Federal prosecutors have filed a new indictment in response to a July 4 noise demonstration outside the Prairieland ICE detention facility in Alvarado, Texas, during which a police officer was shot.

There are numerous problems with the indictment, but perhaps the most glaring is its inclusion of charges against a Dallas artist who wasn’t even at the protest. Daniel “Des” Sanchez is accused of transporting a box that contained “Antifa materials” after the incident, supposedly to conceal evidence against his wife, Maricela Rueda, who was there.

But the boxed materials aren’t Molotov cocktails, pipe bombs, or whatever MAGA officials claim “Antifa” uses to wage its imaginary war on America. As prosecutors laid out in the July criminal complaint that led to the indictment, they were zines and pamphlets. Some contain controversial ideas — one was titled “Insurrectionary Anarchy” — but they’re fully constitutionally protected free speech. The case demonstrates the administration’s intensifying efforts to criminalize left-wing activists after Donald Trump announced in September that he was designating “Antifa” as a “major terrorist organization” — a legal designation that doesn’t exist for domestic groups — following the killing of Charlie Kirk.

Sanchez was first indicted in October on charges of “corruptly concealing a document or record” as a standalone case, but the new indictment merges his charges with those against the other defendants, likely in hopes of burying the First Amendment problems with the case against him under prosecutors’ claims about the alleged shooting.

It’s an escalation of a familiar tactic. In 2023, Georgia prosecutors listed “zine” distribution as part of the conspiracy charges against 61 Stop Cop City protesters in a sprawling RICO indictment that didn’t bother to explain how each individual defendant was involved in any actual crime. I wrote back then about my concern that this wasn’t just sloppy overreach, but also a blueprint for censorship. Those fears have now been validated by Sanchez’s prosecution solely for possessing similar literature.

There have been other warnings that cops and prosecutors think they’ve found a constitutional loophole — if you can’t punish reporting it, punish transporting it. Los Angeles journalist Maya Lau is suing the LA County Sheriff’s Department for secretly investigating her for conspiracy, theft of government property, unlawful access of a computer, burglary, and receiving stolen property. According to her attorneys, her only offense was reporting on a list of deputies with histories of misconduct for the Los Angeles Times.

It’s also reminiscent of the Biden administration’s case against right-wing outlet Project Veritas for possessing and transporting Ashley Biden’s diary, which the organization bought from a Florida woman later convicted of stealing and selling it. The Constitution protects the right to publish materials stolen by others — a right that would be meaningless if they couldn’t possess the materials in the first place.

Despite the collapses of the Cop City prosecution and the Lau investigation — and its own dismissal of the Project Veritas case — the Trump administration has followed those dangerous examples, characterizing lawful activism and ideologies as terrorist conspiracies (a strategy Trump allies also floated during this first term) to seize the power to prosecute pamphlet possession anytime they use the magic word “Antifa.”

That’s a chilling combination for any journalist, activist, or individual who criticizes Trump. National security reporters have long dealt with the specter of prosecution under the archaic Espionage Act for merely obtaining government secrets from sources, particularly after the Biden administration extracted a guilty plea from WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. But the rest of the press — and everyone else, for that matter — understood that merely possessing written materials, no matter what they said, is not a crime.

Guilt by Literature

At what point does a literary collection or newspaper subscription become prosecutorial evidence under the Trump administration’s logic? Essentially, whenever it’s convenient. The vagueness is a feature, not a bug. When people don’t know which political materials might later be deemed evidence of criminality, the safest course is to avoid engaging with controversial ideas altogether.

The slippery slope from anarchist zines to conventional journalism isn’t hypothetical, and we’re already sliding fast. Journalist Mario Guevara can tell you that from El Salvador, where he was deported in a clear case of retaliation for livestreaming a No Kings protest. So can Tufts doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, as she awaits deportation proceedings for co-writing an opinion piece critical of Israel’s wars that the administration considers evidence of support for terrorism.

At least two journalists lawfully in the U.S. — Ya’akub Ira Vijandre and Sami Hamdi — were nabbed by ICE just last month. The case against Vijandre is partially based on his criticism of prosecutorial overreach in the Holy Land Five case and his liking social media posts that quote Quranic verses, raising the question of how far away we are from someone being indicted for transporting a Quran or a news article critical of the war on terror.

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Sanchez’s case is prosecutorial overreach stacked on more prosecutorial overreach. The National Lawyers Guild criticized prosecutors’ tenuous dot-connecting to justify holding 18 defendants responsible for one gunshot wound. Some defendants were also charged with supporting terrorism due to their alleged association with “Antifa.” Anarchist zines were cited as evidence against them, too.

Sanchez was charged following a search that ICE proclaimed on social media turned up “literal insurrectionist propaganda” he had allegedly transported from his home to an apartment, noting that “insurrectionary anarchism is regarded as the most serious form of domestic (non-jihadi) terrorist threat.” The tweet also said that Sanchez is a green card holder granted legal status through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

The indictment claims Sanchez was transporting those materials to conceal them because they incriminated his wife. But how can possession of literature incriminate anyone, let alone someone who isn’t even accused of anything but being present when someone else allegedly fired a gun? Zines aren’t contraband; it’s not illegal to be an anarchist or read about anarchism. I don’t know why Sanchez allegedly moved the box of documents, but if it was because he (apparently correctly) feared prosecutors would try to use them against his wife, that’s a commentary on prosecutors’ lawlessness, not Sanchez’s.

Violent rhetoric is subject to punishment only when it constitutes a “true threat” of imminent violence. Even then, the speaker is held responsible, not anyone merely in possession of their words.

Government prosecutors haven’t alleged the “Antifa materials” contained any “true threats,” or any other category of speech that falls outside the protection of the First Amendment. Nor did they allege that the materials were used to plan the alleged actions of protesters on July 4 (although they did allege that the materials were “anti-government” and “anti-Trump”).

Even the aforementioned “Insurrectionary Anarchy: Organizing for Attack” zine, despite its hyperbolic title, reads like a think piece, not a how-to manual. It advocates for tactics like rent strikes and squatting, not shooting police officers. Critically, it has nothing to do with whether Sanchez’s wife committed crimes on July 4.

Being guilty of possessing literature is a concept fundamentally incompatible with a free society. We don’t need a constitutional right to publish (or possess) only what the government likes, and the “anti-government” literature in Sanchez’s box of zines is exactly what the First Amendment protects. With history and leaders like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán as a guide, we also know it’s highly unlikely that Trump’s censorship crusade will stop with a few radical pamphlets.

The Framers Loved Zines

There’s an irony in a supposedly conservative administration treating anti-government pamphlets as evidence of criminality. Many of the publications the Constitution’s framers had in mind when they authored the First Amendment’s press freedom clause bore far more resemblance to Sanchez’s box of zines than to the output of today’s mainstream news media.

Revolutionary-era America was awash in highly opinionated, politically radical literature. Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” was designed to inspire revolution against the established government. Newspapers like the Boston Gazette printed inflammatory writings by Samuel Adams and others urging the colonies to prepare for war after the Coercive Acts. The Declaration of Independence itself recognized the right of the people to rise up. It did not assume the revolution of the time would be the last one.

One might call it “literal insurrectionist propaganda” — and some of it was probably transported in boxes.

The framers enshrined press freedom not because they imagined today’s professionally trained journalists maintaining careful neutrality. They protected it because they understood firsthand the need for journalists and writers who believed their government had become tyrannical to espouse revolution.

For all their many faults, the framers were confident enough in their ideas that they were willing to let them be tested. If the government’s conduct didn’t call for radical opposition, then radical ideas wouldn’t catch on. It sure looks like the current administration doesn’t want to make that bet.

The post The Feds Want to Make It Illegal to Even Possess an Anarchist Zine appeared first on The Intercept.

The welcome was so warm it could’ve been the first day of school for a new class of kindergarteners, and with the so-called reporters’ level of skepticism for the administration, they might as well have been.

“I would also like to take a moment today to welcome all of you here to the Pentagon briefing room as official new members of the Pentagon press corps. We’re glad to have you,” Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson said in her December 2 briefing. “This is the beginning of a new era.”

Wilson also said that “legacy media chose to self-deport from this building,” a cute way of noting that dozens of news organizations — among them the New York Times, the Washington Post, the major broadcast news outlets, and even Fox News and Newsmax — gave up their press passes rather than sign on to the administration’s blatantly anti-First Amendment set of rules for reporting on Pete Hegseth’s Department of War. Among those rules was a provision allowing journalists to be expelled for reporting on anything, whether classified or unclassified, not approved for official release.

To test-drive the absurdity of this new “press corps,” Wilson granted the second question of the “new era” to disgraced former congressman Matt Gaetz, once Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general and now a host on the feverishly pro-Trump One America News Network. Gaetz, who was wearing a rather dated performance fleece jacket embroidered with “Representative Matt Gaetz,” asked two questions about regime change in Venezuela, a policy the administration is actively fomenting as it carries out strikes on boats it claims are carrying “narcoterrorists” smuggling drugs in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean.

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The substance of the questions mattered less than the opening they provided for Wilson to parrot the administration’s line on these strikes: “Every single person who we have hit thus far who is in a drug boat carrying narcotics to the United States is a narcoterrorist. Our intelligence has confirmed that.” Somewhat puzzlingly, Wilson also said the Department of War is “a planning organization” with “a contingency plan for everything.”

There was no further follow-up from the member of the “press” whom the House Ethics Committee found engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl in 2017. (Gaetz has denied wrongdoing.)

Since the briefing took place just days after the killing of a member of the National Guard blocks from the White House, multiple members of the Pentagon’s new Fourth Estate asked weighty questions in the wake of the tragedy, including whether the service member would receive a medal for distinguished service or a military burial at Arlington National Cemetery. (Both are TBD.)

It wasn’t all softball questions, but every assembled member served their purpose by running interference for the administration in general and Hegseth in particular. One interlocutor, following up on a question about selling weapons to Qatar despite its ties to the Muslim Brotherhood from the indefatigable Laura Loomer, asked without a hint of irony whether the U.S. would be “reassessing our relationship with Israel” over Israeli media reports that the country’s government “funded Hamas.”

Without missing a beat, the War Department flak replied that that would be a “better question for the State Department” and moved right along.

Another member of the press corps asked whether any actual drugs have been recovered from these alleged drug-smuggling boats that the U.S. military has been drone striking — twice, in one case — a question well worth asking, and one that’s almost certainly being posed by the deposed mainstream journalists now reporting on the Pentagon from outside its walls. Wilson, standing in for the U.S. government, responded by essentially asking that we trust her, trust the intelligence, and trust that Hegseth’s War Department is telling the truth. The matter was, once again, closed.

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Along with Loomer, a noted Trump sycophant and conspiracy theorist, I spotted “Pizzagate” promoter Jack Posobiec, who asked about Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly, and Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe in the assembled crowd. In a video of the briefing, an open laptop in one member of the “new” media’s lap was emblazoned with stickers that read “feminine, not feminist” and “homemaking is hot.” A statement from the department trumpeting news of the new corps features an interviewer in front of a backdrop emblazoned with logos for “LindellTV,” the media venture by MyPillow founder Mike Lindell — who is now running for governor of Minnesota. (LindellTV’s IMDB page describes the programming as: “Aging man with many internet connectivity issues, screaming into his cell phone, has discussions with a tired looking news anchor,” although it’s not clear whether that’s the official network tagline.)

The Pentagon press corps has always been a gilded cage — a perch for big-name reporters who want a plush-sounding posting without too much hassle. The most essential, critical reporting never comes from briefings, where reporters sit with their mouths open like baby birds looking up for a news morsel from their press secretary mother. But like with so many things under Trump, by giving up on any semblance of respecting norms, he’s revealed how neutered the institution was to begin with. Critical reporting on the War Department has, and will, continue, even without reporters in the physical building. It’s worth asking if they should ever go back.

The post The Brand-New Pentagon Press Corps Is Gaga for Hegseth appeared first on The Intercept.

The video, which has been viewed more than 2.2 million times on YouTube and millions more on other platforms, sparked a renewed crackdown in Minneapolis, with the Department of Homeland Security announcing on Monday it would visit 30 sites suspected of fraud across the city. A DHS official told CBS News Minnesota its agents would focus on a “little of everything,” when asked whether immigration enforcement would be a part of the crackdown. Threatening arrests, the agency posted a video to X in which agents enter a smoke shop and question an employee about a nearby day care center.

This isn’t the first time the conservative YouTuber has gotten the attention of the Trump administration. Shirley participated in President Donald Trump’s “Roundtable on Antifa” in October after an altercation at an anti-ICE protest. At age 23, his videos aren’t merely influencing his audiences — they’re also influencing government action.

This worries immigrant rights advocates, who fear that the fallout from Shirley’s video will only worsen the harm already being done to Minnesota’s immigrant communities at a time when Trump has taken to calling Somali people “garbage” at his rallies.

“The very real-world consequence is that it’s going to exacerbate the situation that we have in Minnesota right now where we have a lot of people, including U.S. citizens or people with lawful status being arrested and detained by ICE,” said Ana Pottratz Acosta, who leads the Immigration and Human Rights Clinic at the University of Minnesota Law School.

The video, she said, reinforces xenophobic tropes about the Somali community, specifically tying the community to fraud. Pottratz Acosta said she was worried the increase in DHS visits to day cares could be a pretext to simultaneously conduct immigration detentions.

“They’re doing these visits at day care sites under the auspices of conducting a fraud investigation, but if they happen to see anyone who fits a profile, they might be arrested,” Pottratz Acosta said.

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Shirley’s video builds off of the growing interest in a nonprofit fraud scandal in Minnesota involving a pandemic-era program focused on child hunger, which has resulted in dozens of guilty pleas. The Trump administration claims Minnesota’s fraud issue is much larger, to the sum of $9 billion worth of government funds being fraudulently funneled from social services. Republicans have painted Gov. Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison, both Democrats up for reelection, as responsible for an alleged lack of oversight. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., who is Somali American and Muslim, has also been the target of right-wing and xenophobic attacks. Among other racist stereotypes and false claims, Trump said, “We gotta get her the hell out” of the country at a Pennsylvania rally earlier this month.

State regulators said Monday that inspectors had visited the day cares mentioned in the video in the past six months, according to the Minnesota Star Tribune, that there was no evidence of fraud at the sites during those unannounced visits, and some of the centers have already been closed or suspended. According to Minnesota Public Radio, state Republican lawmakers had steered Shirley toward the day care centers he visited in the video.

Shirley defended his video and said people have been silent about “Somalians committing this fraud” because “people are scared to be called Islamophobic, racist.”

“Fraud is fraud — it doesn’t matter if it’s a Black person, white person, Asian person, Mexican,” Shirley told Fox News. “And we work too hard simply just to be paying taxes and enabling fraud to be happening.”

Despite Shirley’s insistence that race and religion have nothing to do with his investigation, the YouTuber has a long track record of using his man-on-the-street videos to target immigrants in the U.S., platforming individuals who spread xenophobic and Islamophobic beliefs and conspiracy theories. While Shirley’s videos include interviews with those protesting against such hate, he often presents immigration and Islam as a growing threat taking over the country. Combined with sensationalized headlines — “Exposing Dangerous Illegal Migrant Scammers” or “The UK’s Insane Migrant Invasion” — the end result is often a portrait of immigrants as lawbreakers, a societal threat, and a strain on government resources.

Shirley did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

In 2019, Shirley began to post prank videos with friends on YouTube while attending a public high school in Farmington, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City. At first, his focus wasn’t especially political. He garnered a large number of his 1 million subscribers after sneaking into influencer Jake Paul’s wedding in Las Vegas.

But amid his comedic stunts, he documented the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., in 2021, where he interviewed far-right commentator and InfoWars founder Alex Jones and infamous rioter Richard Barnett. Shirley said he did not take part in the violence and filmed himself leaving without entering the building. Later that year, Shirley took a two-year hiatus from YouTube to go on a mission in Santiago, Chile, as part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

In late 2023, after his return to the United States, Shirley shifted from prank videos to focus on political topics, such as immigration and crime. In May 2024, he orchestrated a stunt in which he paid day laborers $20 to jump into the back of a U-Haul van, drove them to the White House, and gave them signs demanding a meeting with Biden.

Shirley’s mother, Brooke — herself a right-wing influencer who goes by Brooker Tee Jones on TikTok, where she has more than 250,000 followers — occasionally joins her son in the videos. It was Brooke who pushed her son to start covering immigration at the southern border after his mission trip, according to an interview with Columbia Journalism Review. Early on, she’d feed him questions to ask and lines to say in the videos, she recalled. Her content has similarly focused on immigration in recent years, including other videos that accuse Somali residents in Minnesota of health care fraud without providing evidence.

Reached by The Intercept, Brooke did not answer questions about her work or the work of her son.

Shirley has made a habit of visiting cities and countries that are settings for right-wing, anti-immigrant conspiracies, such as Aurora, Colorado, amid the manufactured crisis around the Tren de Aragua gang.

During a visit to El Salvador in 2024, Shirley filmed a series of videos sympathetic to President Nayib Bukele’s violent anti-crime crackdown on his citizens, including a video from the notorious CECOT prison. It’s his most-viewed video to date, with 6.6 million views. In another video from El Salvador, Shirley recorded from the Centro Industrial prison, which has become a manufacturing hub where incarcerated men build school desks and vegetable market display racks, a form of forced labor. “It’s pretty amazing if you think about what Nayib Bukele has been able to do with this country — the streets are as safe as they’ve ever been, because all these guys are out,” Shirley said while inside a CECOT cell block, gesturing to the incarcerated men. At no point in the video does he mention the stories of torture and abuse within the country’s prison system.

Shirley was recently awarded a “citizen journalist of the year” prize by far-right media figure and Project Veritas founder, James O’Keefe, in large part because of his CECOT video.

In other videos, Shirley himself has become a part of the story.

In September, Shirley and a small crew filmed a video antagonizing street vendors in New York City’s Chinatown, referring to them as “Dangerous Migrant Scammers.” Vendors could be seen scrambling away while Shirley strolls down Canal Street. At one point, one man tells Shirley to leave and asks why he’s filming, leading to a physical confrontation with Shirley’s cameraman.

Several weeks later, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided the street, detaining nine individuals. Shirley praised ICE for the raid that left the street “completely clean of illegal activity” and taunted an individual who was detained as a “scammer [who] got ICED.”

Shirley has accompanied federal agents during immigration raids in Chicago, interviewing a detained man in the backseat of a federal vehicle. Since Trump’s election, media access at raids has largely been given only to outlets or individuals sympathetic to the administration’s mass deportation campaign.

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Alongside other far-right influencers such as Andy Ngo and Cam Higby, Shirley landed an invite to participate in Trump’s “Roundtable on Antifa,” a White House event where the administration advanced its campaign against antifascist activists. “People may wonder, ‘What’s the threat to us as Americans?’ You’ll be labeled as a fascist, you’ll be labeled a Nazi, and they’ll wish death upon you as they wished death upon me,” Shirley said of the decentralized protest group at the event.

Leading up to the Minnesota day care video, Shirley released a video about “the rise of Islam” in the U.S. and what he called “Minnesota’s Somali Takeover.” The July video makes a spectacle of the call to prayer and individuals praying inside a mosque and singles out Omar, as well as an Islamic center that converted from a Lutheran church to illustrate his point of the apparent takeover.

In October, Shirley published an hour-and-a-half sitdown interview with British far-right anti-immigrant and anti-Islam activist Tommy Robinson, during which he repeated the false claim that there are “40,000 British Muslims” on the United Kingdom’s terror watchlist living in Britain. The figure is a misreading of a real list by British intelligence agency MI5, which does not include religious identifiers and contains the names of many people who have never traveled to the U.K. “At what point does this break out from a revolution to a civil war?” Shirley asked.

Shirley’s recent viral video in Minnesota was a continuation of this narrative.

In an attempt to lure people into gotcha situations, Shirley visited day care centers and health care facilities that he claims are operated by Somali Americans. Taking a page out of his prank days, he poses as a parent looking for child care for his fictitious son, “Joey.” Throughout the video, Shirley approaches individuals with dark skin or women wearing hijabs, peppering them with questions about supposed “missing” children and whether they were aware of fraud.

Police are called on Shirley and his team twice in the video, including while at one health care complex where a woman explains to a responding officer, “He’s trying to assume because they’re Somalian providers everyone here is fraudulent — he’s here with some kind of propaganda.” He claimed to be “checking rates” for health and child care. Police eventually escorted him out of the building.

The video’s claims of fraud rely heavily on a Minnesota resident and apparent whistleblower who is identified in the video as David. Toward the end of the video, David claims he was attacked by Somali men who he had confronted about the alleged fraud, describing the men as “very, very violent people.”

Since early December, federal agents have increased their presence in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, profiling and detaining individuals who appear to be Somali, including individuals who are U.S. citizens. The crackdown has also led to the targeting of Latin American immigrant communities in search of undocumented residents. Trump and other right-wing figures have propped up their campaign by falsely depicting “Somalian gangs” who are “roving the streets” of Minneapolis and St. Paul, “looking for prey,” the president said on social media.

Even though Shirley’s video claims to have exposed new truths about fraud in Minnesota, the day care facilities highlighted in the video have previously been spotlighted as problematic by local ABC News affiliate, KSTP, as well as the state government, which earlier this year began to increase oversight of funding to day care facilities over similar fraud concerns.

The most effective way to combat fraud is increased oversight, said Pottraz Acosta. The recent crackdown in Minnesota, which has been exacerbated by Shirley’s video, she said, is not the kind of oversight that will prevent bad actors from exploiting public funds. The issue of anti-Somali sentiments is also a problem within Minnesota, she said, with residents facing demeaning stereotypes and unsubstantiated speculation that they are sending money to al-Shabab, the Somali militant group on the U.S foreign terror list.

This narrative, perpetuated locally and nationally, “feeds into larger narratives around certain immigrant communities,” Pottraz Acosta said. “There are bad actors in every community and just because certain people commit fraud, it doesn’t mean that every person who fits that same demographic profile is a bad actor.”

The post Right-Wing YouTuber Behind Viral Minnesota Fraud Video Has Long Anti-Immigrant History appeared first on The Intercept.

Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe had suspected an employee of his organization leaked the document, the New York Times previously reported, but Fritsch’s confirmation firmly establishes the links in a chain that began in a Florida drug rehabilitation center and led to a predawn raid of O’Keefe’s home last year.

The diary was left behind by Biden, the daughter of President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden, at a friend’s house during a rehab stint in Delray Beach, Florida. Aimee Harris, who subsequently lived in the house, discovered the diary, and with Robert Kurlander concocted a Coen brothers-level plan to sell it. Harris and Kurlander recently pleaded guilty to the charge of conspiracy to commit interstate transportation of stolen property, with prosecutors confirming the diary as authentic. Kurlander, according to prosecutors, is now cooperating with an ongoing investigation, and a key question being probed is whether Project Veritas understood the diary was legally obtained (as the organization has asserted) or whether it had any role in instructing Harris and Kurlander to steal further personal items of Biden’s in order to allow it to authenticate the diary. (The question could hinge on whether Biden abandoned the items, or was “storing” them at the friend’s home, and planned to return. Prosecutors allege the items were “stored,” not abandoned.) No charges have been filed against Project Veritas or its employees.

Fritsch said that O’Keefe, as far as he knew, did not authorize the leak. “It’s kind of ironic, we had to sort of ‘Veritas’ Veritas in order to get the thing broken and out into the news,” he told The Intercept. He said he wanted to speak with The Intercept in order to raise the alarm about the press freedom implications of investigating Project Veritas. During the Bush administration, he noted, journalists routinely denounced efforts to expose the sources of reporters. “We’re doing the same thing now, but we’re not hearing the phrase ‘chilling effect’ at all,” he said.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press have both expressed skepticism about the propriety of the investigation into Project Veritas, and in particular the raid of O’Keefe’s home, warning of its press freedom implications. Press freedom advocates who differ with Project Veritas politically, and who are queasy about the deceptive tactics the group infamously deploys, have also voiced opposition to the raid.

“This is just beyond belief,” University of Minnesota law professor Jane Kirtley, a former executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told Politico. “I’m not a big fan of Project Veritas, but this is just over the top. I hope they get a serious reprimand from the court because I think this is just wrong.”

The diary’s most newsworthy moments are suggestive but stop short of making any concrete allegations against Ashley Biden’s father. In the most-often quoted passage, she writes, “Hyper-sexualized @ a young age. What is this due to? Was I molested. I think so – I can’t remember specifics but I do remember trauma – I remember not liking the woolzacks house; I remember somewhat being sexualized with [a cousin]; I remember having sex with Friends @ a young age; showers w/my dad (probably not appropriate). Being turned on when I wasn’t supposed to be.”

In general, it is legal for a news outlet to publish stolen documents when they are of public concern. Many whistleblowers, after all, do not have legal authority to leak the documents they are making public. Barring journalists from publishing stolen documents threatens First Amendment rights and gives the government tremendous power to censor the press. But it is also generally understood that journalists may not participate in any crime to obtain information, or ask anyone else to. So, if Project Veritas encouraged the pair to steal more items, the outlet could face charges. But if Project Veritas thought the items were abandoned by Biden rather than stolen, they could be protected by the First Amendment.

Project Veritas is in the crosshairs despite making the decision not to publish the diary. “The guy didn’t even break it and he’s getting treated like an enemy of Stalin,” said Fritsch. O’Keefe, in an email to staff obtained by the New York Times, argues that publication of the diary would have been seen as a “cheap shot” and backfire against Project Veritas. On October 24, the National File published excerpts of the diary, and followed up two days later by publishing the full version. The outlet explained at the time, “National File obtained this document from a whistleblower who was concerned the media organization that employs him would not publish the materials in the final days before the presidential election.”

National File’s readership is largely made up of an extreme right-wing audience, many of whom, Fritsch said, have been banned or suspended from Big Tech platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Still, it has managed to break some major stories, including being the first to publish an image from former Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s medical school yearbook, showing a man in blackface beside a man in a Ku Klux Klan robe.

The Times also reported that the Project Veritas whistleblower “adds that his media organization chose not to release the documents after receiving pressure from a competing outlet.” Fritsch said the “competing outlet” referred to a conservative outlet that — the Project Veritas employee told him — urged Project Veritas not to publish the diary.

Federal prosecutors say that Project Veritas paid $40,000 to obtain the diary, a pursuit that continued even after O’Keefe made the decision not to publish, according to prosecutors.

Harris and Kurlander had initially hoped to sell the diary to the Trump campaign and brought it to an event in Florida in an effort to show it to Donald Trump Jr. The Times reported that Trump Jr. advised them to turn it into the FBI. Instead, they reached out to Project Veritas. Fritsch said the plot to get the diary to Trump Jr. was not well thought out. “If they’re in some sort of seaside, boat-in-the-water fundraising event of whatever, Don Jr. is going to jump in the dang canal if somebody tries to push a diary like this in his hands,” he said.

Project Veritas’s attorney, Paul Calli, declined to comment.

The post A Project Veritas Employee Leaked Ashley Biden’s Diary appeared first on The Intercept.

Later, she and other co-workers started coming to work wearing “Free Palestine” pins, as well as hospital ID badges shaped like a watermelon, a pro-Palestine symbol. 

Rochios, whose work includes addressing health disparities within reproductive health care, had been moved by reports of Israel’s targeting and destruction of Gaza’s hospitals and health care system, and started wearing the items as a show of solidarity with Palestinian women and babies, as well as her medical colleagues in Gaza. 

Supervisors ordered Rochios and her colleagues to remove the pins, threatening them with suspension or termination. Most complied, but Rochios refused. 

In April, she traveled to Gaza where she spent a month delivering babies at a maternity hospital in Rafah and the al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah. She saw some of the many delivering mothers who have suffered under dire conditions in Gaza.

“The people who are really ‘unsafe’ are the women who I was supporting in labor as literally bombs were dropping.”

A week after she returned to the U.S., her supervisors at the UCSF Mission Bay campus, one of the graduate school and hospital system’s 10 campuses, placed Rochios on a three-month paid administrative leave for “insubordination.” Her suspension was renewed in September after she again refused to remove her watermelon pin. She may still face further sanctions, including termination. University representatives have told her that several colleagues and patients said the pin made them feel “unsafe.”

“The people who are really ‘unsafe’ are the women who I was supporting in labor as literally bombs were dropping and shaking the walls of our hospital,” Rochios told The Intercept, recalling moments during Israel’s invasion of Rafah. “Women who have not had prenatal care at all; women who went to walk to the hospital in labor and have a baby, and then two hours later, walk back home to their tent where they did not have running water, where they don’t have enough food or hydration to breastfeed, no clean water, or money to buy formula for their kids.”

Medical professionals, especially those who have treated patients in Gaza’s and Lebanon’s hospitals over the past year, have spoken out about atrocities carried out by the Israeli military. Doing so at UCSF, one of the country’s most elite medical institutions, may come at a price. 

Rochios is one of nine health care workers at UCSF who spoke with The Intercept about their experiences of censorship and punishment after speaking out about human rights for Palestinians as a part of their research and medical work.

UCSF declined to comment or respond to a detailed list of questions or multiple phone calls over the course of a week. A UCSF spokesperson said they were concerned that the accounts of UCSF employees were being “taken out of context.”

Rupa Marya, an internal medicine physician and professor at UCSF, is perhaps the most notable and vocal among those who have received pushback. In her social media posts in January, Marya, an expert in decolonial theory, questioned the impacts of Zionism as “a supremacist, racist ideology” on health care and drew immediate criticism from pro-Israel colleagues and Democratic state Sen. Scott Wiener.

The university then published a statement across its social media accounts addressing the posts without naming Marya, disavowing her statements as “antisemitic attacks.” Wiener thanked UCSF for the statement. A flurry of online attacks against Marya followed, including racist and sexist attacks and threats of death and sexual violence. Wiener has continued to single out Marya on social media.

In September, Marya wrote a new post on social media that UCSF students were concerned that a first-year student from Israel may have served in the Israeli military in the prior year, then asked, “How do we address this in our professional ranks?”

The following month, the university placed her on paid leave and suspended her ability to practice medicine pending an investigation into the post. The university has since reinstated her ability to give clinical care, but she remains banned from campus, including the hospital where she worked.

“I wanted to protect people who have lost family members,” Marya said. “People are being murdered, doctors are being disappeared, hospitals are being bombed — you have this traumatized community in UCSF. I’ve been trying to give voice to the experience of the Muslim, Indigenous, Black, SWANA” — Southwest Asian and North African — “students who are afraid, like deeply afraid.” 

The Center for Protest Law and Litigation, a First Amendment group, is assisting Marya in obtaining public records of possible communications about her social media posts between UCSF, Wiener, and the Helen Diller Family Foundation, the school’s largest donor that has in the past donated to pro-Israel propaganda groups. The center filed suit for the records after the university failed to produce documents after nine months of back and forth, during which the school claimed such records are exempt from freedom of information laws. 

In a statement sent to The Intercept, Wiener said Marya’s social media posts “crossed a line,” accusing her of using “an antisemitic conspiracy theory targeting Jewish doctors” and an Israeli medical student. He said concerned UCSF faculty and students brought the January and October posts to his attention. “I then called out those posts as antisemitic, just as I have called out homophobic, transphobic, racist, and Islamophobic statements by various individuals,” he wrote. 

Wiener, as a part of the legislature’s Jewish Caucus, previously targeted K-12 school districts for teaching history lessons that were critical of Israel, dismissing them as “bigoted, inaccurate, discriminatory, and deeply offensive anti-Jewish and anti-Israel propaganda,” according to a January letter to state lawmakers. He decried the online threats against Marya, calling for an investigation. 

The school’s crackdown has been broad, targeting professors, doctors, and medical staff.

Doctors have had their lectures mentioning Gaza scrubbed from the internet or canceled outright. They have been accused of antisemitism and creating an unsafe work environment, and banned from lecturing entirely. Staffers, nurses, and students have been suspended for speaking out in solidarity or for acts as simple as wearing a watermelon pin or hanging a pro-Palestine symbol in their offices. Dozens of employees have criticized the ongoing silence from UCSF and its failure to condemn Israel’s war on Gaza, accusing the school of favoring pro-Israel views.

“This is really unprecedented where this university in particular has stepped in and taken such a strong stand in support of some speech and opposition to other speech,” said Dan Siegel, a longtime Bay Area civil rights attorney who is representing several UCSF employees facing discipline. “It’s really remarkable to me that there is so much content-based discrimination here.” 

For the past 30 years, Siegel has represented faculty and staff across the UC system in employment and workplace issues. Before October 7, he had never seen such a widespread effort to punish employees for speaking out about a specific issue.

“Look, I don’t want to make people feel uncomfortable, but aren’t people made uncomfortable by 40,000 dead in Gaza?”

“Among the supporters of the Israeli government, this is a cynical and manipulative effort to limit debate,” he said. “They’ve promoted an atmosphere where you’re a student at the university or a patient at the hospital, and it becomes perfectly normalized for you to say or for someone to champion your saying, ‘I feel uncomfortable as a Jew because of people saying these things,” said Siegel, who is Jewish. 

“Look, I don’t want to make people feel uncomfortable, but aren’t people made uncomfortable by 40,000 dead in Gaza or the efforts taking place in the West Bank to steal Palestinian land?” Siegel asked. “Those things make me feel uncomfortable — so now we’re all going to be censoring each other’s speech because it makes us uncomfortable, and that really can’t be the criteria for limiting speech.”

In late July, a group of House Republicans, including House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., told UCSF they would investigate allegations of antisemitism made by employees and patients at the institution. The members of Congress threatened to withhold all federal funding, including Medicare and Medicaid payments, from the school and health care system. Their investigation is a part of a larger partisan effort, led by House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., targeting universities whose students and faculty have been vocal critics of Israel. 

Three UCSF physicians have been banned from giving lectures after mentioning the negative health impacts of Israel’s war on Gaza or the apartheid health system in the Occupied Territories. 

Jess Ghannam had received pushback for his scholarship in the past. In 2012, an attendee of one of his lectures about Gaza at UCSF called the police on him, saying they didn’t feel safe with him on campus, Ghannam recalled. Later that year, a student burst into tears and ran out of a lecture Ghannam was delivering at UC Davis and later filed a complaint alleging that Ghannam had created an unsafe learning environment. (UC Davis launched a formal investigation, which eventually saw the complaint dismissed.)

In his 25 years at the university, Ghannam never had any of his lectures canceled outright. He is a well-known speaker who has shared his research on the consequences of war on displaced communities, such as Palestinians, in many venues over the past two decades. And he helped establish mental health and medical clinics for Palestinians, interviewing Palestinian torture survivors who were incarcerated in Israeli prisons. 

In September, he was scheduled to speak to first-year medical students, after a group of medical students had met with the university’s deans to push for more education around Palestine. 

Then, four days before the scheduled talk, Ghannam heard from the course instructor that his lecture was being canceled. The instructor said there wasn’t enough time to provide “wraparound services” for students, or peer support or support services, for those who may be distressed by the topic, Ghannam said. 

Students responded with outrage. Ninety-five medical students signed a letter addressed to school officials, calling the cancellation “an act of intentional erasure of historical harms that continue to affect our communities and our profession” and alleging that it was part of “a pattern of suppression that seemingly targets any element of acknowledgement or advocacy for the health of Palestinians, despite UCSF’s claimed position as a bastion of social justice.” The students went on to host Ghannam independently, allowing him to give his lecture in front of about 100 people.

“That’s the clear message: You can’t talk about Palestine, you can’t talk about genocide.”

“If you talk about Palestine,” Ghannam said of his critics’ perspective, “if you talk about the health consequences of genocide, and the negative impact of genocide and settler colonialism, it’s OK to talk about it in any other people except Palestinians — and then if you do try to talk about it in the Palestinian context, we’re going to shut you down.”

“I mean, that’s the clear message: You can’t talk about Palestine, you can’t talk about genocide.” 

Leigh Kimberg had a similar experience. Kimberg, a medical school professor, primary care doctor, and leader in the field of violence prevention and trauma-informed care, had lectured at UCSF’s continuing education program several times in the past decade.

In April, she gave a 50-minute lecture and dedicated six of those minutes to a discussion of the health of Palestinians in Gaza. She argued that you cannot speak on trauma-informed care without mentioning the genocide in Gaza and described the connections between the liberation of Black, Palestinian, and Jewish people. She also decried antisemitism during her lecture.

Still, the following month, administrators told Kimberg that they had received complaints from attendees who called her speech “biased and antisemitic,” which prompted the school to remove the recording of her talk from the school’s website. When she protested the video’s removal, she said the school barred her from giving lectures at the program.

The ban was lifted after multiple emails from Kimberg and Siegel, who is representing her, but she was told that her future talks must comply with the program’s rules. She also received pushback from her division at the school of medicine, where colleagues have referred to her as “inflammatory” or “not trauma-informed.”

Kimberg began to speak out about Palestine publicly last October, and her Palestinian colleagues welcomed her perspective as a person of Jewish ancestry. Her grandparents had fled antisemitic violence in Poland and Lithuania, and three of her relatives died in the Holocaust. But her colleagues also cautioned her of the backlash to come. 

“We do want to warn you that the second you advocate for Palestine, you will be called ‘antisemitic,’” Kimberg recalled from earlier conversations with Palestinian colleagues. “It doesn’t matter that you’re Jewish — in some ways, it will be worse — but you will definitely be called ‘antisemitic’ if you say anything to value Palestinian life.”

“And that has been my experience.”

Such discrimination is what led Keith Hansen, a former chief resident of surgery at UCSF, to conceal his Palestinian heritage throughout his career. As chief resident in the fall of 2023, Hansen would send daily emails to his co-workers at the trauma surgery department at San Francisco General Hospital, highlighting updates across their field. In one of those emails in October, as reports of Israeli strikes on hospitals in Gaza began to compile, he skipped the updates and instead asked his colleagues “to take a moment to acknowledge that doctors and surgeons and patients, just like us, were being bombed by the Israeli government.”

Hansen received positive feedback for the email from his co-workers, but in his monthly review to assess his performance as a resident, an attending physician referred to Hansen as “a polarizing figure” because of the email. 

In May, as student activists continued to occupy a protest encampment at the school’s Parnassus Heights campus, Hansen gave a lecture as chief resident about his work in organ transplantation along with health inequities of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank under Israeli occupation. 

During the talk, he also disclosed his Palestinian heritage, something he had never done in his career. He shared that he was born in Jordan to Palestinian refugees, his mother from Ramallah and his father from Jenin. After running through data showing health disparities between Palestinians living under occupation and Israeli citizens, as well as the targeting of physicians in Gaza, he called on the university to do more to address such issues. He referenced other UCSF initiatives, such as fundraising to protect doctors and scholars in Afghanistan and Ukraine. He went on to call for an academic boycott of institutions “complicit in the genocide and medical apartheid.” 

Following his talk, several colleagues lodged complaints against him that he was creating an unsafe working environment. The chair of his department also directed him and other speakers not to mention “anything political or anything that didn’t have to do with graduation.” At graduation, he said people he had previously gotten along with avoided him. 

“Everyone kind of shows their true colors once they find out your background.”

“There’s that term — ‘liberal except for Palestine’ or ‘humanitarian except for Palestine’ — and a lot of people as soon as they hear you’re Palestinian just change their entire view of you,” Hansen said. “And it has changed my relationship — I mean, there were people at graduation who didn’t talk to me, who I had known for years and always got along with really well. Everyone kind of shows their true colors once they find out your background.” 

At the same time, pro-Israel speakers have been invited to campus while Palestinian voices have been opposed. Among those speakers were Elan Carr, a U.S. Army veteran and CEO of the Israeli American Council, an influential pro-Israel lobbying and advocacy group. UCSF’s Office of Diversity and Outreach invited him to speak during May’s Jewish American Heritage Month.

Nearly 100 faculty, medical workers, and students wrote to the diversity office, protesting Carr’s talk, citing his role at a counterprotest against student encampments at UCLA that turned violent a month earlier, as well as his endorsement of transphobic comments on social media. Carr’s speech on “the persistence of anti-Zionism, anti-Israel discrimination, and campus antisemitism” went on as planned.

The same office declined to sponsor and publicize an official screening of documentary “Israelism,” which was hosted by the school’s chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. The film centers on the advocacy of anti-Zionist Jewish activists. 

Some staffers have been disciplined for a speech act as quiet as wearing a pin. 

Shortly after October 7, Rosita, a nurse at UCSF who gave only her first name out of fear of being doxxed by pro-Israel activists, started hand-making watermelon pins for her co-workers to attach to their hospital ID cards, green glittery resin disks with a small rubber watermelon glued on top.

A slice of the fruit has been a symbol of Palestinian liberation since the 1980s, when Palestinian artists started to use the depictions of the watermelon, with its red flesh, green rind, and black seeds, as a way to circumvent an Israeli ban on public displays of the Palestinian flag in Gaza and the West Bank. Rosita passed her pins out to interested colleagues at work and to others during pro-Palestine protests.

In a relatively uniform work environment such as a hospital floor or clinic, custom badge pins are typical ways for medical workers to express themselves. At UCSF, such displays are often political, with many wearing pins that advocate for LGBTQ rights or the Black Lives Matter movement. In the past, UCSF even gave away its own uterus pins meant to affirm reproductive rights, said Rosita, who also helped found the school’s faculty and staff pro-Palestinian group. 

“I can tell what type of person you are by the pins that you have on your badge,” she said. “So it’s a sense of pride and solidarity and acknowledgment.”

In all, Rosita said she has made and given away 500 pins. And while many workers received compliments from colleagues and patients, those who wore the pins started to get approached by their managers, telling them the pins were antisemitic and ordering them to remove them under threat of suspension or termination. 

In September, Rosita’s manager called her in for a “counseling” session where she was told to remove the pin because a staff member said it made them feel “uncomfortable.” She refused and responded with an email, calling the manager’s request “discrimination and denial of the Palestinian people.”

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“My niece is Palestinian,” she wrote in the email. “She is 10 years old. She enjoys collecting Polly Pockets and does jujitsu on Saturdays, studies Arabic on Sundays.”

“She exists!” Rosita added. “I wear the watermelon because she exists!”

Rosita, who is Rochios’s union steward and has been representing her in disciplinary hearings, said she worried she would be met with similar punishment. 

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Another staff member faced similar pushback for displaying pro-Palestine symbols. A researcher at UCSF, who declined to give their name due to fear of workplace retaliation, was told by supervisors to remove a sign from their office that said “Queer as in Free Palestine” with a red and pink triangle. The staff member, who is queer, said the sign was meant to express solidarity between the LGBTQ community and Palestinians. They noted that their Mexican LGBTQ flag had been accepted. Leading up to the ban, the researcher had received an online death threat for displaying the symbol, and one community member confronted them inside their office, accusing them of supporting Hamas. 

The school told them the red triangle was a Nazi symbol that is being used to promote violence against Jewish people. The ban remains on the staff member’s employee file. Since reporting the death threat, the school has yet to offer a safety plan for the staff member, who as a result has been working remotely since September.

“It’s been really tough. I’ve had to take time off, my mental and physical health is just shot at this point from the stress and anxiety, not knowing whether I’m going to lose my job,” they said.

“My mental and physical health is just shot at this point from the stress and anxiety, not knowing whether I’m going to lose my job.”

Another staffer received a notice of intent to fire her just for discussing accusations lodged against them with colleagues. In January, UCSF therapist Denise Caramagno quote tweeted, to her modest following of 500 users on X, the school’s public rebuke of Marya with the following: “@UCSF is coordinating an attack on its own faculty of color who are asking legitimate questions about social determinants of health. This is a violation of academic speech. How are we to achieve health equity if we cannot ask important questions about systems of supremacy?” 

Several months later in May, Caramagno’s supervisor sent an email, flagging that a physician at UCSF sent a complaint about Caramagno’s post to school officials and a complaint officer in the diversity office, calling the tweet antisemitic and questioning Caramagno’s ability to “offer psychological support to Jewish and Israeli faculty and staff.” 

Over the past decade, Caramagno helped build the school’s CARE program, which provides resources and support to those on campus who have experienced discrimination, harassment, or abuse. As the co-director, she had remained the point of contact for students to reach out to confidentially and become a trusted source of support to students during difficult moments, including amid protests during the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements. She’s regularly called out systemic racism as a part of her role. 

“When I see what’s happening in Palestine, it just looks like the most extreme form of racism,” Caramagno said, referring to the genocide in Gaza. “We’re a public health care system, so when we see the dismantling of the public health care system [in Gaza], we have an obligation to call that out.”

While the complaint did not lead to any discipline, she was barred from serving as a point of contact for individuals with reports of antisemitism.

In June, her supervisors caught wind that Caramagno had shared the email from her supervisor that included the complaint with close friends and colleagues, seeking guidance and support on how to proceed. Supervisors told her that she was not allowed to share the email, which they considered confidential. Caramagno and her attorney, Siegel, insist the email was not confidential, which she dismissed as “defamatory.” Even so, by August she was suspended and then received notice of the school’s intent to fire her. She is barred from campus and from contacting her clients. 

“I’m a trained clinician in this; I know the laws about confidentiality,” Caramagno said. “I know I had never breached confidentiality, and I never will.”

Last week, a group of faculty staff and students, including Kimberg and Ghannam, gathered for the first session of the UC People’s Tribunal, a group that aims to hold UC leaders accountable for the school system’s complicity with Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and the ongoing displacement of Palestinians.

In addition to the violent crackdown on student encampments across the UC system last spring, school leaders have long shown a pro-Israel bias in their longstanding opposition to attempts by student and faculty groups to join academic boycotts of institutions with ties to Israel. The tactic is part of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, or BDS, which aims to achieve Palestinian statehood.

The People’s group, which presented the tribunal charges at La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley, focused on the UC’s investments in Israeli companies and the other activities of UCSF’s largest private donor, the Diller family. A collection of foundations created by the Bay Area real estate billionaire Sanford Diller, who died in 2018, gave a massive $1 billion to the school in 2017 and 2018, after giving $150 million over the previous 15 years. 

The foundations, named for Diller’s late wife Helen, also donated $100,000 in 2016 to the Canary Mission, a group that aims to blacklist students and professors at universities who are found to be critical of Israel. Once an individual is listed on the Canary Mission site, a flood of cyberbullying messages often follow in an attempt to ruin the person’s reputation. The site has a profile for Ghannam and Marya, accusing both of supporting terrorism and antisemitism. Ghannam jokingly called himself one of the site’s “inaugural” members, or a “first-gen Canary Mission.” The group also recently celebrated Marya’s suspension on social media.

In 2016, the Diller Foundation also donated $25,000 to Regavim, an Israeli NGO that sues Palestinians who try to build homes in the occupied West Bank; $100,000 to Reservists on Duty, a group that pays for Israeli reserve soldiers to travel to U.S. universities to work with students on projects that challenge BDS; and $25,000 to Turning Point USA “for US campus efforts against BDS.” And the foundation has donated to Islamophobic groups American Freedom Law Center and Stop Islamization of America, along with American right-wing conservative groups, Project Veritas and the David Horowitz Freedom Center.   

Jackie Safier, Sanford Diller’s daughter, who now runs the Diller Foundation, has dismissed connections between the foundation and the far-right Zionist and conservative groups in the U.S. and Israel. Given the foundation’s close ties with UCSF, however, faculty and staff who have faced punishment for their pro-Palestine speech have questioned whether the relationship was a factor. 

“You can’t walk anywhere at UCSF without seeing Helen Diller’s name somewhere,” Ghannam said. “The foundation’s name is in the front of UCSF, the main entrance, they’ve endowed chairs and faculty positions.”

Ghannam had hoped to travel to Gaza to assist patients there during this past year, but has been barred due to Israeli travel restrictions into the territory for individuals with Palestinian ancestry. He instead has been forced to watch the conflict from afar, doing what he can with organizing at UCSF, while Israeli strikes kill people he’s close with.

“There’s this awesomeness of feeling the solidarity; people are finally understanding Palestine in ways that they never understood before,” Ghannam said. “But at the same time, the amount of fucking grief and pain that I feel every day with knowing that my colleagues have been killed, that all clinics that we helped build and all the programs we help build and all of the people whose kids I’ve seen grown up over the years and get married — they’re all dead, so there’s this profound sense of grief and guilt.”

Rochios’s advocacy on the health inequality experienced by Palestinians in Gaza began by speaking out at home, both at the workplace and at rallies in the Bay Area. When Rochios, who was allowed to travel to Gaza, was working in Rafah in April, she began to share what she was witnessing on television news for outlets such as Al Jazeera. 

“While the West seems to not give any weight or validation to Palestinian reporters on the ground, these health care workers have become the journalists, the storytellers, all this information, and it became very clear to me to that it was my duty to try and be a voice to that,” she said.

UCSF escalated its punishment against Rochios this week, moving her from a paid suspension to three days unpaid. She will be allowed to return to work for the first time since June on November 21, but was again ordered not to wear her keffiyeh or watermelon badge. If she continues to wear the items, the school said, she would be in violation of UCSF’s PRIDE policies and Principles of Community, which are among several codes meant to reinforce diversity and inclusion within the institution. She expects to be fired, given the climate of repression she and her colleagues have experienced at UCSF.

Through conversations with colleagues in the OBGYN department at the nearby city-run San Francisco General Hospital, Rochios knows that this outcome is not the norm in her profession, even within the same city. Unlike at UCSF, the hospital workers have been able to display their support for Palestine, with some openly wearing sweatshirts that read “Healthcare workers for Palestine.” 

“I’ve become such a pariah in this way within UCSF,” she said. “Whereas it exists without issue in a sister hospital in the same city.” 

Correction: November 19, 2024, 11:23 a.m. ET
This article originally referred to Rupa Marya as a lecturer at UCSF. She is a professor of medicine.

The post San Francisco’s Biggest Hospital System: Don’t Talk About Palestine appeared first on The Intercept.

Musk has not, however, reversed the suspension of Distributed Denial of Secrets, the nonprofit transparency collective that distributes leaked and hacked documents to journalists and researchers. During the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, DDoSecrets published BlueLeaks, a set of documents from over 200 law enforcement agencies that revealed police misconduct, including spying on activists. Revelations from BlueLeaks were widely reported in outlets including The Intercept, The Associated Press, The Guardian, The Daily Dot, The Hill, Business Insider, The Nation, Mashable, The Daily Beast, and Reuters. (I’m an adviser to DDoSecrets.)

In response to apparent pressure from law enforcement, Twitter not only permanently suspended the @DDoSecrets account, citing its policy against distributing hacked material, but also took the extraordinary step of preventing users from posting links to ddosecrets.com. If you try tweeting DDoSecrets links or even sending them to someone in a direct message, Twitter shows the error message: “We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful. Visit our Help Center to learn more.”

The DDoSecrets website has never been malicious or harmful; rather, it’s a vital resource for journalists, researchers, and the public. In order to censor links to ddosecrets.com, Twitter relied on a security feature that was designed to block actual malicious links, such as scams or sites trying to trick visitors into installing viruses.

Twitter’s link-blocking policy states that it may block websites that distribute hacked material, but this policy has never been consistently enforced. Links to wikileaks.com, for example, have not faced similar censorship, despite that site hosting troves of data hacked from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign as well as a dataset of CIA hacking tools known as Vault 7.

The most high-profile case of Twitter enforcing this policy was in October 2020, three weeks before the election, when the New York Post published a story based on documents stolen from Hunter Biden’s laptop. Citing its hacked material policy, Twitter blocked access to the article in question. But the decision was short-lived: After two days of Republican outrage and accusations of censorship, Twitter reversed course and restored access to the article. The incident is still a popular talking point in conservative media about Big Tech censorship.

But while Twitter censored a New York Post article for two days, the entire DDoSecrets website has been censored for nearly two and a half years, and there’s no sign that this will change any time soon. Twitter did not respond to questions about the company’s censorship of DDoSecrets.

Here are a few of the datasets that DDoSecrets has published while it has been censored by Twitter:

• Over a million videos scraped from Parler, the far-right social network that anti-democracy activists used to organize the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Videos from this dataset were used as evidence in Trump’s second impeachment inquiry.
• Emails, chat logs, donor lists, and membership records for the Oath Keepers, the far-right militia that participated in the January 6 attack. This dataset exposed hundreds of current and former law enforcement officers, members of the military, and elected officials as members of the extremist group. It was covered by news outlets including the Washington Post, ProPublica, NPR, BuzzFeed News, Rolling Stone, and Ars Technica.
• Dozens of datasets containing terabytes of data hacked from Russian corporations and government agencies in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Intercept is part of an international consortium of newsrooms investigating the Russian documents and has published new information based on the leaks about Yevgeny Prigozhin, the Russian oligarch and Vladimir Putin ally who founded the infamous mercenary company known as the Wagner Group.
• Six terabytes of emails from the Mexican government agency in charge of the military, Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional. This dataset has been covered by dozens of Spanish-language news outfits.

Despite Musk’s lip service in support of free speech, for some reason he’s only ever expressed an interest in restoring the accounts of people on the far-right who are known for posting conspiracy theories or inciting violence.

The post Elon Musk’s “Free Speech” Twitter Is Still Censoring DDoSecrets appeared first on The Intercept.

After publication, both AFLDS and Project Veritas disputed that they were working together, despite the fact that “Christian Hartsock, Project Veritas” was credited in the series trailer as a “consulting producer” and Project Veritas was prominently mentioned in promotional materials. An email received by The Intercept after signing up for a “Doc Tracy” promotions list stated: “Thank you for joining me and my fellow detectors on the Project Veritas Muckraker tour.” That reference has now been removed from the “Doc Tracy” promotional email and the consulting producer credit has been removed from the trailer. Neither Project Veritas nor AFLDS responded to requests for comment prior to publication.

The series stars Christopher Rake, a former anesthesiologist at UCLA Health. “I’m willing to lose everything — job, paycheck, freedom, even my life for this cause,” he said in a video he recorded of himself as UCLA staff escorted him out of the medical facility where he worked in October for refusing to take the Covid-19 vaccine. He’s the founder of the anti-vaccine group Citizens United for Freedom. In a crowdfunding campaign for his group, he wrote, “I’m a physician, a follower of Jesus, and a patriot who lost his job because I stood up for freedom.”

A trailer for the “Doc Tracy” video series — which the group released on January 29 to its more than 400,000 Twitter followers, its over 200,000 Telegram channel subscribers, and on its email newsletter — includes a few seconds of Kristina Lawson, president of California’s medical board, being accosted in a parking garage. On December 6, people who identified themselves as members of AFLDS followed and intimidated Lawson. In interviews and on a Twitter thread, Lawson said the group parked an SUV at the end of her driveway in Walnut Creek, California, flew a drone over her house, watched her children drive to school, and then followed her to work. When she left work, Lawson said, four men “ambushed” her in a dark parking garage with cameras, saying they wanted to interview her.

? On Monday, I was followed and confronted by a group that peddles medical disinformation, promotes fake COVID-19 treatments, and is under investigation by Congress for stealing millions of dollars from consumers. It was a terrifying experience. /1

— Kristina Lawson (@kdlaw) December 8, 2021

AFLDS’s founder, Dr. Simone Gold, who has reached a plea agreement for her role in the deadly January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, is a licensed medical doctor in the state of California. In September, The Intercept revealed that AFLDS works with a network of telehealth companies to rake in millions of dollars selling hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, and online consultations to Covid-19 vaccine skeptics. Most doctors, as well as the Food and Drug Administration, National Institutes of Health, American Medical Association, and World Health Organization, advise against prescribing these two medicines to treat or prevent Covid-19. Because of Gold’s work with AFLDS spreading disinformation about the vaccine’s safety and efficacy and selling unproven treatments for Covid-19, the state medical board has been under pressure by other medical doctors and pro-science activists to strip her of her license. The Intercept confirmed that the board is actively investigating Gold.

The AFLDS website has a form to sign up for updates about the new “Doc Tracy” video series, which it says will be released this month. The form includes the question, “Are you a social media influencer (any size) and would you like to be involved (paid or unpaid) in promoting Doc Tracy?”

After signing up for updates, the website sent an automated email that stated, “Thank you for joining me and my fellow fraud detectors on the Project Veritas Muckraker Tour. What an event!” The email said the video series will ask “tough questions from people who really don’t want to answer them” and that “They’re going to cry crocodile tears like Kristina Lawson did.” Project Veritas subsequently denied involvement in the video series. AFLDS eventually removed references to Project Veritas from its promotional materials.

The trailer originally listed “Christian Hartsock, Project Veritas” as a consulting producer. Hartsock is a “senior investigative reporter” for Project Veritas. On February 1, just after promoting the trailer for the video series, Gold posted to Twitter and Telegram, “What a joy and an honor to join Project Veritas this week in the freedom state of Florida.”

The post includes a photo of Gold and her colleague John Strand — a professional model and actor who hosts short “fake news” segments for AFLDS and who has also been charged in the January 6 riot at the Capitol — standing with Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla. Gaetz is currently under federal investigation for allegedly sex trafficking a 17-year-old girl.

Gold and Gaetz were likely attending an event related to the launch of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe’s new book, “American Muckraker.” O’Keefe is calling his book tour the “Project Veritas Muckraker Tour.”

The trailer for the new AFLDS video series includes images of discredited scientist Dr. Robert Malone and his suspended Twitter account, while a voiceover says, “In a time where stating the facts is made illegal.”

On December 31, Malone was a guest on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” the $100 million Spotify podcast, where he used his credentials as an early researcher on mRNA gene transfer techniques to promote disinformation about Covid-19 vaccines. He also compared Covid-19 vaccination efforts in the U.S. to Germany when the Nazi Party rose to power.

In response to the episode, over 1,300 doctors, nurses, scientists, and professors signed an open letter to Spotify demanding that the company “immediately establish a clear and public policy to moderate misinformation on its platform.” This letter sparked a backlash against Spotify, with major artists including Neil Young and Joni Mitchell boycotting the platform and users canceling their accounts en masse.

Update: February 24, 2022

This article has been updated to reflect the fact that AFLDS has removed a credit listing “Christian Hartsock, Project Veritas” as consulting producer from the trailer promoting its new video series.

Update: February 22, 2022

This article has been updated to reflect the fact that AFLDS has removed references to Project Veritas from its Doc Tracy promotional emails.

Update: February 17, 2022

After publication, Project Veritas and AFLDS both denied that they were working together, despite the fact that the video trailer listed a Project Veritas staffer as a consulting producer and promotional materials prominently mentioned Project Veritas. The Intercept gave both AFLDS and Project Veritas ample opportunity to provide comments before publication, but neither group responded to our inquiries.

Winston Smith from Project Veritas provided the following statement: “The references to Project Veritas in America Frontline Doctors’ production was neither done with Project Veritas’ knowledge or approval. Project Veritas was not involved in the creation and production of Doc Tracy. Christian Hartsock is not a credited producer. This error is being corrected. Mr. Hartsock has had conversations with AFD about journalism, but his involvement goes no further.”

The post Disinformation Doctors and Project Veritas Deny Teaming Up to Harass Medical Officials appeared first on The Intercept.

On February 10, the Ontario Superior Court of Justice ordered GiveSendGo to freeze access to the money raised in both of these campaigns. “Know this! Canada has absolutely ZERO jurisdiction over how we manage our funds here at GiveSendGo,” the company tweeted in response. Shortly afterward, the hacker broke into the crowdfunding company’s website and stole the donation records — and a whole lot more.

Activists on the right are not happy about this.

https://twitter.com/coolfacejane/status/1493287833641046026?t=rjxtlusoobTwHKScU7jafg

The Intercept obtained the hacked donor data — including records of roughly 104,000 donors who gave $9.6 million to two separate GiveSendGo crowdfunding campaigns, “Freedom Convoy 2022” and “Adopt a Trucker” — from the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets, which is releasing it to journalists and researchers who request access. (For the record, I’m an adviser to DDoSecrets.)

After analyzing the dataset, The Intercept discovered that the majority of donors to the “Freedom Convoy” included in the data are Americans, including U.S. billionaire Thomas Siebel, who is listed as donating $90,000, the largest individual donation. Hundreds of donors are members of the Oath Keepers, an American far-right paramilitary organization. Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers’ founder, was the first January 6 insurrectionist to be charged with seditious conspiracy.

On Wednesday, a Washington Post analysis of U.S. ZIP codes in the data concluded that “the richer an American community was, the more likely residents there were to donate, and the biggest number of contributions often came from communities where registered Republicans made up solid majorities.”

“Freedom Convoy” donors also contributed $7.6 million to other fundraising campaigns on GiveSendGo’s platform.

Thousands of donors gave money to various anti-vaccine causes promoted by Project Veritas, a far-right group known for deceptively editing videos of its undercover operations. On Monday, The Intercept reported that Project Veritas has collaborated on a video project with America’s Frontline Doctors, a major anti-vaccine propaganda group that works with telehealth companies to rake in millions of dollars selling bogus treatments for Covid-19. After that article was published, Project Veritas and AFLDS both denied that they were working together despite the fact that the video trailer lists a Project Veritas staffer as a consulting producer and promotional materials prominently mention Project Veritas.

And thousands more helped fund efforts to overturn President Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory over Donald Trump. Many had also previously given in support of Kyle Rittenhouse, the far-right teenage vigilante who in 2020 shot three Black Lives Matter protesters, killing two of them, in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Rittenhouse was found not guilty on all counts.

Several donors used government email addresses from agencies like the Transportation Security Administration, the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and NASA. The Intercept found one donor who used an email address from the Correctional Service of Canada, the Canadian prison system.

Jacob Wells, co-founder of GiveSendGo, verified the authenticity of the hack to the Washington Post. The Globe and Mail confirmed that at least one donor listed in the hacked data donated to the campaign. Brad Howard, the president of a Canadian pressure washer company who donated $75,000 to the fund, issued a statement in support of the “Freedom Convoy.” Gizmodo reached out to several top donors listed in the data, but “only a single donor had responded—only to say Gizmodo should investigate Black Lives Matter instead.”

Most of the Money Came From Canadians

Of the 104,180 donations, 59 percent came from Americans, while only 39 percent came from Canadians. However, Canadians gave just over 50 percent, $4.8 million, of the total money raised, while American donations made up 44 percent, or $4.2 million.

The largest donation record in the hacked data is for $215,000 but does not include data about the donor or which country the money came from. The only information included is the note “Processed but not recorded.” Wells told the Washington Post that this isn’t a single donation at all but rather “an attempt by GiveSendGo to make the public-facing total amount raised accurate, lumping together many donations that came in offline or before its Freedom Convoy campaign page went live.”

Wells says there is no such donation! The line was an attempt by GiveSendGo to make the public-facing total amount raised accurate, lumping together many donations that came in offline or before its Freedom Convoy campaign page went live.

— Aaron C. Davis (@byaaroncdavis) February 16, 2022

The second-largest donation record is $90,000 from Siebel, a Silicon Valley billionaire who founded the enterprise software company Siebel Systems. The email address associated with his donation is hosted on the domain siebel.org. Siebel has supported right-wing causes in the past: In 2008 he hosted a fundraiser for then-vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.

The third-largest donation record is $75,000 from Brad Howland, president of the Canadian pressure cleaner company Easy Kleen Pressure Systems. The hacked data marks Howland’s donation as “anonymous,” though he confirmed to the Globe and Mail that he made this donation and supports the “Freedom Convoy.” His donation included the comment “HOLD THE LINE!!!”

Hundreds of Oath Keepers Donated to the “Freedom Convoy”

By cross-referencing data from this hack with last year’s hack of the Oath Keepers, which included membership and donor records, The Intercept discovered 355 matches.

The Oath Keepers were key players in the deadly January 6 Capitol attack that was aimed at overturning Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. Prosecutors allege that Oath Keepers stashed weapons at a nearby hotel as part of “quick reaction forces” that could activate if violence escalated.

Oath Keepers left comments with their donations such as: “NWO Tyrants need to be crushed by the fist of Liberty and Freedom. God bless these truckers and their supporters! Thank you!”; “Make Canada Great Again helps Make America Great Again”; and “The communist pigs in uniform are going to try and steal fuel and food. The Biden Junta is afraid of this happening here. this may be why DHS issued a domestic terrorist threat against americans exercising their first amendment rights. They want to silence free speech and separate people from forming groups to fight the communist coup.”

Thousands of “Freedom Convoy” Donors Gave to Other Anti-Vaccine and Far-Right Causes

The hacked data includes the history of every donation ever made through the GiveSendGo platform. “Freedom Convoy” donors gave a total of $7.6 million to other GiveSendGo campaigns as well as the $9.6 million to the “Freedom Convoy” campaigns.

By comparing the email addresses of “Freedom Convoy” donors with donations from other GiveSendGo campaigns, The Intercept discovered that many of the same donors also gave money to other anti-vaccine causes championed by Project Veritas.

• 1,693 “Freedom Convoy” donors also donated $63,000 to Morgan Kahmann, an anti-vaccine former Facebook employee and self-styled “whistleblower” who leaked an internal document about the social network’s Covid-19 misinformation moderation policy to Project Veritas. Kahmann’s GoSendMe campaign earned him over $500,000.
• 1,612 donors also gave $66,000 to Jodi O’Malley, who is described as a “Covid-19 Federal whistleblower.” O’Malley, a registered nurse who worked for Phoenix Indian Medical Center, recorded a video for Project Veritas making unsubstantiated claims that Covid-19 vaccines harmed patients and that ivermectin is an effective treatment for the virus. Public health experts advise against using ivermectin to treat Covid-19. O’Malley earned $475,000 from this GiveSendGo campaign.
• 1,532 donors also donated $55,000 to Melissa Strickler, a former Pfizer manufacturing quality auditor who leaked company emails to Project Veritas that she believed showed the vaccine contained aborted fetal cells. This is false, but she still earned $347,000 from her GiveSendGo campaign.

The Intercept also discovered that many donors gave to anti-democracy efforts in the U.S., legal defense funds for January 6 prisoners, the legal defense fund for Rittenhouse, and various funds supporting the Proud Boys, an American hate group that also played a role in the January 6 Capitol attack.

• Over 2,000 donors also gave more than $120,000 to campaigns aimed at reversing the 2020 election results. The most prominent campaign was for the Voter Integrity Project, run by former Trump campaign operative Matt Braynard. Braynard raised nearly $700,000 through GiveSendGo for his project, which he claimed would acquire voter data from swing states and use this data to prove that there was voter fraud in states where Trump lost to Biden. Braynard’s efforts have been widely discredited. In a Georgia case that cited his data, Democratic lawyers pointed out that “Braynard does not have the appropriate qualifications to opine on these topics, he does not follow standard methodology in the relevant scientific field, and the survey underlying several of his opinions is fatally flawed.” The case was eventually dismissed.
• Over 2,000 donors also gave more than $130,000 to campaigns related to supporting the legal defense of people arrested for participating in the January 6 Capitol attack, including a fund started by a lawyer representing Ashli Babbitt’s family. Babbitt was shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer on January 6 inside the U.S. Capitol.
• 1,166 donors also gave nearly $50,000 to Rittenhouse’s legal defense fund. This campaign raised a total of $629,000. Hundreds of donors also donated $16,000 to campaigns supporting the Proud Boys.

Donors Used Government Email Addresses

A handful of small donations were made using government email addresses.

Someone donated using an email address from the Correctional Service of Canada, the Canadian agency responsible for running prisons. While the user listed his real first and last name in the donation, he put “George Soros” as his display name.

Another person donated multiple times with their U.S. Department of Justice email address. Two people donated using Federal Bureau of Prisons email addresses, and two others donated using NASA email addresses. One donor used their delaware.gov email address. Someone with a U.S. Navy email address donated $50 and listed their display name as “Lets Go Brandon,” and someone with a U.S. Army email address donated $25.

One person used his TSA email address to donate $50 to the anti-vaccine mandate “Freedom Convoy.” The transportation agency has enforced mandates, like requiring passengers to remove their shoes when going through airport checkpoints, in the name of security since September 11, 2001.

So many of the people on this site bleating about mask mandates and freedom and tyranny were totally fine with TSA making us take our shoes off for the past two decades, after 3,000 people died from terrorism on one day, as opposed to 3,000 people now dying from Covid *every day*

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) February 13, 2022

The post Oath Keepers, Anti-Democracy Activists, and Others on the Far Right Are Funding Canada’s “Freedom Convoy” appeared first on The Intercept.

Like the larger group, the Bradley Impact Fund has given money to groups that promote election fraud conspiracies and sought to overturn President Donald Trump’s 2020 election defeat. Bradley Impact’s donors, which were ostensibly cloaked in anonymity by the nonprofit’s structure, are being revealed here for the first time.

The tax document obtained by The Intercept, a publicly filed IRS form that included a list of donors, shows a handful of large corporate and individual donors to the Bradley Impact Fund. The contributions listed in the fiscal year 2018 filing range from roughly $782,000 to $1.5 million. The Bradley Impact Fund operates as a donor-advised fund, a vehicle frequently used to allow anonymous contributions by letting donors give to a fund and then directing their contributions to particular recipients.

Among the corporate donors to Bradley Impact, according to the tax document, were ABC Supply Co., whose website describes it as “the largest wholesale distributor of roofing in the United States”; the Boelter Companies, described online as “a provider of supplies, equipment, and design solutions for commercial foodservice, hospitality, and beverage industries”; and Bandon Golf Courses, which operates a number of golf courses in Oregon. Other donors include a former music industry CEO in Wisconsin, the CEO of a company that provides equipment to pipeline companies, and a number of small family foundations. (Neither Bradley Impact nor the donors listed in the tax filing responded to requests for comment from The Intercept.)

The largest donor to Bradley Impact listed in the fiscal year 2018 filing was the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. A much larger, linked nonprofit, the Bradley Foundation was identified by a recent New Yorker article as “an extraordinary force in persuading mainstream Republicans to support radical challenges to election rules.” The report described the foundation as a key promoter of the idea that election outcomes unfavorable to Trump are the result of fraud, doling out millions in grants to projects in the United States aimed at disqualifying purportedly illegitimate voters from participating in elections, according to the New Yorker, while using the issue of election integrity as a way of both undermining faith in the democratic process and manipulating election outcomes in a manner more favorable to candidates aligned with Trumpism. According to the 2018 filing, the Bradley Foundation gave $2.5 million to the Bradley Impact Fund.

The Bradley Foundation said in a statement that the Bradley Impact Fund is a separate group. Five of Bradley Impact’s board members and officers hold board seats at the Bradley Foundation, and the Bradley Impact group says its donors’ outlook is aligned with the larger foundation.

According to tax filings for fiscal years 2018 and 2019, Bradley Impact funded some of the same organizations funded by the Bradley Foundation — groups that constitute a network of election fraud conspiracists and undertook legal efforts to overthrow the 2020 election. The Public Interest Legal Foundation, identified by the New Yorker as “leading the way” in attempts to nullify the 2020 election, was given more than $300,000 by Bradley Impact over the two tax years. Bradley Impact also funded at least three right-wing groups that have promoted election fraud conspiracies: Turning Point USA, Project Veritas, and the Heritage Foundation.

The issue of election integrity has become deadly serious in pro-Trump circles. Following Trump’s 2020 election defeat, conspiracy theories suggesting that the election had been stolen by President Joe Biden, who took office in January 2021, gained traction. Trump had been setting the stage for such ideas by spreading suspicion of the election process even before his loss, something he had done in 2016 in anticipation of his contest with Hillary Clinton as well. Faced with apparently declining electoral fortunes in the United States, some in the Trump movement have doubled down on voter suppression as a means of maintaining political power in the country. A controversial voter suppression law in Georgia is just one of many current flashpoints over voting rights in the United States, where Republicans have pushed to make access to elections harder for as many people as possible.

“There is an active subset of people on the right, more Trumpist than truly conservative, who are trying to do that to regain and maintain their power even at the cost of free and fair elections.”

“There is an active subset of people on the right, more Trumpist than truly conservative, who are trying to do that to regain and maintain their power even at the cost of free and fair elections,” said Rick Hasen, an elections law expert, referring to groups that seek to “restrict the franchise or undermine democracy.”

Meanwhile, “the big lie,” a term for the Trump-created conspiracy about the 2020 election, continues to inspire radical movements in the country that believe that the democratic process was already abolished in order to keep their favored candidate out of office. The January 6 riot at the Capitol was inspired in large part by the idea that the election had been stolen, a perception that continues to be promoted by pro-Trump media outlets and their financial backers.

In contrast to Bradley Impact, which had a $10 million budget in 2019, the Bradley Foundation boasts an $850 million endowment, making it smaller than liberal rivals but still a potent force in American politics. In discussing the foundation’s role in subverting faith in the outcome of the 2020 election, the New Yorker piece, written by investigative journalist Jane Mayer, quoted an expert who argued that organizations that had previously “focused on advancing such conservative causes as capturing the courts and opposing abortion have now ‘more or less shifted to work on the voter-suppression thing.’” Mayer’s piece also calculated that the foundation had paid upward of $18 million since 2012 to groups working to challenge election results.

“It might seem improbable that a low-profile family foundation in Wisconsin has assumed a central role in current struggles over American democracy,” Mayer wrote. “But the modern conservative movement has depended on leveraging the fortunes of wealthy reactionaries.”

The post Secret Donors to Nonprofit Pushing Trump’s “Big Lie” Election Conspiracy Revealed appeared first on The Intercept.

“The more information that is gathered, the more powerful the system becomes,” the narrator tells us. “The piece of the puzzle missing … is you.”

This is “NextCity,” Cubic Transportation Systems’ idea of a smart city: an urban area that uses technology and networked data to optimize functioning and mobility.

Over the past decade, Cubic has taken the first steps toward actualizing its vision by snapping up contracts for the development of mobile-based, contactless fare collection systems in eight of America’s 10 largest public transit networks. Gone are the days of cumbersome tokens and flimsy farecards; now, millions of bus and subway riders can pay their fare directly by hovering a smartphone or credit card over a reader.

Transit authorities have embraced tap-to-pay technology for its convenience and speed, but privacy advocates are worried that the new fare collection systems pose serious surveillance and security risks. The concerns came to the fore as New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or MTA, rolled out OMNY, a fare payment system backed by Cubic that’s slated to fully replace MetroCards by the end of 2023. Nevertheless, Cubic’s widespread use of touchless, mobile-based reader technology is sprouting up everywhere — including places like San Francisco and Miami, where public transit riders would need to dig deep into city documents to find Cubic’s roles.

Cubic is a privately held corporation with broad and varied interests. In addition to its transit operation, Cubic is a vast military contractor doing hundreds of millions of dollars in business with the U.S. military and sales to foreign militaries. The company supplies surveillance technologies, training simulators, satellite communications equipment, computing and networking platforms, and other military hardware and software. Most of the headlines Cubic garners, though, stem from its increasingly indispensable role in public transit systems across the world.

“I’m deeply concerned about how the development of smart cities creates growing incentives for companies like Cubic to aggregate our data and then sell it.”

As Cubic’s quiet grip on fare collection takes hold in more cities, the company’s ability to process rider data grows with it, creating a sprawling corporate apparatus that has the extraordinary potential to gather up reams of information on the very people it is supposed to serve. In some cases, its access to that information is explicit in the transit systems’ privacy policies.

“I’m deeply concerned about how the development of smart cities creates growing incentives for companies like Cubic to aggregate our data and then sell it to police, ICE, and other agencies,” said Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology and Oversight Project, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Right now, our data is a huge part of the product, with almost no safeguards against these sorts of abuse.”

Cubic did not respond to a request for comment.

Turnstiles and Military Systems

The privacy concerns around Cubic would be acute even if its interests were limited to transit, but the company wears dual hats as ubiquitous public service provider and defense contractor.

Cubic Transportation Systems is but one division of Cubic Corporation. The company’s other concerns revolve around providing technologies to U.S. and other security forces. The defense contractor, Cubic Mission and Performance Solutions, handles Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance — or C5ISR — capabilities for the U.S. military. And Cubic also owns a variety of subsidiaries, including Abraxas Corporation, which supplies counterintelligence and cybersecurity software to agencies working in national security.

Since 1992, U.S. government agencies have awarded Cubic’s defense wing and its subsidiaries billions of dollars in contracts, including more than $42.1 million from the Department of Defense this year alone. One of Cubic’s largest contracts came in 2020, when the Pentagon awarded the company $193.3 million for work on training systems, with over half of the money allocated to foreign military sales in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Oman, Poland, Qatar, Singapore, Australia, and the U.K.

Cubic has also provided key support for U.S. drone operations. The company received $1.4 million from the U.S. Air Force in 2018 for Predator/Reaper training software, and in 2020, it signed a cooperative agreement with U.S. Special Operations for the research and development of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance technologies related to drones. Cubic also sells surveillance technologies; a subsidiary that sells video enhancement software has clients including the New York Police Department, U.S. Secret Service, and military criminal investigators.

The defense contracting business runs in parallel to the transit work — where Cubic’s reach is also international. The company has implemented contactless payment technology in other major cities globally, including London, Sydney, and Vancouver. It controls about 70 percent of the market for public transit fare collection across the U.S., U.K., and Australia.

In 2013, when the Chicago Reporter flagged that the company responsible for Chicago’s Ventra system — cards for public transit — had national security ties, a Cubic Corporation spokesperson insisted that the transportation and defense wings were “entirely separate entities and not connected through anything but ownership.”

In annual reports, however, the company emphasized the benefits of its “Living One Cubic” ethos. The reports describe the touchless reader at the center of Cubic’s transit business as “an innovation developed through engineering collaboration” across both divisions of the company. The 2019 annual report also cites the launch of a new internal product management system that will facilitate the sharing of “technical information and data amongst our engineering teams and the overall company.”

The notion of “One Cubic” is also on display in lobbying disclosures. While Cubic has spent massive sums on more than two decades of defense-industry lobbying, Cubic Corporation has put lesser, though still significant funding into lobbying on transit issues; in 2015, the company started directing its resources into “promot[ing] Cubic transportation technology solutions.” In 2019, the company pushed for the “adoption of integrated fare payment and mobility as a service solutions” — corporate jargon for its mobile-based fare collection systems and public-private transit partnerships.

Often, Cubic Corporation’s defense and transportation lobbying is targeted at the same lawmaker or handled by the same firm, with disclosures listing House and Senate defense authorizations alongside federal transportation appropriations.

For Bill Budington, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the soft wall between Cubic’s transportation and military businesses raises questions that have yet to be addressed by transit authorities about the risks that personal data could move between the two sides of the company.

“I think it depends on the overlap, and whether the technologies employed are bleeding over to the other side of the company,” said Budington. “And whether the typical concerns, when it comes to the privacy and security of data that’s being handled for the public, are lessened by the fact that you’re part of the intelligence community that is looking for targets and employing military technologies overseas.”

He added, “That is something that should be raised to the public, and there should be a public debate about it. And I don’t think that there has been.”

Vague Privacy Policy

The Cubic Corporation’s privacy policy outlines the notably lenient guidelines governing the use of data provided both through Cubic’s own website and its contracts with clients. The sharing of personal information is permitted among recipients, including Cubic’s family of companies, affiliates, and subsidiaries; external auditors; police, regulators, government agencies, and judicial or administrative authorities; and third parties connected with mergers and acquisitions.

The company also says it may share information “where disclosure is both legally permissible and necessary to protect or defend our rights” and in “matters of national security.” Personal data may be stored for up to 10 years.

Cubic’s privacy policy allows data sharing between corporate divisions only if it’s for the product being delivered, not for ancillary business practices. However, Cahn said that it’s difficult to know what corporate firewalls are truly in place when dealing with private companies.

“I think this highlights one of the broader design tensions with smart cities infrastructure,” Cahn said. “Oftentimes, we have a misalignment of incentives, where companies have every reason to look for ways to monetize our most intimate data, or as a government tracking tool, rather than having incentives to truly keep that information protected.”

The guidelines for the MTA’s touchless system OMNY have been criticized for their weakness. The Surveillance Technology and Oversight Project found in a 2019 report that the policy permits the MTA and Cubic to store users’ personal data indefinitely, allowing law enforcement and other government agencies access to that and other information. The touchless system’s predecessor, the MetroCard, which Cubic designed and implemented in 1992, already enables enforcement agencies to track users’ whereabouts.

“There should be some kind of oversight body that is making sure the new surveillance technology that’s employed isn’t going to violate the privacy rights of individuals.”

Recent media reports noted that, because OMNY links credit card information to a user profile by design, location tracking could be connected to names, payment cards, and any other information web tracking and data scraping could tie to the account. According to TransitCenter, a group focused on improving public transportation in cities, OMNY would elevate tracking capabilities to a “near-instantaneous” level.

The MTA’s OMNY privacy policy stipulates that Cubic and other vendors must adhere to privacy practices “at least as stringent” as those in the OMNY policy. Other Cubic-designed systems, though, do not disclose such restrictive rules. The Chicago Ventra program policy simply authorizes the sharing of personal information with Cubic, provided it “maintain[s] the confidentiality of the information” and uses it only as necessary for administering the program.

Budington, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Intercept that phrases such as “necessary to provide services” or “as permitted by law” raise red flags. This vague language cannily obscures any specifics of what the company is doing with the provided data.

“This is why we at EFF are big advocates for city council ordinances when surveillance technologies are employed on a population,” he said. “There should be some kind of oversight body that is making sure the new surveillance technology that’s employed isn’t going to violate the privacy rights of individuals.”

Public Service, Private Equity

Cubic Corporation had been publicly traded since it was founded in 1959, but in May 2021, Veritas Capital and Evergreen Coast Capital paid roughly $3 billion to take the company private. Veritas also owns the Department of Homeland Security’s biometrics database and has acquired business units of Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and other defense contractors. One critic has suggested that Cubic’s recent acquisition by the private equity firms could exacerbate the company’s lack of interest in safeguarding users’ data.

Cubic’s defense industry ties highlight a stark paradox: Public transit is widely viewed as an essential public service, but the private contractors that enable the systems may have corporate incentives that don’t align with the goal of a common good. For instance, though the MTA has pushed back against privacy advocates’ concerns, Cubic’s own documents emphasize that it has broad ambitions for the use of rider data.

A brochure for the back-end analytics tool that Cubic offers to transit agencies boasts that the technology can enable transit authorities to search and visualize large datasets to “make discoveries” and “identify trends.” The software can also aggregate and anonymize personally identifiable information, turning that information into “an analytics-ready dataset that can be securely consumed for research, monetization schemes, and other internal and external purposes.” Experts have noted that even purportedly anonymized data holds privacy risks, as it is often possible to re-identify users with their personal information.

The company’s vision for NextCity would join data collected by Cubic with other smart-city infrastructure to “build a model for real-time data gathered across a transportation network.” Cubic Corporation’s annual reports outline how it aims to expand its portfolio beyond fare collection to include ride and bike sharing, tolls and parking, and traffic congestion reduction. Toward these ends, Cubic Corporation has acquired multiple companies in recent years that are focused on smart city technologies, including GRIDSMART, which supplies cameras to enable real-time traffic monitoring, and Delerrok, an electronic fare-collection system.

For now, cities with Cubic’s mobile-based payment systems also offer the option to purchase fare cards with cash, albeit for an additional $5, at select retailers. Individual people concerned with their privacy might opt for this method despite the convenience of OMNY and similar systems.

Despite the workarounds, transit authorities in major metropolitan areas are increasingly letting any notion of privacy fall by the wayside. As an increasing number of metropolitan areas embrace the concept of smart cities, the privacy risks associated with the technology are poised to grow — until, eventually, everyone’s choice between convenience and privacy might be made for them.

The post Meet the Military Contractor Running Fare Collection in New York Subways — and Around the World appeared first on The Intercept.

As a matter of policy, Hatemi never gets involved in student groups no matter their affiliation, he said, but he thought it his responsibility to make sure that the student was aware of the group’s ties to far-right extremists. So he declined the request and offered some advice. “Your timing, frankly, could be seen as offensive to many,” he wrote, referring to the January 6 assault. “It might be time to reflect on what you stand for and what your organization stands for.”

Hatemi said he put quite some thought into his two-paragraph response. “The right thing to do was to say, ‘Hey, you need to take a look at what you’re doing and this group you belong to,’” he told me in an interview. “If I say nothing, what kind of educator am I?”

Within days, Hatemi’s email to the student was published on Campus Reform, a conservative website that bills itself as the “#1 Source for College News” and whose stated mission is to expose “liberal bias and abuse on the nation’s college campuses.” The article accused Hatemi of having “lashed out” at the student and “responded harshly” to his request. Quotes from Hatemi’s email also appeared in right-wing publications like The Federalist, The Blaze, and the Post Millennial, and they spread on social media, where they were manipulated and stripped of context. A deluge of hate mail followed, directed at Hatemi as well as at his university’s administration. Some of it threatened violence, prompting campus police to intervene, though Hatemi declined to comment on the details. The university did not respond to a request for comment.

Kara Zupkus, a spokesperson for YAF, wrote in an email to The Intercept that the group “has regularly condemned white nationalism, mob violence, and extremism.” She also referred to a statement the organization issued shortly after the incident involving Hatemi.

“It is Penn State YAF’s constitutional right to exist on campus – whether this professor likes it or not,” the group wrote then. “To attack all conservative students and YAF by accusing them of supporting riots and violence with no evidence is disgraceful and unbecoming of a professor at an institution of higher education.”

Campus Reform is published by the Leadership Institute, a nonprofit that has trained conservative activists for four decades through the generous funding of billionaire donors like the Koch family. The institute reported more than $16 million in revenue in 2018 alone. Over the last several years, Campus Reform has targeted hundreds of college professors like Hatemi, leading to online harassment campaigns, doxxing, threats of violence, and calls on universities to fire their faculty. Professors featured in Campus Reform stories have felt isolated and confused as they came under attack, often over public statements they made but sometimes over things they said in class or even academic research they published. Campus Reform stories have regularly been picked up by a host of established conservative outlets, from Breitbart to Fox News, amplifying outrage and unleashing abuse in a manner that observers of the site note mirrors how far-right extremists attack their targets online.

“The effects of Campus Reform stories can be similar to the online harassment often deployed by white supremacists,” said Isaac Kamola, an assistant professor at Trinity College who studies the politics of higher education and closely monitors the site.

A majority were singled out over their comments on race, and Black professors were disproportionately targeted.

Kamola has tracked more than 1,570 stories posted on Campus Reform since 2020 and surveyed the 338 individuals they targeted, many of whose official profiles and contact details were linked to in stories about them. The survey, the results of which will be published by the American Association of University Professors’ Academe magazine, found that at least 40 percent of respondents received “threats of harm” following a Campus Reform article, mostly via email and social media but also often by phone, text message, or postal mail. One professor reported receiving thousands of emails, many of them laced with violent, racist, and sexist comments, Kamola said. In the most extreme cases, he added, online trolls published the professors’ personal information online, forcing them to change their phone numbers, leave their homes, and retain security. Less than half the people surveyed by Kamola reported receiving support from their universities’ administrations, and more than 12 percent reported facing disciplinary action as a result of a Campus Reform story. Three people said they lost their jobs.

The professors were targeted over a variety of liberal positions, the survey reveals, but a majority were singled out over their comments on race, and Black professors were disproportionately targeted. Those who discussed topics like antifa, Black Lives Matter, and Palestine were especially subjected to threats, the survey found. And the intimidation seemed to work, with nearly a quarter of surveyed professors saying that they dialed back their social media presence as a result of being targeted, even though others said that the experience bolstered their commitment to speak out about social justice issues.

“I basically know that Campus Reform has written something about me because I’ll just suddenly start getting vicious hate mail in my inbox,” said Asha Rangappa, a senior lecturer at Yale University who was twice the subject of Campus Reform stories and has described the site as an example of “domestic information warfare.”

“Within 24 hours, it will have been cited or replicated in an entire ecosystem of right-wing media,” she added, noting that professors who lacked the social media status to push back were particularly vulnerable. “It’s just never clear why it’s newsworthy; it’s portrayed as something crazy and outrageous, and it is never contextualized. But it very predictably turns into a barrage of targeted harassment.”

Campus Reform’s managing editor and the site’s chief spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment. Morton Blackwell, a conservative activist and the founder and director of the Leadership Institute, wrote in an email to The Intercept that the institute “was founded to train and develop principled conservative leaders for our country: men and women who share our country’s founding principles of liberty, individual rights, and equal justice for all under the rule of law.”

Cancel Culture

Campus Reform is emblematic of the raging battle in American public discourse over so-called cancel culture, which the site’s writers have regularly lamented even as they set out to cancel the reputations and jobs of the people they attack. Campus Reform is also the product of a decades-old conservative and libertarian effort to shape the values of U.S. higher education through a series of organizations that give the appearance of a diverse and organic conservative campus movement but are in fact part of the same coordinated network.

First published in 2009 as a resource hub for conservative students at U.S. colleges, Campus Reform was created to give them what it called “weapons in their fight for the hearts and minds of the next generation of citizens, politicians, and members of the media,” according to research by Sam McCarthy, a student at Trinity College who works with Kamola and has been studying the site as part of her sociology thesis. About eight years ago, Campus Reform began to rebrand as a “news” site, McCarthy said, aiming to expose bias, waste, and abuse on college campuses and obscuring its political agenda behind a pledge of objectivity and “rigorous journalism standards.” Around that time, the site began to recruit and groom a cadre of student correspondents tasked with discovering instances of liberal misconduct; the site paid $50 per story, or $100 if they included video or photos, McCarthy found.

Soon Campus Reform established a tiered system of rewards for its contributing writers: After publishing four articles, a correspondent would rise from bronze to silver and make $75 a piece. After 15 articles, they would rise to gold and receive $100 per story. Other perks include a verified email account, a blue check on Twitter, business cards, and a press pass, as well as résumé writing help, recommendation letters, mentorship opportunities, and a pipeline to a career in conservative media. Campus Reform offers a way for student writers to build up a portfolio, a chance for their stories to go viral, and access to a steady stream of media gigs, with the most high-profile being appearances on “Fox and Friends” or “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” Even nonwriters can benefit, making $50 for tipping the site off to supposed liberal abuse.

McCarthy calculated that the site’s most prolific writer has published 253 articles since last May, which could have earned them more than $26,000. And while student correspondents she interviewed shared the site’s politics and mission, they told her that the financial incentives were a main draw.

“There’s a lot of money in it,” she told me in an interview. “But there’s some real harm that comes out of this apparatus.”

After Campus Reform published a story about Alyssa Johnson, an assistant professor at Louisiana State University, over a tweet she had posted in response to an incoming student’s racist slur, she faced such an onslaught of abuse and threats that she was forced to leave her home.

“Nobody directly said, ‘I’m going to come kill you,’ but it was so close to that.”

The story was picked up by scores of right-wing outlets, including Fox News, and went viral on social media and on a website for LSU sports fans, where insults and attacks against Johnson filled chat rooms for dozens of pages. “I read them all because I just wanted to make sure that nobody had found my address,” said Johnson, who is Asian American. She noted that a majority of the online comments as well as hundreds of emails she received were filled with sexist insults and “racial slurs about Asian people that I had never even known existed,” she said.

Johnson erased her social media profiles, unplugged her office phone, and filed a police report, but the intimidation got so bad that she ended up temporarily relocating with her husband and two small children to wait out the storm. “Nobody directly said, ‘I’m going to come kill you,’ but it was so close to that,” said Johnson, who declined to press charges even though police told her that some of the messages she received amounted to crimes. “I didn’t want to be worried about somebody showing up at my door, threatening my family.”

It took more than two months for the attention to die down. As Johnson learned more about Campus Reform, she connected with other people who had gone through similar experiences, and they built a network offering support to the site’s latest targets. Johnson has since taken a step back from Twitter. “I post much less; I don’t ever post opinions anymore or really any thoughts,” she told me, noting that she was consumed by guilt for putting her family in harm’s way. “I hate to give in because it’s exactly what they wanted: They wanted to silence me. But it was a feeling that I never want to feel again.”

“Most Universities Have No Clue”

Institutional responses to Campus Reform have varied significantly. A senior communication executive at a top-ranked private university, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid drawing Campus Reform’s attention, said that his university has a policy against responding to any requests by Campus Reform or the College Fix, another right-wing outlet with “an agenda to undermine respect and credibility for higher education.” When student journalists reach out to faculty members seeking comment on something they wrote or said, professors often want to answer in good faith, the executive added, providing thoughtful and lengthy responses that are invariably distorted to give the story an extra boost.

“We just hit delete,” he said. “Nothing good comes from engaging with them.”

Often both university administrators and instructors have little understanding of the amount of money and coordination by outside interests that goes into these attacks, said Kamola, who regularly reaches out to people targeted by Campus Reform with information about the site and its funders. Hatemi, the Pennsylvania State University professor, was surprised to learn from Kamola that Campus Reform was “actually a whole program” designed to put faculty through the barrage of harassment he had just experienced. “Most universities have no clue,” he said.

After he became the target of what felt like an organized intimidation effort, Hatemi dug into YAF as well as Campus Reform and the Leadership Institute and published a long essay detailing their ties to far-right extremists. In the essay, Hatemi listed more than half a dozen YAF affiliates with white supremacist views or connections and referenced YAF-sponsored campus activities like a “Catch an Illegal Immigrant” contest and a “Koran Desecration” competition. While not all YAF members might have shared such views or participated in such activities, the fact that he could find so many examples “within minutes of researching YAF,” Hatemi wrote, spoke to the group’s deep connections to far-right extremism.

Hatemi said he hoped that his essay might help others in similar situations, but he also wanted to ensure that his own employer understood the Campus Reform story as “an outside, concerted effort to manipulate the system.” While no university official formally contacted him about it, he says he initially feared that he might face discipline, hearing “chatter” about it from colleagues, which disappeared as soon as he published his research.

Several professors argued that as learning institutions have increasingly come to view students as paying customers, they have become more preoccupied with reputational damage and public relations than with the tenets of intellectual freedom and education that are essential to academic life. “University administrators often don’t take the side of their faculty member because they don’t necessarily understand how the story originated, what the funding sources are, what the political intentions are of the platform,” said McCarthy. “And so we see the faculty member facing adverse consequences that they really should not have, under their academic freedom.”

Platforming Fascists

In its own words, the Leadership Institute, Campus Reform’s publisher, aims to train “freedom fighters” to “effectively defeat the radical Left.” Funded by a host of well-known, ultrawealthy donors, including multiple foundations connected to the Koch family network, the institute claims to have trained more than 200,000 conservative activists since its founding in 1979 and offers a rich program with a heavy focus on media and communications.

Andrew Isenhour, a spokesperson for two major Koch institutions, wrote in an email to The Intercept that “no support or resources from the Charles Koch Foundation or Charles Koch Institute benefit Campus Reform.”

“We find any form of racism, white supremacy, or intolerance abhorrent and morally repugnant,” he said, adding that the institute has denounced intimidation and spoken in support of “campus free speech.”

Isenhour did not respond to follow-up questions about the Koch family’s support for the Leadership Institute, which employs Campus Reform staff. According to DeSmog, an environmentalist publication that closely monitors the Koch network, the Leadership Institute received at least $278,958 from Koch-related foundations between 2003 and 2017. The Leadership Institute is also part of the State Policy Network, a group of think tanks and political groups funded through the Koch network. Top institute funders also include Donors Capital Fund and Donors Trust, anonymous conservative donor funds that have been called “the Dark-Money ATM of the Conservative Movement.”

The Leadership Institute has long been a major player in mainstream conservative politics, and its early alumni include Republican elected officials like Sen. Mitch McConnell and former Vice President Mike Pence as well as James O’Keefe, the right-wing provocateur behind Project Veritas, famous for his doctored videos targeting the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, and Planned Parenthood. There is a revolving door between the Leadership Institute, YAF, and other conservative youth groups like Young Americans for Liberty and Turning Point USA.

“The Leadership Institute has helped manufacture the right’s construction of anti-antifa hysteria, all while having a long history of platforming actual fascists.”

The group, however, also has a less-known history of ties to far-right movements and racist extremists. “There is actually a long history of close connections between the Leadership Institute and white nationalist organizations,” said Kamola, the Trinity professor. “The Leadership Institute has helped manufacture the right’s construction of anti-antifa hysteria, all while having a long history of platforming actual fascists.”

Matthew Heimbach, a neo-Nazi activist, former YAF chapter leader, and once-Leadership Institute trainee, told HuffPost in 2016 that the institute “trained this entire next generation of white nationalists.” The institute also employed Kevin DeAnna, another former YAF leader who started the campus-based white supremacist group Youth for Western Civilization. In his essay, Hatemi included photos of both Heimbach and DeAnna posing with neo-Nazi activist Richard Spencer as well as a photo of Spencer and Kyle Bristow, a former YAF chapter leader who called Latino students and faculty “savages” and went on to become an attorney for right-wing figures, representing both Spencer and KKK leader David Duke.

Hannah Gais, a senior researcher at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremism, said that the Leadership Institute “definitely has had, historically, ties to the far right and extremism.”

But Gais, who exposed writings DeAnna had posted under different pseudonyms on several prominent white nationalist publications, also noted that the institute is so large that “to a certain extent, some of these kinds of pseudo-anonymous white nationalists coming up through their ranks is sort of inevitable,” she said.

The far-right movement that resurfaced during the Trump years, she added, deliberately relied on the resources of established conservative institutions to gain political power. “If you’re a far-right extremist and you can kind of hide your views and make them seemingly more professional,” she added, “it’s a lot easier to lurk in these spaces.”

“Campus Reform’s content tends to be shared in fringe social media spaces where we have seen consistent thematic overlaps with other content we know plays well with right-wing audiences.”

More recently, former Leadership Institute intern Martin Christopher Rojas was exposed as an active contributor to a series of white supremacist publications, where he published more than 500 pieces under his own name and a series of pseudonyms. The Guardian and the nonprofit Right Wing Watch also recently reported that Michael J. Thompson, a regular in conservative circles who worked with the Leadership Institute and Campus Reform, was also a frequent contributor to online white supremacist publications, where, under the name “Paul Kersey,” he started the racist blog “Stuff Black People Don’t Like” and wrote lies about the demographic replacement of white Americans and the genetic inferiority of people of color. Thompson’s stories have since been scrubbed from Campus Reform.

In his email to The Intercept, Blackwell, the Leadership Institute’s founder, distanced himself from former institute affiliates.

“My Institute has employed hundreds of principled conservatives over the last 40 years,” he wrote. “A few former staffers managed to hide their beliefs from me and my staff. These individuals wrote racist articles under fake names to hide their identities. They went to great lengths to keep their true beliefs hidden. Such beliefs are entirely incompatible with employment at the Leadership Institute.”

Since rebranding as a news enterprise, Campus Reform has effectively been able to straddle between the mainstream conservative politics of its funders and a more radical audience active in fringe spaces and eager for content to feed its online wars.

According to an analysis by Media Matters for America, which monitors media and the web for conservative misinformation, Campus Reform stories have spread on Reddit as well as on social media platforms favored by the far right. Such platforms include Parler, the QAnon forum GreatAwakening.win, and Patriots.win, formerly thedonald.win, a forum for Trump supporters that moved to its own site after being banned by Reddit. “Our research has found that Campus Reform’s content tends to be shared in fringe social media spaces where we have seen consistent thematic overlaps with other content we know plays well with right-wing audiences,” said Stefanie Le, Media Matters’ deputy research director. “Similar to when an article from a conservative outlet goes viral on fringe platforms, users in these spaces attempt to focus on or invent conspiratorial implications of the stories and then use it to support other far-right narratives and stoke conversation.”

That feedback loop is indicative of how far-right discourse has benefited from the support of pillars of the conservative establishment and of the way that the latter have been willing to overlook the harm they enabled — a dynamic that Campus Reform lays bare.

“It really feeds into the conservative outrage machine that will take targets, tied especially to issues of culture war, and basically completely go off on them,” said Gais, of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “But they’re doing so with big money from the Koch Foundation.”

The post A Billionaire-Funded Website With Ties to the Far Right Is Trying to “Cancel” University Professors appeared first on The Intercept.

Some 111 people were arrested or charged for actions connected to the Capitol siege as of Thursday morning, according to the Prosecution Project, an open-source research platform that monitors criminal cases involving political violence. Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Michael Sherwin said that prosecutors were considering a growing set of charges against those involved in the riot. He said that the crimes they could be accused of span from the relatively minor trespassing dozens of people have already been charged with; to theft of mail, digital devices, and possibly national security information from the Capitol; and up to assault of a law enforcement officer, seditious conspiracy, and felony murder. “The gamut of cases and criminal conduct we’re looking at is really mind-blowing and that has really put an enormous amount of work on the plate of the FBI and field offices throughout the entire United States,” Sherwin said at a press conference this week, warning that the cases could take years to prosecute. “This is only the beginning.”

Held nearly a week after the attack on the Capitol, the briefing by Sherwin and Steven D’Antuono, the assistant director in charge for the FBI’s Washington, D.C., office, was the first major update on the status of an investigation occupying hundreds of law enforcement agents and prosecutors nationwide and that has already turned up more than 100,000 pieces of digital media evidence. Lawmakers and other officials have also called for separate investigations to shed light on a historic breach of the Capitol that remains largely unexplained. After the U.S. Capitol police and law enforcement agencies across the district were caught woefully unprepared for last week’s assault, Tuesday’s briefing sought to address criticism that the FBI and the Department of Justice were too slow to respond with arrests and charges. And it came as critics were contrasting the kid-glove police response and relatively minor charges filed to date against the rioters to the treatment of Black Lives Matter and other protesters who have been violently arrested and harshly prosecuted for years.

Amid warnings of more violence to come in the next days and conflicting calls for unity versus accountability, the country is bracing for what will likely be a yearslong effort to investigate and prosecute those responsible for the January 6 attack, harrowing details of which continue to emerge more than a week later. But many who have pointed to the glaring inequities in law enforcement’s response to the Capitol assault as compared to recent racial justice or anti-Trump protests have also warned against calls for mass conspiracy prosecutions or any expansions of law enforcement resources, civil rights erosions, and domestic terrorism and anti-protest laws. Such measures, they said, will inevitably be turned against people of color and government critics legitimately expressing their dissent. As they grappled with the question of how the justice system can meaningfully address the dramatic surge in far-right and white supremacist extremism in this country, many cautioned that accountability is better sought from those who enabled and coordinated its rise, rather than through the mass criminalization of all who embraced it.

“I don’t see how we can prosecute or jail our way out of a burgeoning fascist movement in the United States.”

“I don’t see how we can prosecute or jail our way out of a burgeoning fascist movement in the United States,” Thomas Harvey, justice project director at the civil rights group Advancement Project, told The Intercept. “That’s going to take a lot more effort, and I think some of the accountability that we’ll be talking about is going to happen politically.”

Harvey and several others warned against responding to the attack with “knee-jerk” calls for expanded law enforcement powers and overly broad prosecutions. “We have a strong desire for punishment and retribution in our society, and I don’t think people on the left are completely exempt from that,” he said. As for the mass prosecution of individuals who protested President Donald Trump’s inauguration and others charged during last summer’s unrest, Harvey said, “I understand the desire to see that equivalence, but what we want is for the people who were involved in the J20 protests and people who went out to exercise their First Amendment rights after the George Floyd uprising and who were met with extreme police violence, we want those cases to be dismissed. We don’t want more punishment for people who came out on January 6 as some kind of offset.”

Uneven Response

The Prosecution Project’s records, which track federal charges as well as those filed in D.C.’s District Court, show that many of the 112 cases filed in connection with the storming of the Capitol involve relatively minor misdemeanors. In D.C.’s District Court, 33 people have been charged with unlawful entry and 26 with curfew violations, which carry monetary fines or less than a year in jail. Ten people were also charged locally with firearms-related crimes for carrying weapons, which is illegal in the district. Some 30 people are facing federal cases charges so far, including for violent entry and disorderly conduct on Capitol grounds and for stealing public property. So far, no one appears to have been charged with the more serious crimes prosecutors said they intend to pursue, including conspiracy and sedition. None of those who spoke at a rally held hours before the assault were charged. And no one appears to have been charged with terrorism-related charges, or in connection with the five deaths that happened during the riot, including that of Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick.

It is common for prosecutors to bring additional, more severe charges weeks or even months into an investigation, and Sherwin explained that prosecutors working the case looked for “the most simple charge we could file as quick as possible.” Some of those arrested early on have already had additional charges filed against them. Richard Barnett, an Arkansas man who was photographed with his feet on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk, for instance, was at first charged with unlawful entry, disorderly conduct, and theft. But he was later charged with an additional count of carrying an unlawful weapon in a restricted area — a charge that could result in a 10-year sentence. Officials have all but promised that far more severe charges are coming for many of those with open cases and for others who are yet to be arrested.

Still, critics noted, the charges that were filed so far stand in stark contrast with those filed in recent years against protesters accused of far less severe conduct. They pointed to federal charges — including, in some cases, terrorism charges — filed against people protesting police brutality during last summer’s George Floyd demonstrations, many of whom were arrested on the scene and immediately charged with felonies like rioting. Combined with the fact that most of those who stormed the Capitol were able to leave the scene without being stopped by police — only a dozen people were arrested during the siege — the relatively minor charges filed so far against them speak to profound inequities in the ways law enforcement has long viewed political dissent and political violence depending on the race and beliefs of those behind it.

“There’s certainly a big discrepancy in the way past protesters have been arrested and so far prosecuted,” said Vida Johnson, an attorney and associate professor at Georgetown University Law Center, who has represented protesters charged in D.C. “Here we have a largely white, largely middle-class group of people who are being charged only with misdemeanors for their role in the violent breaking into the Congress, while it was in session, while congresspeople were carrying out their constitutional duties, and they are only charged with unlawful entry,” she said. Johnson added that she expects more charges to come later, but suggested that there was plenty of evidence for them to be filed sooner. “It seems like they could easily bring more significant charges now,” she said. “It’s hard to know what the reasoning for that might be other than what people are afraid of, which is that the U.S. attorney’s office has different priorities.”

“It’s hard to know what the reasoning for that might be other than what people are afraid of, which is that the U.S. attorney’s office has different priorities.”

Prosecutors regularly overcharge or stretch the scope of the law when accusing people of crimes — often in an effort to force plea agreements. Michael Loadenthal, founder and director of the Prosecution Project, noted that following the George Floyd protests, prosecutors seemed to be “bending over backwards” to charge protesters at the federal level over alleged crimes that would have normally been a matter for state courts. He cited the examples of a protester charged with federal interstate crimes for setting a New York police car on fire on the basis that New York police engage in interstate work, and of a protester charged with an interstate crime in Utah because the police car he damaged was manufactured in Canada and used on interstate highways. Loadenthal also cited the case of a Florida protester charged with crimes relating to interstate commerce for using as a weapon a bottle of Patron liquor imported from Mexico. “During the Floyd uprising, we saw a lot of this twisting or manipulation of the law in order to take what could have been a state charge and make it into a federal charge,” said Loadenthal, contrasting those charges with the ones filed so far in connection to the Capitol assault. “We’re not really seeing that here. We are seeing people charged with pretty low-level crimes.”

Loadenthal also contrasted the response to the Capitol riot with the treatment of the nearly 200 “J20” defendants, himself included. The group, which included journalists and legal observers, were arrested on January 20, 2017, the day of Trump’s inauguration; charged en masse with felony rioting, later upgraded to conspiracy; and threatened with decades in prison. Prosecutors in the case argued for a far-reaching notion of liability that essentially sought to hold dozens of people criminally responsible for crimes — like smashing the windows of several storefronts — that only a handful of them had carried out. The case ended in an embarrassing defeat for prosecutors, who after a series of mistrials and acquittals dropped all remaining charges in summer 2018. But the prosecutions upended dozens of people’s lives for more than a year and foreshadowed the crackdown on dissent that defined the Trump administration.

While the J20 protests and the storming of the Capitol were incidents of fundamentally different gravity, “the response to J20 was a hundredfold more potent that what appears to be happening so far with this,” said Philip Andonian, one of the defense attorneys on the J20 case. “It really highlights the disparities.”

Intelligence Failures

Since the attack, the FBI seems to have mostly focused on arresting people whose images inside the Capitol went viral, including several who were identified by activists online. So far, it appears that only one person was charged in connection to some of the worst violence that took place that day, including the brutal beatings of several police officers. The bureau has also announced a $50,000 reward for information leading to the identification of individuals who left pipe bombs on the scene, leaving the impression that law enforcement is scrambling to find the most violent individuals who were at the Capitol. “Those people are still out there,” Michael German, a former FBI agent and now fellow with the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program, told The Intercept. “I would say that the people who are willing to use violence against the police would be the ones you would want to get in the bag quickest.”

The dearth of arrests in connection to the worst violence that took place at the Capitol raised fears about more to come in the next days, a possibility which the FBI has now warned all 50 states of. But officials also seem to be struggling to articulate a clear theory of what happened on January 6. “This is certainly different from the way they have mobilized in the past,” said Andonian, referring to prosecutors’ seemingly cautious approach. “It just makes you question, what is going on?”

While a full accounting of what went wrong will likely take months to emerge, there is no question the Capitol attack was the result of a colossal intelligence failure. Conflicting reports have emerged about what the FBI and other law enforcement agencies knew ahead of the riot; some officials are saying that the bureau had not issued any risk assessments, as it regularly does during protests, and others are reporting that warnings were raised before the riot. After the attack, hundreds of rampagers were able to leave — making it harder for prosecutors to prove whether they were armed or in possession of any stolen property, or to obtain private communications and records that rioters have now had plenty of time to destroy. The Capitol — effectively a crime scene — was quickly cleaned up.

“You had dozens of private citizens emailing the cops, calling for security on Twitter and other places leading up to January 6, but no indication that the actual security apparatus was paying any attention to what was an openly planned insurrection online,” said Sam Menefee-Libey, an activist formerly with the group D.C. Legal Posse, which worked to support the J20 defendants.

He and others noted that the case against the J20 defendants was built in the months before the incidents in question took place. According to Andonian, law enforcement monitored the activities and conversations of a coalition of groups planning to protest the inauguration, and at least one individual working with far-right organization Project Veritas infiltrated the group. On Inauguration Day, protesters were met with a massive police response, arrested, and indiscriminately charged for simply being there. But Menefee-Libey said rather than once again mass prosecuting people, he hoped the Capitol incident would belatedly shift law enforcement’s focus to the threat posed by far-right and white supremacist extremism. “I do hope that they use this as an opportunity to develop a sophisticated intelligence map of the right-wing insurrectionists whom anti-fascists have been paying attention to for years and years,” he said, “and whom anti-fascists have already done a tremendous amount of work to identify online.”

But the growing threat posed by far-right extremist groups was hardly a secret before the Capitol assault. As The Intercept and others have reported many times, officials under multiple administrations have tried to repress reports about the rise of white supremacist groups, armed militias, and other far-right extremists. After coming under intense criticism in the last few years over its targeting of what it labeled “Black Identity Extremists,” the FBI has recently collapsed all identity-based and anti-government ideologies under broad umbrella categories, mixing nonexistent extremist groups with others posing tangible threats to public safety. The recategorization has made it virtually impossible for outsiders to monitor whether the bureau is putting its massive investigative resources toward the monitoring of anti-government militias, anti-fascist activists, white supremacists, or racial justice advocates. But it is clear that the sprawling and costly intelligence apparatus that was built in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks failed to take seriously the most significant national security threat of the last several years.

German, who has written a number of reports warning of the threat posed by the same groups who stormed the Capitol, said he was surprised in 2017 that the FBI had seemed unaware of the individuals who rallied at the “Unite the Right” event in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a counterprotester was killed. Since then, German followed many of the same individuals as they showed up armed at rallies across the country, including several that turned violent. “How is it that police, and particularly the FBI, who tracks them interstate, didn’t understand this?” he asked. “I can’t understand how they were caught so off guard. … The violence hasn’t been hidden, it’s public. I don’t understand how they could have ignored it, except willfully.”

“The violence hasn’t been hidden, it’s public. I don’t understand how they could have ignored it, except willfully.”

FBI Director Christopher Wray and other top officials have been largely silent since the Capitol riot. But at Tuesday’s press conference, D’Antuono, of the FBI’s D.C. field office, said that the bureau had spent the weeks before January 6 looking “for any intelligence that may have developed about potential violence during the rally.” Some of that intelligence led to the arrest, days before, of Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio. But, D’Antuono added, “we have to separate the aspirational from the intentional and determine which of the individuals saying despicable things on the internet are just practicing keyboard bravado or they actually have the intent to do harm.”

That’s hardly a courtesy the FBI has afforded to countless activists, protesters, and even legislative staff expressing different views, who have been surveilled and interrogated without a shred of evidence that they were committing crimes or posing threats to public safety. Instead, the impunity with which far-right extremists have been allowed to operate in recent years was on clear display at the Capitol, where many seemed under the belief that their actions were authorized by the president himself. “If the president of the United States is encouraging you to act this way, and the police don’t intervene when you commit violence against the president’s political enemies, then obviously, it’s authorized,” said German. “Which is why you had so many people willing to go up there without covering their faces: These people weren’t acting like burglars in the night, they were acting as if they had the full authority of the law.”

Justice vs. Vengeance  

There is no question that serious accountability is in order to shed light on the failures and complicity of a host of law enforcement agencies and elected officials in the months and years leading up to January 6. Civil rights advocates warn, however, that only some of that accountability can come through the courts.

Prosecutors now find themselves with the enormous responsibility of ensuring that there are consequences for unprecedented criminal conduct and a clear, if belated, message that such violence cannot be tolerated, even as it was directly called for by the president and effectively enabled by many elected officials. But the U.S. legal system already has all the laws, and prosecutors all the tools, needed to do that, civil rights advocates warn, without further infringing on civil liberties or stretching legal theories to punish more people than those who are responsible. “If this isn’t the right time to just call it for what it is and utilize the law that exists, I’m not sure where that line is,” Andonian, the J20 attorney, said, referring specifically to charges of conspiracy against those who instigated the attack.

This week’s briefing clearly signaled the Justice Department’s intent to make up for its failures by pursuing a hard line against those who stormed the Capitol. Sherwin said that his office had tasked a group of senior national security and public corruption prosecutors with the mammoth task ahead. “Their only marching orders from me are to build seditious and conspiracy charges related to the most heinous acts that occurred in the Capitol,” which he said could come with sentences of up to 20 years. “Regardless of if it was just a trespass in the Capitol or if someone planted a bomb,” he added, “you will be charged, and you will be found.”

“It would be wildly, wildly asymmetric, and wildly uneven, if these people were not charged with conspiracy.”

Several attorneys The Intercept spoke with suggested that a conspiracy case would be much more clear-cut in the Capitol riot than in many of the other instances in which prosecutors have brought similar charges, both against protesters and, increasingly, against alleged gang members. They noted that many of those who participated in the riot had deliberately planned and documented their intentions, online, for weeks leading up to the assault. And conspiracy charges, they added, could also be levied against those who explicitly incited the riot, possibly including the president. “It would be wildly, wildly asymmetric, and wildly uneven, if these people were not charged with conspiracy,” said Loadenthal, who expects such charges will eventually be filed.

But the same attorneys also cautioned against embracing far-reaching theories of liability that seek to hold hundreds responsible for the crimes of a few, and especially warned against validating unjust charges like that of “felony murder,” a crime that has landed scores of people in prison, and on death row, over murders that they did not personally commit.

“Prosecutors routinely deploy those sorts of tactics and those theories of liability against people of color,” said Johnson, the Georgetown professor. “I am not advocating for that or more of it. I want prosecutors to stop using these attenuated theories of liability against people. … I certainly would not advocate for people being charged with felony murder here, just because I think that the felony murder rule is wrong.”

Others echoed that sentiment. “I certainly don’t want to see more people prosecuted more easily with over-expansive theories of guilt,” said Andonian, pointing to the mass conspiracy prosecution of the J20 defendants as an example. “Because it will be turned around tomorrow on [Black Lives Matter], it will be turned around tomorrow on gangs made up of people of color.”

These critics also warned that a mass prosecution holding all Capitol rioters responsible for the worst conduct of some of them would only further embolden a movement that has already turned Ashli Babbitt, the woman killed by Capitol Police as she stormed the building, into a martyr. And while they said that people should be prosecuted for the crimes they committed, they also warned against tasking the courts with fixing a crisis that runs far deeper. “No one in a vacuum believes that prosecution or jailing or arrest is actually going to prevent any kinds of harms that were committed that day,” said Harvey, of the Advancement Project. “That doesn’t address the broader issues.”

The post DOJ Is Considering Charging Capitol Rioters With Seditious Conspiracy, Felony Murder appeared first on The Intercept.

Since leaving prison in 2017, former intelligence analyst and whistleblower Chelsea Manning has been busy. She ran unsuccessfully for Senate in her home state of Maryland, became a Twitch streamer, and was jailed for contempt after refusing to testify in a U.S. government case against WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. Manning joins Ryan Grim and Intercept reporter Ken Klippenstein to talk about prison, prospects for whistleblowers in the Biden era, and what she’s been up to since her release.

Ryan Grim: Hi Deconstructed listeners.

Before we get to the show today, I’d like to talk to you for a moment about The Intercept’s fundraising campaign. We have an ambitious goal to raise $400,000 by June 30 – that’s next Wednesday.

Intercept readers have started kicking in, and now we want to invite Deconstructed listeners to join in, too.

You can donate at theintercept.com/give. Donations of any size are welcome. No matter the amount, you’re part of a grassroots community making our independent journalism strong. You can make a one-time gift or become a monthly donor and break that up into more affordable chunks, like $5 or $10 a month. Plus, everyone who donates $50 will receive an Intercept t-shirt. Join us in holding the powerful to account — make your donation at theintercept.com/give.

Over the last year, this show has become an increasingly important part of our DC political coverage. It was here on Deconstructed that we first published leaked audio from a Biden Zoom call back in December…

Speaker: We ready to go? Can’t hear you, Cedric. You’re on mute.

RG: And just this month we obtained audio of Senator Joe Manchin on a phone call effectively asking donors to dangle a post-retirement financial opportunity in front of a fellow senator to induce him to change his vote.

Sen. Joe Manchin: Roy Blunt is a good friend of mine. Great guy, OK?

RG: Obviously we don’t believe that the need for our adversarial reporting has lessened just because Donald Trump has decamped back to Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster.

Over the next four years, our newsroom will be aggressive in reporting on the powerful in both parties. We’re not backing down from stories that draw blood from the new administration — this is who we are and why we exist.

This reporting is not easy, cheap, or profitable. To help power our reporting in the coming year, head to theintercept.com/give. That’s theintercept.com/give. Your donation also helps keep all of this free for those who can’t afford paywalls. Thank you for all that you can do, and now on to the show.

[Intro music.]

RG: On June 14, former intelligence specialist Reality Winner was finally released from federal prison to a halfway house.

Shepard Smith: A former NSA contractor, sentenced for leaking secrets to the news media, released from prison today.

RG: But it wasn’t part of any pardon, commutation, or compassionate release. She was released for good behavior ahead of her full release, which is scheduled for November. The five years she spent in prison is the longest federal sentence ever handed down to a whistleblower in U.S. history.

SS: The release today for good behavior. She’s now on home confinement.

RG: For more on how she was treated in prison, go back and listen to her interview with her mother, Billie Winner Davis.

Billie Winner Davis: All of the experiences that she has had in the system has opened her eyes. Human beings shouldn’t be treated like this.

RG: The approach that our government now takes in punishing those who leak classified information is new. We didn’t always bring down the full weight and power of the law on whistleblowers. The only person to spend more time than Winner behind bars for leaking classified information is Chelsea Manning, who served her time in military prison. She was first detained on May 27, 2010 for leaking state department cables and evidence of U.S. war crimes to WikiLeaks. She was sentenced to 35 years in maximum security, but her sentence was commuted by President Obama after nearly seven years.

Speaker: The Obama administration had actually considered charges of precisely this kind, but ultimately concluded it would violate the First Amendment and have an intolerably destructive effect on the Free Press.

RG: Chelsea Manning, as she’ll discuss on the show today, went back behind bars just two years after being released, for resisting a grand jury subpoena in the Assange prosecution. She was freed again just as the pandemic ramped up.

We’ll also be joined by Ken Klippenstein, an investigative journalist for The Intercept who has brought a new public-facing approach to developing sources inside the military, corporations, and government agencies. He’s also developed a reputation for trolling politicians on Twitter, and recently tricked Matt Gaetz into retweeting an image of Lee Harvey Oswald, thanking him for his “service.”

I wanted to bring the two of them together because of their mutual appreciation and their mirror image roles in the quest for transparency. As Manning puts it:

Chelsea Manning: If Ken were around in 2010, he would have been the recipient. Well, we’ll just put it that way.

RG: I’m Ryan Grim. This is Deconstructed.

[Musical interlude.]

RG: Alright, so every episode, of course, of Deconstructed is special. But this is a very special episode. We’re bringing together one of the most important whistleblowers in several generations, along with a journalist whose name has kind of become synonymous, at least on twitter.com, with whistleblowing. So I’m talking, of course, about Chelsea Manning, and Ken Klippenstein.

Welcome to you both.

CM: Hey!

KK: Hey! Which is which, Ryan? You didn’t say!

RG: Well, until you blow the whistle on — no. So, Chelsea, let’s tell people a little bit about how this episode actually came together. A few days ago on Twitter, you put out a pretty funny post.

KK: A cryptic post!

CM: [Laughs.]

RG: A cryptic post. That just said: “ken klippenstein.”

KK: That was it.

RG: So tell us about that. What did you mean by that?

CM: ’Nuff said.

RG: ’Nuff said.

KK: It speaks for itself. [Laughs.]

RG: It does speak for itself.

KK: The philosophers will debate the meaning for eons.

RG: And then your reply was: “*our* journalist.”

CM: Yes. Our journalist.

The reason why I tweeted that was because, I mean, one I’m a huge fan of Ken Klippenstein’s trolling in his posts. He’s been doing really incredible work, doing what muckrakers throughout history have done, historically, which is to troll the powerful, and I view a lot of his more aggressive Twitter antics as an extension of that historical legacy, if you will.

I mean, if you remember back before the big lawsuits of the late 90s and the early 2000s, there used to be a lot more hidden camera investigations, a lot more undercover investigations and things like that. And I view that as no different. I view it in the same light. It may have a little bit more of a social media spectacle element to it, but I still see it as holding powerful people to account and showing them who they are.

RG: Ken’s version, I guess, would be that he trolls the comfortable and then comforts the trolls. Yeah.

CM: Yeah.

KK: [Laughs.]

RG: So —

KK: Chelsea, I want to point out here, I think you’re engaging in some erasure, because there is still undercover reporting. Are you going to just paper over all of the excellent work that Project Veritas has done, because they still exist?

CM: Ah, yeah, but they’re not — we’re not gonna give them the veil of credibility here. There is a difference between propagandizing and doing real work. Ken Klippenstein can do both.

RG: And before we get to Ken’s muckraking, what are you up to now?

CM: Oof. [Sighs.] So this year has been a little different. The year before that, I was obviously in a grand jury resistance case, so I was in jail. And then I got released after a depression spiral that happened. They ended the grand jury around the same time as they were getting more aggressive with trying to get me to talk to FBI agents, as opposed to just the grand jury.

I knew the pandemic was about to hit, and I knew it was about to hit hard. And I was just terrified that I was going to spend — because the county jail is different than prison, it’s a lot more intense. There’s fewer people, you interact with fewer people, and I was under the impression that I was going to spend the rest of the six months in lockdown and be forgotten about as a major disaster — rightfully so, what turned out to be, as I anticipated one of the largest disasters in modern history — played out. So I went through a depressive spiral and there was a suicide attempt — content warning. I was released from jail and out into the middle of lockdowns.

Literally the same week that I was released, New York City went under the first week of lockdown. And I’ve been just sort of scrambling to find my own place and find some semblance of stability, while the rest of the country has been, you know, wracked by both an increasing amount of political tension and economic tension, as well as the devastation of this pandemic.

RG: And I will say that that year or so that you spent resisting the grand jury, locked up, is one of the most incredible feats of courage that I can even contemplate because you had already spent, what? Seven-plus years.

CM: Ah, just shy — just 10 days shy of seven years. Yeah.

RG: Ten days shy of seven years, in just brutal conditions, and to then get a commutation from Obama, and then to finally get your freedom.

CM: Right.

RG: And then to be willing to give that up again, it almost feels like it took more courage that time because you knew what you were putting yourself into. I guess it’s a different system.

CM: Yeah. Right. Yeah.

RG: But it’s not a whole lot different.

CM: Yeah, there’s no charge, there’s no trial, you just go in there and you say, “I’m not answering questions.” They give you immunity. They bypass the Fifth Amendment by giving you immunity; you have no protections, no lawyer or anything, and everything is done in secret.

And people, I think, make the assumption that it was about the 2010 case. And they certainly seem to want to talk about that, but there’s no limit to what they can question you on. And once you answer any questions, then you sort of waived your right to make a legal case to resist subpoenas in the future if you cooperate. So I treated this no differently than if it was for a protest or for some other grand jury — if it was a grand jury in general, I would respond the same way. But it did appear that this one was about, specifically, the 2010 disclosures; the media was speculating, but our legal team and ourselves, we never got full confirmation as to whether that was the case. So you can connect those dots. But I didn’t answer any questions, so they never got around to asking any specific questions. And so I ended up not learning anything at all.

RG: Right.

CM: But yeah, I have no problem risking my personal safety and my personal comfort for that. The fines, I think, were much more egregious, and much more troublesome, and much more worrying, particularly since I have never had $250,000 before. And I was fined over $250,000. And if I had gone for another six months, it could have gone almost as close as $500,000. I have never had that amount of money in my entire life. So —

RG: what’s the status of those?

CM: So there was a crowdfunding effort after my release, and they managed to raise the money for me, which I’m super grateful for. But it just put me at $0, it didn’t really give me a foothold to — I came out of this with maybe some savings and the charity of others, to just sort of — because I lost everything. I lost my apartment, I lost my main source of income because of the pandemic, which is doing speaking engagements and traveling and doing traveling consulting, I do digital security consulting. Yeah. So the last year has been about building from that.

And, I think, content production has been for me a little bit more of a potentially stable means of generating income since I haven’t been able to do events, since I haven’t been able to travel, since a lot of the clients that I normally go to for consulting work don’t have the same amount of grants or funding that they did pre-pandemic. So I’ve done what many other people have done, and that is the shift towards digital. [Laughs.] And so I’ve been playing video games!

As well as doing activism like I do. I still do my usual activism during the pandemic; you know, giving out masks, receiving donations for mutual aid groups, going around the city doing deliveries, things like that. Pretty basic stuff. It’s been a busy, wild year, here in New York. And yeah, and then there was last summer. I was in the protests last summer, the protests were pretty intense.

I was actually — and I already have come out with this, I wasn’t talking about it — But I was assaulted at the Washington Square Park, the police during the pride event wasn’t even like a protest. It was a march, during the Pride march, we were attacked, and I got tear gassed and roughed up by some of the NYPD officers, although some people in the crowd pulled me out, thankfully, and I was able to clean myself up. But yeah, it was pretty wild that they came out of nowhere and attacked us. I’m fine! I didn’t get any —

RG: Was that just random? Or did they know who you were?

CM: Oh, I don’t think they knew who I was. It was too chaotic. I was just a bystander, I think. I was dodging somebody who was coming at me, or in my direction, with a baton, dodging an officer, and then somebody else came from the side, and I got blindsided, and I got decked in on the shoulder. And I’ve been digging for footage of it. And I haven’t been able to find camera footage of that. But there’s definitely pictures of me in the crowd. And nobody really noticed me in the videos, so I’m guessing that the officers didn’t recognize me, either. I mean, I was wearing a mask, too.

RG: Well, maybe somebody will find that footage and send it to Ken. Ken, what’s your phone number that they should send that to, if they have it.

KK: I’m 202-510-1268. You can send it on signal. I love that, getting to know Chelsea, she has so many stories like this that are kind of shocking and you’re so understated in all of it. You became a celebrity, obviously, after your disclosures. But there’s so much more that people don’t know and that you don’t talk about unless you’re asked.

CM: Yeah, I think it’s true. I’m pretty busy. I do a lot of things.

I think one of the things that sort of is strange for me, is I’m so used to this. In fact, I am so used to being in prison — and I’ve talked to therapists about this, right? I am so institutionalized, and I will admit — I am institutionalized from my experience being in prison for most of my adult life — that I view things baseline from the prison perspective. So I view things through the lens of my own experience in prison, and I try to understand the rest of the world from that.

It’s like people ask me, “What’s prison like?” And one of the problems that I have constantly is I’m like, “Well, what’s this world like? What’s the regular world like?” Because I’m still trying to figure that out. So most of my experience just comes from either being in the military, or being in prison.

Immediately after school, I was basically homeless for a year. I spent another year sort of working at Starbucks, going to college, before I enlisted in the military. So my experience of most people’s lives is pretty different; the average person, pre-pandemic, at least, has been foreign to me.

RG: Right. And then you had what, you were out for about two years before you went back in?

CM: Yeah. And it was a whirlwind of travel, events, touring. I did a Senate campaign; I had a failed Senate campaign — which I view as actually successful. I managed to get the message out and get some ideas out there. And, you know, I don’t think that was a failure, so much as it was like I obviously didn’t win. [Laughs.]

RG: [Laughs.]

KK: I feel like you have to compare it to a baseline of expectation. I would say Cal Cunningham had a failed Senate campaign.

CM: Yeah.

KK: [Laughs.] If you’re running to kind of bring issues out, that’s a much different baseline.

CM: Yeah.

RG: He brought issues out, that’s for sure.

CM: Yeah, yeah.

RG: And then you get released into a pandemic.

CM: Yeah, I got released from the grand jury, because it was less than two years before I got the grand jury subpoena. That was a wild year and a half of trying to figure things out, and then losing everything again, like back to square one, you know? Do not pass go, do not collect $200, go directly to jail.

RG: Yes, quite literally.

[Musical interlude.]

RG: Ken, tell us a little bit about the muckraking that she’s talking about. For years, and like she said, for generations, some news outlets have been muckraking, some have been soliciting tips, making it either easier or harder to reach out with information. But you’ve kind of gone all the way in that direction. For people who don’t know, that phone number you gave earlier, that’s your number. If somebody does have information, they can hit you up on Signal, the encrypted app, and you’ll receive it.

When did you first start experimenting with that? And when did you realize that it was going to work?

KK: Well, it kind of emerged organically, I didn’t really plan for there to be this kind of Twitter thing where — take, say, the Amazon story. Everyone’s angry about Amazon. I just tweet out, “Oh, if you work there, you know reach me via my number.” There was never any sort of like scheme, as much as I would like to pretend like I plotted this whole thing out, it just kind of happened.

And I realized that if just being myself on Twitter, and doing that, that’s quite different than how sort of legacy media not only does that, but how they’re socialized to do journalism in j-school and things. And so, you know, in retrospect, I’m glad that it played out how it did.

I didn’t live in D.C. or New York for a very long time, so I didn’t have the same access to sources, so I had to come up with a method to find things different than the things people are typically taught. And I spent a lot of time on Twitter, so that was like this sort of porthole into the world when I was starting out. And so it just kind of emerged, I guess. I didn’t really think it through.

And I’ve just been kind of floored every time by how many people want to reach the press, and how they wouldn’t have a means to do so otherwise, because like I said before, I’m not from the D.C. area, or hadn’t been in New York for a long time, those tend to be the constituencies that are best served by national media outlets. But if you’re not an official, and you don’t know how to use those channels to get to media, there’s a whole lot of other people that would love to reach me that they just don’t know how to. And so I think it’s just that I was talking to and reaching out to people that hadn’t been reached out to more than any sort of brilliance or finesse or anything on my part.

RG: Do you find that there’s a typical type of person that reaches out to you, or is it all across the spectrum?

KK: Um, it’s not as obvious as people think. People always think, “Oh, it must be Twitter leftists or something.” Or when I was reporting on the Department of Homeland Security a lot under the Trump administration, some people would say, “Oh, there’s Ken with his DSA sources in DHS.” And it’s like, you don’t have a great sense of DHS, do you? [Laughs.] Do you think there’s DSA people in there?

A lot of them are actually conservatives, my sources, I would say more than anything, they just don’t fit neatly into the buckets that people like to think exist for politics. So it’s not so much that they’re liberal or conservative. I tend to get a lot of people that they’re just not really happy with how things are being conducted. And I don’t know how I would characterize their politics in a lot of cases. Some people, like myself, I guess, spend a lot of time thinking about politics, and so we have these designations and these ways that we characterize things and that we characterize ourselves, but a lot of people they don’t really necessarily think about these sort of theories or about the history of labor or whatever it may be; they just see wrongdoing and feel bad about it. And that’s what drives them.

So I would say it’s a lot more heterodox than what you might think generally about what kind of political person is this, or what age group, or what demographic is this person.

RG: And Chelsea, and you guys can feel free to chime in to each other.

CM: Yeah.

RG: But Chelsea, where would you put yourself on that spectrum in 2010? How political would you say you were? And what drove you to become the kind of person that would have leaked to somebody like Ken?

KK: [Laughs.]

CM: Ah! If Ken were around in 2010, he would have been the recipient. Well, I’ll just put it that way. I say that hands down.

You know, I was looking for someone, preferably a recognized outlet in 2010. I reached out to The Washington Post, The New York Times, before getting more desperate and trying other means and methods. And Ken obviously — he blurts out, like, “Hey, come send me encrypted messages, right?” which didn’t exist 10 years ago. These kinds of methods weren’t available then.

In 2010, me, personally, I didn’t have a strong political bent, right? Now, after living through prison and really kind of growing up a little bit, I have sort of developed a more left-wing, radical politics. But that came after. In 2010, when I enlisted in the military, I was pretty agnostic. And one of the ways that I like to describe my politics in 2007, when I enlisted, was that my politics consisted of “Leave Britney alone,” right?

KK: [Laughs.]

CM: Like that was how non-political I really was. I didn’t really participate in politics, I didn’t really participate in political discussions. I knew about history, I knew about politics, but I didn’t see it as playing an active role in my life, or making a difference. I was much more in video game culture, in pop culture, I was kind of a normie, in 2010. Or maybe, by 2010, I was becoming a little bit more politically aware, but that was out of the necessity of seeing the reality of what Iraq was and what Afghanistan was from on the ground, which was a pretty life-changing experience.

But I think that the two political moments for me, in sort of my political development, happened first in 2008, which was the passage of Proposition 8 in California. As sort of a queer person questioning identity, it made me feel like history was still happening, and that I was a part of it. And then going to prison, and really experiencing that whole intense world of being a member of a forgotten percentage. Like, there’s a whole percentage point of the adult population that is incarcerated at any given time in the U.S., isn’t really talked about, and is living in a totalitarian surveillance state every day, trying to survive. And that is the primary experience of my adult life, after eight years of being in confinement, including solitary confinement for over a year. That’s shaped my political experience more than anything else, I think, is going through the carceral system.

RG: And what kind of people did you meet there? Were you able to make a lot of friends there? Are you still in touch with anybody there?

CM: Yeah, so prison rules are pretty strict. They don’t allow formerly incarcerated people to contact incarcerated people, typically. And they check. So the answer is no, I have been completely disconnected. But I made a ton of friends — everywhere I went, I make friends wherever I go, and I was no different in prison, right? I was pretty friendly. And I made friends with a large number of people. But you also can’t get too close, because people get transferred, they get moved, they get released, you move housing units, you move custody classification levels. So there’s that little bit of distance, because you know that the most you’re going to spend time with somebody is three to five years. And that is extraordinary, right? Most people you know, for a few weeks, and you’ll never see them again.

But what I find so fascinating is that, being on edge and being so desperate and having this like sense of community that builds in the carceral system and this environment, without any sort of political elements to any of that, right? Just the ability of people to come together in a desperate time and come to an agreement, share resources, really get to know people and share experiences, especially in group therapy sessions and things like that, and really face against the security apparatus on a regular basis. If the guards pick on one person, it’s not just a good thing to stand up for the person, it’s also in your direct interest because you could be next. The sort of group dynamic of having a group of people to work together and have solidarity with each other has really struck me, and that was throughout the entire carceral system without question.

I think that TV shows and pop culture sort of give you an impression of what prison life is. And sure, there’s some high school drama, because it’s like high school, but you can’t leave. But also there’s that aspect of, you know, I got your back. At the end of the day, if it comes between you and the guards, the other inmates are going to have your back. And that was everywhere I went: military, civilian, educated, uneducated, white collar, blue collar, drug offenses, violent offenses, it didn’t matter. Age, background, it didn’t matter. That sense of solidarity was always there. And that’s always been very powerful for me to remember.

I think people are under this impression that prison is a violent place because of the inmates, but it’s not. And I found this time and time again — time and time again, when I was in prison, the most violent and dangerous people I encountered time and time again were the prison guards. And these are in maximum security settings, right? Where time and time again, the most of abusive people, the most violent people, because there’s no consequence, right? Does society care if an inmate in a maximum security prison is just abused? What recourse do you have? You don’t have a lawyer anymore, because you’re convicted. You might have an appellate attorney, but there’s no cause of action. If you try to go to a civil court, the Prison Litigation Reform Act of 1997 basically forces you to exhaust your administrative remedies before you can file a civil suit. And when you do that, you have no idea, because they don’t tell you, and they don’t have to tell you all of the administrative remedies that you need to [do], and so you can get your case kicked. And if you try to push a case more than three times, there’s a three-strikes-you’re-out rule, where essentially, you lose your ability to file lawsuits at all.

So there’s no recourse. There’s no way to navigate that in any kind of legal or administrative way. And they know that, so they just abuse you and there’s nothing you could do but take it.

RG: The whole time you were there, did you see anybody get held accountable on the guard side for anything?

CM: The most I ever saw was, whenever a prison guard would get into trouble, they would transfer them. That was the most I ever saw. They would make the problem go away.

RG: Like the Catholic Church.

CM: And the alternative is to transfer the inmate as well.

Say you’re in a civil district of Kansas, right, and you file a lawsuit, they’ll transfer you to a different jurisdiction to screw up your whole case. And they’ll take all your papers, because going through the transfer process, they take everything, you have to throw everything out, so you have no notes, you have no paperwork. And because you can’t afford a lawyer and you’re having to do everything yourself, you’re screwed. And you basically have to dismiss the case, because what are you going to do?

I always used to say: “It’s worse than Vegas.” Right? The house always wins. They have total control over everything.

RG: Ken, how cognizant do you think the sources are who are reaching out to you of the risks that are inherent to leaking, at least if you’re a member of the national security state now?

KK: It really depends. I think, often not. I think the more senior, more experienced ones tend to be, but also counterintelligence is not an intuitive thing. You have to be trained to think that way. I don’t think that it’s human nature to be very paranoid and think four steps ahead and try to anticipate what your adversaries are going to try to do to get you in trouble.

So, in my experience, the bulk of the concern I’ve had to shoulder, and I’ve had cases where people give me things that I’m having to tell them like, “I can’t use this, they’re gonna find out,” and explain to them why. And that’s more common than my trying to be the kind of pushy reporter you think of in movies, is a younger person, less experienced, definitely a moral compulsion — I can’t stress enough how often, at least in my experience, it’s a moral impulse. It’s not even political, necessarily, because people don’t seem to have thought it through that much; it’s more just like they see something and feel bad about it. And then I have to be the voice of reason and say, “Let’s think this through. How many people have access to this? What is the likely response?” And that kind of thing, and that’s the opposite of how I expected things to work when I came into media.

RG: Right. Right. It’s not how a lot of mainstream news outlets work.

KK: Noooo. [Laughs.]

CM: Yeah, I can say out of experience like, I never thought I was going to prison. It had never happened before. And I think people forget that before my case, nobody had ever gone to prison for a national security disclosure to the press, right? It had never happened before.

Even Dan Ellsberg, he turned himself into a federal courthouse. And I didn’t really know about the Ellsberg case, but I knew about the Drake case. And the Drake case, you know, he was out and about, and he never went to prison for it, right? Thomas Drake.

So my understanding of the risks then was very different than it is even now. And I thought: Worst-case scenario I lose my job, I lose my security clearance, I’m in the doghouse and I can’t get a job anywhere else, because nobody wants to hire me, I can’t be a defense contractor anymore, I lose my security clearance, I’m discharged.

And I thought those were horrible things, don’t get me wrong. Being in the military, that was everything — all my job security, all my future, everything that I was looking forward to was at risk, and I was willing to do that. But I think that the idea that I was going to go to prison for all of this, it never really crossed my mind, right?

KK: Chelsea, you make an interesting point.

I often find that sources will understand internally. just within their agency, what the likely consequences are, but they are not good at anticipating the political consequences. Because the law is not fairly applied. The Justice Department clearly makes a calculation about how embarrassing things are.

You know, there’s a saying that an FBI official was telling me a little while ago, “Don’t embarrass the Bureau.” And sort of tacit in that is, you know, we’re going to enforce these things depending on how embarrassing it is to officials down here.

And so that tends to be what they’re weakest at. And it’s not that they’re dumb. It’s like, they don’t work in politics, so how should they understand how something is going to be received and how angry senior leadership will be about it? So that’s another thing — I would say that’s probably the foremost thing that I have to warn people about is trying to explain like, there’s gonna be a shitstorm [laughs] in Washington media if this comes out.

RG: Chelsea, how do you think that would have changed your calculus, if you would have considered that?

CM: I have been asked this question before. And the answer is: I don’t really know what I would do if I had known. What I can say is that it would probably not change the outcome much.

RG: Mhmm.

CM: Yeah, and I hate trying to speculate, right? And I’ve thought about this a lot, because I get asked it a lot. That’s the only reason that it really comes up, is because people are like, “Well, you know, would you have?” And the answer is, “If I had done it any differently, it wouldn’t have been me, right?” I knew what I knew, in 2010, and I had access to what I had, and I had the time and resources that I had, which was pretty limited. High-speed internet is not a thing in a lot of places in 2010, and this is gigabytes of data. I mean, even compressed, like this stuff is DVD-Rs, right? It’s like gigabytes upon gigabytes of stuff, right?

RG: Right.

CM: So we’re probably talking about, and I’m speculating here a little bit, but I would assume that it would make me maybe perhaps a little bit more cautious in terms of time, where I was rushing in 2010. In 2010, I would say that I definitely rushed out of necessity, because I had a limited amount of time in the U.S. to be able to do uploads or to find anyone who would accept, right? So I felt rushed. If I had known the consequences, I am assuming that I would probably slow it down a little bit, but I would be a little bit more methodical, perhaps. But, again, I don’t actually know.

RG: Right. Ken, it sounds to me like from your conversations with sources, the answer would be similar in the sense that they’re driven by a moral compulsion. And this goes to this argument that Daniel Ellsberg has been making that it actually is unconstitutional, to criminalize leaking, never mind criminalizing publishing, there’s absolutely no constitutional basis for that, but there also isn’t for leaking, that leaking is also protected by the First Amendment. And if the government wants to hold its employees accountable, the only thing that they can really do is all of the things Chelsea just laid out: you can be fired, you can be put in the doghouse, you can be dishonorably discharged, you can have your security clearance revoked —

CM: That was scary enough!

RG: Sure! Because that salts the earth for the rest of your career.

CM: Yeah.

RG: So the number of people who would be dissuaded by prison, but wouldn’t be dissuaded by that, I think, is tiny. Because once you’re willing to take that risk, you’re doing it for a moral reason, not for any personal interest calculation.

But Ken, what do you think? If we went back to the regime that Ellsberg is talking about where somebody who leaks and gets caught faces professional consequences, but not criminal consequences, do you think, all of a sudden, the leak floodgates open up? Or do you think it’s roughly about the same?

KK: I would love for them to open up. But I think it’d be exactly the same. I mean, when you look at these cases that the Justice Department brings, I don’t see any evidence that there’s a deterrence. In the intelligence world, at least — it’s different in the private business world and other areas — but in the national security world, which is a lot of what I cover, some leaks are handled internally. They handle it “administratively.” And the idea is maybe they’ll cut off someone’s access to a certain program, or they’ll move someone, or they’ll fire someone, or whatever it is. People are plenty terrified of that, I mean, in the economic system that we have. I mean, any sort of administrative punishment, that’s your livelihood. I mean, we don’t have this generous welfare state that you can fall back on if you lose your job. So I’ve certainly never seen any evidence that there’s meaningful deterrence.

And it’s so selectively applied, too. Like the notion that this is not political, going back to my FBI friend saying, “Don’t embarrass the Bureau.” I know former leak investigators that carried out these cases in the FBI and they will tell you very explicitly that this is supposed to send a message to people to scare them, as it has been described to me. How many four-star generals are targeted by these leak investigations? How many people in the Senior Executive Service in the FBI or the DHS, whatever it is? It’s almost never that. It’s almost always people like Chelsea, junior people, rank and file.

So the idea that it’s some coincidence that the senior executives — I mean, I can tell you as a reporter, the senior executives leak, it’s just that you never hear about it, because the FBI and the DOJ, they don’t go after those people, not publicly anyways.

CM: Right.

KK: So, I already see a system where it’s overwhelmingly just being handled administratively. Why not just handle it that way entirely, instead of this sort of ritual sacrifice process we have, where occasionally you’ll find a junior person like Reality Winner, or, like Chelsea, where you just eviscerate them to try to make an example of them.

CM: Yeah, so, on that note, I’ve actually been told by Obama-era officials — not like Senate-confirmed positions, but people have told me privately — that one of the concerns that they’ve had with some of these high-profile leak investigations is that it may not act as a deterrent, but may actually, essentially by creating a name and generating the the mass-media attention, that it’s actually doing the opposite. It’s drawing attention to the fact. That somebody goes along and says, “Oh, maybe I can do that!”

KK: Interesting.

CM: So there’s been a question among some people, perhaps pre-Trump era, because I don’t know about Trump administration, but certainly Obama-era people, were definitely asking the question: Is the juice worth the squeeze? Are we just creating publicity for future people who may be encouraged to do this because they see these high-profile cases? And I think that may be a calculus that’s also happening as well, is that prison isn’t really the thing that some people are concerned about so much as it is, “Oh, well, maybe people will defend me.” Essentially, like, they don’t want to create martyrs at the same time. That’s become a concern post-Snowden.

RG: Right. And, in American culture, if you reveal something to the public, we still have these very strong kind of small-d democratic norms.

CM: Yeah.

RG: You are a hero. That’s how you get portrayed even in the mainstream press. So that is probably a miscalculation on the government’s part, that with every leaker you elevate into the press and then lock up, you create several more who are like, “Wow that person put everything on the line, and I need to do the same thing and expose what I’ve come across.”

CM: Right.

RG: Ken, have you seen any of that? I don’t want to call it copycat leaking, but people who’ve been inspired by previous whistleblowers?

KK: Totally — 100 percent. You know, people aren’t always as well-read on the specifics of what someone like Snowden discloses, but this general sense that, wow, that guy sacrificed all of this, I mean, in a situation where maybe I’m working for a private company, and this isn’t classified, and there’s no criminal penalties, the least I can do is tell Ken or tell somebody what the heck’s going on.

I mean, that’s had an effect in my work. You know, when I’m nervous about career consequences about things, I think: Well look at these folks who risked so much more, I can’t look at myself in the mirror without sort of laughing at the relative risk that I face.

So, absolutely. I’ve heard that mentioned explicitly, and I think it reverberates in the culture, I think. Because the notion of a dissident — not being a traitor, but rather looking at them as someone that cares so much about the system that they come from that they want it to work better, and perceiving it that way, rather than somebody betraying them, which is the way that a national security state likes to try to — you know, he’s a traitor and all this insinuation about this playing into the hands of X, Y or Z adversary. On the contrary, I think ordinary people hear these things and realize, whoa, actually, it’s not that binary. People can do things that anger the institution, but also we’re going to end up helping it in the end, and helping it to function better. So I do think that there’s that sense, on the part of, at least, a lot of ordinary people, maybe not the senior executive class.

RG: Before you guys go, I want to get your expertise on another thing. You’re both what they call “extremely online,” people.

CM: Yeah.

RG: And social media is built quite explicitly for engagement. And by engagement, they mean people attacking and destroying each other to create content for, for people to then enjoy.

CM: Yep.

RG: Yet neither of you have fallen into that. How have you escaped that kind of quicksand or the morass of social media, yet live so much of your lives in it?

KK: Chelsea, I feel like you’re just very chill, you’re very chill.

CM: Oh, I have a very simple rule.

RG: I’m taking my notebook out here, because this is important.

KK: [Laughs.]

CM: And I have a post-it note that says this: “Nobody wants to hear you complain.” Right? So that’s my simple rule that I’ve always had with regards to social media, right?

I don’t complain, right? If I have something to say, and I create a sort of social media strategy of things that I want to say, in general, and topics that I want to cover in general, and I stick to those. Because when I don’t stick to those, that’s when I’ve had negative feedback, or it’s just kind of fallen flat. I try to find things where I’m actually generating content and content that I want to, and not just, “Oh, yeah, it sucks.” You know? Because I think there’s that impulse, and I get it, too. There’s definitely times where I just want to complain online. But, again, I block myself, because the post-it note says a lot. And sometimes I have to replace it. And maybe I should just tape it up there.

RG: I like that. I’m putting that up. Ken, how do you do it?

KK: I just feel like who gives a shit what I think about x thing. You know what I mean? I hardly give a shit what I think about x thing. I have my own internal thoughts, but it’s just like — I mean our focus, Ryan, and I think you’d be sympathetic to this, has always been kind of scoops and breaking things, and I don’t think I’ve ever done opinion, at least in written form, and I don’t know — I wish there was a loftier way I could say it, but who gives a shit what my feeling or reaction is. You don’t have to have a public reaction to everything that happens. That’s how I feel.

CM: Yeah. I feel like that’s like gamer debate culture —

KK: Right.

CM: — that has just been written large, ‘cause like the insular Twitch, YouTube, gamer debate community. But it’s a microcosm of the larger discourse that happens in social media. And a lot of that is driven, I think, by clicks, views, the algorithm, and I don’t see longevity in that. Someone will do something that gets a big splash in 2017, and then be forgotten about by 2019. Right? And as somebody who’s written boring opinion pieces for The Guardian, I tend to keep my opinions very grounded and bureaucratic. I mean, because ultimately, I’m a bureaucrat at heart.

There’s a longer, slower payoff to that kind of credibility and that kind of legitimacy than just dunking on people. Although it feels great to dunk on people, and there are some people that really need to be dunked on, and I think that’s where Ken and I agree. Like sometimes Kyrsten Sinema needs to be dunked on.

KK: Yeah, I have two standards. You know, if you’re a powerful public person, that’s a much different set of rules, at least that I believe in personally —

CM: Yeah.

KK: — Then if you’re just some ordinary person. I mean, you’re allowed to be an ordinary person and wrong in my view, and not have to have to get dragged publicly for it.

RG: Chelsea, is there a name of any of the shows or content that you’re going to be producing —

CM: Yes.

RG: — that you can tell people about?

CM: So I have a Twitch channel, which is twitch.tv/xychelsea87. That is where I play video games and I do a lot of science and technology content. I also am producing my first YouTube videos on science and technology. The first video is going to be on cryptocurrency, the second video is going to be on artificial intelligence, they’re very Bill Nye the Science Guy style videos; it’s a pretty large production. It’s taken me some time. I started in April and my first video is still getting put through the editing process, and we’re about to spin up filming for the second video. And I also have a Patreon to support these things, to support my endeavors beyond just Twitter, and that’s patreon.com/xychelsea,

RG: And we have a decent number of listeners who are as old as me or older. And so that they’re going to be like, “Wait, playing video games.”

CM: Yeah.

RG: Can you tell people a little bit about what kind of audience you have. And what do people see when they’re tuning in to watch you play?

CM: Yeah, so I have a younger audience, mostly 15 to 35, I would say — Zoomers and millennials, most of whom have a political bent towards the left, not always.

It’s safer for me to play video games, which I really enjoy, by the way, than it is for me to talk about intense politics and things. And I just feel like it’s much more motivating and much more positive for everybody involved. And also, I just want to sort of be a role model for people, because I feel like people, particularly in the gaming space, have a tendency to be aggressive, or try to do things for clicks and try to generate controversies and get contents and stuff and, and I have more flexibility and more shielding from that kind of thing. Most things just sort of roll off my shoulders, so I view myself as being a role model. And I also want to reach out to the younger generation and be like, “Hey, look! You can be trans, you can go through the worst of the worst, and still come out the other side, and still have fun and still be positive, and still be engaged.”

And I do a lot of educational content. Most of the games that I play are pretty cerebral. We’re not talking about shoot-‘em-ups. We’re talking about strategy games, city builders, I talk about the environment a lot, I talk about politics, very constructive things. Historical warfare — I know that you have an interest in the Second World War — [laughs], so I highly recommend Hearts of Iron IV, because it’s a very good war simulator, but I do play a modded version — I play a couple modded versions which have much better, much more fun alternative history content.

RG: Ken, any final questions or final thoughts?

KK: Can we expect a Ryan/Chelsea gaming thing that we can all watch? Because I would really like to —

CM: Let’s go!

KK: — see Ryan in a gaming situation in general, like, regardless of which game.

RG: I haven’t done much since Street Fighter II, but I’d be happy to.

CM: Hey, the graphics are pretty good on that, not gonna lie.

RG: It’s true.

CM: Yeah. And you know, one of the other journalist friends that I have, Jordan Uhl, he also does video games on Twitch and that kind of thing. And I’m a huge fan and a follower of Hasan Piker, who has basically bridged the divide, I think, between political commentators and video gamers. So it’s been fascinating to see that grow.

RG: True pioneer.

KK: Yeah, he’s great.

CM: Yeah.

RG: No doubt.

Well, Chelsea Manning, thanks so much for joining us.

CM: Yeah. Thank you.

RG: Kenny Klips, thank you for joining us here on Deconstructed.

KK: My pleasure.

CM: Bring it to him!

[Credits music.]

RG: That was Ken Klippenstein and Chelsea Manning, and that’s our show.

Deconstructed is a production of First Look Media and The Intercept. Our producer is Zach Young. Laura Flynn is our supervising producer. The show was mixed by Bryan Pugh. Our theme music was composed by Bart Warshaw. Betsy Reed is The Intercept’s editor in chief.

And I’m Ryan Grim, D.C. bureau chief of The Intercept. If you’d like to support our work, go to theintercept.com/give — your donation, no matter what the amount, makes a real difference.

If you haven’t already, please subscribe to the show so you can hear it every week. And please do leave us a rating or review — it helps people find the show. If you want to give us feedback, email us at Podcasts@theintercept.com. Thanks so much!

See you next week

The post Chelsea Manning Meets Ken Klippenstein appeared first on The Intercept.

Amazon ambassadors drew attention this week as they responded to a wave of online criticism for the company’s treatment of workers amid a union drive at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama.

https://twitter.com/AmazonFCGary/status/1375972599021309956?s=20

https://twitter.com/AmazonFCYola/status/1376051062877126657?s=20

Anticipating criticisms of worker conditions at their fulfillment centers in particular, Amazon designed Veritas to train fulfillment center workers chosen for their “great sense of humor” to confront critics — including policymakers — on Twitter in a “blunt” manner. The document, produced as part of the pilot program in 2018 and marked “Amazon.com Confidential,” also includes examples of how its ambassadors can snarkily respond to criticisms of the company and its CEO. Several examples involve Sen. Bernie Sanders, a longtime critic of the $1 trillion firm who has been targeted by it in recent days. It also provides examples of how to defend Bezos.

“To address speculation and false assertions in social media and online forums about the quality of the FC [Fulfillment Center] associate experience, we are creating a new social team staffed with active, tenured FC employees, who will be empowered to respond in a polite—but blunt—way to every untruth,” the project description reads. “FC Ambassadors (‘FCA’) will respond to all posts and comments from customers, influencers (including policymakers), and media questioning the FC associate experience.”

Do you work for Amazon? Text tips to Ken Klippenstein via Signal at 202-510-1268.

Kelly Nantel, an Amazon spokesperson, said via email: “FC Ambassadors are employees who work in our fulfillment centers and choose to share their personal experience — the FC ambassador program helps show what it’s actually like inside our fulfillment centers, along with the public tours we provide.”

In 2018, Amazon admitted that the ambassadors were employees paid to “honestly share the facts” about what working in its fulfillment centers is like. Many Twitter users had at first believed the ambassadors were automated “bot” accounts due to the nearly identical format of their account bios, all of which feature the Amazon smile logo and begin with the handle “@AmazonFC.” But that format was specifically mandated by Amazon, The Intercept’s document shows. “We could also add an emoji to the username to give personality, for example a small box emoji,” the document suggests.

Sens. Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Mark Pocan, D-Wisc., tweeted last week about the company’s treatment of workers and its corporate practices. Amazon’s PR account then sent taunting replies to the lawmakers, asking Pocan, “You don’t really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you?” As The Intercept reported the following day, many Amazon delivery drivers have indeed been forced to relieve themselves in bottles and bags in order to meet demanding quotas — and the company knew it.

Amazon also replied to Warren and Sanders, telling Sanders, “I often say we are the Bernie Sanders of employers, but that’s not quite right because we actually deliver a progressive workplace.” The tweets have vexed many in the company, some of whom feared the account had been hacked, as The Intercept reported.

Sanders, who has confronted the company over its labor practices and recently visited workers in Alabama, is referenced repeatedly in the 2018 document. In one instance, the document refers to a video interview Sanders tweeted: “Bernie Sanders interviewing Seth King on Prime Day. Seth describes feeling so depressed working at Amazon to take his own life.”

An ambassador, role-playing, then responds: “@SenSanders This job has never made me feel bad personally. If you have a job that makes you feel bad, you could leave.”

At another point, Sanders is described as having “tweeted about Jeff Bezos’ wealth.” The ambassador then replies: “Everyone should be able to enjoy the money they’ve earned/saved. It’s theirs. They should be able to do with it as they please. That includes Jeff Bezos.”

Among the program’s tenets is the promise not to offer misleading or false messages, instead exhorting ambassadors to “Tell Your Truth.” But there are some subjects they are forbidden to discuss. The document instructs employees not to respond to “contacts about the right to unionize” — one of only three cases in which they’re told not to respond. An example to ignore is provided: “@Amazon let your FC employees unionize if you have nothing to hide.”

Ambassadors were also told not to respond to media inquiries and to complicated queries where PR approval is needed. One written example of a tweet to ignore mentions Amazon’s advertising relationship with the far-right outlet Breitbart: “@Amazon why are you still advertising on breitbart?! Between that and barely paying your employees, I’m ready to quit shopping with you.”

The document also makes clear that ambassadors are far from a representative sample of workers, noting that “newer employees can be very passionate and effective,” according to their review of a small pilot group. Newer employees who haven’t yet had to pee in bottles, perhaps.

The post Amazon’s Twitter Army Was Handpicked for “Great Sense of Humor,” Leaked Document Reveals appeared first on The Intercept.

The Threat Within

UAE Enlisted Businessman to Spy On Trump White House

An Iranian Activist Wrote Dozens of Articles for Right-Wing Outlets. But Is He a Real Person?

How Erik Prince Used the Rise of Trump to Make an Improbable Comeback

Secret Report Reveals Saudi Incompetence and Widespread Use of U.S. Weapons in Yemen

I Wrote About the Bidens and Ukraine Years Ago. Then the Right-Wing Spin Machine Turned the Story Upside Down.

Did Felix Sater’s 20 Years as an Informant Help Land Him at the Center of the Trump-Russia Story?

Rudy Giuliani Turned NY’s Southern District Into a Spin Machine. His Legacy Is Coming Back to Haunt Him.

A Republican Conspiracy Theory About a Biden-in-Ukraine Scandal Has Gone Mainstream. But It Is Not True.

Charging Julian Assange With Espionage Could Make His Extradition to the U.S. Less Likely

The post Revealing the Real Threats and the Manufactured Ones: The Intercept’s 2019 National Security Coverage appeared first on The Intercept.

Close observers of Veritas and Facebook, including one at a research lab that works with the social network, said the testimony shows the group is clearly violating policies against what Facebook refers to as “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” The company formally defined such behavior in a December 2018 video featuring its cybersecurity policy chief Nathaniel Gleicher, who said it “is when groups of pages or people work together to mislead others about who they are or what they’re doing.” The designation, Gleicher added, is applied by Facebook to a group not “because of the content they’re sharing” but rather only “because of their deceptive behavior.” That is, using Facebook to dupe people is all it takes to fit the company’s institutional definition of coordinated inauthentic behavior.

In practice, “coordinated inauthentic behavior” has become a sort of catchall label for untoward meddling on Facebook, snagging everyone from Burmese military officers to Russian meme spammers. But curbing such activity has become a very public crusade for Facebook in the wake of its prominent role as a platform for the spread of disinformation, propaganda, and outright hoaxes during the 2016 presidential campaign. This past January, Gleicher announced the removal of coordinated inauthentic behavior from Iran, which spread when operatives “coordinated with one another and used fake accounts to misrepresent themselves,” thus triggering a Facebook ban. Similarly, in a 2017 update on Facebook’s internal investigation into Russian online propaganda efforts, the company’s then-head of security Alex Stamos assured the world’s democracies the company was providing “technology improvements for detecting fake accounts,” including “changes to help us more efficiently detect and stop inauthentic accounts at the time they are being created.”

Throughout all of this, coordinated inauthentic behavior has remained more or less synonymous with “foreign actors” and “nation-states,” the cloak-and-dagger stuff of an increasingly militarized internet filled with enemies of the Western Democracy who seek to subvert it from abroad.

Project Veritas, a hybrid of an opposition research shop and a ranting YouTube channel, has taken pride in its ability to deceive since its creation in 2010. With conservative backers like Peter Thiel, the Koch brothers, and the Trump Foundation, the group and its founder James O’Keefe have worked relentlessly to target and malign individuals at institutions they deem leftist, whether it’s Planned Parenthood (reportedly targeted by O’Keefe posing as a young teen’s 23-year-old boyfriend), George Soros (the progressive philanthropist whose professional circle Veritas tried and spectacularly failed to infiltrate), or the Washington Post (whose reporter was offered a fake story on Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore). O’Keefe has long attempted to position himself in the context of dogged, daring, traditional journalism, describing Veritas’s efforts as “investigative” reporting executed by “undercover journalists.” But his efforts are often executed by what the New Yorker has called “amateurish spies” — their efforts against the Post and Soros resembled a Three Stooges bit — and packaged with mendacious editing, duplicitous production, and outright lying, making Veritas’s audience as much a victim of its productions as the subjects. Debates over who or what is to be considered “real journalism” are almost always counterproductive and contrived, but Veritas stands out for the shamelessness with which it pursues nakedly partisan ends.

There is, of course, a proud tradition of undercover journalism executed unequivocally in the name of informing the public. Writers like Barbara Ehrenreich and Shane Bauer have taken jobs they were not otherwise interested in in order to reveal injustices in society’s margins, and some of the most damning details of the Cambridge Analytica scandal were exposed by a reporter with the UK’s Channel 4 posing as a foreign politician interested in the company’s services. This reporting involved lying, sure — or at least the withholding of true intent, and a willingness to let others deceive themselves — but only as a means to a truthful end. The distinction between these reporters and Veritas operatives may be that the end the latter group seeks, the final media product, is typically just another act of partisan misdirection that doesn’t withstand further scrutiny.

Neither Project Veritas nor Facebook commented for this story.

“Legend Building” by Project Veritas

Project Veritas has systematically deceived not just targets on the left and viewers on the right but Facebook users as well (their official page has over 200,000 followers) at a time when the company is publicly dedicated to fighting this sort of systemic duplicity. That’s a wrinkle that raises questions about Facebook’s commitment to rooting out coordinated inauthentic behavior closer to home — Thiel sits on the company’s board — not to mention Project Veritas’s presence on social media.

“We thus have the admission of intent by the organization and evidence of action by multiple of its agents.”

In 2017, O’Keefe sued the Suffolk County district attorney over a Massachusetts law barring the covert recording of government officials. This past December, a federal judge overturned the rule. But in the course of the lawsuit, Joe Halderman, a member of the Project Veritas inner circle who was previously convicted of trying to extort late night television host David Letterman in 2010, sat for a deposition. In it, Halderman was compelled to submit to a sworn interrogation of Veritas methods. Just how does one go about duping savvy politicos and the politico-adjacent in the 21st century?

During his deposition, Halderman, Project Veritas’s self-described “executive producer,” stated under oath that the organization falsifies Facebook accounts as part of its overall strategy of deceiving the targets of its investigations. Halderman, characterizing himself as “integrally involved in [Project Veritas’s] investigations and have been since I started four years ago,” describes the work that went into setting up Robert Creamer, a Democratic operative recorded by Veritas in a 2016. That video attempted to portray Creamer as complicit in a Hillary Clinton-led campaign to violently disrupt Donald Trump’s campaign events with counterprotests and engaging in counter-Trump voter fraud — both regular, unfounded talking points repeated by Trump on the campaign trail. Last year, the Wisconsin Department of Justice concluded an investigation into the videos, determining that they “reveal no evidence of election fraud,” the Associated Press reported.

But before Veritas could get Creamer on camera, they needed to make contact via a fake persona, Halderman explained. Per the transcript (emphasis added):

Q. And you spoke earlier about PVA [Veritas] creating this donor, Charles. When you say create the donor, what did PVA do to create the donor?

A. So, I thought of a name. I talked to the undercover journalist who was the person who met with Foval. We between us sort of created this story of this person. I got some business cards made. I got an e-mail. I set up an e-mail account. What else did I do? I think that’s about all I did.

Again, in this particular case, we didn’t feel like they were going to get seriously vetted. In some investigations we do legend building because we believe or our concern is that we’re going to be vetted reasonably, you know, by open source information.

So, we’ll create a Facebook page, a LinkedIn page. We’ve even gone so far in the past of creating LLCs, offshore bank accounts. We do a lot of things because undercover journalism is a tricky, complicated business.

According to Lauren Windsor, a political organizer and partner at Democracy Partners (alongside Robert Creamer) who began documenting Veritas’s team of “undercover” operatives and their various aliases after her own organization was infiltrated, this sort of use of phony social accounts is the group’s standard operating procedure. “In conducting extensive outreach to victims and extensive research of social media networks to build the vetting resource website Project Veritas Exposed,” explained Windsor, “I documented several instances of PV violating Facebook’s terms by creating fake profiles. We thus have the admission of intent by the organization and evidence of action by multiple of its agents.”

Windsor’s work includes cataloging Project Veritas’s network of fake Facebook accounts; Windsor provided screenshots to The Intercept. In one example, Veritas operative Marisa Jorge’s likeness is used for the Facebook profile of “Ava-Marie Joyce.” The bio of the Ava-Marie persona bizarrely describes herself as “Carrie Tallinn, a self-employed professional women’s right activist.”

According to a 2018 lawsuit reported by The Intercept last year, Jorge previously misrepresented herself as a University of Michigan student in order to gain improper access to teachers union documents. The friends list for “Ava-Marie Joyce” lists another profile fabricated by Project Veritas, “Ava Marie Allen.”

Another screenshot shows a Facebook profile for “Tyler Marshall,” which O’Keefe himself disclosed as a fabricated identity in his 2018 book “American Pravda.” In a section of that book (subtitle: “My Fight For Truth in the Era of Fake News”) detailing Veritas’s attempts to infiltrate protestors planning action around Trump’s presidential inauguration, O’Keefe wrote that his operatives all “of course, establish a social media presence under their assumed names—‘Tyler Marshall,’ say, or ‘Adam Stevens.’ The presence includes Twitter, Facebook, and email at the least.”

Exploitation of Facebook by a Group Linked To Military Intelligence

Emerson Brooking, a resident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab, said Veritas’s homegrown social media deception is a clear violation of Facebook’s policy. After reading the deposition, Brooking told The Intercept, “Mr. Halderman describes the creation of fake Facebook personas for the purpose of deception” and “implies that this is a regular and systematic practice. Under any reasonable definition, Project Veritas is engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior and abuse of the Facebook platform.”

“Under any reasonable definition, Project Veritas is engaged in coordinated inauthentic behavior and abuse of the Facebook platform.”

Brooking’s group, a frequently cited authority on online electoral interference and other digital propaganda campaigns, entered into an official partnership with Facebook last year. A Facebook director wrote at the time that experts at the lab “will work closely with our security, policy and product teams to get Facebook real-time insights and updates on emerging threats and disinformation campaigns from around the world.”

If it sounds like a stretch to compare Project Veritas to a Russian troll farm, consider the group’s links to the U.S. defense establishment. As The Intercept reported in May, Veritas members underwent “intelligence and elicitation techniques from a retired military intelligence operative named Euripides Rubio Jr.,” personally arranged by the infamous American mercenary and Trump adviser Erik Prince. What we have here, then, is a 2016 military intelligence-linked, organized effort to undermine the Democratic Party and boost the Trump presidential campaign using falsified social media profiles. If that doesn’t sound familiar, it certainly should.

The problem with Facebook and its peers has never been identifying abuses and misuses, whether truly dangerous or merely toxic; Facebook, Twitter, and Google alone represent perhaps history’s greatest living catalog of antisocial behavior, a frenzy of rule violation on a mass scale. Whether these companies deem comprehensive content moderation simply too expensive or not worth the public relations mess, the fact is that the public rarely sees movement on these issues in the absence of congressional scolding or media uproar.

The real issue is uneven, arbitrary enforcement of “the rules.” Max Read, writing in New York magazine on another social network’s enforcement blunders, argued that “the problem for YouTube is that for rules to be taken seriously by the people they govern, they need to be applied consistently and clearly.” YouTube is about as terrible at this exercise as Facebook is, and there’s a good chance that if Facebook treated malicious right-wing American exploitation of its network the same way it treats malicious foreign exploitation of its network, it would probably botch the whole thing and end up burning people who actually do use phony Facebook profiles for work toward the public good.

That a company like Facebook is even in a position to create “rules” like the coordinated inauthentic behavior policy that apply to a large chunk of the Earth’s population is itself a serious problem, one made considerably worse by completely erratic enforcement. It’s bad enough having a couple guys in California take up the banner of defending “Democracy” around the world through the exclusive control of one of the most powerful information organs in human history; if nothing else, we should hope their decisions are predictable and consistent.

Correction: June 11th, 2019, 11:19 a.m.

This article has been updated to name Lauren Windsor’s employer, Democracy Partners, where she is a partner.

The post Right-Wing Sting Group Project Veritas Is Breaking Facebook’s “Authentic Behavior” Rule. Now What? appeared first on The Intercept.

Bin Zayed had convened a group of close family members and advisers at the luxurious Indian Ocean resort for a grand strategy session in anticipation of the new American administration. On the agenda were discussions of new approaches for dealing with the civil wars in Yemen, Syria, and Libya, the threat of the Islamic State, and the United Arab Emirates’ longstanding rivalry with Iran. Under bin Zayed’s leadership, the UAE had used its oil wealth to become one of the world’s largest arms purchasers and the third largest importer of U.S. weapons. A new American president meant new opportunities for the tiny Gulf nation to exert its outsized military and economic influence in the Gulf region and beyond.

Prince was no stranger to the Emiratis. He had known bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and de facto ruler of the UAE, since 2009, when he sold the sheikh on creating an elite counterterrorism unit. That deal ended badly for Prince, but Trump’s election had recalibrated his usefulness. As a prominent Trump supporter and close associate of Steve Bannon, not to mention the brother of incoming cabinet member Betsy DeVos, Prince was invited to the meeting as an unofficial adviser to the incoming administration.

Prince’s meeting with a Putin intimate shortly before Trump’s inauguration has drawn intense interest from Congress, the Mueller investigation, and the press.

When Prince joined the Emirati royals and other government officials on a deck overlooking the Indian Ocean, bin Zayed made it clear to everyone there that “Erik was his guy,” said a source close to the Emirati rulers, who was briefed by some of those in attendance. Prince, in bin Zayed’s view, had built and established an elite ground force that bin Zayed had deployed to wars in Syria and Yemen, the first foreign conflicts in his young country’s history. It was because of Prince, bin Zayed said, that the Emiratis had no terrorists in their country. Prince had solved their problem with Somali pirates. “He let his court know that they owed Erik a favor,” the source said.

Part of that favor apparently involved facilitating an introduction to Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of an $8 billion Russian sovereign wealth fund and a close associate of President Vladimir Putin. Prince repeatedly and under oath in testimony to Congress denied that his meeting with Dmitriev had anything to do with the Trump administration, describing it as no more than a chance encounter over a beer.

“We were talking about the endless war and carnage in Iraq and Syria,” Prince told the House Intelligence Committee. “If Franklin Roosevelt can work with Joseph Stalin after the Ukraine terror famine, after killing tens of millions of his own citizens, we can certainly at least cooperate with the Russians in a productive way to defeat the Islamic State.”

Although the UAE has been a very good customer of U.S. arms dealers, bin Zayed had grown frustrated with the Obama administration’s refusal to work with Russia to end the war in Syria. Russia was actively courting the UAE, and from bin Zayed’s perspective Russia was a key player that couldn’t be ignored, according to a current and a former U.S. intelligence official. Trump’s public infatuation with Putin and his apparent eagerness to improve relations with Russia gave the UAE a chance to play dealmaker and diminish Iran’s position in the Middle East, starting with the war in Syria.

Prince’s 30-minute meeting with a Putin intimate shortly before Trump’s inauguration has drawn intense interest from Congress, the Mueller investigation, and the press. The Mueller report established that the meeting was a pre-arranged attempt to establish a backchannel between Russia and the incoming Trump administration and has led House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff to make a criminal referral to the Justice Department for perjury. Yet the focus on Russian interference with the 2016 presidential election has deflected scrutiny from what the meeting reveals about Prince’s unique role in the world of covert services.

Blackwater made Prince an infamous symbol of U.S. foreign policy hubris, but America’s most famous mercenary has moved on. Although he continues to dream of deploying his military services in the world’s failed states, and persists in hawking a crackpot scheme of privatizing the U.S. war in Afghanistan, Prince has diversified his portfolio. No longer satisfied with contracting out former special forces operators to the State Department and Pentagon, Prince is now attempting to offer an entire supply chain of warfare and conflict. He wants to be able to skim a profitable cut from each stage of a hostile operation, whether it be overt or covert, foreign or domestic. His offerings range from the traditional mercenary toolkit, military hardware and manpower, to cellphone surveillance technology and malware, to psychological operations and social media manipulation in partnership with shadowy operations like James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas.

This account is based on interviews with more than a dozen of Prince’s former colleagues and peers, as well as court records, emails, and internal documents provided to The Intercept. An examination of Prince’s time working with the UAE in particular reveals suspicious financial transactions at a moment when his personal finances were under stress and his mercenary ventures were failing. The picture that emerges is one of a man desperately trying to avoid U.S. tax and weapons trafficking laws even as he offers military services, without a license, in no fewer than 15 countries around the world.

Prince’s former and current associates describe him as a visionary, a brilliant salesman with remarkable insight into the future of warfare, who is nonetheless so shady and incompetent that he fails at almost every enterprise he attempts. And yet he endures. Prince is thus, in many ways, an emblematic figure for the Trump era.

Suitcases Full of Cash

Prince’s partnership with bin Zayed got underway, fittingly, with a slapstick moment in early 2010, when two of Prince’s men, a veteran of the Canadian special forces and a Lebanese fixer, were ordered by Emirati security officials to meet at an Abu Dhabi intersection. There, a few government employees helped Prince’s men load the trunk of a Chevy Impala with more than half a dozen carry-on suitcases, most worn and with busted wheels. The two drove back to their hotel, Le Méridian, where they unloaded the bags, returned to their room, and summoned their immediate supervisor, a former Navy SEAL who had known Prince in the military, telling the American that they had a problem. Their new company, Reflex Responses, often called R2 for short, was so new it didn’t yet have a bank account or even an office with a safe.

When the former SEAL entered their hotel room, the contents of the suitcases had been largely removed, much of it dumped onto a bed: bricks of new, sequential $100 bills, in $10,000 stacks, each bound by a green and white band. The three men counted each stack, measuring the height to be sure that they all had 100 $100 bills, until they tallied it all: roughly $13 million. For the first two weeks of the program, the hotel room, always occupied by a security guard or a company employee, served as the Reflex Responses vault. Hotel staff were not allowed to clean the room, and by the time R2 opened a bank account and deposited the money, the room was covered in empty whiskey bottles and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts.

Prince had arrived in the UAE at a low moment. The Obama administration had made clear in its first months that it would not welcome new Blackwater contracts. The company had become infamous after Blackwater security contractors shot and killed 17 Iraqi civilians and wounded dozens more in Baghdad’s Nisour Square in 2007. By 2010, Prince had changed Blackwater’s name and sold the company, ceasing to work on any U.S. government contracts. As Prince negotiated a settlement with the Justice Department for a series of Blackwater arms trafficking violations,  then-CIA Director Leon Panetta discovered a secret assassination program involving Blackwater operatives that former Vice President Dick Cheney had hidden from Congress. Prince was bitter, blaming the Obama administration for leaking his CIA role and comparing himself to exposed CIA operative Valerie Plame. Prince couldn’t understand why the American public viewed him as a villain. “He was genuinely upset,” said a former colleague who discussed the public scrutiny of Blackwater. “He kept asking, ‘Why do they hate me?’”

A converted Catholic raised by Christian fundamentalists and the scion of a Midwestern auto-parts fortune would seem to be an unlikely ally to the Muslim crown prince of a tiny, oil-rich Arab kingdom, but from their first meeting in 2009, Prince and bin Zayed hit it off. Almost immediately it was clear they shared common enemies: Islamic militants and, especially, Iran. Prince was introduced to bin Zayed after pitching a two-page schematic of a light attack airplane — an agricultural crop duster modified with surveillance and laser-guided munitions — to the Emirati government as the Blackwater sale to a private equity group was being negotiated. When the Emirati ambassador to the U.S., Yousef Al Otaiba, learned that Prince’s legal problems with the Justice Department would mean that he wouldn’t be able to be involved in building, selling, or brokering armed aircraft, the Emirati government approached another aviation manufacturer to help establish an entire air wing of armored and weaponized crop dusters. In exchange for Prince bowing out of the deal quietly, Otaiba introduced him to bin Zayed explicitly in order to find another role in which he could assist the UAE government.

Bin Zayed was determined to bolster the UAE’s sphere of influence and project power in the Middle East. Despite Prince’s tarnished reputation, bin Zayed saw in him a glimpse of the future. It didn’t hurt that “Erik could sell you your own hat,” according to one former associate. The former SEAL and self-described CIA “asset” saw in bin Zayed a willing buyer who shared his desire to play soldier. Prince sold bin Zayed on the idea of creating a half-billion-dollar program in which he would train, equip, and lead an elite cadre of foreign soldiers called the Security Support Group that would serve as a presidential guard for the Emirati monarchies and help quell any internal unrest. Bin Zayed insisted that Prince use non-Muslim ex-soldiers, according to two senior advisers who helped build the unit, telling him that he did not believe Muslim soldiers could be trusted to kill other Muslims. Eventually, Prince also sold bin Zayed on the creation of an armed aviation wing, a team to protect the Emirates from a weapons of mass destruction attack, and a separate force to combat Somali piracy.

One indication of both Prince and R2’s growing value to bin Zayed was that Prince became a favored foreign policy and military adviser, joining bin Zayed’s inner sanctum. Prince told his colleagues at R2 that bin Zayed, whom Prince often referred to as “the boss,” gave him ownership of two side-by-side villas in Abu Dhabi, which were originally worth $10 million each. The wealthy enclave was built as a luxury community, each villa with a private beach, and quickly housed several foreign embassies. Prince’s neighboring houses sat at the end of a residential peninsula and had expansive views of central Abu Dhabi across a sea channel, a pool, and beachfront in the Persian Gulf. Prince built a dock for his sailboat, which has a Blackwater logo across the port side.

Despite Prince’s tarnished reputation, bin Zayed saw in him a glimpse of the future. The former SEAL and self-described CIA “asset” saw in bin Zayed a willing buyer who shared his desire to play soldier.

The $13 million in the suitcases was an advance on $110 million the UAE gave Prince to get Reflex Responses off the ground. The deal gave Prince and his team a guaranteed 15 percent profit margin on whatever the company spent in addition to salaries. Prince had long tried to own a piece of each part of the foreign conflict supply chain: planes, ships, vehicles, weapons, intelligence, men, and logistics. Reflex Responses gave him a blank check to do just that.

Structurally, Reflex Responses became a model for how Prince masks his involvement in selling or providing military services, which was a necessity given that he’s unlikely to obtain an arms trafficking license under the U.S. State Department’s International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR). Officially, Prince was never an R2 employee. He officially worked for a company called Assurance Management Consultants, which shared a floor in an Abu Dhabi office tower with Reflex, where he oversaw the entire military program. It was Prince who hired and installed Reflex’s senior management, according to people directly involved in the effort. And it was Prince who recruited and hired the subcontractors who fulfilled Reflex’s contractual requirements. Prince flew to South America, where he helped oversee the recruitment of former Colombian soldiers who served as both hired guns and a training cadre for the fledgling Emirati security force.

Prince’s approach to management created problems almost immediately, issues that would arise again and again in his various projects. In what would become a pattern, Prince’s American colleagues at Reflex were troubled by his directives about ITAR regulations. Prince argued to his lawyers that because Reflex was an Emirati company, working on an Emirati government contract, he was not required to have an ITAR license from the State Department to sell military services. “We’d tell him, ‘No, that’s not how it works. You’re an American,’” said one of Prince’s former colleagues involved in Reflex Responses. “It was stupid, honestly. There was a way to do it legally and make lots of money, but Erik didn’t care. When Erik wakes up in the morning, Erik does whatever he feels like doing. I always assumed that’s how it is when your father is a billionaire.”

In response to a request for comment, a Prince spokesperson stated: “Mr. Prince at all times relied upon the advice of counsel, including both in-house compliance counsel and outside experts, to ensure compliance with ITAR and other laws.”

Prince also hid his financial interest in subcontractors working with R2. Six months into the project, senior executives discovered that Prince had an arrangement with Thor Global, the company that he’d insisted Reflex use to hire the Colombian soldiers. On paper, Thor Global was wholly owned by Robert Owens, a former aide to Oliver North during the Iran-Contra affair, but Prince received a substantial amount of the money R2 paid Thor Global, according to court documents and two former Prince colleagues familiar with the arrangement. “I asked Erik if the crown prince knew he was self-dealing,” said one of the former colleagues. “Erik wouldn’t answer.”

Prince had long tried to own a piece of each part of the foreign conflict supply chain: planes, ships, vehicles, weapons, intelligence, men, and logistics. Reflex Responses gave him a blank check to do just that.

Owens’s involvement and connection to North is not incidental. Prince and North are friends, and Prince has told others over the years that he greatly admires the former Marine officer and Reagan National Security Council staffer, who was convicted on three felony counts during the Iran-Contra scandal. (The convictions were reversed in 1991.)

A former colleague said it took him some time to recognize that Prince generally works to control the entire supply chain of any mercenary or security contract. “Everything he does, he skims,” said the former colleague, who has known Prince for two decades and described how Prince generally operates as a military services provider. “He will run a contract through two companies and then dictate that those two companies have to subcontract out to another eight companies. What he doesn’t disclose is that he owns all or part of those eight companies and will take 25 percent from each company. Then, he can use those same eight entities to make the money disappear.”

After Prince’s first team of U.S. executives quit, he brought in another former SEAL and a former CIA officer. That team conducted audits and quickly discovered financial problems. “There was massive embezzlement going on inside R2,” said a third former employee with direct knowledge of the company’s finances. “Overbilling, false billing, missing cash — millions were gone.”

According to four former Reflex employees and consultants, the alleged graft and embezzlement ran through two of Prince’s lieutenants, who handled logistics and administration for R2. The first was a former Blackwater employee who told colleagues at Reflex that he’d done intelligence work in the Middle East for the Pentagon’s intelligence agency. Internal R2 documents list him as the first employee of the company. Several of Prince’s colleagues confronted him about the missing money and his lieutenants’ conduct, but Prince rebuffed any effort to remove them. Contacted by The Intercept for comment, Prince’s lieutenant denied that he had ever embezzled or stolen money and denied ever working for R2. He said that he had worked for Assurance Management and occasionally “consulted” for R2.

Prince did not respond on the record to questions about the financial improprieties.

While money was disappearing from Reflex Responses’s accounts as a result of these financial shenanigans, Somali pirates were engaging in a more traditional form of robbery off the Horn of Africa, harming UAE shipping interests. Prince had a solution: a sea, air, and land battalion to eradicate the pirates. He established a group for this purpose within Reflex Responses known as Special Projects and hired a former South African special forces officer named Lafras Luitingh, who also worked for Executive Outcomes, a private military company comprised mainly of apartheid-era South African soldiers.

Together, Prince and Luitingh created the Puntland Maritime Police Force in northeastern Somalia, in a semiautonomous region home to the most active Somali pirates. A United Nations monitoring team subsequently documented extensive violations of the U.N. arms embargo of Somalia, including falsifying export paperwork for small arms and attacks that left civilian casualties by Luitingh’s company, Saracen, a subcontractor on the project. The two-year program resulted in “an elite force outside any legal framework … answerable only to the Puntland presidency,” according to a U.N. investigation into the PMPF. Both Prince and the UAE denied involvement, but one source with knowledge of the operation witnessed Emirati intelligence officers providing a suitcase with millions of dollars in $100 bills to Luitingh for his payroll. Citing Prince’s involvement in the police force, the U.N. report said, “This externally financed assistance programme has remained the most brazen violation of the arms embargo by a private security company.”

Although Prince and the UAE’s involvement was meant to be largely clandestine, Prince sought publicity for the program, according to a person with direct knowledge. Prince arranged for a February 2012 Fox News segment from North, then a military analyst for Fox News, who embedded with the PMPF in Puntland and explicitly reported that the UAE was behind the fledgling military unit. The media attention enraged the Emirati government, according to one of Prince’s former colleagues who worked with him at the time, and blamed him for the unwanted publicity.

The program’s lack of legal legitimacy was perhaps the least troubling legacy of Prince’s vision, however. The program shut down shortly after a South African mercenary was murdered by one of the local soldiers hired to fight the pirates during one of the first operations the Puntland force conducted. According to a contemporaneously filmed documentary of the anti-piracy effort, the killer was a relative of a pirate targeted by the unit. The unit had been infiltrated from the beginning, a failure of basic counterintelligence, which a former CIA officer, who was also involved, readily admitted in on-camera interviews. The U.N. would later report “credible” allegations of human rights violations stemming from corporal punishment, which led to severe injuries and a death at the South African-run PMPF camp.

Robert Young Pelton, an author who worked for Prince on the Somalia project and helped write Prince’s autobiography (and recently lost a civil suit against Prince over a contract dispute), said Prince’s efforts were “delusional. He operates with a 12-year-old’s mindset of war. He’s romanticized the South African mercenaries who fought those ugly wars.” Pelton said when Prince first showed him a map with plans for the security force, he realized that Prince had never been to Somalia. Pelton said Prince told him that the idea for an anti-piracy force came from reading “The Pirate Coast,” a book detailing a secret American operation in 1805 to end piracy off the coast of Libya.

As with the Security Support Group, the anti-piracy force suffered from mismanagement. According to two individuals who worked on the program, at least $50 million meant for the anti-piracy force had gone missing by the time the Emirates decided to stop funding the effort. Among the items that were never returned or accounted for were several aircraft, including at least one cargo plane and two helicopters, as well as several ships. Before he was asked by the Emirates to end his involvement in the program, Prince brought in a former intelligence operative to conduct an audit of the PMPF program. The American identified $38 million in cash that the UAE had delivered to Luitingh, for which the former South African mercenaries refused to provide accounting or receipts. “I told Erik, ‘[Luitingh] and the South Africans couldn’t account for $38 million,’” said a former Prince employee. “Erik wasn’t upset at all. He just said, ‘I’m sure they are just saving it for a rainy day.’” Luitingh did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

“When Erik wakes up in the morning, Erik does whatever he feels like doing. I always assumed that’s how it is when your father is a billionaire.”

Over a six month period beginning in late 2011, after the New York Times exposed Prince’s involvement with the UAE’s Security Support Group and the deployment of the anti-piracy force, bin Zayed gradually removed Prince from his multiple projects for the government. The parting of ways came as a result of the unwanted media exposure, U.N. pressure, and ongoing financial audits. The UAE shut down Reflex Responses and rolled what they wanted to keep into new companies with new management.

As his private military ventures with the UAE stumbled, Prince shifted to private equity, establishing an investment fund focused on African natural resources called Frontier Resource Group. But Prince’s income dried up after the UAE stopped funding him and he began having cash-flow problems. One of his personal bankers grew alarmed as Prince cashed out Treasury bonds to fund Frontier Resource. According to tax, banking, and internal business documents obtained by The Intercept, Prince at the time was worth less than $100 million, and much of his wealth was tied up in real estate and fixed-income investments. One of Prince’s creditors, Michigan’s Huntington Bank, refused a request for a $6 million increase on a $17.5 million line of credit, according to emails and other documents obtained by The Intercept. In turning Prince down, the bank reduced his line of credit by $2.5 million.

In late 2011, the Emirati government asked one of Prince’s former colleagues, Reno Alberto, if he would take over Prince’s aviation contract. Alberto was a former Navy SEAL who Prince originally hired to help save the Reflex Responses project. An Emirati general offered Alberto the job on two conditions: Reflex Responses needed to be shuttered so that a new corporate entity could take its place, and Prince could not be involved. Alberto agreed and created a new, temporary holding company called Vulcan Management. Vulcan would take the roughly $100 million resulting from the liquidation of R2 and hold it until a new entity could be established to create a wing of armed helicopters for the UAE air force.

Prince soon came calling on Alberto, however, claiming that a portion of the roughly $100 million left over from Reflex Responses was his and that any future contract for Alberto was a consequence of Prince’s efforts and therefore should result in him receiving a percentage. Prince claimed repeatedly to Alberto that bin Zayed had directed that some of the leftover R2 funding be paid to him. Prince and his business adviser Dorian Barak arranged to structure the payout as a loan from Alberto’s Vulcan Management to one of Prince’s holding companies in Bermuda. Barak, on behalf of Prince, requested that the loan be divided into 10 transactions, which Prince could then call on Vulcan to pay out as needed. Prince told several other colleagues that he felt he was owed upwards of $40 million for his effort in getting bin Zayed to create the SSG and establish R2. Alberto, who stood to make millions in his new venture, reluctantly agreed to pay his former boss through a loan.

On July 26, 2012, Barak emailed Prince, informing him that a wire transfer of approximately $5.9 million was sent by Vulcan, according to an email obtained by The Intercept. The money was wired to Prince’s Frontier Resource bank account in Abu Dhabi.

“That was fast. Well done,” Prince responded.

Prince pitched Frontier Resource to potential investors as a $500 million private equity fund. Fund documents state that Prince would provide 10 percent of the funding. In late 2011 and early 2012, as FRG tried to get off the ground, Prince had soft commitments from investors in the UAE, including bin Zayed’s brother Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, the Emirati national security adviser. But by the time he’d taken his first draw of the Vulcan loan, Prince was toxic, and the outside financial commitments had withered and disappeared. Sheikh Tahnoon, however, appears to have invested at least $5 million, according to internal Frontier Resource documents provided to The Intercept.

Then, in October 2012, Prince directed Alberto and Vulcan to make a second wire transfer. This one, however, was not sent to Prince or his companies. According to documents reviewed by The Intercept, and confirmed by a person with direct knowledge of the transaction, more than $9 million was wired to Zafra Group, the company Sheikh Tahnoon had originally created to invest in Prince’s Frontier Resource. It is unclear why Prince wanted the Vulcan money routed to Zafra Group, but he told Vulcan that the payment had been ordered by “the boss,” according to the person with direct knowledge of the transaction. In effect, Prince had steered UAE government money meant for an armed helicopter wing to one his fund’s investors, a senior member of the Emirati royal family.

When Prince asked for $10 million in the third installment, Alberto refused and subsequently told Prince that no more installments would be paid. According to a person with knowledge of the dispute, Alberto learned that no one in the Emirati royal family had ordered the payments to Prince.

The loan to Prince, which has not been previously reported, was not repaid to Vulcan, and the entire $15 million was written off as a loss by the company in subsequent years, according to a person with direct knowledge of the transaction. Prince did report the $5.9 million payment as a loan on his personal tax returns that year.

The Intercept sent Prince a detailed list of questions for this article. In response, a Prince spokesperson stated that “Vulcan Management’s loan, which was made in connection with FRG’s investment activity, was at all times fully disclosed to both FRG’s auditors and the IRS.” Prince would not comment for the record about the circumstances of the loan, or why he directed the $9 million payment to Zafra.

A New Frontier

Over the next several years, as his speculations in African natural resources turned into losers time and again, Prince looked to China for new funds, creating Frontier Services Group with an investment banker and former Marine named Gregg Smith. For Smith, the business model seemed simple enough: Frontier Resource would find undervalued, distressed assets, and Frontier Services would transport the materials out of Africa. Smith says he saw the potential of a logistics company to move freight and natural resources across Africa, where the Chinese were increasingly active. “We wanted to start a straightforward logistics company,” Smith said recently. “Trucks and planes and that’s it.”

Prince had other ideas, as did some Chinese investors, who made it clear that they wanted a “Blackwater China.” Although Frontier Services attracted a $110 million investment from a Hong Kong tycoon named Johnson Ko and the China International Trust Investment Corporation, a state-owned investment company, Prince’s investment fund lost money, and several projects ended in a total loss, according to three people with knowledge of Prince’s investment portfolio. Instead, Prince would end up directing FSG to purchase companies that Prince had a financial interest in — as well as services from such companies — in an effort to salvage his private-equity fund’s investment. In total, according to documents, FSG spent $8.5 million on Prince-connected businesses. And as he had with Thor Global and Reflex Responses, Prince failed to disclose his financial interest to the FSG board prior to most of the transactions. The board eventually passed a resolution prohibiting undisclosed self-dealing.

For two years, beginning in 2013, while Frontier Services executives ran a legitimate logistics and aviation company, Prince was traveling around Africa pitching paramilitary services under the Frontier Services banner. As reported by The Intercept, Prince proposed creating counterterrorism forces, a private air force, and a “black ops” program for Nigeria to defeat Boko Haram. He made a similar pitch to President Salva Kiir Mayardit of South Sudan to help him defeat rebels there. There were meetings and proposals for Libya, Cameroon, and Kurdish Iraq, none of which found a buyer. Although Prince failed to sell an entire paramilitary force, he did make money across the continent and the Middle East “advising” countries on how to fight wars. According to one of his closest colleagues, over a roughly five-year period, including his time as chair of the board of FSG, Prince earned as much as $10 million from his meetings. Prince’s efforts were nothing if not ambitious. “Erik was trying to create a private JSOC,” said a former senior military officer who discussed many of Prince’s ideas with him. Since he left Blackwater, Prince has sold or pitched his war supply chain in no fewer than 15 countries, nearly all of them with majority Muslim populations.

Since he left Blackwater, Prince has sold or pitched his war supply chain in no fewer than 15 countries, nearly all of them in countries with majority Muslim populations.

Prince tried to hawk surveillance products and services as well. In 2014, he demonstrated for some of his Frontier Services colleagues cellphone geolocation software that he said he had licensed from an Israeli company. At a strip mall diner in Washington, D.C., Prince pulled out a laptop and punched in a cellphone number. The program identified the most recent cell tower the phone had connected with, allowing the user to locate the target within 300 meters and revealing the last 10 calls the targeted user made. Prince, according to one person who discussed the software with him, believed his time at Frontier Services had “cleaned” his image up with the U.S. government enough that he approached both the CIA and the Pentagon, offering to run the software in counterterrorism operations. He was rebuffed. Later, he and one of his deputies claimed that they sold the program to the Saudi and Emirati air forces to locate bombing targets in Yemen.

In 2015, Prince became involved in the ongoing conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the disputed area of Nagorno-Karabakh. Azerbaijan spent hundreds of millions of dollars equipping and training their small military. Prince was brought in by a former Russian weapons supplier to help create a training force. Prince would ultimately be kicked off the contract after his business partners accused him of wildly padding the proposed contract by adding a series of unnecessary expenditures that would have been provided by companies to which Prince had financial ties. In an effort to smooth over Prince’s anger at being fired, the Russian weapons supplier offered him $5 million, according to three people with direct knowledge of the offer. Prince agreed to take the money but insisted the payment be made through a complex series of loans between companies that Barak would set up. When his Russian colleague refused the terms and offered a simple check made out to Prince for the total amount, Prince walked away from the deal, according to a person with direct knowledge of the incident.

In response to questions from The Intercept, a Prince spokesperson stated: “FSG contemplated a logistics, construction, and aviation support project in Azerbaijan, but neither FSG nor Erik Prince ever moved forward with it, and neither FSG nor Mr. Prince was ever offered money to abandon the project.”

As The Intercept has reported previously, when Frontier Services Group discovered that Prince had secretly modified two crop dusters to be used as light attack aircraft, and had used an Austrian company he’d secretly purchased a stake in, FSG hired the law firm King & Spalding to conduct an investigation to determine whether Prince had violated arms trafficking laws. (Prince attempted to sell the two weaponized aircraft to Azerbaijan as part of their buildup — another potential violation of ITAR). The attorneys, supervised by current FBI Director Christopher Wray, concluded that Prince had likely violated U.S. law in his effort to sell the crop dusters. In 2016, FSG disclosed the ITAR violations to the Justice Department, which opened an investigation.

The Rise of Trump

Although Prince’s turn in Africa as a mercenary was a bust, he was somewhat successful at recasting himself as a globetrotting businessman through Frontier Services Group. The 2016 presidential election and the rise of Donald Trump now promised a full-scale rehabilitation. The potential for a Republican administration would be an opportunity for new U.S. government contracts and, possibly, something even more lucrative. After Trump had clinched the Republican nomination, Prince told his Chinese business and government contacts that if Trump won, he would be the next secretary of defense.

Prince’s family has a history of supporting right-wing and conservative causes. Edgar Prince, Erik’s father, was a major financial contributor to former President Gerald Ford, and in recent years, the family has supported Mike Pence, first as a member of Congress and later as Indiana governor. While in Congress, Pence helped Prince navigate Capitol Hill in the aftermath of the killing of four Blackwater contractors in Fallujah in 2004. Prince became an enthusiastic Trump supporter. By Election Day, Prince had donated $250,000 to Trump’s 2016 election effort.

During the campaign, Prince solidified his relationship with Steve Bannon, appearing on his Breitbart radio show on SiriusXM less than a month before Bannon formally joined the Trump campaign. Four days before the 2016 election, Prince went on Bannon’s show and smeared Hillary Clinton, claiming without evidence that a New York City police investigation into former Rep. Anthony Weiner had uncovered extensive criminal activity by the Democratic presidential candidate. Prince claimed that the Obama administration had suppressed the investigation implicating Clinton using “Stalinist tactics.”

In apparent coordination with Trump’s advisers, Prince had also begun exploring the world of domestic information warfare. In August 2016, according to the New York Times, Prince brokered a meeting at Trump Tower between George Nader, an aide to bin Zayed, Donald Trump Jr., and Joel Zamel, the owner of Psy-Group, an Israeli private intelligence company that specialized in manipulating elections using social media accounts and untraceable websites. The Trump campaign apparently passed on the offer. Prince already had familiarity with private Israeli intelligence companies through Dorian Barak. Several years earlier, Prince had been offered a financial stake in what was then a fledgling company called Black Cube, run by former Mossad officers. The company gained notoriety during the #MeToo movement when a firm representing Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein hired Black Cube to help stop publication of an account of his abuses. Black Cube hired an operative who used false identities to approach actress Rose McGowan, as well as a reporter looking into the multitude of sexual misconduct and assault allegations against Weinstein.

Prince declined to invest in Black Cube, but appears to have liked the idea of selling a service that provided undercover operatives. During the 2016 election, he became involved with James O’Keefe and Project Veritas, a group of conservative provocateurs who specialize in using hidden-camera footage and secret recordings. O’Keefe, a protégé of the conservative firebrand Andrew Breitbart, describes himself as a “guerrilla journalist” and has used undercover cameras in an effort to expose purported liberal bias in political groups and the media. Trump often promoted O’Keefe’s videos and met with O’Keefe just days after he declared his candidacy. (A few weeks before that, Trump had donated $10,000 to Project Veritas through his foundation.) It is unclear if Trump’s support of Project Veritas spurred Prince’s interest in the group, but in late 2015 or early 2016, Prince arranged for O’Keefe and Project Veritas to receive training in intelligence and elicitation techniques from a retired military intelligence operative named Euripides Rubio Jr. According to a former Trump White House official who discussed the Veritas training with Rubio, the former special operative quit after several weeks of training, complaining that the Veritas group wasn’t capable of learning. Rubio did not respond to requests for comment.

“Erik was weaponizing a group that had close ties to the Trump White House.”

In the winter of 2017, Prince arranged for a former British MI6 officer to provide more surveillance and elicitation training for Veritas at his family’s Wyoming ranch, according to a person with direct knowledge of the effort. Prince was trying to turn O’Keefe and his group into domestic spies. For his part, O’Keefe posted photos on Instagram and Twitter from the Prince family ranch of himself holding a handgun with a silencer attached and wearing pseudo-military clothing. He described the ranch as a “classified location” where he was learning “spying and self-defense,” in an effort to make Project Veritas “the next great intelligence agency.”

“Erik was weaponizing a group that had close ties to the Trump White House,” said the former White House official familiar with Prince’s relationship with O’Keefe and Project Veritas.

In February 2017, O’Keefe and another Project Veritas associate, Seijah Drake, posted photos on their individual Twitter accounts of them training at Prince’s family ranch in Wyoming. Screenshots: The Intercept

It is unclear how much involvement Prince has with the selection of targets for O’Keefe’s stings and undercover operations, but several months after the organization received training in Wyoming, a Project Veritas operative was exposed by the Washington Post after she posed as a sexual assault victim of Roy Moore, who was then a Senate candidate in Alabama.

After Trump won the election, Prince began sending defense and intelligence policy proposals to the Trump team via Bannon, including his plan for privatizing the war in Afghanistan. The plan called for removing all U.S. troops and replacing them with a small cadre of security trainers, a small fleet of light attack aircraft, and a surge of covert CIA operations. In an attempt to appeal to Trump, Prince tweaked his proposal with a plan to secure mining concessions for Afghanistan’s vast untapped mineral resources, an idea with obvious parallels to his failed efforts in Africa. But the national security establishment was uniformly opposed and it failed to gain traction.

Armed with his beliefs about reshaping the Middle East and Afghanistan, and enjoying his new status as an unofficial adviser to the next U.S. president, Prince was invited back to Mohammed bin Zayed’s royal court.

Prince later testified before the House Intelligence Committee that his invitation was linked directly to Trump’s victory. “I think the Obama administration went out of their way to tarnish my ability to do business in the Middle East, and, with a different administration in town, [the Emiratis] probably figured that that downdraft wasn’t present anymore … so it was not a surprise that the meeting happened. And those are the kind of things we talked about, whether it’s Somalia and terrorism there or Libya, Nigeria, and of course all the places that are even closer to the UAE.”

Meanwhile, Prince’s relationship with Bannon has gone from fellow ideological traveler to business partner. According to a former Trump White House official and the former U.S. official close to the UAE royal family, Prince has teamed up with Bannon to offer a newer version of the armed crop duster to the Emirati air force. The pitch includes Israeli-made avionics and surveillance software for geolocating targets on the ground. Prince and Bannon are also offering a different package to the Emirate’s despised rival, Qatar. According to a former senior U.S. official who reviewed the proposal, Prince is currently hawking proposals for preventing social and political unrest from Qatar’s foreign laborers before and during the 2022 FIFA World Cup. The proposal specifically names Project Veritas as a partner and offers the Qatari government an ability to infiltrate the community of foreign laborers, who make up almost 90 percent of the country’s population of roughly 2.3 million. The pitch is designed to appeal to Qatari fears of a popular uprising and to fend off and neuter political dissent leading up to the soccer tournament. The proposal also offers social media monitoring and messaging — something Bannon would be familiar with from his past work for Cambridge Analytica.

In response to questions from The Intercept, Prince’s spokesperson said, “Mr. Prince supports Project Veritas’s mission of uncovering government largesse and corruption, and has allowed Project Veritas to use his family’s ranch in Wyoming. Mr. Prince has no business relationship with Steve Bannon, James O’Keefe, or Project Veritas, and has never pitched a project with Mr. Bannon to the Qatari or any other government.” Bannon would not comment.

To those who know him best, Prince’s latest proposals suggest that he sees business opportunities in services that are closer to political skullduggery than outright conflict. By marrying the two capabilities — social media manipulation and undercover surveillance by trained operatives — Prince has moved further along the spectrum of contemporary warfare. If a government won’t pay him for a heavily armed paramilitary force in a hot conflict, he appears prepared to offer services that utilize a less obvious, but perhaps more insidious, kind of weaponry.

Given his wealth and political ties, it may be that the Department of Justice will never have the political fortitude to thoroughly investigate Prince for defense brokering and trafficking violations, or to challenge his questionable ties to China’s intelligence service. But he does face legal scrutiny. The FBI is currently probing Prince’s work at Frontier Services Group, with a team assigned from the Washington field office. It is unclear whether the investigation is a continuation of the 2016 probe or stems from the Mueller investigation. Three different congressional committees are also investigating Prince, including his relationship with the Chinese government. The FBI declined to comment and would not confirm the existence of an investigation. Prince’s spokesperson stated that “other than his well-documented cooperation with the Special Counsel’s Office, Mr. Prince has had no interaction, directly or through counsel, with the FBI in years.”

Prince’s role in the Trump-Russia affair perfectly encapsulates his latest effort to refashion himself, this time as a self-appointed warrior diplomat. According to the Mueller report, Prince flew to the Seychelles a week before the inauguration, at least in part to meet with Kirill Dmitriev, who was acting as Putin’s emissary and sought a backchannel to the incoming Trump administration. But Prince repeatedly denied in his testimony that he flew to the Seychelles to meet Dmitriev. Prince also failed to disclose that he met with Dmitriev twice during his stay at the Four Seasons.

The Mueller investigation relied on the cooperation and testimony of George Nader, who arranged the meeting at bin Zayed’s behest. Nader testified that Dmitriev was “not enthusiastic” about meeting Prince. To help sell the meeting, Nader described Prince to Dmitriev as Bannon’s chosen representative for the Kremlin-directed meeting: “this guy [Prince] is designated by Steve [Bannon] to meet you!” Which suggests that Prince presented himself to Nader as an influential member of Trump’s circle. Testimony from both Bannon and Prince cast doubt on whether Prince flew to the Seychelles with Bannon’s knowledge or approval. If Bannon’s testimony is accurate, it’s quite possible that Prince oversold his influence with Trump and Trump’s inner circle to get the meeting with Dmitriev.

Although in his congressional testimony Prince described only a single interaction with Dmitriev at the resort bar, there was an earlier, longer private meeting in Nader’s villa. After the first meeting, Prince learned that an Russian aircraft carrier was moving off the coast of Libya, according to the Mueller report. Prince, who has spent years offering his paramilitary services in Libya, was incensed at the news, calling Nader to demand a second meeting with Dmitriev. Prince told Nader that he’d just checked with his “associates” and needed to convey an important message to Putin’s emissary. Prince told Mueller that he was speaking only for himself, based on his three years as a Navy SEAL. In the second meeting, Prince went off-script and warned Dmitriev that the U.S. could not accept Russian involvement in Libya.

As the report describes Dmitriev’s complaints to Nader after meeting Prince, he expected to meet a member of the Trump team who had more authority and substance: “Dmitriev told Nader that [redacted] Prince’s comments [redacted] were insulting [redacted].” As in so many other episodes involving Prince over the last decade, his involvement in the Trump-Russia political scandal is a result of his relentless ambition, combined with his snake-oil salesmanship and his ability to gain entry to rooms with genuine power, even if it quickly becomes apparent that he doesn’t belong there.

The post How Erik Prince Used the Rise of Trump to Make an Improbable Comeback appeared first on The Intercept.

Observers noted after the release that the most purportedly salacious aspect of the film — a suggestion that McCaskill carefully conceals her support for gun control — is hardly true: McCaskill’s support for various gun control policy is no secret. She voted for the last major gun control legislation in the Senate in 2013 and has openly campaigned for what she calls “common-sense gun safety” measures that include expanded background checks for those seeking to purchase firearms.

The attack on McCaskill, however, was only the latest in O’Keefe’s signature style — often selectively edited undercover videos featuring contrived and less-than-truthful attacks against liberals and Democrats — and it’s not going to be his last foray into the 2018 midterm elections.

At a gathering attended by Republican politicians and major religious right donors in North Carolina late last month, O’Keefe promised more undercover tapes on Democratic Senate candidates.

“We have videotapes of U.S. senators’ staffers, and we’re going to release them starting next week up until the election.”

“I’m going to tell you, in the coming weeks, my organization, Project Veritas Action, has spent the last year undercover inside the office,” O’Keefe said, speaking at the Council for National Policy gathering in Charlotte. “And all legally filmed, all legally obtained, most of it was filmed outside of federal buildings. But we have hidden cam videotapes of U.S. senators and their staffers, and we’re going to release them starting next week up until the election.”

Prodded by Tony Perkins, the Family Research Council president who had introduced him at the podium, O’Keefe noted that he would begin by releasing a video on the Missouri Senate race, followed by Arizona, then Florida and “a lot of the swing states.”

Now the McCaskill video is out. The other races O’Keefe mentioned constitute other battleground elections that will likely determine control of the Senate next year. In Arizona, Democratic Rep. Kyrsten Sinema faces Republican Rep. Martha McSally for the Senate seat vacated by retiring Republican Sen. Jeff Flake. And in Florida, Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson faces a challenge from Republican Gov. Rick Scott.

“They’re on tape saying, ‘We have to lie to get elected,'” boasted O’Keefe. “I think it’s going to get people fired.”

The Council for National Policy confab is a secretive gathering of evangelical leaders, politicians, and conservative donors. The Intercept covered the event, mostly from the hotel lobby, where a number of participants shared information from the conference.

The event featured presentations by United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, who announced her resignation from the Trump administration a few days after her speech at the event, as well as Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, and Ginni Thomas, the spouse of Justice Clarence Thomas.

O’Keefe, for his part, specializes in sending people to infiltrate left-wing groups, encouraging typically low-level staff or volunteers to say something embarrassing or offensive.

In some cases, the O’Keefe videos have misfired. Last year, a woman working with O’Keefe’s nonprofit approached the Washington Post to plant a false story about Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore. But the paper quickly caught onto the deception and tracked the woman back to Project Veritas, an affiliation she attempted to conceal. In another botched sting, O’Keefe and his associates left a voicemail for George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, but forgot to hang up, leaving a recording of their plot to try to manipulate the foundation.

The McCaskill video follows the now-familiar template. In one clip, a staffer is heard saying that he wishes that former President Barack Obama would campaign for McCaskill, but worries that it would send the wrong message to voters. In another segment, a campaign staff member hopes that McCaskill will embrace impeachment of President Donald Trump.

Partisan, right-wing media outlets championed the video with glee. Rush Limbaugh crooned that the tape “exposed the blatant hypocrisy” of McCaskill. The American Thinker declared that it exposes the “McCaskill hidden agenda.”

Not every journalist was convinced of the importance of the video’s revelations.  Reporter Danny Wicentowski, of St. Louis’s alt-weekly, Riverfront Times, panned the release as “pretty boring by O’Keefe’s standards, which tend to rely more on shock value than new information.”

The video, though, may have an impact on the race: It was quickly embraced by Republican Josh Hawley, McCaskill’s challenger, and also the state attorney general, whose campaign claimed the video unveiled McCaskill’s “REAL views.”

The post Provocateur James O’Keefe Has More Ambush Videos On Key Senate Races, He Tells Secretive GOP Donor Confab appeared first on The Intercept.

The escalating fight, which is being played out in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, began last September, when the teachers union filed a lawsuit accusing Project Veritas of infiltrating and illegally gathering proprietary information from its Michigan affiliate.

Project Veritas, a right-wing activist group known for releasing undercover video exposés of liberal organizations like ACORN and Planned Parenthood, has taken a special interest in targeting teacher unions over the last eight years. The group has been accused of routinely doctoring its videos, and last year it was caught trying to feed a false story about Roy Moore, then a U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, to the Washington Post. The discovery in the Michigan case may shed new light on its internal operations.

According to the September complaint, which was filed in state court, Marisa Jorge, a political operative for Project Veritas, presented herself as a University of Michigan student named Marissa Perez who was interested in becoming a teacher. She applied for a summer internship with AFT Michigan and was hired in May 2017. For the next three months, she allegedly gathered a wide range of confidential information on the teachers union. The lawsuit claims that on multiple occasions Jorge was found alone in other employees’ offices, accessing information she, as an intern, had no right to see. In other cases, she requested to attend bargaining sessions, was given access to internal databases, and secretly recorded conversations, according to the complaint.

A Michigan judge responded to the lawsuit by issuing a restraining order against Project Veritas in September, barring the group from publishing or disclosing any materials it may have collected from the union. The next month, following a motion by Project Veritas, the case was moved from state to federal court. In December, U.S. District Judge Linda Parker lifted the restraining order. Parker said the AFT had not sufficiently demonstrated it would be harmed by what Project Veritas had collected. In her decision she wrote that “a preliminary injunction most certainly will infringe upon Defendants’ First Amendment right.”

The union went back to court in early May to try once more to prevent Project Veritas from releasing any documents or videos it had obtained from its Michigan affiliate. Parker denied the AFT’s second request, again citing First Amendment concerns.

Project Veritas began releasing information from AFT Michigan immediately thereafter. In its first post, headlined “BREAKING: Alleged Child Molester Paid Off in Union Negotiation by Michigan American Federation of Teachers,” Project Veritas boasted of releasing documents and undercover footage “which reveals that the union protected a teacher after accusations of sexual misconduct with a seven- or eight-year-old girl arose.”

AFT president Randi Weingarten and  AFT Michigan President David Hecker released a joint statement following the video’s release, calling it a “heavily spliced” smear tactic intended to undermine educators and their unions.

“In this particular case, following accusations of a teacher’s misconduct with a child of a woman he was dating years before, the union and district officials worked together to separate a teacher from service and make sure students were protected,” Weingarten and Hecker stated. “To this day, the teacher denies the accusations, and no charges have been filed. AFT Michigan continues to prioritize the well-being of students and the promise of high-quality public education in Michigan.”

“It’s going to get interesting now because we have the opportunity to dig pretty deep into Project Veritas and their activities,” AFT Michigan attorney Mark Cousens told The Intercept. “We can discover not only how they work, but what they did in Michigan.” Cousens said the union, through discovery, might request information on Jorge’s relationship to Project Veritas, background on Jorge, and what materials she may have taken while working as an intern.

Weingarten said in a statement that her union is “committed to holding Project Veritas accountable for its unlawful misrepresentations, infiltrations, and splicing and dicing of unlawfully obtained material to smear teachers and public schools.” Weingarten pledged to “move forward in our efforts to bring to light the deceptive, unscrupulous distortion tactics Project Veritas is known for.”

Marco Bruno, a spokesperson for Project Veritas, dismissed the decision. He told The Intercept that the AFT “is winning only the highest award for delusional self-congratulations. Contrary to its claims, AFT’s reckless efforts throughout this lawsuit to censor a Veritas publication failed repeatedly. As far as the case goes, they have won nothing, and their latest pleadings are as weak as their previous complaint. AFT is wasting union members’ dues on a frivolous lawsuit that it has no chance of winning.”

Project Veritas has long targeted teacher unions. In 2010, O’Keefe, the group’s founder, infiltrated a New Jersey Education Association leadership conference and produced a project called “Teachers Union Gone Wild.” His group produced another video last summer that purported to show a New Jersey teacher offering journalists cocaine at a union convention. After that video was released, O’Keefe went on the radio to say his teacher union exposés are not finished. “I don’t ever, ever expect the institutions to hold people accountable, so it’s up to exposures,” O’Keefe said, promising that “we have more coming out.”

And indeed, they did. In May, on top of its AFT Michigan work, Project Veritas released two more undercover videos of New Jersey union officials discussing how to protect teachers accused of abuse, which subsequently led to the suspension of two union presidents. New Jersey Democrats, including state Senate president Steve Sweeney and Gov. Phil Murphy, have since called for investigations into the union’s behavior.

The NJEA released a statement in response to the videos, saying it “does not, in any instance, condone the abuse or mistreatment of children or the failure to properly report allegations of abuse.” The union also announced it would be commissioning an independent review of its local affiliates to ensure that staff and leaders “understan[d] and clearly communicat[e] the responsibility of all school employees to report any suspected abuse of children.”

While the NJEA charged Project Veritas with being a political group “with a long history of releasing deceptively edited videos that later prove to have been dishonest and misleading,” Sweeney did not back down. “They can attack the videos and who did the videos all they want,” he told NJ Advance Media, referring to the union. “But those words were real, those actions were real, and they need to be dealt with.”

Also in May, Project Veritas released another video, showing teachers union officials in Ohio discussing how they would defend educators who abused students. State union officials called the videos doctored and edited to fit the organization’s agenda.   

O’Keefe hinted at more videos in the future. Following the Michigan, New Jersey, and Ohio videos, Project Veritas promised to release “more undercover videos of teachers unions from ALL ACROSS THE COUNTRY in the coming days and weeks.”

Top photo: James O’Keefe holds a news conference at the National Press Club Sept. 1, 2015 in Washington, D.C.

The post Lawsuit Against Project Veritas May Shed New Light on Right-Wing Group’s Internal Operations appeared first on The Intercept.

At pretrial hearing Wednesday afternoon, Morin agreed that the prosecution had violated the “Brady rule,” which governs the state’s pretrial obligations to disclose exculpatory evidence, but declined to rule on the defense’s motions to dismiss the indictment or suppress the evidence. Morin will rule on those sanctions next week.

“The government has abused its power by hiding discovery from all defendants, purposefully choosing not to disclose Brady information.”

“The government has abused its power by hiding discovery from all defendants,” the attorneys, led by Andrew O. Clarke and Cary Clennon, wrote in the motion, “purposefully choosing not to disclose Brady information, and calling into question the integrity of all of its third-party video evidence and proffers in open court.”

J20 supporters cheered Morin’s finding, but pushed for serious sanctions. “We hope that the court further recognizes that these violations are characteristic of the U.S. Attorney’s approach to this case from day one and their shameless attempts to criminalize standard acts of organizing and protest,” said Sam Menefee-Libey of D.C. Legal Posse, which is coordinating support for the defendants. “We hope that other aspects of the prosecution’s strategy, including use of right-wing ultranationalist sources and many repressive tactics drawn from the post-9/11 security state, are also shut down by the court.”

The trial for the latest tranche of J20 defendants — Matthew Hessler, Christopher Litchfield, Daniel Meltzer, Dylan Petrohilos, Clay Retherford, and Caroline Unger — is slated to begin June 4. They are accused of conspiring to commit acts of violence during Donald Trump’s inauguration in Washington, D.C. A key piece of evidence in the state’s case against them, as well as other protesters, is a video of a January 8, 2017, meeting of “Disrupt J20,” the umbrella group under which left-wing activists organized the protests.

The video of the planning meeting was provided to investigators by Project Veritas, a controversial far-right media group known for “sting” operations against its political opponents and the publication of selectively edited videos. In the J20 video, organizers can be heard discussing plans for blockades and other civil disobedience. At one point, a speaker promises to make the inauguration a “giant clusterfuck.” At no point do they explicitly endorse property destruction.

Defense lawyers say the government edited the Project Veritas video to exclude evidence favorable to their clients.

“Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Kerkhoff has repeatedly shown contempt for the legal process in her zeal to convict political activists,” said Menefee-Libey. “Federal prosecutors are prepared to hide evidence, malign political organizing, and spend millions of taxpayer dollars in an attempt to put anti-Trump protesters behind bars for decades.” (A representative for the U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to comment for this story.)

The J20 prosecution has been ongoing for well over a year. Thus far, prosecutors have had little success in their effort to collectively criminalize protest participants. In December 2017, a jury acquitted the first six defendants to face trial. Charges against an addition 129 were dropped in January 2018. A total of 59 defendants still face felony prosecution.

In its filing, the defense also accused Kerkhoff of disclosing new video evidence without notifying the defense. If Morin decides not to dismiss the charges against the six defendants, the defense lawyers are asking for the entire Veritas video to be suppressed at trial.

Prosecutors have maintained that the footage redacted from the video had no evidentiary value. Kerkhoff asserted in court that the only two minor edits were made to the video: one at the beginning, when the Veritas infiltrator can be seen in a bathroom mirror, and another at the end, when an undercover police officer’s face appears on camera. “We cut that part out,” Kerkhoff said at a hearing on April 6, 2018, “and then provided everything else to defense counsel.”

“What better exculpatory evidence for the Defense than the words from the person sent to capture a nefarious meeting stating right after the meeting, ‘I don’t think they know anything’?”

But that’s not the whole story, defense attorneys said in their filing. Recently, the defense obtained the full video after the court compelled prosecutors to produce an unedited version. According to their motion, the full video “shows the creator of the video coming from the bathroom, walking past a huge group of people talking loudly and then sitting down in a breakout session already in progress.” More importantly, toward the end of the video, the Veritas mole can be heard saying, “I was talking with one of the organizers from the IWW”— the Industrial Workers of the World, a left-wing group — “and I don’t think they know anything about any of the upper echelon stuff.”

“This is exculpatory evidence to the defense,” the defense motion says. “The government plans to argue that Mr. Petrohilos and everyone else at that meeting were intending to plan a violent protest. What better exculpatory evidence for the Defense than the words from the person sent to capture a nefarious meeting stating right after the meeting, ‘I don’t think they know anything’?”

In the 1963 case Brady v. Maryland, the Supreme Court held that “the suppression by the prosecution of evidence favorable to an accused … violates due process where the evidence is material either to guilt or to punishment, irrespective of the good faith or bad faith of the prosecution.” Under the Brady rule, prosecutors must disclose any information that might help the defense in advance of trial.

If not for the court compelling the government to produce the whole video, the defense would never have seen what may be exculpatory evidence.

Along with the suspicious edits, defense attorneys say that on April 12, 2018, the government uploaded — to a file system shared by prosecution and defense attorneys — an additional 45 minutes of video “seemingly from the same planning meeting,” but from another angle. None of the defense attorneys had previously seen this footage; it was never mentioned in the Government’s Designation of Evidence, and the government did not announce that new videos had been uploaded.

“Although defense is now in possession of this information, this blatant hiding of evidence leads counsel to have to go through hours of video evidence in this matter again to make sure there aren’t any other instances when the government has clipped or misrepresented evidence,” the defense lawyers state in their motion. “That is an impossible task and should not be the burden of the defendants.”

In March, lawyers for defendant Cassandra Beale also accused prosecutors of a Brady violation when they failed to disclose that the government had misidentified Beale in a video of a protest planning meeting — an incident supporters of the J20 defendants seized on.

“At best, the U.S. Attorney’s Office is playing fast and loose with the rules of discovery.”

“This motion identifies an ongoing pattern by this prosecution,” said Menefee-Libey. “At best, the U.S. Attorney’s Office is playing fast and loose with the rules of discovery; at worst, they’re knowingly withholding evidence that could mess up their case and seeking to convict these protesters by any means necessary.”

The apparent cooperation between federal prosecutors and far-right groups has been a subject of controversy throughout the trial. Undercover D.C. police officer Bryan Adelmeyer also attended the January 7 planning meeting. According to the government, the police did not know Project Veritas had sent a mole to the meeting until the video was released online. At that point, prosecutors say, they requested a full copy of the footage from Project Veritas. But J20 supporters have questioned the extent of the government’s relationship with Veritas.

“The prosecution has entered into evidence a video recorded by a third party that both has a reputation for dishonesty and is clearly biased against the defendants,” said Chip Gibbons, the policy and legislative counsel for Defending Rights and Dissent. “The public absolutely has a right to know about the extent of law enforcement collusion with a right-wing outfit seeking to demonize and delegitimize protesters.” Gibbons, along with the National Lawyers Guild, have filed Freedom of Information Act requests pertaining to law enforcement involvement with third parties like Project Veritas.

Last September, Kelly Weill reported in the Daily Beast, the U.S. attorney sought to introduce a series of videos ripped from right-wing YouTube channels, including one produced by the far-right Oath Keepers militia.

The defense’s motion comes amid another Inauguration Day protest trial, which began May 14, against four defendants: Michael Basillas, Seth Cadman, Anthony Felice, and Casey Webber. On Wednesday, jurors heard testimony from a property manager of a building housing a Starbucks whose window was damaged on Inauguration Day. Another set of defendants are set to go on trial beginning May 29. Morin, the D.C. Superior Court judge, heard the defense’s Brady violation motion Wednesday morning at a pre-trial hearing. He indicated that he will likely introduce sanctions against the U.S. Attorney for the Brady violation, but won’t rule on those until next week.

During the hearing, Morin also ruled to permit testimony from Christina Williams, an FBI analyst who until recently headed the “Domestic Terrorism Analysis Unit.” Prosecutors portrayed Williams as an expert on “black bloc” tactics, in which protesters dress alike and mask their identities. In a May 18 pretrial hearing, Williams testified that she had overseen the preparation of FBI intelligence reports on “anarchist extremism” but had no specific FBI training regarding black bloc.

On cross examination, Williams admitted that she had never personally researched black bloc tactics before the J20 case; never interviewed a participant in a black bloc; or written any memos, reports, or presentations specifically about black bloc workings. Nonetheless, Morin ruled that Williams would be allowed to offer educational testimony about black bloc tactics, but she will be prohibited from commenting on the specific events of January 20, 2017. She is also prohibited from using the phrase “anarchist extremist” or offering definitions of words like “direct action,” “medic,” “marshal,” “scout,” or “affinity group.”

According to a court filing, much of her testimony was to be based on publicly available material, such as books including academic Mark Bray’s “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook” and Kevin Danaher and Jason Mark’s “Insurrection: Citizen Challenges to Corporate Power.”

When asked in court to comment on one of the books cited in the filing to establish her bona fides, Williams responded, “It’s been a while since I’ve read it.”

Correction: May 24, 2018
An earlier version of this story misidentified the group IWW as International Workers of the World. The group is the Industrial Workers of the World. The story has also been corrected to clarify that a witness who testified at the ongoing trial was a property manager at the building where a damaged Starbucks was located, not a Starbucks manager.

Protesters confront riot police on K Street Northwest, outside the offices of the Washington Post, as they react to the swearing in of U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington on January 20, 2017.

The post Prosecutors Withheld Evidence That Could Exonerate J20 Inauguration Protesters, Judge Rules appeared first on The Intercept.