s face was blank,” Lahiri told me. Suddenly, he ran away, tossing the gun.

When police retrieved the weapon, they discovered six live rounds. “You’re a very lucky man,” an officer told Khalid. “He pulled the trigger, but the gun somehow jammed.” The alleged assailant and an accomplice were later arrested but released on bail. The next year, the assailant was backed by a political party with Hindu supremacist ties to run in a local assembly election, which he lost.

The assassination attempt convinced Khalid that the only place he would be safe was in a Muslim neighborhood. Khalid stopped taking public transport, friends recalled, and he wouldn’t travel alone. He was constantly looking over his shoulder. “Earlier, the threat to his life was hypothetical,” Lahiri said. “Now it was real.”

But Khalid was undeterred from his mission to rally the masses against Modi. During a Facebook Live event with the human rights activist Teesta Setalvad in January 2019, he told viewers that Modi’s regime was based on “jumlebaazi” and “nafrat,” the Hindi words for false promises and hate, respectively, adding: “His government is run on lies.”

He also continued to face hurdles on campus. The JNU administration refused to accept Khalid’s Ph.D. thesis, effectively preventing him from receiving his degree. The Delhi High Court intervened, and after a successful thesis defense in August 2019, Khalid found himself at a loose end. He thought about applying for a postdoctoral research fellowship, but he didn’t exclude the possibility of becoming a politician.

“It was no longer about putting out a pamphlet or having a polemical debate — it was about community, aspirations, and citizenship.”

“Earlier, his ideas were evolving within a university campus,” Bhattacharya told me. “Now the canvas was much larger. It was no longer about putting out a pamphlet or having a polemical debate — it was about community, aspirations, and citizenship.”

Bhattacharya said Khalid wanted to shape how Muslim youth facing second-class citizenship envisioned their futures. “He was frustrated that the community was reduced to saying, ‘Humko bas jeene do’ — ‘Please let us just live,’” he said. “Muslims were being lynched, so of course safety was important, but he was also trying to broaden the idea of citizenship to include other rights. He wanted people to live in full bloom.”

On the second anniversary of Khalid’s imprisonment in September 2022, I went to a public park in central Delhi to meet Lahiri, Khalid’s partner. It was dusk when I arrived; a human-made lake glittered in the dwindling light, and birds of prey surveyed the grounds with sharp-eyed interest. Though Lahiri was only a few minutes late, she was very apologetic. She explained that she lived in Jamia Nagar, a predominantly Muslim neighborhood about 40 minutes away, near where Khalid grew up. She had remained there so that he would one day have a familiar place to come home to. 

Banojyotsna Lahiri, Umar Khalid’s partner, looks out from the balcony of her home in Delhi on June 18, 2023.

Photo: Sanna Irshad Mattoo for The Intercept

Lahiri, a 39-year-old research scholar focused on minority rights, was born in Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal, to a biology teacher and a chemist who were members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), one of India’s long-established left-wing political parties. Lahiri was a student at JNU when she first met Khalid while counseling students harassed by police in the aftermath of the Batla House encounter. When Khalid enrolled at JNU the following year, the two reconnected. He and Lahiri helped co-found a group called United Against Hate after Khalid’s 2016 arrest to address the rising mob violence against Muslims.

“We were, like, very hot-headed radicals and all that,” Lahiri told me with a laugh. “Politics was and continues to be the cornerstone of our relationship.”

Less than a year into Modi’s second term, the government passed a citizenship law that signaled to Indian Muslims that they were no longer welcome in their own country. The Citizenship Amendment Act, or CAA, would make it nearly impossible for Muslim migrants to become citizens in India. The law was twinned with a planned nationwide campaign to force people already living in India to prove they belonged there.

Mander, the human rights advocate, called the citizenship law the first of its kind in India’s history to target one community. “It was meant to destroy the way we imagined this country, how we built it, and the promises of the constitution,” he told me.

“It was meant to destroy the way we imagined this country, how we built it, and the promises of the constitution.”

The potential impact of the plan was already playing out in the northeastern state of Assam, which is controlled by the BJP. The state, which shares a border with Muslim-majority Bangladesh, has long been depicted by the right as a hotbed of illegal immigration. As a part of the citizenship drive there, the state’s 33 million residents, many of whom are poor, illiterate, or itinerant, had to produce documents certifying their date and place of birth. The cruelty of this laboratory experiment became clear when 2 million people, including many Muslims, were struck off the citizenship rolls.

Declared “foreigners,” many were sent to detention camps within existing jails. In January 2023, news reports said that detainees would be transferred to India’s first immigration detention center as more such camps sprouted, creating the fearsome specter of a country where Muslims are kept in cages.

Protests started in Assam and quickly spread to the rest of the country. In several cities, the peaceful gatherings, known as the anti-CAA protests, were led by students on Muslim-majority campuses. They recited the preamble to the constitution, which mandates a secular state. They unfurled the national flag and shouted slogans such as “Keep dividing, we will keep multiplying,” and “Asking questions isn’t anarchy; abusing power is.”

Days after the law was passed, police unleashed their arsenal on student protesters at Jamia Millia Islamia, a renowned Muslim university in Delhi. CCTV footage showed police in riot gear storming the glass doors of the library, where students were engrossed in their work, and thrashing them with hefty bamboo sticks. One student was so badly wounded that he lost his left eye. In a hearing calling on the Delhi High Court to investigate the violence, a lawyer representing injured students said the police fired 452 tear gas cannons.

Muslim women in Shaheen Bagh protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act, on Feb. 22, 2020.

Photo: Yawar Nazir/ Getty Images

Lahiri told me she could hear the firepower from her and Khalid’s apartment: “I felt like I was in a war zone.”

The Indian government imposed an internet blackout to try to stop the protests. Still, they continued. So many hundreds of people were detained in Delhi that the police sought permission from the city to convert a sports stadium into a temporary prison.

As the protests and police violence raged, about 100 women sat down to block a main road in the largely Muslim neighborhood of Shaheen Bagh. Their sit-in lasted through the night into the morning and kept going. Every day, more and more people from all over the city joined them. “Hum Dekhenge,” or “We Shall See,” by the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, became their anthem:

Underneath our feet — we the governed.
The ground will echo like a thumping heartbeat
And the sky over the heads of the rulers
Will echo with the sound of thunder.

“It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen,” Lahiri told me. “I haven’t seen the Paris Commune, but I’ve seen Shaheen Bagh.”

Shaheen Bagh inspired sit-ins across the country, and Khalid was deluged with speaking invitations. From December 2019 to February 2020, he spoke at almost 70 sites.

“Seventy-two years after independence, Muslims are still being told to prove that we are patriots,” he told a crowd of protesters in Mumbai on December 27. “Even today we’re told, ‘You got Pakistan, what more do you want? You’ve divided the country once, now what do you want?’ To them I’d like to say, ‘We’re not Indians by chance. We’re Indians by choice.’’’

“The fact of us being here is proof of our patriotism. Muhammad Ali Jinnah was not our leader, is not our leader. Mahatma Gandhi is our leader. … Narendra Modi said, ‘I feel happy seeing [Muslims] wave the flag.’ Mr. Modi, the flag has been in our heart, and in our hands, since 1947. It took you people more than 50 years to raise the tricolor at the RSS headquarters. We don’t need a certificate of patriotism from you.”

“He spoke very bravely, very charismatically,” said Mander, who sometimes shared the podium with Khalid. “He was by then a political leader with significant clout.”

The moment of mass resistance was short-lived. On February 23, 2020, Kapil Mishra, a Delhi BJP leader known for his hateful rhetoric, incited his followers to forcibly remove women from their protest sites if the police did not take action.

“Those who clean the toilets of our homes, should we now place them on a pedestal?” he asked at a gathering of BJP supporters. “We will have to teach them a lesson.”

The next day, Mishra’s followers started attacking protesters with guns, swords, spears, and stones. The violence quickly expanded to target any Muslim regardless of their involvement in the demonstrations, as the mob destroyed cars and threw petrol bombs at shops, homes, mosques, and madrasas. Lahiri, who was in Bihar with Khalid at the time, told me her phone exploded with messages from friends in Delhi reporting “horrible violence.”

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The next day, Trump landed in India. While Trump was fêted by Modi in front of 100,000 people in a stadium in Ahmedabad, in Gujarat, and lunched with the prime minister on leg of lamb, mushroom curry in saffron gravy, and date halwa, 53 people, mostly Muslims, died, and more than 500 were injured. Many Delhi police officers either stood by or attacked Muslims themselves, in a display reminiscent of the Gujarat riots 18 years earlier. The deputy commissioner of police had stood beside Mishra during his speech and was later seen shaking hands with members of the mob.

When police began investigating the violence, they focused not on the perpetrators — many of whom had been caught on camera or identified by their victims — but on the protesters. Nearly 2,500 people were arrested, including 17 high-profile activists who had galvanized the anti-CAA protests as organizers and speakers. Modi had described the protests as a “conspiracy against the country,” and the activists were charged with conspiracy, as well as sedition and murder.

“Claiming that the violence was a conspiracy by the left and Muslim activists to create an insurrection to force a regime change is fantastical,” said Mander, who was investigated as part of the crackdown but not charged.

Police pinned Khalid as a “ringleader,” despite ample evidence that Mishra had whipped up his followers. A month after many of the arrests, the charges against Khalid and the 17 other activists were updated to include offenses under UAPA.

Police pinned Khalid as a “ringleader,” despite ample evidence that Mishra had whipped up his followers.

Khalid was detained on September 13, 2020. In October 2022, the Delhi High Court rejected his appeal for bail, declaring that the charges against him were “prima facie true.” As proof, they pointed to the fact that Khalid was in a WhatsApp group set up by a student activist who had also been charged with conspiracy and was still in prison.

The court’s decision affirmed what human rights defenders have said all along about India’s terror law: that the charge is the punishment.

“There’s no evidence that Umar Khalid was engaged in violence,” Ganguly of Human Rights Watch said. “So on what grounds is UAPA being used against him? Simply because he made statements the government disliked?”

Khalid refused to let his imprisonment take away his voice. In a letter published by The Wire, an Indian news site, Khalid wrote: “On Independence Day, in the evening, I sat outside the prison cell with a few others. We saw kites flying high above our jail compound and reminisced about our childhood 15th August memories. How did we reach here? How much has the country changed?”

He spent most of his time in jail alone because he’d grown weary of trying to convince fellow inmates that what they read about him in the newspapers was not true.

“Now, the sight and sound of people and traffic during my visits to court make me irritable and anxious. Far from the madding crowd, the tranquility of jail is starting to become my usual,” he wrote. “I wonder, am I getting used to captivity?”

A photo of Umar Khalid at his sister’s wedding last winter, after a Delhi district court granted him temporary bail to attend.

Photo: Sanna Irshad Mattoo for The Intercept

A Taste of Freedom

One Friday afternoon in December, Lahiri was startled awake from a vivid nightmare. It was bitterly cold in Delhi, but she was soaked in sweat. Before she could process her dream, she realized she had only three minutes to log into her video call with Khalid. She couldn’t miss it, or he would worry. He would think that now she was in danger.

Lahiri sat up in bed and reached for her phone. When she joined the call, she saw an empty chair, and her face in the small top-right window peering anxiously down at the screen. She felt a pinprick of anxiety. Would the sound work? Would the internet connection be stable? Would he even come? Until Khalid sat down and smiled at her, she could never be sure the call would happen.

After five long minutes, Khalid finally appeared. He affectionately commented on her hair, disheveled from the nap. “Why are you looking like this?” he laughed.

She told him about her dream. In it, the police allowed Khalid to visit JNU to meet his friends, and many students gathered to get a glimpse of him. How happy they were! But then the police, threatened by the growing crowd, chased them away, and suddenly, members of the ABVP, the right-wing student group, emerged from the fog to lynch him.

Khalid burst out laughing. But when he saw that Lahiri wasn’t amused, he reassured her. “It’s just a dream,” he said. “It’s not real.”

“I should be consoling him,” she told me later, “not the other way around. But he does more of the consoling.”

The two saw each other via video once a week. Khalid was also entitled to a mulakat, or in-person meeting, every week at Tihar jail, where he is imprisoned. His family and friends divided the dates to ensure that he always had a visitor.

Bhattacharya told me that visiting his friend in jail evoked a range of emotions from grief to guilt. After being arrested for sedition at JNU, he had stepped back from activism; his case is on hold while the law is under review.

“I come to the office, I have a drink with a friend, go for fieldwork, go to eat out, buy new clothes,” he said. “Of course, there barely passes a day when I don’t think, ‘When will he come home?’ or ‘He would’ve done this,’ or ‘He would’ve loved watching this film,’ or how he is so irritating. But the clock of life hasn’t stopped for me — the way it has for him.”

Tihar is considered one of India’s progressive jails, offering inmates counseling services, yoga classes, and sports facilities. But it is also overcrowded, with more than 13,000 prisoners crammed into a space built for 5,000. When Khalid first arrived, prison staff put him in a cell by himself instead of the army-style barracks typical of Indian prisons. Under the pretense of safety, he was locked up 24 hours a day; after 30 days, Khalid approached the Delhi High Court for relief from “practically a sort of solitary confinement.” The court granted his request, and since then, he has followed the same routine as the other prisoners, who include an Olympian charged with murdering a fellow wrestler.

Sometimes, Khalid can’t help but shake his head at how he ended up here. “Kabhi kabhi, I feel like I have never even hurt a person,” he told Lahiri during another call. “I have never even, you know, injured a person. And here, there are people accused of multiple murders — and we are together, in the same space.” 

With his parents, Khalid is less ruminative and more of a jokester. On a recent call with his mother, he quipped, “The other prisoners tell me, ‘We’re here because we killed someone, but you’re here because you did a Ph.D.’”

When Khanam asked, “And how are you, my son?” Khalid responded, “Very well, you tell me.”

“Very well? Are you on holiday in Switzerland?” Only from Khalid’s lawyer did Khanam learn that her son was strip-searched prior to every court appearance.

Khalid has tried to make the most of the past few years awaiting trial. Under the tutelage of the Olympian, he started lifting weights. He also returned to his first love, cricket, and took up badminton.

Without a phone or social media to distract him, he reads constantly, borrowing books from the prison library and asking friends and family to send more. Lahiri estimated that he’s read nearly 200 books while incarcerated. He recently finished Haruki Murakami’s “Norwegian Wood” and “Not Just Cricket: A Reporter’s Journey Through Modern India” by sports journalist Pradeep Magazine. He has filled dozens of notebooks with musings on prison life and published five articles, including a review of a graphic novel about Shaheen Bagh and an obituary for the Indian historian Ranajit Guha.

After Lahiri recounted her dream, the conversation quickly moved to lighter topics. They joked about how they had missed two “dates,” a pun on Khalid’s court dates that had recently been canceled. Khalid spoke proudly about how he had quit smoking. He told Lahiri that when he is released, he wants to learn how to swim.

Khalid spoke proudly about how he had quit smoking. He told Lahiri that when he is released, he wants to learn how to swim.

The jail imposed a strict 15-minute time limit for video calls, but Khalid often begged for more. Two minutes, please, he asked the police officer in charge. But ultimately, it was time to go.

“Chalo ab jaana hoga,” he told Lahiri — Now I really have to go. “Bye,” he said, “I love you.”

“Bye, I love you,” Lahiri replied. He disappeared. The screen was now filled with just her face.

This past winter, a Delhi district court granted Khalid a week’s bail to attend his sister’s wedding. The family had planned three celebrations: a haldi, mehendi, and nikah. The court set strict conditions: Khalid could only leave his parents’ house for the nikah, the Islamic marriage ceremony. He couldn’t talk to the media or the public. Still, Lahiri recalled wistfully, “It was wonderful.”

All his closest friends came to see him, often staying past midnight. “He’s a chatterbox, so most of the time, we were listening,” Bhattacharya told me.

For the first 48 hours, Khalid didn’t sleep. He met his twin nieces, who were born while he was in prison. He ate pizza. He rested his head on his mother’s lap and closed his eyes as she gently stroked his hair. “Ammi, I’ll only eat non-vegetarian food,” he warned her, tired of the prison menu of rice and dal.

Sometimes he went up to the roof of his parents’ apartment building to look over the city. When would he walk the streets again as a free man?

On the day of the nikah, Khalid wore a bespoke black sherwani, a traditional knee-length jacket, over white trousers. Lahiri and his friends stood protectively around him — he was under as much scrutiny from guests as the bride herself. He was overwhelmed, Lahiri told me. Although he enjoyed the festivities, it was impossible to forget that he was on borrowed time.

“This will be over soon,” he said again and again.

An entourage of family and friends accompanied Khalid back to Tihar. When they arrived at 5 p.m., sympathetic staff told them that since the prison gates didn’t close until 6, they could hang around for another hour. The group drank chai from a street vendor, but no one spoke much. Khalid wore black trousers and a warm sweater and carried a small duffle bag with items he was allowed to take in: fresh clothes, a second pair of reading glasses. When it was time to go, he raised his fist, a wide smile on his face.

The main gate leading into Tihar jail, where Umar Khalid is imprisoned.

Photo: Sanna Irshad Mattoo for The Intercept

Back inside, Khalid fell into a deep depression. “If you taste freedom for seven days, the ‘unfreedom’ becomes stark,” Lahiri told me. A few weeks later, he was back to what had become his normal routine. 

Khalid periodically appears before a judge for a bail hearing over whether he must remain incarcerated, with the next one scheduled for August 9. Eventually, a trial date will be set, said Ganguly of Human Rights Watch, adding that the charges against Khalid are unlikely to withstand judicial scrutiny.

“There’s no evidence that he’s engaged in anything that could be considered a violent act against the state,” she told me. “He’s never wielded a weapon. In fact, he’s been targeted and attacked. At some point, a judge will overturn the charges, but by then, he would have spent many years in jail.”

While they wait and hope that day comes sooner, Khalid and Lahiri will keep competing to make each other laugh. The joy they are still capable of feeling, Lahiri told me, is their resistance.

“We don’t know what’s going to happen to him. How can we when the whole thing is a farce?” she said. “But it can’t go on for eternity. It will come to an end, and until it does, we must be happy. Because if we are not, they win. So we’ve decided to be happy just as things are. And no one can take that away from us.”

Correction: August 7, 2023
A previous version of this article stated that the Delhi High Court rejected Umar Khalid’s appeal for bail in October 2020. This happened in October 2022.

The post Umar Khalid Challenged Modi’s Anti-Muslim Agenda. India Accused Him of Terrorism and Locked Him Up. appeared first on The Intercept.

Lorance, who won his pardon following an advocacy campaign by conservative activists and Republican politicians, left prison in 2019 thanks to Trump. Since then, he has by all accounts moved on with his life. He has written two books: one on his experience being charged with war crimes and another offering tips for millennial conservative activists on how to ensure that the U.S. will “always lead the world in everything.”

In his latest post-murder move, Lorance is working to become a lawyer. After graduating from Appalachia School of Law this May, he is now also reportedly sitting the Oklahoma bar exam and applying to practice law in the state.

The idea of a convicted war criminal being tasked with interpreting and upholding the law in the U.S. has rankled a few — most notably Lorance’s former military comrades. It was the men in his unit who turned him in after witnessing his murder of two innocent Afghan villagers, Haji Mohammed Aslam and Ghamai Abdul Haq. They testified against him at his court-martial.

Now, one of the men from his unit is making his objections official. In response to the news that Lorance would sit the bar exam, Todd Fitzgerald issued a letter to the Oklahoma Bar Association calling on his one-time commander to be denied certification to practice law in the state.

Fitzgerald, a former Army soldier who served with Lorance in the 82nd Airborne Division in Kandahar and witnessed his crimes, sent his letter late last month. The missive outlined a series of events that he and his fellow soldiers witnessed during the period they were briefly under Lorance’s volatile command — for all of three days — before he murdered the two civilians.

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“His actions during the three days he was in charge of our platoon were deliberate and he repeatedly displayed an astonishing lack of candor so egregious that resulted in his being reported, detained, and eventually convicted and sentenced based on the testimony of myself and many other eyewitnesses,” Fitzgerald wrote in his letter to the bar. (Neither Lorance nor the Oklahoma Bar responded to requests for comment.)

Over the span of those three short days, Fitzgerald wrote, after Lorance was sent to their outpost, soldiers witnessed him pointing a gun in the face of an elderly Afghan man while counting down in preparation to kill him, directing random fire into a village, ordering his reluctant troops to open fire and kill two unarmed men on a motorcycle, and then threatening to kill the crying women and children from the village who came to collect the dead men’s bodies afterwards.

In his letter, Fitzgerald said that Lorance had “acted cruelly and inhumanely, without provocation, and to the detriment of innocent lives as well as the safety of everyone else around.” The letter accuses Lorance of creating a false narrative in his defense that the men he had ordered killed, villagers known to U.S. troops, had been supporters of the Taliban, while characterizing himself as a victim of a politicized military justice system. The killings of the two men, Fitzgerald said, not only devastated the residents of the nearby village but also destroyed efforts by the U.S. military to cooperate with them against the Taliban.

“He has since refused to acknowledge any responsibility for his own actions.”

“He has since refused to acknowledge any responsibility for his own actions,” Fitzgerald added in his letter, “instead making a point to say that he takes responsibility for our actions as if he were protecting us when the truth is that he endangered all of our lives by causing the deaths of people who had been previously helping us and destroying the relationship we had built up with the local nationals.”

Fitzgerald is not the only one from Lorance’s platoon who had this sentiment about their former commanding officer. In the wake of his pardon, a number of them came forward to describe their reactions, with one describing it as a “nightmare.” While Lorance has become a cause célèbre on segments of the right, with Trump even bringing him and other pardoned war criminals on stage with him at public events, the soldiers who served under Lorance’s command and witnessed his actions while on duty have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, alcoholism, suicide, and drug abuse since leaving the military.

In an op-ed for the Army Times published last month, another soldier who served under Lorance in Afghanistan, Mike McGuinness, also called for the Oklahoma bar to deny Lorance’s bid to practice law. McGuinness described Lorance as morally unfit to be entrusted with upholding or interpreting the law in any circumstance.

“Giving orders to shoot unarmed people, threatening women and children, and then asking subordinates to cover it up is pretty damning evidence of a lack of moral fiber,” McGuinness wrote. “What displays that even more is Lorance’s insistence that he was the victim, his complete lack of remorse, and his failure to take accountability for his actions in Afghanistan.”

Mike McGuinness at home in Raeford, N.C., on May 6, 2020. McGuinness was staff sargeant in the platoon that was serving under Clint Lorance.

Photo: Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Trump Pardons

Lorance had initially been sentenced to 19 years in prison following his 2013 court-martial on murder charges. He was released from prison in 2019, following a successful campaign by conservative activists and commentators — including Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Pete Hegseth, as well as current and former GOP politicians Duncan Hunter, Paul Gosar, and Adam Kinzinger — to lobby Trump for his pardon.

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Lorance’s pardon — and subsequent self-reinvention as a conservative activist, author, and would-be lawyer — was only one consequence of Trump’s embrace of convicted war criminals during his time in office. In addition to Lorance, Trump pardoned a group of Blackwater mercenaries convicted of a notorious massacre in Iraq, former Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, and a host of other soldiers convicted by military courts of murdering civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. These pardons were often issued over the objections of U.S. military lawyers, senior military commanders, and other Pentagon officials, who criticized the moves as undermining military discipline and harming the reputation of the armed forces.

Today, Lorance’s LinkedIn page describes himself as a “military justice reform advocate” as well as “Iraq & Afghanistan veteran & author.” The page says he completed his degree at Appalachian School of Law in May of this year. It’s unclear whether the outcry from other veterans who served with him will be enough to stop Lorance from practicing law in Oklahoma, particularly given his support from a range of powerful conservative politicians who advocated for his pardon. Despite his unpopularity with the troops he commanded, he remains a celebrated figure on the Republican right, who have characterized their defense of Lorance as an act of loyalty to U.S. service members.

“This is a plea of conscience, for the men who were killed unjustly and are not here to advocate for themselves.”

Yet the celebration of a war criminal, convicted by the military’s own court system, coupled with the neglect of those who served under him and tried to do the right thing has left a painful memory for Fitzgerald and others who spoke out against Lorance. In his letter to the Oklahoma bar, Fitzgerald called for the institution to take a moral stand against Lorance by refusing him admission in light of the grave crimes for which he had been convicted.

“It is my utmost respect for the rule of law and the institutions that uphold these laws that drives me to send this communication. It has been a terrible experience and a moral injury to live through the murders of two innocent men. It would be a much greater injustice to say nothing while the person responsible takes no accountability and attempts to exert influence over the lives of others in any position of authority or control again,” wrote Fitzgerald. “This is a plea of conscience, for the men who were killed unjustly and are not here to advocate for themselves, for their families, and for all of the other surviving witnesses that live with the weight of this burden on their hearts and souls.”

The post War Criminal’s Bid to Become Lawyer Faces Obstacle: His Own Troops appeared first on The Intercept.

RAND Corporation experts, panelists, and other guests attend the ribbon-cutting of the new RAND Corporation headquarters in Santa Monica, Calif., on April 14, 2005.

Photo: Ted Soqui/Corbis via Getty Images

The bank robber John Dillinger is one of history’s most famous thieves, absconding with the equivalent today of about $7 million. You’d think that if someone had stolen $7 million on each of 7 million separate crime sprees, you would have heard about it, right? But you would be wrong.

In 2020, the RAND Corporation, a think tank in Santa Monica, California, released a study with the humdrum title “Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018.” RAND itself resides at the center of America’s establishment. In the decades following its founding after World War II, it was largely funded by and served the needs of the military-industrial complex. Daniel Ellsberg was working at RAND when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, which he had access to because RAND possessed several copies.

Incredibly enough, this dreary-sounding paper describes what might be the largest material theft since human civilization began. It examines a simple question: If U.S. income inequality had remained at its 1975 level through 2018, how much more money would the bottom 90 percent of Americans have made during these 43 years? Put another way, how much additional wealth flowed to the top 10 percent during this time, thanks to increased income equality?

If you have a butt, you should hold onto it, because the answer is 47 TRILLION DOLLARS.

This is a number so large that it surpasses human understanding. There are only a few hundred billion stars in the Milky Way; $47 trillion is about twice the size of the annual U.S. gross domestic product.

This raises an obvious question. Traditionally, this kind of upward concentration of wealth has required mass slaughter. How did America’s elites pull this off without needing to mow thousands of us down in the streets?

The answer can be found in the new book “The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.” It was written by Naomi Oreskes, a history of science professor at Harvard, and Erik M. Conway, a historian at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who previously collaborated on “Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues From Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.”

As Oreskes and Conway explain, “The Big Myth” grew out of their previous book. While writing “Merchants of Doubt,” they discovered that the groundwork of global warming denialism had been laid in the 1980s by prominent scientists who understood the reality of the situation quite well. However, these scientists were convinced believers in what Oreskes and Conway call “market fundamentalism” (borrowing from George Soros, one of market fundamentalism’s loudest critics). This is a system of belief that holds that political and economic freedom are indivisible. They quote the physicist Fred Singer, who wrote that “if we do not carefully delineate the government’s role in regulating … dangers there is essentially no limit to how much government can ultimately control our lives.” 

In other words, government interventions in the economy — such as laws removing lead from gas, carbon taxes, or mandated cooling-off breaks for people working in 100-degree heat — not only make us all poorer, but also put us on the road to Stalinist tyranny. Hence it’s crucial to head them all off at the pass, even if that requires a vast misrepresentation of observable fact.

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This worldview is such incoherent drivel that it’s hard to believe anyone with a functioning brain stem can buy into it. Meanwhile, market fundamentalists are oddly unconcerned with government intervention that’s profitable for large corporations. If you’re an entrepreneur who boldly tries to manufacture and sell any of the pharmaceutical industry’s patented products in a free market, you will quickly encounter the suffocating hand of the administrative state. Yet there are no Wall Street Journal op-eds decrying this injustice. (This doesn’t mean there’s no justifiable rationale for patents, but that there are rationales for other government regulations too.)

There’s also the reality that markets are a human creation, not a phenomenon like gravity that would exist whether or not people ever came along. And since markets are created by us, it is legitimate and within our power to alter them to better serve our needs.

Finally, there’s the historical fact that no country has ever gone communist gradually, starting with minimum wage laws and ending up with gulags. Rather, it happened in various fell swoops in places with glaring injustices and vicious capitalistic inequality, and even then generally has required contemporary wars. As the renowned Soviet expert George Kennan put it in 1946, “communism is like malignant parasite which feeds only on diseased tissue.” Therefore, Kennan believed, “every courageous and incisive measure to solve internal problems of our own society” was a victory over communism. 

Markets are a human creation, not a phenomenon like gravity that would exist whether or not people ever came along.

This equanimity about using democratic power for the common good was common among U.S. potentates in the decades following World War II. Averell Harriman, the son of a 19th-century robber baron who later became secretary of commerce and governor of New York, believed that “Our social and economic system is working perhaps toward Swedish socialist concepts but not toward Soviet Communism. The government in Sweden has overcome poverty, achieved decent housing and medical services for all, but Sweden has in no way compromised the principle of representative government and concern for civil liberties.”

The story of how we got from there to here is shocking even if you consider yourself a wised-up malcontent, and “The Big Myth” tells it in granular detail. It’s a sweeping tale of what must be one of the most successful propaganda campaigns ever, one that transformed the intuitive common sense — what everyone “knows” without thinking about it — of both American elites and regular people. 

You know the drill. Lowering taxes on billionaires will unleash their wondrous creativity and make us all richer in the long run. Minimum wage laws make regular people worse off and must stop going up. (Incredibly enough, the federal minimum wage has not increased in real terms since 1968 and, adjusted for inflation, is now worth less than in 1950.) Stultifying environmental regulations are the reason your boss can’t give you a raise. Social Security was a mistake and is destined for extinction. 

The funniest part is that this indoctrination into the glories of the “free” market could never have happened via free markets. Rather, as Oreskes and Conway illustrate, it required enormous subsidies from corporate America, much of it going to tenured professors working at nonprofit universities. 

The book is an incredible work of scholarship, and every page has at least one sparkling, fascinating fact. Adam Smith’s 1776 book “The Wealth of Nation” is now seen as the key text proving the virtues (economic and political) of unregulated capitalism. This is not true at all: Smith argues that bank regulation is crucial; that workers should unionize; that businesspeople have often “deceived and oppressed” the public; and that any political proposal they make should be viewed with the utmost suspicion. George Stigler, a prominent economist at the University of Chicago and colleague of Milton Friedman, produced an edition of “The Wealth of Nations” that dealt with Smith’s inconvenient views by quietly excising many of them.

Also striking: Corporate funders realized that another book central to their cause, “The Road to Serfdom” by Friedrich von Hayek, was just too long and complicated for most people to get through it. So they paid for a simplified version that appeared in Reader’s Digest in the 1950s, where it found a devoted reader in Ronald Reagan.

“Ideas do not exist ex nihilo. They are developed, sustained, and promoted by people and institutions.”

And there is just so, so much more. It’s all enough to make you paranoid about what other thoughts were put in your head on purpose by people without your best interests at heart. The most important lesson of “The Big Myth” is a meta one. They write convincingly, “Ideas do not exist ex nihilo. They are developed, sustained, and promoted by people and institutions. [This] is the history of the construction of a myth.”

Speaking of, the RAND study was funded by the Fair Work Center in Seattle, which in turn is largely funded by the foundation of Nick Hanauer. Indeed, the question the paper answers was itself thought up partly by Hanauer, who’s a venture capitalist and early investor in Amazon — but one has with views much more in tune with the views of 1950s U.S. elites. Preposterous myths can be successfully promulgated with huge gobs of cash, but even getting the truth out there takes a lot of money.

Update: August 7, 2023

A previous version of this article stated that the federal minimum wage has not increased since 1968. It been updated to make clear that this refers to the fact it has not increased in real terms since 1968; it has been adjusted upwards on several occasions in nominal terms.

The post The Big Myth About “Free” Markets That Justified History’s Greatest Heist appeared first on The Intercept.

In a provocative new book, historian Eli Merritt argues that the 13 Colonies only overcame their differences and united into a single entity due to an existential fear of civil war, collapse, and invasion. That fear is now gone. This week on Deconstructed, Merritt joins Ryan Grim to discuss his new book, “Disunion Among Ourselves: The Perilous Politics of the American Revolution.” Merritt argues that the founders — motivated by surviving as an independent government — united to avoid a civil war between the colonies. The “survivalist interpretation” of the nation’s founding, he explains, led to a historic “shotgun wedding”: a compromise-laden journey leading to the Declaration of Independence and a failure to confront slavery.

[Deconstructed intro theme music.]

Ryan Grim: Welcome to Deconstructed. I’m Ryan Grim.

On today’s episode, we are joined by Eli Merritt, who’s a political historian at Vanderbilt University, and he’s the author of the new book: “Disunion Among Ourselves: The Perilous Politics of the American Revolution.”

Eli, thanks for joining me.

Eli Merritt: Great to be with you, Ryan.

RG: I’m not steeped in all of the different historiography around this period, so can you just set the tone a little bit by telling us what is new in the disunionist, versus the kind of unionist literature that had come before? Because I know, as somebody who writes books myself, I don’t actually have to be kind of new. I can just kind of write the same story that other people have written, and write it a little bit differently, and with better interviews and a little bit better style, and that’s OK for a journalistic non-fiction book. But I know in the academic world, you’ve got to be breaking new ground.

So, what’s the new ground that you would say you’re breaking with this book?

EM: Yeah. I think that, in its overall premise, this book [is] about the American revolution. It really highlights some things that we get wrong about our understanding of that first founding seven or eight years And what that is, is when we think of the American revolution, there’s a general consensus over several centuries that what the founders of the nation feared most, was the power and might of the British army and navy. And, when you read the text closely — meaning their letters and their speeches — what you find is, in fact, that that’s not correct. What they feared most was disunion leading to civil wars among themselves.

And so, the concept, or the emotion of fear has always been of great interest to me. Long before I started researching this book, I had come to the conclusion that fear is the number one motivator of human behavior. And so, that’s the approach I took to the book, and it, really, is very true.

We think of the Founders as homogenous white men who came together easily, and the opposite is really true. They came from very distinct colonies — later called states — and, critically, very distinct regions. And different religions, different economies, different food, different moral views of slavery, so it was very tough for them to unite. And, in fact, I describe it as a shotgun wedding, that the only reason they united is that they feared civil wars, or they would have probably peacefully separated into separate confederations as a matter of first preference.

RG: Yes. And I thought you made the case persuasively. At the end of this book you are, I think, easily able to conclude that this was never a project that was destined for an easy integration, that the differences among these different colonies were so profound that it’s almost miraculous. I don’t know if it’s necessarily a great miracle — we can talk about that later — but miraculous that they were able to put it together.

You break them up not just in individual states, but also, as you said, in kind of sections or regions. The New Englanders, the middle states, and then the southern states. And I was curious, why was it that the middle states were so reluctant to sign on to independence? Because in the early days, you’ve got the New Englanders really leading the charge for independence, with the Southerners going along as well, but they really had to browbeat, and almost went to war with the middle states.

What about the middle states made them so skeptical of independence?

EM: Well, you’re alluding to a very important outcome that relates to the book’s overall thesis, which is — I call it in the introduction the survivalist interpretation, meaning that the founders did what they did to save themselves from civil wars.

The middle colonies, if you get to June of 1776, they were the laggards, the last to come along, in terms of deciding in favor of independence. And they were conservative, those states were focused upon commerce. And they, actually — like the others, but more so — really feared the consequences of uniting together with such distinct other regions. They were, of course, in the midst of a developing imperial civil war, which we call the War of Independence, which was being fought against supreme concentrated power. So, they feared the formation of a new supreme power within the 13 colonies after the Declaration of Independence; we call them states.

That was one of the dominant reasons they were skittish and afraid. And what’s fascinating is, with regard to the Declaration of Independence and the launch of independence, as you said, the New England colonies were just very fervently in favor of independence by 1776, and Virginia and a few of the other southern colonies were as well.

The middle colonies, by June 8th of 1776, the day before Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, had stood up and said, the time has finally come when we as 13 United States should declare our independence. The next day, Thomas Jefferson keeps notes in which he records that mainly the middle colonies plus South Carolina drew a bright red line of disunion in the center of the congress, and the term that Jefferson used was, we will secede from the Union if you try and strongarm us into this.

So, they decided that the matter was too hot to handle, so they deferred it, and put the vote for independence on July 1st. But, even by then, the middle colonies were reluctant. And what you got on the first vote for independence is: nine colonies voted in favor of independence, two voted flatly against independence — and that was South Carolina and Pennsylvania — and Delaware split, and New York did not have instructions to vote either way.

So, that’s the moment, the greatest moment of shotgun wedding that occurs in the book, in my view. New England plus some of the southern colonies were going to move into independence, they had waited too long. So, the middle colonies — which if you think of it, middle colonies, they are geographically between the other two regions — had a decision to make. Were they going to stay with the British Empire? Or were they going to, even though they were anti-independence at that moment, were they going to throw their fate in with the pro-independence states? And that’s what they did in the shotgun wedding.

And so, on July 2nd, we have the resolution adopted, ultimately, unanimously, by the 13 states, and then the Declaration of Independence came about two days later. So, it was high pressure, high politics, with, really, risk of civil war as an outcome of the middle colonies making a contrary decision.

RG: You convincingly argue that they were deeply worried about civil war and, of course, we eventually did get a civil war later, but I’m curious how right you think they were. Is there a world in which they don’t come together? And, instead, they just kind of sit there and are weak colonies?

And this goes to the role of Spain as well. You write about how the Americans reached out to Spain and said, look, if you will support us in our war effort against Britain, we’ll give you, what? We’ll give you Pensacola, and in exchange, we get access to the harbor and we get full navigational rights to the Mississippi. Spain got that and was like, absolutely not, we actually hope that you guys just constantly fight each other forever, and never unite, and are just weak little colonies, so that we can dominate the Louisiana area and the Mississippi.

So, would they even be strong enough to wage civil war against each other? Or are we just talking about little cross border raids? What does a “disunited states of America” look like when it comes to the kind of violence they were afraid of?

EM: That’s a great question, and I think you can break it into two parts. One is the less likely disunion of the colonies, or states, during the American revolution, and then the other is, after they together fight a successful War of Independence.

It was a time of great trepidation, because they no longer had the war of independence to unite them, and I think that’s very important to understand today, for us, that what united these 13 dissimilar states in different regions was the War of Independence. It was this common fight for liberty and ultimately independence, and they knew. As the clock ticked down to peace, they were very frightened of what was going to happen after that.

So if, somehow — I’ll give you an example: If, when they had early meetings of the Continental Congress in the 1770s, when they were trying to put together a defensive war and then an offensive war. If, for example, several of the northern states had said, well, this is great, we’ll put together this government with you but, of course, we’re fighting this war for liberty. And so, we want to make sure if we do form one union with you that we need to have a plan for the gradual emancipation of slaves, and certainly we need to have a plan for ending the slave trade.

If that had happened, based on the evidence, it seems sure that South Carolina, and Georgia, and perhaps the other Southern Colonies would have withdrawn from the union. They would have refused to fight the war in one union with other states that were coercing them to give up enslaved people, the institution of slavery in the South.

And what would have happened then? Oh, just imagine. The Southern Colonies would have re-allied themselves with Britain, and that would have become a launching pad and, also, a source of soldiers on the British side. So, we would have had an imperial civil war, which did turn into a domestic civil war, if we want to think of it in that regard.

And so, after the War of Independence ended, there’s a lot of writing that the most natural division of the States would be a New England, middle and southern, as you said, or maybe — for complex reasons that we might get into having to do with the Hudson River — that New England would unite with New York.

But, again, this was a natural movement. All of the political science of the time suggested that small republics would ultimately be more successful than a large republic, as they were forming at the time. But they simply knew they couldn’t do it. They had too much entanglement. They would have fought civil wars, they would not have had a supreme arbitrating power, courts and parliament or legislatures, or a central legislature.

They would have fought civil wars over finances, and they would have fought civil war over commerce, and over land. And if they fought civil wars, many people did believe that — and there’s some really beautiful descriptions of this — that, if that happens, you can be sure that the enslaved people within the southern states are going to rise up with whatever army is opposing the South to fight for their own freedom and liberty.

RG: Yeah, that’s what I was wondering. So, that would help explain why the southern slaveholding states would have as much willingness as they did to side with the New Englanders on a lot of their key issues. And we can get into the fishing rights fight later. I think that’s a lost story that was just kind of amazing to go learn about.

But yeah, you could imagine that in a world where the Southerners, let’s say they’re pressured into eventual, gradual emancipation, end of the slave trade, and you call their bluff and you force them to do that. And then they actually do secede, as they did later, you could see a world in which Spain is rallying enslaved people to rise up.

You know this history way, way better than I do, but Spain was already doing that to some degree, right? Launching raids into South Carolina, out of Florida. Isn’t that one of the reasons they initially made Georgia a free state, to try to put a buffer between Spain and South Carolina?

Is that something that the Southern slaveholders were worried about? That these foreign countries maybe allied with New England, or otherwise just trying to cause trouble, would then be able to effectively launch slave insurrections throughout the South?

EM: That would be part of it. The story of foreign nations inciting insurrections of enslaved people is not a dominant theme that I recall from the research, but I think, just to put Spain in its proper place: Most folks understand, the American Revolution, there’s a deep sense of indebtedness to France for the way it aided us, and we had a lot in common with France, in terms of enlightenment principles of liberty and freedom and constitutionalism, to some extent. They did have a king there, but they, surprisingly, were on their way to their own French Revolution.

Spain, on the other hand, is considered an ally, and I just think that’s incorrect. Spain played for itself, and really wanted to manipulate the situation of the 13 states and its relationship with Great Britain, for the reason — to understand them fairly — for the reason that they had a lot of land holdings abutting the American states, and they were very afraid of the aggressiveness of Americans, even back then.

But, to your larger point about the role of foreign nations, the other piece that was certain, written about, is if the 13 states broke apart into either one or two separate confederations, that they would immediately look to Europe and find allies. The thought was that the Southern Confederation would look to France, and that New England would look immediately to Great Britain. And one of the reasons this was necessary was, this was the age of naval imperialism. So, a nation could not survive unless it had either its own navy, or it had an alliance with a country with a very significant and powerful navy.

That was part of the hot mess, if we want to call it that, that they were going to get into by breaking apart into separate confederations. Not only their own civil wars, but also the involvement of foreign nations, who would try to assist them but, also, obviously, try and exploit the division within the 13 states, for the advantage of France or Spain, in this case

RG: And you also write about how John Adams remarked that the southern colonies were really unfit for republic, small-R republicanism. That the poor white population in the South was nothing like the kind of working class population in the North, when it came to levels of education or civic engagement. And the inequality between elites of the John Adams level and common folk in New England, and elites in the South and white common folk in the South was just widely different.

And so, was it the necessity to ally with the rest of these states that kind of pushed these Southern aristocrats into a Republican form of government? A kind of Republican straitjacket that they’ve been bursting at ever since and trying to throw off?

EM: Yeah. I think that’s very important to recognize in looking at — as I mentioned, just briefly — the political differences between the regions. One of the most extreme was, if you take — and many historians have written — we have the 13 states, but if you really want to see the dichotomy, you look at New England versus the southern states and you sort of leave out the middle states or colonies.

And what you find is that New England was not only a region that had a history of and was invested in a Republican form of government, it was actually quite democratic. Local democratic assemblies were very important throughout the history of New England.

So, on the one hand, the different states looked upon New England as being somewhat dangerous because of its democracy, which was considered to be a very dangerous form of government back in the 18th century. And then, to your other point, how do we look at the southern states? And it’s quite fascinating. They were quite republican. I mean, their assemblies did dominate, they did live by a representational form of government. However, all of the southern states had mixed feudalism. So, that has much to do with the presence of slavery within the southern colonies, but it was kind of an aristocracy merged in a hybrid fashion with republics in each of the four or five southern states.

Those were vast differences. And you’re right, if I’m thinking of the writings of John Adams that you’re referring to, he said, look, this is really not going to be easy, and wrote down a number of criticisms of the southern states. You know, notably, these people are aristocratic, they have their noses pointed in the air, they think they’re superior to others but, he said, what we have to do is be very careful, and proceed with forbearance, or otherwise we’re going to lose this union and therefore lose the war. And then, the sequela of that was going to be, of course, separate confederations and the catastrophic outcome of civil wars, potentially, in the 1780s or 1790s. It’s fascinating to think about.

It’s also fascinating to think about what might’ve happened to the crime against humanity of slavery if, somehow, they had broken apart earlier. At that time, there were approximately 400,000 enslaved people, whereas at the time of the Civil War there were 4 million. So, those are contingencies that can be interesting to think about. But might it have been better for enslaved people if the original 13 states did break apart? Or would it have led to an absolute catastrophic outcome for people of all races at that time?

RG: How do the American Indian tribes play into the politics at this time? Were they also concerned about some of the alliances that those confederacies might have been able to put together?

EM: There was some attention to that. My book studiously goes through the records of the Continental Congress and the diplomatic records during the American Revolution that looks for sources of discord, and conflict, and disunion, and fears of civil war throughout the entire eight or nine years of the Continental Congress during that time. And in that review, obviously, Native Americans came up frequently. But, in terms of Native Americans being a cause of disunion and civil wars, that was not a common finding, and therefore it doesn’t form a significant part of my book. But the concern was, very often — and, basically, the history evolved this way as well — is that the British forces would ally with Native Americans against the colonists.

So, that was a worry from the very beginning, and both the Americans and the British did, in separate ways, try to harness alliances with Native Americans in order to win the war.

[Deconstructed mid-show theme music.]

RG: And so, despite these differences between New England and the South that you talked about, you go pretty deep into the Treaty of Paris  and this feat of diplomacy on the part of — Who was it? Benjamin Franklin, John Jay… Who was the third?

EM: John Adams.

RG: John Adams. And you’ve got the southern states pushing, you know, for westward expansion to the Mississippi plus navigation rights, and then you’ve got the New England states ready to seemingly go to endless war over cod fishing and drying rights. Can you set that up for us?

EM: Yeah. I’m so appreciative, Ryan, that you’re attentive to that. It’s very obvious that you really enjoy history and know something about this period, because what you’re bringing up about that diplomatic history is another aspect of the book that people are finding to be completely new, that they didn’t know about.

So, I think the best way to think of this is, you have 13 states that unite in 1776 in July, and the overriding ambition of those states was, first and foremost, to protect themselves from attack by the British because, in fact, all the 13 states had done is they stated, we have would like to withdraw from your government, because we find your government to be tyrannical. So, let’s have a peaceful separation, we want to form our own government. Of course, Britain opposed that, and that’s why we got a war.

So, by the end of 1776, it became very clear there was not only one overriding objective of the War of Independence — and that’s independence for all 13 states — there were three objectives of the War of Independence, and they were based upon regional preferences and regional economic interest.

So, the four southern states claimed the land all the way from the coast, the East Coast, to the Mississippi River. So, for people to envision that is important. The Southern — led by Virginia and North Carolina — the southern states said, we do want independence for our current seaboard states, but we really probably are going to also want to fight until we get the land that we claim, across the Appalachian mountains to the Mississippi River. And, in fact, that land won’t be too useful if we don’t have navigational access to the Mississippi River. So, again, to paint the map: Spain, actually, was in possession of what we think of as the Louisiana Purchase land.

So, the core condition for all 13 was independence. For the southern states, it was, we also want our Western land and, in addition, we need navigation rights on the Mississippi River. And, even more fervently, as you say, New England was a region of four states that lived and breathed fishing.

There are merchant vessels at different seasonal times [that] went up into the North Atlantic, the Newfoundland fisheries, and they caught cod and haddock, and it became a cultural emblem for them; the Massachusetts State House emblem was a codfish. And so, New England said, we are also not going to put down arms until we get access to fishing rights and drawing rights at the island of Newfoundland, and at some areas of Nova Scotia.

So, that’s where you get the three overriding goals of the American Revolution: independence, western lands plus navigation of the Mississippi River and, also, access for all the states to the Newfoundland fisheries. And it was torturous to get there.

But, in the end, in the Treaty of Paris, because they knew if they only obtained the economic interest of the one region over the other, oh man. The others would’ve cried foul, and said there was political preference of one or the other. So, in complex ways, they obtained all three of these objectives by the time the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783.

RG: By the way — this is neither here nor there — but why wasn’t there a Southerner in that trio?

EM: Well, there was supposed to be, and that created quite a crisis. One of the Southerners — there are actually supposed to be five representatives there — one of the Southerners, Henry Lawrence, a South Carolinian, he got captured at sea.

RG: Oh, that’s right.

EM: Basically, on his way over to Europe. And Jefferson was the other one who was appointed to go to Paris and represent the southern states, or all the states, and Jefferson got quite delayed in this by the death of his wife, Martha. But then, Jefferson was at Baltimore, ready to catch a ship, he was going to go over and do his duty, although he was arriving at the 11th hour. But, just before departing, he got a message from Congress saying, we just learned that the preliminary articles of these treaties have already been signed, so Jefferson turned around and went home.

But I’m glad you brought that up. It created quite a crisis among a lot of the Southern delegates, the very idea that we were going to get a peace treaty with no Southern diplomat at the tables was terrifying to them. Fortunately, John Jay and John Adams knew everything in the world about a terrible, long, hot, and disunionist series of debates that had happened in 1779 over the Mississippian fisheries, so they knew this was a tender matter, so they had to fight equally for both of those two war objectives.

RG: And was Henry Lorenz, is that John Lorenz’s dad, the character from Hamilton who gets killed at the end of the revolution?

EM: That is his father. Yes, that’s correct.

RG: And Lorenz — the son, at least — was an abolitionist. What were his father’s politics on that? Because if you’ve got an anti-slavery Southern representative, I can imagine the racists crying foul of that, too.

EM: Yeah, the son was very much a rare bird. Maybe not as rare as we think of it, having a very strong abolitionist streak. I don’t recall that his father had that same proclivity. I don’t recall that coming up, but it was very unique.

RG: Sure. We have a lot of children of billionaires in today’s world who have far-left politics while their parents might be right-wing billionaires. So, that’s not unheard of.

EM: Another delegate who early in the war of independence was very interested in taking this opportunity to set enslaved people in the South on a pathway to emancipation was James Madison. But, you know, these things get quashed in a young person. Madison was in his early twenties at that time, and he consulted with a senior, a Virginian, whose name was Joseph Jones, and Jones basically turned to him and said, yeah, it’s a nice ideal, but we have far too much to do here, and this is too perilous a thing for us to undertake, so why don’t you just drop that, Jimmy? He went by Jimmy to a lot of people.

RG: I didn’t know that.

EM: So, there was that idealism, there was that absolute recognition that, when you say all people are created equal, that that does include enslaved people. But, for reasons that we’ve touched upon, but I’ll touch upon a little more now, virtually nothing was done during the founding period at a federal level with regard to slavery. And, just to recapitulate, why did that happen? I like to think, there are at least three models that inform our understanding of why the founders, in spite of the fact that they understood that slavery was a horrific, despotic practice, why did they perpetuate slavery?

So, the first explanatory model that is very compelling and powerful, is probably best known to people, and that is what I call an introduction to white supremacist interpretation, which is somewhat self-explanatory. That enslaved Africans were at the bottom of the social hierarchy, and there was just a sense of inferiority, and a sense of white superiority, that we’re grappling with, even today, of course. And so, that’s one reason, the white supremacist interpretation is one reason they perpetuated slavery.

Another is the economic interpretation, by which we come to understand that both North and South were deeply invested in the economics of both the slave trade and their perpetuation of slave labor. And the final one, which I think we’ve touched upon, or I hope we’ve communicated effectively, is what I introduce in the book as the survivalist interpretation.

So, it’s yet another additive, a model for understanding why they really did nothing with regard to this crime against humanity. And in that one, of course, as we’ve explained, if a northern state or two had really pushed hard against slavery during the revolution or after, it would have led to secession of southern states with this three-step reaction, which is: crisis in the Congress leads to secession, secession leads to separate confederations, and separate confederations leads to civil wars.

And so, I’ve called that a devil’s bargain that the founders made. And that is, they could either do something with regard to slavery, at least a gradual plan for emancipation, which would have broken up the government, or they could save their own souls from civil wars. And so, selfishly, they chose their own self-preservation over any sort of justice or freedom or rights to enslaved people.

RG: And, certainly, if you’re ballasting different interests at the negotiating table, enslaved people had none there. Nobody was there standing up for them. So, very quickly, if there’s any reason to get rid of that argument, nobody’s going to really … Like you said, there were people who had high-minded ideas, but they’re not going to lose any sleep, or they’re not going to burn much energy fighting it, it sounds like.

EM: I appreciate you bringing that into this story that I tell in the book. I haven’t put those pieces of the puzzle together in just that way. I mean, as you say that, it makes me think of a lot of my contemporary thinking about American democracy today, but I haven’t stopped to think, well, the big problem was that Black people had no representation in government, but, clearly, you are correct.

As there are today, there were some white people and white founders who pushed a bit, at least, within the federal system, but understanding the catastrophic outcome of disunion, they didn’t push much. But we do know that within ten years or so, a number of northern states set their states, their small sovereignties on the pathway towards emancipation of slaves.

The critical thing is at the federal level, which is most important, of course, but you’re right. Certainly there was no representation of Black people in government at the time.

RG: And thinking through the counterfactual of the union breaking apart, or never actually coming together, the anecdote about Spain comes back to my mind. Because the Spanish ambassador, he’s making this argument that he hopes that these states stay weak and stay small, or these colonies stay weak and stay small. He’s also nervous that they are going to then inspire their own colonized people in Central and South America to revolt. And we know for a fact that they did, they did inspire people in South America, that some of the leading Bolivarian revolutionaries were part of the entire American revolutionary milieu. But the South Americans did not manage to come together in the way that the North Americans did.

And so as I try to think through what North America might look like as a disaggregated bunch of states, I wonder if it would look more like South America, with more extreme inequality, more instability, more revolutions, more civil wars, more poverty and, ultimately, you becoming a kind of client region of some other major power.

Do you think that’s fair or am I oversimplifying that?

EM: Well, I think the British colonies, whether they had existed in one new union of 13 states or, let’s say, hypothetically, three different confederations or two. If they had successfully made it into those separate confederations, I don’t see any reason why it would follow distinct cultural and economic and political patterns of South America. I think they, if it could have been done successfully, you would have continued to see British North America following in the tradition of parliamentary Republican government, which they inherited directly from Great Britain.

But to the other points you made, what’s fascinating to me is to read closely the primary sources of the time, and to see how frequently, whether it’s the founders or the Spanish, they’re reading the tea leaves. They are seeing the future, and it is remarkable how often they’re correct. My whole book is about the perception of the founders of the approach of disunion and its consequences leading to civil war.

And so, for the Spanish, they were predicting, oh no, this idea of colonies rising up for liberty, and equality, and establishing themselves as an independent nation? They viewed this as a contagion that would go viral to their large number of colonies, and would initiate revolution/independence movements.

And so, what happened? That’s exactly what happened. The American Revolution launched what is known as the Age of Revolution, and a dozen countries within 20 to 30 years followed suit. The first was the French Revolution, and then many of the colonies that were formerly under the control of Spain. It’s just remarkable. Of course, we might read into it, but it’s remarkable how much people can feel and understand.

I’ll give as a final quick example: in 1783, Charles Thompson, who was the Secretary of Congress for the entire American Revolution, so he really had the sharpest window onto the behavior of the various colonies. He predicted that, possibly, the 13 states were going to break apart into a series of confederations. But he said, you know, I don’t think South Carolina is probably going to ever join any union. He characterized South Carolina as being so hotheaded and unable to unite with others that, he said, it was going to take a civil war to humble South Carolina before it would join any union.

So that’s in 1783. And, of course, we see the next 90 years of history, and even more, where South Carolina is, I hate to say, the troublemaker.

RG: Well, I think the sense of fear that you write about so persuasively is no longer something that is as much a fabric of our character as it was then. The sense of fear of disunion leading to civil wars, and leading to calamitous outcomes. I think there is a sense among the public that something like a civil war feels like, potentially, in the offing, although it doesn’t make any sense, like, exactly how it would happen.

Because, does Austin go to war with the Austin suburbs? We don’t have the same kind of sectionalisms that we had that enabled the civil war, the actual civil war to take place. And so, while there’s that vague sense of civil war out there, I think the fear of it isn’t quite there like it was 250 years ago.

And so, I’m wondering if you have any sense of what we can learn from our present character from your book. If the fear of civil war was such a uniting factor at the origin, what does it mean that that might be dissipating?

EM: You’re bringing up a great point. I often, myself, tend to think of history as being a progression, and it is. But, at the same time, the phases of history which began in 1774 with the first Continental Congress and end at the end of the Civil War is a very distinct one, in which It had not yet been established that a state or group of states could not actually, legally and constitutionally, secede from the Union. The Constitution doesn’t say anything about that.

So, the underlying trepidation, nervousness, and possible earthquake that was always coming as of 1783 — and even after 1787, 1788, when we adopted our second constitution that we’re living under today — there was always this sense that disunion was a permissible pathway to go. So, what did it take?

It took 86 or so years, if I’m calculating correctly, for the Civil War to happen, and that put to rest — it could have a resurgence — but it put to rest the very idea, not necessarily constitutionally, but even more powerfully through Civil War, that, you know, disunion is not permissible. It has been made unconstitutional, even though it’s not written, by the Civil War.

So, I agree with you. The idea of civil wars now, I can’t have it make much sense. The great worry today is more political violence that stems from the contest that we’re having, but most significantly from demagoguery, particularly demagoguery coming out of the mouth of the first demagogue who served in the White House, quite tragically. That’s the great danger.

The other danger where I think we could get something that looks like civil war — I’ll try to be brief — is if we actually had the installation of an arbitrary government. So, I hate to think about 2024, but if we look back at 2020 and, for some reason, circumstances had been quite different, where Trump’s attempt at an autocoup had succeeded — and that would have really required the military to be an ally of him, and thank god it was anything but that — but if we do get the installation of arbitrary government, then those who are in opposition to that, which would be most of us, I hope, are going to be in quite the conundrum. We will fight for probably ten years, using civil disobedience against that, even getting European nations to intervene against our arbitrary government that’s installed.

But, at some point, it would be logical to — at some point, and I’m not recommending this — but, at some point, I would be on the side, if we had arbitrary government, the way the Americans perceived that the British government was arbitrary in 1776, then John Locke and all the best traditions in Democratic Republican government say, you have a right to withdraw from that government. And that’s not saying you want to have bloodshed; it means you have a right to withdraw from tyrannical government.

So, that’s when we might get a block of states, in that scenario, I painted that breakaway. But then, of course, it could be opposed by the tyrannical government itself, and that would be the beginning of civil war.

RG: Yeah, well, we’ll see. We’ll see.

EM: Well, hopefully we won’t see.

RG: Yeah, indeed. Eli Merritt, thanks so much for joining me.

EM: Great to be with you, Ryan.

RG: And that was Eli Merritt, he’s a historian at Vanderbilt University. And, again, the book is called Disunion Among Ourselves. Congratulations on the book.

EM: Thanks so much, Ryan. Great to be with you.

RG: That was Eli Merritt. You can also find his Substack newsletter called American Commonwealth for more on these themes and others.

Deconstructed is a production of The Intercept. Our producer is José Olivares. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. The show is mixed by William Stanton. This episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Roger Hodge is The Intercept’s editor-in-chief, and I’m Ryan Grim, D.C. Bureau Chief of The Intercept.

If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week, and please go and leave us a rating or a review, it helps people find the show.

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Thanks so much, and I’ll see you soon.

The post United by Necessity: How the American Revolution Averted Civil War appeared first on The Intercept.

Now Black is back in the headlines, this time accused of raping a 16-year-old girl in the home of Jeffrey Epstein, a serial sex trafficker Black financed with more than $150 million.

Black’s support of Sinema is a window into the devil’s bargain the one-time radical leftist cut in order to rise through the ranks. Wall Street financing enabled her rise, even as it has forced her into politically unpopular positions, defending indefensible private equity giveaways in the tax codes, and linked her to unsavory characters always at risk of becoming a public relations liability.

In 2018, Black and his wife together made a $5,400 donation to Sinema’s campaign, the maximum legal contribution at the time. Three years later, Black was out from the top post at Apollo Global Management, the firm he helped found, after it was revealed that he paid the disgraced financier Epstein more than $150 million for estate planning and tax services. The Senate Finance Committee is currently investigating that payment and whether it involved tax evasion.

During her 2018 bid, Sinema received a smattering of donations from others in the private equity world, including a few dozen senior Blackstone managers, Bain executives, and Goldman Sachs financiers, but she received much more money through the Emily’s List political action committee and from Google employees.

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After she entered office, however, what had begun as a smart bet on Sinema from private equity leaders like Black quickly evolved into a full-scale industry feeding frenzy, with private equity and investment firms seizing on her as a powerful ally in the fight to preserve their status quo. They have since become her strongest financial anchors, with hundreds of employees from the biggest Wall Street companies donating millions to Sinema’s campaign. All told, Sinema has raked in well over $3 million from investment and private equity firms in the past six years. Sinema’s office did not respond to questions about her association with Black and Apollo Global Management. 

According to campaign finance data analyzed by Open Secrets, employees at Apollo Global Management represented the single largest corporate donor base to Sinema’s campaign committee between 2017 and 2022, contributing a combined $172,025. The laundry list of executives who have given since her election to the Senate include the chair of one of the largest private equity firms in the world, KKR; top directors at the Carlyle Group; the CEO of Blackstone; and dozens of other senior investment managers. 

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As The Intercept previously reported, Sinema has maintained close ties to the private equity industry, even interning — as a senator — then fundraising at a winery owned by private equity mogul Bill Price, co-founder of the private equity giant TPG Capital. 

Her coziness with the industry has guided her hand against key Democratic priorities, including those designed to raise taxes on the wealthy in an effort to balance the federal budget. Sinema’s obstinance has soured her standing in her own state, Arizona. After ditching the Democratic Party, she now faces a tough reelection campaign; as an independent, she’ll be competing against both a Democrat and a Republican in the general election. Even as private equity cash continues to pour into Sinema’s campaign coffers, her Democratic opponent Rep. Ruben Gallego outraised her in the first quarter of this year, suggesting that fury at her continued allegiance to corporate donors will have a lasting impact. 

President Joe Biden’s massive spending bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, was a pivotal point in Sinema’s mounting unpopularity. Sinema, along with Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., had to be wooed for her yes vote. The Arizona senator was eventually placated by Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., agreeing to kill many of the bill’s taxation priorities, most notably efforts to close the carried interest tax loophole. 

That’s a tax break that allows hedge fund managers and private equity executives to pay taxes on their income as tax deferrable capital gains, subject to far lower rates than standard income. Eliminating the loophole would have generated an estimated $14 billion in revenue over 10 years. 

The American Investment Council, which represents firms including Apollo, Blackstone, Carlyle, and KKR, staunchly opposed the reform effort, launching a media blitz pressuring Sinema and Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly to preserve the carried interest tax loophole — and in turn their executives’ salaries. 

Former Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, who now sits on Apollo Global Management’s board, also lent a hand in the effort to preserve the tax giveaway. In the run-up to the bill’s passage, he told the press that he was “not speculating about what [Sinema] is going to do, but I do know there are some provisions in this field that she has had reservations [about] in the past,” adding, “I’m looking forward to chatting with her this week.”

Sinema’s preservation of the carried interest tax loophole ensured that private equity billionaires like Black will continue to raise massive fortunes with little intervention by the IRS. The Senate committee interrogating Black’s finances has accused the former executive of consulting with Epstein to avoid hundreds of millions in taxes with payments that “were inexplicably large; well in excess of what Black paid any other financial advisors and far higher than the median compensation of Fortune 500 CEOs at the time.”

Last week, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., sent a letter to Black asking for additional information about the payments. The request is “part of an ongoing set of investigations by the Committee into the means by which ultra-high net worth persons avoid or evade paying federal taxes, including gift and estate taxes,” Wyden wrote.

Just days later, a woman filed a lawsuit against Black, accusing him of raping her at Epstein’s New York City townhouse in 2002, when she was a teenager. The filing in Manhattan federal court also alleges that Epstein confidant and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell had trafficked the then-16-year-old girl to that location. Black’s lawyer denied the allegations and said that the plaintiff holds a “vendetta” against him. The lawsuit marks the third rape allegation against Black, and the second one in a property owned by Epstein. (The billionaire has denied all such accusations, and a lawsuit related to the second alleged rape at Epstein’s home remains pending.) 

Last month, Black agreed to a $62.5 million settlement with the U.S. Virgin Islands to avoid a potential lawsuit in relation to the U.S. territory’s ongoing investigation into Epstein’s sex trafficking operation. This month, he continues to fend off investigators in the Senate. 

The post Private Equity Billionaire Tied to Jeffrey Epstein Led Industry Backing for Kyrsten Sinema appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Supporters of mutinous soldiers hold a Russian flag as they demonstrate in Niamey, Niger, on July 27, 2023.

Photo: Sam Mednick/AP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This undated photograph handed out by the French military shows Russian mercenaries in northern Mali.

Photo: French Army via AP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spending too much too fast, with little oversight, would lead to “unanticipated consequences,” John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, said at an event sponsored by the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft last week. The U.S. has sent more money to Ukraine in one year than it spent in Afghanistan over 12 years, Sopko pointed out. “I’m not opposed to spending that. I just want to make sure it’s done correctly and there’s oversight,” he said.

Sopko especially warned about the risk of fueling corruption, perhaps the most damaging legacy of the billions the U.S. spent in Afghanistan and a major factor in the collapse of its effort in the country. “If that much money is coming in, you know some of it is going to be stolen,” he said. “In Afghanistan, corruption was the existential threat. It wasn’t the Taliban. It was corruption that did us in.”

Debate over installing a special inspector for Ukraine modeled after SIGAR began swirling on Capitol Hill as it became clear that U.S. support for Ukraine in the face of Russia’s full-scale invasion would reach unprecedented levels. The push for a special inspector for Ukraine aid has been heralded by some of the Biden administration’s most vocal opponents, including Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo.; and J. D. Vance, R-Ohio; and Reps. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla.; and Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga. That factor, as well as a conflation of calls for greater oversight with opposition to sending the aid in the first place, has made the idea of a watchdog to oversee all aid to Ukraine somewhat toxic for many Democrats.

Following multiple failed efforts to pass standalone legislation on this issue, Republican lawmakers tried to include such a provision in the annual defense budget, the National Defense Authorization Act. 45 Democrats, joined by Sens. Angus King, I-Maine; Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; and Rand Paul, R-Ky.; voted against it last Wednesday, blocking its passage. The provision was also opposed by the White House, which wrote in a statement to lawmakers that the Pentagon Inspector General and the Government Accountability Office “are currently undertaking multiple investigations regarding every aspect of this assistance.”

Opponents of a special inspector for Ukraine have argued that existing agency-specific oversight mechanisms are sufficient, with Elizabeth Hoffman, director of congressional and government affairs at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, telling VOA last month that the special inspector office could have “a chilling effect.”

For proponents of the office, the unprecedented rate of aid to Ukraine naturally calls for greater oversight. Sopko has called for a holistic “whole-of-government” approach, focused on a broader evaluation of U.S. overall spending, rather than one limited to each agency’s scope and to tracking how much money was spent and on what. “The U.S. government,” he said, “whether it’s USAID, or DOD, or State, have horrible records on effective monitoring and evaluation.”

In Ukraine, many of the same groups lobbying for greater international support against Russia’s invasion are also speaking out about the need to make sure that money gets to its intended recipients. “Huge money always comes with corruption,” said Vita Dumanska, leader of the Chesno movement, a Ukrainian anti-corruption group. “We can’t keep silent on this.”

President Joe Biden signs the Consolidated Appropriations Act, which includes $14 billion in humanitarian, military, and economic assistance to Ukraine, on March 15, 2022, in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Lessons From Afghanistan

U.S. involvement in Ukraine is fundamentally different from the role it played in Afghanistan. Reconstruction and state-building efforts came to Afghanistan after the U.S. and its allies invaded a country that was roiled by civil conflict and remains so after a two-decade U.S.-led war there. In Ukraine, U.S. assistance has so far been primarily of a military nature and has come largely in an effort to keep the U.S. from getting more directly involved — this time in support of the sovereignty of a nation that was invaded by another. If in Afghanistan the U.S. spent billions in an effort to establish, train, and equip a local military that ultimately faltered amid political failures, in Ukraine, it is responding to local calls for help bolstering a highly motivated military that is defending its country against what many Ukrainians see as an existential threat.

Still, there are important parallels, said Sopko, whose office tracked at least $19 billion that was lost to waste, fraud, and abuse over the last decade in Afghanistan. In response to requests from senators advocating for more oversight, he has suggested how lessons learned in Afghanistan may serve U.S. efforts in Ukraine. SIGAR was established in 2008, nearly eight years after the U.S. first invaded the country and after it had already spent – and lost track of — billions in reconstruction money there. Given those experiences, Sopko, who was appointed to the role in 2012, has stressed the importance of starting the monitoring in Ukraine early in the process. “No matter who is doing the oversight, it’s important to start now, not eight years from now,” he said.

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Already, U.S. assistance to Ukraine as it fends off Russia’s aggression and relentless bombing campaigns has reached unprecedented levels, though the money, equipment, and other assistance is not always easy to track. Congress approved some $113 billion in aid to Ukraine last year, and some analysts put the full figure to date at closer to $137 billion.

By comparison, the U.S. spent some $146 billion in reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2022 (although it spent far more going to war there in the first place). “By the end of this year, we will have spent more money in Ukraine than we did to do the entire Marshall Plan after World War II,” Sopko said.

“By the end of this year, we will have spent more money in Ukraine than we did to do the entire Marshall Plan after World War II.”

SIGAR issued dozens of audits and assessments over its ongoing mandate, often despite stonewalling by government agencies that are legally required to disclose information to its investigators. While the reports occasionally made headlines for the exorbitant waste they exposed, they did little to change the trajectory of U.S. spending in Afghanistan, in part because there were plenty who benefitted financially from it and because of a short-sighted system — including annual appropriations schedules and brief deployments — that incentivized fast spending over effective investment.

In Afghanistan, Sopko said, the U.S. never developed a workable, coherent strategy as priorities and approaches kept shifting. There was also no coordinated effort between agencies, he added, noting that, that is likely going to be an even greater problem in Ukraine, where more actors, states, and international organizations are involved.

Currently, individual agencies are tasked with monitoring different elements of the U.S. government’s assistance to Ukraine. Speaking alongside Sopko last week, Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, noted those offices are under-resourced and have a poor track record. “In order to ensure that the Ukrainian people receive the support that the U.S. are sending them, we need far stronger systems in place here in the U.S.,” she said.

It’s not just the money that needs monitoring: In Afghanistan, the U.S. lost track of expensive and dangerous equipment, including some $7.1 billion worth of defense articles the Pentagon left behind when it pulled out of the country. In Ukraine, there has been some reporting of misplaced equipment, but because most U.S. monitoring programs were not designed for war zones, there are few people on the ground who are able to track it.

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Brian called out the Defense Department’s abysmal oversight, with the Pentagon unable to account for some 61 percent of its assets in 2021. Earlier in the war in Ukraine, she noted, defense officials learned that U.S.-issued small arms and bulletproof vests had ended up in the hands of criminals only after Ukrainian intelligence services discovered that. She also noted that key oversight positions at other agencies have long remained vacant, hindering individual agency efforts at better monitoring aid in the absence of a more comprehensive approach. (The White House just announced nominees for the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development watchdogs last week.)

Brian contrasted lawmakers’ opposition to an inspector general for Ukraine to their passage of emergency procurement powers in the annual defense budget, allowing the Pentagon to enter into multiyear contracts to buy munitions to send to Ukraine.

“More money does not solve acquisition issues. It exacerbates existing ones and creates a path for more waste, fraud, and abuse,” she said. “Lawmakers cannot allow the war in Ukraine to become another pathway for contractors to pursue excess profits at the expense of the Pentagon and taxpayers.”

A U.S. plane delivers nonlethal aid, including 10 Humvee vehicles, at Boryspil International Airport on March 25, 2015, after a U.S. decision to help Ukraine with defense aid.

Photo: Vladimir Shtanko/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Fighting Corruption

While Ukraine has a long history of corruption, over the last decade, the country has developed a strong infrastructure to fight that corruption, leading, for instance, to the creation of a system of tracking public procurements that some watchdogs note is far more transparent than its U.S. counterparts. Chesno, Dumanska’s group, is part of a burgeoning Ukrainian civil society that’s grown exponentially in the aftermath of the Maidan Uprising in 2013.

But following Russia’s full-scale invasion last year, many Ukrainian groups found themselves softening their criticism of their own government in order to focus on Russia’s crimes and avoid feeding Russian propaganda. It was “self-censorship” in a moment of crisis, Dumanska told me during a recent interview in Kyiv. “We had in civil society some kind of consensus not to criticize the government. We were working together with the state, begging for military help, closing the sky and everything, so there was unity there, and we were trying not to focus on troubles inside the country.”

With the war now well into the second year and no clear end to the fighting in sight, however, Dumanska noted that Ukrainian civil society is beginning to once again focus on internal corruption and abuses of power, even as they fear alarming the international donors the country desperately needs.

“If nobody is saying anything, then the situation becomes even worse, and those in power can feel that nobody’s watching corruption, nobody is monitoring them,” said Dumanska. “We do understand that it might influence the position of international partners, because at every international meeting, they are asking us about corruption, and if they understand that we have a lot of corruption scandals, a lot of money stolen, and that money is coming from their taxpayers, that’s not very good.”

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has also taken a hard line on corruption, firing some senior officials and issuing increasingly stern warnings that there will be no tolerance for those seeking to profit from the conflict. But Zelenskyy himself has faced corruption scandals in the past, and despite significant improvement over the last decade, Ukraine remains low on Transparency International’s corruption perception index.

That’s not an argument against aid as much as in favor of stronger guardrails to ensure it reaches the Ukrainian people it is actually intended for, something Ukrainians themselves are increasingly calling for. In the devastation brought by Russia’s invasion, and as the country prepares to embark on what will be a massive reconstruction effort, some there see an opportunity to rebuild the country more equitably.

“With the war, we had huge changes in our oligarch structure: some oligarchs lost their assets, some oligarchs moved, some were prosecuted,” said Dumanska. “We can expect that during reconstruction, we will see new oligarchs. Those who are close to the president, they might create a new pool of oligarchs. Now the question is, do we build a new oligarch structure? Or do we refuse the oligarch approach and develop something else?”

The post Senate Democrats Blocked Watchdog for Ukraine Aid — Ignoring Lessons From Afghanistan appeared first on The Intercept.

Jeffrey Clark, then assistant attorney general for the environment and natural resources division at the U.S. Department of Justice, speaks during a news conference in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 14, 2020.

Photo: Susan Walsh/AP

The man with no pants is the unnamed star of Donald Trump’s latest indictment.

Jeffrey Clark was an obscure government lawyer in the waning days of the Trump administration when he very nearly seized control of the Justice Department to help the president overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Clark is not identified by name in Tuesday’s indictment, which accuses Trump of being at the heart of a conspiracy to fraudulently upend the election and prevent Joe Biden, the legitimate victor, from taking office. But the 45-page indictment’s description of “Co-Conspirator 4” matches Clark, who comes across as the most cinematic villain in the latest criminal conspiracy laid out by special counsel Jack Smith. (Filed in federal court in Washington, the indictment is Trump’s third this year.) Clark’s hunger for power and his contempt for democracy drip from the indictment’s pages.  

The first time most Americans ever saw Jeffrey Clark, he was in his underwear. When the FBI raided his house in July 2022 in connection with the criminal investigation into Trump’s attempts to stay in power, Clark was only half dressed; he asked if he could go put on some pants, but they ordered him to come outside immediately while they searched his house. Videos of Clark standing in his doorway and then his driveway, wearing a blue dress shirt and what appeared to be black boxer briefs, were all over cable news.

Clark was a top environmental lawyer in the Justice Department during most of the Trump administration but was clearly eager for bigger things. After the election, when Trump was pressuring top Justice Department officials to cooperate with his efforts to overturn the vote, Clark saw his opportunity to move up. While his bosses at the Justice Department refused to get involved with Trump’s scheme, Clark went directly to the president behind their backs with a brazen scheme designed to weaponize the Justice Department to help reverse Biden’s victory.

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The indictment offers an astonishing, blow-by-blow account of Clark’s attempt to help Trump and, in the process, help himself by hijacking the Justice Department while leaping over his superiors to become acting attorney general.

On December 22, 2020, Clark began to secretly conspire with Trump without the knowledge of his superiors at the Justice Department, according to the indictment. He met that day with Trump at the White House, but “Co-Conspirator 4 had not informed his leadership at the Justice Department of the meeting, which was a violation of the Justice Department’s written policy restricting contacts with the White House to guard against improper political influence.”

On December 26, Clark spoke on the phone with Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and lied about the circumstances of his meeting with the president, “falsely claiming that the meeting had been unplanned,” according to the indictment. Rosen told him not to have any further unauthorized contacts with the White House, and Clark promised he wouldn’t.

But the next day, according to the indictment, Clark talked to Trump on the phone. That afternoon, Trump called Rosen and Richard Donoghue, the acting deputy attorney general, and told them: “People tell me [Co-Conspirator 4] is great. I should put him in,” suggesting that he was considering putting Clark in charge of the Justice Department. At the same time, Trump followed up on his earlier efforts to pressure Rosen and Donoghue to use the Justice Department to help him overturn the election results, telling them: “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”

On December 28, Clark sent a draft of a letter to Rosen and Donoghue for them to sign. The letter was addressed to officials in Georgia, but he proposed sending versions of the same letter to officials in other key swing states as well. The letter stated that the Justice Department had “identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple states,” and claimed that two valid slates of electors had gathered and voted at the legally required time and place, and that both sets of ballots had been sent to Congress. That was Clark’s way of claiming that the Justice Department considered that fake slates of electors, created illegitimately by Republicans in states Trump had lost, were actually valid and should be accepted by state officials.

“Co-Conspirator 4’s letter sought to advance [Trump’s] fraudulent elector plan by using the authority of the Justice Department to falsely present the fraudulent electors as a valid alternative to the legitimate electors,” the indictment says. The letter also called on state legislatures to hold special sessions to choose fraudulent electors who would vote for Trump in the Electoral College instead of Biden.  

As soon as he read the proposed letter, Donoghue emailed Clark and told him it was filled with lies. Rosen and Donoghue once again told Clark not to have any further contact with the White House. But once again, Clark disobeyed.

On December 31, Trump called Rosen, Donoghue, and other Justice Department officials to the White House and repeated that they were overlooking widespread voter fraud, adding ominously that he was thinking about a leadership change at the Justice Department.

On January 2, Clark raised the pressure on his bosses. He told Rosen and Donoghue that Trump was considering making him acting attorney general, but that he would turn down the job if they would sign his proposed letter to the states. They refused, according to the indictment.  

On January 3, Clark met with Trump at the White House again, and accepted the president’s offer to become acting attorney general.

Right after that meeting, Patrick Philbin, the deputy White House counsel, told Clark not to accept the job and to drop his attempts to use the Justice Department to overturn the election, warning Clark that doing so would lead to “riots in every major city in the United States.” The indictment says that “Co-Conspirator 4 responded: “[W]ell, [Deputy White House Counsel] that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”

Later that day, Clark met with Rosen and told him he was taking over as acting attorney general. Rosen shot back that he would refuse to accept being fired by him, and immediately called the White House and scheduled a meeting with Trump for that night. 

During that meeting, Rosen and other Justice Department officials told Trump that if Clark were named acting attorney general, there would be mass resignations from the Justice Department. Clark was sitting right there with them in the meeting when they issued their warning, the indictment says. Trump finally backed down and agreed not to turn the Justice Department over to Clark.

But Clark persisted; during the same meeting, he said that the Justice Department could issue an opinion saying that Vice President Mike Pence had the power to change the election outcome during the certification proceedings on January 6. When another Justice Department official said the department shouldn’t do that, Trump interrupted. “No one here should be talking to the Vice President,” he said, according to the indictment. “I’m talking to the Vice President.”

That ended the conversation, and Jeffrey Clark’s reach for power. The next time Clark was heard from, he was trying to reach for his pants.    

The post The Man With No Pants Is the Star of Donald Trump’s Latest Indictment appeared first on The Intercept.

“This is a trend that we’re seeing across the country of state governments that don’t like how local communities want to address concerns about public safety,” said Josh Rosenthal, legal director at Public Rights Project, which is working on the suit. “When local communities are making choices that these conservative state governments don’t like, state governments aren’t respecting the will of the voters. They’re taking that power away from local communities.”

“When local communities are making choices that these conservative state governments don’t like, state governments aren’t respecting the will of the voters.”

The Georgia bill is one of at least 37 preemption measures — proposals that seek to limit the power of elected prosecutors — introduced in recent years across 17 states. Such bills have multiplied since 2017 after reform prosecutors started winning elections in greater numbers.

The laws work in different ways, sometimes prohibiting constituents in certain jurisdictions from electing their own prosecutors, restricting a prosecutor’s authority over certain crimes, or creating new pathways to remove them from office altogether.

In Georgia, the law puts discipline and removal of prosecutors in the hands of a commission made up of political appointees. The measure allows the commission to discipline prosecutors for decisions based on any policy, written or otherwise, to not prosecute certain offenses, like low-level drug possession or sex work. Prosecutors removed by the commission are disqualified from running again for 10 years.

Several of the laws have targeted jurisdictions that recently elected reform-minded prosecutors, including in Missouri, Texas, and Mississippi.

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The lawsuit in Georgia is attempting to restore power to prosecutors who were elected by constituents by having the new law declared to be against the state’s constitution. The prosecutors on the suit are Sherry Boston, Jonathan Adams, Jared Williams, and Flynn Broady, who represent seven counties in Georgia with a total population of more than 1.8 million people.

Kemp’s Ideological War

Republican state officials including Kemp have claimed without evidence that prosecutors to their left are causing the moral decline of cities and driving crime. In December, two weeks before the start of the 2023 legislative session that saw the bill passed, Kemp had publicly criticized what he described as “far-left local prosecutors [who] are failing their constituents and making our communities less safe.”

Efforts to undercut the power of reform prosecutors, though, frequently center on ideological disagreements. Key issues of disagreement between state-level officials and local prosecutors have included Republican efforts to eliminate the right to abortion and overturn the 2020 election, and the future of the movement for criminal justice reform.

The pattern has played out in other states with centrist or right-wing government administrations. Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended Andrew Warren, the prosecutor in Hillsborough County, which includes Tampa Bay, last year after Warren said he wouldn’t charge people who sought abortions.

“These are not things you would expect to see in the United States. This is what authoritarians do.”

“These are not things you would expect to see in the United States,” Warren told The Intercept. “This is what authoritarians do. They use the power of prosecution to protect their allies and to punish their enemies. This is a very slippery slope to go down.”

Hot-button culture war issues like the prosecution of abortion and gender-affirming care were also at play in the passage of Georgia’s law. The state had passed an aggressive abortion ban in 2019. Several prosecutors have pledged not to enforce criminal abortion bans, the same kind of affirmation that exposed Warren to removal in Florida. Also in Georgia, Fulton County attorney Fani Willis has been preparing to charge former President Donald Trump for his efforts to overturn the results of the state’s 2020 presidential election. (The governor’s office said it would not comment on pending litigation.)

The movement to subvert elected prosecutors gained steam as reform-minded candidates have gained ground in elections since the mid-2010s, including in Georgia. The state, in that time, has also been confronting issues of racial and ideological diversity among district attorneys. Prior to the 2020 election in Georgia, only five elected prosecutors were people of color. Now there are at least 14, several of whom campaigned on criminal justice reform and represent districts where people of color are the majority.

The Georgia bill has also drawn criticisms from prosecutors who don’t identify as reformers.

“Although I may disagree with some DAs’ decisions in other communities, I believe it is their right to make those decisions,” said Adams, who joined the lawsuit and represents a conservative community. 

Crimes like adultery, fornication, and sodomy are still on the books in Georgia, but many prosecutors decline to prosecute them. Adams had a situation in September where a woman filed an application for a warrant to arrest her husband for adultery. “If I didn’t have that policy against prosecuting that crime, her husband would have had an arrest, would have had to be booked into the jail, may have lost his job or had some other impact,” he said. “Every unmarried person in the entire state of Georgia having sexual activities is committing a criminal offense.”

Conservative lawmakers could be setting a precedent that could come back to bite them, Adams said, potentially facing edicts in the future by a more liberal governor or legislature. He said, “Down the road, we’re gonna have to face this on the other side.”

Undermining Democracy

The new Georgia law’s critics are concerned about its poorly explained grounds for discipline of prosecutors.

Georgia’s state constitution allows for prosecutorial discretion and a right to free speech, Rosenthal, the legal director, said. The state already has several mechanisms that provide oversight of prosecutors, including the state bar, rules of professional conduct enforced by the state Supreme Court, the power of impeachment by the general assembly, and prosecutors’ own elections.

“Because the grounds for discipline are so vaguely written, it’s really handing a blank check to this new commission — which is appointed entirely by the governor and his political allies — to discipline essentially whomever they want,” Rosenthal said. “That kind of blank check is an opportunity for political shenanigans instead of expecting the will of the voters in each of these communities.”

Related

17 States Have Now Tried to Pass Bills That Strip Powers From Reform-Minded Prosecutors

Georgia lawmakers have also found other ways to limit the jurisdiction of reform-minded attorneys. Williams, one of the prosecutors on the lawsuit, was elected as the first Black prosecutor in the Augusta Judicial Circuit in 2020. Shortly thereafter, Republicans carved out the whitest county from Williams’s jurisdiction and created the state’s first new judicial circuit in four decades.

Williams had run as a reformer following the high-profile murders of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery, the latter hailing from a county in Williams’s circuit. 

“The community made a very intentional choice in moving away from the traditional style of prosecution that had dominated my circuit for 150 years,” Williams told The Intercept. 

That message won bipartisan support across three counties. For opponents of the move to cut his district, people in Williams’s jurisdiction spent hours knocking doors and fundraising in the Augusta heat, only to have the Legislature turn around and strip them of their choice before he was even sworn in.

“What’s different?” Williams asked. “What’s changed such that now it’s a good idea to have this political commission that has the authority to Monday-morning quarterback the very tough choices that prosecutors have to make every day?” 

The answer lies in politics, Williams said: Running on punitive policies is unpopular at the ballot box, so conservative lawmakers have turned to a political game. Prosecutors should be able to concentrate on violent crimes like murder and not divert limited resources to low-level offenses like nonviolent marijuana possession. 

“It is the same thing that we’re seeing across the nation,” Williams said. “There are people who are resistant to the change and those people are in the minority, but they often have a good deal of authority, and they wield it in ways that are unconstitutional.”

Update: August 2, 2023, 11:00 a.m. ET
This story has been updated to include a comment from Gov. Brian Kemp’s office that was received after publication.

The post Reformist DAs Sue Georgia Over Law to Remove Elected Prosecutors — Including One Probing Donald Trump appeared first on The Intercept.

Troops from Niger ousted the country’s democratically elected president, Mohamed Bazoum, last week. One of the coup leaders had previously received training from the U.S. government, becoming the 11th coup in the region led by U.S.-trained officers. This week on Intercepted, Nick Turse, investigative journalist and contributing writer with The Intercept, joins Jeremy Scahill and Murtaza Hussain to discuss the unfolding events in Niger and the Sahel region. Turse outlines how Africa has seen elevated conflict and instability as the U.S. has increased its military involvement on the continent over the last two decades.

[Intercepted intro theme music.]

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted.

Welcome to Intercepted. I’m Jeremy Scahill.

Murtaza Hussain: And I’m Murtaza Hussain.

The Sahel region of Africa has been wracked by instability in recent years, including extremist violence, climate change impacts, and a series of military coups that have deposed democratic governments in six countries.

The latest coup took place last week in Niger, where U.S. trained military officers moved to depose an elected leader who sent the country into chaos.

JS: We’re joined now by Nick Turse, he’s an investigative journalist and a contributing writer for The Intercept. Nick has been reporting on the African continent and the U.S. influence in various African nations for many years. He was in Niger on a reporting trip earlier this year, and has been reporting on that country for a sustained period of time.

Nick Turse, you’ve been on this program many times, and we thank you once again for being with us here on Intercepted.

Nick Turse: Thanks so much for having me on.

JS: Nick, I want to start with just, basically, a TikTok of what happened in Niger, who the coup leaders are, and the events that led us to this moment. Take us through the timeline and what exactly went down.

NT: Yeah. Just this past week, there was a junta that rose up in Niger. It began with the presidential guard kidnapping the president, basically taking him hostage, holding him for some time. And, while the president was being held hostage, about ten high-ranking Nigerien officers appeared on state television to tell the country that they had deposed the president, that the regime had so bungled the counterterrorist response over the last several years that they were taking charge.

It’s still shaking out as to who the real power players in this junto are but — as I reported for The Intercept this week — one of them is Brigadier General Moussa Salaou Barmou, who is the chief of the special operations forces in Niger, and he’s been a darling of the U.S. government for many years. He was trained in the United States at Fort Benning — since renamed — but this has been a school for foreign military officers for many years, and also in Washington at the National Defense University. At least those two; likely more.

There are many pictures on U.S. military websites of him embracing U.S. military officers, being involved in U.S. military activities. And, just last month in June, he met with a three-star commander of U.S. Army Special Operations Forces in Niger at a large U.S. military base there. So, he’s really wired into the U.S. security matrix.

JS: One follow-up to that. You’re mentioning the U.S. ties of one of the coup plotters, but isn’t it also true that the current government, also, has curried a lot of favor with the United States? The U.S. has viewed it as not necessarily a full-blown client state, but close to it.

So, what’s going on there? Because, also, the Biden administration, even before the coup was officially announced, the U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken came out, basically warning that no one should attempt to seize power in Niger.

So, what’s happening here, given what you just described about the U.S. training background of at least one of the coup plotters?

NT: Yeah. The United States has viewed Niger as a true counterterrorism bulwark in the region for many years. Niger has become increasingly more important to the United States in the region over the last several years, but there’s been a longstanding relationship, and U.S. taxpayers have sent more than half a billion dollars in security assistance to Niger since just 2012, and the United States has really been pumping assistance, military aid, weapons, sending trainers, advisors into Niger since about 2002, 2003. Right at the beginning of the war on terror.

So, we have a very strong security relationship there, and Antony Blinken, as you mentioned, he came out forcefully about this coup. He had been in Niger earlier this year, talking about just how important that country is to the U.S. security apparatus within West African Sahel and across the continent as a whole.

MH: Can you talk a bit about the conflict in Niger, which the U.S. is participating in as supporting the Niger government. Obviously, this conflict has been going on for some years, but I think it’s very poorly understood by people outside the region, especially in the U.S.. But the U.S. has been very intimately involved, as you said, for quite a long time.

Tell us, briefly, what are the dynamics and the origins of this conflict?

NT: Yeah. As I mentioned, the United States has been involved here since about 2002, 2003, but when they first got involved, there was very little terrorist activity in the region. But, over the period of the last 20 years, there’s been a tremendous rise, and it’s taken place in an area they call Liptako Gourma, a tri-border region where Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso all meet.

Basically, there are a number of terrorist groups operating there. Some are Al Qaeda affiliated, some are affiliated with the Islamic state, some are free agents, but they have a very similar playbook. These are jihadists who generally attack on motorcycle. They will roll into villages; generally, they’ll come before attacking, to tell people how they want them to dress, to act.

These are, generally, in these countries, Muslim people, but they want them to ascribe to a more strident version of Islam. They want women to wear the veil, they want men to wear short pants, they want alcohol to be completely verboten. And, if you don’t comply — if you don’t pay Zakat, the Islamic tax — they will come back, and they will come back shooting. And they’ve terrorized villages in these regions and, generally, the militaries of these countries have been unable to protect their people.

The United States has poured security aid in, supposedly to bolster these militaries, to make them more effective in protecting their people. But, every year over the last ten years, the number of terrorist attacks have gone up, the number of civilian fatalities has gone up.

And, basically, the only metric where the United States has been successful is training military officers who are able to overthrow their own governments. They’ve been unable to combat the jihadists in any kind of effective way.

JS: Nick, there’s a lot of pushback against France happening on the African continent, especially in countries where French colonialism reared its ugly head for a sustained period of time, and both the United States and France have troops that are on the ground in Niger. I think, by last time I checked, France has roughly one and a half thousand troops there, and there are more than a thousand — I think 1,100 — U.S. troops. And most of those, as I understand, are stationed at drone bases that are used to carry out strikes, either in Niger or elsewhere.

But talk a little bit about the place that French colonialism holds in, not just Niger’s current day politics, but also in some of the other coups or rebellions that we’ve seen in former French colonial nations in Africa.

NT: Yeah. There’s a great deal of anti-French sentiment in the Western Sahel, in the countries that I talked about — Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali — and the United States has been really wired into the French military response there. [They] aided France in many ways with ISR, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, worked alongside French troops.

But the militaries in these countries and the civilian populations have really soured on the French who, as you mentioned, the colonial relationship there has never really gone away. These are still treated by France as de facto colonies in many ways, French corporations dominate the landscape there, and people see them as very extractive, taking mineral wealth, uranium, you know? And people want these resources back, and don’t think the French should have their hands on them.

And I think the United States has, because they’re so wired in with the French, has taken on some of that colonial sheen. You know, the population sees them as working together. So, that hasn’t benefited the United States.

And I think, also, just the ineffectiveness of the French counterterrorism effort and the U.S. counterterrorism effort over the last 20 years, it’s really soured common people in these countries. And also a lot of military officers, who are now looking elsewhere — Russia, the Wagner group — as a possible solution, because 20 years of the United States and France conducting counterterrorism missions, sending in advisors, sending in special operations forces, training, advising local troops. It just hasn’t worked. The terrorism has just increased, year after year, civilian deaths increasing, year after year.

MH: Nick, you mentioned earlier that this issue of terrorism was less prominent in the region 20 years ago when the war on terror began, but something happened in that time to exacerbate it. Can you explain the dynamics by which it began to increase over the past generation or so?

And, second to that, in a lot of places in the world, jihadist groups tend to exploit currently existing ethnic conflict. Is there a dynamic of ethnic conflict in Niger, in this region you’re talking about, where the epicenter of jihadism is?

NT: Yes. One, when we’re talking about the increase in terrorism, it’s been profound.

Back in 2002, 2003, when the United States first began putting counterterrorism funds into Niger, the State Department counted something like a total of nine terrorist attacks in sub-Saharan Africa. I mean, a tremendously small number. Last year, in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger alone, there were more than 2700 terrorist attacks. So, we’re talking about a 30,000 percent increase since the U.S. began its counterterrorism efforts. So, it’s a tremendous increase.

And you mentioned the ethnic conflict, local dynamics. Yeah, it’s very much the case. Actors like Al Qaeda and ISIS have been able to play on this. There’s an ethnic group that spans all three countries, sometimes called the Fulani, sometimes called the Peul, and this group has been marginalized, really, since colonial times, when the French colonized the region. And this group has been really kept out of government positions. They’ve wanted a place in the military, have been kept out of that, and they’re generally Islamic herders.

Some of the other groups are Christian groups that have had a preferred place in the government and in business. And just the changing dynamics in the country, economics, climate change, all these things have affected these Peul herders. And because they are then recruited due to this dissatisfaction with the government by these terrorist groups, the governments in these regions generally assume that all Peul are terrorists, and treat them as such. So, they abuse these communities, they commit atrocities there, they arrest and disappear men, and this drives the Fulani herders further towards the terrorists.

So, again, it’s outside. The U.S. counterterrorism model has helped to feed this by empowering these militaries more, allowing them to target these communities further, and just ramped up the terrorism in there. So, it’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy and, really, an endless cycle and spiral of violence.

JS: You know, this coup happens at a really interesting time in not just world affairs, but also in African affairs. It happens, as you have this Africa summit taking place in St. Petersburg, Russia, one of the stated purposes of the conference was the continued liberation from colonialism and neocolonialism. This coup happens while you have Russia’s war continuing to rage in Ukraine.

You mentioned earlier the Wagner Group and its leader, Yevgeny Prigozhin. Prigozhin, when this coup happened in Niger, was actually, I think The New York Times described him as hovering on the margins of the conference on Africa in St. Petersburg. But he praised the coup, Prigozhin did, and actually suggested that he could send his own armed fighters to help. And, of course, the Wagner Group — and you’ve reported on this for The Intercept — the Wagner Group is already entrenched in several African nations, including in Mali, in Mozambique, and elsewhere. They also serve as the presidential guard for some military juntas.

Talk more about Wagner and Prigozhin in Africa, and specifically what they might want out of Niger. Because Wagner, like many mercenary companies, often tends to operate in the economy of natural resources. And so, looking, just in a surface way at Niger’s natural resource wealth, it seems quite clear what one of the motivations would be.

But talk a bit about the broader posture of Wagner in Africa and, specifically, what they might want out of Niger.

NT: We haven’t seen that Wagner is involved in Niger yet, but you can look to neighboring Mali to get an idea of what the playbook might be. And there, Mali was — like Burkina Faso before it, and Niger — dissatisfied with the current state of counterterrorism in the country. And, in all these countries now, you’ve had military officers rise up, all of them have been U.S.-trained military officers.

But, in Mali, even though we trained that officer, he brought Wagner group in, and my understanding is that Wagner is paid $11 million a month for trainers and advisors, but, really, they’re troops on the ground who are conducting military operations. And they also have been given access to mineral resources, specifically artisanal gold mines, which there are a lot of in the Western Sahel.

So, there’s great mineral wealth to be had there, and this has generally been their playbook. They want to get their hooks into these mines, and it’s a tremendous profit center for them, and it’s an opportunity for them to burnish their image and just expand their reach.

As you mentioned, they’re in several places on the continent: Central African Republic, Mozambique, Mali. And it looks like Prigozhin is interested in going to Niger and, depending on how the United States and France respond to this, I think they’re worried about driving Niger into the arms of Wagner. And I think it’s going to be a very delicate dance by the United States to condemn this coup but use every possible method to keep their influence there, and to keep some sort of aid going, and keep Niger in the U.S. counterterrorism column instead of Wagner.

[Intercepted mid-show theme music.]

MH: You mentioned Wagner has been active in some of the neighboring countries, including Mali, in the region.

Can you tell us a bit about what we know about the conduct of Wagner in these conflicts? I know Human Rights Watch and some local journalists have done reports on some of the impact of Wagner operations. How may that model, which you described, be applied to Niger if it does come into play?

NT: You know, as I’ve reported recently for The Intercept — and this was off some stellar on the ground research by Human Rights Watch — Wagner has been accompanying Malian troops into the field and committing some exceptionally heinous atrocities.

They’re going into areas where terrorist groups are active, but targeting the civilian populations there. So, they will come in by helicopter, land in a village, round up the men. They’ll go house to house and loot these homes. Generally, it’s just a few Malian troops, but mostly Wagner forces. The people who are being attacked, some of them call them Wagner, some of them call them Russians, some of them call them just white soldiers, but they don’t speak French, and they’re a new type of force with new types of tactics.

And these men are generally rounded up and taken away. Human Rights Watch shared some video footage with me of villagers who went out and found the men from that village that had been disappeared. And the camera takes you out into a field, and it’s littered with bodies. Some of them have been shot, some of them have had their throats slit. In most cases, it looks like the men were bound before they were killed. So, these were summary executions by Wagner forces.

And this seems to be the Wagner playbook, they’ve done this in the Central African Republic as well. But some really brutal methods, and it’s a worry that this will again repeat itself in Niger, but I think it’s certainly a possibility.

JS: In your assessment, given that you follow this conflict quite closely, were there gaps in what Human Rights Watch reported? And are there, not discrepancies, but are there differences in the way that you can tell that Human Rights Watch approaches the crimes, or alleged human rights violations, or extrajudicial killings of individuals, where the perpetrator is a Russian-backed force versus a U.S.-backed force, if you get what I’m saying?

Were there inconsistencies there, or double standards at play? I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but just give us an assessment of how you think Human Rights Watch and others approach these kinds of questions, when it’s the case of a Russian-backed mercenary firm committing the crimes versus U.S. proxies.

NT: I think that groups like Human Rights Watch, Amnesty; I mean, they do good work, but sometimes the framing of the issue can see a difference there. Though, I should say, in some cases they hit it harder when it’s Russian-backed.

Now, generally, the U.S. at least keeps a lower profile when it heads out with its local proxies in the region, and we generally don’t have the same type of reporting on that, it often doesn’t come to light. Human rights groups, generally back off to some degree when they’re talking about U.S. proxies, and really pushing the line that these are U.S.-trained forces. And some of it owes to the fact that the United States is able to keep these missions secret.

We know in Niger, for example, the United States have run something called 127-Echo programs there for years, and these went on under the radar for a very long time, until October of 2017, when there was an ambush by Islamic State forces of U.S. troops. [They] killed four U.S. soldiers, two of them Green Berets, wounded a couple more U.S. troops, and killed a number of Nigerien proxies who were with them.

The United States came out and said this was an advise and assist mission, but really what it was and what came to light was that this was the United States operating under Section 127E of the U.S. Code, which allows U.S. forces to employ local Nigerien forces as proxies in the field. They’re doing the United States’ bidding, they’re out there to achieve U.S. aims.

But rarely do these come to light. So, we know there are a lot of atrocities by Nigerien forces. Were they accompanied by the United States during these? You know, it’s often impossible to tell. The United States has played such a strong role in backing Nigerien forces over the years, there’s a good chance the United States is involved in one way or another, and this is something that often doesn’t come through in reports by human rights groups. Often, I think, because they don’t have the visibility on it, but it’s something that, at least, could be raised more in these reports, in the same manner that they would raise when it comes to Russia or Wagner group.

MH: Nick, given your breadth of experience across the region, you’ve actually connected the dots in a very interesting way about the relationship, incidental or intentional, between U.S. training of militaries and this wave of political instability in coups which have taken place across the Sahel region and beyond in Africa. I think The New York Times actually had a story the other day, noting that there have been coups from one coast of the Sahel to the other over the past few years; a pretty remarkable string of unrest.

So, I wanted to ask you: is there causality between this training relationship, in the sense that something benefits the U.S. in having this political instability? Or is it more a product of a lack of control or incompetence on the part of U.S. policymakers? On what sides do U.S. interests lie?

And, secondarily to that, how are these coups all related to each other, if they are? It seems like this geographical proximity has some sort of salience, but what is that? How is the region’s instability infecting other countries?

NT: Yeah, I’ve noticed, since this coup, there’s been a tremendous number of security analysts, Western security analysts on Twitter, folks that parrot the U.S. line. They’ve attacked my coverage, saying that I’m claiming there’s causation here, that there’s causality that the United States either — there’s something in U.S. training that makes these folks overthrow their governments.

And I don’t claim causation in the way that I think they want to frame the reporting. And, in fact, I think that the way they frame it is actually much more damning.

You know, they say that the United States floods the region with money and trains tremendous numbers of officers. When you break that down and think about it, the amount of money that’s been pumped into these conflicts and how poorly they’ve gone… I mean, it doesn’t speak very well for U.S. training, and it doesn’t speak very well for U.S. advising for the counterterrorism paradigm that we’ve sold to these countries.

And, it’s true. I mean, many, many officers across West Africa have gotten U.S. training, and not all of them overthrow their governments. But I think the case is that the United States isn’t able to control how this training is used. It doesn’t seem to be effective in any type of way for its stated purpose: counterterrorism, making these countries safer. But the officers that it’s trained there, it doesn’t seem to have had an impact when it comes to laws of war, when it comes to democratic principles, and these are things that the United States always stresses that they are imparting on their trainees across the region.

So, yeah. I think, at least, it should give U.S. policymakers pause, and say, this doesn’t seem to be effective in any of the ways we’ve wanted it to be. We’ve used the same paradigm for the last 20 years. Maybe we need to rethink at this point. Maybe it’s time to think about another way forward, because 20 years of counterterrorism assistance, billions and billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars pumped into the region has just left us with coups now by 11 U.S.-trained officers.

You know, again, correlation doesn’t equal causation, but the metrics are exceptionally bad.

JS: Yeah. And, I mean, you also have the entire duration of modern U.S. history. You mentioned one of the coup plotters being trained at Fort Benning, and just to remind people, it used to be known as the U.S. Army School of the Americas. You had string after string after string of military officers from Central Latin America who came to the United States and received training at what was then called the School of the Americas, who, not only committed human rights abuses while they were members of U.S. client state militaries, but also then joined paramilitary groups, or became assassins.

The people that assassinated Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980 in San Salvador, the Archbishop of San Salvador, the group that assassinated him included individuals that were trained at the U.S. Army School of the Americas. That also has been replicated in African nations, and in Asia, and elsewhere, where you have foreign military officers who’ve received extensive and advanced training from the United States then go on to commit heinous human rights abuses, or antidemocratic regimes come to power with graduates of U.S. military training.

And I think that, to an extent, I saw some of the criticism being levied at you, Nick. I think a lot of it is really baseless because, just to point to the most obvious, I mean, history is on your side in your analysis here. And it is not just fair game to point out the U.S. role in training people that go on to commit human rights abuses or engage in antidemocratic putsches around the world, but also to ignore it, or to just preemptively say that this isn’t a data point we should look at is a totally intellectually dishonest exercise.

Oftentimes, people who are levying that kind of criticism at people like you are the very people who have to be forced to acknowledge that the U.S. played any role whatsoever in any of the events that have taken place around the world. So, I would just completely set that aside, but I think it opens a door for a different sort of a nuanced conversation or question to you, and that is to explain, post-9/11, why the U.S. started taking increased interest in African nations — and particularly Niger — and what the past almost 23 years of so-called counterterrorism strategy have looked like on the African continent. There’s, of course, drone strikes, but that’s not the entirety of it.

This has been the heart of a lot of your reporting over the past two decades on Africa, and I think it would be great if you just walk people through, how did we get to this point where the U.S. was using Niger and other African nations in the way it has used them since 9/11?

NT: Sure. I mean, just after 9/11, the United States looked out on the world and just made a decision that, basically, they would look to places that they considered the ungoverned spaces, places where they thought that terrorism could take hold. This was just a theory that you would have to flood these areas with security assistance, get U.S. advisors on the ground, create a counterterrorism regime. And they did this in place after place, area after area, in Africa.

And, generally, there were no transnational terror groups in Sub-Saharan Africa at the time; even Al Shabaab was still a glint in the eye of the Islamic Courts Union. There were none of the threats that they were so worried about. 20 years later, U.S Special Operations Command Africa counts about 50 transnational terrorist and militant groups on the continent.

So, you’ve had a tremendous increase over that time. And, again, correlation doesn’t equal causation, but I think you can look at the way that the United States has structured its aid, how it’s bolstered this counterterrorism mindset that has turned localized conflicts into regional conflicts, that has taken, what were local problems between ethnic groups and their governments, and internationalized them by creating openings for transnational terror groups to come in and recruit.

Just in almost every context you can look at where the United States has put real counterterrorism dollars into real significant numbers of U.S. troops, the conflicts have all worsened for the countries involved. And, especially, for the people that are living in these conflict areas. Things have just gotten exponentially worse over this time.

And you mentioned drone strikes have been one part of this, mostly in Somalia, earlier on in the war on terror and in Libya. That’s subsided, at least for the moment, but the United States has put a lot of boots on the ground. Small numbers, but a lot over time, and they cycle these special operations teams in and out of these countries. And Niger has been one, as I mentioned, where they used this shadowy 127E authority, 127-Echo.

Again, this is small numbers of U.S. commandos on the ground working alongside Nigerien forces, who they use as proxies to fight, kill America’s enemies on the continent. They’ve done this in country after country. They do it in Somalia, they’ve done it in Cameroon, in Burkina, in Mali at one point, and in Niger. We had a small window into those types of operations due to the debacle in 2017, but one thing that came out of that — as I said, U.S. Africa Command said that this was an advise and assist mission, that this was a complete fiction. And an investigation by a three-star U.S. general found that Nigerien forces had had no input in the planning process or the decision to execute these missions.

What the U.S. said were advise, assist, accompany, were more like U.S. direct action missions, and “direct action” is a special ops euphemism for strikes, raids, other offensive missions. And this has been what’s been going on in the continent in secret for more than a decade now. The United States is running teams of Navy SEALs, Green Berets in, and conducting offensive operations.

These are wars by another name that, generally, the American public doesn’t know about, and this has been a major portion of counterterrorism strategy on the continent.

MH: So, given this unrest in this very critical region — obviously, Sahel’s became a zone of great power competition, China and Russia both have a presence there; and some of China, maybe you can enlighten our readers about.

But I wanted to ask: given the U.S.’s very military focused role in the Sahel over the past generation, could you give us a sense of what may be a more constructive policy? The U.S. obviously has been training these military officers and setting them loose, and they’ve been, in many cases, either ineffective or actively agents of destabilization in the region.

Is there a better way that the U.S. could support the people of the region and the governments, as opposed to the current course they’ve taken, which has caused so much havoc?

NT: Generally, I think these questions are above my paygrade and are better served by smarter people than me. I try not to give prescriptions on these things.

But I think that to start, at least, U.S. lawmakers should be taking a really hard look at this long and sordid history of U.S. intervention there, and ask some really pointed questions of the State Department and U.S. Africa Command.

Generally, in testimony before Congress, AFRICOM gives up some talking points, there’s some predictable questions. No one asks the hard questions, or tells them that they need to come up with metrics to show that 20 years of counterterrorism efforts have helped in any way, and I think they’d be hard pressed to do that. So, I think, as a start, that needs to be done.

These countries, generally, I think the unrest is driven by poverty and by the governments that we’ve been supporting that have driven people into the arms of terrorists. So, I think a greater focus on humanitarian aid, not only suspending aid when coups happen, but when you have year after year, decade after decade, reports of governments that are abusing their populations, sending militaries out, committing atrocities, and driving terrorism, that the United States needs to take action in these ways. Cut off aid before we have 20 years of ineffectiveness and a military uprising.

So, I think those are some places where, at least, that there could be a start.

JS: Nick, just one follow-up. Murtaza had mentioned China and great power competition. Can you comment a bit on the difference in approach between the United States and China in the Sahel, and how these countries both have tried to assert their influence or economic or diplomatic power?

NT: The United States has spent the last 20-plus years with this counterterrorism whack-a-mole strategy, and China has really pushed a soft-power approach. I think the Chinese have been very effective at what they’ve done.

The best example that always comes to mind, and it’s in the Sahel, in Mali: a few years ago, the United States had given Mali a large sum of money through the Millennium Challenge Corporation, which is an economic aid the United States supplies to African countries. And it was for a major construction project, and the U.S. casted about looking for a U.S. firm that would carry out this work, the building project, but there were no U.S. corporations that were interested in going to Africa and building this big public works project.

Eventually, the company that was hired was a Chinese firm, state-connected. So, it was U.S. taxpayer dollars but, when Malians looked at this project, they saw Chinese on the ground, they saw Chinese writing on it, they assumed it was a Chinese project.

I mean, I think it’s emblematic of how things have gone. The U.S. is putting the money out there and China’s able to take the credit. I mean, they’ve eaten our lunch over and over again in circumstances like this, and this one was one of the more egregious, but it shows that China knows how to play the game on the continent, and the United States is flailing about, I would say, in a rather ineffective manner.

JS: All right. Nick Turse, thank you so much for joining us once again here on Intercepted.

NT: Thanks so much for having me.

MH: That was Nick Turse, an investigative journalist and contributing writer for The Intercept.

[Intercepted end-show theme music.]

JS: And that does it for this episode of Intercepted.

Intercepted is a production of The Intercept. José Olivares is the lead producer. Our supervising producer is Laura Flynn. Roger Hodge is editor-in-chief of The Intercept. Rick Kwan mixed our show, and this episode was transcribed by Leonardo Faierman. Our theme music, as always, was composed by DJ Spooky.

If you want to support our work, you can go to theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter what the size, makes a real difference. And, if you haven’t already, please subscribe to Intercepted, and definitely leave us a rating or a review wherever you find your podcasts. It helps other listeners to find us as well.

If you want to give us feedback, you can email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Thank you so much for joining us.

Intercepted is going to be on hiatus for a few weeks, but we will be back in September. Until then, I’m Jeremy Scahill.

MH: And I’m Murtaza Hussain.

The post Niger Mutiny: Another U.S.-Trained Military Officer Led Coup appeared first on The Intercept.

The lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, accuses the FBI, the Colorado Springs Police Department, and local police officers of overstepping their authority in infiltrating, surveilling, and requesting search warrants aimed at Colorado Springs activists. The FBI’s targeting of racial justice activists was revealed in February by The Intercept and the podcast series “Alphabet Boys.”

In a separate federal case in Denver, the Justice Department last week did not deny that the government’s initial investigation of racial justice activists was prompted by speech. That filing — the government’s first public response to revelations that the FBI infiltrated the racial justice movement in Denver using a violent felon as a paid informant — claimed that the “violent nature” of the activists’ statements “made them a legitimate subject of investigation.”

The two cases stem from the same source. During the summer of 2020, the FBI secretly hired an informant, Michael “Mickey” Windecker, to infiltrate the racial justice movement in Denver. While being paid by the FBI, Windecker accused movement leaders of being informants themselves; encouraged violence at protests; and tried unsuccessfully to entrap two Black activists in a plot to assassinate the state’s attorney general.

Internal FBI reports showed that Windecker, a tattooed, cigar-smoking white man who drove a silver hearse, first attended racial justice demonstrations in the Denver area in May 2020. Windecker then approached the FBI, claiming to have unique information about racial justice protesters. But Windecker’s tips, according to initial FBI reports, were entirely about speech. As an example, Windecker claimed one Black activist, Zebbodios “Zebb” Hall, said of the city of Denver: “We need to burn this motherfucker down.”

Based on statements he claimed to have overheard and a recording he secretly made of Hall speaking vaguely about training and revolution, the FBI enlisted Windecker as a paid informant and asked him to pose as a racial justice demonstrator.

The FBI, in its reports, stated Windecker had come forward voluntarily out of some sort of duty to protect the United States, but the bureau’s documented knowledge of Windecker complicated that claim: The FBI was aware that Windecker had prior arrests in at least four states and had been convicted of misdemeanor sexual assault and felony menacing with a weapon. The FBI also knew that Windecker had a long history of working the system as an informant, going back as far as two decades earlier, when he’d been a jailhouse snitch in a murder-for-hire case. Nevertheless, the FBI paid Windecker more than $20,000 for his work during the summer of 2020.

Windecker’s work for the FBI resulted in at least two investigations: one in Colorado Springs, led by a young female detective, and the other in Denver, led by Windecker himself. Both are now under scrutiny in federal court.

April Rogers, left, a police officer who went undercover for the FBI in the Colorado Springs activist community, participating in a 2021 housing rights march during which several activists were arrested.

Photo courtesy of Chinook Center.

“Unconstitutional Actions”

While investigating racial justice demonstrators in Denver, Windecker provided information about a protester who was active in both Denver and Colorado Springs, according to FBI records. That prompted the bureau to recruit a young Colorado Springs Police detective, April Rogers, to infiltrate the activist community there. Wearing provocative clothing, the pink-haired Rogers suggested she was a sex worker named “Chelsi Kurti.” She offered to volunteer at the Chinook Center, a community space for left-wing activists in Colorado Springs.

During the pandemic summer of unrest that followed George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis, members of the Chinook Center organized a protest near the home of a police officer involved in the fatal 2019 shooting of a young Black man, De’Von Bailey. For more than a year after the demonstration, Rogers, pretending to be an activist, secretly collected information about members of the Chinook Center; she also tried unsuccessfully to lure at least two activists into gun-running stings engineered by the FBI. The information Rogers surreptitiously collected from the Chinook Center, coupled with the use of a new FBI program called Social Media Exploitation, allowed the FBI and its local law enforcement partner to build dossiers on individual activists without warrants.

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After building the intelligence files, Rogers participated in a 2021 housing rights protest organized by the Chinook Center. As The Intercept reported in March, Colorado Springs police, armed with intelligence reports created by the FBI’s Social Media Exploitation program and filled with photos from social media, eagerly awaited the protesters they planned to arrest. “Boot to the face,” a police officer, Scott Alamo, said gleefully as he flipped through the pages of activists’ photos, his body camera recording the comment. “It’s going to happen.”

The cops, dressed in riot gear, violently arrested several activists on charges related to their roles in the protest near the police officer’s home a year earlier. As police stormed in to make arrests, Jacqueline Armendariz Unzueta, an activist and Colorado-based staffer for Democratic U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet at the time, was walking her bike. She saw a cop charging toward her and reacted.

“I just threw my bike down and was like, ‘Bitch, you’re coming for me?’” Armendariz Unzueta said. “That’s the honest truth.”

The charging officer sidestepped the bike, but the encounter was captured by a police body camera.

Armendariz Unzueta was not arrested that day. In the days after, local police couldn’t determine her identity because she had been wearing a face mask and a bike helmet. But Daniel Summey, a Colorado Springs detective assigned to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, started looking for the mysterious cyclist by searching the social media accounts of known Chinook Center activists.

Summey found Armendariz Unzueta on social media, matching her bicycle helmet and shoes to photos online. He then wrote an application for a warrant to search her home, but the warrant was based on activities that are protected under the First Amendment. Summey noted, for example, that the demonstration Armendariz Unzueta participated in included red flags, which Summey claimed were a “radical political symbol.” In his search warrant application, Summey also gratuitously appended a full-page photo of Armendariz Unzueta in a bikini that had nothing to do with the investigation. “Sometimes you’ve got to laugh to keep from crying,” Armendariz Unzueta said of the photo’s inclusion.

The ACLU’s lawsuit against the FBI and Colorado Springs Police Departments alleges that the search warrant targeting Armendariz Unzueta and additional warrants to obtain private chats associated with the Chinook Center’s Facebook account and the group’s membership roster essentially criminalized First Amendment-protected activities and violated Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

“The warrants targeting Chinook and Armendariz were part of a pattern and practice of unconstitutional actions intended to teach activists a lesson: Colorado Springs police would retaliate against political expression with dragnet warrants to chill free speech,” the ACLU of Colorado alleges in its complaint, the first lawsuit related to FBI’s surveillance of activist groups in Colorado during the summer of 2020.

Zebbodios “Zebb” Hall was among the Denver activists who became close to Mickey Windecker, not knowing he was a paid FBI informant.

Photo: Trevor Aaronson

Policing “Violent” Speech

Remarkably, the Justice Department isn’t denying that the FBI’s investigations of activists in Colorado were related to potentially First Amendment-protected activity. In the Denver criminal case, the Justice Department acknowledged that the FBI’s investigation there during the summer of 2020 was based on speech, albeit of a “violent nature.”

The admission came last week in the criminal case of Hall, the primary Black activist targeted by the FBI and its informant, Windecker, during the summer of 2020. The Justice Department was compelled to respond to Hall’s motion to vacate his felony conviction for buying and giving a firearm to Windecker, a convicted felon who was not allowed to have a gun.

Windecker asked Hall to buy him the gun after failing to persuade Hall and another Black activist to join an FBI-engineered assassination plot supposedly targeting the state’s attorney general. Hall bought the Smith & Wesson handgun for Windecker, despite knowing that Windecker was a convicted felon, and pleaded guilty to the federal charge in January 2022. He was sentenced to three years of probation.

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But following the reporting by The Intercept and “Alphabet Boys,” Hall petitioned the court to vacate his conviction based on his previous lawyer’s alleged failure to investigate Windecker fully and pursue an entrapment defense. Hall claims that Windecker, who made public death threats while being paid by the FBI and claimed to have killed Islamic State fighters as a volunteer for the Kurdish Peshmerga fighting force, threatened to harm him if he didn’t buy him the gun. Windecker’s threats of violence weren’t secret. In one YouTube video, Windecker, while secretly being paid by the FBI, states: “I have a plan to kill everybody in the fucking room if need to be.”

“We believe he could have prevailed with an entrapment defense,” Lisa Polansky, a Colorado lawyer who was recently appointed to represent Hall in his effort to vacate his conviction, told The Intercept.

The Justice Department described Hall’s claims as “meritless,” but Denver federal prosecutor Rajiv Mohan acknowledged that FBI reports showed that Hall and other racial justice activists were initially targeted following Windecker’s reports about speech. Mohan claimed, however, that Hall’s decision to buy a gun for the FBI’s informant was independent of “any outrageous government conduct in relation to speech.”

The FBI’s investigation in Colorado is the first documented case of federal agents infiltrating the racial justice movement during the summer of 2020. Although the Justice Department and the FBI have said little about it, the probe has garnered attention on Capitol Hill. Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon called it “a clear abuse of authority.” Republican Rep. Dan Bishop of North Carolina quipped: “This is what the FBI does.” Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio submitted The Intercept’s article about the FBI activity in Denver into evidence in his Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

The post Lawsuit Targets FBI Probe of Racial Justice Activists appeared first on The Intercept.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis sits in a courtroom in the Fulton County Courthouse on July 11, 2023, in Atlanta.

Photo: Brynn Anderson/AP

On Monday afternoon, I met an investigator from the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office in a nondescript parking lot downtown in Atlanta. He handed me two subpoenas to testify before one of the grand juries empaneled here considering charges in the 2020 election interference case with Donald Trump.

I’m at Buteco, a bar in East Atlanta. I don’t drink anymore. I’m thinking about it.

It’s the second time I’ve been asked to testify. A year ago, I sat in front of a grand jury on the third floor of the courthouse — which is now buttressed with orange barricades in anticipation of incipient madness — to describe barging into a semi-clandestine meeting of Republicans pretending to be Georgia’s official electors in December 2020.

For more than two years, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has been probing whether Trump and his allies broke the law when they tried to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. The prosecutor has said that she will announce charging decisions by the end of August.

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I went to Georgia’s state Capitol on December 14, 2020, to watch the solemn and usually forgettable ritual casting of electoral votes. As Stacey Abrams led the Democratic delegation upstairs, Republicans sat in a reserved room on the Capitol’s second floor to prepare a competing — and potentially illegal — slate of their own.

The Republicans threw me out of the room moments after I entered, camera phone in hand, going live on Facebook. When I asked what kind of gathering they were having, they told me it was an “education meeting.” As it turns out, Donald Trump’s election team had sent an email the previous night, instructing the group to maintain “complete secrecy.”

Election madness wasn’t incipient in 2020; it was happening all around us. And I get thrown out of a lot of places. So I didn’t think much about it beyond tweeting a still from the Facebook Live, asking my friends to identify the people in the picture.

But because I was lied to and thrown out, it confirmed that the legislators were acting in secret, that they didn’t want the press or public to know what they were doing. That specific bit of information has apparently been important enough to ask me to convey it to a grand jury — again.

Security at the Fulton County Courthouse is tight on a normal day. The ghosts of Judge Rowland Barnes, court reporter Julie Ann Brandau, Sgt. Hoyt Teasley and Special Agent David G. Wilhelm — the four victims of Brian Nichols’s murder spree in 2005 — still haunt the space and inform its defenses.

As Willis prepares a possible case against Trump, she’s taken even more serious precautions. The district attorney asked judges to reschedule hearings and other work for the next two weeks. Her office staff is working off-site for the moment.

Willis has empaneled two grand juries for the coming month, and I have a subpoena for both of them. This process gives plausible deniability to the members of the grand jury reviewing election interference — and protection from public harassment. It also means I can’t tell which of the panels I’ve been called before is the one probing Trump — or if it’s both of them — until after I’m called. (I have no intention of disclosing those details, regardless.)

Journalists should not be testifying in front of grand juries. We are not agents of the government, gathering intelligence to be used in prosecutions. Our role should be adversarial, and my role as a journalist in Atlanta has regularly been just that with regard to Fulton County government, law enforcement, and even the operation of its courts. The county jail is in shambles, the courts are backed up, and prosecutors’ increased emphasis on gang cases raises questions about criminal justice reform in this city.

Journalists should not be testifying in front of grand juries. Our role should be adversarial.

Grand jury proceedings are secret, and for ethically defensible reasons. If a grand jury chooses not to indict someone, open proceedings would leave a stain of suspicion on people without the detergent of sunlight and a public trial. But the secrecy also means that a journalist who is called to testify cannot generally assure their sources that they didn’t tell the government secrets they had promised to keep. It is for this reason that journalists who work on sensitive material usually fight such subpoenas.

I am reviewing my legal options with retained counsel. But I expect to testify, as before, after receiving assurances that I will not be compelled to offer information outside of the narrow issue of election interference and my observations on December 14, 2020.

The Trump election interference case raises unique questions about the role of a free press in preserving democracy. I ignore my obligations to that not just at my own peril, but also that of every journalist.

The post I Was Just Subpoenaed by Trump’s Georgia Grand Jury. Here’s What I’ll Tell Them. appeared first on The Intercept.

In a press release announcing the arrest, the Justice Department said that Meyer had been caught after he had “pledged an oath of allegiance to the leader of ISIS and intended to travel to serve as a fighter for ISIS in Iraq.”

Beneath the surface of these serious allegations, however, are troubling details about what really happened between Meyer and the FBI in the months leading up to his arrest. According to the criminal complaint against him, Meyer had first come to the attention of the FBI last year when he was 17 years old, after a person he knew contacted the local sheriff’s office to report “concerning behavior,” including threats of violence against them and the United States by Meyer. The complaint did not mention that the person who reported Meyer to the authorities was his mother.

Concerned over Meyer’s erratic behavior and deteriorating mental health, Deanna Meyer reported her son, then a minor, to the authorities in the hopes that they would help keep him away from trouble. What followed instead was a lengthy government investigation employing two confidential FBI informants. First contacting Meyer the day after his 18th birthday, the informants secretly developed a relationship with him. Rather than help steer him away from wrongdoing, the FBI informants helped Meyer develop the plan to join the Islamic State that eventually led to his arrest.

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In a hearing last week to determine whether Meyer would be held in custody while awaiting trial, his mother testified that she had tried to get help from the police to aid her son, who had suffered from mental illness for years and made threats of violence against her since he was 14 years old.

Meyer had previously spent eight months, between 2021 and 2022, in a facility “focused on mental health and behavior treatment,” according to the affidavit. He had been diagnosed with autism, clinical depression, and a range of anxiety and mood disorders — diagnoses of which the government was aware and even referenced in the criminal complaint. All while still a minor, Meyer espoused white supremacist beliefs and, still grappling with a range of diagnosed mental illnesses, then developed an interest in extremist Islam online. The behavior had alarmed his mother.

“It was the wrong place to go for help in going to law enforcement.”

“I had exhausted all private routes,” Deanna Meyer said at the hearing, explaining her original decision to contact the local sheriff’s office for help with her child. “I was more concerned about ideology and where that would go.”

If convicted on the charges, Meyer could face up to 20 years in prison. Yet his family and lawyers say that he had been the victim of an FBI sting operation that groomed him for the very crime for which he was arrested.

“It was the wrong place to go for help in going to law enforcement,” Meyer’s lawyer David Kaplan said at the hearing. “They represented themselves as facilitators and fanned the flames of what they condemn now.”

Davin Daniel Meyer at 16 years old.

Photo: Courtesy of Deanna Meyer

Mental Health Diagnoses

The two paid undercover FBI informants who helped secure his arrest began communicating with Meyer “soon after his 18th birthday,” according to the affidavit in the case — fostering his path to extremist ideology only once he could be legally prosecuted as an adult. One of the informants even traveled to meet with Meyer in person, three times, in his small Colorado hometown. They discussed the idea of going abroad to join a terrorist group — a possibility that Meyer had already been talking over with the other FBI operative online.

The complaint goes into considerable detail about the relationship that developed between Meyer and the undercover informants, whom he believed to be members of the Islamic State who could facilitate his travel abroad.

Court documents also show that the FBI was aware of Meyer’s history of mental illness, including his stay at a residential treatment facility during part of the year in which the investigation started.

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While institutionalized, Meyer reportedly refused to take his prescribed psychiatric medication or attend online school programs. He also engaged in racist speech against medical staff before developing an interest in radical Islamist ideology. The FBI reviewed this history, saying in the affidavit that “records show that Meyer has received diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder; attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder; adjustment disorder with mixed anxiety and depressed mood; specific learning disorder with impairment in mathematics; and major depressive disorder, recurrent episode, moderate.”

Sometime after his release from mental health treatment, in the summer of 2022, Meyer was banned from a local mosque he tried to attend after being accused of harassing the imam and congregants.

That November, he found the Islamic State online — in the form of the FBI informant. After developing a relationship with them, Meyer sent the informant videos of himself, face wrapped in scarves, pledging allegiance to the group. The informant later introduced Meyer to the second informant in December 2022, whom he met in person and discussed travel abroad. In their meetings, Meyer shared videos with the informant he had found online of violent acts perpetrated by ISIS abroad.

For a period of several months, Meyer continued discussing with the FBI informants a plan for him to leave the country and join a terrorist group abroad. Many of these discussions included talk about what type of shoes, clothing, and electronic devices would be useful for him while traveling, as well as how he would obtain a passport and accumulate enough money to pay for his ticket. Meyer attempted to work part-time jobs to save the required funds. After running into problems securing the cash, he eventually settled upon using a sum of $3,000 provided by his mother that she had given him to pay for groceries and transportation.

“I am very happy this is happening, but at the time I feel sad because I will most likely never see my parents again.”

The issue of his mother and how she would respond to him potentially leaving the country was a running theme for Meyer in his conversations with the FBI. “One day she’s gonna wake up and her son’s not gonna be there and that’s gonna be difficult for her,” Meyer said, as quoted in the indictment. In the end, he decided upon leaving a note in his apartment, to which she had a spare key, indicating that he had left the country and would not be coming back.

In the days leading up to his final departure, Meyer, while expressing to the FBI informant his continued commitment to the plan for him to leave, continued to bring up his parents. “I am very happy this is happening, but at the time I feel sad because I will most likely never see my parents again, and I’m leaving the place I’ve grown up all my life and become attached to,” he told an FBI informant in a message. “It is a trial but it can be heavy on the heart.”

According to the indictment, Meyer continued to express “anxiety and hesitation,” right up until the hours he was expected to board a flight to Turkey in July, though he reassured the informants that he would still go through with the plan. To his own detriment, he would wind up fulfilling his promise to the FBI — a plan that they themselves had helped him develop. At around 8:00 p.m. on July 14, after showing his boarding pass to a gate agent at Denver International Airport, Meyer was arrested by FBI agents while walking the jet bridge to board his flight.

“Groomed”

Meyer’s case follows a long pattern of FBI sting operations targeting young people with histories of mental illness that make them vulnerable to manipulation — stings that often result in the teens being prosecuted for terrorism and receiving lengthy prison terms. Just last month, a lengthy FBI investigation targeting a 16-year-old with “brain development issues” led to an arrest on terrorism charges shortly after he — like Meyer — became a legal adult.

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At Meyer’s hearing last week, it was alleged by prosecutors that Meyer had also communicated online with an Islamic extremist in the United Kingdom who had recently been arrested — likely a reference to a notoriously media-friendly radical activist named Anjem Choudary. The nature of that alleged contact and how extensive it was remains unclear. In the charges against Meyer related to his alleged criminal plot, the only terrorists he is accused of ever actually collaborating with were undercover operatives working for the FBI.

More details could come out as Meyer’s case heads to trial that could shed light on the allegations against him. At his hearing, prosecutors stated that the 18-year-old was given many “off-ramps” during the investigation by the FBI informants, but that he remained committed to carrying out his imagined plan to leave the country with their help and join ISIS.

His mother, however, believes that Meyer — far from being a legitimate threat to herself or to U.S. national security — was “groomed” at a young age while already grappling with mental illness to generate yet another terrorism case for federal prosecutors and the FBI.

In a Facebook post, titled “My Lost Son,” Deanna Meyer lamented what she described as the manipulation of her son by law enforcement officials and the FBI.

“I made the choice to call the police and beg for any kind of mental health options before his 18th birthday to keep him safe and out of the criminal justice system not knowing that their solution would be to wait until he the day he was 18 and send multiple undercover agents to groom him,” she wrote. “I lost him. He is gone behind the walls of steel and indifference.”

The post After His Mother Asked for Help, FBI Terrorism Sting Targets Mentally Ill Teen appeared first on The Intercept.

Former President Donald Trump speaks during a rally on July 7, 2023, in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

Photo: Charlie Riedel/AP

Only a career criminal finds himself facing four indictments in four different jurisdictions at the same time. That level of legal exposure is generally reserved for those who engage in crime sprees of historic proportions.

Enter Donald Trump, a serial criminal who has been the subject of so many federal and state investigations and indictments that he could put most Mafia bosses to shame. 

It seems likely that Trump, who has already been charged with felonies in two separate cases, will soon be indicted at least twice more, perhaps before the summer is over. If that happens, Trump will have to spend much of the next year traveling up and down the Eastern Seaboard defending himself in courtrooms in New York, Washington, Georgia, and Florida, even as he campaigns for the presidency.

But rather than conflicting with his court appearances, Trump’s presidential run is inextricably linked to his legal strategy: He is clearly running for president again to try to shield himself from a prison sentence. Trump doesn’t see the difference between politics and the law. He appears convinced that his one chance to make his legal troubles disappear is to once again win the country’s top political office.

There is nothing in the law or the Constitution that would stop Trump from running for president, even if he were convicted of one or more crimes by November 2024. But if he is elected and takes office, all kinds of weird and interesting questions will arise. His legal troubles could very quickly lead to an unprecedented constitutional crisis.

Among Republican voters, Trump has been bolstered, not weakened, by his criminal cases; each time he is indicted, his base seems to rally to him. As a result, Trump is now the runaway leader in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. A new Monmouth University poll found that Trump is leading the Republican primary field with 54 percent of the vote, far ahead of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is in second place with just 22 percent. No other candidate received more than 5 percent. Barring some major change, it seems likely that the United States is headed for a rematch between Trump and President Joe Biden.

But if Trump is reelected in 2024, he will find it difficult to navigate all the obstacles in the judicial system he now faces. If he is sitting in the Oval Office again in January 2025, he will still probably face several legal threats, since experts say it is unlikely that all his cases will be resolved before the election. The biggest threat could, in theory, come from the case that many analysts have downplayed as the weakest: Trump’s indictment in New York state in connection with hush-money payments to former porn star Stormy Daniels.

Yet even the New York case could have unexpected advantages for Trump, and might ultimately cement his status as Teflon Don.

Special counsel Jack Smith, who is prosecuting Trump in a case involving the alleged mishandling of classified documents, speaks to reporters on June 9, 2023, in Washington, D.C.

Photo: Jose Luis Magana/AP

Trump was indicted in the New York case in April; he was indicted again in June in federal court in Florida on charges that he took more than 100 classified documents when he left the White House and arranged to hide them at his Palm Beach home and club Mar-a-Lago — including in a shower — when the government asked for them back. Prosecutors issued a new indictment in the classified documents case Thursday, adding charges against Trump that include allegations that he and an aide tried to obstruct investigators by deleting security tape footage at Mar-a-Lago. He is also likely to be indicted soon in Georgia state court and in federal court in Washington in connection with his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results; the federal case also involves his role in the January 6 insurrection.

But if he becomes president again, there are a number of highly controversial gambits Trump could try to use to wriggle out of at least some of his mounting legal problems. If he is reelected and the federal criminal cases against him are still making their way through the courts when he takes office, Trump could order the Justice Department to drop them. If he refused to do so, Jack Smith, the special counsel hired last year by Attorney General Merrick Garland, could be fired by a new Trump-appointed attorney general.

If, by contrast, Trump is convicted in either federal case and is subsequently elected president, he could try to pardon himself once he takes office. But there is an unresolved debate among legal scholars about whether that is possible under the Constitution. Just before President Richard Nixon resigned in 1974 rather than face impeachment in the Watergate scandal, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion saying that a president could not pardon himself. But Trump could still test that legal guideline. The issue would almost certainly end up before the Supreme Court, where a conservative majority could hold sway.

“The weight of authority goes against the idea that a president could pardon himself,” said Caroline Mala Corbin, an expert on constitutional law at the University of Miami School of Law. “But the constitutional text does not directly answer the question, so it is possible to come up with a theory that allows it.”

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Yet another legal mine field for Trump lies in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which bars from federal office anyone who has engaged in an insurrection against the United States. Section 3 of the 14th Amendment prohibits anyone who once swore to support the U.S. Constitution and later “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same” or gave “aid or comfort to the enemies thereof” from holding any federal office, including the presidency. If Trump were convicted on federal charges of seditious conspiracy — the same charges on which the leaders of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers have been convicted in connection with the January 6 insurrection — that could lead to an interesting debate over whether he would still be qualified to serve as president.

Trump’s legal peril could also be eased if another Republican is elected president, and either forces the Justice Department to drop its prosecutions of Trump or pardons him.

Of course, any aggressive, unprecedented moves to protect Trump would have a huge political impact, and their success would depend heavily on the makeup of Congress. If the House and Senate are both controlled by Democrats, it is unlikely that Trump could get away with these tactics. But Republican control of Congress would likely allow him to protect himself.

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis speaks in court in the Fulton County Courthouse on July 11, 2023, in Atlanta.

Photo: Brynn Anderson/AP

The New York and Georgia cases are different, however. Trump’s status as president won’t allow him to get rid of his criminal cases in state courts. 

“There are a lot of questions about whether Trump could pardon himself,” said Corbin, “but it is not disputed that the power of the presidential pardon only extends to federal crimes.” 

In Georgia, Trump may be able to rely on friendly Republican officeholders to get him out of trouble. Georgia is one of only three states in the nation where the governor does not have the power to issue pardons; instead, the state has a five-member board in charge of pardons and paroles. However, all the board members are appointed by the governor, and all five current members have been appointed by Republicans. If Trump is convicted in Georgia, Terry E. Barnard, the former Republican state legislator who is the longtime chair of the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, may suddenly become a household name.

“I expect [Trump] will be indicted,” said Darryl Cohen, an Atlanta lawyer who previously worked as an assistant district attorney in the Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney’s office that is expected to bring charges against Trump. “If he is convicted, he could go to the pardon board, and they could pardon him. But this is so unique and unusual, that I think [Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis] is on to something that is way more than she expected.”

In fact, the Republican political establishment in Georgia has already begun to move against Willis, a Democrat. In May, Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, signed legislation that creates a state oversight commission with the power to remove locally elected district attorneys from their positions. The law seemed to be aimed straight at Willis, just as she was preparing to charge Trump. 

But if Trump is convicted in the hush-money case, he would have to rely on Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul for a pardon. She is unlikely to help him avoid prison.

The potential threat that a New York conviction holds for Trump no doubt explains why he has been trying to move the hush-money case to federal court; a federal judge on July 19 denied that attempt.

To be sure, Trump’s legal cases have a long way to go before pardons would be considered. He and his attorneys are certain to file motions seeking to delay all the cases, hoping that none go to trial before the 2024 election. It’s possible that he won’t be convicted in any of them, and even if he is, he could file endless appeals and might never be sentenced to prison. Michael Bachner, a New York lawyer and a former assistant district attorney in the Manhattan DA’s office that brought the hush-money case against Trump, noted that the ex-president has been charged with the lowest-grade felony in New York state.

“It is extremely unlikely that a judge would send him [to prison] in this case,” said Bachner. “Most first-time offenders [on this type of charge] would not go” to prison.

That raises yet another possible way Trump could avoid incarceration: He might claim that he’s a first-time offender — in four different jurisdictions.

The post Stormy Daniels May Have the Last Word on Donald Trump appeared first on The Intercept.

Marx is more than just a competitive gun-disarmer and martial artist. He is also a former Marine, a self-proclaimed exorcist, and an author and filmmaker. He also helped launch the Skull Games, a privatized intelligence outfit that purports to hunt pedophiles, sex traffickers, and other “demonic activity” using a blend of sock-puppet social media accounts and commercial surveillance tools — including face recognition software.

The Skull Games events have attracted notable corporate allies. Recent games have been “powered” by the internet surveillance firm Cobwebs, and an upcoming competition is partnered with cellphone-tracking data broker Anomaly Six.

The moral simplicity of Skull Games’s mission is emblazoned across its website in fierce, all-caps type: “We hunt predators.” And Marx has savvily ridden recent popular attention to the independent film “Sound of Freedom,” a dramatization of the life of fellow anti-trafficking crusader Tim Ballard. In the era of QAnon and conservative “groomer” panic, vowing to take down shadowy — and frequently exaggerated — networks of “traffickers” under the aegis of Christ is an exercise in shrewd branding.

Although its name is a reference to the mind games played by pimps and traffickers, Skull Games, which Marx’s church is no longer officially involved in, is itself a form of sport for its participants: a sort of hackathon for would-be Christian saviors, complete with competition. Those who play are awarded points based on their sleuthing. Finding a target’s high school diploma or sonogram imagery nets 15 points, while finding the same tattoo on multiple women would earn a whopping 300. On at least one occasion, according to materials reviewed by The Intercept and Tech Inquiry, participants competed for a chance at prizes, including paid work for Marx’s California church and one of its surveillance firm partners.

While commercially purchased surveillance exists largely outside the purview of the law, Skull Games was founded to answer to a higher power. The event started under the auspices of All Things Possible Ministries, the Murrieta, California, evangelical church Marx founded in 2003.

Marx has attributed his conversion to Christianity to becoming reunited with his biological father — according to Marx, formerly a “practicing warlock” — toward the end of his three years in the Marine Corps. Marx’s tendency to blame demons and warlocks would become the central cause of controversy of his own ministry, largely as a result of his focus on exorcisms as the solutions to issues ranging from pornography to veteran suicides. As Marx recently told “The Spillover” podcast, “I hunt pedophiles, but I also hunt demons.”

Skull Games also ends up being a hunt for sex workers, conflating them with trafficking victims as they prepare intelligence dossiers on women before turning them over to police.

Groups seeking to rescue sex workers — whether through religion, prosecution, or both — are nothing new, said Kristen DiAngelo, executive director of the advocacy group Sex Workers Outreach Project Sacramento. What Skull Games represents — the technological outsourcing of police work to civilian volunteers — presents a new risk to sex workers, she argued.

“I think it’s dangerous because you set up people to have that vigilante mentality.”

“I think it’s dangerous because you set up people to have that vigilante mentality — that idea that, we’re going to go out and we’re going to catch somebody — and they probably really believe that they are going to ‘save someone,’” DiAngelo told The Intercept and Tech Inquiry. “And that’s that savior complex. We don’t need saving; we need support and resources.”

The eighth Skull Games, which took place over the weekend of July 21, operated out of a private investigation firm headquartered in a former church in Wanaque, New Jersey. A photo of the event shared by the director of intelligence of Skull Games showed 57 attendees — almost all wearing matching black T-shirts — standing in front of corporate due diligence firm Hetherington Group’s office with a Skull Games banner unfurled across its front doors. Hetherington Group’s address is simple to locate online, but their office signage doesn’t mention the firm’s name, only saying “593 Ringwood LLC” above the words “In God We Trust.” (Cynthia Hetherington, the CEO of Hetherington Group and a board member of Skull Games, distanced her firm from the surveillance programs normally used at the events. “Cobwebs brought the bagels, which I’m still trying to digest,” she said. “I didn’t see their software anywhere in the event.”)

The attempt to merge computerized counterinsurgency techniques with right-wing evangelism has left some Skull Games participants uncomfortable. One experienced attendee of the January 2023 Skull Games was taken aback by an abundance of prayer circles and paucity of formal training. “Within the first 10 minutes,” the participant recalled of a training webinar, “I was like, ‘What the fuck is this?’”

Jeff Tiegs blesses U.S. Army Soldiers and explains to them the religious origins of a popular hand gesture on Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson, Alaska, on April 20, 2022.

Photo: Alamy

Delta Force OSINT

The numbers of nongovernmental surveillance practitioners has risen in tandem with the post-9/11 boom in commercial tools for social media surveillance, analyzing private chat rooms, and tracking cellphone pings.

Drawing on this abundance of civilian expertise, Skull Games brings together current and former military and law enforcement personnel, along with former sex workers and even employees of surveillance firms themselves. Both Skull Games and the high-profile, MAGA-beloved Operation Underground Railroad have worked with Cobwebs, but Skull Games roots its branding in counterinsurgency and special operations rather than homeland security.

“I fought the worst of the worst: ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Taliban,” Skull Games president and former Delta Force soldier Jeff Tiegs has said. “But the adversary I despise the most are human traffickers.” Tiegs has told interviewers that he takes “counterterrorism / counterinsurgency principles” and applies them to these targets.

“I fought the worst of the worst: ISIS, Al Qaeda, the Taliban. But the adversary I despise the most are human traffickers.”

The plan broadly mimicked a widely praised Pentagon effort to catch traffickers that was ultimately shut down this May due to a lack of funding. In a training session earlier this month, Tiegs noted that active-duty military service members take part in the hunts; veterans like Tiegs himself are everywhere. The attendee list for a recent training event shows participants with day jobs at the Department of Defense, Portland Police Bureau, and Air Force, as well as a lead contracting officer from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Skull Games employs U.S. Special Forces jargon, which dominates the pamphlets handed out to volunteers. Each volunteer is assigned the initial informal rank of private and works out of a “Special Operations Coordination Center.” Government acronyms abound: Participants are asked to keep in mind CCIRs — Commander’s Critical Information Requirements — while preventing EEFIs — Essential Elements of Friendly Information— from falling into the hands of the enemy.

Tiegs’s transition from counterinsurgency to counter-human-trafficking empresario came after he met Jeff Keith, the founder of the anti-trafficking nonprofit Guardian Group, where Tiegs was an executive for nearly five years. While Tiegs was developing Guardian Group’s tradecraft for identifying victims, he was also beginning to work more closely with Marx, whom he met on a trip to Iraq in 2017. By the end of 2018, Marx and Tiegs had joined each others’ boards.

Beyond the Special Forces acumen of its leadership, what sets Skull Games apart from other amateur predator-hunting efforts is its reliance on “open-source intelligence.” OSINT, as it’s known, is a military euphemism popular among its practitioners that refers to a broad amalgam of intelligence-gathering techniques, most relying on surveilling the public internet and purchasing sensitive information from commercial data brokers.

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Sensitive personal information is today bought and sold so widely, including by law enforcement and spy agencies, that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence recently warned that data “that could be used to cause harm to an individual’s reputation, emotional well-being, or physical safety” is available on “nearly everyone.”

Skull Games’s efforts to tap this unregulated sprawl of digital personal data function as sort of vice squad auxiliaries. Participants scour the U.S. for digital evidence of sex work before handing their findings over to police — officers the participants often describe as friends and collaborators.

After publicly promoting 2020 as the year Guardian Group would “scale” its tradecraft up to tackling many more cases, Tiegs abruptly jumped from his role as chief operating officer of the organization into the same title at All Things Possible — Marx’s church. By December 2021, Tiegs had launched the first Skull Games under the umbrella of All Things Possible. The event was put together in close partnership with Echo Analytics, which had been acquired earlier that year by Quiet Professionals, a surveillance contractor led by a former Delta Force sergeant major. The first Skull Games took place in the Tampa offices of Echo Analytics, just 13 miles from the headquarters of U.S. Special Operations Command.

As of May 2023, Tiegs has separated from All Things Possible and leads the Skull Games as a newly independent, tax-exempt nonprofit. “Skull Games is separate and distinct from ATP,” he said in an emailed statement. “There is no role for ATP or Marx in Skull Games.”

The Hunt

Reached by phone, Tiegs downplayed the role of powerful surveillance tools in Skull Games’s work while also conceding he wasn’t always aware of what technologies were being used in the hunt for predators — or how.

Despite its public emphasis on taking down traffickers, much of Skull Games’s efforts boil down to scrolling through sex worker ad listings and attempting to identify the women. Central to the sleuthing, according to Tiegs and training materials reviewed by The Intercept and Tech Inquiry, is the search for visual indicators in escort ads and social media posts that would point to a woman being trafficked. An October 2022 report funded by the research and development arm of the U.S. Department of Justice, however, concluded that the appearance of many such indicators — mostly emojis and acronyms — was statistically insignificant.

Tiegs spoke candidly about the centrality of face recognition to Skull Games. “So here’s a girl, she’s being exploited, we don’t know who she is,” he said. “All we have is a picture and a fake name, but, using some of these tools, you’re able to identify her mugshot. Now you know everything about her, and you’re able to start really putting a case together.”

According to notes viewed by The Intercept and Tech Inquiry, the competition recommended that volunteers use FaceCheck.id and PimEyes, programs that allow users to conduct reverse image searches for an uploaded picture of face. In a July Skull Games webinar, one participant noted that they had been able to use PimEyes to find a sex worker’s driver’s license posted to the web.

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In January, Cobwebs Technologies, an Israeli firm, announced it would provide Skull Games with access to its Tangles surveillance platform. According to Tiegs, the company is “one of our biggest supporters.” Previous reporting from Motherboard detailed the IRS Criminal Investigation unit’s usage of Cobwebs for undercover investigations.

Skull Games training materials provided to The Intercept and Tech Inquiry provide detailed instructions on the creation of “sock puppet” social media accounts: fake identities for covert research and other uses. Tiegs denied recommending the creation of such pseudonymous accounts, but on the eve of the eighth Skull Games, team leader Joe Labrozzi told fellow volunteers, “We absolutely recommend sock puppets,” according to a training seminar transcript reviewed by The Intercept and Tech Inquiry. Other volunteers shared tips on creating fake social media accounts, including the use of ChatGPT and machine learning-based face-generation tools to build convincing social media personas.

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Tiegs also denied a participant’s assertion that Clearview AI’s face recognition software was heavily used in the January 2023 Skull Games. Training materials obtained by Tech Inquiry and The Intercept, however, suggest otherwise. At one point in a July training webinar, a Virginia law enforcement volunteer who didn’t give their name asked what rules were in place for using their official access to face recognition and other law enforcement databases. “It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission,” replied another participant, adding that some police Skull Games volunteers had permission to tap their departmental access to Clearview AI and Spotlight, an investigative tool that uses Amazon’s Rekognition technology to identify faces.

Cobwebs — which became part of the American wiretapping company PenLink earlier this month — provides a broad array of surveillance capabilities, according to a government procurement document obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. Cobwebs provides investigators with the ability to continuously monitor the web for certain keyphrases. The Tangles platform can also provide face recognition; fuse OSINT with personal account data collected from search warrants; and pinpoint individuals through the locations of their phones — granting the ability to track a person’s movements going back as many as three years without judicial oversight.

When reached for comment, Cobwebs said, “Only through collaboration between all sectors of society — government, law enforcement, academia — and the proper tools, can we combat human trafficking.” The company did not respond to detailed questions about how its platform is used by Skull Games.

According to a source who previously attended a Skull Games event, and who asked for anonymity because of their ongoing role in counter-trafficking, only one member of the “task force” of participants had access to the Tangles platform: a representative from Cobwebs itself who could run queries from other task force analysts when requested. The rest of the group was equipped with whatever OSINT-gathering tools they already had access to outside of Skull Games, creating a lopsided exercise in which some participants were equipped with little more than their keyboards and Google searches, while others tapped tools like Clearview or Thomson Reuters CLEAR, an analytics tool used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

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Tiegs acknowledged that most Skull Games participants likely have some professional OSINT expertise. By his account, they operate on a sort of BYO-intelligence-gathering-tool basis and, owing to Skull Games’s ad hoc use of technology, said he couldn’t confirm how exactly Cobwebs may have been used in the past. Despite Skull Games widely advertising its partnership with another source of cellphone location-tracking data — the commercial surveillance company Anomaly Six — Tiegs said, “We’re not pinpointing the location of somebody.” He claimed Skull Games uses less sophisticated techniques to generate leads for police who may later obtain a court order for, say, geolocational data. (Anomaly Six said that it is not providing its software or data to Skull Games.)

Tiegs also expressed frustration with the notion that deploying surveillance tools to crack down on sex work would be seen as impermissible. “We allow Big Data to monitor everything you’re doing to sell you iPods or sunglasses or new socks,” he said, “but if you need to leverage some of the same technology to protect women and children, all of the sudden everybody’s up in arms.”

Tiegs added, “I’m really conflicted how people rationalize that.”

People march in support of sex workers and decriminalizing sex work on June 2, 2019, in Las Vegas.

Photo: John Locher/AP

“Pure Evil”

A potent strain of anti-sex work sentiment — not just opposition to trafficking — has pervaded Skull Games since its founding. Although the events are no longer affiliated with a church, Tiegs and his lieutenants’ devout Christianity suggests the digital hunt for pedophiles and pimps remains a form of spiritual warfare.

Michele Block, a Canadian military intelligence veteran who has worked as Skull Games’s director of intelligence since its founding at All Things Possible, is open about her belief that their surveillance efforts are part of a battle against Satan. In a December 2022 interview at America Fest, a four-day conference organized by the right-wing group Turning Point USA, Block described her work as a fight against “pure evil,” claiming that many traffickers are specifically targeting Christian households.

Tiegs argued that “100 percent” of sex work is human trafficking and that “to legalize the purchasing of women is a huge mistake.”

The combination of digital surveillance and Christian moralizing could have serious consequences not only for “predators,” but also their prey: The America Fest interview showed that Skull Games hopes to take down alleged traffickers by first going after the allegedly trafficked.

“So basically, 24/7, our intelligence department identifies victims of sex trafficking.”

“So basically, 24/7,” Block explained, “our intelligence department identifies victims of sex trafficking.” All of this information — both the alleged trafficker and alleged victim — is then handed over to police. Although Tiegs says Skull Games has provided police with “a couple hundred” such OSINT leads since its founding, he conceded the group has no information about how many have resulted in prosecutions or indictments of actual traffickers.

When asked about Skull Games’s position on arresting victims, Tiegs emphasized that “arresting is different from prosecuting” and argued, “Sometimes they do need to make the arrest, because of the health and welfare of that person. She needs to get clean, maybe she’s high. … Very rarely, in my opinion, is it right to charge and prosecute a girl.”

Sex worker advocates, however, say any punitive approach is not only ungrounded in the reality of the trade, but also hurts the very people it purports to help. Although exploitation and coercion are dire realities for many sex workers, most women choose to go into sex work either out of personal preference or financial necessity, according to DiAngelo, of Sex Workers Outreach Project Sacramento. (The Chicago branch of SWOP was a plaintiff in the American Civil Liberties Union’s successful 2020 lawsuit against Clearview AI in Illinois.)

Referring to research she had conducted with the University of California, Davis, DiAngelo explained that socioeconomic desperation is the most common cause of trafficking, a factor only worsened by a brush with the law. “The majority of the people we interview, even if we removed the person who was exploiting them from their life, they still wanted to be in the sex trade,” DiAngelo explained.

Both DiAngelo and Savannah Sly of the nonprofit New Moon Network, an advocacy group for sex workers, pointed to flaws in the techniques that police claim detect trafficking from coded language in escort ads. “You can’t tell just by looking at a picture whether someone’s trafficked or not,” Sly said. The “dragnet” surveillance of sex workers performed by groups like Skull Games, she claimed, imperils their human rights. “If I become aware I’m being surveilled, that’s not helping my situation,” Sly said, “Sex workers live with a high degree of paranoia.”

Rather than “rescuing” women from trafficking, DiAngelo argued Skull Games’s collaboration with police risks driving women into the company of people seeking to take advantage of them — particularly if they’ve been arrested and face diminished job prospects outside of sex work. DiAngelo said, “They’re going to lock them into sex work, because once you get the scarlet letter, nobody wants you anymore.”

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