Now, a new report details how private equity companies — operating in relative obscurity — stand to benefit too. Trump’s promised mass deportation campaign will enrich private equity companies, according to a new report released Wednesday by a watchdog organization tracing the industry’s far-reaching involvement in the business of detention and deportation.

“Trump is pretty set on expanding the deportation and detention system, he is pretty set on declaring a national emergency, and as shown in the report, declaring an emergency opens up all these avenues for companies to rush in without the proper vetting,” said Azani Creeks, the senior research and campaign coordinator at the Private Equity Stakeholder Project. “The companies with the most power and the most money will win those contracts — so that will be private equity firms.”

Public to Private

For years, advocates concerned about private industry’s role in immigration have focused their ire at two large, publicly traded companies that dominate the business of owning and operating lock-ups for immigrants.

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Those companies, Geo Group and CoreCivic, both saw their stocks soar after Trump’s election on the expectation that he will follow through on his pledge to deport millions of people.

While private prison operators might play top dog at many detention facilities, advocates say they are only one part of a constellation of companies that stand to profit off deportation. Some companies are simply privately held, but a growing number are owned by private equity firms.

Those firms do not offer stock to the general public, instead collecting investments from pension funds and other institutional funders to buy companies they believe are undervalued. Sometimes they make structural changes and sell their acquisition targets for a profit. Sometimes, they slash expenses by firing employees and use the companies they have purchased as piggy banks by issuing debt in their name.

Unlike publicly traded companies, which must disclose certain financial information, there is little visibility into the world of private equity. 

Creeks said that while some publicly traded companies pull back from operating in the detention and deportation world under public pressure, private equity firms have rushed in to fill the void. Some 63 percent of federally designated immigration detention facilities contract with companies owned by private equity firms, according to the report.

Asked for comment by The Intercept, none of the firms listed in the report that are mentioned in this story provided one.

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The services that the private equity-owned companies provide might sound like a benefit at first blush: Immigration detainees obviously need access to nurses and doctors, for instance. Still, Creeks said inserting a profit motive into services such as health care carries serious risks for immigrants.

“Private equity’s main purpose is to generate high returns for investors,” Creeks said. “We see declining services. So in the example of health care, companies across the country are facing labor shortages. This of course is very dire for folks who are incarcerated, and we see really really poor medical service.”

Nurses, Food, and Phones

One of the top private equity-owned medical providers, Wellpath, operates at 12 detention facilities in states ranging from California to Florida, according to the report. The company, which also provides services to people in criminal detention, has been named in more than 1,000 lawsuits, including 70 alleging wrongful death.

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Wellpath’s owner, H.I.G. Capital, owns another company called TKC Holdings that served a detention facility in Laredo where immigrants complained of “inedible food and undrinkable, foul-smelling water,” according to the report.

Even the telephone calls that immigrants in detention make to their loved ones serve as a profit center. Two private equity firms, American Securities and Platinum Equity, dominate the jail and prison telecommunications industry through firms they own.

In July, the Federal Communications Commission cracked down on prison phone companies by capping how much they can charge for calls. Republican state attorneys general are challenging the phone rate caps in court. Regardless of how that case plays out, the report says that companies such as ViaPath and Securus have found new ways to profit by offering tablets where detainees can pay to access entertainment. 

In addition to providing services at detention centers, private equity-owned companies offer surveillance systems used to track immigrants and the contracts to deport them.

A security firm called G4S ultimately owned by the private equity firm Warburg Pincus has racked up contracts with Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement amounting to more than $1 billion for transportation and security services that include deportation, according to the report.

Another private equity owned firm, Peraton, has a contract with DHS estimated at $6.2 billion to develop a massive biometric database.

Private equity firms are also heavily involved in artificial intelligence — which could be employed to aid in deportation efforts under the second Trump administration, according to Creeks.

“We’re All Implicated”

The rising number of private equity-owned contractors serving ICE, the Department of Homeland Security, and other federal agencies involved in detention and deportation mirrors private equity’s growing influence in the U.S. economy writ large.

The number of companies owned by private equity firms has soared over the past two decades, eclipsing the number of companies that are publicly traded around 2012. More and more employees ultimately answer to private equity firms promising sky-high rates of return to their investors.

Those investors in many cases are pension funds representing government employees or other big institutional investors. Though the lack of transparency obscures details about the actions of private equity firms from the public, former teachers and firefighters may have a stake in their operations regardless.

“We’re all implicated in it, in a way,” Creeks said. “Given that these are services that are run by federal and state and local governments, I think there should be greater measures of transparency and accountability for those companies that we just don’t have access to, because of the private equity structure.”

The post Guess Who Profits From Trump’s Deportation Plan? Private Equity Firms. appeared first on The Intercept.

Homeless sweeps have become the go-to, bipartisan performance of “doing something” about the U.S. housing crisis — a spectacle embraced by Democrats and Republicans, city halls, and the White House alike. But sweeps are not a solution. They’re a way to make homelessness less visible while the crisis deepens.

The roots stretch back decades. President Ronald Reagan’s Tax Reform Act of 1986 pulled the federal government out of building and maintaining public housing, paving the way for a fragmented patchwork scheme of vouchers and tax credits. The result is the system we live with today — one that does little to stem the tide.

Last year, more than 700,000 people were officially counted as homeless, the highest number ever recorded. Nearly 150,000 of them were children. And that number leaves out the “hidden homeless”: families doubling up in cramped apartments or bouncing between motels.

“What causes homelessness, in the 1980s as now, is a lack of access to housing that poor and working-class people can afford,” says Brian Goldstone, journalist and author of the new book “There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America.”

This week on The Intercept Briefing, Goldstone tells host Laura Flynn that the housing emergency is no accident; it’s the product of deliberate political choices: “It’s an engineered abandonment of not thousands, not hundreds of thousands, but millions of families.”

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

Transcript

Laura Flynn: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Laura Flynn. 

Living on a tight budget can feel like balancing on top of a metaphorical Jenga tower — one wrong move and the whole thing collapses. Maybe your hours are cut at work, or you lose your job, or your credit score is dinged. Maybe an eviction notice lands on your door. Suddenly, what once felt stable is gone. 

When we think of homelessness in America, we often picture people living on the streets, maybe in tents or cars. But it can come for many of us, faster than one might imagine. As journalist Brian Goldstone writes, homelessness isn’t a fixed state. It’s a “point along a spectrum: in a motel today, on a couch tomorrow, possibly in a tent a year from now.”

Here’s the thing: Homelessness in the U.S. is increasing. Last year, more than 700,000 people were officially counted as homeless — the highest number ever recorded. Nearly 150,000 of them were children. And those figures don’t capture the “hidden homeless”: the families doubling up in cramped apartments or living in motels. 

Meanwhile, housing costs are rising while incomes, especially for low-wage workers, are not keeping pace. Nearly 10 million children live in poverty in the U.S. — that’s also a growing number. The precariousness people and families face are under even greater pressure today. 

Donald Trump: We’re going to be removing homeless encampments from all over our parks, our beautiful, beautiful parks, which now a lot of people can’t walk on. They’ve very dirty, very — got a lot of problems. But we’ve already started that, we’re moving the encampments away — trying to take care of people. Some of those people — we don’t even know how they got there. 

LF: President Donald Trump is calling for encampment sweeps, implementing budget cuts to food assistance and health care aid, proposing changes that would make it easier for landlords to evict people in public housing or who are receiving housing assistance, and even limiting the amount of time someone can receive assistance. 

To understand the realities so many face trying to navigate staying housed in America today, I spoke to Brian Goldstone. His new book, “There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America,” captures the crisis with deep reporting and vivid storytelling. And just a note, I spoke to Brian a few weeks ago, before Trump’s latest attacks. Here’s our conversation. 

Welcome to the Intercept Briefing, Brian. 

Brian Goldstone: Thank you. It’s wonderful to be with you. 

Laura Flynn: Your book tells the stories of five families, and I want to start with one of those stories. Can you introduce us to Celeste? 

Brian Goldstone: Yeah, absolutely. So Celeste’s story begins in a really dramatic way. One day, she’s driving home from work with her children. She’s just picked them up from school. She’s left her warehouse job, and her neighbor calls to say that her rental home is on fire.

And by the time Celeste makes it back to her rental, it has burned down. The street is closed off, and the family loses everything. The only possessions they have left are the few things that were in the kids’ backpacks and a few loads of dirty laundry that Celeste had thrown in her Dodge Durango that morning, intending to go to the laundromat after work. They’ve lost everything else. 

And it’s later determined that an abusive ex who Celeste had recently taken a restraining order out on was responsible for the fire. And even though this fire was kind of the first domino that fell on Celeste and her children becoming homeless, I think it’s really important to note that it wasn’t the fire, it wasn’t even the domestic violence that led them to become homeless.

What led them to become homeless ultimately was the fact that months after the fire, Celeste was applying for apartments and she was denied. She was told that there was an eviction that had been filed against her, and she said, that’s not true, I don’t have an eviction on my record. 

Come to find out that after this fire took place, Celeste called her landlord, which was not just like a mom-and-pop landlord, it was a private equity firm called the Prager Group. They owned tens of thousands of rentals across the south. And when Celeste called to request that she be put in another home in their portfolio, they told her that in order to “terminate her lease” on this house that had just burned down, she would have to pay not only the current month’s rent — the fire had happened at the beginning of the month, so she hadn’t yet paid her rent — but an additional month’s rent as well. And she would lose her security deposit. And Celeste had hung up in disgust. But yeah, like months later, found out that after she hung up, they filed an eviction against her for nonpayment.

In Georgia, a tenant doesn’t even have to be notified of an eviction in person. The sheriff was able to carry out what’s called tack and mail dispossessory. And when she actually drove to the house that had been burned down — it still hadn’t been repaired — in the mailbox, she found an eviction notice on which the sheriff had written “served to fire-destroyed property.” 

So at this point in her story, Celeste realized that her chances of getting into an apartment were basically destroyed. And her credit score — this three-digit number that has come to determine whether millions of people in this country have access to something as basic as a place to live — she realized her credit score would basically lock her out of the formal housing market. 

In those proceeding months before she found out about the eviction, she had been calling on favors from every friend, relative, co-worker to allow her and her kids to sleep on a couch, to sleep in a basement. Many nights were even spent sleeping in her Dodge Durango. And those nights were terrifying for her because it wasn’t just having to wake up for work the next morning, despite lack of sleep and just the fear of someone maybe breaking into her car or hurting them. It was also that the cops would come. And that fear was founded. In Georgia, over a third of child removals are the direct result of “inadequate housing.” 

So at that point, when Celeste realized that she was locked out of the formal housing market, she was desperate to get out of her car. And she did what scores of other homeless and precariously housed families and individuals in America are doing: She went to an extended stay hotel. 

LF: Like you said, Celeste and her family went to a budget motel and like others in the book as well. And it’s this kind of place I would think of as on the edge of homelessness. I grew up in a place like this in LA in the ’90s. And I always thought of us as like, not quite homeless, but very close to it.

And today, there is greater recognition that people and families living in motels and overcrowded homes do meet the definition of homeless, but often slip through the cracks of official counts. Can you walk us through how homelessness is defined and counted in the U.S., and how those definitions shape both our understanding of the problem and how resources are allocated or distributed?

BG: It’s actually instructive just to continue following Celeste as she and her children move into this squalid extended stay hotel. Like many people, Celeste, up to this point, she thought that these extended stay hotels that she was passing by every day as a resident of Atlanta were hotels — just, you know, as we tend to think of them. Some people when they hear “extended stay hotel,” they think of places where traveling nurses or health care workers or business people will stay.

But these hotels — as Celeste came to discover — are actually extremely profitable homeless shelters. They are places that are proliferating around the country. They’re really concentrated in regions of the country intentionally, where working people are most likely to be deprived of a stable place to live. These are places that don’t require a credit score to get in.

And so this entire underclass of Americans — who really make up what one journalist friend of mine calls the “credit underclass” — these are places where they are forced to go in the absence of family shelters or in the absence of any other accommodations. So Celeste, when she ends up at this place called Efficiency Lodge, there are nearly a dozen similar places lining the roads around this hotel. The weekly rent at this place was almost double what she had been paying for the rental home that had just burned down.

So these places are not cheap, even though they’re called budget hotels. They’re actually much more expensive than a real rental apartment. And Celeste, after staying there for a few weeks — this place that she thought at first could be a refuge for her kids, kind of a temporary stopping point — she realizes they have to get out, that they’ve fallen into what people refer to as the “hotel trap.” 

What also happens in Celeste’s story is she’s diagnosed with ovarian and breast cancer. So at that point, she’s been resisting the term “homeless” for herself and for her kids. She has this kind of “name it and claim” theology that says that if she puts that label on herself she will become that thing, she will become that in a very deep way. But finally, she fishes out a homeless resource list that a school social worker gave her. She calls the numbers and one number after another, they say, you’ve got to go to Gateway Center, you got to go to Gateway Center to get help.

And she goes to Gateway Center, which is called the Coordinated Entry Point. That’s where people who are homeless in Atlanta — and every city in the country has their own version of Gateway Center — it’s where they go to access services. So Celeste, she goes there, and that’s where, as you mentioned, she finally encounters a definition of homelessness that locks her and her children out of help. 

And you know, when she sits down with a caseworker, even though she has ovarian and breast cancer, she’s told that it doesn’t render her “vulnerable” enough to access resources — to access housing assistance. And then she’s told that she doesn’t even meet the definition of what the government calls literal homelessness. That’s a term that comes from HUD [the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development]. 

And even the Department of Education actually categorizes families and children living in these hotels as homeless, along with families and individuals or children who are living in doubled-up arrangements with others in apartments. They consider that homeless because school social workers and teachers saw over the years that this was just as volatile for children, just as precarious as being in a homeless shelter or being on the street. 

So the Department of Education considers them homeless, but HUD does not. And the caseworker tells Celeste, “I’m so sorry. If you want to be considered homeless and therefore qualify for assistance, you have to go with your kids to a shelter.” But then the kicker comes in where Celeste says, fine, we’ll go to a shelter, and the woman says, wait, you mentioned your son just turned 15. None of the shelters in Atlanta allow boys over the age of 13. So he would have to go by himself to a men’s shelter. And of course, Celeste is not willing to do that. 

The point in saying all of this is not that this was some bizarre aberration; this was just a tragic falling through the cracks. This is an engineered neglect. It’s an engineered abandonment of not thousands, not hundreds of thousands, but millions of families just like Celeste, who are homeless. But they have been written out of the story we tell about homelessness. They literally don’t count. And one of the shocking things that I discovered in the course of working on this book and reporting it was that there’s this entire world of homelessness that is out of sight that we’re not seeing. And what that tells us is that as bad as the official numbers on homelessness are, the reality is exponentially worse. 

LF: Your book focuses on working families, people hustling across multiple jobs, gig work, side hustles, and people are doing all this while also unable to actually make ends meet and are just one step away from an eviction and homelessness. And it’s a direct rebuke as you were alluding to this narrative we see so often in the media that fixates on street encampments, addiction, or mental illness, and portrays people’s homelessness as the product of personal failings and not societal failings. You outline these various factors that contribute to all of this, but I want to focus on one of them, which is working and the job market — what that looks like for the families you followed and how today’s labor conditions are feeding this crisis.

BG: Absolutely. When we talk about this dramatic rise of the working homeless in America, that’s what my book is ultimately about, is this staggering, staggering rise of the working homeless that we attend not only to the homeless part of that equation and unpack that term. And as you mentioned, show the ways that this category confounds and really upends the myths and stereotypes that we as a society have perpetuated about those experiencing homelessness. And it’s become commonplace in discussions of the housing crisis and the homelessness crisis to talk about a growing chasm between what people are earning in their jobs and just what it costs to have a place to live — to keep a roof overhead. And that’s absolutely true.

All of the people in this book, they are working and working and working some more. But their wages — which are effectively poverty wages — are not enough just to afford this basic human necessity. But I think it’s not just a matter of wages when we talk about the working homeless. It’s also that the nature of work itself has really changed over the last couple of decades.

Work itself, labor itself has grown ever more precarious, ever more insecure. One of the people in the book, Cass, she works at the Atlanta airport, the pride and joy of Atlanta’s economy. She works an overnight shift cleaning bathrooms and mopping floors. And Cass’s employer is not the airport. It’s actually a third-party contractor who gives Cass 29 hours a week of work because at 30 she would be eligible for benefits like sick leave or health insurance. So she’s working. She’s making not much at all. But it’s also the nature of the work that she doesn’t have these benefits.

Celeste, when she’s diagnosed with ovarian and breast cancer, she’s having to decide, do I go to my warehouse job or do I go to my chemo appointment? Because if I go to my chemo appointment, I don’t get paid because I don’t have sick leave. And if I don’t get paid, me and my children go from living in this awful extended-stay hotel room to being on the street or being back in our car. 

And I think that gets back to the question of why have these myths and stereotypes about homelessness been allowed to flourish in the way they have? And part of it, I think, is that it insulates those who are benefiting from these conditions. It shields them from the scrutiny, the interrogation that I think we as a society would begin to demand if the reality of housing precarity and homelessness came out in all of its really brutal and ugly reality.

LF: OK, when you argue that homelessness reflects societal failures, you’re challenging the dominant narrative of individual responsibility and meritocracy. How do you navigate conversations with readers or policymakers who might intellectually accept your premise, but maybe still struggle emotionally or politically with the implications that our entire approach has been fundamentally misdirected?

BG: It’s helpful to remember that mass homelessness, as we know it, is a relatively recent phenomenon in America. It erupted in the 1980s, during the Reagan administration. And from the beginning, there was a concerted effort on the part of that administration, and the part of those in power at that time, to control the narrative about homelessness — to shape public perception.

So even though at that time the fastest-growing segment of the homeless population were children under the age of 6, these ideas that homelessness is caused by mental illness, by alcoholism, by addiction, or as Reagan put it, by a “lifestyle choice” — a refusal to work. Those really became the dominant narratives in this country about homelessness. 

By the end of the 1980s, the New York Times and CBS News conducted a poll asking New Yorkers at random what causes homelessness. And the number one answer was psychological problems. The number two answer was a refusal to work. Not a single person mentioned housing. 

Never mind the fact that the Reagan administration, as many listeners will be aware, ushered in this neoliberal experiment in slashing, decimating the social safety net, gutting assistance for housing, especially low-income housing. Researchers, scholars who wanted to study the effects of a legacy of racist housing policy or the gutting of the safety net on this burgeoning homelessness crisis, they were systematically not funded. They were not given grants. But scholars and researchers who wanted to look at alcoholism or addiction or mental illness in relation to homelessness, they were the ones who were funded. To the extent that the journal Nature actually had an article called “Reagan versus the social sciences” because of just how concerted that tactic was to make a certain kind of research and therefore a certain kind of knowledge possible. That attempt to control the narrative was very much successful. And I think we’re living under the legacy of that today.

It is undeniable that most people who are suffering most visibly on the street, who are unhoused, are in the throes of mental distress. They are often in the throes of substance use and addiction. First of all, it’s important to note that those struggles are often the consequence of homelessness, not the cause.

What causes homelessness, in the 1980s as now, is a lack of access to housing that poor and working-class people can afford. That is the variable. That is why we see huge rates of homelessness in places that are very, very expensive or where affordable housing does not exist, and we don’t see it in places that might have high rates of drug use, like certain areas of Appalachia, but housing is still relatively available. That is the variable, is not having access to housing that people can afford. 

LF: You write about President Ronald Reagan’s Tax Reform Act of 1986 and how that got the federal government out of the business of public housing. And now we have this patchwork system of vouchers and tax credits. Gentrification is obviously a major factor in driving homelessness, not just in Atlanta, but throughout cities, across the country for over a decade now. Can you talk a bit about how gentrification is played out in Atlanta specifically, because I feel like that is a particularly interesting story. And can you also explain the term “rent gap” and how it drives gentrification? 

BG: So along with these myths and stereotypes about what causes homelessness, I think we also as a society have tended to think of homelessness as a problem of poverty — a problem of really extreme poverty. 

Part of what I’m trying to argue in the book is that the current homelessness disaster that we are witnessing is less a crisis of poverty than of prosperity — a particular kind of prosperity. It’s the product, not of a failing economy, but a booming economy, a thriving economy. It’s just not thriving for the people I’m writing about. 

Part of the reason I base the book in Atlanta is because of how representative the city is. Over the last several years, Atlanta has undergone this much-celebrated renaissance, a wholesale transformation of its urban space and its city center.

White flight into the suburbs has been reversed, and now white, educated, relatively wealthy people are flocking back to the very city that was abandoned years ago in the sort of post-industrial era. And that is a trend that we’re seeing across the country. Unemployment in a city like Atlanta has been at historic low.

The signs of growth and corporate profits are everywhere, and yet the people I’m writing about in this book, they’re not just being pushed out of the neighborhoods they grew up in — formerly Black working-class neighborhoods — they are increasingly being pushed out of housing altogether. And that is a trend we see across the nation.

So I think that it’s important, as you mentioned, that we really look at gentrification not just as this kind of aesthetic phenomenon, a phenomenon that sees cafes appear where empty storefronts were once standing. But what I’m trying to show in this book is that gentrification is planned. That it happens as the result of very particular decisions at the city level, at the level of urban planning and city policy. Before a neighborhood is gentrified, it first has to become gentrifiable. That is a process that begins not with individual homeowners or renters moving into a neighborhood.

And you know, you mentioned this term, “rent gap.” Rent gap is a concept that comes from the geographer Neil Smith. And a recent book by Samuel Stein called “Capital City” flushes this out a bit more. But a rent gap is basically a gap that exists between the current value of a property and what it could demand or collect if certain conditions were met. In the case of Atlanta, one of the biggest rent-gap drivers, creators of a rent gap in the city’s history, is the emergence of the Atlanta Beltline, which is a 22-mile mixed-use trail that circles the city.

Everything that the Beltline touches or is anticipated to touch, again, property values have just been skyrocketing in those areas and investors have been swooping in. That’s a classic example of rent gap. The wider the rent gap, the more valuable it is for speculators and profiteers, and it really is at the heart of why gentrification has been fueling not just this housing insecurity, but homelessness.

[Break]

LF: You also write about this cottage industry of predatory companies that have developed in this current environment where more than 30 percent of American households are considered “cost burdened,” meaning more than 30 percent of their income goes to keeping a roof over their head. So how have corporate landlords, private equity companies, and co-signing lease companies, for example, contributed to the housing crisis? 

BG: One of the astonishing realities that I encountered in reporting this book over many years was the fact that private equity firms, Wall Street firms, they’re not just buying up vast swaths of America’s rental housing stock. That is something that I think has become familiar for many of us. But that in itself is shocking and the tactics that are employed once they take over this housing is really startling.

One of the families in the book — Maurice and Natalia and their children — they end up in one of these apartment complexes owned by a private equity firm called Covenant Capital based in Nashville. And they are the victims of this automated eviction system where if you’re just a couple of days late on your rent, there’s no human to call and talk to. They tried to call. They only got [an] answering machine. Instead, an eviction is automatically filed against the tenant.

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And this private equity firm that owns the property, they’re not really worried if this family gets evicted because the demand — the competition — just for a single apartment in these red-hot rental markets is so fierce that another family will take their place almost immediately. And also the court costs are put on the family that’s evicted. So that’s what happens to Maurice and Natalia. So it’s not just that these firms like Covenant Capital are making the housing that people currently live in evermore insecure and precarious. What was truly astonishing was that they’re also buying up the places where families and individuals are forced into once they are pushed into homelessness.

Just to stay with Maurice and Natalia, once they become homeless with their children, they move to a studio-sized room at Extended Stay America. And they are paying more than double for the studio-sized hotel room, whose conditions — like with Celeste’s hotel room — are just abysmal. I mean, I spent countless hours in this room and saw roaches scurrying across the floor. I saw water leaking from the ceiling, bubbling up around the wall. They’re paying more than double for this room than they were for the two-bedroom apartment just down the street that they were evicted from.

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What ultimately happens to this chain of hotels that Maurice and Natalia had moved into, Extended Stay America, is, during the pandemic when all other hotel chains, normal hotels were at like zero-percent occupancy, these Extended Stay hotels remained at like 80-90 percent occupancy. And Blackstone and Starwood Capital — these private equity giants — they noticed that and they noticed that Extended Stay America was bringing in revenues of hundreds of millions of dollars, and they bought the chain for $6 billion. 

And many of us are familiar with the James Baldwin line about how in America, how extremely expensive it is to be poor. I think that the journeys of these families in the book, what they illustrate really strikingly is the flipside of that equation: how extremely profitable all of this precarity has become. 

LF: It was Natalia and Maurice’s story, right, where before they ended up at the motel, they had to rely on a co-signing leasing company to get into an apartment, but they were limited by which apartments they could rent from and ended up in a “luxury apartment” that was roach-infested? Is that right? 

BG: Yeah, and that’s actually the one that they were evicted from because it was owned by Covenant Capital. Even the way that they got into that apartment was because they had to go through this co-signing company, Liberty Rent. It’s just yet another example of how every single turn in these family stories, there are entire new business models designed to profit off their suffering and, I would argue, to ensure that their precarity continues. 

LF: I want to shift a bit to the current political climate. President Donald Trump campaigned on deporting people to solve the national housing crisis. And then in July, he signed an executive order to make it easier for cities and states to force homeless people that are living on the streets off the streets — to where is unknown — and even forcefully institutionalize people without their consent. What do you make of this? 

BG: There’s really no words for what we’re seeing right now under this administration. When I finished the book, when I finished the reporting, I really thought, “It can’t get any worse.” Surely we as a nation will turn a corner soon and begin to meaningfully address this catastrophe of housing insecurity and homelessness.

What we’re seeing under this administration is gasoline being poured on this crisis and not just where housing assistance and the way that homelessness is treated is concerned, but with these massive cuts to the safety net more generally with Medicaid cuts, with cuts to food stamps. The families who I wrote about in this book, they and the millions of people like them, their lives will become worse as a result of these budget cuts and the sort of continuation of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls an organized abandonment.

Having said that, there’s a reading of this book that I’m really trying to resist where people read it and they encounter the stories of these working families who are working not just one job, but two jobs, three jobs, and it’s not enough. They’re doing everything right. They’re doing everything that as a society we’ve said you need to do in order maybe not to get rich, but to at least have a modicum of stability, and yet that stability is still out of reach. And when people read the book, they have sympathy for these families and they feel awful.

But some people who read the book, they’re also saying, OK, well that may be true of the “working homeless” but those we see on the street, those are the ones we can banish. Those are the ones that we can criminalize. Those are the ones we can still continue to brutalize through ticketing them, through rounding them up, forcibly institutionalize them, through now under this new executive order that Trump put through. And that’s a reading I really want to resist, first of all, because we’re not talking about distinct populations here. We’re not talking about the working homeless on the one hand, and these people who are on the street on the other.

This is better conceived, I would argue, as an entire spectrum of insecurity. Homelessness in America is a spectrum of insecurity. One day you could be in a hotel with your kids. The next night you might be in the car with them. A month from now you could be in a tent on the street. That is how quickly families and individuals can cycle through these conditions. 

And one person in the book, Michelle, when we first meet her, it’s Christmas Eve, and she and her children are living in an apartment making Christmas Eve dinner for them and wearing a Santa hat. And by the end of the book, she is sleeping in a MARTA [Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority] station and could easily be mistaken in the grip of alcoholism — an alcoholism that has developed as a result of preceding years of housing insecurity from the time the book opens and all of the steps that were so avoidable, so preventable, where she could have remained stably housed but didn’t.

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And so I really want to emphasize that this is not a distinct population. Those who we see on the street in a tent or in these encampments, they are just the tip of the iceberg of homelessness in America. And yes, the people I’m writing about in this book are those who comprise the much, much bigger portion of the iceberg that is under the water surface that is not just invisible, but that has been actively rendered invisible.

If we just criminalize homelessness and we don’t address homelessness at its true root source — which is an unavailability and a lack of access, again, to housing that people can afford — then that entire world that’s under the surface is going to continue to spill out into the open. 

LF: Well, that’s a great segue to my next question, which is, there’s a lot of debate about how to solve the national housing crisis. Are there solutions that you think are being oversold or even counterproductive? And if we’re actually serious about solving the homelessness crisis and the housing crisis, where do you think attention should be?

BG: There are so many low-hanging-fruit policy solutions that can ease people suffering immediately, that can both keep them in the homes they already have and that can get them into new homes that they don’t yet have much easier, much quicker. 

I just want to say that I have a background in anthropology. And as the anthropologist, one thing we like to do in Anthro 101 courses is say that the point of anthropology is to make the familiar strange, to take things that are part of our status quo and to force us to look at them with fresh eyes. And nowhere, I would argue, is that more urgently needed than when it comes to how we treat housing in this country. 

It’s just taken for granted in this country that housing is a vehicle for accumulating wealth. That it’s basically a luxury that if you can afford it, you can have it, but if you can’t afford it, you are just left to fend for yourself in what a case manager in the book, Carla Wells, refers to as the housing Hunger Games.

These housing Hunger Games are what the families in this book are forced to suffer through. And it’s what millions of people in this country are forced to suffer through because housing is not treated as just a fundamental human right. It’s not treated as just a basic human necessity. 

You know, I remember during the pandemic in the early days, there were these two brothers in Tennessee who were widely and justifiably vilified for going around to all the Dollar Generals they could find, buying hand sanitizer, and putting it in a U-Haul truck. And then selling that hand sanitizer on eBay and Amazon for $80 bucks a pop, $90 bucks a pop. And there were calls for them to be prosecuted. I remember thinking at that time as I was following these families and their experiences, I remember thinking that is precisely what we’ve allowed housing to become.

We’ve allowed for it to be hoarded up and in effect put into a giant U-Haul truck and then auctioned off to the highest bidder. But we don’t call that by its proper name, which is price-gouging — price-gouging amid a national emergency. We just call that supply and demand economics. 

And I think until we encounter housing in this country with fresh eyes, until we are shocked out of the complacency of continuing to treat housing this way, this crisis will just continue to spiral. The true scale and severity of homelessness is, to put a number on it, actually six times greater than the official figures. So we’re talking about 4 million people right now in this country who have been deprived of housing. 

The reason I’m at pains to emphasize the true scale isn’t just to catastrophize. It’s to say, let’s no longer kid ourselves that these nibble-around-the-edges solutions — a few tiny homes over here, 20 percent units at 70 percent, 80 percent AMI [Area Median Income] over there — that this is meaningfully addressing this crisis at scale. Building more market-rate housing and hoping that eventually someday affordability will trickle down to those who are in most desperate need of a place to live — I think that that is misguided. I think we do need all [the] solutions on the table. We don’t have the luxury right now of having this kind of Manichaean vision of, it’s either the market or government intervention. 

I think we need it all, but I do think that we need to be clear-eyed about the true scale and severity so that we can say, and this is what I believe: Public housing redone, public housing done right — which many refer to as social housing — which would be not, again, hundreds of thousands but millions of safe, dignified, affordable housing units owned by the public, owned by the government, built on government-owned land. That is really the only way we are going to get out of this catastrophe. 

LF: I’m so glad you brought up Carla, the case manager, because I thought her view of the problem was so clear-eyed about the failures of the systems developed to solve homelessness in this country.

And your book is full of these gut-wrenching stories — these harrowing stories — of families trying to navigate this impossible maze, trying to find and maintain shelter for what should be a basic human right. Also includes stories like Carla and Pink, who are people in the community, whose generosity and openness brought a smile to my face as I learned about them. And before we close, any final thoughts? 

BG: I think it’s easy in talking about these issues for words like homelessness to become a kind of abstraction, yet another social malady, a uniquely American social malady perhaps, that is divorced from just the visceral reality of what it looks like, what it feels like. And I think that if the book accomplishes nothing else, that is what I hope it will accomplish. I was recently in conversation with one of my heroes, the labor organizer Sara Nelson. And she said something that I think could almost be an epigraph for this project. She said before we can fix the crisis, we have to feel the crisis.

And my hope really is that as readers follow these parents and their kids and just immerse themselves in the experience — the desperation, the anxiety, the depression, what public health researchers refer to as the toxic stress that these kids, these parents are exposed to the ways that this actually rewires their brains and opens them up to all kinds of disabilities down the road that basically choke their futures — that readers will encounter that in a very, very immediate and visceral way. And that even a term like homelessness or poverty, that these terms will be imbued again with the full force of the devastating reality that they imply. That is what I hope this book accomplishes because that’s the only way I think that it will truly be solved.

It certainly won’t be solved when policymakers, even well-intentioned ones, wake up one day and say, we’re going to tackle this. It will be solved when the tens of millions of people in this country — tenants, renters, and their allies, those who themselves are right on the cusp of being pushed into homelessness — say, this is intolerable and we will not tolerate it any longer. 

LF: Brian, there’s so much more that we could talk about, from how the families you followed navigated the pandemic to the failures of welfare-to-work programs like TANF [Temporary Assistance for Needy Families], but we’re out of time. And so I just want to say, if you care about understanding the roots of America’s housing crisis, not just through numbers but through lived experiences, you should read Brian Goldstone’s book, “There’s No Place for Us.” It’s urgent, it’s compassionate, and it’s a warning because if we don’t act, more and more people will find themselves in the same impossible situation and too many people already have in the wealthiest country on Earth.

Thanks for joining us on the Intercept Briefing, Brian. 

BG: Thank you, Laura. It was wonderful to talk to you.

LF: That does it for this episode of The Intercept Briefing. 

We want to hear from you. 

Share your story with us at 530-POD-CAST. That’s 530-763-2278. You can also email us at podcasts@theintercept.com. 

This episode was produced by Truc Nguyen. Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by Shawn Musgrave. Transcript by Anya Mehta. 

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

You can support our work at theintercept.com/join. Your donation, no matter the amount, makes a real difference. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to The Intercept Briefing wherever you listen to podcasts. And obviously tell all of your friends about us, and better yet, leave us a rating or a review to help other listeners find us.

Until next time, I’m Laura Flynn.

Thanks for listening.

The post The Housing Hunger Games appeared first on The Intercept.

What has gone overlooked as Ratcliffe speeds toward a Thursday confirmation vote, however, are his ties to the artificial intelligence industry that is angling to pick up billions of dollars in government contracts during the Trump presidency.

Ratcliffe’s financial disclosures reveal that in just a few short years since his tour of duty in the first Trump cabinet, he amassed thousands of shares in artificial intelligence companies by serving on their advisory boards. Those gigs were among a host of potential conflicts of interest that also included an oil and gas firm, venture capital companies, and a private equity firm.

Democrats have not made noise about Ratcliffe’s tour through the revolving door. One progressive critic said that may be explained by the fact that former intelligence community leaders under Democratic presidents have had similar résumés — but that shouldn’t mean Ratcliffe gets a free pass.

“It’s unfortunately bog-standard corruption, which is part of why his nomination is so uncontroversial,” said Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project. “It’s not right, but it is standard.”

As is customary for government officials, Ratcliffe has vowed to avoid “any actual or apparent conflict of interest,” by selling stocks and recusing himself from any matter in which he had a personal stake. For Hauser, however, that does not erase the risk that his ties to the industry will affect his judgment on a technology that many critics say has yet to prove its usefulness.

Ratcliffe and the Trump administration did not respond to requests for comment.

A Gig Machine

Ratcliffe was a former Justice Department prosecutor and small-town mayor when he ran to represent a congressional district outside Dallas in 2014, besting a 91-year-old World War II veteran as a tea party challenger in their primary.

Trump first tried to tap him as director of national intelligence in 2019, calling off the nomination under protests that Ratcliffe was too inexperienced, before putting him forth again the next year under less opposition. As DNI, Ratcliffe was criticized for releasing a report on Russian intelligence during the waning days of the 2020 presidential election that seemed tailor-made to help Trump win.

His resume for his first confirmation process listed only a handful of prior positions outside government. The documents that Ratcliffe filed with the Office of Government Ethics last month, however, paint a picture of a man who has held a dizzying array of gigs since then.

Among a smorgasbord of consultantships, fellowships, and advisory roles, Ratcliffe itemized $2.2 million in income since 2021, when he left the government.

He took home $180,000 as the co-chair of the Center for American Security at the America First Policy Institute, which served as a haven for Trump officials in waiting during the Biden presidency, and another $80,000 as a fellow at the Heritage Foundation, which produced Project 2025.

In six months alone last year, he earned $80,000 in consulting fees from Blackstone, a massive private equity company whose CEO backs Trump, along with another $15,000 to $50,000 in bills the company still owed him as of his December 18 filing.

He also banked $500,000 in consulting fees from oil and gas pipeline company U.S. Trinity Energy Services, and a $25,000 honorarium from the Gatestone Institute, an anti-Muslim think tank.

The AI Goldmine

The industry that could overlap most with Ratcliffe’s portfolio as CIA director, however, is artificial intelligence. Ratcliffe’s disclosure listed a trio of artificial intelligence companies that have already received defense contracts.

As the CIA director, Ratcliffe would direct a vast and classified “black budget” for an agency that often relies on contractors to perform essential functions. The agency is increasingly seeking to build up its AI capabilities, from a chatbot designed to simulate world leaders to a cloud computing contract potentially worth tens of billions of dollars.

For advisory work starting as early as March 2021 and lasting until his nomination, Ratcliffe said he received stock options for serving on the advisory boards of Silicon Valley company Latent AI, Los Angeles-based Arctop Inc., and Dallas defense tech company Shield AI.

Latent AI makes software that it says can help the Navy speed up underwater threat detection.

In an interview with the Intercept, Latent AI CEO Jags Kandasamy praised Ratcliffe’s work as an adviser to the company and said he would do well at the CIA. During his stint with Latent AI, Ratcliffe was not involved in interacting directly with Congress or the executive branch, instead providing big-picture advice on strategic priorities, according to the CEO.

“We were approached by several foreign governments and stuff, and I always ran that by John to ensure that we are, from a policy point of view, we are staying on the right side,” Kandasamy said.

Kandasamy said his company has not sought contracts with the CIA, but he declined to comment on whether it has sought to work with other parts of the intelligence community.

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Arctop, which describes itself as a “cognition company,” won a military contract in September to decode in real time the brain activity of Air Force cadets going through training simulations. Shield AI is developing a product called Hivemind, which it claims will “enable swarms of drones and aircraft to operate autonomously without GPS, communications, or a pilot.” The company won a contract worth up to $60 million from the Air Force in 2022, according to a report. Neither of those companies responded to requests for comment.

In a January 14 letter to a CIA ethics official, Ratcliffe said he would sell any remaining stock he had in the artificial intelligence companies and promised not to make any decisions that could affect them unless he obtained a written ethics waiver.

Still, Hauser said Ratcliffe’s AI portfolio raises concerns about the nominee’s potential to wield influence over CIA contracting decisions.

“The more you’re tied into artificial intelligence companies, the more you might become bullish on AI’s applicability than a more neutral figure might be,” Hauser said. “If you’re an AI company and you can tell people, ‘I have a CIA contract,’ I think that’s pretty good marketing. I think it’s just incredibly valuable, these contracts, both for direct cash and for legitimizing functions.”

Other Questions

Ratcliffe was initially set for a full floor vote in the Senate on Tuesday before objections from Democrats delayed his confirmation. Pointing to the debate over the release of declassified information in 2020, Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said some Democrats worried that Ratcliffe had politicized intelligence work.

Still, Ratcliffe’s nomination has drawn speculation that he could win more Democratic votes than Trump’s more controversial national security nominees, including Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence or Kash Patel for FBI director. In a committee vote Monday, five members of the Democratic caucus gave him their support.

During his confirmation hearing, Ratcliffe sought to downplay the idea that he would serve as a lackey for Trump, calling it “absolutely essential” for the CIA director to be “apolitical.”

Those assurances failed to win over Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., long a dissenting voice on surveillance and national security issues. In a Senate floor speech Tuesday, he criticized Ratcliffe for impeding the release of a congressionally mandated report on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s role in the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Ratcliffe claimed falsely during his confirmation process this year that the declassification review was not complete when he left office, despite telling members of Congress in 2020 that he had finished the process and there was nothing he could release, Wyden said.

“If John Ratcliffe is willing to make representations to Congress that are contradicted by what is in the public record,” Wyden said, “imagine how easy it would be for him to misrepresent classified matters, behind a veil of secrecy.”

The post Democrats Are Worried About John Ratcliffe’s Role in the 2020 Election. They Should Also Take a Look At His AI Gigs. appeared first on The Intercept.

In recent years, the privately owned monopoly over the Democratic Party’s voter data has changed hands from one for-profit company to another. Apax Partners, a global private equity firm, currently owns EveryAction and NGP VAN, the firms that house the Democrats’ suite of voter file, compliance, and organizing tools. Apax acquired them from another private equity firm in 2021, creating a new merged entity called Bonterra.

Last month, according to current and former employees, Bonterra cut at least 20 percent of its staff, more than 200 employees. Staff members across EveryAction and NGP VAN, which hold the Democratic Party’s most sensitive data, were cut. At least a quarter of the people laid off belonged to the union, 51 of them unit members from EveryAction and NGP VAN. At least half of the developers at ActionKit, a fundraising and customer relations management software acquired by EveryAction in 2019, lost their jobs. (Bonterra did not respond to a request for comment.)

The myriad challenges facing Democrats ahead of 2024 include lagging fundraising, low voter enthusiasm, and potential challengers to President Joe Biden. Neglect of long-standing issues with the party’s campaign tech infrastructure could further complicate those challenges, as could staff cuts at the firms Democratic campaigns rely on.

For insiders, the decision to make deep cuts at certain parts of the operation suggests changes could be in store for the even more crucial parts of the company. There are alternatives to ActionKit, but fewer to NGP VAN, where Bonterra could cut more staff with little notice, said Tara Harwood, who was laid off from her role as ActionKit lead quality assurance engineer last month. “I really think that Bonterra is a menace to the sector,” Harwood said.

“There’s nothing to prevent Bonterra from doing to NGP VAN what they did to us,” she added. “What’s happened to ActionKit should be a cautionary tale to every NGP VAN customer.”

The recent cuts at Bonterra come after layoffs earlier in the year, which preceded a wave of contraction in the Democratic-aligned campaign industry. In the two years since Bonterra’s creation, at least 340 people have been laid off. Cuts in January were followed three months later by layoffs at other Democratic and progressive consulting, media, and polling firms like Middle Seat and ActBlue. Last month, EMILY’s List laid off eight people, including most staff working on grassroots candidate outreach and training, and shut down its national training and recruitment program. The leader of the group who oversaw the cuts, Laphonza Butler, was just appointed to represent California in the Senate on Tuesday.

Democrats’ main concern should be with who owns the party’s most important campaign tech tools, said Michael Podhorzer, the former political director at the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, the nation’s largest union federation. “The problem,” Podhorzer said, “is when the monopoly is owned privately, like NGP VAN was, and can be sold to another company that doesn’t have the founder’s original commitment to the party or progressives.”

Consolidation and Collapse

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., was the first candidate to use ActionKit in 2016. The company’s clients have included liberal and progressive groups like MoveOn and the Natural Resources Defense Council. (The Intercept uses ActionKit for its email newsletters and fundraising.)

The campaign of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., was in the process of moving its list over to ActionKit from NGP VAN last month when staff members working there on the transition were laid off. Harwood said she was laid off while she was working on Warren’s migration.

“Some of the people that we’re all counting on to make a difference in 2024 are relying on ActionKit. That’s horrible,” said Tanya Africa, the company’s former vice president of product. When she left the company in December, Africa said, “the writing was on the wall.”

Democrats’ campaign technology was once described as “too big to fail.” Republicans had largely dominated the voter targeting landscape before the early 2000s, when VAN was first created to track and store voter data. By 2006, its software was being used by 25 state parties. In 2007, the Democratic National Committee centralized VAN and made it a preferred vendor offered across 50 states. VAN became the de facto tool for Democratic campaigns and went on to power Barack Obama’s presidential win in 2008.

VAN merged with Stu Trevelyan’s NGP fundraising software in 2010, followed by a long line of roll ups in the campaign technology space. Companies combined operations across email and fundraising to compete with the growing number of firms that did similar work with greater profit, like Salesforce and Blackbaud, whose clientele extends beyond the Democratic Party sphere.

Over the last decade, EveryAction tried to secure its leading position by acquiring a slew of campaign tech firms, including ActionKit and Mobilize.

The acquisition of EveryAction and NGP VAN by Apax continued the trend. The creation of Bonterra rolled those firms and three other fundraising, corporate philanthropy, and case management firms into one entity. Less than two years later, the major layoffs came.

After the initial acquisition, Bonterra let ActionKit continue to operate mostly independently, Africa said. That was smart for business because ActionKit brought in so much money. From the perspective of a venture capital firm, the layoffs were a “shocking miscalculation,” Africa said. In a LinkedIn post shortly after the layoffs, she said ActionKit clients should plan emergency migrations as soon as possible.

“I am personally confident that Bonterra will not be able to support ActionKit and hasn’t left the team with adequate staffing to do so,” she wrote.

Since the layoffs, Africa said she’s most concerned with how staff cuts will affect campaigns this cycle and beyond. “I don’t know if Bonterra actually realized what they did,” she told The Intercept. “There’s no way that the support’s going to be up to what people expect for 2024.”

After the layoffs, five developers are now responsible for their own systems and database maintenance, quality assurance, and tech support, Harwood said.

“I just feel really bad for the clients. I’m just not seeing how they’re going to be able to keep everyone afloat.”

“I just feel really bad for the clients,” she said. “I’m just not seeing how they’re going to be able to keep everyone afloat.”

Prior to layoffs, Bonterra’s merged companies were given an internal rating to invest, maintain, or harvest, Harwood said. ActionKit was labeled “maintain,” which meant they would keep doing their work but wouldn’t necessarily grow. If Bonterra decides that NGP VAN doesn’t meet its criteria for further investment, it could lay off staff in an instant, Harwood said.

“They don’t care about the movement,” she said. “Bonterra’s not in it to get Democrats elected, to provide the progressive movement with tools.”

The day of the layoffs, Bonterra’s CEO Scott Brighton announced that NGP VAN would be reorganized as a separate and independent business unit “focused exclusively on serving the needs of the Democratic and progressive ecosystem.”

“I can share that the Dem party should be prepared to have NGP VAN staff ‘augmented’ by ChatGPT,” said a former NGP VAN staffer who was laid off last month and requested anonymity to protect professional relationships. As an autonomous unit, NGP VAN will be a saleable asset, Harwood added. “They could sell it to anyone,” she said. “They could sell it to Elon Musk, right? Why wouldn’t they?”

“Need to Future-proof”

Impacts on 2024 remain to be seen. So far, however, layoffs have lowered morale among the workers who created and sustained the party’s campaign tech tools, said one former NGP VAN staffer who was laid off in January. Staff cuts mean heavier workloads for everyone else, they said: “As customers, they’re going to see that in terms of the quality of service that they’re seeing, and internally, burnout.”

Because campaigns run by seasoned staffers don’t need the same attention or support that a fledgling candidate typically does, high-priority campaigns for Biden or other major federal candidates will likely be insulated from tech issues, they said. The cuts could be detrimental to campaigns for new candidates or people running in rural areas.

“The smaller candidates, the first timers, the people coming from rural areas, those are the people that when I was onboarded — that was our focal point,” the former NGP VAN staffer, who asked for anonymity to protect future job prospects, said. “But now that they’re kind of pulling that back, those are going to be people affected most for this next cycle.”

Recent layoffs are in some ways typical for an off-cycle year, when it’s harder to generate small-dollar donations, said Chuck Rocha, who advised both of Sanders’s presidential campaigns and founded Solidarity Strategies. (Rocha is a senior adviser to Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego’s Arizona Senate campaign.)

Broader layoffs reflect the near-total transformation of campaign tech over the last three decades since Howard Dean and Obama harnessed what was, at the time, the cutting-edge power to mobilize voters through the internet, Rocha said. It’s possible that Democrats staffed up too quickly in efforts to mimic Sanders’s insurgent fundraising campaign in 2016 and ride the wave of unprecedented donor engagement under former President Donald Trump.

“It’s become really competitive,” Rocha said. “You can’t throw a dead cat in D.C. and not hit a digital consultant.”

The larger problem at work, said Democratic strategist Ben Tribbett, who runs Pocket Aces Consulting, is lack of competition. Strategists get nervous when the few companies that do provide key services confront financial problems, he said: “It just raised alarm bells for everyone — having this technology in so few hands is a long-term concern for the party.”

A fundamental problem for the party’s campaign technology is the lack of innovation in recent years, said Chris Lundberg, co-founder and former CEO at Salsa Labs, which was acquired by EveryAction in 2021. Lundberg is now the CEO of Frakture, a company that automates communication and fundraising tools. Beyond low donor enthusiasm, the party needs to reckon with the fact that its most coveted tools aren’t on the cutting edge like they were in the early 2000s, he said. And the Democratic National Committee is the only body with the power to do anything about it.

“I’m not worried about the tech failing on Election Day. I’m worried about somebody like the Republicans coming up with a better idea.”

“That’s perhaps an underreported aspect of this — that nobody can move without the DNC,” he said. “They’ve ceded that territory for a while because they don’t want to make a mistake.”

The failure to innovate drove a slow decay in the party’s campaign technology apparatus, which could eventually give up space to competitors, he said. “I’m not worried about the tech failing on Election Day. I’m worried about somebody like the Republicans coming up with a better idea.”

Dozens of alternative campaign tech firms serving Democrats and progressives have come and gone in recent years. In April, Politico reported that an outside entity called the Democratic Data Exchange would serve as “the primary national real-time data sharing hub” for the DNC and Biden’s reelection campaign. (The DNC did not respond to a request for comment.)

Harwood, the former ActionKit engineer, said Movement Cooperative is among the organizations best positioned to build an alternative; they just need the funding. The campaign tech firm has partnered with groups like MoveOn and Forward Majority Action. She said, “We need to future-proof ourselves against Bonterra’s potential mismanagement of NGP VAN.”

The post As 2024 Looms, Democrats’ Campaign Tech Crumbles Under Private Equity Squeeze appeared first on The Intercept.

The TikTok deal announced on Thursday poses a fundamental threat to free and honest discourse about Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Under the reported deal, the Chinese company that owns the short-video social media app, ByteDance, will transfer control of TikTok’s algorithm and other U.S. operations to a new consortium of investors led by the U.S. technology company Oracle. The long-gestating deal will give Oracle’s billionaire pro-Trump board members Larry Ellison and Safra Catz the power to impose their anti-Palestinian agenda over the content that TikTok users see.

Most mainstream U.S. media coverage of the TikTok deal has completely ignored the explicitly anti-Palestinian agenda of its biggest Western investors. TikTok has played a critical role in helping hundreds of millions of users see the ugly reality of Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. But the Trump-favored billionaires who will take over TikTok’s U.S. operations have a documented agenda of both suppressing voices critical of Israel and supporting the very Israeli military that has killed so many Palestinian civilians. Without safeguards in place, TikTok’s U.S. operations could soon become an exercise in blocking users from seeing and reacting to the crimes against humanity perpetrated by a major U.S. ally.

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Ellison and Catz have a documented record of supporting Israel and its military. Ellison is a major donor to the Israeli military — in 2017, he donated $16.6 million to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces, what was at the time the nonprofit’s largest single donation ever — as well as a close confidant of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Catz, who stepped down as Oracle’s CEO in September, has also been quite blunt about the company’s ideological agenda. The Israeli American billionaire said while unveiling a new Oracle data center in Jerusalem in 2021, “I love my employees, and if they don’t agree with our mission to support the State of Israel then maybe we aren’t the right company for them. Larry and I are publicly committed to Israel and devote personal time to the country, and no one should be surprised by that.” The Ellison family has also brought his pro-Israel agenda to CBS News, where Larry’s son, David Ellison, recently installed anti-Palestinian ideologue Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief.

TikTok played an important role in the sea change of U.S. opinion about Israel, particularly among young people. It’s why the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, the organization I work for, condemned the sale as a “desperate” attempt to silence young Americans.

What’s at stake is no less than whether or not U.S. voters will continue to be able to see what Israel’s military is doing to Palestinians. While many mainstream media outlets pushed coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza that was deferential to Israeli government talking points, TikTok users watched unfiltered videos of Israel’s horrific attacks on Palestinian civilians.

The effects are undeniable: A March Pew Research poll found Israel’s unfavorable rating among Republicans aged 18 to 49 had risen from 35 to 50 percent (among the same age group of Democrats, the country’s unfavorability also climbed almost 10 percentage points to 71 percent). A September New York Times/Siena University survey found 54 percent of Democrats said they sympathized more with the Palestinians, while only 13 percent expressed greater empathy for Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made it clear that he understands the consequences of access to unfiltered social media. He recently described the sale of TikTok as “the most important purchase happening. … I hope it goes through because it can be consequential.” Netanyahu, who faces an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity in Gaza, sees control of TikTok as a part of Israel’s military strategy. “You have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefield, and one of the most important ones is social media,” he continued.

President Joe Biden signed legislation in 2024 mandating that ByteDance sell its U.S. operations. That law forced the sale of TikTok under threat of an outright ban, which briefly took effect in January 2025. The new “agreement,” which is reportedly set to close on January 22, will establish a new and separate TikTok joint venture that will control U.S. operations, U.S. user data, and the TikTok algorithm. Just over 80 percent of the new company, dubbed “TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC,” will reportedly be owned by investors that include Oracle, private equity group Silver Lake, and Abu Dhabi-based MGX. ByteDance will retain a 19.9 percent share.

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The TikTok Ban Is Also About Hiding Pro-Palestinian Content. Republicans Said So Themselves.

The official arguments for forcing the sale focused on preventing Chinese government surveillance of TikTok users, but some elected U.S. officials were more honest. At a McCain Institute forum in May 2024, then-Sen. Mitt Romney said, “Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down potentially TikTok or other entities of that nature. If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians, relative to other social media sites — it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.”

That’s why advocates for human rights and a free press must work to challenge and reverse this government-sanctioned censorship effort. That means calling on both current and future members of Congress, as well as future White House administrations, to undo this dangerous media consolidation. The Ellison family’s control of TikTok, Paramount, and potentially other massive media properties in the future is a threat to free and open public discourse about U.S. foreign policy, particularly U.S. military support for Israel.

The work of chilling dissent has already been underway. Even before the 2024 law was passed, TikTok had begun taking steps to silence users who have criticized Israel. In July 2025, TikTok hired Erica Mindel, a former Israeli soldier with a documented record of anti-Palestinian politics, to police user speech on the platform. Given the Israeli military’s long record of propaganda, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, especially toward Palestinians, no former Israeli soldier should have been given the power to police TikTok users’ speech.

Even so, savvy social media users have long demonstrated an ability to organize and evade social media censorship, jumping from platform to platform regardless of what Western billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have tried to do. These challenges will continue in new forms, as demonstrated by the recently launched #TakeBackTikTok campaign. The campaign is pushing for a “user rebellion” in which American TikTok users challenge the Oracle takeover by flooding the platform with content in support of Palestinian liberation. Organizers began making their case last weekend with a massive projection onto Oracle’s U.K. offices.

This is a critical moment. The transfer of TikTok’s algorithm from ByteDance to Oracle would mean that TikTok’s content would move from being controlled by a company under the influence of a Chinese government committing genocide against Uyghurs to being controlled by U.S. investors who want to silence TikTok users’ opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Once billionaire anti-Palestinian investors and ideologues take control, TikTok users who are critical of Israel will need to fight even harder and more creatively to evade the suppression of free speech. Millions of U.S. citizens now support an end to unquestioned diplomatic and military support for Israel. Anti-Palestinian billionaires like Ellison and Catz know this full well, and it’s up to us to stand in the way of their efforts to subvert the will of the many.

Correction: December 21, 2025, 6:10 p.m. ET
This story previously stated that, under the deal, Oracle could now moderate the content that 2 billion users see, which is the number of TikTok users globally, rather than in the U.S. As the deal is not yet final, it remains to be seen how many users could be affected.

The post Anti-Palestinian Billionaires Can Now Control What TikTok Users See appeared first on The Intercept.

Jason Friedman, one of 18 candidates vying to replace Davis in the March Democratic primary next year, has pulled ahead of the pack in fundraising. His campaign reported donations totaling over $1.5 million in its October filing with the Federal Election Commission.

About $140,000 of that money comes from major funders of pro-Israel groups, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee PAC and its super PAC, United Democracy Project. The two groups spent more than $100 million on elections last year and ousted two leading critics of Israel from Congress. The pro-Israel donors’ support this year is an early sign that Friedman’s race is on AIPAC’s radar.

A former Chicago real estate mogul, Friedman launched his campaign in April, before Davis announced his retirement. From 2019 to 2024, he was chair of government affairs for the Jewish United Fund, a charitable organization that promotes pro-Israel narratives, noting on its website that “Israel does not intentionally target civilians,” “Israel does not occupy Gaza,” and “There is no Israeli ‘apartheid.’” Friedman has not made Israel a part of his campaign platform, but last month, the Joint Action Committee for Political Affairs, a pro-Israel PAC, held an event for its members to meet him.

AIPAC has not said publicly whether it’s backing a candidate in the race, but more than 35 of its donors have given money to Friedman’s campaign. Among them, 17 have donated to the United Democracy Project, and eight have donated to both. Together, the Friedman donors have contributed just under $2 million to AIPAC and UDP since 2021.

That includes more than $1.6 million to UDP and more than $327,000 to AIPAC, with several donors giving six or five-figure contributions to the PACs. Friedman’s donors have also given $85,500 to DMFI PAC, the political action committee for the AIPAC offshoot Democratic Majority for Israel, and another $115,000 to the pro-Israel group To Protect Our Heritage PAC, which endorsed another candidate in the race, Chicago City Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin. The Conyears-Ervin campaign and To Protect Our Heritage PAC did not respond to a request for comment.

Friedman is running largely on taking on President Donald Trump on issues from health care to education and the economy. His campaign website says he supports strong unions, access to education, reducing gun violence, and job training and support. Prior to his tenure leading his family real estate empire, Friedman worked in politics under former President Bill Clinton and for Sen. Dick Durbin on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Reached by phone, the pro-Israel donor Larry Hochberg told The Intercept that he was supporting Friedman because he thought he’d be a good candidate. “I’ll leave it at that,” Hochberg said.

Related

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A former AIPAC national director, Hochberg sits on the board of Friends of the Israel Defense Forces and co-founded the pro-Israel advocacy group ELNET, which has described itself as the AIPAC of Europe. Hochberg has given $10,000 to AIPAC, $5,000 to DMFI PAC, and just under $30,000 to To Protect Our Heritage PAC. In September, he gave $1,000 to Friedman’s campaign. Asked about his support for AIPAC and DMFI, he told The Intercept: “I don’t think I want to say any more than that.”

Former Rep. Marie Newman, a former target of pro-Israel donors who represented Illinois’s nearby 3rd District and was ousted from Congress in 2022, criticized Friedman for the influx in cash.

“If you receive money from AIPAC donors who believe in genocide and are funding genocide, then in fact, you believe in genocide,” Newman told The Intercept. She’s backing another candidate in the race, gun violence activist Kina Collins, who ran against Davis three times and came within 7 percentage points of unseating him in 2022.

Friedman is running against 17 other Democratic candidates, including Collins and Conyears-Ervin. During Collins’s third run against Davis last year, United Democracy Project spent just under half a million dollars against her. Davis, who received support from a dark-money group aligned with Democratic leaders in his 2022 race, has endorsed state Rep. La Shawn Ford to replace him. Other candidates include former Cook County Commissioner Richard Boykin, Forest Park Mayor Rory Hoskins, immigrant advocate Anabel Mendoza, organizer Anthony Driver Jr., emergency room doctor Thomas Fisher, and former antitrust attorney Reed Showalter, who has pledged not to accept money from AIPAC.

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

The genocide in Gaza has aggravated fault lines among Democrats in Chicago. Last year, the Chicago City Council narrowly passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, with Mayor Brandon Johnson casting the tie-breaking vote. As chair of government affairs for the Jewish United Fund, Friedman signed a letter to Johnson last year from the group and leaders of Chicago’s Jewish community, saying they were “appalled” at the result. Friedman’s campaign did not respond to questions about his position on U.S. military funding for Israel or the war on Gaza.

At least 17 Friedman donors have given to the United Democracy Project, with contributions totaling over $1.6 million. That includes nine people who gave six-figure contributions to UDP and seven who gave five-figures. Twenty-nine Friedman donors have given to AIPAC PAC, including eight of the same UDP donors.

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Even Former AIPAC Democrats Are Signing On to Block Arms Sales to Israel

Among those supporters are gaming executive Greg Carlin, who has given $255,000 to UDP and gave $3,500 to Friedman’s campaign in April; investor Tony Davis, who has given $250,000 to UDP and also gave $3,500 to Friedman’s campaign in April; and attorney Steven Lavin, who has given $125,000 to UDP and gave $7,000 to Friedman’s campaign in June. Carlin, Davis, and Lavin did not respond to a request for comment.

Attorneys Douglas Gessner and Sanford Perl, who work at Friedman’s previous law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, have given $105,000 and $100,000 to UDP. Both have also given to AIPAC PAC: Gessner over $50,000 and Perl over $44,000. Gessner gave $3,000 to Friedman’s campaign in September, and Perl gave $3,400 in April. Gessner and Perl did not respond to requests for comment.

Three other donors who have each given $1 million to UDP have given to Friedman’s campaign: Miami Beach biotech executive Jeff Aronin, Chicago marketing founder Ilan Shalit, and Jerry Bednyak, a co-founder of Vivid Seats who runs a private equity company focused on e-commerce.

“You could be the nicest person in the world,” said Newman, the former Illinois congresswoman. “But if you’re taking money from people who are supporting a far right-wing government that believes in genocide and is executing a genocide, what does that say about you?”

Friedman’s campaign coffers saw six-figure boosts on three days in June and September — vast outliers compared to most days in his first quarter. Those kinds of fundraising boosts are often associated with a blast email from a supportive political group to its network of donors, according to a Democratic strategist with knowledge of the race. AIPAC did not respond to a request for comment about whether the group had sent such an email encouraging supporters to contribute to Friedman’s campaign.

Friedman’s fundraising boost has also come largely from the finance and real estate industries, where just under a quarter of his donors work. He has also given $36,750 of his own money to his campaign.

Correction: February 17, 2026
This story previously identified Rory Hoskins as the former mayor of Forest Park, Illinois. He is currently the mayor.

The post AIPAC Donors Back Real Estate Tycoon Who Opposed Gaza Ceasefire for Deep-Blue Chicago Seat 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.

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. 

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.

She has also violated campaign finance law by taking pricey trips to places like Rome and California wine country, according to a Wednesday complaint lodged by the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

The group claims that since Sinema announced in March that she would not run for reelection, her campaign has spent over $100,000 on personal travel expenses. Those expenses do not appear to have any connection to campaign or official duties, making them illegal uses of her funds, CREW says. (Sinema’s office did not respond to a request for comment.) 

“The law applies to you whether it’s your first week in office or your last.”

She has successfully fought off similar charges before by claiming that the expenses were related to fundraising, but that could be a tougher sell this time around given her departure from the Senate.

Noah Bookbinder, the president of CREW, said it was particularly concerning that Sinema was still trotting the globe during her lame-duck period.

“The law applies to you whether it’s your first week in office or your last,” Bookbinder said in a statement. “Spending thousands of dollars of campaign contributions on yourself is even more troubling when it comes after you’ve announced you’re no longer a candidate.”

Racking Up Miles

Sinema’s campaign organization has not raised any money in the last two quarters since she announced her departure from the Senate, but fundraising from past years has left her with nearly $5 million in cash on hand, as of her latest Federal Election Commission report.

That has given her campaign plenty of money for a globe-spanning spending spree.

The expenses, according to the CREW complaint, include trips to various locations spread across several months that include:

• $3,120 to vendors in Italy in March, including a hotel in Milan and a restaurant steps from the Pantheon in Rome
• Nearly $9,000 to vendors in Massachusetts around the time of the Boston Marathon in April, which Sinema, a fitness buff, has participated in before
• $15,000 of spending in California and Colorado over the summer in locations that included Three Sticks Wines, a winery where Sinema has both interned and courted private equity donors
• $82,000 in a grab bag of travel expenses this year that include $3,600 in the United Kingdom and $5,400 in France, including $2,800 at the Castel de Très Girard in the wine region of Burgundy 

CREW said that despite “an extensive search of the public record,” it was unable to find evidence that the expenses related to official congressional duties or to campaign activities.

It would be perfectly legal for a member of Congress to use their campaign money to host fundraising events or to finance excursions nominally related to their job — but there is no evidence that Sinema has been engaging in either, CREW says.

“It’s hard to see how any of this spending was for the benefit of the campaign.”

The FEC’s test of whether a particular expense violates the law is straightforward: For every expense, the commission asks whether the candidate would have dished out the money irrespective of being a politician. If they would have paid the money even if they were not a member of Congress trying to drum up donations or make official visits, the expense is no good.

To CREW, the spending outlined in its complaint is a clear violation.

“The rule of thumb is that any dollar your campaign spends has to be for the campaign — it can’t just be for your own personal benefit,” Bookbinder said. “It’s hard to see how any of this spending was for the benefit of the campaign.”

No Punishment Before

While Sinema did not respond to a request for comment from The Intercept, or one weeks before from the Arizona Republic, the outcome of a similar complaint filed last year shows how reticent the FEC has been to take action against her before.

In May 2023, Change for Arizona 2024 PAC, a group opposed to Sinema, filed a complaint alleging that a whirlwind of previous spending on trips to places like Boulder, Colorado, and Boston violated the law.

Sinema argued successfully that many of the trips coincided with fundraising junkets. Some were also paid for by the Sinema-affiliated Getting Stuff Done PAC, a separate organization known as a leadership PAC that has more leeway to cover her personal expenses. The FEC voted to dismiss the 2023 complaint against Sinema this September.

Critics of the FEC say that it too often punts on taking action against politicians who violate the law, and that when it does, the punishment is too late and too light to matter.

By the time CREW’s complaint is resolved, Sinema could be long gone from the Senate. She has previously mused, according to a biography of her friend Mitt Romney, about serving on a board or as a university president in her post-Senate life.

Although Sinema has missed some of the most votes of any senator during this Congress, that has not stopped her from making news during her final weeks.

In her first Senate vote since before Thanksgiving, Sinema helped tank a Democratic appointee to the National Labor Relations Board who could have kept its pro-union members in the majority through 2026.

“It is deeply disappointing, a direct attack on working people, and incredibly troubling that this highly qualified nominee — with a proven track record of protecting worker rights — did not have the votes,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said after the vote.

Sinema left the Democratic Party in 2022 to become an independent, after helping kill one of organized labor’s top priorities, a law that would have made it easier to unionize workplaces.

The post In Waning Senate Days, Kyrsten Sinema Screwed Workers and Spent Campaign Cash on Stay at French Castle appeared first on The Intercept.

The group, Moderate PAC, launched in January 2023 to target progressives in Democratic primaries. It’s doing so with Republican money.

The ads back the candidate recruited by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to run against Lee, Bhavini Patel, in hopes of making it to a general election against Republican candidate Laurie MacDonald.

Although Moderate PAC has employed Democratic consultants, including former Ohio Rep. Tim Ryan, its primary funder is Jeffrey Yass, one of the richest man in Pennsylvania and a major donor to the GOP. Yass, though formally registered as a libertarian, is one of former President Donald Trump’s picks for Treasury secretary should he win election in 2024.

Yass, a co-founder of a large hedge fund, has become increasingly involved in spending against progressives, aimed at keeping a regressive tax code in place and cutting funding for public schools in Pennsylvania.

“Take a cue from Laurie McDonald and just run as a Republican.”

“If you have to rely on a Super PAC bankrolled by Pennsylvania’s richest Republican — who has made it his mission to defund public education and ban abortion in PA — you’re not just unfit to run in a Democratic primary, you’re actively anti-democracy too,” said Usamah Andrabi, communications director for Justice Democrats, which is backing Lee. “Take a cue from Laurie McDonald and just run as a Republican.”

Moderate PAC Donors

Moderate PAC president and founder Ty Strong told The Intercept that other Pittsburgh area donors, including labor unions, had given to the PAC to fund ads against Lee in the race for the Pennsylvania’s 12th Congressional District.

“All the money raised for the ads in PA-12 were received from members of that community and Pittsburgh labor unions,” Strong said.

Though he didn’t identify the labor unions, Strong named six individual Democratic donors. Among them were private equity and venture capital executives Todd Reidbord and Gregg Perelman, who run the Pittsburgh private equity firm Walnut Capital; Richard and Arlene Weisman, who are active philanthropists in Pittsburgh’s Jewish community; and Evan Segal and Andy Rabin of the 412 Venture fund.

Strong said the names of other donors would be revealed in the PAC’s next filings with the Federal Election Commission, which is due on April 15.

One of those donors, Segal, a Democrat who worked in the administration of former President Barack Obama, told The Intercept he hardly agreed with Yass on anything, including his reasons for funding the PAC in the first place.

“Mr. Yass’s reasons for funding this are in support of a very, very ultra-right-wing group of crazies who despise Summer Lee,” he said. Though he is supporting Yass’s PAC, Segal said, “I don’t support people on the extremes.”

Segal said he gave to Yass’s PAC not because he believes the enemy of his enemy is his friend, but that observers are anticipating further outside spending to back Lee. “We firmly believe that there will be money that will come in from the outside — from people who also hate marginalized communities — to support Summer Lee, as well as people from the right like Mr. Yass who want to run these Machiavellian games with their billions of dollars,” Segal said. (The other five identified donors did not respond to a request for comment.)

Segal said he’s backing Patel because she’ll support Democratic leaders including President Joe Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and House Majority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., to fight for issues like reproductive freedom and women’s equality.

Past Spending Against Lee

For her part, in a press statement last week, Lee said, “Republican-funded Super PACs and their chosen candidate couldn’t stop us last cycle, and they won’t stop us this time.”

Lee faced an onslaught of spending from pro-Israel lobbying groups in 2022. AIPAC and its ally, Democratic Majority for Israel, spent millions against her.

It’s also not the first time Lee’s opponents have claimed she’s not really a Democrat — while themselves taking money from Republicans. Patel and her campaign have strategized about how to encourage Republicans to get involved in the primary, how Patel’s campaign appeals to Republican voters, and how the campaign can encourage Republicans to switch parties to vote in the April 23 primary.

Moderate PAC’s Strong compared the donors who funded the new ads to one of Lee’s donors. “This is in contrast to Rep. Summer Lee, who receives money from people condemned by the White House,” Strong added.

Strong said he was referring to Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, whom the White House denounced in December after he said he was happy to see the people of Gaza breaking the long-running siege against the territory on October 7. Awad has explicitly condemned the Hamas attack and clarified that his comments were in support of Palestinians’ fight against Israel’s illegal occupation, not in support of Hamas.

Yass is also a major donor to a far-right Israeli think tank that has tried to reconfigure the country’s judicial system and suppress criticism of human rights abuses by the Israeli government.

Correction: March 21, 2024
This story has been updated to correct an errant reference to Andy Rabin’s party registration; he is a Democrat, not a Republican.

The post GOP Megadonor’s PAC Fires Off First Ads in Summer Lee’s Democratic Primary appeared first on The Intercept.

Sanabil Investments, the company that manages Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, recently published its first list of investments in venture capital, buyout firms, and startups. The list includes two private equity firms involved two years ago in the sale and acquisition of EveryAction and NGP VAN, the companies that make up the Democratic Party’s campaign tech apparatus.

“Saudi Arabia’s investments are definitely strategic.”

“Saudi Arabia’s investments are definitely strategic,” said Paul Rose, an associate dean at the Ohio State University’s law school, who has done research on sovereign funds in Gulf states. “This disclosure is interesting because I look at it and I think, ‘Well, why would you disclose all this?’ The Saudis are really quite shrewd about signaling to not only people in their own country but people abroad what their priorities are.”

Rose added, “Investment for them is in part a brand-building exercise.”

Sanabil runs the Public Investment Fund, the official name for the Saudi government’s sovereign wealth fund. The fund is one of the world’s largest, with $620 billion in assets.

In addition to investments in Apax Partners, which acquired NGP VAN and EveryAction in August 2021, Sanabil is also invested in Insight Partners, another venture capital and private equity firm that invested in EveryAction in 2018 and sold parts of the company to Apax in 2021. (Another company called Vista Equity Partners that sold assets to Apax as part of the 2021 acquisition is also listed as a Saudi partner.)

“Limited partners in Apax funds are passive investors with no role in the management of portfolio companies,” said a spokesperson for Apax. “While they are entitled to receive information relating to the performance of their investments at fund level, they do not have access to sensitive portfolio company information.”

Other Saudi investments disclosed recently include Blackstone, Apollo Global Management, and Andreessen Horowitz.

Federal regulations are designed to stop sovereign wealth funds from interfering in domestic politics. If a particular investment includes a national security risk, federal regulators can force the transaction to be undone through the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States under the Department of the Treasury. Most of that risk is typically mitigated because sovereign wealth funds tend to be invested in companies through intermediaries like Apax or Insight Partners.

Investment in a company that deals with data related to voting and politics could be of potential concern to the Committee on Foreign Investment, even if the investor has no real influence over relevant data, Rose said. The committee could require the fund to use a mitigation agreement that limits interactions with the portfolio company. Rose added that the committee is quiet about its work and generally responsive to potential threats. (A spokesperson for the Treasury Department declined to comment.)

It’s not clear why Sanabil published the list of its partner venture capital and buyout firms. Any fund or investment vehicle that invests $100 million or more in publicly traded U.S. companies has to disclose those investments quarterly to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Sanabil is not required to disclose several of the investments it made because some were made in funds or companies that aren’t publicly traded.

Sanabil did not disclose the amount of money invested in each firm. (The company did not respond to a request for comment.)

The disclosure of Saudi Arabia’s investments comes less than three months after Bonterra, the new merged company created by the Apax acquisition, instituted layoffs at EveryAction and NGP VAN. At least 140 people were impacted by the layoffs, which Bonterra CEO Mark Layden attributed to the pursuit of “long-term, efficient growth.” (Bonterra did not respond to a request for comment.)

The Sanabil investment doesn’t mean the Saudi government has an interest in the functions of the companies.

Instead, said progressive strategist Gabe Tobias, the disclosure is a further indication that the fate of EveryAction and NGP VAN is not a priority for their owners.

“They just don’t care. It’s so, so important to the Democratic Party and to progressives organizations and it’s owned by a thing that absolutely doesn’t care about them or even know they exist,” Tobias said. “The priority that Apax puts on all the pieces of those holdings means they’re gonna continue to downgrade the services that NGP provides to political campaigns. Unless they say differently, which they never have.”

In 2016, Saudi Arabia announced its Vision 2030 plan to transition its economy away from dependence on oil and gas and toward tech investment. Sanabil’s disclosure indicates more spending on that front, with partners including Bird and Oura. The fund invests 50 percent of its assets in venture capital firms like Insight Partners, 30 percent in private equity firms like Apax, and 20 percent in a liquid portfolio.

It’s typical for national sovereign wealth funds to invest in foreign companies as part of their strategy for growth. Apax has also sold stakes to investors from sovereign wealth funds in China, Singapore, and Australia.

Sanabil’s list of partners resembles something more like a venture capital press release than an investment disclosure by a sovereign wealth fund, Rose said.

“This is sort of what a VC firm would do,” he said. They’re trying to signal something about who they are as a brand, who they are as investors. It’s hard to know what to make of it.” The disclosure could be meant to signal their ability as savvy investors to pick good assets, he added. “But beyond that, I don’t know. Who knows what else they could be trying to signal?”

The post Saudi Arabia Owns Stake in Firm That Bought Democratic Party’s Campaign Tech appeared first on The Intercept.

“The deliberate cruelty that they found humor in stood out to me,” says Jordan Uhl of Donald Trump’s Tuesday evening State of the Union. This week on the Intercept Briefing, co-hosts Uhl, Akela Lacy, and Jessica Washington disentangle Trump’s nearly two-hour-long speech so you don’t have to. 

“This is who these people are. In some ways, they’re trying to sugarcoat what they’re doing, but in other ways they’re so blatant about doing really evil things around the world and being totally OK with it,” says Lacy, in reference to Trump talking about kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. “It is really alarming to me how good they are at framing that in a positive light. And there were people cheering all over the room for us toppling a regime, doing regime change, while they’re telling you that we don’t do that anymore.” 

Washington adds, “The whole thing, if you read it, if you listen to it, it reads like a white nationalist speech.”

The co-hosts also dissect the Democratic Party’s official response to the State of the Union, delivered by Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger.

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

Transcript 

Jordan Uhl: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing. I’m Jordan Uhl, Intercept contributor and co-host of this podcast, joined by my co-hosts.

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

Jessica Washington: And I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.

JU: Akela, Jessica, it is late. We just sat through — endured, rather —nearly two hours of Donald Trump’s State of the Union and the multiple responses. We’ll get into some of what will surely be the main takeaways from this speech, but in a word or a few words, what are both of your initial reactions to tonight’s State of the Union?

JW: My word is “long.” I don’t think it needs an explanation.

AL: This is not a word, but I kept having an image in my head of villains in a superhero movie, standing around, laughing at what they’ve accomplished. [laughs]

JW: No, but you’re totally right because that one line about the food stamps. So there was this line from the very long speech that we’re describing where Donald Trump says that, he — I can’t remember exactly what word he gave. 

AL: “Lifted off.” I think he said “lifted off.”

JW: Lifted off.

AL: Yeah.

JW: Lifted off 2.4 million people from food stamps as like an economic accomplishment. And that does give like Disney villain in a very specific way.

AL: “Dark” — dark is my one word.

JU: Yeah, that was certainly one way to frame plunging millions of people into food insecurity. And of course that was an applause line.

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My takeaway would be the weaponized contrast. One thing I thought was a significant departure from past State of the Unions was how Trump specifically leaned into Democrats not standing and clapping for certain talking points. Now in the state of the union’s past, of course, the opposition party for the most part remains seated, but tonight felt like a slight departure from that partisan tradition where he singled them out. Repeatedly pointed out that they weren’t standing and clapping, and even on some points remarked how he was surprised that they even clapped. 

Trump delivered his last [joint session of Congress] address a year ago in a very different environment, coming off winning the presidency for a second time and major GOP wins that year. Things aren’t so rosy this time around. What do you both think has been the biggest change for Trump? What was the primary obstacle that he needed to clear or try to spin in tonight’s speech?

JW: There’s a lot that he had to clear up. I think there’s his loss on tariffs, obviously he’s still smarting from that, now saying that he’s going to do it anyway. A little bit confusing on what he means by that.

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I think his “anti-war” agenda that he’s been trying to spin himself as very anti-war is difficult when he just did what he did in Venezuela and when we’re watching the preparations for a very likely strike on Iran. So he’s got a lot that he has to spin because he’s tried to create this image of himself as anti-war, as good on the economy — and those things are not panning out even remotely close to what he’s promised.

AL: And the Epstein files blowing up in his face. There was reporting today that apparently DOJ scrubbed allegations against Trump sexually abusing a minor, and we have some Democrats, I think Rashida Tlaib was yelling at him during this to release the Epstein files. And this is high on many Democrats’ mind, but obviously not that he would address this, but that’s in the background here. Not even in the background, it’s in the foreground right now. 

And then, yeah, his approval ratings are lower than they were at this point in his first term. His disapproval ratings, I would say are higher, and his approval is about the same. 

And there are two very different stories being told about the economy right now. Obviously, Democrats are — we’ll get to the response later — but trying to focus on affordability issues. And you have Trump pretty much making a mockery of that and trying to throw that in their faces while claiming that everything is fine and dandy when we know very clearly that it’s not, people have lost their health care, are paying exorbitant amounts just to get through on a day-to-day basis. 

And I feel like this didn’t really come through. If you haven’t been paying attention, and you might have just been watching the State of the Union for pleasure — which I don’t know many people who are doing that — but he was able to get the One Big Beautiful Bill. As Jessie mentioned, the tariffs are falling apart. That was another major part of his economic agenda. 

But you also have Republicans who are saying that they’re not necessarily going to go through with his pressure to have them codify tariffs or codify any of these other things into law. And this is not a “Let’s hand it to Republicans” moment, but they have also broken with him on Epstein in very small numbers. But not everything is hunky dory with him and the Republican caucus right now as well.

JU: I think any Republican opposition in Congress to another attempt to institute tariffs isn’t out of concern for those costs being passed on to the consumer. It’s simply out of fealty to corporate interests, the Chamber of Commerce, their donors.

That’s where he would meet opposition, not out of any purported concern for their base. And like you’re saying, there are two different stories about the economy. He’s bragging, similar to Pam Bondi in the Epstein hearing, about the Dow hitting 50,000. He’s bragging about the stock market.

Donald Trump: The stock market has set 53 all-time record highs since the election. Think of that, one year.

JU: Those gains rarely affect the average working person. And then on the other side, you have “60 Minutes” reporting that SNAP and Medicaid benefits are facing the biggest federal funding cuts in history.

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Another part of the speech that stood out was the focus on militarism. Along those lines on these funding cuts for these social safety net programs, we’re seeing a massive uptick in military spending. He’s committing to 5 percent of GDP in our military spending. And we saw a report over the past few days from Jeff Stein of the Washington Post that said a requested $500 billion increase in military spending is slowing down the budget process because the military doesn’t even know how they would spend that additional $500 billion.

So I’m curious, from both of your perspectives, how do you think this lands in the minds of the average voter? Granted, like you said Akela, who’s watching this for fun? But we live in a shortened attention span economy where people will see clips, and surely some of these narratives will filter out. So when they see him bragging about the economy saying it’s robust and strong, meanwhile they’re looking at their bank accounts and they see a totally different story but ratcheting up military spending, how does this land?

JW: Yeah, I think that kind of stuff backfires. I think you’re talking about kind of two separate but connected things, which is military interventions, which we know are unpopular with a lot of, even the Republican base, a lot of Trump’s base is uninterested in that.

And then there’s also — which is the same mistake that the Biden administration made — which is telling people what the economy looks like for them. And I interviewed members of the Biden administration during the presidential election. And something that they kept saying was, people feel great, the economy is strong, people are doing fine. And people didn’t feel that, and they didn’t vote that way. 

And so I think they’re going to run into the exact same problems that every administration runs into, when they’re campaigning on their accomplishments, which is, it actually has to match up with how people are feeling economically, and the indicators just aren’t there.

I also listened to Summer Lee’s rebuttal for the Working Families Party, and this was something she brought up really directly. And I think this is something that has been talked about in our politics a lot recently, which is, we have money for bombs overseas, but we don’t have money for health care. We don’t have money to actually provide a good life for our citizens. And that’s something that Summer Lee brought up. They’re trying to distract you with all these different issues when the real problem is we’re giving money to corporations, we’re spending money on bombs, and we’re not spending money feeding people as Donald Trump himself pointed out. And we’re also not spending money on people’s health care.

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Summer Lee: Don’t let anybody tell you we can’t afford it. We somehow find endless money for ICE, for private prisons to warehouse Black and brown people and for bombs to be sent abroad. But we’re told health care and childcare are too expensive. And when we begin questioning those priorities, the powerful try to divide us once more. But that old playbook is losing its grip.

AL: I was reading some reporting in Punch Bowl on Tuesday that Republicans were talking about how they wanted Trump to frame this military spending. This is talking about him wanting to increase Pentagon funding by 50 percent. And they’re like, we don’t want him to sit to say the number $1.5 trillion. We want him to talk about it as a percentage of GDP and how it compares to past decades of military spending. Basically so it doesn’t sound as bad, but they also want him to frame it as what we’re doing to modernize the military and counter threats from our enemies around the globe.

Which we did hear him, reverting to this, what is a theme for him, painting this image of himself as a strongman, like policing the world while also telling everyone that he’s not policing the world and he’s the president of peace. So it’s an artful exercise in cognitive dissonance the way that they’re trying to frame this stuff to people.

But to their credit, Republicans are at least acknowledging openly that you have to frame this in a way that makes sense to the American public, whether it’s accurate or not. And I think that is the one thing that if you’re someone who is already giving Trump the benefit of the doubt and you listen to this, that sounds good, right, on its face?

JU: Yeah. It’s much more abstract when you’re talking about percentages of GDP than a $1 trillion-plus military budget.

JW: You guys can’t forget that he ended the war in the Congo, though. That was a key accomplishment from the speech. [laughs]

JU: Oh, who could forget? Where were you?

AL: Can we talk about the Venezuela thing? Because that —

JW: Please,

AL: Freaked me out to my core. Like jokingly, let’s not forget about our buddy Venezuela, when you kidnapped the fucking president, and JD Vance and Mike Johnson are behind him, like, laughing. I don’t know, that moment for me was just so blatantly, this is who these people are. In some ways, yes, they’re trying to sugarcoat what they’re doing, but in other ways, they’re so blatant about doing really evil things around the world and being totally OK with it. And it is really alarming to me how good they are at framing that in a positive light. And there were people cheering all over the room for us toppling a regime, doing regime change, while they’re telling you that we don’t do that anymore.

JW: Yeah.

JU: Yeah. Not just that, but the deliberate reckless killing of fishers. Yeah, that was a laugh line. Yeah. Oh, we decimated their fishing industry, and you get hardy laughs from the Republican caucus.

DT: We have stopped record amounts of drugs coming into our country and virtually stopped it completely coming in by water or sea. You probably noticed that. [Laughter]

We very seriously damaged their fishing industry. Also nobody wants to go fishing anymore. [Laughter]

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JW: The Intercept’s reporting, which we’ve done a lot of great reporting on this from Nick Turse. But we’re talking about these strikes where people were clinging, dying with no relief. Just like these strikes are horrific, if you read about them the strikes have now passed over 150 dead. So just to keep that in mind for the laugh line there.

JU: The deliberate cruelty that they found humor in stood out to me as yet another departure from past State of the Unions, and we saw that also in how they talked about the Somali population in Minnesota. Trump made, if you want to call it a joke, that once they crack down on Somali fraud in Minnesota to a sufficient extent, we will balance our budget. And this served as a segue to brutal crackdowns in our cities, the deliberate targeting of certain populations in places like Minneapolis and St. Paul. And what was also interesting to watch in this part of the speech was the vocal opposition from Rep. Ilhan Omar and Rep. Rashida Talib. Now, what were both of your reactions during this part and what stood out to you?

AL: What really stood out to me beyond the disgusting racism was the fact that he telegraphed that they’re going to do this in other states. At the end of that whole thing, he was like, oh, the number of this fraud is much higher in California, Massachusetts, and Maine. Places where he’s also been sending ICE. There’s been ICE agents terrorizing people all over those states and ramping up operations in Maine, particularly after Minneapolis. So that was alarming.

DT: There’s been no more stunning example than Minnesota. Where members of the Somali community have pillaged an estimated $19 billion from the American taxpayer. Oh, we have all the information, and in actuality, the number is much higher than that, and California, Massachusetts, Maine, and many other states are even worse.

This is the kind of corruption that shreds the fabric of a nation, and we are working on it like you wouldn’t believe. So tonight, although started four months ago, I am officially announcing the War on Fraud to be led by our great Vice President JD Vance.

AL: We’ve been talking about this and doing a lot of reporting on this, but a perfect and fully disturbing example of how the racist conspiracy theories that incubate in the far-right corners of the internet, become policy like that in this administration. And where like where this whole thing came from is a far-right influencer who started peddling this online. Chris Rufo picked it up and a couple months later, ICE agents killed two people in Minneapolis. 

Like these are the consequences of this. And I think people understand that is directly linked to what he’s doing with ICE. This is obviously not about fraud. This is about creating a pretext to unleash this country’s military power on its own citizens. 

JU: Chris Rufo, of course, for those unfamiliar, is with the Manhattan Institute and has been a key player in nationalizing right-wing controversies and culture wars, specifically the rights fight against “DEI” — diversity, equity, and inclusion — initiatives among other “hot-button issues.” He really does have a significant and outsized ability to shape narratives on the right.

AL: And while we’re talking about DEI, there was raucous applause to Trump saying we ended DEI. I think that was the most applause that I heard the whole time. And like, people were cheering. 

JU: Kitchen table issue. 

AL: You can also thank Chris Rufo for that.

JW: To your point, the whole thing, if you read it, if you listen to it, it reads like a white nationalist speech — not all of it, but large sections of it. Particularly when he says that Somali pirates are coming to commit fraud and also to ruin the culture. The cultural elements of the ways he was talking about Somali people, I think are some of the most kind of clearly racist elements.

But I have been just thinking about the State of the Union in the light of Trump posting that really racist image of the Obamas, because in some ways he’s broken the racism barrier is the way I would think about it is that he’s done something so blatantly racist in our culture. And just to be clear, I’m referring to the photo, sorry, the AI image that he posted on Truth Social of the Obamas as apes. So he’s already broken this racism barrier. So there is almost no point. to a certain extent, in even talking about him saying that Somali people are ruining the culture, the kind of Hitler-esque things that he said before about immigrants poisoning the blood — there is no deniability at this point about who and what he is. And so this white national speech, it just makes sense. It’s in character and it’s almost un-newsworthy in that way.

AL: It just makes me so upset because each of these things are issues where Democrats ceded so much ground in the beginning that like allowed him to just be like, OK, actually yeah, now we’re just doing racist stuff because you guys let us get really far on immigration and claiming this was a problem and claiming there were people flooding in. 

They’re like, some people are ruining the culture, not quite in the way that you’re saying it. Some people are creating all this crime problem, not quite in the way that you’re saying it, and like that being their strategy to win back voters is like to cede ground on these issues effectively. And it just makes me really mad when I think about it for too long. That’s what you saw in my eyes.

JW: On that point, I do want to talk about his anti-trans rhetoric. Speaking of Democrats ceding ground on issues, Donald Trump brought a Liberty University college student at one point, who he had brought as a guest, to make this point about transgender children, essentially. And so he had said that a school had enabled her to transition, which had then led her to run away and be kidnapped and sex trafficked. Now the mom and this girl are suing multiple entities that they hold responsible, including the school. But Donald Trump really used this moment to try and fearmonger against trans children.

This kind of idea on the right that they’re going to kidnap your children and make them trans — I think this is really an issue where we’ve seen a lot of Democrats cede ground. Obviously there was the infamous Seth Moulton comment about not wanting his kid, his young daughters, to play with males — referring to trans children that they would potentially be playing soccer with, trans girls. 

So we’ve seen Democrats really cede ground on this issue and say it’s fair that people have these concerns. It’s fair that people are scared about their children being kidnapped and turned trans — which is not a thing that’s happening.

But it’s really just this massive ceding of ground. We’ve seen obviously outlets like The Atlantic, the New York Times have obviously really contributed to this paranoia. And it’s legitimizing this fearmongering that Republicans have invested millions and millions of dollars, and it’s doing the work for them instead of actually talking about this issue directly or not just throwing trans kids under the bus is another option. So that’s my little rant.

AL: I’ll also just add one thing on that, I am not a fan of Abigail Spanberger. She’s a moderate and she’s an ex-CIA agent. We’ll leave it at that. But the fact that she delivered the Democratic response after winning a gubernatorial election, in which her Republican opponents repeatedly tried to bait her on trans issues and weaponize this issue against her — We did some reporting on that, talking with analysts about how her win was an example of Democrats sticking to their values on this issues is not necessarily a liability. I can’t speak to her record throughout Congress on this stuff, but at least in charting the path for midterms for both parties tonight and the Democratic response, I just thought that was interesting, that like after doing this whole dog-and-pony show over trans stuff, like they picked someone who stood firmly on that to give the response.

JW: I will also say anecdotally, so I’ve been covering the Senate primary race between Seth Moulton and Ed Markey, and I would say anecdotally, people are still really upset about those comments that Seth Moulton made about trans children.

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And so there’s this idea that there’s only political upside to throwing part of your base and parts of your base that your base also cares about, right, even if they aren’t a large part of your voting block. I think there is a political penalty for that that Democrats don’t see, and I think that’s true with immigrants. That is true on issues related to transgender people. They only see the upside of winning over this kind of mythical moderate and they never seem to see the downside, where you lose people who actually thought that you supported their values.

[Break]

JU: One of the other areas on the topic of ceding ground that I’m really fascinated by that Trump talked about in this speech were his purported desires to ban private equity in Wall Street from buying single-family homes and his calls for Congress to pass a ban on congressional stock trading. Now the devil’s in the details with these sorts of things and with the stock trading ban further reporting shows that he opposes a version of this bill that would also apply to himself, the White House and the judiciary.

Then while he says he wants to stop Wall Street and private equity from buying single-family homes, he’s calling on Congress to do that. And similar to the expected opposition from Republicans in Congress on tariffs at the behest of corporate interests, I expect similar opposition on this. But in rhetoric alone, I do think those are two things that resonate with the average American. What did you both make of those two points tonight?

AL: It’s one of those things where he knows what to say. He knows to say the right thing. Less than 1 percent of the population is going to be like, is this true? Maybe that’s ungenerous, but you know what I mean. Democrats, on the flip side, tangle themselves up in the these particular issues, not only because they’re doing the thing that’s bad, like they’re doing insider stock trading, they’re siding with corporate landlords and fighting or doing everything they can to not really do anything on housing, but they’re so afraid to say something that isn’t poll tested that again, they’re ceding ground to him on this when he’s clearly lying and enriching himself and doing all these things that would negate this behind the scenes, particularly for himself, as you’re saying. 

But the fact that Democrats are also hypocrites on this doesn’t really work because they won’t say the thing. It’s not that hard to go toe to toe with him. It’s actually very simple, but you’re so concerned about making sure that you’re not turning off again, this middle of the road person, that you don’t take this low-hanging fruit. 

And like you saw Elizabeth Warren standing up. This is the only part that they panned to her during this. I don’t know if she stood otherwise, but she was like pointing at him, being like, what about you? OK, let’s get that. Let’s get that in the response. Let’s get Abigail Spanberger hitting that on the head.

JW: Yeah. To your point, Akela, in her response for the Working Families Party, Summer Lee brought up the fact that Democrats are hamstrung by their commitment to corporate donors.

SL: The Democratic Party is at a crossroads. On one side are millions of working people demanding bold action, lower costs, higher wages, Medicare for all. On the other side are corporate donors and consultants who are terrified of upsetting the very interests that rigged this economy in the first place.

JW: You cannot be sworn to the American public, sworn to working people and to their benefit, and also sworn to corporations that we cannot bring down MAGA while also making billionaires comfortable. And I think she’s really poking at that weak center point of the Democrats that you keep mentioning, which is that they are unwilling to, I think there’s both the issue of everything needs to be tested, but they’re also unwilling to throw off the shackles of corporate money, corporate interests.

JU: And to add some context to Trump’s investments, specifically Dave Levinthal in NOTUS has a piece from December 23, 2025, where he wrote that Trump has invested tens of millions of dollars into corporate and government bonds, including those of companies and local governments his administration’s decisions could affect according to a new financial disclosure. So it’s not just that he’s enriching himself off of dealings with other governments, dealings with other oil Gulf state figures. He’s also making money in the market and his own decisions influence the performance of those investments. So of course, he’s going to oppose applying a stock trading ban to himself.

But I also want to go back to Spanberger and the Democratic Party’s decision to pick her to deliver the official response. Like you said Akela, you’re not necessarily a fan, she’s extremely moderate, we’ll say, former CIA official. What do you think this says at a time where we’re seeing surprising flips in state legislatures in red states, massive swings in favor of Democrats, poll numbers for Trump in the tank, you’re seeing Trump voters, some of Trump’s loudest supporters switch? They’re changing their tune entirely. They’re criticizing him over his handling of the Epstein files, of ICE and other federal law enforcement agencies’ presence and actions in cities across this country. That seems like a window where they can shift things more to the left, but here they rolled out Abigail Spanberger. Does that send up a red flag for you going into the midterms?

AL: I’m of two minds about this because you can’t ignore the fact that she just won her race and that Glenn Youngkin was the governor of Virginia. For a while, Democrats thought they had it in the bag. She was openly talking about her win in her response, pointing to the fact that they had Republican voters, Independent voters, Democratic voters, this big tent. And that’s important in a state like Virginia.

Is that a roadmap? Is that what’s going to help them win back the house? Wild card Senate even might be up for grabs. Republicans seem really concerned about this. I don’t think so, but I do think, again, the fact that she didn’t see it on some of these “cultural war” issues in her last race is a positive sign. Do I think that means that’s how Democrats are going to play this? Absolutely not.

I’ll also mention that Abigail Spanberger was a pretty big recipient of corporate PAC money while she was in the House and during the 2023 to 2024 cycle. AIPAC was her top single donor. So these are all issues that we know have lost Democrat support and mixing that with a couple of things that are positive and helped her win her election, I don’t think that’s enough to get them where they want to be.

I was not shocked at all that they pick someone like Abigail Spanberger. They typically pick a moderate. I was pleasantly surprised, I would say, because the bar is on the floor, the fact that she was saying Trump is not telling you the truth, talking about the fact that he’s enriching himself, talking directly about the impact that him unleashing federal agents on U.S. cities has had.

Abigail Spanberger: In his speech tonight, the president did what he always does. He lied, he scapegoated, and he distracted, and he offered no real solutions to our nation’s pressing challenges, so many of which he is actively making worse. He tries to divide us. He tries to enrage us to pit us against one another, neighbor against neighbor. And sometimes he succeeds.

And so you have to ask who benefits from his rhetoric, his policies, his actions, the short list of laws he’s pushed through this Republican Congress? Somebody must be benefiting. He is enriching himself, his family, his friends. The scale of the corruption is unprecedented.

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AL: She didn’t say this explicitly, but shortly after being sworn in as governor, she said Virginia law enforcement was going to stop cooperating with ICE. These are things that we know are moving Democrats. And so whether that translates into the whole party getting on board with this, I think the answer is a pretty clear no. But it wasn’t like, didn’t Elissa Slotkin give the response one year? And I just remember sitting there and being like, this is worse than the State of the Union, and I didn’t feel that way coming out of this. So what does that mean? I don’t know.

JU: I guess that’s good.

JW: That was a ringing endorsement from Akela [laughs]: The speech didn’t make me feel like it was worse than the two-hour speech we all just listened to from the president.

AL: Sorry, the thing that pissed me off the most about Abigail Spanberger’s speech, I will say, and I think this gets to the heart of the issue, was that she’s in Virginia, she’s in Williamsburg where I went to college. So I understand sort of the nerdy allusions to what our Founding Fathers would’ve wanted.

But she was using this like trite device to be like, Trump is ruining the America that our Founding Fathers wanted for us. And we could sit here and talk about all day how stupid that is. But that is like the model: It’s just like third-grade patriotism — a couple of jabs here and there, and we’re going to get everyone back on board. Again, I just don’t think it’s enough.

JW: Like you said, I’m not at all surprised that they picked her. They want a moderate. It obviously looks good for the Democrats to have a woman combating Trump. So that’s clearly part of the calculus as well. Spanberger did just win her election, flip the governor’s mansion, if you want to call it that. But with Spanberger’s election, you also have to keep in mind the context of Trump and what he did to the federal government.

He decimated the economy of D.C., Maryland, and Virginia. The massive layoffs, the anger at Trump in this area is astounding, so it’s not at all shocking, frankly, that she would win in this exact moment. Is that something that can be replicated throughout the country? Are they feeling the same direct impacts of Trump? I think in some ways, they are. When you look at SNAP cuts, when you look at cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, when you even just see videos of the violence happening in cities from ICE. But it doesn’t have that same direct impact, and so I don’t know if she’s as exciting [for] somewhere that’s not Virginia.

JU: As we wrap, we’re all exhausted. We’re fed up. What was the bright spot tonight for both of you? Was there a funny moment?

JW: This is not necessarily funny, but it made me think of a funny joke, when he brought out the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team. Now, they’d also had this kind of video stunt where the team had also been hanging out with Kash Patel, the FBI director; they had Trump on the phone where he made a joke about, I’ve gotta invite the women’s hockey team [or be impeached] — which, by the way, declined.

But the only thing that kept going through my mind was that this was terrible hockey PR. And “Heated Rivalry” had worked so hard to get us all into the spirit, to get all of us woke people who are too woke for hockey into it, and they’ve just tarnished the reputation of hockey. Once again, it can’t recover.

JU: Akela, what about you?

AL: I’m somewhere between the communist mayor of New York City, his little homage to Zohran Mamdani, who he’s obsessed with, and I just think it’s funny. And said again, I don’t like his policies, but I like him a lot [laughs] which honestly probably applies to like more than 75 percent of people outside of New York in his age demographic. They’re like, there’s something about this guy, I like him.

Either that, or this is just my brain being broken, because this made me laugh — this is not funny at all, but the response was funny — when he was like, “This should have been my third term.” And in the audience, you hear — I heard — like a mixture of what sounded like “Awww” and like boos. And I was just like, yeah, that sums it up pretty much.

JU: Someone did yell out “Four more years,” which is —

JW: Oh, great.

JU: Disconcerting. I’d say mine was, again, not funny subject matter, but the reaction was funny when he was talking about Iran yet again, trying to escalate tensions there, making not-so-veiled threats. Credit to the camera people and the control room for the event because somebody wisely fixated their camera on Lindsey Graham, who looked like he had reached another plane — like just the bliss that was so visible on his face throughout his body did make me laugh, as horrifying as it is. And that one was mine.

AL: “Operation Midnight Hammer.”

JU: Yeah. Good Lord. I want to thank you both for suffering through this with me, and hopefully we saved the listeners two hours of their precious lives.

JW: Thanks, Jordan. 

AL: Thanks, Jordan.

JU: That does it for this episode. 

This episode was produced by Laura Flynn. Sumi Aggarwal is our executive producer. Ben Muessig is our editor-in-chief. Maia Hibbett is our managing editor. Chelsey B. Coombs is our social and video producer. Desiree Adib is our booking producer. Fei Liu is our product and design manager. Nara Shin is our copy editor. Will Stanton mixed our show. Legal review by David Bralow.

Slip Stream provided our theme music.

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

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

Let us know what you think of this episode, or If you want to send us a general message, email us at podcasts@theintercept.com.

Until next time, I’m Jordan Uhl.

The post Rambling Man: Trump’s State of the Union  appeared first on The Intercept.

Instead, U.S. Magistrate Judge Ivan Davis placed Asif William Rahman on home detention and GPS monitoring at his father’s house before trial, in a case that grew even more mysterious after a Friday hearing.

Rahman, 34, is accused of the October leak of secret analyses of Israel’s preparations for a strike on Iran. Those analyses, which were based on satellite photos, included details of the missiles and planes that could be used in an attack.

The disclosures embarrassed U.S. officials who were caught spying on a purported ally and launched a leak hunt that ultimately landed on Rahman, who was arrested by the FBI in Cambodia on November 12. He had been posted to the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh, legal filings show.

While prosecutors made no claims Rahman was working with a foreign government, they sought on Friday to keep him detained as a flight risk as he faces two counts of leaking documents. Instead, Davis allowed Rahman to go free while acknowledging that the government had what a prosecutor called “damning evidence.” The government said it would appeal that decision.

Neither prosecutors nor Rahman’s attorneys spoke to what may have motivated Rahman, a Cincinnati native and Yale University graduate who has served in the CIA since 2016. A trail of online records uncovered by The Intercept suggest that he was interested in social justice causes from a young age.

Delayed Strike

The most intriguing information revealed at Friday’s hearing may have been a federal prosecutor’s claim that when the documents surfaced on a pro-Iranian Telegram channel, they forced Israel to hold off on attacking Iran for an unspecified period of time.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Troy Edwards claimed that the leak forced Israel, although he did not identify it by name, to delay “kinetic action.”

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The leaks first surfaced on social media on October 17, at a time when Israel was widely suspected of preparing to attack Iran in what U.S. officials dubbed a “tit-for-tat” sequence of strikes. Israel went ahead with the strikes October 26.

By that time, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was well into an investigation into the leaker’s identity.

The government contends that Rahman was trying to stay one step ahead of them. Three days after the leak, Edwards said in court, Rahman deleted 1.5 gigabytes of classified CIA data. It was information that he once had official access to, but that authorization expired four years ago. Rahman also “fortified” his mobile devices and computer, Edwards said.

The government says those efforts failed to throw agents off Rahman’s tracks. Prosecutors said that government data logs “revealed that only one user in the entire United States government accessed both Document 1 and Document 2 in the same format they appeared online between the time the documents were published on classified networks and the time the documents were posted on social media and also printed both of those documents: the defendant, Asif William Rahman.”

Arrest in Cambodia

Rahman’s arrest in Phnom Penh was first reported by the New York Times, which said that he was posted overseas while working for the CIA.

Edwards said that Rahman had what the prosecutor described as “pocket litter” when he was arrested by FBI agents, including a wad of paper with notes that included the words “contingencies,” “vacation mid-Nov?,” and “run.” Another paper contained a series of digits that the government is now working to decipher.

To the prosecutors, those notes suggested that Rahman was a flight risk. Rahman’s defense attorney, Amy Jeffress of the firm Arnold & Porter, said there was a more innocent explanation.

“He’s a runner,” Jeffress said. “I don’t know why anyone would write ‘run’ on a to-do list when they’re trying to run from the law.”

Davis, the magistrate judge, appeared to be swayed by Rahman’s lack of prior criminal history and his strong ties to the Washington, D.C., area. His father lives in Bethesda, Maryland, and property records suggest that Rahman’s wife lives in Vienna, Virginia.

In court, Jeffress pointed to the 11 relatives and supporters sitting behind her as evidence that Rahman would not attempt to flee.

Still, a government prosecutor raised concerns that Rahman could still cause further damage to U.S.–Israeli relations from the comfort of his father’s home on a leafy street in the well-to-do suburb.

Edwards said that regardless of whether he still had access to documents, Rahman undoubtedly had memories of classified information. To spread that, Edwards said, “all it takes is the snap of a finger and a click of a button.”

Under questioning from Davis, Edwards said the government did not know whether Rahman might still have access to secret electronic information stored elsewhere. Davis said he thought the government was short on concrete indications that Rahman might flee or leak more.

“I’m hearing a lot of ‘ifs’ and ‘coulds’ — which is all speculation,” he said.

Davis said he was satisfied by the family’s promises to restrict Rahman from access to any electronic devices that are not equipped with monitoring.

Prosecutors said they would appeal his release order to U.S. District Judge Patricia Tolliver Giles, a Joe Biden appointee.

Rahman appeared in court wearing a green jumpsuit and did not speak.

A Question of Motive

While neither prosecutors nor defense lawyers touched on the question of motive, Rahman’s prosecution on Espionage Act charges has already raised concerns for one civil liberties group.

That group, Defending Rights and Dissent, said last month that while Rahman’s motives were unclear, the fact that he was charged under the Espionage Act could have troubling implications.

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“Rahman did not disclose the documents to a journalist — though, once released, the documents received widespread press coverage and were clearly in the public interest,” said the group. “Rahman may or may not have released the documents with the intent to promote public debate, but the Espionage Act makes no distinction between whistleblowers, spies, and those with alternative motives for disclosing national defense information.”

While court records give little information about Rahman besides his name and age, a trail of online material stretching back to his days as a teenager in Ohio can be found online.

Along with pursuits including Scrabble and running track, Rahman appeared to have an early interest in social justice causes.

At around 13 years old, Rahman and a group of classmates designed a website titled “Blood, Sweat and Tears: The Story of Child Labor.”

Two years later, Rahman alongside one of his sisters and other classmates, would go on to design another site entitled “A Dollar a Day: Finding Solutions to Poverty.” Both websites won the Oracle Foundation design competitions. Alongside that site, Rahman maintained a blog dedicated to exploring measures for alleviating poverty.

Among the class of 2009 at Indian Hill High School, Rahman was a hallmark of overachievement: an AP National Scholar, a National Merit Scholarship finalist, and class valedictorian. Rahman delivered the year’s commencement speech, noting that “Much awaits the Class of 2009 — success, certainly, but also unforeseen challenges.”

After high school, Rahman headed off to Yale, a local newspaper reported. During college, he served as a copy editor for the Yale Daily News. After graduation, Rahman became a fixed income broker at Morgan Stanley for two years, according to financial records. He graduated in three years, according to a defense filing.

Prosecutors said Friday that Rahman had joined the CIA by 2016, around the time when the trail of digital evidence about him begins petering out.

In 2019, Rahman was listed as the buyer on a house in Vienna, Virginia, about a 20-minute drive from the CIA headquarters building. One of the lenders was his father, Muhit Rahman.

Muhit Rahman, who declined comment, has worked as a private equity fund manager and founded a nonprofit called the Bangladesh Relief Fund, which has distributed funds in the South Asian country designed to alleviate poverty and address the ravages of recurrent flooding.

In a 2004 letter announcing his creation of the fund, the elder Rahman stated, “The images that I cannot shake off are not those of water, water as far as the eyes can see, nor of bodies and carcasses flowing rapidly by. They are of children rendered mute by suffering and more suffering.”

More recently he struck a similar note on a GoFundMe page created in February that aimed to raise money for Palestinian children.

Asking donors to chip in $26.20, or a dollar for each mile of a marathon he was going to run, Muhit Rahman said that the money was for “the silent children of Gaza.” He posted a picture of the singlet he wore while running the Tokyo Marathon, which included a Palestinian flag inscribed with the names of his donors. Nestled above the slogan “For the children — who are always innocent” was a partial name: Asif R.

The post Israel Delayed Its Attack on Iran Due to CIA Leak, Prosecutors Allege appeared first on The Intercept.

The murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson is a profoundly revealing moment in American politics. Not only has it opened the floodgates of public anger at health insurance companies, but it has also demonstrated just how avoidant most U.S. politicians are when it comes to acknowledging that anger or doing anything about it.

The surge of online excitement surrounding the man accused of murdering Thompson, 26-year-old Luigi Mangione, is a symptom of a much larger problem: an oligarchic U.S. political system that repeatedly fails to respond to the needs of the people. In the absence of effective government, vigilante violence becomes much more likely.

Mangione has found popularity precisely because the man he is accused of killing ran a company that routinely boosted profits by pushing its customers closer to illness and death. Earlier this year, a U.S. Senate committee investigated UnitedHealthcare and determined that the insurance company frequently denied nursing care to patients who were recovering from falls and strokes in order to boost its profits. Health news platform Stat reported that a UnitedHealthcare subsidiary called NaviHealth systematically denied care for seriously ill seniors. Thompson himself was facing a class-action lawsuit for insider trading amid a Department of Justice investigation.

Of course, it is easy to treat UnitedHealthcare’s abuses as the actions of just one evil company run by a handful of bad men. But these companies are owned by Wall Street. Institutional investors and shareholders reward and punish corporate executives based on the profits they generate and the share prices they produce. In causing harm to so many Americans, Thompson was meeting the demands of his corporate board members and the even wealthier interests that they serve. 

These profits generated by denying Americans medical care are in turn converted into campaign contributions and lobbying dollars that block our political system from doing anything about it. In 2023 and 2024, UnitedHealth Group’s political action committee reported donating  $2.95 million to federal campaigns and spending $16.62 million on lobbying expenses. Meanwhile, the top federal recipient of campaign contributions from UnitedHealth Group executives and employees was Kamala Harris. Perhaps this is why Harris flip-flopped on abolishing private health insurance during her first of two failed runs for president: she knew just how much money was on the table.

Harris, of course, isn’t the only major recipient of campaign contributions from UnitedHealth Group employees in 2024. The Democratic National Committee received $103,022; the Republican National Committee received $207,125; and the Trump campaign took in $144,297. And UnitedHealth Group is not alone. A quick review of other major health insurance companies demonstrates that each of them has spent heavily in recent campaign cycles to maintain a political system that responds to their corporate interests, while undermining the health of the American people. 

Perhaps this is why prominent Democratic politicians like Pennsylvania’s Sen. John Fetterman and Gov. Josh Shapiro were so quick to condemn the murder of Thompson, while saying little or nothing about the thousands of people who have been denied coverage for their medical care by UnitedHealthcare under Thompson’s management. And perhaps this has something to do with why New York Gov. Kathy Hochul issued a statement regarding the murder of Thompson and personally joined a virtual convening of some 175 corporate representatives who were concerned about their safety, but has said nothing regarding the insurance abuses of UnitedHealthcare.

With Republicans about to control all three branches of the U.S. government, any real accountability for health insurance companies, including criminalization of their abuses, is highly unlikely. But even under the best of circumstances, we shouldn’t expect much from our status quo political system. The high-water mark of health care reform in recent American history was the Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare.” Obama’s signature achievement was originally a conservative Heritage Foundation plan previously implemented by former private equity executive Mitt Romney when he was the governor of Massachusetts. And even this market-friendly approach was later disavowed and attacked by Republicans.

But despite these tremendous hurdles — or because of them — a clear public rage exists that would be foolish to ignore. For progressives seeking to reboot the Democratic Party, this is the time to turn public outrage at UnitedHealthcare into tangible pressure that breaks the back of business-as-usual.

In evaluating the present moment, it is worth remembering just how often Republicans leverage false crises to capture the national debate. The hysterias over the so-called war on Christmas, transgender access to bathrooms, critical race theory, “all lives matter,” and “they’re eating the cats” are all examples of moments when conservatives have created controversies or flipped the script on real-world events to shift headlines and distract the public from the actual problems of concentrated power and wealth in America. 

Republicans have long been better at this than Democrats, because Republicans use their meme wars to punch down and target the powerless, while Democrats are usually too fearful to punch up and target the corporate elites who fund their campaigns while driving many of America’s ills.

But unlike many Republican attacks, the problems with health insurance are real, and public concern is quite broad. A recent Economist/YouGov poll revealed that 62 percent of those polled blamed health insurance companies for problems with the health care system, and the same percentage blame corporate executives. Democrats would be foolish to let the public’s focus on UnitedHealthcare dissipate, but as the 2024 elections revealed, Democratic Party leaders have a long track record of such foolishness. 

Given that Republicans will soon hold a trifecta in Washington, and that many Democrats are too fearful of their paymasters to bluntly criticize the corporate classes, how can we push our political system to hold health insurers and Wall Street accountable? One answer might be found in abandoning any hope of seeking immediate redress through our legislative process. Instead we should treat health insurance companies, their dominant shareholders, and the politicians who serve them in the same way that one would treat a repressive government that one is trying to reform — or overthrow. In this context, our tools of battle become cultural delegitimization, demand radicalization, economic pressure, and (nonviolent) political war.

Cultural Delegitimization

Our goal should be to build an American political culture in which health insurance executives and their companies are viewed and treated the same way that child molesters and drug cartels are. They should be ostracized, stigmatized, and demonized. By doing so, we will shift American politics and create a more hospitable environment for pursuing the long-term accountability that health care reformers seek.

This cultural delegitimization can be accomplished through a series of campaigns that target health insurance executives, demonize employment in their businesses, and create a broader negative environment in which no one wants to be associated with them. When it comes to finding opportunities to stigmatize these individuals and corporations, there are likely to be many opportunities to choose from. 

One recent example? Even as Thompson and UnitedHealthcare were denying sectors of the public access to valuable medical coverage, they were allowed to “sportswash” their reputations by serving as sponsors of the 2026 Special Olympics USA Games. The next time a philanthropic or community initiative unrolls a red carpet for a health insurance executive, there should be a dramatic public backlash.

Radicalize the Demands

We must shift the Overton window far enough that legislative reforms and accountability become the moderate position in American politics. This means speaking bluntly and directly about what should happen to predatory health insurance executives, their corporations, and their enablers. 

Health insurance CEOs who implement denial of coverage practices to boost profits should go to jail. Health insurance companies that enable this behavior should face revocation of their corporate charters. And shareholders and investors who financially benefit from these ugly profits should be made directly and criminally liable. 

Finally, the thousands upon thousands of people who have been unjustly denied coverage for their medical services should be introduced to a new concept: reparations.

Economic Pressure

Every entity that profits from predatory health insurance practices should be made to face economic costs. Corporate accountability campaigners and health insurance exchange experts should put their heads together to determine the best ways to undermine abusive health insurance companies’ access to new customers and policy holders. 

In addition, investors in UnitedHealth Group and other abusive health insurers should face direct pressure to divest from these companies. Investment funds, retirement funds, university endowments, and other major investment players should all be pushed to take their money elsewhere. 

As documented by Derek Seidman in Truthout, the top two shareholders of UnitedHealthcare parent company UnitedHealth Group “are the world’s two biggest asset managers, BlackRock and Vanguard,” which oversee a combined total of over $20 trillion in assets. Not only that, but BlackRock and Vanguard are also the top two shareholders of each of the top four U.S. health insurers. Both investment firms should face public demands to stop building their wealth off of the suffering of the thousands of people denied coverage for their medical needs.

Political War

Finally, the days of prominent politicians taking money from UnitedHealth Group must come to an end. It’s not hard to imagine a large number of senior citizens signing on to a demand that politicians should not take money from health insurance companies that are denying older Americans health care coverage.

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With elections for the next Democratic National Committee chair coming up in February 2025, now is the time to push the DNC to stop taking money from UnitedHealth Group and other major health insurers. Politicians who stay silent on these demands and who refuse to bluntly criticize health insurance executives and companies should face electoral boycotts in which voters commit to voting against them.

Moving From Anger to Action

In a fairer world, Brian Thompson wouldn’t have been murdered. He would already have been put behind bars.

Health insurance executives profiting off of human suffering should live in fear. But what they should fear is jail, not murder. We don’t want to live in a society where private individuals become judges, juries, and street executioners based simply on their own determinations of morality or crime. That is the world in which anti-abortion activists kill doctors and nurses. It is the world where white supremacist gunmen assume Black community members are “criminals” to be executed. In the space between illegal vigilante violence and deference to a broken political system is a vast opportunity for constructive and sustained political disruption that eliminates the “safe space” for business executives who profit from the destruction of human life.

One can easily condemn the murder of Thompson while simultaneously condemning who Thompson was and what UnitedHealthcare is known to have done. Denying countless people access to the medical coverage they needed has caused significant pain and suffering, and may have even caused many unnecessary and early deaths. That it took a murder of a health insurance CEO for us to be talking about this reveals just how broken our political, legal, and media systems are. 

Health insurance executives, investors, and the politicians who they purchase should all fear social ostracism, financial collapse, and political defeat. This is entirely possible if the political rage of the American public is combined with a strategic road map that turns that anger into action. The fundamental question is whether or not progressive leaders and health care reformers have the courage to turn this moment into something of lasting significance.

The post Health Insurance Execs Should Live in Fear of Prison, Not Murder appeared first on The Intercept.

AIPAC has given more than $600,000 in total to Latimer’s campaign — 42 percent of his total $1.4 million in contributions so far — according to filings with the Federal Election Commission submitted Wednesday night.

The heavy spending in Bowman’s district is part of AIPAC’s wider plans to spend at least $100 million to oust progressive Democrats in the House. The members, known as the Squad, are regular critics of Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinians and U.S. military funding for the ongoing assault on Gaza. (Latimer’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

“This report makes it clear that George Latimer’s campaign to unseat Jamaal Bowman is heavily funded by the same Republican megadonors who’ve spent millions to elect Donald Trump,” Bill Neidhardt, an adviser to Bowman’s campaign, said in a statement to The Intercept. “There is a direct connection between Latimer and the upper echelons of the Republican party.”

Latimer’s race against Bowman has attracted Republican support. The county executive held a fundraiser hosted by a donor to Republicans including former President Donald Trump last month. AIPAC officially endorsed Latimer’s campaign days later. The Intercept reported in December that one AIPAC donor encouraged Jewish Republicans to switch parties to vote in the primary to oust Bowman.

AIPAC has played an outsized role in in campaign finance in recent years, since it started giving directly to federal candidates. In addition to its PAC, the group launched a super PAC, United Democracy Project, that spent millions against progressive candidates in 2022. During that election season, AIPAC came under fire for attacking Democrats while it endorsed more than 100 Republicans who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. (AIPAC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

This cycle, the flagship Israel lobby group ramped up its attacks on Squad members who criticize Israel and supported a congressional ceasefire resolution in Gaza. In addition to Bowman, AIPAC has tried to recruit challengers to oust Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.; Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.; and Summer Lee, D-Pa.

The group began urging Latimer to challenge Bowman last year after he and other progressive members boycotted a congressional address by Israeli President Isaac Herzog.

Bowman had previously been endorsed by J Street, an advocacy group that positions itself as a liberal alternative to AIPAC. But the group withdrew its endorsement of Bowman on Friday and said his rhetoric on Gaza had “crossed a line.”

Latimer’s other major donors include venture capitalists, private equity partners, attorneys, and consultants. The contributors included political strategist Bradley Tusk, who gave the maximum of $6,600; oil trader Shai Barnea, who has given $5,000; and Michael Benn, a partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, a corporate law firm, who gave $3,300.

The post AIPAC Is the Largest Donor, by Far, to Jamaal Bowman’s Primary Challenger appeared first on The Intercept.

The trip included top officials from private equity firms like Bain Capital; leaders from the tech industry, like a Patreon executive; and a managing director at the endowment investment firm of Harvard University, a school riven by political clashes around the Israeli war on Gaza.

“In every war there are multiple fronts. The attendees of this mission are here to help counter the war’s economic disruption.”

The documents, which include an itinerary and list of attendees, provide details about the weeklong meeting taking place in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, called the Israel Tech Mission. Beginning on Sunday, the meeting includes panels like “Tech in the Trenches: Supporting an ecosystem during wartime.”

Participants will hold meetings with top Israeli officials, like President Isaac Herzog, along with opposition leader and former military chief of staff Benny Gantz, who joined Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet after the October 7 attack.

Shoring up investor confidence would be welcome news in Israel. The Israeli stock exchange — whose chair Tech Mission participants are slated to meet with on Thursday — suffered billions in losses after the Hamas attack on October 7, though it has gradually recovered. The market losses came in the wake of the reported withdrawal from Israel of some foreign investors when the country was roiled by Netanyahu’s controversial attempt to roll back judicial independence.

The Israel Tech Mission is explicit in its support for the Israeli war effort.

“In every war there are multiple fronts,” Ron Miasnik, a co-organizer of the Israel Tech Mission who invests for Bain Capital, told the Israeli business website CTech. “The attendees of this mission are here to help counter the war’s economic disruption. We are focused on supporting and helping rebuild Israel’s world-class tech industry.”

According to an online application for the trip, a screenshot of which was obtained by The Intercept, attendees on the trip will have to pay their own way. “Attendees will organize their own travel,” the application says. “Participants will cover their own trip cost.”

Israel Defense Forces and Right-Wing Politicians

On the trip, the delegation will spend time with Israel’s senior political leadership as well as military figures. The online trip application says attendees will “receive confidential military and political briefings from former Israeli Prime Minister Nafatali Bennett, as well as current Members of Knesset and senior military leaders.”

The group, according to the itinerary, is scheduled to meet with Israel Defense Forces, or IDF, soldiers on Tuesday before taking part in a “solidarity tech reception” drawing on figures as diverse as the Israeli NBA player and venture capitalist Omri Casspi to the CEO of Goldman Sachs Israel. (In response to a request for comment, Goldman Sach’s U.K. office said it had not heard back from its Israeli office.)

The Israel Tech Mission appears to have been organized by Itrek, a nonprofit based in New York whose logo appears on the itinerary and list of attendees. Itrek sponsors weeklong “Israel Treks” to build “appreciation for Israel among present and future leaders” so they can understand its “complex reality,” according to the group’s website. (Itrek did not respond to a request for comment.)

Israel boasts a robust tech sector. While pro-Israel figures have long touted the country’s reputation as a “start-up nation,” criticisms have emerged in recent years pointing to the role of Israel’s defense sector in creating talent and funding research that becomes the locus of tech projects — effectively profiting off Israel’s occupation of Palestine. The cyber specialists of the Israeli army’s Unit 8200, for instance, are known for creating successful start-ups, sometimes involved in security work and even alleged rights abuses.

Close relationships between Israel’s security state, its tech sector, and the U.S. technology community are common. Tesla CEO Elon Musk met with Netanyahu and top IDF officials last month to discuss “the security aspects of artificial intelligence,” according to a readout of the conversation. The Israeli–Palestinian magazine +972 reported last month that advances in artificial intelligence have allowed the Israeli military to generate targets more rapidly than ever before.

Israel Tech Mission attendees, for their part, are looking to support Israel’s tech sector.

“After October 7th, we feel it is critical for venture capital and technology business leaders to stand with Israel,” David Siegel, CEO of Meetup and co-organizer of the mission, said in a press release. “Our trip was oversubscribed for attendees. The technology community recognizes the heightened need for support as many Israeli entrepreneurs and their workforces are on the front lines as reservists.”

Harvard’s Massive Endowment

The attendee list for the Israel Tech Mission includes a diverse roster of investors and business leaders. Among those listed are top officials at companies working in stock trading such as Vstock Transfer, a stock transfer firm, and TIFIN, a financial technology investment firm that employs artificial intelligence. Investors from private equity funds like Apollo Global Management and Entrepreneur Partners are also slated to participate.

The attendee list also includes business officials like Ariel Boyman, a vice president at Mastercard; Steve Miller, chief financial officer at the glasses retailer Warby Parker; Michael Kohen, who leads the autonomy and automation platform at John Deere; and Jeffrey Swartz, the former CEO of Timberland. (Vstock, TIFIN, Apollo, Entrepreneur Partners, Mastercard, Warby Parker, John Deere, and Swartz did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Also listed as an attendee is Adam Goldstein, managing director at Harvard Management Company, which helps oversee Harvard University’s over $50 billion endowment — the largest on Earth. The endowment investment fund has been accused in the past of investing nearly $200 million in companies that profit off Israel’s illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian West Bank. (The Harvard Management Company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Elite Ivy League colleges have become a flash point in the U.S. debate about Israel’s war on Gaza. Harvard has faced a backlash from donors. Billionaire investor Bill Ackman, for instance, has become a strident critic of pro-Palestine students and what he says is the school’s lackluster response to them — a battle fueled by years of resentment. And Harvard President Claudine Gay has faced, and resisted, calls to resign because of her response to pro-Palestinian activism and alleged antisemitism on campus.

In recent years, the movement for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel has gained steam at the university. Last year, the student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, faced a backlash for its endorsement of the BDS campaign — which, if successful, would see Goldstein’s Harvard Management Company divest from Israel.

While Israel Tech Mission delegates are looking to boost the tech sector in Israel, the Israeli war on Gaza is also being used as a pitch for tech firms like NSO Group to improve their image back in the United States. The company was blacklisted by the U.S. when its phone-hacking software Pegasus was shown to be involved in rights abuses.

Lobbyists in Washington working for the company, which has faced cash shortages, have been using the Israeli war on Gaza to refurbish the company’s reputation. In November, the NSO lobbyists wrote to the U.S. State Department to make the case for “the importance of cyber intelligence technology in the wake of the grave security threats posed by the recent Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel and their aftermath.”

The post Harvard Endowment Investor and Other Business Leaders Take a Solidarity Trip to Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

Four years later, Altikriti, an Iraqi-born British citizen and vocal critic of the United Arab Emirates, is filing a report to the Metropolitan Police in London accusing the Israeli spyware firm NSO Group of complicity in the targeted hacking of his phone. On Wednesday, he filed the complaint about NSO and its associates alongside three fellow U.K.-based human rights defenders whose phones were also hacked.

“This case has some real legs,” said Leanna Burnard, a lawyer at the nonprofit Global Legal Action Network, who prepared the complaint. “The U.K. shouldn’t stand for the hacking of human rights defenders on its own soil.”

Assembled with the help of advocates from GLAN on behalf of the victims, the extensively footnoted filing sent to the Metropolitan Police, which was obtained by The Intercept, puts the ball in the police’s court. The police now have discretion over whether to open an investigation and subsequently bring charges.

“The U.K. shouldn’t stand for the hacking of human rights defenders on its own soil.”

“Due to regulatory constraints, we cannot confirm or deny any alleged specific customers,” Gil Lanier, vice president for global communications at NSO, told The Intercept. “NSO complies with all laws and regulations and sells its technologies exclusively to vetted intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Our customers use these technologies daily, as Pegasus continues to play a crucial role in thwarting terrorist activities, breaking up criminal rings, and saving thousands of lives.”

The Metropolitan Police declined to comment.

The U.S. blacklisted NSO in 2021 after its software was accused of enabling human rights abuses by the company’s authoritarian government clients. Amnesty International has said NSO was complicit in many of these phone hackings. 

The cyber spying firm, however, has never been sanctioned in the U.K., despite calls from members of Parliament. The failure to act was particularly jarring because the government itself had been a target of the software. In 2022, cybersecurity researchers at Citizen Lab said that the U.K. prime minister’s office and the Foreign Office likely had been victims of multiple Pegasus attacks, with the UAE as the main suspect. 

While prosecutors around the world have investigated criminal claims against NSO in countries, including Spain, Hungary, and Poland, so far there have been no formal charges.

The complaint against NSO to London police has been two years in the making, since lawyers began investigating the hackings victims on British soil. Lawyers on the case said they hoped the police report could lead to a landmark moment for human rights defenders who have been targeted. Altikriti, alongside the other complainants, certainly hopes so. 

“This has to be exposed,” he said. “We are now talking about a potential world where literally no one can ever claim to enjoy anything called privacy.”

Hacked on British Soil

Alongside Altikriti, the hacking victims include include Azzam Tamimi, a Palestinian-born British journalist and academic, a prominent critic of the Saudi regime; Mohammed Kozbar, a Lebanese-born British citizen and the leader of the Finsbury Park mosque; and Yusuf Al Jamri, a Bahraini human rights activist who was granted asylum in the U.K. All were hacked between 2018 and 2021 on British soil.

Their complaint to the police is being made against NSO Group and its board members; the firm’s parent company Luxembourg-based Q Cyber Technologies; London-based private equity firm Novalpina, which bought NSO in 2019. The human rights activists are alleging the people involved with NSO breached the U.K.’s Computer Misuse Act by enabling state actors to hack their phones using Pegasus. (Novalpina did not respond to a request for comment.)

The hackers in question are believed to be the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and the Kingdom of Bahrain. 

The U.K. recently became more significant to NSO’s operations. In 2023, the management of five NSO-linked companies was moved to London and two U.K.-based officers were appointed. 

Meanwhile, NSO continues to face a slew of civil cases in the U.S., with the company moving for dismissal in lawsuits by hacked Salvadoran journalists and Hanan Elatr Khashoggi, the widow of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi. 

Last week, Apple asked a court in San Francisco to dismiss its three-year hacking suit against NSO, after Israeli officials took files from NSO’s headquarters — an apparent attempt to frustrate lawsuits in the U.S. Apple argued it may now never be able to get the most critical files about Pegasus and that the revelation of its own defensive systems in court might aid other spyware companies. 

“NSO is very vigorously defending these lawsuits,” said Stephanie Krent, attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute. “It is trying to draw litigation out and really avoid being held to account.” 

“Absolute Non-reaction”

In July 2021, Altikriti was notified by The Guardian as part of its Pegasus Project that his number was on a leaked list of those suspected to be hacked. According to The Guardian, Altikriti’s phone number was on a list of people of interest to the UAE given to NSO. Altikriti was concerned but not surprised.

For many years, he had been vocally critical of the UAE, where he previously lived. The UAE designated his organization, the Cordoba Foundation — which works to promote dialogue and rapprochement between Islam and the West — as a terrorist group in 2014. In response, the organization issued a statement calling the country a “despotic regime seeking to silence any form of dissent.” He made similar declarations about the UAE over the following years. 

Around the time Altikriti was hacked in July 2020, he had been working on several hostage release deals, mainly in the Middle East. He alleges that phone hacking interfered with his communications related to one deal.

After he was notified of the potential hack, Altikriti’s phone was tested by Amnesty International and Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, which studies cyber issues affecting human rights. The hack was confirmed. Altikriti quickly went public about the cyberattack, posting a statement calling on the U.K. government to stand against the use of such spyware. Altikriti has since become increasingly frustrated by the lack of action. 

“You think that the U.K. Government, having seen a number of its own citizens and those on its lands being violated in the way that we have evidence now, would do something,” Altrikiti told The Intercept. “But so far we have seen an absolute non-reaction.” 

In 2022, Altikriti and Kozbar, one of the other human rights activists behind the complaint to police, sent a pre-claim notice to NSO, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, of their intention to file a civil suit over the alleged Pegasus phone hacking. In formal response letter obtained by The Intercept, NSO said there was “no basis for the claims.”

The company said that since Q Cyber Technologies Ltd and NSO Group Technologies Ltd are each lsraeli companies and neither was present in England and Wales, English courts had no jurisdiction over them. They also argued that the claims were barred by state immunity because, if the alleged attacks happened, they were conducted on behalf of foreign governments who are immune from prosecution.

In Wednesday’s complaint to police, other claimants have stories similar to Altikriti. Al Jamri was active on social media promoting awareness of human rights abuses and political issues in Bahrain. In 2011, he was politically active during the Arab Spring. In its wake, he was regularly subjected to interrogation and harassment by authorities. He was detained for the third time in August 2017 and subjected to torture. Upon his release, he sought asylum in the U.K. 

Two years later, Al Jamri was targeted with Pegasus by servers traced to Bahrain, according to Citizen Lab. This happened around the same time he was posting about an incident at the British Embassy of Bahrain, when a dissident was allegedly assaulted by staff. In August 2019, like Altikriti, Al Jamri was notified by The Guardian, and his phone was subsequently tested and confirmed to have infections. He also went public about the hack.

U.S. Lawsuits 

Despite Apple’s attempt to withdraw its case, NSO still faces a slew of lawsuits in the U.S. In October 2019, WhatsApp filed a lawsuit against the Israeli company for using its platform to hack the phones of 1,400 of the chat app’s users. NSO has repeatedly tried to get the case thrown out, including by claiming sovereign immunity — that it acted as an agent of foreign governments — though that effort was rejected in January. 

In November 2021, the same month NSO was blacklisted by the U.S. government for its role enabling human rights abuses, Apple also filed its case against NSO to hold it accountable for the surveillance and targeting of its users. On September 13, the company moved to dismiss its case, saying that Israeli officials’ seizure of NSO documents “were part of an unusual legal maneuver created by Israel to block the disclosure of information about Pegasus.” 

NSO is known to have a close relationship with the Israeli government, which it claims to have been working with during Israel’s war on Gaza. In November, in an attempt to rehabilitate its image, NSO sent an urgent letter to request a meeting with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and officials at the U.S. State Department, citing the threat of Hamas. 

In 2022, the Knight Institute filed its lawsuit on behalf of current and former journalists of El Faro, one of Central America’s leading independent news organizations, based in El Salvador. It was the first case filed by journalists against NSO in U.S. court. A judge dismissed the case in March, but it is currently on appeal. 

“We felt it was important that victims have access to courts in order to hold NSO Group to account,” said Krent, the Knight attorney. “At the end of the day, they are facing the most serious threats from the use of this spyware.”

The post These Human Rights Defenders Were Hacked by Pegasus. Now They Want Police to Charge the Spyware Maker. appeared first on The Intercept.

A day later, Columbia suspended two of the student groups who had co-sponsored the demonstration. Senior Executive Vice President Gerald Rosberg called it an “unauthorized event” that “proceeded despite warnings and included threatening rhetoric and intimidation.”

Now, those groups have sued the school. On Tuesday, the New York Civil Liberties Union and Palestine Legal filed a lawsuit against Columbia University, “for the unlawful suspension of its chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) for engaging in peaceful protest.” The groups seek reinstatement and a declaration that the school violated state law in carrying out the suspensions.

The suit — brought on behalf of the SJP and JVP chapters, as well as one Palestinian and one Jewish student — notes that the November 9 protest was “sponsored by a coalition comprised of over 20 groups,” and that nevertheless, the “two groups were given no notice of the planned suspensions and no opportunity to respond to the charges or to contest them. None of the other groups involved in the event faced disciplinary action.”

The plaintiffs draw attention to a “Special Committee on Campus Safety,” created in the aftermath of Hamas’s attack on October 7, which carried out the suspensions (Rosberg is its chair). They say that the suspended student groups, the university senate, and broader school community only learned of the committee’s existence after it took action. The suit adds “the Petitioner students had previously been warned by their student advisor about a so-called ‘protest-shutting-down committee’ that had been regularly meeting and purportedly waiting for SJP, especially, to make a wrong move.”

The suit notes that Rosberg told SJP and JVP in a November 30 meeting — also attended by other administrators, university senators, and faculty members — that they had not been suspended for a violation of the university code of conduct. According to the students, he did not specify what exactly accounted for the decision, or why it was conducted in such a public manner. “When pressed to specify which of the student groups’ actions constituted ‘threatening rhetoric and intimidation,’ VP Rosberg proffered that protestors’ accusations that Israel was ‘a racist state committing genocide’ and ‘is an apartheid state’ could upset some people and ‘seem … like an incitement of violence,’” the suit reads. (In December, students confronted Rosberg, asking him, “Are Palestinians human?” He responded, “I refuse to be intimidated.”)

“Clearly, Columbia has the capacity to act quickly to enact unilateral policy changes and take extreme actions, but only insofar as they can preserve the interests of their investments in Israel and their donors.”

Columbia declined to comment on the pending litigation. The university still has an open investigation into a January protest on campus where pro-Palestinian students were attacked with chemicals. Students maintained to The Intercept that the university had disregarded their complaints about the attack at the protest. The demonstration had also been labeled “unsanctioned.”

“It was incredibly frustrating to see a ‘Special Committee on Campus Safety’ weaponize the notion of safety to restrict dissent when, in doing so, they in fact compromised the safety of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian students,” one of the plaintiffs, Maryam Alwan, told The Intercept. “Clearly, Columbia has the capacity to act quickly to enact unilateral policy changes and take extreme actions, but only insofar as they can preserve the interests of their investments in Israel and their donors — not when it comes to the physical safety of pro-Palestinian students.”

Penn Sued to Block “Witch Hunt”

At the University of Pennsylvania, meanwhile, campus affiliates are also taking their school to court. Penn Faculty for Justice in Palestine — made up of professors, staff, and graduate students — filed a legal complaint on Saturday pressing the university to not hand over teaching files, emails, and other documents to the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. (Penn did not respond to a request for comment on the complaint.)

The committee is investigating what it claims is “rampant antisemitism” on college campuses, namely Ivy League schools like Penn and Harvard University, as well as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It’s the same committee — with Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., at the helm — that held hearings in December that led to the resignation of Penn President Elizabeth Magill and Harvard’s Claudine Gay.

The Penn faculty group said, “The Committee is engaged in a partisan witch hunt by seeking syllabi, academic papers, and other material from Penn faculty of all ranks, with the search highlighting keywords like Jew, Israel, antisemitism, Palestine, Gaza, resistance, settler colonialism and diversity, equity and inclusion, to name most of their criteria.”

The “would-be McCarthyesque House of Representatives is behaving as if it never heard of the First Amendment,” the complaint continues. The faculty members cited the passage of House Resolution 894 — which equates anti-Zionism with antisemitism — and the fact that the committee is seeking to obtain student information deemed confidential under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.

Plaintiff Eve Troutt Powell, a professor of Middle Eastern history at Penn, told The Intercept that the university was in a difficult position, being under attack from Congress and donor pressure, but that the school should have stood firm. “We have been doxxed and we have been harassed and the university has promised it would protect us,” she said, “but we now understand that the university has been giving over documents, perhaps in hopes that this congressional committee will not subpoena the university, and we don’t accept it.”

Troutt Powell noted that Penn faculty and students are already feeling pressure after Magill’s resignation and from statements by Marc Rowan, the billionaire CEO of private equity firm Apollo Global Management, who is chair of the board of advisers of the university’s Wharton School of Business.

Rowan has advanced an assault on academic freedom at Penn, all while smearing its students for their views on Israel. He suggested the university eliminate certain departments — including the arts and sciences school — and revise policies surrounding hiring and campus speech. He has derided students as antisemitic for using the phrase “from the river to the sea,” while at the same time calling them ignorant: “If you ask these kids what river and what sea, they don’t know. Who lives between the river and the sea? They don’t know. How did they get there? They don’t know,” he said at the Economic Club of Washington last month.

Rowan is also among the “critical Penn donors” who shelled out tens of thousands of dollars in January to Foxx, the Virginia House member, after her crusade against colleges including Penn began.

“We’re not hearing enough of a response” from the school administration, Troutt Powell said. “I feel like I wouldn’t tell a graduate student to come here if you’re going to work on Middle East stuff. I’m worried about my junior colleagues very much and I’ve never seen a university go from safe to unsafe so quickly.”

A week after Magill’s resignation in December, and in response to comments by Rowan, over 900 school faculty signed a letter railing against “attempts by trustees, donors, and other external actors to interfere with our academic policies and to undermine academic freedom.”

The lawsuit takes this a step further, asking a judge to issue an injunction to stop the university from cooperating with the House investigation.

Faculty for Justice in Palestine said, “Penn FJP hopes that this lawsuit will encourage Penn to … protect its faculty from a committee that forced the resignation of former president M. Liz Magill — for the first time in both the House Congressional Committee’s history and that of the university.”

The post More Than 20 Student Groups Protested. A Lawsuit Asks Why Columbia Only Suspended Two. appeared first on The Intercept.

Some members of the Columbia University community, however, leapt at the chance to get young people they claim are “supporters of Hamas” detained and deported. Several people on a large WhatsApp group, Columbia Alumni for Israel — which counts over 1,000 members, including parents, at least one current student, and Columbia professors — welcomed Trump’s plan.

Deporting Gaza protesters was already a topic of conversation in the Columbia Alumni for Israel group before Trump’s order came down. On the president’s first day in office, group members shared flyers advertising a pro-Palestine January 21 walkout to push the school to drop disciplinary actions against anti-war protesters.

“Identifying the Columbia student-Hamas-sympathizers who show up is key to deporting those with student visas,” former Columbia’s Teachers College assistant professor Lynne Bursky-Tammam said in the chat, according to screenshots from the WhatsApp group obtained by The Intercept.

Victor Muslin, another alumnus and pro-Israel activist, responded: “If there are photos of someone who needs to be identified (even with a partially obscured face) I have access to tech that may be able to help. DM me.”

Within a few days another member posted a link to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement tip line and wrote, “Let’s get to work.”

In late January, a group member shared an article about students who spray-painted a building and put cement in a sewage line to protest the anniversary of Israel’s killing of 6-year-old Hind Rajab. Bursky-Tammam responded to the article and questioned who was funding the protesters, adding, “Arresting them for hate crimes is not enough. We have to get rid of them.” (Bursky-Tammam declined to comment.)

The activities of the chat group, which formed in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 attack, come amid a wider campaign to crack down on dissent over Israel’s war on Gaza. Columbia has disciplined and suspended protesters — helping to create an environment that has fomented attacks using the courts, among other tactics. Members of the pro-Israel WhatsApp group, whose identities were confirmed by The Intercept using their phone numbers, were of a piece with these efforts, discussing how to report people to law enforcement, including the FBI.

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With Trump taking the Oval Office, right-wing pro-Israel activists have focused their energy on using his draconian immigration policies to deal with Israel’s critics, including efforts to paint international student protesters as terrorists to have their visas revoked.

“It’s very disturbing that the alumni and parents are doing this,” said Abed Ayoub, executive director of the civil rights group the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. “Really, it’s an across-the-board attempt to silence and take away the First Amendment right of people simply because they don’t agree with them. It’s a very dangerous precedent.”

Critics of the school’s policies toward protesters say Columbia administrators have done little to intervene with attacks on students and faculty. On Thursday, two Columbia professors wrote an op-ed demanding that the school to condemn calls to deport its students.

“The Palestine exception to the First Amendment, to our right to free speech, has been something that’s been ongoing for so many years,” said Sabiya Ahamed, a staff attorney at the civil liberties group Palestine Legal, which filed a complaint about anti-Palestinian discrimination at Columbia that led to a federal investigation.

The success of offensives against pro-Palestine students and faculty on campuses across the country today stands as a testament to how far administrators have let pro-Israel advocates take their attacks, Ayoub said. And those efforts started before Trump took office.

“These universities have been laying the groundwork for whatever Trump wants to do. This targeting of the students did not begin once Trump was inaugurated. This began last year,” he said. “It began when they started targeting the students, putting them in disciplinary process, disciplinary proceedings, calling law enforcement and police to college campuses and putting the students in harm’s way.”

“We Have a List”

As campus protests grew in response to Israel’s assault on Gaza, the “Columbia Alumni for Israel” WhatsApp group kicked into overdrive. It soon became a hub for efforts to identify student and faculty protesters, claim they have links to Hamas, and discuss reporting them to the school or law enforcement agencies for alleged antisemitic activity — which, for the pro-Israel activists, includes anti-Zionist speech.

Screenshots from the group show its members frequently singling out Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim student activists, including some who have already faced disciplinary action. Faculty and other students, including Jewish student leaders, also land in the group’s crosshairs. Several messages show chat members discussing how to make reports to law enforcement, including contacting New York police and the FBI.

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The Far-Right Group Building a List of Pro-Palestine Activists to Deport

Several of the students named in the WhatsApp group have also been targeted by name by groups like Canary Mission, which publishes profiles of students involved in anti-Zionist activism, or in social media posts by the group “Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus at Columbia U,” which at least one chat member is involved in. One student mentioned in the chat was also named in a Twitter post from the Zionist group Betar, which last month sent a list of students it wants deported to the White House and federal agencies including ICE. (Students and faculty targeted in the screenshots from the chat declined to comment. The Intercept is withholding their names to protect them from any possible harassment.)

How Columbia has responded to the group’s activities, if at all, is unclear. Several group members have referenced meetings or correspondence with school administrators, including Columbia’s interim president, trustees, donors, and executive vice presidents.

“There are reasons why some of these efforts are not public,” wrote Heather Krasna, an associate dean of career services at Columbia, referencing meetings with top Columbia administrators. “For example, if certain efforts were publicized, specific individuals would possible [sic] be fired.” Krasna, whose handle on the WhatsApp group was simply the letter “H,” raised the possibility that their “efforts would backfire by giving pro-Hamas faculty political weapons by claiming external forces are trying to influence the university or squash free speech; a lot is happening that is confidential for these and other reasons.” (Krasna declined to respond to questions.)

Beyond pushing the school to target individual students and faculty — including calls to remove two deans — members of the WhatsApp group have also strategized how to best build cases to paint student protesters as “supporters of Hamas.”

Trump vowed to “quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses” in a January 30 White House fact sheet published alongside his executive order. Like Trump, the WhatsApp group members regularly refer to opposition to the war on Gaza as sympathy or support for Hamas.

At one point, a group member pointed to an issue with only targeting foreign students: “And then there’s the problem that most of the students protesting are US citizens and cannot be deported.”

Bursky-Tammam, the former Columbia professor, also addressed how pro-Palestine U.S. citizens could be targeted. “If anyone can trace any of their funding to terror organizations, not a simple task, they can be arrested on grounds of providing ‘material support’ for terror organizations,” she wrote, referring to the Hind Rajab protest. “That is the key to getting these U.S. citizen supporters of Hamas, etc. arrested.”

Even before Trump’s executive order, Muslin, the Columbia alumnus, sent a message asking how to identify whether foreign students were on visas, and therefore eligible for removal.

“How does anyone know whether any given troublemaker is in fact a foreigner or on a visa (or not on a visa, given that Biden opened the border)?” Muslin also wrote, echoing a false right-wing claim about former President Joe Biden’s immigration policy.

Muslin, a technology executive, has been vocal in pushing colleges to treat criticism of Israel’s actions as examples of antisemitism. He founded CU-Monitor, an online platform that tracks anti-Zionism on campus. He also helps maintain the digital archive for the group Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus at Columbia U, which gathers reports of alleged antisemitic incidents. When one chat participant asked whether any members had connections to Canary Misson, another user replied, “Victor is an honorary bird.” (Muslin did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

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Last October, WhatsApp group administrator and Aliya Capital CEO Ari Shrage asked the group for help to “identify students who were protesting” and leaders of groups affiliated with the coalition Columbia University Apartheid Divest. Shrage, who co-founded the Columbia Jewish Alumni Association, wrote, “We have a list and need people to do some research.” Last month, he praised Trump’s executive order targeting campus protesters.

Among Jewish students targeted by the pro-Israel activists, particular ire was reserved for Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Zionist group whose Columbia chapter was already banned from campus. In one screenshot, a group member referred to members of JVP as “kapos,” a slur referencing Jewish prisoners forced to work as guards in Nazi concentration camps. At one point, following an opinion piece in the school paper by JVP members, Muslin asked for information about students involved in the group.

“Does anyone have a list of JVP members, especially group leaders or a way to get it,” Muslin wrote.

Another member responded: “My daughter will send me a list shortly,”

After the names were sent, Muslin was unsatisfied.

“Thank you. But we need more than theee [sic] random names of potentially low ranked members,” he wrote. “We need to hold leaders responsible for this antisemitic op-ed in the Spec. And we need to hold all members accountable for their membership in this despicable organization. Are club membership lists secret? How does one obtain a list of members in the official Columbia student club?”

Friends in High Places

Discussions in the group, which includes several people with teaching positions at Columbia, have also focused on efforts to communicate with school administrators and donors about the Columbia’s handling of campus speech.

In a discussion in late 2023 about how to get donors like the billionaire football team owner Robert Kraft to influence the school’s actions, Shrage wrote: “Robert is well aware of the situation.” Kraft announced last April that he would withdraw financial support from Columbia over its handling of the protests. Another group member shared a screenshot of Kraft’s contact card and said his friend knew Kraft personally and that he would reach out and report back with any information.

Gil Zussman, the chair of Columbia’s department of electrical engineering, along with Columbia Business School professors Ran Kivetz and Shai Davidai, are members of the WhatsApp group. Davidai became famous for his tirades against Gaza protests and has been accused by numerous students of online harassment. At one point, Kivetz shared a petition urging the removal of a dean over public comments at the school’s convocation last year. (Davidai, who was suspended from the Columbia campus after he posted videos of his confrontations with university staff online, declined to be interviewed without a video call. Kivetz did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.)

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Zussman is a member of the school’s antisemitism task force, which was formed in November 2023 amid the protests. The task force, stacked with vocal supporters of Israel, has pushed the university to include expressions of anti-Zionism under its definition of antisemitism. Zussman regularly participates in the WhatsApp group by posting news stories, sharing his social media posts, and asking people to save protest material for an archive at the school. (Zussman did not respond to a request for comment.)

In July, Columbia alumnus Ilya Koffman told the group he had scheduled a meeting the following week with the university’s endowment arm on behalf of his private equity firm. “My initial instinct was to politely tell them we don’t want their money and explain why,” Koffman wrote, but he realized “it may be more effective to take the meeting and challenge them on what’s going on at Columbia and what, if anything, the investment arm of the endowment can and should do about it.” Koffman asked the group for any suggested questions or points. (Koffman declined to comment.)

Last April, more than 1,600 people including high-profile Columbia alumni and donors signed an open letter calling on President Minouche Shafik to clear encampments and discipline student protesters. Shafik stepped down last August amid pressure over her handling of the protests. Shrage, one of the WhatsApp group admins, wrote to the group on May 1 that he had co-authored the letter with Lisa Carnoy, a Columbia trustee emerita and current member of one of the board of visitors of the school’s Center for American Studies. (Carnoy did not respond to a request for comment.)

The alumni and donors wrote the letter “to keep pressure on the university,” Shrage said in the WhatsApp group. “Lisa hired Minouche and was former co- chair of the board,” he added, referring to Carnoy and Shafik. In another message to the group in November, Shrage wrote that Columbia alumnus David Friedman, a Trump adviser and former ambassador to Israel, was one of the first 22 people to sign the letter.

When the group member wrote in February about efforts to influence Columbia’s handling of campus speech “that are not public information” including “meetings with the Interim President,” Shrage replied and added that some of those efforts would not go public.

“A lot has already been done,” he wrote. “Multiple lawsuit, [sic] congressional hearings, meetings with influential (now former) donors, meetings and calls with people in DC, dozens and dozens of newspaper articles, an entire database of information that has been used by Congress and lawyers.”

Shrage added, “much much more that is not public information that likely will never become public info. We are all frustrated but much has been done and working together makes us all stronger.” Shrage declined to speak to The Intercept on the record.

Normalizing the Crackdown

In the past, Columbia opposed moves by the federal government that impacted foreign students. The school took part in litigation against ICE restrictions affecting international students in 2020 and issued a statement denouncing Trump’s order barring immigrants from several Muslim countries in 2017.

Lee Bollinger, the president of the university at the time, wrote that while it was important for the school to avoid political or ideological stances, it had a responsibility to step forward “when policies and state action conflict with its fundamental values, and especially when they bespeak purposes and a mentality that are at odds with our basic mission.”

For the WhatsApp group members who seek deportations and terrorism charges, the school’s actions against pro-Palestine students are regularly described as grossly insufficient. Palestine Legal’s Ahamed said, however, that the actions of groups like Columbia Alumni for Israel are aided by the school’s own crackdown on pro-Palestine protests.

“All of these things that the university has been doing has been normalizing the fact that it is wrong to say something about Palestine, it is against our policies to protest for Palestine,” she said. “That is the kind of message that the university has been sending. So it’s not that surprising then that you see these sorts of WhatsApp groups. And people feel comfortable being a part of a group like that.”

The post The Columbia Network Pushing Behind the Scenes to Deport and Arrest Student Protesters appeared first on The Intercept.

In a companywide email on January 12, Mark Layden, the chief executive of Bonterra, the new merged company created by the private equity firm, notified staff that, in its pursuit of “long-term, efficient growth,” 10 percent of the company would be let go. Within the next several minutes, people who were laid off received emails telling them that they no longer had a job. Numerous employees shared their experiences on social media.

“Went to get coffee, by the time I came back to my comp I was locked out of all of the systems,” one Bonterra employee wrote on Twitter. “Folks lose jobs everyday but there was a better way. This was just tacky and apathetic.” Even some of those who kept their jobs announced their dissatisfaction; one tweeted the lack of warning was “just incredibly vile.”

At NGP VAN — one of the two major organizations that run the Democratic Party’s vaunted organizing, voter file, and compliance tools — and EveryAction, the fundraising software company it operates under, some 40 people lost their jobs in the layoffs.

For some employees and strategists, the layoff announcement was confirmation of exactly what they had feared from the start: that the private equity firm, Apax, would try to maximize revenue by cutting costs, firing people, and effectively hollowing out the acquired companies with potentially drastic implications for the Democratic Party and liberal organizations that rely on NGP VAN and EveryAction.

“NGP VAN having a reduced staff will make it harder for us to do our jobs,” said one current NGP VAN employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional reprisal.

“NGP VAN having a reduced staff will make it harder for us to do our jobs.”

The cost cutting could have unintended consequences for the Democratic Party, said progressive strategist Gabe Tobias.

“There are no nefarious purposes necessarily, like that they don’t want Democrats to win,” he said. “I don’t think they care. But what happens if they just start degrading service? No one can do anything about it. Everything sits inside of VAN, and almost everyone uses the other services they have.”

While NGP VAN was one of the companies merged into Bonterra during the private equity purchase, it remained a standalone brand and has the monopoly on campaign tools and compliance reporting software for the Democratic Party, including its database of coveted Democratic National Committee voter file information. Loyal Democrats in the NGP VAN orbit fear the job cuts — across NGP VAN and EveryAction’s product, data services, client support, and sales departments — could hamper the entire party’s efforts.

While cuts across multiple departments are typical in layoffs, the current employee said, NGP VAN is in a unique position. “We also happen to be a near-monopoly for the Democratic Party software and provide products/services to many labor unions and nonprofits,” they said. “It shouldn’t be owned by a British private equity firm and led by a nonpolitical ‘social good’ tech company.”

NGP VAN EveryAction Workers Union, under the Communications Workers of America, represented some of those laid off. In a tweet last week, the union wrote, “We fear the direction of our union-built platform—the largest database for Democrats, large unions, and many progressive nonprofits—under private equity. So should you.”

In early December, NGP VAN’s general manager, Chelsea Peterson, wrote a blog post offering assurances that, despite recent changes to the company, NGP VAN was “in it for the long haul” and that the company remains committed to serving in the progressive political tech space.

“The fact that Chelsea had to write a blog post saying NGP is ‘safe’ shows it’s not,” said one former NGP VAN employee who left prior to the layoffs and requested anonymity to protect their livelihood. “The question no one is asking in the Democratic community is: Is private equity the best place for this data? Are they vulnerable to these types of cuts with no rhyme or reason? How does this affect the infrastructure?”

The former staffer raised the organizations that worked with NGP VAN: the Democratic National Committee; the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, its fundraising arm for the House; and other political action groups and advocates that spend on campaigns all rely on NGP VAN’s technology — “all of these groups have invested millions into this organization,” the staffer said.

For Democrats, that infrastructure is of paramount importance. Where once several smaller shops ran the party’s fundraising and campaign technology, many of the most prominent firms — ActionKit, Mobilize, Salsa Labs, and Blue State — were acquired by NGP VAN and EveryAction. (In 2019, EveryAction acquired ActionKit, a service that The Intercept uses for its email newsletters and fundraising.)

Now Apax, a private equity group with a broad portfolio of companies and both Democratic and Republican donors among its partners, has bought the whole operation and merged it with other acquisitions as Bonterra. (The DNC, DCCC, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which also uses EveryAction and NGP VAN, did not respond to requests for comment.)

Apax is a buyout firm, the former staffer said, “which is not inherently bad — but let’s be honest — they didn’t buy NGP/EveryAction/Salsa etc. out of pure altruism.”

“People often ask me — what’s the famous CEO question — like what keeps you up at night? I want you to know nothing keeps me up at night. I sleep like a baby.”

Another current NGP VAN employee, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, said that Bonterra had internally discussed failing to reach its target growth numbers at the end of the last quarter. When staff asked about potential layoffs during a question-and-answer session, they said, management “gave a deflection non-answer.”

According to a transcript of a December meeting obtained by The Intercept, Layden, the newly appointed CEO, was asked about his priorities in his new role. “People often ask me — what’s the famous CEO question — like what keeps you up at night? I want you to know nothing keeps me up at night. I sleep like a baby. It’s just [as] if I have no conscience.” (Bonterra declined to comment.)

In early December, Bonterra announced that then-CEO Erin Mulligan Nelson would be leaving the company and that Layden had been appointed interim CEO. “Erin was widely liked and admired, and her departure was announced unceremoniously,” the employee said, speculating that the former CEO was “unwilling to play ball with private equity.”

As other left-leaning and progressive organizations go through similar shifts, Democrats are concerned about the health of the party’s infrastructure ahead of 2024 elections.

Democratic and progressive organizations that use EveryAction and NGP VAN should collectively demand investment in its services, said Tobias, the progressive strategist. “Either this company who now owns this thing promises us, signs agreements with us that they won’t cut costs, that they won’t degrade services, or we invest in alternatives,” he said. “It’s probably both, but it’s certainly not neither — which is what’s happening right now.”

The post Inside the Slow Implosion of the Democratic Party’s Vaunted Campaign Tech Firm appeared first on The Intercept.

That question, which has lurked behind the defamation lawsuit Dominion Voting Systems filed against Fox News, was answered today in an unsurprising fashion: no.

Fox and Dominion reached a $787.5 million settlement just moments before opening arguments were set to begin in the Delaware trial. A jury had been selected, and everyone was preparing for what seemed likely to be a six-week trial that would scrutinize Fox’s broadcasting of false conspiracy theories that Dominion machines stole votes from then-President Donald Trump in 2020. Dominion was seeking $1.6 billion in damages from Fox.

The settlement is not a total shocker. Just days ago, there was a flurry of speculation that Fox wanted to settle, with the goal of avoiding a court’s verdict that it had lied with malice when it aired false accusations — from its hosts and guests like Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani — that Dominion had tried to rig the presidential election.

The settlement is unlikely to be welcomed by Fox critics who believed that a guilty verdict would serve a mortal blow to the network’s reputation. The idea was that Fox, on the ropes, should not be allowed to slip away by writing a settlement check and mumbling an insincere apology. As a headline from The New Republic pleaded amid the settlement rumors a few days ago, “Don’t Settle, Dominion! Drag Fox News Across the Coals.” It argued that with a guilty verdict, “we will be able to say, with a certainty we can’t quite claim now, that Fox News lies.”

Dominion does not exist to serve the public interest. It is a for-profit company owned by a small private equity firm.

But Dominion does not exist to serve the public interest or liberal magazines. It is a for-profit company owned by Staple Street Capital, a small private equity firm. Staple Street has fewer than 50 employees and claims $900 million of assets under management (a modest amount in its industry). It was founded in 2009 by Hootan Yaghoobzadeh and Stephen D. Owens, who previously worked at Carlyle Group and Cerberus Capital Management, giants in private equity. Yaghoobzadeh and Owens graduated from Harvard Business School and have no records of political donations or political activity; they are business people, not pro-democracy agitators.

The size of the settlement represents a windfall on Staple Street’s investment in Dominion: Its controlling stake cost just $38.3 million in 2018, according to a filing in the case. While Dominion’s lawsuit has attracted an enormous amount of attention, it’s actually not a large company, as the market for its vote-counting services is limited; its expected revenues in 2022 were just $98 million, according to the filing.

While Dominion and Staple Street have not explained why they agreed to the settlement, the rationale is pretty clear. Their case was strong, but it wasn’t certain that a jury would deliver as much as they were seeking, and it also was not certain how quickly they might see any award, as Fox would likely appeal. The owners of Staple Street — along with John Poulos, who is Dominion’s chief executive and has a 12 percent stake in the firm — were unlikely to have been strapped for cash before the settlement, but now their companies will reap an immediate and significant bounty. In its discovery efforts, Fox unearthed a text message from a former Staple Street employee to a current executive that noted, “Would be pretty unreal if you guys like 20x’d your Dominion investment with these lawsuits.”

Speaking to reporters after the settlement was announced, a lawyer for Dominion, Justin Nelson, said, “The truth matters. Lies have consequences.” A statement from Fox said, “We acknowledge the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion to be false.”

It’s not uncommon for a company to turn its back on the public good for the sake of enriching its owners (a transaction that’s traditionally known as maximizing shareholder value). That’s essentially what happened, for instance, when Twitter’s board eagerly decided to sell the company to Elon Musk for the generous sum of $44 billion. The board lunged at the lucrative transaction even though it was widely predicted that Musk would diminish the usefulness of the social media site, which has indeed happened (Musk recently admitted the company is now worth half as much as he paid for it).

Triumph of American Capitalism

The discovery process that preceded the trial’s opening was a nightmare for Fox, because it exposed in detail the levels of deceit practiced by hosts and executives as they pumped out the conspiracy theory that Trump actually won the 2020 election. But those disclosures appear to have had zero impact on the network’s ratings, which remain strong. While Fox’s reputation is at rock bottom with its critics, its viewers have remained loyal, and it’s not clear that a jury’s verdict would have influenced them any more than the bounty of evidence that emerged in discovery. It’s pretty certain, however, that a settlement will have even less sway.

The high hopes that were riding on the trial reflected the exasperated state of the longtime — and so far unsuccessful — effort to counteract the deceptive and racist programming that has been Fox’s hallmark since its founding in 1996 by Rupert Murdoch, who is now 92 years old and oversees the network with his eldest son, Lachlan (both were deposed and were expected to testify in the trial). Despite years of criticism from journalists and politicians — Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., memorably described Fox as a “hate-for-profit racket” — the network has prospered. While most advertisers have fled its airwaves, Fox remains profitable because the bulk of its income consists of exorbitant payments from cable and satellite providers (so-called carriage fees). Despite several years of attempts to pressure those companies, there has been little success, though a renewed push is underway.

“Cable and satellite providers have to stop paying Fox News the carrying fees that are really Fox’s bread and butter, far more than ad revenue,” noted The New Republic. “If the jury finds against Fox, pressure must mount for that to end as well.”

These hopes, while widely held among Fox’s detractors, constitute the kind of magical thinking that circled around earlier efforts to undo the lies and violence of the Trump era. Just as the investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller failed to deliver the knockout blow that was hoped for by its supporters, the now-settled lawsuit filed by Dominion is unlikely to alter the nature of Fox News, as the network has escaped the legal, moral, and financial punishment of a judicial verdict. We probably shouldn’t be surprised by this outcome: One terrible limb of American capitalism was always unlikely to save us from another terrible limb.

The post Dominion Was Never Going to Save Our Democracy From Fox News appeared first on The Intercept.