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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Declining Sector Hangs Hopes on Clarity Act

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democrats Holding the Keys

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Ethics?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trump’s announcement was widely criticized as a legally baseless attempt to criminalize his enemies on the left, but the Southeast Florida Fusion Center took it very seriously.

Citing sources that included right-wing social media accounts, the bulletin described antifa as a “decentralized autonomous network of cells” that “stand against capitalism and want to overthrow governments they feel are oppressive through violence and silence their opposition by any means necessary.”

“Antifa has been very active, their most prevalent presence during the George Floyd riots and recently during the anti-ICE protests,” it said, citing the 2020 national uprising against police brutality and the protests against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that followed Trump’s rise to power.

The Miami-Dade bulletin went on to describe the National Lawyers Guild — a left-leaning collective once villainized by Joseph McCarthy — as the “legal representative” of antifa. It also warned about the danger of zines as tools to “recruit new sympathizers” and of inflatable animal costumes as a “form of propaganda implemented by Antifa to soften their image.”

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It was just one example of how, as the administration accelerates its crackdown on left-wing organizers, Trump’s push to paint antifa as a terror group has seeped into local law enforcement.

Previously unreported documents obtained by The Intercept show how local fusion centers are borrowing the tone and some of the language of Trump’s invectives against the left. They draw on his September 22 executive order designating antifa as terrorists and on prosecutions launched after a similar but more wide-reaching directive issued three days later, known as National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, or NSPM-7.

“The tone set by leadership is important,” Brendan McQuade, a University of Southern Maine professor who studies fusion centers and domestic surveillance, said of the documents obtained by The Intercept. “In the Trump administration the incentive structure is clear: Trump wants to mobilize the security apparatus against his perceived enemies, and in some sense the FBI and the Florida fusion center are both responding to that incentive structure.”

A White House spokesperson said the administration’s approach was part of a “new law enforcement strategy.”

“The President’s Memorandum is focused on investigating, disrupting, dismantling, and prosecuting individuals and entities engaged in organized political violence and domestic terrorism,” said White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson. “The Trump Administration will get to the bottom of this vast network inciting violence in American communities.”

The Florida Report

The Florida report was among a trove of scores of such documents obtained by The Intercept that were distributed through a national network of fusion centers.

Fusion centers were created after the September 11, 2001, attacks to facilitate information sharing about terror threats between federal and local law enforcement. Independent reviews, however, have found few tangible results after more than two decades in operation and countless dollars of federal funding for the centers. Critics say they have often been used to cast dissent as suspicious.

Many of the fusion center memos and bulletins focus on mundane topics of interest to local cops, such as the latest trends in ATM card “skimming.”

Others focus on foreign terror threats, such as the latest edition of “Inspire,” Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s magazine.

Some of them, however, echo the Trump administration’s obsession with the left.

The Florida report, which is marked “for official use only,” stretches 28 pages. It starts off by defining antifa as terrorism and stating that the “goal of Antifa is the violent overthrow of the United States government.” (The Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office, which houses the Southeast Florida Fusion Center, did not respond to a request for comment.)

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Then it reproduces in full Trump’s executive order claiming to designate antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization” — a power he would not have even if antifa were a well-defined group rather than an ideology or movement.

Throughout, the Florida report leans heavily on right-wing sources, including the journalist-provocateur Andy Ngo, the Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, and an X account called Far Left Watch.

The report casts a wide variety of First Amendment-protected activities as antifa tactics, including using “profane language against law enforcement” and “doxing.” It warns that zines are used as “educational tools and offered as propaganda to recruit new sympathizers” — echoing an argument that federal prosecutors used against the defendants in the Prairieland ICE detention center protest case.

Police, the Florida report says, should also be on the lookout for inflatable animal costumes, in an apparent reference to the Portland Frog Brigade: “This is a form of propaganda implemented by Antifa to soften their image and change the narrative that they are a violent domestic terrorist organization.”

The document’s tone and reliance on partisan sources make it read “like opposition research,” McQuade said.

“This is not an intelligence bulletin about an organization,” he said. “This is like a target package that, to me, is encouraging police to go hunting for a very broad profile of not even just dissent but sometimes aesthetic markers of dissenting behavior.”

Target: Lawyers

The report devotes a full page to the National Lawyers Guild, the legal collective founded in 1937 as a colorblind alternative to the American Bar Association, which forbade Black members.

The group’s leftist sympathies have long drawn the ire of the right. In the 1940s and 1950s, it was infiltrated by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and mentioned in McCarthy’s infamous Senate hearings. More recently, the group has become an obsession for right-wing think tanks such as the Center for Security Policy and the Capital Research Center.

The Florida fusion center casts the National Lawyers Guild’s efforts to observe police on the streets and defend protesters in court in sinister terms, calling it antifa’s “legal representation.” That is laughable, said Xavier de Janon, director of mass defense for the National Lawyers Guild.

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“I don’t know what that means, because antifa is not an organization,” he said, adding that if it were true, the group would proud to fight fascism. “But again, it’s false. It’s just not based on truth. There is no retainer agreement with antifa.”

And beyond that, he said, “NLG as an organization does not provide legal representation. Its members do.”

The report included a picture of National Lawyers Guild legal observers wearing their trademark lime-green hats, which de Janon interpreted as essentially a call to target them.

Pro-Palestine Groups

While the Florida report drew heavily from White House messaging, a different report from Texas relies on court filings from the Justice Department.

In December, the Dallas Regional Fusion Center produced an “intelligence brief” centering on the Turtle Island Liberation Front, a left-wing group accused of plotting coordinated bombing attacks in southern California.

The small group appears to have been thoroughly infiltrated by a paid informant and an FBI agent. The Dallas fusion center argued for even more surveillance, citing a “tangible and immediate threat from newly formed, violent extremist cells that require enhanced monitoring and inter-agency coordination.”

Corbin Rubinson, a spokesperson for the Dallas Police Department, which houses the fusion center, declined to comment on the report.

“These assessments are developed to support information sharing and situational awareness among our public safety partners, and we do not discuss their contents or how they are developed,” Rubinson said.

The Dallas document went on to name two groups that have no apparent connection to the Turtle Island Liberation Front: Direct Action Movement for Palestine Liberation and Unity of Fields. The only connection to the Turtle Island Liberation Front was that each group could be described as, in the words of the report, “another far-left, pro-Palestine, anti-Zionist extremist group.”

The bulletin acknowledged that none of the groups it singled out had a known presence in Dallas. Still, it urged police in the Dallas–Fort Worth area to “Monitor social media pages for extremist groups using ghost accounts and/or VPN” and to “Expand monitoring of encrypted messaging platforms for extremist activity.”

Anarchists in Minneapolis

The Miami and Dallas reports cribbed extensively from Trump’s executive order and Justice Department court filings, respectively. In January of this year, the FBI put out an alert more explicitly directed at local police.

Four days after federal officers shot and killed nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, the FBI issued a “public safety awareness report” produced by its Office of Partner Engagement and Counterterrorism Division. The report, which was first made public last week by the news outlet Prism, was independently obtained by The Intercept.

The January 30 report was titled “Anarchist Violent Extremists Pose Persistent Public Safety Threat.” It ticked off recent instances of what the FBI saw as instances of anarchist violent extremism, or AVE, including the Prairieland ICE detention facility protest near Dallas and the Turtle Island Liberation Front. Then it swiveled to Minneapolis, which for weeks had been the scene of ordinary protesters confronting masked federal agents.

“Given recent criminal activity in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the FBI is concerned about the potential for AVE violence there,” the report said. “The FBI has seen indicators of this, to include an individual who self-identified as Antifa advocating on social media for violence against ICE in Minneapolis, telling people to ‘get your guns.’ The FBI investigates any reports of violence or the threat of violence by AVEs or other domestic violent extremist or criminal actors.”

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The reference about a “self-identified” antifa member appears to be to Kyle Wagner, a Minneapolis man whose online videos featured prominently in the recent indictment of 15 anti-ICE protesters there.

The entire FBI report has a more professional tone than the Florida fusion center bulletin, McQuade said, but it rests on equally thin evidence.

“The FBI talks about two criminal cases, some social media monitoring, but they have claims that would not pass peer review — that anti-capitalist graffiti is an indicator of threat,” he said. “Then the little pull box they had in there about Minneapolis, where one tweet or social media post is interpreted to mean the whole city is ready for violence against federal agents. That just seems like bad analysis.”

Dissent as a Threat

It is not the first time that counterterrorism agencies have mobilized against the left on thin evidence.

Months before Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, The Intercept obtained hundreds of hacked law enforcement materials showing agencies obsessing over the threat from the left while ignoring the burgeoning right-wing, anti-government boogaloo movement. Adherents of the movement played a role in the assault on the Capitol.

In 2024, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a public records lawsuit against the Justice Department seeking internal documents about how Joint Terrorism Task Forces and fusion centers responded to protests.

Skeptics of domestic counterterrorism agencies say the overreach has spanned both Democratic and Republican White House administrations, but the documents the ACLU obtained from the first Trump administration share remarkable similarities with his second term.

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The January 2026 bulletin from the FBI obtained by The Intercept includes a warning about “black bloc” clothing used to obscure demonstrators’ identities, securing financing through “lawful donations,” encrypted messaging apps, and anti-government graffiti.

The ACLU, meanwhile, obtained a July 2018, bulletin produced by the Department of Homeland Security and local fusion centers that warned about “potential indicators of violent activity by anarchist extremists at events and protests in the homeland.”

The “indicators” of a heightened threat in the bulletin include wearing black and red clothing, soliciting legal defense donations ahead of protests, wearing “Guy Fawkes” masks, and “use of public transportation” to mask license plate information.

“Merely wearing certain colors and taking the bus to a protest should not be enough to justify heightened scrutiny from law enforcement,” Sara Robinson, an attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project, said in an emailed statement. “Using overly broad and stigmatizing terms to describe people who may be engaged in First Amendment-protected activity opens the door to pretextual law enforcement investigations and aggressive policing based not on evidence of criminal activity, but on the exercise of free speech rights.”

She said, “The Trump administration is continuing to treat dissent as a threat.”

The post How Local Cops Are Running With Trump’s NSPM-7 Attacks on Antifa appeared first on The Intercept.

The resolution sponsored by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., failed 235–189, with near-universal opposition from Republicans.

Still, the vote was another sign of changing attitudes among Democrats about Israel: 187 Democrats voted in favor of it, and only 22 voted against.

Tlaib’s resolution marked the second time she has forced the House to go on the record about the war on Lebanon, which Israel says is aimed at Hezbollah but has left a fifth of the country displaced and thousands dead.

Under the 1973 War Powers Act, any member of Congress can force a vote on U.S. involvement in hostilities. Critics of Israel suspect the U.S. military has supported Israel’s attacks on Lebanon through help with developing target lists or refueling military aircraft. (U.S. Central Command, which oversees military operations in the region, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

On June 4, Tlaib’s first attempt to pass a war powers resolution about Lebanon failed on a 324–92 vote.

House Democratic leaders opposed that earlier resolution because of what they said were drafting errors that might have inadvertently forced the U.S. to stop protecting its embassy in Beirut or providing aid to the Lebanese Armed Forces, the regular military of the Lebanese government.

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The more recent version of the legislation gained the support of Democratic leaders by including explicit carveouts for those activities. While leadership did not officially whip the vote, the ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., who is close to Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., spoke in support of the measure on Monday.

Speeches from Meeks and Tlaib, however, revealed a divide in what Democrats thought the measure might accomplish.

Meeks criticized the conduct of Hezbollah and Israel alike, adding that, to his knowledge, no U.S. forces were directly involved in combat in Lebanon. The resolution would prevent the Trump administration from joining in the war, he said.

Tlaib, meanwhile, cast the resolution as a way to cut off U.S. support for Israeli forces. She pointed to Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s call “to burn all of Lebanon” as proof of the Israeli government’s intent there.

“I want to make this very, very clear: The United States is not a bystander to these war crimes,” Tlaib said. “It is an active participant. The United States is currently engaged in illegal and unauthorized hostilities supporting the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, in violation of the War Powers Act.

“Without that support,” she added, “those jets cannot drop bombs to kill Lebanese children. Congress must reassert its constitutional authority and immediately vote to end all unauthorized U.S. participation in the destruction of Lebanon.”

Only two Republicans, Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Lauren Boebert of Colorado, voted in favor of the resolution. The Republican caucus was officially represented during the Monday floor debate by Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

“This resolution only seeks to embolden Hezbollah. That is the only thing that it does,” Mast said. “There are no U.S. forces engaged in hostilities. Do we train Lebanese Armed Forces? Yes, we do. Do we provide intelligence? Yes, we do. But we don’t have forces engaged there.”

Ahead of the vote, Erik Sperling, the executive director of Just Foreign Policy, a group that is sharply critical of Israel, said he was pleased to see more Democrats backing Tlaib’s resolution.

“Democrats have been pretty unified about speaking out against the killing of innocents and all of the harm by the Iran war, but there has been less vocal outrage about the mass killing and occupation in Lebanon,” Sperling said. “This is just an important signal that Democrats are aware of the way the Lebanon war is a humanitarian crisis and is the key roadblock to ending this war and delivering the peace that Americans are demanding.”

The post Congressional Dems Shift to Overwhelmingly Oppose Involvement in Israel’s War on Lebanon appeared first on The Intercept.

“The punishment must fit the crimes — not the headlines, not the politics, not the fears that have been mongered about the case,” he said.

Instead, O’Connor gave Sanchez Estrada a 30-year term.

The lengthy sentence was among the eight harsh terms handed down by judges in two courtrooms in Fort Worth on Tuesday to activists who played roles at or after the July 4, 2025, protest at Prairieland Detention Center. Their sentences — longer than any of those received by members of the January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol — capped a case that is widely regarded as the Trump administration’s first major victory in its crackdown on left-wing activism.

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The defendants were convicted at trial in March. Prosecutors convinced a jury that the fact that the eight defendants present at the protest wore all black and used the Signal encrypted messaging app supported their material support of terrorism charges. Sanchez Estrada, who was not at the protest, was convicted of corruptly concealing a document or record and conspiracy to conceal documents.

Only one of the defendants, Benjamin Hanil Song, was accused of firing a gun at a police officer, who left the scene with an injury to his neck; Song was convicted of attempted murder. Still, federal guidelines calling for harsher sentences for all because of links to terrorism — which were applied by O’Connor, a George W. Bush appointee, and U.S. District Judge Mark Pittman, a Donald Trump appointee — meant that all the defendants faced long prison terms.

Their only hope ahead of the simultaneous twin hearings was that the two judges might break sharply with federal guidelines. Instead, O’Connor and Pittman chose to make an example of the defendants.

Several defendants said Tuesday that they never intended to hurt anyone. Their only hope was to show solidarity with the detainees by staging a noise demonstration with fireworks, they said.

“When I went to protest on the night of July 4, it seemed more like a party to me than anything else,” Autumn Hill told the court Tuesday. “We didn’t expect or want any violence or destruction of property to occur.”

Prosecutors, however, seized on the fact that the protesters arrived at the scene with guns and fireworks. O’Connor, the judge, said several times that the defendants had committed an “assault on democracy.”

“What happened here was not by any stretch of the imagination a protest,” he said during the sentencing of one defendant.

So it went repeatedly in the two courtrooms as the judges brushed aside the defendants’ assertions that they were attempting simply to show solidarity with the detainees inside the ICE facility. Song, the sole defendant convicted of attempted murder, received a 100-year prison sentence.

The other defendants’ arguments that they should be distinguished from Song because they never fired a gun won them little relief.

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Sanchez Estrada’s wife, Maricela Rueda, received a 70-year sentence, longer than most of the other defendants because of her alleged role in a conspiracy to commit obstruction by asking Sanchez Estrada to move the zines after her arrest.

Hill, Savanna Batten, Zachary Evetts, Meagan Morris, and Elizabeth Soto all received 50-year sentences for their roles in protest at the Prairieland detention facility. A ninth defendant, Ines Soto, awaits a July sentencing.

The defendants’ relatives and supporters said at a press conference after the sentencing that they had harbored few illusions about their likely sentences. They have now placed their hopes on appeals.

The Prairieland case should be placed in the context of a larger crackdown on anti-government protesters, supporters said.

The protest that triggered the case came months before the September killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, which prompted President Donald Trump to issue an executive order purporting to designate antifa as a domestic terrorism group and a presidential memo dubbed NSPM-7 calling for a broader crackdown on the left. Following those directives, federal prosecutors upped the charges facing the Prairieland defendants. FBI Director Kash Patel also made clear the importance of the case to the Trump administration by posting about it on social media in October.

In a press release Tuesday, the Justice Department hailed the case as “the first sentencing of defendants affiliated with Antifa following President Donald J. Trump’s executive order designating the group as a Domestic Terrorist Organization in September 2025.”

“Today’s sentencings show the FBI remains committed to identifying, locating, and dismantling Antifa and its funding networks across the country,” Patel said in a statement.

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More indictments against activists have followed since the issuing of NSPM-7, most recently the charges in Minnesota earlier this month against 15 people accused of trying to impede federal agents during the immigration crackdown there.

“It’s not just here in the north Texas area,” said Tamera Hutcherson, a local activist who served as a member of Batten’s defense team. “This is also now in other parts of our country, and it concerns me what this means for our free speech, as well as our right to protest. If we are to bring a medical kit to a protest, does that mean we are a criminal now? If we are to even just attend a noise demonstration, does that mean we are a criminal now, and we may not return home to our loved ones?”

Justice Department prosecutors pushed back against the idea that the defendants had been convicted merely for expressing their First Amendment rights. What distinguished them from other protesters was their belief that they were justified in using violence to accomplish their goals, said Frank Gatto, an assistant U.S. attorney for the northern district of Texas.

“The very crux here is their firm belief that the use of violence is justified,” Gatto said during the sentencing of Evetts.

Although the case centered on the government’s claim that the defendants were affiliated with antifa, prosecutors offered little evidence of that at trial. Even Pittman, the judge who oversaw the trial, questioned whether he needed to mention antifa in his jury instructions.

Still, the movement of various anti-government and antifascist zines led directly to the conviction of Sanchez Estrada, whose case stood out from the others because he was not accused of attending the July 4 protest at the ICE detention center.

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Weinbel, the public defender, said the zines that Sanchez Estrada moved were his own and protected by the First Amendment. None of it helped convict the other defendants at trial, Weinbel said.

“At the heart of this case is a simple truth: Mr. Sanchez moved a box,” Weinbel said. “He is not a murderer, he is not ISIS, he is not a foreign terrorist.”

Sanchez Estrada said he still could not understand why he was convicted.

“I am a father, I am a husband, I am a teacher, a poet — I am many things, Your Honor, but I am not a terrorist,” he told the court.

O’Connor said he disagreed with the idea that moving the box of the zines was harmless. At the time of Sanchez Estrada’s actions, Song was still on the run from police.

“What was at stake at that time was a known terrorist was on the run for shooting a police officer during a terrorist attack,” he said.

The post Prairieland Defendant Sentenced to 30 Years in Prison for Moving a Box of Antifascist Zines appeared first on The Intercept.

The Fellowship PAC dropped $300,000 on Monday to boost Torres in the final days of his reelection primary campaign, funneling its ad spend through a firm co-founded by Trump’s former top crypto adviser.

The super PAC’s largest funder is Cantor Fitzgerald, the investment bank helmed by the sons of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

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Torres is not expected to face serious opposition in the June 23 primary in New York. The sole public poll of the race put him far ahead of his leading opponent, former Democratic National Committee vice chair Michael Blake.

Torres, the Fellowship PAC, and Blake did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The spending is another sign of bond between crypto firms and Torres, a member of the key House Committee on Financial Services who has been one of the industry’s most vocal Democratic supporters. Torres was a co-founder of the Congressional Crypto Caucus.

Still, the primary intervention still comes as something of a surprise given that, in the past, the Fellowship PAC only doled out campaign funds on behalf of Republicans. Reporting on its creation, the New York Times described the PAC as “more aligned with the Republican Party and President Trump than Fairshake, which is the dominant, pro-crypto super PAC.”

The PAC signaled support for Trump in a press release announcing its creation in September, praising him for putting “America on the path to become the global crypto capital.” In the months since then, however, the odds that Republicans will control the House after the midterm elections have dimmed.

The Fellowship PAC, which spends on ads rather than giving directly to campaigns, put Torres’s picture on its endorsement page in recent weeks, according to an archive of its website. Other candidates the group has endorsed include Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, R-Texas, in their Senate races.

Big Crypto Bucks for Shoo-in

The Fellowship PAC is not the only crypto campaign organization spending on behalf of Torres. Protect Progress, which is affiliated with the juggernaut crypto super PAC Fairshake, buoyed the Bronx Democrat with nearly $1.4 million in advertising.

The two super PACs are aligned with different factions of the crypto industry. The Fellowship PAC’s chair is the vice president of regulatory affairs for Tether, a massive stablecoin company that is trying to break into the U.S. market after years of scrutiny over its use by money launderers, including terror groups.

Although Tether has not donated directly to the Fellowship PAC, the PAC received $10 million from the financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, which is the custodian of billions of dollars of U.S. Treasury bills on behalf of Tether. Lutnick, Trump’s commerce secretary, stepped down as the head of the banking firm and divested his assets to join the Cabinet.

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This Commission That Regulates Crypto Could Be Just One Guy: An Industry Lawyer

The media buy on behalf of Torres was made through Nxum Group, which was co-founded by Bo Hines, a former Republican congressional candidate who served as the executive director of Trump’s Council of Advisers on Digital Assets last year. Hines is the CEO of Tether U.S., the American division of the El Salvador-based firm.

Protect Progress and Fairshake, meanwhile, have been funded by the crypto exchange Coinbase and the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Fairshake and its affiliates have spent money on both sides of the aisle, although it was criticized in 2024 for helping tip the Senate in favor of Republicans.

The post Trump-Loving Crypto Super PAC Finally Backs a Democrat: Ritchie Torres appeared first on The Intercept.

Privacy advocates thought they had their best chance in years of passing reforms, including a warrant requirement for searching American communications collected abroad.

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Centrists allied with U.S. intelligence agencies, meanwhile, thought they were close to renewing Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act with only minor tweaks.

Then Trump, who had once already thrown the renewal process into chaos, announced on Wednesday that he wouldn’t sign it unless Congress passed an unrelated voter suppression bill.

Claiming that Democrats were poised to walk away from a spy law compromise, Trump said that “to add a slight bit of intrigue but, for the Good of the Nation, and the People of our Country, I will not approve FISA without THE SAVE AMERICA ACT going along with it.”

Trump’s surprise outburst on Truth Social on Wednesday scrapped the confirmation hearing set later in the day for Jay Clayton, a federal prosecutor in New York, to serve as the permanent director of national intelligence. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., had said that he hoped to quickly confirm Clayton.

Clayton’s impending confirmation had appeared to solve a problem — at least for some Democrats — that Trump created by tapping lapdog housing chief, Bill Pulte, as the Cabinet-level intelligence chief. It might also have opened a route for Congress to renew Section 702, the surveillance law that allows federal agents to conduct “backdoor,” warrantless searches of Americans’ communications collected abroad.

In a joint press conference on Wednesday, top Senate Democrats revealed the cracks in their coalition over next steps on FISA.

A key reformer, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said he still hopes to pursue adding a warrant requirement to Section 702, while a centrist aligned with the intelligence agencies, Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., expressed disappointment that the easiest route to renewal without major changes had been foreclosed.

“This has become a complete debacle, and now it’s up to the White House to figure out a path forward here,” said Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., a member of the intelligence committee. “We had a path forward, as of yesterday, and today we don’t, and that’s because of this president and his advisers.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., remained cagey about what version of the law he would like to see ultimately passed. But in comments at the joint press conference, he sought to portray Democrats as the more responsible party when it came to Section 702.

“It’s on our Republican colleagues to work with us to find A) a capable director, not someone who is a menace, and second, then to work with us on renewing FISA. It is up to them,” Schumer said at the press conference. He said he was deeply concerned about Trump’s appointment of Pulte, who appears likely to step into the office on Friday.

Republicans “have got to have the courage to buck the president, who clearly doesn’t want a DNI director and doesn’t want FISA renewed,” Schumer said. “All he wants is Pulte.”

Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, claimed Sunday that Section 702 renewal was on a “glide path” before Pulte’s nomination. He also praised Clayton’s selection, while reserving the right to ask about Clayton’s views on election integrity.

Reformers said Thursday, however, that Section 702’s renewal was never as assured as Warner and Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton, R-Ark., have suggested in public comments.

Majorities of both Republicans and Democrats voted in recent weeks against advancing the law’s renewal in versions of the bill that do not include a warrant requirement.

“They want that to be the narrative, because they don’t want to have to deal with people who want things like warrants,” said Kia Hamadanchy, a senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union. “At no point have they actually demonstrated that they have a deal that one, has 60 votes in the Senate, and two, has any chance of going anywhere in the House.”

Wyden expressed alarm about Trump’s actions at the joint Senate Democrat press conference. Wyden said that he always wanted to reform the law — not allow it to expire.

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“It is now even clearer than before that the only path to 60 votes in the United States Senate on intelligence is real reform, actual black-letter law, that addresses these issues,” Wyden said.

Privacy advocates argue that the way out of the congressional logjam is to allow members of Congress to vote on whether to add a warrant requirement, something that Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson have not been willing to allow so far. Even then, however, Trump could veto whatever version of the law emerges from that process.

The post Senate Democrats Aren’t Happy About Trump’s Spy Law Ultimatum appeared first on The Intercept.

Now some high-ranking Democrats are lining up to support another permanent appointee with a dubious claim to the legal job requirements — Jay Clayton — who has also openly questioned the integrity of U.S. elections.

Clayton’s nomination will be heard by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Wednesday. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., hopes to have him confirmed as soon as Thursday — a lightning-fast process for a top intelligence post.

What’s at stake, however, isn’t just the outcome of Clayton’s nomination process. Trump’s pick is intertwined with the fate of a key domestic surveillance law, Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, that expired Friday.

Privacy advocates are worried that Clayton’s nomination will give some Democrats the excuse they have been looking for to vote for renewing Section 702. The advocates are raising concerns about Clayton and calling on Congress to add a warrant requirement to the surveillance law, no matter who ultimately takes over as intel chief.

The top Democrats on the House and Senate intelligence committees, Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut and Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, who have both supported renewing Section 702 without major changes, have issued positive statements about Clayton’s nomination.

Neither House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., nor Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has tipped their hand as to whether Clayton’s nomination will lead them to support a so-called “clean” renewal of Section 702.

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Jeffries said last week that he supports making significant reforms to the law, although he did not specifically commit to a warrant requirement.

Sean Vitka, executive director of the left-leaning advocacy group Demand Progress, urged Democratic leaders to stand firm on reform.

“There is no universe where the momentary person who happens to satisfy Himes and Warner’s vibe check,” Vitka said, “should mitigate everybody’s concerns that are decades old with warrantless surveillance.”

Election Conspiracies

The reauthorization of Section 702 once appeared to be on a “glide path,” according to Warner. The law sets the parameters for when intelligence agencies can warrantlessly search American communications collected abroad.

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Congress was within days of passing a new version of the law with minor tweaks when Trump nominated Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and chair of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, to serve as temporary director of national intelligence.

When he tapped Pulte, Trump said he wanted to him to use the post to investigate “rigged” elections. That alarmed Democrats who noted that Pulte is already accused of misusing sensitive mortgage databases to help launch investigations against Trump’s political enemies.

The intelligence chief post has no formal role in election administration, but that did not stop outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard from appearing at an FBI raid of a Fulton County, Georgia, ballot warehouse.

Pulte’s lapdog reputation was not the only thing that worried Democrats. They also noted that he did not meet the job requirement for the intelligence chief post in statute, which states that the nominee “shall have extensive national security expertise.”

Centrist Democrats who were willing to renew Section 702 despite Gabbard’s overt politicization of the intelligence chief job finally had enough when it came to Pulte’s nomination. Even Warner and Himes voted against the law’s reauthorization.

Trump’s nomination of Clayton was an attempt to undo the backlash. Clayton currently serves as the federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York and was previously the Securities and Exchange Commission chair — the kind of resume that reassures Washington insiders.

“I’ve known and respected Jay Clayton for decades,” Himes said on X. “His intelligence, temperament and deep commitment to public service will make him a terrific DNI. Had this nomination been made a week ago, lots of pain might have been avoided.”

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Advocates were more dubious. They noted that only days before his selection, Clayton had been asked on CNBC about the delays in returning California’s election results that had fueled right-wing conspiracy theories.

“On the integrity side, we’re doing an absolutely terrible job,” Clayton said, without offering evidence. “And the American people are right to question it.”

Clayton’s willingness to engage with one of Trump’s favorite tropes alarmed advocates, who say that Gabbard’s role in the Georgia warehouse raid shows how the intelligence chief post could be misused to sow election doubt.

Even centrist Democrats concede that, like Pulte, Clayton doesn’t have “extensive” national security experience. In his defense, supporters point to the role of federal prosecutors in launching national security cases.

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., the ranking member of the armed services committee, sounded a note of skepticism on “Fox News Sunday.”

“We have to look very clearly at Jay Clayton,” Reed said. “He is a very accomplished lawyer, but the statute requires someone taking this job to have significant national security experience, and that has to be measured. I don’t think he does.”

Senators of both parties will have an opportunity to probe Clayton’s qualifications at Wednesday’s confirmation hearing. Warner has said that Clayton will have to answer questions about his views on elections.

Whatever happens with his nomination, privacy advocates say the entire saga of replacing Gabbard further proves the need for major reforms to Section 702.

“It doesn’t matter who’s in charge,” longtime privacy booster Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said on June 11. “FISA 702 can’t be renewed without real reforms.”

“Case in point: Trump’s latest nominee for director of national intelligence was peddling election conspiracies just a few days ago.”

The post Are Jeffries and Schumer Getting Ready to Greenlight Domestic Spy Power for Trump? appeared first on The Intercept.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., pointed to a March bulletin from Colorado law enforcement analysts that was unearthed by The Intercept last month. It warned that DHS posts using language popular with neo-Nazis could inspire acts of far-right violence within the U.S. as well as prompt white supremacists to join the agency.

The bulletin by the Colorado Information Analysis Center cited repeated instances of DHS recruitment posts spurring discussion among neo-Nazis about enlisting in ICE with the hope of spurring a race war. It noted at least one instance of white supremacists claiming online that someone in their organization “had already been a captain at an ICE-contracted detention facility.”

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The DHS posts, which sometimes appeared to borrow material verbatim from racist memes, songs, and tropes, were made as part of a recruiting push under then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem. Noem and former U.S. Border Patrol official Greg Bovino, who became the public face of Trump’s draconian mass deportation agenda, were pushed out of their positions by the White House this year.

Whitehouse said that Mullin should disavow his predecessor’s “dangerous recruitment campaign.”

“I cannot believe that you support the messages associated with these recruitment campaigns, or want anyone under your supervision to use the imprimatur of the United States Government to promote those messages,” Whitehouse said in a letter dated Wednesday.

In response to a request for comment, a DHS spokesperson criticized Whitehouse and the Colorado law enforcement analysts. The analysts’ report came from a fusion center, part of a network of information clearinghouses for local, state and federal police that spread across the U.S. following 9/11.

“It is gross that Senator Whitehouse and the state of Colorado are actively weaponizing official law enforcement bulletins to promote dangerous anti-ICE conspiracy theories,” the agency wrote in a statement. “Comparing recruitment efforts aimed at filling critical public safety roles to extremist rhetoric is not only absurd, but it also dangerously undermines the mission and sacrifices of federal officers.”

Mullin also rejected criticism of the department’s social media accounts when he was questioned by Rep. Shri Thanedar, D-Mich., about the Colorado fusion center’s report at a June 3 hearing.

“I’m very concerned that your department is promoting white nationalist, anti-immigrant sentiments on official social media accounts,” Thanedar said.

Mullin brushed off Thanedar’s assertion that this concern was backed by the facts.

“There is no facts,” Mullin said. “You throw out ‘nationalism,’ ‘Naziism,’ and that is exactly what causes the hatred and the violence that happens to our officers every single day.”

Whitehouse initially wrote to Noem on Feb. 23 with a detailed list of questions about the origin of the ICE recruiting posts. Noem never responded, according to Whitehouse’s more recent letter.

Since Trump installed Mullin atop DHS, the former U.S. senator from Oklahoma has taken small steps to distance the department from some of Noem’s most controversial moves, including a decision to lower training standards for newly hired ICE officers. DHS also appears to be posting fewer of the most provocative posts since Mullin took office.

In his latest letter to Mullin, Whitehouse said he was still trying to get to the bottom of who authorized and crafted the posts. He’d also previously asked whether there were sufficient checks in place to prevent the hiring of individuals with connections to “violent extremist or terrorist organizations.”

“DHS and ICE have deployed recruitment ads featuring white nationalist slogans, songs, and imagery while lowering recruitment standards—facilitating the hiring of agents with histories of violent extremism. I renew my request about what DHS has done to ensure it has not been infiltrated by violent extremists, and who is responsible for this dangerous recruitment campaign,” Whitehouse said in this week’s letter.

Noem has stayed out of the public eye since her March ouster, taking a role as special envoy for Trump’s so-called Shield of the Americas program. Bovino has been more outspoken. He attended a “remigration” conference with white nationalists in Portugal. In an interview before the conference’s start, the now-retired Border Patrol commander-at-large compared himself approvingly to Nazi general Erwin Rommel, describing the Third Reich strategist as someone who captured the imagination of the public.

The post ICE Should Show It Hasn’t Been “Infiltrated by Violent Extremists,” Senator Urges appeared first on The Intercept.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., had said he personally supported reforms, for instance, but declined to whip votes against the law.

President Donald Trump’s appointment of housing czar Bill Pulte to be the nation’s spy chief, however, appeared shore up Democratic leaders’ spines — for now.

Citing Pulte’s lack of experience and fealty to Trump, Jeffries on Thursday corralled his members into opposing a short-term extension of the law, leading to a 218–198 defeat of the measure. Democratic leaders did not issue a formal whip notice, but they did release a forceful statement against it hours before the vote was set to take place.

The different approach from leadership between the two votes was “night and day,” one Democratic staffer told The Intercept.

Dozens of the 42 Democrats who had voted for the “clean” renewal last time reversed their positions, dooming an attempt by Speaker Mike Johnson. R-La., to pass the short-term extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act before it expires Friday.

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The hardened line was welcomed by advocates, but in a letter penned by dozens of civil society groups they told Democrats not to flip back without changes — whether Pulte is slated to take the helm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence or not.

Hours after the failed vote, Trump said he would nominate Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, to serve as national intelligence director. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard had resigned, saying her husband had been recently diagnosed with bone cancer, and is expected to depart on June 19.

There are bedrock policy problems with the surveillance law that go much deeper than the personnel Trump installs atop spy agencies, the groups said in the letter. They asked Democrats to block a long-term renewal of Section 702 unless it includes major reforms.

“Voting for a clean reauthorization of Section 702 is co-signing the Trump administration’s mass surveillance agenda,” the groups said in the letter. “Key administration officials — including Stephen Miller, FBI Director Kash Patel, and outgoing DNI Tulsi Gabbard — have made it clear that this reauthorization fight is a White House priority, and that reform is an unacceptable impediment to the administration’s agenda.”

The letter targeted 42 Democrats — including House Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Jim Himes, D-Conn. — who voted in April for a “clean” three-year renewal of Section 702 with only minor tweaks.

Himes was among those who, citing Trump’s appointment of Pulte to replace Gabbard, changed positions and voted against the extension Thursday.

Only Seven Holdouts

The fight over FISA has roiled Congress for months. Following the “clean” renewal’s failure and lawmakers’ inability to agree on a compromise for a longer extensions, more than 90 Democrats voted for the shorter-term postponement of Section 702’s expiration.

Since then, advocacy groups have kept up their pressure on Democrats. Thursday’s vote suggests they are making progress. Only seven Democrats voted for the short-term renewal of the law on Thursday, compared to 199 opposed. The split was reversed in the Republican caucus, with 190 votes in favor and 19 against.

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The Democrats voting in favor of the short-term extension were Reps. Henry Cuellar of Texas; Donald Davis of North Carolina; Jared Golden of Maine; Vicente Gonzalez of Texas; Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey; Susie Lee of Nevada; and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington.

While the privacy advocates said reforms shouldn’t hinge on any spy official’s fate, they did say their preexisting concerns about the spying law were heightened by Trump’s appointment of Pulte and the administration’s recent release of a counterterrorism strategy calling for a crackdown on “left-wing extremists.”

“It is alarming that, under these conditions in particular, any Democratic members of Congress would vote to extend a warrantless surveillance authority for this administration to wield with no meaningful oversight,” the groups said. “The case for reforming Section 702 has never been more urgent. It is critical that you protect your constituents from the Trump administration’s mass surveillance agenda.”

The groups signing the letter Thursday — including the American Civil Liberties Union, Common Cause, and many local chapters of the organizing group Indivisible — support requiring intelligence officials to obtain judicial approval for searches of American communications.

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Debates over the law, which was first passed in 2008, have occasionally flared thanks to events such as the disclosures of former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden and Trump’s complaints about a “deep state” intelligence conspiracy against him — though GOP opposition to the spy law dwindled with Trump taking power.

The privacy advocates, however, said they have never seen left-leaning organizers as fired up as the current round of debate over the spying law — organizing that helped precipitate the turnaround by some Democrats.

Some Democrats who were previously staunch supporters of the domestic surveillance law, such as Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., and now facing serious primary challenges voted against clean reauthorization in April, though Goldman missed Thursday’s vote.

Trump’s appointment of Pulte to serve as intelligence chief has put the law’s most fervent Democratic supporters in a bind, however, given his lack of qualifications for the job and accusations that he has wielded sensitive government databases against Trump’s opponents.

Himes, for instance, led the House Intelligence Committee’s Democrats in writing a letter to Trump calling on him to rescind his appointment of Pulte on Wednesday.

The Connecticut representative sounded exasperated in comments to Politico earlier this week. In previous fights over renewal of the surveillance law, reformers have suggested that the deadlines were artificial because of certifications from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court allowing spy agencies to continue collecting overseas communications for another year.

“It’s a total mess,” Himes told the outlet. “Very sadly, I think we’re going to test this untested question about whether the program can run on a judicial certification alone.”

The post Hakeem Jeffries Finally Finds a Spine: Dem Leaders Rallied Against Extending Domestic Spy Law appeared first on The Intercept.

Then President Donald Trump tapped Bill Pulte — an unqualified housing official accused of misusing sensitive databases to pursue the president’s political vendettas — to oversee the nation’s spy agencies. That got the centrist Democrats’ attention.

Warner, who serves as ranking member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, voted with every Senate Democrat except for Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman last week against advancing the renewal of the NSA program authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.

In the face of pushback from Democrats and some Republicans, Trump declined to back down on his choice. Instead, he said Tuesday that he was moving up the effective date of Pulte’s appointment to lead the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to June 19.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., a longtime critic of Section 702, said that there’s unprecedented support for reforming the law.

“I have been doing this a while,” Wyden, who is on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told The Intercept on Tuesday. “I am the longest serving member of SSCI in history, and I’ve never had this kind of bipartisan support.”

That doesn’t, however, mean that reform efforts hinge on Pulte’s political fate. Though the announcement narrowed the odds that the spying program will be renewed before it expires Friday, the fracas over Pulte has revealed a deep divide among Democrats that could keep the issue alive.

Centrists such as Warner would still vote to renew Section 702 if Pulte is sacked. Other Democrats, like Wyden, say that Pulte’s selection only exacerbated long-standing issues such as the lack of a warrant requirement for searching through the NSA’s data.

“Firing Pulte doesn’t fix the problem,” Wyden told reporters on Tuesday. “There have to be reforms.”

Section 702 has been the subject of an intense behind-the-scenes squabble since Congress passed a short-term, 45-day extension of the program in April.

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The law allows the FBI and other agencies, including ODNI, to pore through Americans’ communications collected abroad without a warrant. Ostensibly, there are safeguards in place to prevent those agencies from targeting specific Americans — but courts have repeatedly found widespread violations of those rules.

For years, civil liberties advocates have sought to create a warrant requirement that would require the FBI and other agencies to go to a judge to read through Americans’ communications.

That idea has proven a nonstarter for defenders of Section 702 such as Warner, who argue that it would create insurmountable logistical obstacles for agents hoping to prevent terror attacks. Warner has long allied with Republicans to push back on the warrant proposal.

Compromise Flop

Since April, a bipartisan coalition of civil liberties supporters in Congress has managed to block a long-term reauthorization of Section 702. In recent weeks, Warner helped craft what was billed as a compromise proposal intended to win over enough of the critics to allow the passage of a long-term renewal of the law.

Then, Trump said on June 3 that he would appoint Pulte to serve as temporary director of national intelligence, to replace departing chief Tulsi Gabbard.

The announcement immediately soured centrist Democrats’ plans to help secure passage of a FISA extension. Pulte, whose net worth is at least $190 million, is a private equity firm founder who became a minor internet celebrity for giving away money on Twitter. Then Trump appointed him last year to serve as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and chair of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

In those roles, Pulte helped launch housing fraud probes of Trump nemeses including Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Democratic New York Attorney General Letitia James. He is being investigated by the Government Accountability Office for allegedly misusing confidential government databases for information on the president’s foes.

“There were already sensitive negotiations that were ongoing,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., told PBS NewsHour on Tuesday. “And then Donald Trump chose to elevate this partisan political hack, Bill Pulte, into this position of great sensitivity, effectively tossing a hand grenade in the midst of these negotiations as we approach the deadline to potentially renew surveillance authority.”

The compromise deal floated by Warner and others had never impressed privacy advocates. They said the changes it made to the law mostly layered on more layers of internal oversight, which would not stop a determined Trump flunky from abusing the NSA’s spying powers.

Even calling it a “deal” was misleading, said Elizabeth Goitein, senior director of the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit working on law and policy.

“The members who drafted this legislation, basically Trump allies plus Sen. Warner — all longtime opponents of 702 reform who are in complete alignment with each other on the fundamental points of debate — they were the members who drafted the legislation,” she said on a conference call Tuesday. “Members who support reform were shut out.”

Push and Pulte

While Warner and other Democratic supporters of the program voted against putting its renewal on the Senate agenda last week, that boiled down to a repudiation of Pulte instead of a sudden change of heart on the program.

“Pulte is the major stumbling block for people like myself and Mark Warner, who are generally supportive because of the importance of the program,” Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats, told The Intercept on Tuesday. “But we can’t in good conscience hand the keys to the country’s most significant car to a teenager.”

In the Republican caucus, a faction of members with libertarian tendencies support adding a warrant requirement. Some longtime supporters of the program, on the other hand, have dismissed the significance of Pulte’s appointment.

“He’s an interim guy, he’ll be there for weeks to a couple months, so I don’t understand why it’s a big issue anyway,” said Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., who serves on the Intelligence Committee.

Privacy advocates are largely aghast at the appointment of Pulte, but they hope the expiration of Section 702 will create space for reform. They were heartened on Tuesday when Jeffries gave some of his strongest statements yet in support of overhauling the law.

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“Donald Trump needs to withdraw his decision to elevate Bill Pulte,” Jeffries said on PBS. “That’s a starting point, not an ending point. And then we can see if we can responsibly get to a place where there are enough reforms built into the law to provide guardrails and protect the American people.”

Reformers have a smorgasbord of reform proposals. Wyden wants to create a warrant requirement not only for searches of NSA data, but also one for searches of sensitive information available on the open market, such as location tracking from commercial data brokers.

Wyden said he senses a rare opportunity, pointing to support from Republicans such as Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, and said, “Both of us have bipartisan bills with almost all of the provisions we’re talking about.”

The post Momentum Builds to Rein In Domestic Spying Law — Whether or Not Bill Pulte Survives as Intel Chief appeared first on The Intercept.

The second measure failed 324-92 Thursday afternoon, a day after passage of a war powers resolution focused on Iran sent a message to the Trump administration.

Ninety-one Democrats voted for the measure sponsored by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., to block U.S. support for Israel’s assault on Lebanon. 117 Democrats voted against.

Citing a range of drafting concerns, Democratic leaders voted against the resolution but promised to support a tweaked version from Tlaib in the future.

At least some pro-Israel Democrats, however, said they opposed to anything that would tie Israel’s hands in Lebanon.

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Tlaib’s measure would have halted U.S. involvement in the Israeli assault on Lebanon without further congressional approval. The Israeli attacks have claimed at least 3,500 lives, displaced over 1 million people, and left wide swaths of the country, including entire towns, in ruins.

The war in Lebanon, which Israel had continued over reported objections from President Donald Trump, is widely seen as an obstacle to a deal with Iran to end the U.S. war there. Iranian officials have excoriated the Israeli attacks and threatened to suspend talks because of them.

U.S Aid for Israel War?

The Trump administration has not explained the extent of its involvement in the war being waged by right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israel says its attacks are aimed at Hezbollah fighters despite the growing civilian death toll.

There are widespread suspicions that the U.S. government has provided support for the attack in the form of intelligence sharing and other coordination. The administration has not responded to a May 4 letter from Sen. Pete Welch, D-Vt., about whether and how the U.S. is aiding Israel.

Tlaib spoke out in support of her measure during a debate on the House floor on Wednesday.

“This vote on the Lebanon war powers resolution is a clear moral choice: Do you stand with the Netanyahu government and Trump’s endless war crimes, or do you stand with human life, peace, and justice?” she said.

In response, House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Brian Mast, R-Fla., accused supporters of the measure of serving as “proxies for Hezbollah.”

That kind of language was not limited to the GOP. It echoed a similar statement made by Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., on social media last month.

“Hezbollah is evil — kneecapping our ability to track and respond to their terror serves nobody except Hezbollah and its Iranian overlords,” he said about Tlaib’s resolution.

Other Democrats said they were opposed to the measure on more technical grounds. In a joint statement Thursday, House Democratic leaders said they were worried that it might prevent the U.S. from securing its embassy in Beirut or assisting the country’s official military, the Lebanese Armed Forces.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y.; Whip Katherine Clark, D-Mass.; and Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., said they were opposed to the measure that was up for a vote Thursday, but would support another one that Tlaib has introduced addressing those concerns.

Hassan El-Tayyab, the legislative director for Middle East policy at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, said he was optimistic that support for halting U.S. involvement in the Lebanon war would grow in a future vote.

“If we don’t stop what’s going on in Lebanon, getting a true and lasting ceasefire with Iran is virtually impossible,” he said. “So it is critical we try to curtail U.S. involvement in any operations in Lebanon.”

The post House Dems Coming Around on Iran War — But Won’t Vote to Stop Israel’s Destruction of Lebanon appeared first on The Intercept.

Adam Hamawy beat a crowded field of Democrats in the state’s 12th Congressional District. The winner of the primary is expected to coast to victory over Republican Gregg Mele in the November general election.

His victory came despite a flurry of right-wing media reports that sought to tarnish the progressive candidate as an Islamic extremist because of his 1995 trial testimony for a religious leader convicted of plotting terror attacks.

Hamawy said he was being targeted with outdated “tropes” as a Muslim in politics. His campaign, which was supercharged by an ad campaign from the independent super PAC American Priorities, demonstrated the growing influence of pro-Palestine donors in contested Democratic primaries.

Hamawy stood out among the 13 candidates in the race vying to replace retiring Democratic Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman because of his compelling backstory and the large ad spend on his behalf by American Priorities, the super PAC founded to counter AIPAC’s influence in Democratic politics.

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Working as a combat surgeon in Iraq in 2004, Hamawy helped save the life of Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., when her helicopter was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade, which led to the loss of both her legs. In 2024, he also went to Gaza to provide medical aid to Palestinians wounded by Israeli forces and was temporarily trapped there after Israel closed the Rafah border crossing. When the crossing was reopened, Hamawy was among a small group who refused to leave on demands that more medical workers be let in.

Pointing to his experience as a physician, Hamawy staked out policy positions that included support for Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, and opposing military aid to Israel. He drew endorsements from Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Congressional Progressive Caucus PAC, and the Sunrise Movement, in addition to Ocasio-Cortez.

In a joint statement, two progressive, pro-Palestine groups hailed Hamawy’s win. The Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project and Justice Democrats said they spent a combined $200,000 in support of his campaign.

“Voters were drawn to Dr. Hamawy’s candidacy because he knows firsthand the reality of Israel’s genocide in Gaza like few do — having worked to save the lives of Palestinian children under bombardment and unimaginable conditions,” the groups wrote. “His experience is necessary in Congress now more than ever, as too many of the people meant to represent us continue to look the other way while our tax dollars fund injustices here and abroad.”

Trailing Hamawy was East Brunswick Mayor Brad Cohen, a centrist with the backing of his county party who ran as a pro-Israel candidate.

Hamawy competed for the progressive vote against Sue Altman, a longtime activist in New Jersey who served until recently as the state director for Democratic Sen. Andy Kim. Her endorsements included former Sen. Bill Bradley and the New Jersey Working Families Party, which she previously led from 2019 to 2023. She ran far behind Hamawy.

Hamawy’s win was a notable accomplishment for American Priorities, which only launched in February. The group’s first major pick, Nida Allam, fell just short of toppling incumbent Democratic Rep. Valerie Foushee in North Carolina. It had better luck in Pennsylvania, where progressive state Rep. Chris Rabb won his district’s Democratic primary last month.

Hamawy’s campaign represented an even bigger test for American Priorities, since he was a first-time politician with a relatively low profile before launching his campaign. The group said at the end of April that it was planning to spend $2 million to boost Hamawy.

Hamawy was polling at only 5 percent of the electorate in a March 30–April 1 poll sponsored by his campaign. By the first week of May, however, the outside support helped power him to first place, with 19 percent support compared to Altman’s 12 percent, according to another poll sponsored by his campaign.

The wide-open nature of the primary and large number of undecided voters helped make it hard to gauge who had the edge. Further complicating matters was a surge of negative press focusing on the brief testimony Hamawy, then 26, gave at the 1995 trial of Omar Abdel-Rahman, commonly known as the “The Blind Sheikh,” who was convicted of planning terror attacks.

Hamawy said he had known Abdel-Rahman as a leader in the Egyptian community in New Jersey and condemned extremism of all stripes. He noted his own long service for the U.S. military as well as his experience as a first responder during the September 11, 2001 attacks. “Any Muslim is going to be called a terrorist at some point, and these tropes are outdated and worn. Unfortunately, they continue to be used right now,” Hamawy told the New Jersey Monitor. “These are not serious arguments, and they’re getting old.”

This developing story has been updated.

The post Adam Hamawy, Doctor Who Volunteered in Gaza, Poised to Become Pro-Palestine Rep. From New Jersey appeared first on The Intercept.

A fusion center in Philadelphia combed through spicy internet comments from AI critics and concluded there is a growing risk of physical violence against data centers from “domestic violent extremists,” ranging from white supremacists to anarchists.

“Domestic violent extremists (DVEs) are likely interested in targeting artificial intelligence (AI) data centers, posing a physical and cyber threat to infrastructure in the Philadelphia regional area,” the Delaware Valley Intelligence Center wrote in a December alert.

The fusion center distributed its warning, marked “for official use only,” through the national fusion center network of state, local, and federal police agencies.

Like many of the reports produced by fusion centers, the bulletin points to news reports and social media posts, but cites little in the way of tangible threats. It acknowledges “a lack of specific information on plans to target AI data centers in the Philadelphia area,” but warns law enforcement that three planned data center facilities in the region could become targets of future protests.

Some of the anti-AI posts included in the document reflect hyperbolic anti-AI rhetoric that is widespread across social media, including an unnamed internet user who “indicated a desire to ‘burn down’ data centers.” Other examples of potentially terroristic posts included references to a fictional anti-robot movement in the science fiction novel “Dune” and a Facebook meme.

The fusion center, housed inside the Philadelphia Police Department, warned that “disruptive First Amendment activity” is an “indicator” of risk from “Domestic Violent Extremists,” an expansive term favored by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.

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Fusion centers, which sprouted up across the country after the September 11, 2001, attacks, have long been criticized for doing little to thwart actual terror plots and too much to subject lawful protesters to suspicion and surveillance. They have previously warned local cops about the supposed threat from Black Lives Matter protesters and Keystone XL to Line 3 pipeline opponents.

Pennsylvania has its own history of counterterror agencies targeting advocacy groups. In 2010, then-Gov. Ed Rendell apologized for the state Department of Homeland Security contracting with a private firm to produce fearmongering reports on groups including anti-fracking activists.

When it came to the recent data center activist report, longtime Philadelphia civil rights lawyer Paul Hetznecker said he was troubled by the fusion center’s association of AI skeptics with terrorists.

“Those are legitimate, popular political concerns that are raised by local communities,” Hetznecker said. “This particular report from [the Delaware Valley Intelligence Center] reflects a very dangerous attempt to characterize that protected First Amendment activity — activity which is fundamental to our democracy — as something other, something more dangerous, a breeding ground for something more sinister.”

In response to questions emailed to the Philadelphia Police Department and the Delaware Valley Intelligence Center, a spokesperson responded with a statement asserting that the center “recognizes and respects the rights of individuals to lawfully express opinions, engage in peaceful advocacy, and participate in protected First Amendment activities.”

“Fusion centers exist to help stakeholders understand emerging threats and hazards that could impact public safety, critical infrastructure, major events, government facilities, businesses, and the communities we serve,” said Sgt. Eric Gripp, a spokesperson for the Philadelphia Police Department. “These assessments cover a wide range of topics and are designed to provide situational awareness, not to characterize lawful activity or constitutionally protected speech as criminal conduct.”

The Intercept obtained the Philadelphia report as part of a larger cache of such documents from local fusion centers. It adds to growing evidence that counterterror officials are putting data center skeptics under a microscope. Last week, Wired magazine reported on other notices from local intelligence agencies warning about “anti-tech extremism.” Journalists Ken Klippenstein and Dan Boguslaw also reported on a document from the U.S. Capitol Police Intelligence Services Bureau warning of the potential for anti-data center violence.

The reports are tied to a genuine upswell in popular pushback against data centers. The opposition extends well beyond the mishmash of far-right and far-left groups identified in the Philadelphia fusion center’s report. Seven out of 10 Americans oppose having data centers as neighbors, a recent Gallup poll found.

The fusion center report frames the outcry as a potential first step toward violence, telling local police with jurisdiction over the roughly 16 data centers near Philadelphia that they should be aware of angry online posts.

The report warns about posts on an “anti-capitalist blog that remains popular amongst local anarchist extremist collectives.”

Under a title urging “Butlerian Jihad Against AI” — a reference to a book in the Dune science-fantasy series about humans revolting against their intelligent computer overlords — a post on the Philly Anti-Capitalist blog said “only we can decide to smash the screens that are brainwashing us into submission. The time is now, the day is here, ATTACK! ATTACK! ATTACK!”

The post was unattributed, did not include targets for attack, and included a cartoonish sketch of an old-fashioned computer struck by arrows. Nevertheless, local intelligence analysts appeared to take the threat seriously.

The bulletin also ticked off other signs of anti-data center furor. There was a meme post on shared on a local Facebook account with text reading: “I cannot escape the feeling that I am morally obligated to sabotage AI data center infrastructure.” Commenters on the post had discussed a proposed Amazon data center near Berwick, Pennsylvania, as a “potential target,” according to the report. The Intercept was able to find other versions of this meme posted to Facebook and Instagram unrelated to the targeting of specific, physical data centers.

The fusion center bulletin also said that white supremacists and members of the dark online subculture dubbed “nihilistic violent extremism” by the FBI had agitated online against data centers.

The document also mentioned a DHS report highlighting a thread on an online image board where users discussed using magnets, explosives, or even — in an idea that reflected a sci-fi movie trope — an electromagnetic pulse weapon to take out data centers.

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The fusion center analysts appeared to take seriously other rhetoric proposing dramatic attacks. “In addition to general anti-AI data center rhetoric, online users have recently discussed tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) for carrying out attacks varying from simple swatting and hoax threats to property damage, arson, and even the use of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) material,” the report said.

Hetznecker, the civil rights lawyer, said the idea of a nuclear threat raised concerns for him about the quality of the fusion center’s sources and its conclusions.

“That appears to be an effort by law enforcement to hype up the threat where there may be no threat at all,” he said. “To increase scrutiny on First Amendment activities by lumping in those activities with the most extreme, possible scenarios one could imagine that have no factual basis.”

The Philadelphia fusion center report specifically warned authorities of the likelihood that new local data centers could be the target of protest.

“There is potential for significant pushback to the three newly proposed AI data centers in the Philadelphia area. Indicators of an increased threat in the short term may consist of more disruptive First Amendment activity in opposition to AI data centers, small acts of vandalism, online calls for action to boycott and or protest local AI data centers in the Philadelphia area, and extensive criticism of higher utility bills resulting from AI data centers,” the report said.

The mention of boycotts, criticism, and other activities protected by the First Amendment raised red flags for Hetznecker.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if we see heightened law enforcement scrutiny on legitimate expressions of AI data center concerns, and I hope that would not chill the appropriate dialogue that needs to occur on the impact of data centers on local communities,” he said.

Update: June 1, 2026, 11:01 a.m. ET
The article was updated with a statement from the Philadelphia Police Department received after publication.

The post Philly Cops Admit That They’re Tracking “First Amendment Activity” Critical of AI appeared first on The Intercept.

The Colorado Information Analysis Center cautioned in a March bulletin that “violent extremists” might perceive “White Supremacy Ideology in ICE Recruitment Materials, Leading to a Potentially Increased Threat Environment.”

The bulletin from an agency tasked with preventing terrorism advised law enforcement offices throughout the United States that these posts could create a “permissive environment to engage in vigilante action and/or violence against individuals perceived to be immigrants.”

These DHS posts, the analysts warned, could convince “white supremacist violent extremists to attempt to join or infiltrate ICE and engage in bias motivated violence, endangering the public, other ICE personnel, and local law enforcement.”

The bulletin circulated following months of inflammatory social media posts by the Department of Homeland Security intended to drive ICE recruitment and promote the Trump administration’s agenda of violent mass deportation.

Colorado officials singled out tweets mimicking memes popular in right-wing online subcultures, referencing the rhetoric, lyrics and tropes commonly used by violent white supremacists, neo-Nazis and the Third Reich. The social media campaign drew widespread criticism, with groups such as the Southern Poverty Law Center alleging that DHS “is using white nationalist imagery and language to recruit new employees and arrest immigrants.” DHS has defended its online tactics as “bold and effective.”

The bulletin originated from a Colorado fusion center, part of a network of information clearinghouses for local, state and federal police that spread across the U.S. following 9/11. Originally conceived as a counter-terror measure, fusion centers have evolved into a sprawling surveillance apparatus tracking everything from drugs and shoplifting to student protests despite little evidence of their efficacy as a terror-fighting tool.

Reports from fusion centers are widely circulated among law enforcement agencies nationwide. The bulletin from the Colorado fusion center is notable in that it is the first indication that state officials in the U.S. counter-terrorism establishment are concerned about the messaging of DHS under Trump.

“The fact that you have the fusion center putting out a warning for law enforcement offices based on DHS messaging is surprising, even if it seems appropriate,” said Claire Trickler-McNulty, who spent eight years as an ICE official both under Obama and Biden and during Trump’s first administration.

She described the evidence presented in the bulletin as “rather damning.”

ICE and DHS did not respond to requests for comment.

Do you have information about fusion centers? Contact the authors on Signal at sledge.41 and sambiddle.99.

The posts highlighted in the report were crafted under former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who was fired in March and replaced by Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin. Noem was preceded in her departure by combative DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, who oversaw the agency’s social media push.

The bulletin delved deep into DHS and social media posts, which the report noted have been eagerly reposted by White supremacists from Austria to the U.S.

A January 9 DHS post on X, for instance, included an image of a lone man on horseback with the caption, “We’ll have our home again.” It might look like a piece of romanticized frontier nostalgia to many, but some would recognize the phrase “is a lyric from a song popular within and adopted by white nationalist organizations,” the memo reads. “The lyrics feature lines about reclaiming ‘our home’ by ‘blood or sweat,’ language often used in white supremacist rhetoric.” The memo noted that “Members of the white nationalist group, Patriot Front, have been recorded chanting ‘By God, we’ll have our home,’ the song’s refrain,” and that “Lyrics from the song opened the manifesto of a white supremacist who killed three people at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville, Florida in 2023.”

After The Intercept reported on DHS’ use of the song “We’ll Have Our Home Again” by Pine Tree Riots, lawmakers urged Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, to stop running the ad.

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DHS’ quotation of a song known to be popular among neo-Nazis is part of a pattern, the report says, of “repeated use of visual or rhetorical elements that overlap with symbols historically referenced within extremist subcultures.” The memo highlights the frequent use of the term “remigration” by the Department of Homeland Security, a term the Colorado law enforcement analysts explained “dates back to 1930s Germany,” where it was used to advocate for forced expulsion of Jews.

It points out Homeland Security’s use of the “Moon Man” meme, a character from a 1980s McDonald’s advertising campaign that has become popular among online racists for its resemblance to a Ku Klux Klansman. The bulletin highlighted one social media user who replied to a DHS post using the “Moon Man” character, stating “it’s TND time” — an abbreviation for the phrase “total n***** death,” which has spread among white supremacists. This user attached his own version of the meme showing the character posing before a swastika flag with a rifle.

“I appreciate them putting it together and so clearly laying out the dangers of using this white nationalist imagery,” Trickler-McNulty said.

The report includes a disclaimer noting that it doesn’t intend “to imply ideological alignment between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and white supremacist ideology.” But the analysts show how the social posts were quickly gaining traction among white supremacists, who were encouraging each other to sign up as immigration agents.

“During the timeframe that these posts from DHS have circulated online,” the intelligence bulletin warns, “white supremacist violent extremist groups have been simultaneously advocating for their followers to join ICE and/or musing about the potential for ICE to turn into a white supremacist militia.”

In a “neo-Nazi accelerationist social media channel,” for instance, internet users talked about infiltrating ICE and using its authority to form a “breakaway militia,” auguring a nationwide race war. Users on a neo-Nazi message board, the bulletin says, “discussed the advantages of joining ICE, viewing it as an opportunity for ‘accelerating conflict in the US’ and ‘beating up race traitors.’ One user claimed that someone in the network had already been a captain at an ICE-contracted detention facility.”

A spokesperson for the Colorado Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, which oversees the fusion center, did not answer when asked whether the agency had received a response from DHS about its bulletin. The fusion center spreads information to “private sector, local, tribal, and federal organizations,” spokesperson Micki Trost said in an email statement. “Bulletins help us share information with this network to meet our mission.”

The bulletin also argues that DHS’ posts could provoke violence against law enforcement from those who oppose white supremacists. Antifascist activists might “misinterpret DHS messaging and perceive all ICE personnel, and by extension law enforcement and government officials, as supportive of or complicit in white supremacy, therefore creating perceived justification for violence targeting those individuals,” the report says.

Spencer Reynolds, a former DHS official who advised the department on intelligence collection, domestic terrorism and other national security issues, rejected this warning that law enforcement might find itself at risk. “The intelligence report’s conclusion that DHS’s rhetoric may push both ‘anti-fascists’ and white supremacists to violence presents a false equivalency that ignores historical and present-day facts,” Reynolds, now senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, told The Intercept.

“From this country’s founding to today’s crisis, Black people and other people of color have always been victims of white supremacist violence. It is deeply flawed of the bulletin to suggest that ‘both sides’ are likely to resort to violence due to the administration’s inflammatory rhetoric,” he said. “In reality, white supremacy, not the people who adamantly oppose it, has fomented mass violence and oppression throughout our country’s existence.”

The post ICE Recruitment Tweets Are So Racist That Cops Feared They Could Incite Neo-Nazi Violence appeared first on The Intercept.

It also reaffirmed the grip of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in GOP politics.

AIPAC’s super political action committee and two other groups backed by pro-Israel donors poured more than $15.8 million into the race either opposing Massie or supporting his opponent, former Navy SEAL Ed Gallrein, according to Federal Election Commission reports released through Tuesday.

That blizzard of cash may not have been as important for Republican primary voters as Trump’s hatred of Massie. Still, it helped make the 4th Congressional District race the most expensive House primary in history, with overall spending reaching $32 million, topping the 2024 New York Democratic primary in which AIPAC’s super PAC aided Westchester County Executive George Latimer in ousting then-Rep. Jamaal Bowman.

Massie had framed the race in terms that led to accusations of antisemitism, calling it “a referendum on whether Israel gets to buy seats in Congress.” He denied the charge and repeated similar language in his concession speech Tuesday night. “For 14 years, those S.O.B.s in Washington tried to buy my vote,” Massie said. “Why did the race get so expensive? Because they decided to buy the seat.”

Massie is a libertarian contrarian who reliably votes for the conservative position on measures in the House — but he has generated headaches for Trump on everything from the Justice Department’s files on Jeffrey Epstein to the NSA’s surveillance of Americans.

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He has also been a critic of U.S. funding for Israel and the war on Iran. His vote has helped make every attempt at blocking the conflict through a war powers resolution bipartisan, although so far all of them have fallen short.

A spokesperson for AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project, described Massie as “the most anti-Israel Republican in the House.”

The Kentucky representative says he is taking a stand on principle: He has always opposed foreign aid in general.

“I have never voted for foreign aid to Egypt, to Syria, to Israel or to Ukraine,” Massie told CBS News. “But the ones in Israel, since they’re the biggest recipients of it, that makes them a little bit mad.” 

Republicans still overwhelmingly support Israel, according to public opinion polls. But the share who do so has declined significantly over the last few years, and younger GOP voters are much less supportive of unconditional funding for Israel.

When he emerged for his concession speech on Tuesday, a grinning Massie told the crowd, “I would have come out sooner but I had to call my opponent and concede, and it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv.”

In a statement congratulating Gallrein on Tuesday, AIPAC announced that voters “support Democratic and Republican candidates who view a strong U.S.-Israel relationship as an American interest and reject those who focus on attacking that alliance and pro-Israel Americans.”

“Massie has been one of the most consistently hostile voices in Congress toward the U.S.-Israel relationship and the millions of Americans who support it,” read the AIPAC statement posted on X. “Our community was proud to support Gallrein and help ensure Massie’s defeat.”

The race was dogged by accusations of antisemitism and salacious, negative advertising. Massie’s opponents seized on a pro-Massie super PAC’s television ad that featured a picture of anti-Massie billionaire donor Paul Singer with a rainbow Star of David and that accused Gallrein of being backed by “the gay mafia.” Meanwhile, the anti-Massie camp created a deepfake artificial intelligence ad pointing to the few times he crossed party lines to accuse him of being in a “throuple” with progressive Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.

Singer was the largest donor to MAGA KY, the Trump-supported super PAC that was created specifically to oust Massie.

Also spending against the representative were the United Democracy Project and the Republican Jewish Coalition Victory Fund.

This developing story has been updated.

The post Thomas Massie Loses His Seat in a Win for Trump — and AIPAC appeared first on The Intercept.

The group had an anodyne name — the Center for Democratic Priorities — and no track record in Michigan politics. It was incorporated in Delaware seven months ago under a shroud of secrecy.

Online sleuths soon discovered, however, that whoever was behind the group had used the same consulting firm employed by a super PAC affiliated with AIPACs to buy the ads. Suspicions fell on the pro-Israel lobbying shop or its super PAC affiliate, which has repeatedly created so-called “pop-up” super PACs to influence elections elsewhere. AIPAC issued a denial that it was funding the ads.

Thanks to Federal Election Commission rules, voters may not know the true source of the ad campaign for months.

With the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision 16 years ago, special interest groups began using a raft of loopholes to pour money into elections without disclosing who was doing the spending. Super PACs can take in unlimited donations and spend unlimited amounts — as long as they do not coordinate directly with candidates. Now, big money forces in politics are growing ever more sophisticated about exploiting legal loopholes to obscure their identity.

Today, groups are setting up pop-up affiliates, gaming disclosure deadlines, and using party-specific conduits — akin to a sub-political action committee — to help deflect attention away from the origins of their cash.

“All their spending on election ads immediately before a primary or general election is anonymous to voters — particularly when they use names that have no meaning and have no indication of the broader groups they are tied to,” said Shanna Ports, senior legal counsel at the Campaign Legal Center and a former attorney in the Federal Election Commission’s enforcement division. “They are very damaging to transparency for that reason.”

In the 2026 election cycle, front groups are proliferating, with cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence industries getting in on AIPAC’s game.

Groups aligned with the two tech industries have split their operations into Democratic- and Republican-aligned affiliates. The benefit can be twofold: obscuring the ultimate source of the donations, while also attracting from the large pool of partisan funders who want to give donations solely to one party.

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The “pop-up” super PACs and party-affiliate PACs are not always “dark money” — a loosely defined term that generally refers to political operations that don’t disclose their donors’ identities. Nevertheless, the way they are set up can make it much more difficult for voters to follow the lavish campaign spending.

Campaign finance experts say the trend is poised to continue unless Congress and the FEC decide to act. Until then, here is a guide to who is funding the groups, what they are called and how they work.

Pop-Up Politics

AIPAC used a complicated web of political committees to influence the Illinois primary elections in March. Whether or not it is using the same tactics in Michigan — the group did not respond to a request for comment — observers expect it to continue to hide its campaign spending in the months to come, as primary candidates battle over AIPAC’s influence.

AIPAC itself is a tax-exempt nonprofit, which prohibits direct engagement with electoral politics. But the group is publicly affiliated with a traditional political action committee that can take donations of up to $5,000 per year; AIPAC PAC can donate directly to candidate campaigns.

AIPAC’s supporters can also give to United Democracy Project, a so-called “super PAC.” United Democracy Project is openly affiliated with AIPAC, an increasingly toxic brand among Democrats.

As AIPAC weighed involvement in the recent Illinois primaries, three new “pop-up” super PACs took advantage of campaign finance reporting loopholes to hide their donors’ identities. The groups — Elect Chicago Women, Affordable Chicago Now, and Chicago Progressive Partnership — were created so late in the campaign that they were only required to disclose their donors after voting in the primary was over.

The groups’ donors were finally revealed after the election. They included two wealthy Chicago political donors: Michael Sacks, the CEO of an asset management firm, and Anthony “Tony” Davis, the co-founder of a private equity firm.

Before those groups filed official campaign finance reports, journalists had built a circumstantial case linking them to AIPAC through the use of campaign vendors linked to the pro-Israel lobby group.

Eventually, the hard truth emerged. FEC reports filed after the election revealed that Elect Chicago Women and Affordable Chicago Now got funds from United Democracy Project. Then Elect Chicago Women turned around and handed $1 million to the third group, Chicago Progressive Partnership.

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That complicated two-step helped Chicago Progressive Partnership conceal its donors as it was running ads that many observers said were misleading. In Illinois’s 9th Congressional District, the group attempted to boost one pro-Palestinian candidate in an apparent attempt to harm another, the influencer Kat Abughazaleh. Abughazaleh ultimately lost.

In the same congressional race, Elect Chicago Women spent money to support state Sen. Laura Fine and oppose progressive Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, who won.

In other races, it was easier for voters to track how AIPAC-aligned groups were spending their money. In some of the contests, the pop-up super PACs never popped up. Instead, United Democracy Project spent directly.

In Michigan, the new group Center for Democratic Priorities has yet to file any registration documents with the FEC. If it is classifying itself as a super PAC, it will not have to file disclosures revealing its donors until July 15, according to Ports.

Gambling on Races

With AI and crypto becoming increasingly ubiquitous, Washington is trying to sort out the regulations that could have huge impacts on these industries. In turn, crypto and AI businesses are making huge investments in electoral politics. So far, however, crypto and AI have taken a different approach to influencing elections than AIPAC. Rather than using “pop-up” super PACs, they have divided their influence operations into Republican and Democratic affiliates.

The biggest crypto super PAC is called Fairshake. The group is funded by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, as well as two crypto companies the firm has invested in, Coinbase and Ripple Labs.

The venture capital firm’s co-founder Marc Andreessen rose to fame in the 1990s for co-founding the web browser Netscape. More recently he has become notable as one of Donald Trump’s biggest defenders in the tech world and a frequent visitor to Trump’s Florida estate Mar-a-Lago.

Fairshake spends money on Republican primaries through its GOP affiliate, Defend American Jobs, and Democratic races through an outfit called Protect Progress. Fairshake has portrayed itself as an equal-opportunity shop, but the group’s extraordinary spending in favor of Republican candidate Bernie Moreno in 2024, when he ousted former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown in Ohio, opened it up to accusations of partisanship.

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Brown is now running to return to the Senate against JD Vance’s Republican replacement, Jon Husted. His rhetoric this time around has been notably more muted when it comes to crypto.

Fairshake’s split personality allows donors to pick a single-party affiliate for its campaign giving. Democratic megadonor and angel investor Ron Conway donated to Protect Progress in 2024, for instance, only to announce later that year that he was breaking from the network over its support of Moreno.

The model of using party-specific affiliates may be less deceptive than “pop-up” super PACs, Ports said, but it is still misleading.

“They know that a Republican voter doesn’t want to hear from a super PAC that supports Democratic candidates. [Republican voters] are not going to trust that messaging as much, or vice versa,” she said. “They are dividing this money up to try to present their message as persuasively as possible to their target audiences.”

Fairshake’s spending on Republicans has not gone far enough for some figures in the fractious crypto world. The Winklevoss twins — the brothers behind a top Coinbase competitor, a cryptocurrency exchange called Gemini, which is distinct from Google’s AI assistant — have given millions’ worth of bitcoin to the Digital Freedom Fund PAC, which is explicitly opposed to the Democratic Party. The Digital Freedom Fund has also drawn donations from crypto exchange Kraken, another Coinbase competitor. So far the PAC has not spent heavily on political campaigns, but that could change as the midterm election season heats up.

Yet another crypto political action committee, The Fellowship PAC, is chaired by an executive at the domestic affiliate of the international stablecoin company Tether, which has recently begun mounting a push into the U.S. market. The company is backed by $10 million in donations from Cantor Fitzgerald, the bank that holds the U.S. Treasury notes backing Tether’s stablecoins. Former Cantor Fitzgerald chief Howard Lutnick serves as Trump’s commerce secretary. The PAC has endorsed only Republican candidates thus far.

Artificial Interference

Two of the artificial intelligence industry’s biggest players are backing rival political influence operations. OpenAI and Anthropic have picked their fighters in a battle over how much of a role the government should play in regulating AI.

On one side, OpenAI President Greg Brockman and his wife have donated to Leading the Future, a super PAC that aims to be an umbrella organization for the industry along the lines of Fairshake.

Perplexity AI and Andreessen Horowitz — which was an early investor in OpenAI — have also given money to the umbrella super PAC.

Leading the Future has a Democratic affiliate, Think Big, as well as a Republican arm, American Mission. Conway, the Democratic megadonor, has given only to Think Big, while Joe Lonsdale, the voluble right-wing venture capitalist, has given to American Mission.

If that structure sounds eerily similar to Fairshake, that is no accident. One of Leading the Future’s shot-callers is Josh Vlasto, a political operative who once worked for two powerful New York Democrats: former Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

OpenAI has generally favored a more relaxed approach to AI regulation. One of its top competitors, Anthropic, has staked out a position — at least rhetorically — in favor of stricter rules.

To pursue that aim, Anthropic recently created a traditional corporate political action committee, AnthroPAC, that can donate directly to politicians.

The $380 billion company has also made a major donation to a political nonprofit called Public First Action. That group sits at the heart of a network of affiliated super PACs: the bipartisan Public First PAC, the Democratic-aligned Jobs and Democracy PAC, and the Defending Our Values PAC for Republican causes.

The Republican and Democratic affiliates are led respectively by former Reps. Chris Stewart, R-Utah, and Brad Carson, D-Okla.

Public First Action has donated to all three super PACs. In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson called the three PACs “aligned” but said they all operate independently and that Anthropic does not play a role in directing any of the groups’ political spending.

“Public First Action did not establish Jobs and Democracy PAC, Public First PAC, or Defending Our Values PAC, all of which are independent from Public First Action and were established separately,” said the spokesperson, Anthony Rivera-Rodriguez.

In a recent North Carolina primary, Public First Action’s Democratic affiliate spent $1.6 million boosting incumbent Rep. Valerie Foushee over her opponent Nida Allam, a Durham County commissioner who has supported a moratorium on AI data center construction.

Allam told The Intercept that she believes the Anthropic-backed super PAC network has split its spending arms into Democratic and Republican affiliates to blunt attacks like those that have dogged United Democracy Project. AIPAC’s super PAC has long faced criticism in Democratic primaries for drawing donations from Trump-supporting billionaires.

Anthropic and its backers “are trying to confuse folks to say, ‘we’re not the same,’ so that their spending is not on the same FEC reports,” she said.

Anthropic voluntarily disclosed its donation to Public First Action. But since the group is set up as a nonprofit rather than a campaign committee, voters may never know who Public First Action’s other donors are. And the group does not intend to disclose them, Rivera-Rodriguez said.

“We’d welcome a broader conversation about transparency in political spending, starting with the hundreds of millions Big Tech companies are spending to prevent any regulation of AI whatsoever,” he said. “That said, Public First Action, Jobs and Democracy PAC, Public First PAC, and Defending Our Values PAC make all public disclosures required by law either to the FEC or the IRS, and those filings are publicly available online. Additionally, all advertisements by those groups include the required disclaimers identifying who is paying for the advertisement.”

Allam is convinced that spending from AIPAC and the Anthropic-backed groups helped tip her race. She claimed 48.2 percent of the vote compared to Foushee’s 49.2 percent.

“For the incumbent to not receive more than 50 percent of her district’s support, that shows you that working families want change, they want something different,” she said. “We can build a progressive grassroots movement without being aligned with the same people who gave us Trump and MAGA Republicans.”

Correction: May 18, 2026, 12:53 p.m. ET
A graphic previously featured the Winklevoss twins as represented in the 2010 movie “The Social Network”; the images have been replaced with photos of the Winklevoss twins.

The post Who’s Spending in Your Congressional Election? We Tracked the Front Groups Fueling the 2026 Midterms. appeared first on The Intercept.

One of New York state’s grievance committees, disciplinary panels that determines penalties for violations of legal ethics, notified nonprofit groups last week of its finding against Sarcone, Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again U.S. attorney in Albany.

The committee is keeping mum on the exact nature of its findings, and in a letter to a press freedom group last week, it even tried to claim that the foundation could not disclose the very fact that it found “there was sufficient basis for a finding of professional misconduct.”

The letter from the Attorney Grievance Committee for the Appellate Division, Third Department, was dated April 1 and sent via email on May 8. The committee did not immediately respond to a request for comment on when the finding was reached.

The committee’s actions fit in a larger pattern of New York shrouding prosecutorial misconduct investigations in secret. One of the groups that filed a complaint, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said it was time for the state’s legal ethics cops to stop insisting on silence.

“Sarcone is a high-ranking prosecutor who is at the center of national news as we speak and who the New York Grievance Committee found had engaged in professional misconduct after he retaliated against a news outlet,” said Seth Stern, chief of advocacy at the foundation. “No complainant, but especially a press freedom organization, should be told to keep quiet about something so plainly newsworthy and important to New Yorkers and Americans.”

Sarcone and the Justice Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In an emailed statement, the grievance committee said it was following state laws. Under that law, chief committee attorney Monica Duffy said, “until such time as charges of professional misconduct are sustained against an attorney in a public order of the New York State Supreme Court, Appellate Division, all papers, documents and records concerning this Committee’s investigation and disposition of any grievance complaint concerning the conduct of that attorney are sealed and deemed private and confidential.”

Sarcone had no prosecutorial experience when the Trump administration tapped him to lead the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of New York last year. Since then, he has been involved in a long-running saga over whether he can even run the office.

Sarcone has never been confirmed by the U.S. Senate. After his temporary appointment to the post expired, judges appointed a veteran prosecutor to fill the post. That replacement was fired within hours. Sarcone has continued to oversee the office as state Attorney General Letitia James and Justice Department lawyers argue in court over whether he lawfully holds the office.

The administration has a major incentive to keep the Trump loyalist in charge: The Albany prosecutor’s office has jurisdiction over New York state politicians who have drawn the president’s ire, including James.

In addition to the question of whether he can hold the office, Sarcone has faced criticism for booting the Albany newspaper off his office’s press list after it reported that he had attempted to claim a boarded-up apartment building in the district as his home to satisfy residency requirements.

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That action was a violation of the First Amendment, the Freedom of the Press Foundation argued in the August 11 complaint it filed with the grievance committee, along with Reinvent Albany and the Demand Progress Education Fund. The complaint alleged that Sarcone may have violated at least four of the state’s rules of professional conduct.

In the response to the complaint sent last week, the committee said that “after deliberation, the Committee determined there was a sufficient basis for a finding of professional misconduct and took appropriate action.”

The case was now closed, the committee said. In the letter dated April 1, the committee said that it had reached its conclusion at a “recent” meeting.

What “appropriate action” the committee took is unclear. There are no records of public discipline in Sarcone’s entry on the state attorney directory. The committee has a range of actions it can take short of public discipline, including private letters of reprimand.

Another group that filed a similar complaint against Sarcone, Campaign for Accountability, received a near-identical letter from the grievance committee. In a statement, that group noted that Sarcone remains in charge of the U.S. attorney’s office with a title of first assistant.

“While we’re pleased the New York Attorney Grievance Committee recognized that Mr. Sarcone, who remains First Assistant in the U.S. Attorney’s Office, engaged in professional misconduct, a secret slap on the wrist is insufficient. Mr. Sarcone’s pattern of conduct reflects on his credibility as an officer of the court, so any court in which he appears — along with the public — deserves to know what he was sanctioned for and why,” said Campaign for Accountability’s executive director, Michelle Kuppersmith.

The letters to both complainants including a heading indicating that they were “confidential.” Stern said that attempting to force people who filed complaints to remain silent about the letters they receive in response would be unconstitutional.

One state grievance committee previously tried to clamp down on law professors who shared details about the complaints they had filed against local prosecutors accused of failing to turn over exculpatory evidence or lying in court. The professors sued and won a federal district court ruling in their favor.

The post A Trump U.S. Attorney’s Professional Misconduct Must Be Kept “Private and Confidential” appeared first on The Intercept.

The battle playing out in the state attorney general’s race is one example of many of the crypto sector trying to elect industry-friendly officials. In Nevada, it’s also a story of an eccentric multimillionaire whose money threatens the political ascent of a woman who helped deny his dream.

The spending by crypto entrepreneur Jeffrey Berns is “meaningful money, especially at this early stage in the primary,” said Kenneth Miller, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “And we don’t know if this only represents an initial investment and will be followed up by more.”

Spending Big

Berns has donated at least $2.5 million since 2023 to a political action committee controlled by Nevada State Treasurer Zach Conine, who is running for attorney general against state Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro.

That is more than twice the $1.2 million that Conine received from individual donors to his personal campaign account over the same period.

After receiving money from Berns, Conine’s PAC in turn donated more than $1.8 million to a newly created campaign outfit called Safe and Strong Nevada PAC, which rolled out a website and video advertisement attacking Cannizzaro.

Both Cannizzaro and Conine are Democrats on the June 9 primary ballot. They have settled on similar campaign themes as fighters who will take on President Donald Trump — a reliable message in an election year with an energized Democratic base.

Neither candidate has made cryptocurrencies a focus of their campaigns. Yet Berns’s donations make him by far the largest donor to Conine’s campaign organizations. Miller, the political science professor, said the scale of Berns’s donations reflected a larger trend.

“All semblance of constraints on political donations have eroded away in the past couple decades, and the amount of money it takes to be impactful in a Nevada primary election is well within reach for a lot of wealthy individuals,” he said. “Campaigns around the country often have one or two super PACs involved that are funded by one or just a handful of people. It is not typical for a campaign to be almost entirely propped up by one wealthy megadonor, but it does happen sometimes.”

A Dream Denied

While Berns did not respond to a request for comment on why he is intervening in the race, he has a tangled history with Cannizzaro. Five years ago, she helped kill his vision of building what his company called a “smart city” near Reno.

Berns was formerly a California plaintiff’s lawyer who won huge settlements taking on the banking industry. He was also an early investor in the Ether token, a leading competitor to bitcoin.

His multiplying fortune allowed him buy waterfront properties in ritzy destinations including Lake Tahoe, where he bought and sold a $47.5 million mansion, and Turks and Caicos, where he recently listed for sale at $35 million a beachfront property that was once featured on the Netflix reality dating show “Too Hot to Handle.”

He also founded a company called Blockchains, which in 2018 purchased 67,000 acres of land in Storey County in northern Nevada near the Tesla “Gigafactory” for the sum of $170 million.

Storey County has flexible development rules, but not flexible enough for Berns. Instead, he and his company wanted to build an entire city running on blockchain that operated independently from the county.

“I want to create a place where we can rethink things. Where we can democratize democracy,” Berns told the BBC.

Berns won the support of a critical backer: then-Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak, a Democrat who endorsed the idea in his 2021 State of the State address.

Opponents noted that Berns had donated tens of thousands of dollars to Sisolak and smelled an end-run around regular democratic governance. They also raised concerns about more mundane issues such as lost tax revenue and water rights.

The idea would have needed approval from the Nevada Legislature. Berns’s push for legislative approval was damaged by the revelation that he was being sued by his children’s nanny for allegedly trying to force her into a sexual tryst with him and his wife. Berns said the plaintiff was a disgruntled former employee, and he settled the case the next year without admitting wrongdoing, according to the Reno Gazette-Journal.

Despite Sisolak’s support, the smart city idea was ultimately doomed to die the bureaucratic death of a study committee. One of the key players who helped kill the proposal was Cannizzaro, the state’s first female Senate majority leader.

A lobbyist involved in the discussions confirmed that Cannizzaro was instrumental in shelving the idea. In a statement, her campaign also said that she opposed the idea.

“Like nearly all of her legislative colleagues in both parties, Majority Leader Cannizzaro was extremely skeptical of the idea of letting private corporations run their own governments and siphon off millions of taxpayers’ dollars,” said Peter Koltak, a campaign spokesperson. “Ultimately, she informed the Governor’s staff and the bill’s supporters that there wouldn’t be legislative support for the concept.”

Berns was so disappointed by the process that his company pulled out of the study process, prompting its staff to declare that there was no point in exploring the idea further.

Berns Shifts Gears

While Berns vastly expanded his wealth by investing in cryptocurrency, he is not a household name in the industry. Many of the wealthiest crypto companies and venture capital firms have backed a national super PAC called Fairshake that has hundreds of millions to spend on federal elections. Berns has not donated to that effort, federal campaign finance records show.

Instead, he has focused his giving on Nevada, supporting politicians on both sides of the aisle. Berns gave $5,000 to Republican Gov. Joseph Lombardo in 2024 and $250,000 to the Democratic Party of Washoe County in 2022, campaign finance records show. He also gave $5,000 to Cannizzaro in 2020 before the smart city proposal died in the legislature.

Despite the pushback the smart city proposal drew, it has not made him a particularly controversial donor.

“In Las Vegas, not a month goes by without an artist’s rendering of a proposed resort, arena, or other project popping up,” said Miller. “Some of them happen, and many of them don’t. I don’t expect that the smart city proposal left much of an impression on many Nevada voters.”

While neither Conine nor Berns responded to questions about the latter’s donations, Conine has signaled that he is friendly to crypto.

During the smart city debate, Conine promoted the idea of allowing government entities to accept payments in stablecoin. In 2024, he attended an event sponsored by a crypto industry trade group.

Cannizzaro, for her part, does not appear to have staked out any major public positions on the crypto industry. Since the start of 2024, she has raised $2.2 million between her personal campaign account and a PAC she controls. Her campaign said she will not be deterred by Berns’s spending.

“Leader Cannizzaro has always defended Nevada from big corporations and wealthy special interests, and an unaccountable tech billionaire dumping his millions into this race is certainly not going to stop her,” said Koltak, the spokesperson.

The post She Opposed His Plan for a Blockchain City. Now He’s Bankrolling Her Primary Opponent. appeared first on The Intercept.

Wyden said the public needs to know about a secret court opinion that found fault with the Trump administration’s use of data collected by the National Security Agency, prompting Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Tom Cotton, R-Ark., to warn of “consequences” for “distorting highly classified material.”

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The unusually pointed back-and-forth came amid a fight over the reauthorization of a controversial domestic spying program. The barbs exchanged by the senators highlighted how much Wyden has angered colleagues aligned with the NSA who want the spy program to be renewed without changes.

By the end of the day, Congress voted to give the program a 45-day extension to allow further negotiations over its fate.

Wyden had argued for a shorter extension, but he was able to secure a concession. Cotton and the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, agreed to pen a letter to the executive branch asking for the court opinion to be declassified within 15 days.

Wyden says that opinion details serious violations of the program’s guidelines.

“That ruling found serious violations of Americans’ constitutional rights and how the Trump administration has used Section 702,” Wyden said. “Congress should not vote — should not vote — to renew Section 702 when Americans are left in the dark about these troubling abuses,” Wyden said.

Wyden has a long history of trying to pry loose evidence of civil liberties violations by intelligence agencies. Most famously, in 2013, he attempted to force then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to acknowledge the existence of a phone record dragnet months before NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s disclosures made it public.

His sometimes-cryptic statements warning about secret spy programs have been dubbed “the Wyden siren.”

Most recently he has zeroed in on the court opinion. He irritated supporters of the NSA program on Thursday by initially refusing to give his consent for a 45-day extension of the program, until he secured the letter from Intelligence Committee leaders.

While speaking on the floor about why he opposed that extension, he accused Cotton of ducking the court opinion, prompting a pointed response.

“I am ducking nothing. I am pointing out the senator from Oregon’s long-standing practice of distorting highly classified material in public,” Cotton said. “One of these days there are going to be some consequences, and it may be while I’m the chairman of this committee.”

Cotton’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Members of Congress are protected from prosecution for comments they make on the floor under the speech or debate clause of the Constitution.

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Little has been revealed about the court opinion besides a New York Times report earlier this month that it centered on searches of information about Americans in a vast database of communications that gets around laws on domestic spying because the data is collected abroad.

Wyden noted that current law already requires the court opinion to be declassified and released to the public at some point. He wants that process sped up so that it can take place before Congress votes on a long-term extension of the surveillance program.

“Congress must use a short-term extension to openly debate the critical issues in front of the American people. I am disappointed that, instead, it sure feels like the other side of the aisle is covering the abuses up,” he said.

Although the debate that was resolved later in the day hinged on a seemingly mundane issue — whether Congress should have three weeks or 45 days for further negotiations — it exposed hard feelings between the committee colleagues.

Wyden said a three-week extension was “more than reasonable,” given that Congress has had months to work on the issue.

Cotton said a longer extension was necessary because Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the ranking member of the committee, recently suffered a family tragedy. Warner’s 36-year-old daughter died earlier this month, and he returned to the Senate this week after taking time off. As the highest-ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, Warner will play a key role in the negotiations in extending the law.

“I would suggest that comity also counsels that we give a little bit longer than two weeks to a grieving colleague who just had a terrible family tragedy,” Cotton said.

Warner’s office did not immediately return a request for comment.

Update: April 30, 2026, 5:29 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include Congress’s extension of FISA after publication.

The post Ron Wyden Is Pissing Off the NSA’s Biggest Backers. Tom Cotton Warns There Will Be “Consequences.” appeared first on The Intercept.

Twenty Republicans who opposed a procedural vote earlier this month flipped their position on Wednesday to allow a vote on a three-year extension of the law that allows government agents to search Americans’ communications without a warrant.

Not all the Republicans voted for the final version of the bill, which passed 235–191, but they were crucial in giving Johnson a hand on an initial procedural vote.

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The final bill drew the support of dozens of Democrats, who backed it despite the polarizing central bank digital currency ban. One of the most prominent backers was Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, who gave a floor speech in support.

Now that it includes a digital currency ban, however, the House version of the law faces dim prospects in the Senate. The upshot of Johnson’s maneuvering may be that the Senate has the final say on surveillance reforms.

Longtime privacy champion Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., told The Intercept that the versions of reauthorization on the table — one a three-year “clean” extension offered by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and the other the House version with the digital currency ban — were both “deeply flawed and unacceptable.”

Instead, he is pitching colleagues on requiring a warrant before government agents can search through foreign surveillance databases for the communications of Americans.

“We are spending some time now talking to those who want a bill that shows you can have both security and liberty,” Wyden said, “and they are not mutually exclusive.”

Extending Deadline

The high-stakes deliberations are happening against the backdrop of a looming deadline to renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which underpins much of the National Security Agency’s global surveillance apparatus.

The law authorizes much of the most valuable surveillance populating intelligence agency reports. It has also been abused hundreds of thousands of times by officials at the FBI to scour through Americans’ communications.

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Johnson tried and failed to secure an extension of the law with minor tweaks earlier this month. Conservatives joined Democrats in opposing that push, and Congress ultimately wound up passing a short-term extension of the law that expires Friday.

The deadline is manufactured, many reformers say. A secretive intelligence court has already granted the government yearlong orders allowing it to continue scooping up information from private providers.

The Senate was set to hold its own vote on the surveillance bill Tuesday but wound up postponing it. In a floor speech, Wyden chalked the delay up to skepticism from senators about the bill in its current form. He called for discussions about reforms.

The nature of those negotiations remained up in the air Wednesday. Some senators said it was possible that Congress would pass another short-term extension of the law.

On Wednesday afternoon, Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, who caucuses with the Democrats, told The Intercept, “The last thing I heard is that there was going to be another extension to give us more time to figure it out and get the House to decide what they want to do.”

“Dead On Arrival” in Senate

Wyden and other reformers have long pushed for a warrant requirement before government agents can search NSA databases for information on Americans. They say the need for reform is only more urgent now that artificial intelligence has made combing through those databases easier than ever.

They are pushing back against long-held skepticism from members of Congress who contend that requiring agents to get a court order would be too unwieldy in practice.

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In an email to colleagues, for example, Himes, of the House Intelligence Committee, said that he would vote to reauthorize FISA “because it is essential to keeping our country and our constituents safe from terrorists, cartels, spies, state-sponsored hackers, and other national security threats.”

Himes said on the House floor later that the process leading up to the vote on Wednesday was flawed.

“We are where we are, and it is a binary choice. And allowing this authority to expire, which I think we are close to, is not an option,” he said.

Wyden expressed optimism, citing the bipartisan coalition that has so far stymied President Donald Trump’s demand for a clean extension.

“The reality is, we are further along in real reform than we have been since I have been in public service,” he said.

Whatever version of the law the Senate settles on, it likely will not involve a central bank digital currency ban. Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., has already described that idea as “dead on arrival.”

“That’s messing around with a very important national security issue,” King said of the ban.

Johnson Saves Face

Still, the ban gave Johnson a crucial boost in securing House passage of his own version of the FISA law. The ban on government-issued digital currency took aim at a boogeyman of the far right that is nowhere close to becoming reality.

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For years, conservatives have fretted over the idea that the U.S. Federal Reserve could launch a digital currency that could be traded electronically. Currently, there is no way for ordinary Americans to exchange money through electronic means without the help of a private intermediary, such as PayPal or Visa. A central bank digital currency would give people an option to pass money without the for-profit companies involved.

The Federal Reserve never came close to implementing a digital currency under President Joe Biden, however, and one of Trump’s first acts upon taking office was to issue an executive order aimed at banning research into them.

While conservatives have raised concerns that a central bank digital currency could allow the government to surveil Americans’ every transaction, the issue is distinct from the foreign surveillance law that lays out the NSA’s powers.

Before the bill reached the floor, Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., the top Democrat on the House Rules Committee, unsuccessfully attempted to strip out the central bank digital currency ban during a House Rules Committee hearing on Tuesday.

“Republicans are obsessed with random, fringe issues,” McGovern said, “instead of doing literally anything to bring down the cost of living.”

The post Mike Johnson Used Crypto Catnip to Get Freedom Caucus Support for Domestic Spy Law appeared first on The Intercept.