In addition to passionate debates about the Olympics themselves — the geopolitics of the Games and their effect on local hosts — Wasserman has come in for criticism over his ties to the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, his support for Israel, and the potential that the Games might bring him profits through his role as a talent manager for entertainment stars.

The controversies, especially revelations about his relationship with a member of Epstein’s inner circle, nearly led to Wasserman’s ouster from his role atop LA28, the Los Angeles Olympics organizing committee.

Now, another personal wrinkle is coming to light: Wasserman’s daughter, Stella, is training to compete for the Israeli equestrian team at the 2028 Games.

Stella Wasserman, 21, is training to compete with the Israeli team in the show jumping competition, according to a recent profile in World of Show Jumping, a trade publication covering the sport. Instagram accounts for Stella Wasserman and her mother, Laura Ziffren Wasserman, posted in the wake of the article to celebrate Stella’s plans to compete with the Israeli team.

There’s a very real possibility that the man responsible for orchestrating an American Olympic games will have a child competing for another country that has become an international pariah due to its genocide in Gaza and wars with Lebanon and Iran — a team that is likely to face protests in LA. (Casey Wasserman, Stella Wasserman, LA28, and the Israeli Olympic committee did not respond to requests for comment.)

Casey Wasserman is himself an outspoken supporter of Israel. In December, he took a trip to Israel during which he met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and pledged that the safety of athletes, and particularly Israeli athletes, was his “number one concern,” according to Algemeiner, a right-wing, New York-based newspaper covering Jewish issues.

“If you’re claiming that this thing that you’re promoting so heavily is going to bring all these benefits to Los Angeles, but you’re also promoting the interests of a foreign genocidal state — and on top of that your daughter is representing that state in the Games — that’s a conflict,” said Miguel Camnitzer, an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace Los Angeles. “Somebody else, without those very personal connections to Israel, might be able to make a different call, but he’s unable to.”

Wasserman, a longtime local powerbroker and grandson of Hollywood Golden Age tycoon Lew Wasserman, has been central to bringing the Games to Los Angeles, a role that has come under increased scrutiny due to his ties to Epstein and the late pedophile’s former companion, convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.

While his connections to the Epstein world were known to some degree for years  — he rode with Bill Clinton on Epstein’s private jet for a humanitarian mission to Africa — the release of the so-called Epstein files earlier this year revealed graphic sexual emails between Wasserman and Maxwell. The revelations sparked a backlash from some of the artists represented by his eponymous talent agency, which in March changed its name to The Team; Wasserman also announced he would be selling the company.

This week, Wasserman reaffirmed that he has no plans to step down as the chair of LA28.

Olympian Hypocrisies

Despite her young age, Stella Wasserman is an accomplished show jumper and owns at least four competition horses, according to a report in the Chronicle of the Horse.

It is common for athletes from one country to compete for a country in which they hold dual citizenship; the International Olympic Committee requires that competitors be nationals of the countries on whose behalf they are competing.

Amid the genocide in Gaza, the Israel connection underscores arguments from critics of the Olympics who say that the Games whitewash human rights abuses by nations taking part — and that international approaches to the Games foster a global double standard that penalizes some nations while allowing others to compete. In the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian teams were barred from competing in the 2026 Winter Olympics; Israel has faced no such sanction.

The yearslong campaign by Wasserman and others — including former Mayor Eric Garcetti — to host the Olympics in Los Angeles has met with stiff opposition from local activists. Forming a coalition, dubbed NOlympics, the activists sought to call attention to the ways in which they say the Games would exacerbate issues of affordability, surveillance, and anti-immigrant policing by federal law enforcement.

“When we started organizing against the Olympics 10 years ago, LA was already reeling from homelessness, housing shortages, brutal policing, and ICE. And 10 years later these issues are all worse,” said Jonny Coleman, an organizer with NOlympics LA. “Mega-events like the Olympics or the World Cup don’t necessarily create problems from whole cloth, but they accelerate them.”

In December, LA28 announced it had raised more than $2 billion in sponsorship revenue, according to Reuters. If the costs of the Games exceed what the Olympic committee is able to fundraise, however, Los Angeles would be on the hook for the first $270 million of over-cost expenses, with the next $270 million to be covered by the state of California.

The Games, activists said, could be a boon for Wasserman. Wasserman chaired a host committee to bring the Super Bowl to LA in 2022; his client Kendrick Lamar was featured in the halftime show — a coveted slot not least for the millions the exposure can bring.

For Coleman, Casey Wasserman’s relationship to Ghislaine Maxwell and Stella Wasserman’s potential competition on behalf of Israel only further highlights the corrupt nature of the Olympics.

“We know these mega-events are a way to legitimize awful regimes,” said Coleman. “It’s disgusting, but I don’t really care about the supposed integrity of the sports, personally. So yeah, let her play — why not?”

The post Daughter of 2028 Olympics Chair Dreams of Competing in LA — for Israel appeared first on The Intercept.

The revelation comes amid renewed scrutiny of DiNapoli’s spending spree on Israel Bonds, a financial instrument that directly funds the state of Israel. DiNapoli, the administrator of New York pension funds, is facing his first primary fight in 18 years as comptroller, and the branded, non-tradeable assets have become an issue in the race.

The trip was paid for by the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, which has a financial relationship to Israel Bonds, the organization that issues Israeli government debt securities in the U.S.

In a February 2, 2024, letter to the comptroller, the New York State Commission on Ethics and Lobbying in Government approved reimbursement for DiNapoli by the JCRC, but raised concerns that the sponsored trip could create an appearance of potential improper influence.

The ethics commission informed DiNapoli that several commissioners raised concerns “the proposed reimbursement could give reasonable basis for the impression that a person could improperly influence you,” according to the letter, which was obtained through a public records request and shared exclusively with The Intercept.

DiNapoli has been an enthusiastic backer of investing New York pension and investment funds in Israel Bonds. Amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza, efforts by the movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel have gained steam — including campaigns urging divestment from Israeli bonds. DiNapoli tilted in the opposite direction, including a $20 million New York pension fund investment in Israel bonds in the wake of the October 7 attacks.

According to an itinerary of the trip drafted by JCRC and obtained by the group Jewish Voice for Peace New York, DiNapoli was slated to meet with Israel Bonds staffers. In 2024, according to its website, JCRC received financial backing from Israel Bonds — which Jewish Voice for Peace organizers said could hint at a potential improper influence. The Israel Bonds donation was for a float in the 2024 Israel Day parade organized by the JCRC, a spokesperson for the group said. DiNapoli regularly attends the rally, including in 2024.

On Sunday, DiNapoli and other state and local electeds marched in the parade again, joined by an array of extremist Israeli political figures including Bezalel Smotrich, the current finance minister and a far-right champion of illegal settlements.

“By participating in trips organized and paid for by an organization that receives institutional donations and is closely and publicly aligned with Israel Bonds, while simultaneously promoting his office’s ongoing investments in Israel Bonds, Comptroller DiNapoli engaged in a foreign policy function far outside his statutory mandate as a fiduciary to millions of pensioners and public employees,” Lisa Mulleneaux, a researcher with JVP’s “Break the Bonds” campaign, wrote in an October complaint to the ethics commission.

“This represents a serious violation of his ethical obligation under §74(3)(f) to avoid any impression that his official duties can be swayed by outside groups,” Mulleneaux wrote. “At minimum, it undermines public trust in the independence of the Comptroller’s office and the integrity of the state’s investment decisions.”

In a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson for DiNapoli pointed to the ethics commission’s ultimate approval of the JCRC reimbursement and said his office was unaware of any ethics complaint filed in relation to the trip. (The New York State Commission on Ethics and Lobbying in Government declined to comment.)

In his 18 years as comptroller — and particularly in the months and years following October 7 and the launch of Israel’s genocide in Gaza — DiNapoli has turned the state’s pension fund into one of the largest holders of Israel Bonds nationwide. Since the February 2024 trip, Dinapoli has invested $120 million of the state’s common retirement fund in the instruments, bringing the total investment of state pension funds in Israel Bonds to $332.5 million.

“Officials like Comptroller DiNapoli are responsible for the safeguarding of pension funds through strategic investing that prioritizes the needs of public sector workers and retirees,” said Dani Noble, an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace. “Instead, Comptroller DiNapoli is investing the NY pension in Israel Bonds — unrestricted loans to the Israeli military and government used for every aspect of violence against Palestinians.”

Israel Bonds in Primary

DiNapoli’s fervent support for Israel Bonds have become a talking point in his primary race, with challengers Raj Goyle and Drew Warshaw both pledging to divest from investments in Israel should they take office.

Running from DiNapoli’s left, Goyle’s and Warshaw’s positions are in line with former New York City comptroller and current House candidate Brad Lander, who chose not to buy new Israel Bonds while overseeing the city’s pension fund.

For the most vocal critics, the moral argument against public investment in Israel Bonds is paramount. Becky Silber, a New York state employee and member of Jewish Voice for Peace told The Intercept that she was horrified to learn in 2024 that her hard-earned retirement funds were being used to send money to the state of Israel.

“When I became aware that my pension fund was being used to fund Israel, I was gutted, honestly,” Silber told The Intercept. “I was horrified watching the news coming out of Gaza. I was checking every purchase in the grocery store to make sure that my money wasn’t funding it. And so to learn that hundreds of millions of dollars of my pension fund were being sent to Israel with no guardrails on how it was spent, that was devastating.”

Critics of the investments also point to a fiscally responsible argument against the bonds. Unlike traditional foreign-debt assets, Israel Bonds cannot be sold on a secondary market and instead must be held until they mature. That makes them a potentially unsound bet, especially considering the rapid decline of Israel’s credit rating in recent years.

“It is hard to justify this as financial prudence or an effective strategy for diversification, especially when many other comparable investments are less risky; more transparent; and more liquid,” said Kaycee Wimbish, a Kingston, New York, resident active with the Mid-Hudson Valley chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. “These utterly disproportionate investments reveal a hidden political agenda.”

The post New York Comptroller’s Trip to Israel Raised Ethical Concerns, State Commission Said appeared first on The Intercept.

Staff at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Delaney Hall Detention Facility — a Newark immigration jail operated by the private prison giant GEO Group — took steps to crack down on the strikes, including attacking immigration detainees with pepper spray and batons, transferring protest leaders to other facilities, and shutting down family visitation, advocates and relatives of detainees told The Intercept.

One woman who spoke with her nephew inside Delaney Hall told The Intercept that she was told negotiations were set to take place between guards and striking inmates — but instead, her nephew reported, guards attacked the detainees with pepper spray.

“My nephew can’t see right now because he was hit on the head with a baton,” said the woman, who requested anonymity for fear of further retaliation against her nephew. “Prison operators told my nephew and the others on the hunger strike that ICE was going to negotiate on Thursday. They got hit instead.”

Members of Congress from New Jersey and New York made repeated visits to inspect the facility this week. On Wednesday, New York Democratic Reps. Dan Goldman and Jerry Nadler emerged from Delaney Hall looking deeply shaken and spoke of hearing about miserable conditions inside with no doctor onsite.

“Detainees told me about scalding hot showers that have led to burns and blisters; worms in food; and being denied medical care, visitation rights, and time outdoors,” Goldman told The Intercept. “Many of them believed that this treatment is in retribution for the ongoing hunger strike, which they have initiated to bring attention to the horrific conditions they are enduring despite having committed no serious crimes.”

The alleged retaliation against detainees matches a long-standing pattern, according to a 2021 report from the American Civil Liberties Union, which detailed systematic abuses carried out against hunger strikers at dozens of facilities across 24 states.

In a post to X on Thursday, Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., said he was barred from visiting the unit on which the physical abuses were alleged to have taken place, but said he spoke with detainees on another unit who reported several of their fellows being taken to the hospital for injuries sustained in attacks by guards.

In a statement to The Intercept, GEO Group spokesperson Christopher Ferreira confirmed the use of chemical agents against detainees on Thursday as part of a “physical altercation involving detainees at Delaney Hall,” but did not address questions about the attacks on detainees coming as retaliation.

“In accordance with established policies and protocols approved by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement,” Ferreira said, “staff implemented appropriate response and control measures to safely resolve the situation, including the limited use of chemical agents.”

The accusations came amid ongoing protests outside the facility, at which federal agents have repeatedly attacked demonstrators, including family members of those inside, with pepper spray and batons. (ICE referred a request for comment its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, which did not immediately respond.)

For nearly a week, family members have been denied visitation, and protesters have set up a tent outside Delaney Hall to provide support for those who had hoped to visit their loved ones inside.

“Relatives of detainees haven’t been let in since Saturday,” said Ana Paola Pazmino, the director of Resistencia en Acción NJ, a local grassroots group. “This is despite the fact that DHS has said there has been no hunger strike. They are liars.”

Protesting Poor Conditions

The hunger and labor strikes began last week when detainees began refusing food and stopped showing up for their jobs to protest their poor conditions inside the facility. Among their demands are the release of elderly and very young detainees and those with serious medical conditions.

In response to a call from one detainee leader’s wife for solidarity demonstrations, protests began gathering outside the facility on May 21, with demonstrators showing up virtually around the clock every day since, despite attacks by armed ICE agents.

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Andre Beresford Burger, an organizer with the group Movimiento Cosecha, told The Intercept on Thursday that he had been pepper-sprayed by ICE agents but remained undeterred.

“If ICE agents are willing to storm into a crowd and brutalize people on camera and in front of the press,” he said, “what does this say about what they’re doing to people inside immigration detention, away from the cameras?”

Deploring the conditions, members of Congress called for Delaney Hall to be closed.

“The situation here just gets worse every day,” Pallone, the House member from New Jersey, said in a video after visiting the facility. “This place needs to be closed down. The conditions are horrible. You can’t get due process, you can’t see a doctor on any kind of regular basis. The reality is that ICE and the Department of Homeland Security … are trying to ship people out that are trying to tell the stories.”

Ferreira, the GEO Group spokesperson, denied reports of poor conditions at the facility, which he labeled a “coordinated, politically motivated campaign by outside groups to dismantle ICE and federal immigration detention.”

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On Thursday evening, New Jersey state troopers and Newark police shut down traffic on Doremus Avenue, the industrial thoroughfare on which Delaney Hall sits, but protests continued well into the night. Long standoffs between demonstrators and ICE agents were punctuated by bursts of violent aggression from federal officers, who swung at protesters with batons, doused them in pepper spray, and fired pepper balls into the crowd.

From outside Delaney Hall, detainees could be seen in windows raising their fists and lights could be seen flickering periodically, a signal from those inside that they heard their supporters on the outside.

The post ICE Pepper-Sprayed, Beat Detainees for Protesting “Horrific Conditions” in Delaney Hall Jail appeared first on The Intercept.

The 192-page report, authored by a Democratic strategist and first published by CNN on Thursday morning, goes in-depth on several factors found to be detrimental to Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign in its ultimate loss to Donald Trump. Despite the contention within the party over then-President Joe Biden’s support for Israel’s genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, however, the war doesn’t get a single mention.

Also missing from the document are the words “Israel,” “Palestine,” “Arab American,” and “Muslim.”

A spokesperson for the DNC declined to comment on the omission of anything having to do with Gaza, instead pointing The Intercept to a Substack written by party chair Ken Martin in which he acknowledged what the committee found to be several shortcomings by the report’s author, Democratic strategist Paul Rivera.

One policymaker who spoke with Rivera in July 2025 for the qualitative, fact-finding portion of the autopsy research told The Intercept that he was surprised when the report emerged with no mention of Gaza or the resulting conflicts within the Democratic coalition. He said that his group had discussed the impact of Gaza policy with Rivera at length. 

“Paul was very clear with us in our conversation that they had done the quantitative review,” said the politico, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the issue, “and that the data clearly showed that Gaza had hurt Biden and Harris.”

In recent weeks, pressure mounted to release the report in full — a move Martin said he was reluctant to take due to major flaws in the report, which he dubbed “not ready for primetime.”

“I am not proud of this product; it does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards,” Martin wrote Thursday in a post on the DNC’s Substack. “I don’t endorse what’s in this report, or what’s left out of it. I could not in good faith put the DNC’s stamp of approval on it.”

Martin also fails to mention Gaza, Israel, or any other terms related to the genocide in his post.

The policymaker said he had found Rivera to be thorough and professional, and he believes Martin is shifting the blame.

“My strong suspicion is that Paul was being thrown under the bus,” he said. “It’s very convenient to a lot of people that a lot seems to be missing, and it would be very convenient if the reason it’s missing is ‘oh, Paul’s really bad at his job.’”

Others defended Martin’s conduct. James Zogby, a founder of the Arab American Institute and a candidate for vice-chair of the DNC in 2024, praised Martin’s leadership but called his pledge to release the report an “unforced error” that was being seized upon by a consultant class hostile to his on focus rebuilding state party infrastructure.

“We know what the mistakes were,” Zogby said. “The question now is how do we not make them again, and we didn’t need to make a fuss over a report that wasn’t going to tell us anything we didn’t know.”

The Intercept attempted to reach Rivera via The Capacity Shop, a firm that lists him as an advisor, but the group did not respond to a request for comment.

“Nothing about this surprises me,” said Linda Sarsour, an organizer from Brooklyn who was active in organizing a campaign to pressure Harris to take a stance against the war. “If they don’t change course quickly to center Palestine, foreign policy and recognize the influence of Arab/Palestinian/Muslim/young/progressive American voters, they will likely have to write another autopsy report post 2028 presidential elections.”

In the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, Biden’s support for Israel’s war on Gaza became a key point of contention between the Democratic establishment, on one side, and progressive Democrats, including Arab Americans, on the other. The progressives argued that the failure to take a stance against unflinching support for the genocide was tamping down excitement among the party’s base, especially young voters.

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A group of delegates that dubbed themselves the “Uncommitted Movement” fought to get push the party left on Gaza. The activists put forward a slate of suggested speakers at the party convention in Chicago, including Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian-American state representative in Georgia, but none of the speakers were accepted.

Romman, who is currently running for Georgia’s state Senate, said she was deeply disappointed to see the lack of mention of Gaza in the report.

While the Gaza war was a key issue for many Arab American and Muslim voters, particularly in a swing state like Michigan, Romman acknowledged that most voters nationwide and in her home state of Georgia were not listing Gaza as their top concern. Still, she said, the issue emerged as something of a smell test for the integrity of Democratic politicians hoping to sell their message to an electorate beset by financial insecurity and healthcare woes.

“For most voters, if you look at what was their top issue, it’s the economy — of course,” Romman said. “But if you want politicians that are going to put you first and implement the kind of economic issues that you need to have a better life, those are going to be the politicians that are not beholden to special interests. And so Gaza became a way to look for that.”

The Democratic Party, meanwhile, has sought to thoroughly distance itself from the report, going so far as to release an annotated version highlighting missing data and unsubstantiated claims.

The document contains a disclaimer at the top of every page: “This document reflects the views of the author, not the DNC. The DNC was not provided with the underlying sourcing, interviews, or supporting data for many of the assertions contained herein and therefore cannot independently verify the claims presented.”

Update: May 21, 2026, 2:35 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with comments from a policymaker who spoke with Paul Rivera for the DNC autopsy report.

The post DNC Autopsy of 2024 Loss Doesn’t Mention Gaza or Israel at all appeared first on The Intercept.

The woman, a dual citizen of New Zealand and the United States with residences in Manhattan and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was one of 30 passengers who left the MV Hondius expedition cruise ship while it docked at Saint Helena island, in the South Atlantic, in late April after one passenger had already died of a lethal strain of hantavirus. A second and third passenger died days later, one on board and one in a hospital in South Africa, but by the time the ship had become a focus of headlines worldwide, the woman was well on her way on a globe-hopping itinerary.

The CDC informed health officials in various states of other Americans potentially exposed to the virus, but failed to alert New York health officials about the Manhattan woman.

There is no indication that the woman intended to come back to the United States or to New York any time soon. Instead, she continued on a multi-continental trip around the world. Her ability to continue traveling — and the lack of notice issued to authorities in the location to which she might eventually return — raise worrying questions about the potential spread of the disease, said Dr. Abraar Karan, an infectious disease specialist at Stanford University.

“If she’s on the loose, then we need to be aware of where she might come back to,” Karan said. “So the New York Department of Health, and officials at the port of entry, they need to make sure this person is flagged when they return.”

The traveler, a 75-year-old former pharmaceutical executive, matches the description of a former ship passenger who is now in quarantine in Taiwan, according to local news reports there. Her peregrinations first came to light in reporting by Intercept contributor Jacqueline Sweet, who published a report on the traveler on her personal Substack.

The woman’s dual nationality and connection to addresses in multiple states appears to have muddied the lines of communication.

A spokesperson for the New York State Department of Health told The Intercept that after raising the issue with the CDC, they learned that the agency had notified a different state of the woman’s possible exposure to the virus. The spokesperson did not identify the state in question, but public records show the woman is registered to vote at an apartment in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Despite her voter registration in Florida, she has referred in social media posts to the co-op she owns in Manhattan as her home.

Representatives of the CDC and the Florida Department of Health did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment. Florida has not reported that it is monitoring any residents for possible exposure to hantavirus.

New York and other states — including California, Arizona, Washington, Georgia, Virginia, and North Carolina — have reported residents with possible exposures, with some states indicating they received notice from the CDC and others saying cruise passengers self-reported. All 18 U.S. citizens who returned to the country directly from the cruise are currently in quarantine in Omaha, Nebraska, and Atlanta, Georgia, while another 16 citizens who shared a plane with a woman evacuated to Johannesburg are being monitored.

From the South Atlantic to a Global Conference

The outbreak took place aboard the MV Hondius, an “expedition” cruise ship that takes adventurous passengers on a monthlong specialized polar tour, stopping at hard-to-reach islands in the South Atlantic. The cruise attracted wildlife enthusiasts, biologists, and extreme travelers attempting to visit as many countries and territories as possible, willing to shell out tens of thousands of dollars for the trip.

On April 6, one of those travelers, a 70-year-old Dutch man who prior to the sea voyage had spent more than three months traveling in South America, became ill. He died onboard on April 11, and on April 24, the victim’s 69-year-old wife disembarked at Saint Helena; the next day, she flew to Johannesburg, South Africa, where she died soon after. A third passenger died on May 2 — the same day that the World Health Organization declared an outbreak of hantavirus as the culprit.

The CDC has been accused of a slow response to the outbreak, holding its first briefing on the crisis on May 9, a week after WHO announced that the deaths were caused by the rare Andes strain of hantavirus, which is spread in South America by the pygmy rice rat and which can be transmitted among humans via close physical contact with someone already showing signs of infection. Because the early symptoms of the virus, including fever, fatigue, and muscle aches, are common in many other viral infections, the disease can be hard to identify before the rapid onset of more serious symptoms like pneumonia and respiratory distress.

In the case of the hantavirus outbreak, as with other public health crises, officials need to walk a careful line between ensuring safety and avoiding panic, Karan said. And the key to keeping a lid on the outbreak is ensuring proper quarantine for anyone with a potential exposure.

“Because this took place on a cruise ship, it actually helped us detect this quickly, and for now it appears to be decently contained,” Karan said. “But the problem is that, it’s not like you have a camera on these people to know if they’re not going out or seeing other people. So you don’t definitely know unless they’re quarantining at a monitored center.”

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Compounding the trouble, however, is that many of the passengers on the cruise are part of an “extreme travel” subculture whose lifestyle centers around relentless jetsetting. Even with the international attention being paid to the ship and its passengers, a number of people have been found to have trekked globe-spanning itineraries since the outbreak was revealed. 

The itinerary of the Manhattan woman after she left the MV Hondius showed a complexity typical of such “extreme travelers.” In a social media post on April 28, the traveler said she had flown from Saint Helena to Johannesburg, where she stayed in a hotel before flying on to Hong Kong and then to Bangkok, Thailand. In Bangkok, she wrote that she took a shuttle across the city to its second airport and flew to Trang, in southern Thailand, where she stayed in a hotel overnight before taking a boat to the island of Ko Ngai. Her most recent social media post was from Hanoi, Vietnam, several days before reports surfaced of the former ship passenger matching her description under quarantine in Taiwan.

She was just one of 30 travelers who left the ship while it docked at Saint Helena, prior to the declaration of an outbreak — setting off a scramble by global public health officials to identify everyone who might have been exposed.

The profile of the passengers themselves complicated the picture, according to Alina Chan, a molecular biologist and co-author of “VIRAL: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19” who advocated for more scrutiny of a possible lab origin for the virus that caused the Covid pandemic.

“The cruise selected for these extreme travelers, and you cannot ask for a potentially better superspreader,” Chan said. “And if one of the passengers presented to an international hospital with symptoms without the hospital being aware of their exposure on the ship, by the time the hospital would know, healthcare workers could have already been exposed.”

Most public health officials agree the hantavirus outbreak is unlikely to transform into a pandemic. But the incubation period for the Andes virus is anywhere from four to 42 days, raising concerns that the traveler and others who left the ship prior to the outbreak becoming known could transmit the virus to others if they become sick. That’s led global health officials to scramble to identify passengers and notify their home countries. But the timing of these communications, and how they unfolded, are unclear, as the case of this woman reveals.

While the CDC alerted a number of states, including New York, to the fact that residents with potential exposures could be coming home, the Manhattan-based traveler appears to have slipped through the cracks, and state health officials there only learned of her connection to the state after receiving inquiries from Sweet.

It appears that the MV Hondius’s parent company first reported that this passenger was a New Zealand national to New Zealand health authorities. After The Intercept began making inquiries with the New Zealand Ministry of Health in conjunction with reporters from news outlet Radio New Zealand, as well as to the woman and other conference attendees, the Ministry of Health told Radio New Zealand that although the woman had ignored their previous attempts to contact and assist her, on Tuesday she suddenly contacted them. The Ministry of Health said they had alerted the United States last week that she was in fact a resident of the U.S., and not New Zealand, and on Tuesday, they also alerted health officials in the country she is in currently, which is unknown.

On Monday, news from New Zealand broke that an American woman, since reported as being from California, had turned up in remote Pitcairn Island, a tiny South Pacific island with less than 50 residents. She had flown from Saint Helena after departing the MV Hondius early to San Francisco, before flying to Tahiti and then taking a boat voyage to Pitcairn. It’s unknown if any health authorities contacted her before her travels. She is now being quarantined on the island.

Reached by The Intercept, a spokesperson for the California Department of Public Health pointed to an existing press release about monitoring hantavirus exposures and added: “When we have new information to share, we will do so.”

Chan advised that “the WHO should make a list of all passengers available to all countries so they can be aware of visitors with exposure, rather than rely on each country.” Communication between the WHO and the United States was delayed in the days of the MV Hondius outbreak, since the Trump administration left the global health alliance, but the CDC and the WHO have reportedly been working together for the past week. 

“In a best-case scenario there are no more waves, but this shows the WHO and the CDC are not prepared. This was the best-case scenario, with the passengers all known from the cruise,” Chan said. “When you can mess up with this controlled of a scenario, what will happen next time?”

The post CDC Didn’t Tell New York About Resident on Hantavirus-Plagued Cruise appeared first on The Intercept.

David Suarez, a city commissioner for Miami Beach, is accused of hiring the trucks to drive past a Jewish Voice for Peace demonstration outside the Art Basel festival in Miami Beach in December. The trucks accused JVP of being an “extremist group” and singled out members Alan Levine and his wife, Donna Nevel, with the label “Jew Hater,” according to court documents that Jewish Voice for Peace South Florida filed on Wednesday.

The trucks arrived while JVP and other Palestine solidarity organizations were protesting Art Basel in what has become an annual tradition since 2023. Activists have picketed each year outside the annual art fair, calling for a boycott over financial ties between Art Basel sponsor UBS and Elbit Systems, an Israeli weapons manufacturer.

Nevel, a native of Miami Beach who described her early education in Jewish ethics as a driving force behind her activism, accused Suarez of targeting her and her husband over their clashing views of Judaism and Israel’s assault on Gaza.

“The Commissioner has targeted me and called me a Jew hater because I differ with his views on Israel,” Nevel said. “When we saw the billboards, we didn’t know Commissioner Suarez was the one who created and paid for them, but having watched his destructive, taunting behavior in City Commission meetings over and over again, I can’t say I was shocked to learn it was him — though, even for him, it was extreme.”

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Supporting exhibits filed alongside the motion include an invoice from Mobile Billboards of Miami dated December 6, 2025, charging Suarez $4,000 for the rental of three trucks, and an email from the company to a Gmail account that JVP claims is the commissioner’s personal email address.

After publication, Suarez sent The Intercept an email doubling down on his accusation. “You can use this response, only in its entirety,” Suarez wrote, “as a jew, I can spot a jew hater a mile away.”

The motion, filed in the Southern District of Florida on Wednesday, requests that the court compel Suarez, Miami Beach Mayor Steven Meiner, and others to produce documents related to a larger court case brought by JVP over a city ordinance that the group claims was passed to stifle its protests against the genocide in Gaza.

“In the months since October 2023, the Mayor and the Miami Beach City Commission have become active supporters of Israel’s campaign of relentless destruction in Gaza,” the group wrote in its broader complaint filed in September of last year. “At the same time, the Defendants have aggressively sought to silence critics of the Israeli onslaught in Gaza, first by adopting a resolution that prohibited the City from hiring contractors who refused to do business with Israel, then by publicly castigating Israel’s critics for their views, and finally by passing an unconstitutional anti-protest Ordinance explicitly designed to silence criticism of Israel.”

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The city government of Miami Beach has come under fire recently for allegations that it targeted pro-Palestine residents, including Raquel Pacheco, a local artist who in January received a visit to her home by police after writing a Facebook post criticizing Meiner for his pro-Israel views. In March, Pacheco sued the city, Meiner, and police chief Wayne Jones in federal court alleging that the visit to her home violated her First Amendment rights.

A spokesperson for Meiner told The Intercept that the police visit was motivated by legitimate security concerns and denied that it took place due to disagreement with Pacheco’s political speech.

Similar stunts to the Miami Beach billboard trucks have become a hallmark of pro-Israel groups seeking to discredit and attack pro-Palestine activists. Accuracy in Media, a pro-Israel pressure group focusing on allegations of antisemitic media bias, has hired so-called “doxxing trucks” on multiple occasions to personally call out members of the pro-Palestine movement at Columbia University and other college campuses. In January, a state court in New York ruled that a defamation lawsuit over the tactic could proceed.

Update: May 13, 2026, 6:11 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with a statement from the Miami Beach mayor’s office.

Update: May 14, 2026
This story has been updated with a statement from city commissioner David Suarez.

The post Miami Beach Official Hired Billboard Truck to Call Pro-Palestine Activists “Jew Hater,” Lawsuit Alleges appeared first on The Intercept.

The “Great Israeli Real Estate Event” took place Monday evening at Young Israel of Midwood, an Orthodox synagogue in southern Brooklyn. Event organizers confirmed the location in an automated response to The Intercept’s request for comment, but they did not comment on the event itself.

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The roving expo is co-sponsored by several real estate companies with ties to Israel, and it is typically held at synagogues and other centers of Jewish life. At the event held last week at Park East Synagogue, The Intercept saw at least one table advertising land sales in Kfar Eldad, Karnei Shomron, and other Israeli settlements in the occupied territories — sales considered illegal under international law.

The event presented a test for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has caught flak from the pro-Israel side for condemning the illegal land sales, and from pro-Palestine groups and free speech advocates for allowing the NYPD to maintain “buffer zones” that keep protesters away from houses of worship.

Compounding the mayor’s entanglement is the fact that Young Israel of Midwood, the synagogue where Monday’s event took place, is home to a city-funded senior center called Young Israel Senior Services. The senior center received more than $800,000 from the Department for the Aging in 2024, according to a city budget document.

A spokesperson for Mamdani, who campaigned on his pro-Palestine bona fides, declined to comment on the latest real estate event, pointing instead to comments about last week’s expo.

“Mayor Mamdani is deeply opposed to the real estate expo this evening that includes the promotion of the sale of land in settlements in the Occupied West Bank,” spokesperson Sam Raskin told The Intercept last week.

The mayor has also affirmed attendees’ rights to go to and from synagogues without interference, in line with a controversial “buffer zone” bill the New York City Council passed last month. The new law, sponsored by the council’s moderate speaker, requires the New York Police Department to address physical obstructions and interference at houses of worship — which opponents see as a means to crack down on protests.

By late afternoon on Monday, the NYPD had blocked off the street for a block in each direction from the synagogue, but allowed protesters to congregate within sight of the building.

Groups of pro-Palestine demonstrators marched through the neighborhood on side streets, followed by a swarm of pro-Israel counter-protesters. Among the pro-Israel demonstrators, a large number of young men on scooters hurled slurs at the pro-Palestine protesters and at times almost came to blows as police struggled to keep them apart. Members of the pro-Israel crowd threw eggs, and one protester told The Intercept a pro-Israel counter-protester had pepper-sprayed him.

Police appeared to make at least one arrest. A spokesperson for the NYPD did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Related

Mamdani Condemns NYC Expo Promoting Property Sales in Israeli West Bank Settlements

Last week’s event, held Tuesday at Park East Synagogue on the Upper East Side, prompted heated protests from Pal-Awda and other pro-Palestine activists, which in turn drew a counter-protest from pro-Israel groups including members of the extremist group Betar U.S. The NYPD kept the groups separate and kept protesters, members of the media, and members of the public alike away from the synagogue with a tight cordon of security barriers that impeded movement along numerous city blocks in the vicinity of the synagogue.

After last week’s event, Mamdani praised the NYPD’s handling of the crowd at an unrelated press conference on Wednesday.

“We in this city believe in the sacrosanct nature of the right to protest and also are committed to ensuring that any New Yorker can safely enter or exit from a house of worship and that access never be in question while we also protect the First Amendment, and I do believe that the police ensured that yesterday,” he said. “I think that critique of the policies of a government is very much separate from bigotry toward the people of a specific religious faith. And there is no tolerance for antisemitism.”

The New York Civil Liberties Union, by contrast, offered a rebuke for the police force, calling the NYPD’s barricaded area a “no-speech zone.”

“When politicians use Freedom of Religion as a pretext to impose severe restrictions on speech, they undermine all New Yorkers’ rights,” said Donna Lieberman, the NYCLU’s executive director, in a statement released Wednesday. “The subject of last [week’s] protests was not a religious service but a private, politically-charged real estate event held at a synagogue.”

Correction: May 11, 2026, 4:59 p.m. ET
Due to an editing error, this story previously stated that Mamdani signed the City Council’s new “buffer zone” law. The bill passed with a veto-proof majority, and Mamdani allowed it to become law without his signature.

Update: May 11, 9:31 p.m. ET
This story has been updated with details about the protest outside Monday’s event.

The post Israeli Real Estate Expo Advertising West Bank Settlements Returns to NYC appeared first on The Intercept.

On Monday, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee issued a coveted endorsement of state Sen. Joe Baldacci in the primary race, prompting angry protests from the three other candidates in the race to replace outgoing Democratic Rep. Jared Golden.

In response to the endorsement, the Penobscot County Democratic Committee — in Baldacci’s home county, which includes the city of Bangor — will vote Saturday on a measure to condemn the endorsement. The language of the proposal, which was put forward by former Maine state Senate President Charles Pray, denounces the endorsement as being in “total disregard and willfully ignoring” local party rules that bar the Democratic state and county chapters from backing a candidate in a primary.

“With the DCCC deciding to throw itself into the mix here, truthfully that just kind of aggravated me,” Pray told The Intercept. “I’m going to support whoever wins the Democratic nomination, but I just think it was an unfair position on their part of trying to dictate or trying to boost up a candidate. Point is, let the people decide. Let the voters in the primary make that determination.”

Pray, who previously worked in the Clinton and Obama administrations and described himself as “a progressive moderate with liberal tendencies but conservative perspectives,” has personally backed State Auditor Matt Dunlap in the race, but said his pique at the DCCC’s endorsement isn’t about any one candidate.

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“This has nothing to do with Joe — I think all four of them have an equal chance,” Pray said. “It’s a primary, and, by the way, our state party rules and our county rules are that the party organization cannot endorse or support a candidate.”

A spokesperson for the DCCC said the group was focused on winning in the general elections and beating back President Donald Trump’s agenda.

“It’s imperative that Democrats must take back the House to hold Trump accountable and deliver on what truly matters to voters,” said the spokesperson, Viet Shelton. “That’s why we are proud to announce our latest round of Red to Blue candidates who span the ideological spectrum, are authentic voices in their districts, and are best positioned to win in November.”

Four-Way Race

The race to replace Golden — who announced in November that he would not seek reelection — is being closely watched nationwide ahead of the midterm elections. Whoever takes the Democratic primary will square off against Paul LePage, a brash, plainspoken businessman and Republican former governor whose time running Maine was marked by proto-MAGA far-right populism.

Baldacci is facing off against Dunlap, who is also a former Maine secretary of state; Jordan Wood, a longtime Democratic fundraiser and political operative; and Paige Loud, a social worker and first-time candidate. In the wake of the DCCC endorsement of Baldacci, the other candidates in the race took aim at D.C. Democrats for picking a side.

“It’s undemocratic for national establishment Democrats to put their thumb on the scale in any primary,” Dunlap said. “Just like in certain other races across Maine this year, they won’t decide this one — the people of Maine will.”

With Dunlap picking up endorsements from Our Revolution, Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., and other progressives, Baldacci — who enjoys name recognition as the brother of former Gov. John Baldacci — is widely seen as the establishment candidate in the race. Reached by phone Thursday, Baldacci declined to comment on the Penobscot County party proposal condemning the endorsement, but said he was glad to have the backing of Democrats in Washington.

“I’m pleased that they did it,” Baldacci said, referring to the endorsement. “My understanding is they based it on polling to determine who is the best candidate to run against LePage.”

Wood said the DCCC move demonstrated the problems with Washington party politics.

“The fact that the national Democratic Party would come in and try to decide this primary literally weeks before we vote is just another example of how broken our Democratic leadership is,” he said.

A Pan Atlantic Omnibus poll in March put Baldacci well ahead of his opponents, but there is little in the way of recent polling to indicate a current popular favorite in the race. Following the stunning collapse of Gov. Janet Mills’s bid for the U.S. Senate — despite the backing of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee — against populist insurgent Graham Platner, not everyone in Maine sees the DCCC as the best political oracle to follow.

“It’s annoying that the DCCC thinks they know better than Mainers,” said Loud, the left-leaning social worker. “We just saw the DSCC’s endorsement of Janet Mills, and we all saw how that turned out. I don’t think they have the finger on the pulse.”

Update: May 7, 2026, 5:12 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include Jordan Wood’s experience as a political operative.

The post Maine Dems to Vote on Condemning DCCC Interference in House Primary appeared first on The Intercept.

The Great Israeli Real Estate Event — a showcase that advertises its services in helping people in the United States, Canada, and the U.K. purchase land in Israel and the West Bank — hosted the event at Park East Synagogue in Manhattan’s Upper East Side on Tuesday. The expo helps potential buyers navigate taxes, education concerns, and other issues that arise during relocation to Israel.

Ahead of the event, Mamdani spoke out against the possibility of potentially illegal land sales being facilitated within the city.

“Mayor Mamdani is deeply opposed to the real estate expo this evening that includes the promotion of the sale of land in settlements in the Occupied West Bank,” said Sam Raskin, a spokesperson for Mamdani, in a statement to The Intercept. “These settlements are illegal under international law and deeply tied to the ongoing displacement of Palestinians.”

The website for the expo includes a reference to Gush Etzion, a cluster of some 20 settlements in the West Bank, southeast of Jerusalem, that are considered illegal under international law. Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, said the inclusion of Gush Etzion was a telling reminder of the claim made on all of the Occupied Territories by the pro-settlement movement.

“Gush Etzion is the Israeli term for an area of the West Bank located south of Jerusalem on which, under international law, all Israeli construction, all Israeli communities are considered illegal under international law,” Friedman said. “The pro-settlement movement around the world, and most Israelis, do not make any distinction between Israel and the West Bank. The idea is that all of this is Eretz Yisrael” — Hebrew for “the land of Israel” — “and it belongs to the Jews because God gave it to them.”

The Intercept attended the event Tuesday. Just inside the synagogue, a large welcome sign specified that the event was for “information purposes only.” More than a dozen tables advertised the services of real estate companies, most of which promoted glitzy luxury buildings in Tel Aviv, Netanya, and other cities inside Israel’s internationally recognized borders.

At least one company, Harey Zahav, displayed a map of properties in Kfar Eldad, Karnei Shomron, and other Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Brochures at the Harey Zahav table offered detailed looks at properties in these settlements.

Past Discrimination Allegations

The expo is being sponsored by a group called Home in Israel, but it isn’t the only organization putting on events of this sort. In recent years, real estate fairs put on by similar groups have popped up in New York and other North American cities, including Baltimore, Montreal, and others, including at synagogues.

Israeli settlements in the West Bank are widely considered to be open only to Jewish residents. At one real estate event in suburban New Jersey in 2024, protesters said they were explicitly asked about their religious affiliations when they tried to register for the fair, potentially implicating anti-discrimination laws. The New Jersey Civil Rights Division reportedly questioned realtors about their practices. (The New Jersey Civil Rights Division not immediately respond to requests for comment.)

Pal-Awda, a pro-Palestine group, announced plans on social media for a protest on Tuesday outside the Park East Synagogue.

“We will not be silent as ethnic cleansing is being actively promoted in our neighborhoods,” the group wrote.

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Self-proclaimed supporters of the synagogue have circulated a flyer on social media announcing a counter-protest. “All members of the Jewish community need to come out and protect the synagogue,” says the flyer. Though it includes the social media handles of the synagogue, the call for a counter-protest did not appear to come from Park East Synagogue itself. (A spokesperson for the synagogue declined to comment.)

Past events have led to sometimes violent confrontations between protesters and counter-demonstrators.

In light of the dueling protests planned outside Park East Synagogue, Raskin, the mayoral spokesperson, called for both the safety of eventgoers and respect for the free-speech rights of the protesters.

“Our administration has also been clear that we are committed to ensuring safe entry and exit from any house of worship,” he said, “and that such access never be in question while all protesters are able to exercise their First Amendment rights.”

Protests at Park East

Park East Synagogue has already been the site of one anti-Zionist protest that raised hackles in New York.

In November, Pal-Awda organized a demonstration against an event hosted by Nefesh B’Nefesh, a group that facilitates migration to Israel, sparking howls of protest from then-Mayor Eric Adams and other political leaders in the city.

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That protest, along with others across New York City, were part of the impetus behind a bill introduced this year in the City Council aimed at creating a so-called buffer zone to keep demonstrators at a distance from any house of worship.

Despite the opposition of free-speech advocates, a version of that bill — requiring the New York Police Department to provide a plan for protecting houses of worship but without the buffer zone provision — passed in March and became law on April 25 after Mamdani declined to sign or veto it. The bill gave the New York Police Department 45 days to provide a proposed plan of action and 90 days to give a final plan, meaning it is not yet in full effect.

A related bill proposing buffer zones for universities and other educational institutions passed the City Council but was vetoed by Mamdani, who criticized the bill as overbroad and a threat to free speech.

Update: May 5, 2026, 6:45 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include reporting from inside the Great Israeli Real Estate Event on the promotion of property for sale in Israeli settlements that are considered illegal under international law.

The post Mamdani Condemns NYC Expo Promoting Property Sales in Israeli West Bank Settlements appeared first on The Intercept.

Sightline Intelligence, a firm focused on AI video processing, has made at least 10 shipments of hardware to the Israeli weapons giant Elbit Systems since 2024, according to investigators with the Movement Research Unit, the group that originally obtained the documents.

The revelation that a local company has been doing business with Israel has led to protests by activists in Portland.

“We really want our city councilors to help us follow up and look into what Sightline is doing,” said Olivia Katbi, a member of Portland Democratic Socialists of America and an organizer with the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. “Are they producing these items here in our city? What is their relationship with Elbit Systems in Israel?”

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Drones have become a crucial part of Israel’s military strategy, allowing it to mount deadly attacks without endangering its own troops, said Movement Research Unit’s Abdullah F., who asked to omit his last name due to the sensitivity of his work.

“They’ve been connected to the death of many civilians,” he said, “and they’re a critical part also of the surveillance architecture.”

10 Shipments

Researchers with the Movement Research Unit, which gathers information for left-wing organizations and causes, said they pinpointed 10 shipments from Sightline to Elbit Systems in Israel. Four of the shipments went to an Elbit facility in the city of Karmiel, Israel; four to Rehovot; one to Holon; and one to Haifa.

The Intercept was able to independently verify the dates and corresponding cargo weights of those shipments from Portland to Israel.

Six of the shipments passed through John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and four went through Newark International Airport in New Jersey. (Sightline, its parent company Acron Technologies, and Elbit Systems did not respond to requests for comment.)

Using commercial data drawn from cargo manifests, the researchers found that the shipments included SLA-3000-OEM embedded video processing boards and associated components that are part of a surveillance system that can be used for target recognition.

In marketing materials, the company says the tech can quickly identify people and vehicles on the ground and classify them as civilians, military targets, armed targets, or people willing or unwilling to surrender. It assigns a percentage to the confidence of these classifications.

“Sightline provides an application that allows unmanned vehicles to autonomously classify targets, and these video processing boards are a crucial part of that,” Abdullah said. “They enable low-latency — AKA very fast — video processing so that a drone operator can, in real time, see like, ‘This person is 94 percent unarmed’ or ‘75 percent military.’ And so we can all imagine how decisions might be made based on that algorithm.”

Abdullah declined to detail research techniques for fear that companies could take steps to evade identification of future shipments. Research using these techniques has, however, been borne out in the past. Shipments identified by the group’s methods were confirmed through parliamentary questioning in the United Kingdom and are, in part, the basis for an ongoing court case in Belgium against FedEx for the undeclared transport of weapons components, in both cases with regards to the shipment to Israel of parts for F-35 fighter planes.

Similar methods were also used to expose a shipment of nitrocellulose — an explosive component used in ammunition — from JFK Airport to Israel in May 2025, as first reported by The Intercept and the Irish investigative website The Ditch.

Israeli Targeting

Originally founded in 2007 as Sightline Applications, Sightline Intelligence is based in Portland, with offices in Hood River, Oregon, and Brisbane, Australia. Until Friday, the company was owned by Artemis, a Boston-based private equity firm that announced last week it had sold the company for an undisclosed sum to Acron Technologies.

Sightline specializes in target recognition and touts its low-latency video processing as an essential tool in the modern military arsenal. The firm has not publicized business dealings with Elbit Systems, a prominent target of the global BDS movement. On its website, however, Sightline lists FMS Aerospace — a company that works with weapons contractors in the country — as an “international partner.” FMS Aerospace, in turn, lists Israel’s air force as a partner, along with Elbit Systems and other companies in the Israeli military–industrial complex.

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Israel’s use of military drones and commercial quadcopter drones has been documented extensively by journalists and human rights organizations like Human Rights Watch and Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. There is no publicly available information as to whether the hardware or software developed by Sightline Intelligence has seen use in the field by Israeli forces, but a recent photo included in a dossier of information hacked from the phone of a high-ranking general appears to indicate that, at the very least, Israel has tested the technology, Abdullah said.

The photo, published online by the Handala hacking team, an outfit believed to be operating out of Iran, shows Israeli Gen. Herzi Halevi with half a dozen other men in military garb and a laptop screen in view that appears to shows a software user interface that places a map with markings on the left of the screen and informational and toggle displays in a column on the right side. (Abdullah, who pointed The Intercept to the image, cautioned that he could not independently verify it.) The display is similar to the user interface for Sightline targeting program that the company posted online.

“On the laptop you can see what looks very, very similar to Sightline’s geospatial intelligence planning tool,” Abdullah said. “You can see the long blue lines that are on the front of the screen, which appear to match up with the planning tool. You can also see a couple of blue toggles on the side that also seem to match up, and then a goal distance bar in the bottom right of the screen that appears very similar.”

“While we cannot say conclusively that this is the same platform,” he added, “this is highly suggestive of this software being deployed or trialed in an Israeli military environment.”

Portland Protests

In Portland, protesters organizing against Sightline’s business relationship with Israel spoke last week at a City Council meeting and later gathered several dozen people to rally outside the company’s headquarters. (A spokesperson for Portland Mayor Keith Wilson declined to comment.)

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One item in particular from Sightline’s promotional materials caught the eye of local activists. The company’s website shows what appears to be a surveillance image taken from above the aerial tram stop at Oregon Health & Science University, a public research university in the city.

The image appeared in a video originally posted online by the company last June. The video, however, has since been updated with several seconds cut to exclude the images of the tram stop.

Katbi, the BDS organizer, said, “I think people will be mad if they find out that this company is potentially training this technology to identify us as civilians here in Portland, without our consent, and then using that technology to kill people in Gaza.”

Correction: May 5, 2026, 9:39 a.m. ET
This story has been updated to correct the destination cities in Israel where Elbit Systems received shipments from Sightline Intelligence, according to shipping data. They are Karmiel, Rehovot, Holon, and Haifa.

The post Portland AI Company Ships Targeting Tech to Israeli Drone Maker appeared first on The Intercept.

“It’s simultaneously infuriating and laughable that they’re charging the SPLC with funding hate groups,” said Mary Wynne Kling, an Alabama native and longtime supporter of the group. Pointing to the SPLC’s long-standing work battling extremist groups, which included bankrupting the United Klans of America, she added, “We knew they were paying informants.”

The indictment, filed Tuesday in the SPLC’s home state of Alabama, charged the group with fraud for funding hate groups and with money laundering for setting up fictitious business entities to route payments to informants. SPLC leadership has denied the allegations.

Kling and over a dozen other donors to the group told The Intercept that by using its money to root out information on hate groups, the SPLC was doing exactly what they hoped it would with their dollars.

Originally founded in 1971 as a civil rights-focused legal clinic, the SPLC struck on a lasting strategy of direct confrontation with hate groups in 1979. It soon shifted its focus entirely toward combating the far right and documenting extremism in its “Hatewatch” project, which identifies hate groups and their leaders — a practice that has drawn the ire of right-wing figures enraged at being labeled as purveyors of hate.

The Trump administration is taking aim at SPLC’s image by accusing the group of lying to its donor base and propping up the very groups it claims to fight in order to stay in business.

“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in a statement released on Tuesday. “Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked. This Department of Justice will hold the SPLC and every other fraudulent organization operating with the same deceptive playbook accountable. No entity is above the law.”

FBI Director Kash Patel accused the group of taking advantage of the esteem in which its donors held the SPLC.

“They raised money by lying to their donor network — thousands of Americans — to go ahead and pay the leadership of these supposed violent extremist groups,” Patel said the same day at a press conference.

The Intercept put out a call for responses and sent a survey seeking reactions to the indictment, verifying that 20 respondents were SPLC contributors with proof of donation. Seven of them spoke to The Intercept in interviews; 13 others submitted responses to the survey. All 20 verified SPLC donors said they continued to support the organization and felt their money had been put to good use — including when used to pay informants inside groups like the Klan.

Far from feeling defrauded, Ellie Wilson, a donor from Texas, said the indictment prompted her to make a new contribution to the group.

“I read up on the story this morning, before I made my donation, and to me, it doesn’t sound unusual,” Wilson told The Intercept on Wednesday. “There’s overhead costs associated with either joining these groups or doing their proper research and due diligence. If my donation was used to pay for the people who are infiltrating these groups to, you know, cover their expenses to join, to add to their cover, I see no problem with it.”

According to the indictment against the group, some of the funds used to pay informants went to existing members of hate groups, including people who were already on the SPLC’s list of extremists. One such individual, identified in court documents as a former chair of the National Alliance with the code name “F-42,” allegedly received more than $140,000 from the SPLC while being featured on its “Extremist File” page, according to prosecutors.

But according to Maya Lenox, a donor based in Texas, it’s only by working with such individuals that the SPLC is able to get the granular and encyclopedic information on the groups in its “Hatewatch” and “Hate Map” projects.

“This is an organization that has been providing very detailed information about how these hate groups have been moving, and of course, in order to have that information, you essentially are going to need spies,” said Lenox. “In order to obtain this information, you’re going to have to make it worth their time.”

In addition to the 20 verified donors, dozens of other self-identified donors to the SPLC, whose contributions were not independently verified, responded to The Intercept’s survey and expressed their support for the group and their skepticism of the indictment against it. Some respondents expressed mild criticisms of the group, pointing to controversy over its labor practices or accusations that its work chills free speech, but no respondent reported feeling deceived or defrauded by its use of paid informants in extremist groups.

All seven people who spoke with The Intercept for this story rejected outright the claim that the actions outlined in the indictment amounted to fraud. Multiple donors added that they found the current Department of Justice difficult to trust given the agency’s documented history over the past year of politically motivated indictments against the perceived foes of President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.

“Anything that comes out of this administration, this FBI, or this Department of Justice, I have to take it with a level of incredulity that I find really unfortunate,” said donor Joe O’Donnell of Buffalo. “We’ve seen this administration truly pick and choose where they want to be and how they want to enforce.”

The SPLC did not respond to a request for comment from The Intercept, but the group is receiving support from fellow civil rights organizations and other organizations on the left. In an open letter published Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union, the AFL-CIO, and more than 100 other civil rights groups, labor unions, and religious coalitions agreed to a mutual defense pact and committed to defend one another against attacks by the Trump administration.

“We have the right to assemble—and we will continue to do just that, and we will encourage and support people and allied organizations to do the same, uniting across communities, sectors, issue areas and identities,” the pact declared. “We will not be silenced. We will continue to do the work that puts people over power.”

Tuesday’s indictment against the SPLC is just the latest shot in a long-running war between elements of the MAGA right and the civil rights group. In 2019, the Center for Immigration Studies — a hard-line anti-immigration group whose platform mirrors many of the Trump administration’s platform — sued unsuccessfully to get their group removed from the SPLC’s list of hate groups. In October, Patel and the FBI cut ties with the SPLC, which had been a longtime FBI partner, pointing to the work of his agency’s “Anti-Christian Bias Panel” and calling the SPLC a “partisan smear machine.”

Many of the donors who spoke with The Intercept cited this long history of animosity between the MAGA movement and the SPLC as a reason to be suspicious of the indictment.

“They’re in bed with groups that the SPLC has, in my opinion, rightly identified as hate groups,” said Kling, the donor from Alabama. “The SPLC has spent their entire existence fighting a lot of the things that it appears this administration supports.”

The post “We Knew They Were Paying Informants”: SPLC Donors Reject Trump DOJ Fraud Claims appeared first on The Intercept.

ICE put out a call for information from parties interested in securing a contract with the agency for up to 150 parking spaces, according to a government procurement document posted online on April 16. The infamous immigration enforcement agency is looking for a lot in the vicinity of its Varick Street field office in Hudson Square, just south of downtown New York City’s tony West Village.

The need for parking of ICE vehicles set off alarms for immigrant advocates like Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition, who called on garage owners to resist the temptation of “a quick buck” in exchange for making ICE’s job easier.

“The Trump administration continues to expand its war on immigrants, and in this moment it’s incumbent on private parking facilities to not collude with immigration enforcement that separates families and guts our communities,” Awawdeh said. “New Yorkers are outraged by what we’re seeing day in and day out, and we should all be ensuring that we’re not complicit.”

ICE operates a fleet of vehicles to use in its deportation operations, including unmarked vehicles that agents use to get around and take people into custody. At a downtown lot near its Varick Street office, ICE has stored compact cargo vans with internal cages — the sort used to transport immigrant detainees — according to local news site The City. The contract for that lot is set to expire.

The new request for information about potential contracts says, “The ICE NYC Field Office is seeking no more than 150 exclusive secure, reserved indoor parking spaces to accommodate a mix of SUVs, mid-sized vans, and mini-buses.”

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There are at least a dozen parking garages within a quarter mile of the office operated by ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations at Varick and West Houston streets, the distance specified in the request for information. Among the other requirements listed are 24/7 security monitoring, a single designated space within the facility for ICE vehicles, key-card access controlled by ICE, and a minimum height clearance of 7 feet and 6 inches. (ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The posting of the procurement document comes as one of the agency’s go-to parking spots in the area is set to become unavailable to ICE vehicles. In January, the Hudson River Park Trust, a publicly owned corporation overseen by the state and the city which administers the garage at Pier 40, announced it would allow its contract for ICE parking at a waterfront garage to expire.

A New York-based ICE observer, who asked for anonymity to avoid retaliation, told The Intercept they had seen unmarked ICE vehicles used for deportation operations using the Pier 40 garage as recently as last week.

The Trust had maintained the contract with ICE dating back to 2004, but, amid the mounting criticism of ICE for its instrumental role in President Donald Trump’s hyper-aggressive immigration crackdown, the corporation said it was no longer interested in providing space or taking ICE money.

“The Trust is currently in the last year of a five-year parking contract that commenced during the previous federal administration and does not intend to renew the contract,” a spokesperson for the organization told The City. News of the group’s continued business with ICE was first reported by Sludge, and its intent to let the contract expire was first reported by Hell Gate, another local news site.

It was unclear from the new request for information if the need for parking spaces is meant to address existing demand for ICE parking or whether it would be intended to accommodate any increased presence of ICE vehicles in Manhattan. In the 15 months since Trump returned to power, immigrant advocates in the city have waited in uneasy anticipation for a surge of Department of Homeland Security agents like those seen in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Minneapolis. 

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Thus far, it hasn’t arrived. But amid periodic threats from the Trump administration to target so-called sanctuary cities like New York, the threat of a large-scale surge remains on the minds of immigrants and their supporters.

For ICE observers in the city, monitoring ICE parking facilities is a key part of keeping tabs on the agency and trying to divine its upcoming moves.

“Agents are important to this process, but the vehicles they move in are of almost equal importance, and many of these vehicles begin and end their days at these contract lots,” said the New York-based ICE observer. “They have aggressive abduction quotas that they’re pursuing, and when you think about what they need to reach those quotas, people often think about detention capacity, but that’s the post-abduction side. The pre-abduction side is where you put all the goddamn cars.”

The post ICE Is Looking for Parking in New York City — For a 150-Vehicle Deportation Fleet appeared first on The Intercept.

Dusten Mullen, a sergeant with the Phoenix Police Department, has been suspended with pay pending an internal review of his conduct at a protest at Hamilton High School in Chandler, Arizona, on January 30, according to Phoenix Police Chief Matthew Giordano.

“As law enforcement professionals, we are held to higher standards of conduct — both in and out of uniform,” Giordano said. “When we fall short, we must be accountable, and we will not tolerate actions which undermine the trust the community has placed in the Department.”

Fox 10 Phoenix, the outlet to first identify Mullen, reported that Mullen told Chandler Police Department officers on the scene that he was there in the hopes of getting a rise out of the kids that would then allow the local cops to cuff them.

“My plan is legitimately to just let them all assault me and you guys arrest them all and I’ll keep it on film,” Mullen said, according to a police report obtained by the local TV news site. “I also have other people filming from a distance.”

The protest at Hamilton High School was one of dozens of student-led walkouts that took place across the greater Phoenix area that day, coming just over a week after the killing of Alex Pretti by Customs and Border Protection officers in Minneapolis. At Hamilton High, several hundred students walked out and rallied along a thoroughfare, chanting and holding signs decrying U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Mullen, who in 2025 drew a salary of $336,518, is suspended with pay and was required to surrender his badge and gun pending the outcome of the investigation, according to a spokesperson for the department.

Steve Serbalik, an attorney representing Mullen, said his client was within his rights as a member of the public to voice his disagreement with the students.

“Placing Sgt. Mullen on administrative leave and issuing a media advisory that suggests misconduct based solely on his lawful, off-duty expressive activity appears to chill the exercise of constitutionally protected speech and risks violating both federal and state constitutional guarantees,” Serbalik wrote in a letter sent Monday to Giordano and shared with The Intercept. “I respectfully urge you to immediately reconsider and lift the administrative leave, withdraw or correct the media advisory, and ensure that any ongoing review fully respects Sgt. Mullen’s constitutional rights.”

Gun at Teenagers’ Protest

Mullen’s appearance at the protest sent a wave of fear through some attendees. Megan Craghead, whose 18-year-old son attends Hamilton High School, showed up that day because her 13-year-old daughter wanted to take part in the protest. Craghead told The Intercept it was a peaceful, upbeat scene, and most passersby honked in support of the rally.

That changed suddenly when a pair of girls came running toward her yelling about a man with a gun.

“He was just walking up and down the sidewalk, talking kind of smugly and yelling at the kids,” Craghead recalled. “It felt like something that could easily escalate into something that’s going to be traumatic for all of these teenagers.”

As soon as she heard about an armed man on the scene, Craghead sent her daughter away with Craghead’s sister.

“We had no idea why he was there, he’s wearing a mask, and even if he did not plan to use his gun, we still don’t know what’s going to happen, right?” Craghead said. “We had all just witnessed the shooting of Alex Pretti, where he was at a protest with a gun and he ended up getting shot and killed. And so even if this armed person did not touch his gun, we still don’t know what’s going to happen.”

In a TikTok video from the scene, Mullen was seen in a T-shirt emblazoned with an American flag and the words “Trump 2024” and “We took the country back.” He concealed his face with a neck gaiter and wore a handgun, along with several extra magazines on his hip.

Surrounded by young people jeering at him, he told a Chandler Police Department that he had been assaulted as he appeared to record the scene on a cellphone.

“Nobody assaulted you,” one person told Mullen.

“Grown-ass man, out here with a gun crying about a little kid,” another person said.

In the wake of the incident, the Chandler Police Department told reporters that a girl was arrested for throwing a water bottle at Mullen, but video of the incident published by Fox 10 appears to show just water — no bottle — hitting him. The charges against the girl were later dropped by the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office.

A spokesperson for the Chandler Police Department did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Department With a History

Chandler, a city of about 275,000 people, lies in an area known as the East Valley, and its deep-purple electorate is not particularly known for progressive activism. Amid the deadly immigration crackdown in Minneapolis and heightened border tensions in Arizona, however, many students could see a direct impact on their own lives or those of their friends, according to Craghead.

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“They’re seeing a lot of their friends that are immigrants or have immigrant families feeling really scared right now,” she said. “There’s a lot of things happening in politics that are not directly affecting the lives of teenagers, but this is one of those things that they can see has a direct impact on their own lives.”

Bill Moore, a defense attorney in Phoenix, said he was pleased to see Mullen placed on administrative leave, citing the department’s history of frequently failing to hold its personnel accountable — part of a pattern of misconduct and impunity severe enough to trigger a civil-rights probe by the Justice Department in 2024.

“The ‘blue line’ thing is still very much a thing here,” Moore said, referring to an unwritten code where police look out for one another instead of pursuing complaints about misconduct. “That they took this action tells me that their internal investigation must be fairly damning.”

The revelation that the armed man who showed up to the protest in January was actually a cop sent ripples of anger through the community, according to Brandy Reese, a co-leader of the local Indivisible chapter for Chandler and the neighboring city of Gilbert.

“I find it especially upsetting that he went there armed,” said Reese, who was observing the protest that day from the sidelines. “Why did he feel he needed to do that? I think the whole situation is unfortunate and upsetting.”

Craghead, the mother of the protest attendees, said her opinion of what should happen to Mullen has gone back and forth in the days since she learned that a police sergeant was the masked, armed man who she had seen trying to pick a fight with the kids at the rally. After an initial reaction of wanting his immediate termination, she wondered if he wasn’t within his First and Second Amendment rights to show up, off-duty and armed.

The more she’s thought about it, she said, the more she’s felt anger at his conduct.

“We have a duty to hold our public safety officers to a higher standard. If this was a regular person that had come to counter-protest and they happened to bring their gun, that would be one thing,” she said. “The issue is that he went there with the purpose of agitating children to get them to break the law so that they could be arrested, or worse. So now I’m back to thinking he should be fired.”

The post Armed Off-Duty Cop Tried to Incite Violence at a High School Anti-ICE Protest appeared first on The Intercept.

Prosecutors have until May 1 to provide a slew of records, including Ross’s personnel file, to a magistrate judge to review and determine which files should be released. The materials could shine light on the killing of Good, an observer who died after Ross shot her during a January 7 confrontation amid a monthslong immigration crackdown in Minneapolis. 

The order came in response to a motion from the defense attorneys for Roberto Carlos Muñoz-Guatemala, a man who Ross attempted to apprehend in a separate confrontation in June. After Ross broke a window in Muñoz-Guatemala’s car and fired his Taser, Muñoz-Guatemala drove away and was later convicted of dragging Ross with his car.

Muñoz-Guatemala’s defense attorney Eric Newmark praised the ruling as key to defending the rights of his client, but also important for public understanding of what transpired in the shooting of Good.

“My client is entitled to a full hearing and to review these documents to determine whether there’s any basis for a new trial,” Newmark told The Intercept. “Ultimately, we’re seeking dismissal of the charges against my client. This information is important because it will help me provide a full and complete defense.”

Beyond mounting an argument for a new trial or a reduced sentence, Newmark said the information could provide crucial information on Good’s death to Minnesotans hungry for answers.

“As Minnesotans, we’re frustrated with the apparent lack of a full investigation, the lack of prosecution, and the lack of federal cooperation with local authorities,” Newmark said.

In addition to Ross’s personnel and training file, the order issued Thursday in Minnesota federal court by Judge Jeffrey M. Bryan commands prosecutors to turn over records of statements Ross made in the 60 minutes before and during his shooting of Good; records of statements by Ross and other federal officials; witness statements regarding the Good killing; medical records pertaining to Ross’s fitness for duty; cell data that might have been extracted from Ross’s phone; body-worn camera footage of the incident; and more.

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Muñoz-Guatemala’s case rose to prominence in January when Ross’s identity as the shooter of Renee Good came to light, in part because both incidents involved Ross confronting a civilian in a car. Ross, a deportation officer based in the ICE field office in St. Paul, was attempting to detain Muñoz-Guatemala during a traffic stop on June 17, when Muñoz-Guatemala attempted to drive away. In the process, he dragged Ross, who had his arm thrust into the window, according to court records.

On December 12, a jury found Muñoz-Guatemala guilty of one count of assault on a federal officer. After Ross’s killing of Good was revealed, Newmark, Muñoz-Guatemala’s attorney, submitted a request for post-conviction discovery, arguing that the facts of the Good case could be grounds for a new trial or support a lesser sentence for his client.

“Even if this Court ultimately determines that Defendant is not entitled to a new trial based on newly discovered evidence, he must still be sentenced,” Newmark wrote. “Given the recklessness of Ross’ decision to step in front of Good’s vehicle, the violence he showed by continuing to shoot at a vehicle that was passing harmlessly by, and the extreme callousness he displayed after it should have been clear that he either killed Good or injured her terribly, it would be reasonable to assume he presented similar danger to Defendant in June of 2025. However, without the full investigative file, Defendant cannot make that conclusion.”

If prosecutors comply with the order, the materials will not immediately be made public. The materials will go first to a magistrate judge who will determine their relevance to the defense team’s case and perform any necessary redactions before handing it over to the defense. At that point, Muñoz-Guatemala’s team would be able to review the material and use it as needed to mount a bid for a new trial or to present as mitigating factors warranting a reduced sentence. Barring a protective order sealing the information, whatever materials submitted as mitigation by the defense could then become a matter of public record.

“This judge is effectively doing the investigation that the United States has turned its back on,” said Shauna Kieffer, a defense attorney in Minneapolis. 

But Kieffer, who is not party to the case, expressed reservations about premature celebration of the transparency the order could provide. 

“I think because this order is so thoughtful and it’s legally sound, that I think there’s a strong chance that the government will dismiss this case if they’re forced to go forward with complying with the order,” she said.

In a statement to The Intercept, Rep. Becca Balint, D-Vt., joined the calls for transparency.

“I am glad to see this case finally moving into discovery, but let’s be honest — it should never have taken this long to get here,” said Balint. “Renee Good’s family has been forced to wait for answers while DHS and ICE closed ranks. That’s not how justice works in a healthy democracy. Her family deserves full transparency and accountability, and Americans need to see our government protect them and not just those in power.”

Spokespersons for the Minnesota U.S. Attorney’s office and the Hennepin County District Attorney’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The post Government Ordered to Turn Over Files on ICE Agent Who Killed Renee Good appeared first on The Intercept.

The Maine Wire launched in 2011, and for the next decade most of its output was standard libertarian fare. But as the U.S. right took a hard nativist turn — and amid an infusion of cash from some of the most powerful right-wing money men in the country — the site developed a fixation on Maine’s Somali community, a highly visible immigrant population in a state that’s over 90 percent white.

Amid the runaway success of a right-wing YouTuber’s viral video about “Somali fraud” in Minnesota, the site played an enthusiastic role in selling a similar narrative in Maine, spinning nuggets of truth into overstated claims of massive graft. And they got results.

In January, the Department of Homeland Security launched a surge of federal agents into the state, sweeping up hundreds of migrants while also performing showy raids on Somali-owned businesses linked to people who had been mentioned in the Maine Wire. In February, top federal officials, including Donald Trump himself, called for greater scrutiny of the state’s Medicaid system in language that directly targeted Somalis — a tack that closely followed The Maine Wire’s lead.

Editor-in-chief Steve Robinson, a Maine native who spent years producing shock-jock radio in Boston, came to the publication in 2023. The shift in tone was evident almost immediately. “Maine Governor Wants to Resettle 75,000 Foreign-Born Migrants in Maine by 2029,” Robinson warned in a headline that year. Critics blamed the piece for sparking an anti-immigrant rally by neo-Nazis at the state Capitol a few weeks later.

Robinson and his staffers present the website as a plucky upstart fighting for the common Mainer, but their work is not all driven by lobstermen and loggers. In recent years, The Maine Wire and its parent organization, the libertarian-leaning Maine Policy Institute, benefited from millions of dollars in donations from entities associated with Leonard Leo, the judicial activist widely credited with the conservative takeover of the Supreme Court, and Thomas D. Klingenstein, a MAGA megadonor and chair of the ultra-conservative Claremont Institute.

Between 2020 and 2024, the most recent year for which records are available, the Maine Policy Institute saw its annual revenue nearly triple — with a surge in funding from entities linked to Leo and Klingenstein, according to an analysis of tax documents by The Intercept. In 2024, at least $1.2 million of the institute’s $1.9 million budget came from organizations connected to Leo’s dark-money network.

The budget boost came amid a broader push by Leo, Klingenstein, and other conservative bankrollers to inject cash into state-level projects, ensuring their authoritarian, anti-immigrant, and climate-denial efforts have local staying power. (Representatives for Leo and Klingenstein did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.)

Matt Gagnon, the Maine Policy Institute’s CEO, declined to comment on how much of that cash goes into the operations of The Maine Wire. But over the course of those years of plenty, its staff has more than doubled to include three reporters, one “digital media correspondent,” and three editors.

In the process, The Maine Wire has carved out a belligerent presence in the state. Its reach is felt especially on social media, where it boasts some 200,000 followers across Facebook and X, as well as 26,000 subscribers to a spinoff on Substack. (Maine’s population hovers at around 1.4 million.) Gagnon credited Robinson for this growth, praising him for pursuing a web-savvy strategy and a voicey style.

“What we’re trying to do with The Maine Wire is not like a Wall Street Journal,” Gagnon told The Intercept. “It’s not ‘Just the facts, ma’am,’ or completely free of bias or opinion. We try to shake through our bias to make sure we’re reporting accurately, obviously, and to make sure that we’re not engaging in tabloid garbage news, but we’re very open about our perspective.”

That perspective is openly hostile to Maine’s Somali community. While discussing the Minnesota fraud scandal on a podcast, for example, Robinson posed, “You get one Somali on a jury in Minnesota, you think they’re going to convict anybody?” — ignoring the dozens of people indicted and convicted by federal prosecutors under President Joe Biden.

This apparent bias leads to similar distortions at home in Maine. Many of The Maine Wire’s claims of fraud rest on existing state audits from years past in which investigators — employed by the state of Maine — found evidence of improper payments. Without producing hard evidence of equivalent examples that have gone unaddressed, the site presents these as the tip of the iceberg, rather than instances of the state actually doing its job to combat fraud.

“The Maine Wire has a way of telling half-truths and then getting Mainers riled up about it,” said Paige Loud, a social worker running for Congress in the state’s 2nd Congressional District.

After an initial interview fell through, Robinson stopped responding to The Intercept’s attempts to reschedule. When contacted with a detailed list of questions prior to publication, he declined to comment.

On the homepage of The Maine Wire, the reader finds a grim portrait of the state. In between stories hinting at — but hardly proving — extensive fraud in Maine or scaremongering about the security of mail-in ballots, the site’s coverage is a miasma of stock tabloid fare: Tales of small-time drug busts and mugshots of vacant-eyed defendants abound. To take the site at face value, it would seem that Maine is awash in fraud, upcoming elections are in danger, and violence lurks around every corner — often at the hands of immigrants, and specifically members of Maine’s Somali diaspora.

Whenever possible, links to Somali people and institutions are presented as red flags. The term “Somali-linked” appears frequently, suggesting a stain of corruption inherent to anyone of Somali descent; one recent article managed to squeeze the word “Somali” twice into a single headline. In another story, a reporter flagged a business as suspicious in part because it shared an address with a hawala, a type of money-transfer business found in Muslim communities worldwide, which The Maine Wire described as “equipped to funnel taxpayer money back to Africa.”

The fixation on Somalis only recently became the site’s bread and butter. In the first 11 months of 2025, The Maine Wire published approximately 23 articles that included the word “Somali,” averaging about two per month. 

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Beginning in December, as right-wing audiences frothed over the viral Nick Shirley video in Minnesota, The Maine Wire leapt into action. Its journalists dusted off earlier reporting to suggest the existence of a sprawling conspiracy of Medicaid fraud, protected by a sordid alliance between Democratic political elites and allegedly corrupt Somali-run nonprofits and health care providers. That month, the Maine Wire published at least 31 articles that included the word “Somali” and kept it up with at least 26 in January, at least 14 in February, and at least nine in March. Robinson published still more stories about the issue on his Substack, dubbed The Robinson Report.

Somali Americans in the state are no strangers to nativism, but people who spoke with The Intercept said the past few months have been unusually tense, thanks in large part to The Maine Wire’s obsession with their community, which numbers less than 3,000 people, according to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data.

“It’s created a lot of stress for me,” said a Somali American resident of Lewiston who has been the subject of reporting by The Maine Wire and harassed by its readers. “The Maine Wire started this rhetoric against Somalis last year, and a lot of people really are saying horrible things on social media that are very, very racist. And that’s just kind of normalized now.”

Still, the site wins praise from readers for reporting on issues they feel are ignored by more mainstream publications. Maine journalists who spoke with The Intercept for this story admitted a grudging respect for some of the work that The Maine Wire has done, including a series on illicit marijuana grow houses owned and operated by Chinese nationals. But they criticized the site for overhyping the idea of widespread fraud.

“Some of the people who work there seem like they actually have the smarts and the talent to be good journalists. It’s just that the whole damn thing is geared towards electing Republicans,” said Steve Collins, a longtime reporter in the state who writes a column for the Portland Press Herald and has been openly critical of the website. “They take information, and instead of using it to report news in some kind of straight, rational way, it’s just a way to bash people and stir up fear.”

Others were blunter.

“The Maine Wire is poison,” said independent journalist and former Maine state legislator Andy O’Brien, who has written critically of Steve Robinson. “When you look at the comments, they are so often violent and racist. It gets scary.”

The “think national, act local” strategy has won The Maine Wire an audience of ever more powerful people, a fact that was made clear in February when Mehmet Oz — the quackery-boosting former television personality who now helms the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services — took to Instagram to issue an ultimatum to Gov. Janet Mills. 

“You’ve probably heard about Minnesota’s fraud problems. Maine also needs to clean up its act,” Oz wrote. “Somali fraudsters in Minnesota stole millions from a similar program, and we’re seeing all the same red flags in Maine.”

In a February 6 letter, Oz gave Mills 30 days to produce documentation of Maine’s public health funding and the safeguards in place to prevent fraud. The letter included a provision for an extension, but when Mills asked for one, Oz denied it. According to Ben Goodman, a spokesperson for Mills, The Maine Wire knew about the denial before it even hit the governor’s desk. 

“Addressing allegations of fraud is — and should be — a collective, professional effort between the State and Federal government, not a political cudgel from a President desperately trying to distract from his failed agenda,” Goodman told The Intercept in a statement. “So let’s be clear about what this is — yet another attempt to attack and intimidate those who dare stand up to Trump’s abuses of power.”

It’s no accident that the events playing out in Maine resemble the playbook used to justify the federal crackdown in Minnesota, according to Graham Platner, a U.S. Senate candidate running against Mills for the Democratic nomination.

“This is a nationwide project. This is directly connected to the story in Minnesota to demonize Somali communities, which brought about ICE raids there,” Platner told The Intercept.

It made sense, Platner added, to see Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents rush into Maine after The Maine Wire ramped up its Somali fraud coverage.

“It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to connect the dots,” he said.

For some Mainers who’ve found themselves in the outlet’s crosshairs, its tactics have raised questions about its accuracy.

In February, as part of a series alleging widespread fraud and abuse at group homes in Maine, the site posted a video of a young man with autism who had wandered out of his facility. The article did not say when the video was taken, but Claudia Millett, the man’s mother, told The Intercept it was almost a year old: Her son had escaped from his home in March 2025, and since then, she said, the staff responsible had been fired, and he has been safe and well taken care of.

“My son is non-verbal, with level-III autism,” Millett said. “He did get out that time, but they haven’t had any trouble since, and they have been really great with my son.”

Millett said she reached out repeatedly to The Maine Wire, but the outlet showed no interest in talking to her.

“I sent them a message on Facebook Messenger about them posting that video, but they haven’t even read it,” she said. “I think it’s unethical, because they haven’t even contacted me for comment.”

Loud, the social worker running for Congress, said she saw firsthand how the state’s byzantine system for documenting Medicaid claims — and an unwillingness by lawmakers to confront the problem — led to worker burnout and frustrated patients. But rather than covering those systemic causes, The Maine Wire’s staff have pushed to dismantle Medicaid and MaineCare and target immigrant-owned businesses.

“Unless Medicaid is abolished all of the fraud hunting will be just a fun exercise for data nerds,” Robinson wrote on X in February. “Abolish Medicaid, deport all foreign recipients and all foreign Medicaid profiteers.”

“Steve Robinson has been able to lock in on a topic that a lot of Mainers are talking about but that the Democratic legislature is unwilling to comment on,” Loud told The Intercept. “I wish it was in good faith, because this population deserves a voice. But unfortunately, the only people giving them a voice are trying to use it against them.”

The Maine Wire has not always been such a combative force for nativism. The Maine Policy Institute first launched the site in 2011, and in the intervening decade, its content stuck mostly to sober articles pushing for libertarian-minded policies. (Allegations of Medicaid fraud have been a constant, but the focus on allegations against Somalis is more recent.) Then known as the Maine Heritage Policy Center, the think tank had an annual revenue hovering just over half a million dollars in the 2010s, tax records show, much of it from relatively modest donations from family foundations linked to its local backers.

The organization was caught flat-footed by Trump’s 2016 victory, according to a former employee who worked there in the latter half of the 2010s, spurring “a wake-up call for the organization.”

“If we wanted to be more successful in the state, not just spreading our ideas, aligning with MAGA in some form might be advantageous,” the former employee said, speaking on condition of anonymity to not jeopardize future job prospects. “It was just a realization that there’s more money to be made and more eyeballs to attract.”

The money began to arrive in earnest in 2021, thanks to the largesse of groups connected with two of the country’s most powerful right-wing donors: Leonard Leo and Thomas D. Klingenstein. Leo, a longtime vacationer in Maine, moved to the state in 2020, and his fingerprints could soon be found on various political campaigns and causes.

Leo, who has been publicly connected with The Maine Wire since at least 2023, has spoken obliquely of his support for the site, including in a lovefest of an interview in 2023 with Robinson in which he told the editor that it had “been a privilege to be able to support your work.”

An analysis by The Intercept of tax documents detailing donations to the organization showed that funds controlled by or linked to Klingenstein and Leo donated at least $2.6 million to the Maine Policy Institute between 2020 and 2024, while a handful of other donor-advised funds — a common vehicle for anonymous donations — provided at least another $390,965 during that period.

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In 2021, the Thomas D. Klingenstein Fund contributed $249,000, and overall contributions leapt from $693,536 to $1.07 million. Funding surged yet again two years later, to $1.7 million in 2023, including another $200,000 from Klingenstein’s foundation and a gift of $760,100 from a donor-advised fund that had previously received tens of millions of dollars from a nonprofit linked to Leo.

In 2024, the most recent year for which tax documents are available, the Maine Policy Institute had $1.9 million in total revenue — including $760,000 from the 85 Fund, a Leo-linked nonprofit, and $450,000 from DonorsTrust, a conduit for dark money that has is heavily funded by Leo’s network.

The Maine Policy Institute does not disclose its donors, but Gagnon, the CEO, acknowledged having received support from Leo.

“He has publicly disclosed an association with us, so I’m not going to sit here and tell you that’s not happening,” Gagnon said. “He’s been supportive around the country of many projects which he believes will help the conservative media universe.”

The money being funneled into the Maine Policy Institute might be a drop in the bucket for megadonors, but it’s more than enough to make a real difference in a small state like Maine, said Platner, the U.S. Senate candidate.

“This is a very clear example of what happens when too much wealth gets consolidated in our political system,” Platner told The Intercept. “In a state like Maine, which is not a wealthy state, and there are not a lot of resources around, they can come in and utilize their money as power to drive specific media narratives and to incentivize certain kinds of stories.”

For now, those certain kinds of stories continue to revolve heavily around Somali Americans and other immigrants in Maine.

“They are spewing hate and demonizing an entire population as un-American, as scammers, and the right is just eating that up,” said one Somali American community organizer, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of further targeting by the site and its readers. “The fascist regime we’re under right now, that is one of their tactics — to change the conversation and the public opinion of certain groups in order to destroy democracy.”

The post GOP Megadonor Leonard Leo Is Bankrolling a Website on the Warpath Against Somalis appeared first on The Intercept.

In a March 11 memo, Hegseth, who has made grooming and appearances a central focus in his time at the helm of the U.S. military, raised the bar to qualify for a religious exemption to his blanket ban on beards. The guidelines lay out a strict new process by which service members may apply for a religious exemption and subject those who’ve already received one to a reevaluation, arguing they need to ensure their religious beliefs are “sincerely held” and have a genuine conflict with the grooming standards.

Service members who have spoken against Hegseth’s focus on grooming standards say his restrictions on beards are exclusionary to people from religious communities that require adherents to follow specific tenets of faith around beards, hair, and other grooming matters.

Sikhs, for example, who have served in the U.S. military since at least World War I, are required by their faith not to cut the hair on their head, to keep a beard, and to wrap their long hair in a turban. Members of many schools of Muslim tradition likewise have rules around beards and hair length.

A Sikh advocacy group derided the new requirements as “completely unnecessary.”

“Sikhs and other service members of faith already earned their accommodations, under policies and processes established under both the Obama and first Trump Administrations,” the Sikh Coalition said in a statement. “If there are accommodations that the Department of Defense feels are not sincere, they could have chosen to pursue those cases with a process that doesn’t force every single soldier, sailor, airman, guardian, and Marine with an accommodation through more paperwork and bureaucracy.”

The Department of War did not respond to a request for comment.

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Hegseth introduced the new guidelines as the military increasingly embraces overt Christianity and Christian nationalism, including an ideological turn on the Air Force Academy’s oversight board and the presentation of the war on Iran as part of “God’s divine plan.”

The changes come months after Hegseth declared war on “beardos” in a combative speech in September.

“If you want a beard, you can join Special Forces. If not, then shave,” Hegseth said at the time.

In a November letter to Hegseth, four senators — Gary Peters, D-Mich.; Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; Tim Kaine, D-Va.; and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y. — warned that an overly strict grooming standard could force religious service members from the ranks and ultimately harm the military’s primary mission of national security.

“This will happen either by forcing out servicemembers with accommodations earned through carefully following their branch’s established processes or signaling to members of these religious communities that their contributions are not needed in the world’s greatest fighting force,” the senators wrote. “At a time when readiness and retention remain urgent concerns, such a move would be ill-advised.”

Federal courts have repeatedly ruled in favor of service members’ rights to observe tenets of faith while in the military, limiting Hegseth’s ability to put in place an outright ban on any facial hair. He has opted instead to tighten the screws on anyone wishing to get an exemption.

Courts have generally required the military to accommodate sincerely held religious beliefs unless it can demonstrate a compelling operational need.

Under the new rules, anyone applying for an exemption — or facing reevaluation under the new guidelines — must submit a sworn statement affirming their religious beliefs, a statement detailing those beliefs, a statement explaining how the grooming standard would conflict with those beliefs, and supporting evidence backing up their “sincerely held” beliefs. Additionally, anyone applying for an exemption must receive from their unit commander a written assessment of the applicant’s sincerity of belief.

The policy also places commanders in the position of evaluating the sincerity of a service member’s religious beliefs. False statements could expose service members to disciplinary action under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

The post Hegseth Makes Troops Prove “Sincerely Held” Faith in Latest Beard Crackdown appeared first on The Intercept.

As email dated Thursday compares immigration enforcement to fighting wildfires and other disaster response and implores civilian employees and contractors to “step up for our country’s next challenge.”

Those who volunteer “will directly support the operations of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) as they work to ensure a safe and orderly immigration system,” reads the email, listed as from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness. “To date, participants have helped ICE and CBP develop concepts of operation, provide logistics support, and managed enforcement activities that enhance public safety.”

ICE and CBP have faced a wave of public backlash in recent months, as immigration operations have terrorized communities across the country and killed two civilians in Minneapolis. President Donald Trump fired DHS Secretary Kristi Noem earlier this month, and in February, Congress triggered a partial government shutdown by letting DHS funding lapse while Democrats request reforms.

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A photo of the memo, which was first reported by Military Times, appeared Thursday afternoon on an unofficial Facebook page for Air Force personnel. A spokesperson for the Department of Defense did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment, but the email’s details match those of an earlier department press release published March 11.

The Pentagon’s current call for DHS support appears to be a re-up of an earlier ask for volunteers made last August. At that time, Michael A. Cogar, the deputy assistant defense secretary for civilian personnel policy, expressed pride in civilians joining the efforts of DHS.

“This is a national security problem, and our civilians have the critical skill sets to support DHS in their mission,” Cogar said in August. “We’re proud that our civilians are already willing to sign up.”

The memo sent out Thursday claimed that more than 900 people had submitted applications so far to take part in the details, but did not specify how many people have been deployed. The March 11 press release claimed that around 200 civilians had deployed as part of the program.

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The email linked to a page on USA Jobs, a clearinghouse for federal job opportunities. The page, titled “Volunteer Force,” advertises a salary range of $25,684 to $191,900 per year. A list of potential volunteer duties include data entry, operational support, assisting ICE and CBP with managing the flow of detainees, and logistical planning.

The Pentagon has taken an active support role in DHS activities since the beginning of Trump’s second term, when Trump declared a national emergency on the southern border and authorized the armed forces to deploy there.

Pentagon spending on border security has been the subject of controversy over the past year. In December, Democratic lawmakers accused the Trump administration of siphoning at least $2 billion from the Pentagon’s budget and prioritizing hard-line border initiatives and political stunts over its traditional focus on national security.

Spokespeople for DHS, ICE, and CBP did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The post Pentagon Implores Civilian Workers to Join ICE “Volunteer Force” appeared first on The Intercept.

Kent’s resignation came as the most recent and perhaps most consequential of a series of rifts opening on the far right over the war in Iran. While most of the defections had come from MAGA media figures, Kent’s departure from his role as director of the National Counterterrorism Center was the first major defection from the administration.

In his letter of resignation, Kent condemned the war as a violation of the president’s campaign promises to steer clear of foreign wars, criticizing what he described as Israeli pressure as a catalyst for dragging the U.S. into a deadly potential quagmire.

“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran,” wrote Kent in a letter posted to X, where it had received nearly 100 million views as of Friday morning. “Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.”

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Kent is not the only government national security professional disaffected by Donald Trump’s war in Iran, according to advocates for conscientious objection who say they’re fielding nonstop calls from distressed service members. Many service members could refuse to take part in the war, either by refusing outright — and risking punishment — or by declaring as conscientious objectors, according to Mike Prysner, executive director of the Center on Conscience and War, a group that counsels members of the military on their rights in objecting to participation in or support of combat operations.

“This is the kind of thing that really resonates: seeing respected people in positions of power validating what many service members feel, which is that this is bad and people shouldn’t take part in it,” Prysner said. “There are a lot of people who may be inspired by what Kent did.”

Skyrocketing Objections

Prysner said that in the weeks since the war began with joint U.S.–Israeli airstrikes on February 28, the group’s phones have been ringing around the clock. Active-duty military personnel and military families are scrambling, he said, to figure out what their rights might be in refusing to take part in the war. His group has helped dozens of service members explore or start applications to declare as conscientious objectors.

“We’ve started more people in the CO process in the past two weeks than we typically do over the period of a year,” Prysner said.

Prysner said the group has spoken with service members occupying ranks from major to private, including three fighter pilots.

Prysner’s numbers could not be independently confirmed, and representatives of the Army, the Navy, and the Air Force did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the number of new applications for conscientious-objector status.

Kent, an Army veteran who later served in the CIA before running as a hard-right House candidate in Washington state, is the most senior member of the administration to resign over the war in Iran. Until Tuesday, he served under Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence and herself a former critic of pressure to the U.S. and Israel to carry out regime change in Iran.

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The resignation came amid a broader split in the MAGA movement, with some Trump loyalists backing up the president’s decision to go to war while others, perhaps most notably conservative pundit Tucker Carlson, questioning the logic of attacking Iran in concert with Israel. In the wake of Kent’s announcement, Trump called his departure “a good thing,” while White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said the letter was brimming with “false claims.” Kent, according to media reports, was the subject of a leak investigation by the FBI.

“Sooner the Better”

The U.S. military offers service members avenues to avoid combat or even be discharged from the ranks if they can prove that they hold religious, moral, or ethical objection to “war in any form.” The practice in the U.S. of declaring as a conscientious objector goes back as far as the U.S. military, although the regulations around it and the reasons cited by would-be conscientious objectors have expanded over time, and in the current, all-volunteer military, regulations require that one’s believes have “crystalized” since signing on.

“It’s totally valid for people to cite a specific conflict in their CO application, as long as that leads them to the broader realization that they cannot participate in any war,” Prysner said. “It’s absolutely valid for service members to look at the war in Iran and make the conclusion that they can’t be part of this in any form.”

Prysner is himself a veteran who served in the Iraq War, and came to anti-war activism after his deployments there. He said he began to question the violence unleashed in Iraq after coming into contact with Iraqis. In the age of the internet, however, the horrors of war can be quickly beamed into people’s phones and social media, potentially spurring more members of the military to question their role in that violence.

That dynamic was on display in Iran, Prysner told The Intercept. The surprise nature of the U.S.–Israel attack caused the families of service members to reach out to loved ones stationed abroad, while numerous active-duty members who reached out had been motivated by the clear and devastating impact of the war on civilians, notably a U.S. airstrike on February 28 that killed 168 people, most of them children, at a school in the Iranian city of Minab.

“By far the most common thing we’ve heard from people for a specific thing that caused them to reach out was the Minab school massacre,” Prysner said. “It’s not wanting to be a part of what they see as crimes against people they have no reason to hurt.”

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Hundreds of service members resisted participation in the Iraq War, including many who successfully applied as conscientious objectors. But many had a difficult time successfully proving that their opposition to war was not simply a fear of serving overseas. Others went AWOL, with at least 200 service members fleeing to Canada to avoid fighting.

Some, such as former Marine Stephen Funk, served jail time for refusing to deploy. Funk also faced discrimination in the Marines as a then-closeted gay man and spent months in the brig for his refusal to ship off to Iraq. In the years after his discharge, he worked with anti-war groups like Iraq Veterans Against the War and Veteran Artists to promote peace and work with other vets to reintegrate.

Funk told The Intercept he has been horrified to see the U.S. yet again charging into a war that has already killed hundreds of civilians and stands to kill, injure, and morally compromise members of the U.S. military. He urged service members facing a crisis of conscience to listen to their heart.

“I would say go for it, the sooner the better,” Funk told The Intercept. “You don’t want to have injuries, or moral injuries, that you’ll carry for the rest of your life.”

Correction: March 20, 2026, 12:25 p.m. ET
Due to an editing error, this story contained an errant reference to Mike Prysner’s military service; he did not serve in Syria.

The post Joe Kent’s Resignation Could Bolster a Wave of Conscientious Objectors to Trump’s Iran War appeared first on The Intercept.

Jordan Wood, who is running for the Democratic nomination in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District, is the former executive director of democracyFirst PAC, a group that — despite its left-of-center orientation — donated to at least one Republican PAC, in addition to giving thousands of dollars to at least six GOP campaigns for House and Senate seats during the 2024 election cycle, according to the records.

In total, the group donated $75,000 to various House and Senate races, including Sen. John Curtis, R-Utah; Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb.; and Rep. David Valadao, R-Calif., with contributions ranging from $1,000 to $3,000.

Wood’s PAC also gave $5,000 to Republican Governance Group/Tuesday Group PAC, a group of moderate Republicans that has gradually moved to the right as it aligned with the policy priorities of the Trump administration.

“I don’t necessarily condemn anyone for contributing to left or right candidates as long as they’re actively protecting our civil rights, but this is pretty troubling,” said Maine state Rep. Amy Roeder, a Democrat.

While some of the candidates democracyFirst donated to were running for safe seats in deep-red districts, others, such as Valadao, an incumbent, were considered to be more competitive. Valadao, first elected to the House in 2012, lost his seat to Democrat TJ Cox in 2016 before regaining it four years later.

Though some of the GOP lawmakers supported by democracyFirst have at times voted for President Donald Trump’s agenda items, most are considered moderate Republicans. Valadao, for instance, was one of just 10 House representatives to vote to impeach President Trump.

But at least six GOP lawmakers who received money from democracyFirst, including Valadao, voted along party lines to support Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” a sprawling funding bill that realized a wide array of long-standing conservative aims, including cuts to Medicaid, tax cuts for billionaires, and a $75 billion infusion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

At the state level, democracyFirst pitched in to help several campaigns for state legislature seats and county commissioner positions in Pennsylvania, including that of County Commissioner Mike Pries, of Dauphin County, who went on in 2025 to vote to reject a resolution that would have restricted local cooperation with ICE.

“democracyFIRST was built to do one thing: defeat Trump-aligned candidates who were trying to seize control of America’s election infrastructure,” Wood said in a statement. “Every Republican candidate democracyFIRST ever supported held an office with direct authority over election administration or certification, and every single one of them was in a primary against an election denier who supported Trump’s false claims of a rigged election. We were trying to take their power away. It was a carefully designed firewall to safeguard future elections.”

Wood is one of several candidates vying for the Democratic nomination in the race to replace Rep. Jared Golden, D-Maine. Golden was already facing a primary challenge from State Auditor Matt Dunlap.

Golden, a centrist who has caught heat from progressives for voting against party lines in several key instances, announced in November that he would not seek reelection. In the wake of the announcement, Wood was months into a campaign to unseat the longtime Republican Maine Sen. Susan Collins, but swiftly pivoted to throw his hat in the ring for Golden’s seat.

In addition to the democracyFirst spending, Wood has been scrutinized for his ties to Mothership Strategies, a liberal-leaning fundraising outfit run by his husband, Jake Lipsett. The firm has gained a controversial reputation in Democratic circles for aggressive tactics, inflammatory and alarming rhetoric, and accusations of self-dealing and other unethical billing practices.

Wood has said he and his husband keep their professional lives separate, but FEC records show that in the months after Wood stepped down from democracyFirst to run against Collins, the new candidate’s old PAC began funneling money to Mothership to the eventual tune of more than half a million dollars.

Dunlap, meanwhile, has earned a chilly reception from national Democratic leadership over his decision to primary Golden, whose district elected Trump in the 2024 election by 9 percentage points, and faced criticism from the right for his role in auditing the state’s Department of Health and Human Services. Trump and his allies have said the agency exercised lax oversight in the disbursement of federal money to other state health care programs. The other main contender, Joe Baldacci, a state senator and the brother of former two-term Maine Gov. John Baldacci, joined the race in January. (Dunlap and Baldacci’s campaigns declined to comment.)

Whoever wins the Democratic primary will likely face up in the general against former Maine Gov. Paul LePage, a proto-MAGA populist. LePage, who occupied the governor’s mansion from 2011 until 2019, is known for his long record of foot-in-mouth gaffes and racially charged statements.

Baldacci and Dunlap are longtime residents of Maine’s 2nd Congressional District. Wood, on the other hand, only announced after pivoting to the House race that he would to move with his family to the city of Lewiston in order to qualify. LePage has spent his years of political exile in the sunny wilderness of Florida.

“I am friends with both Sen. Baldacci and State Auditor Dunlap and have known them to be people of integrity and people who really give a damn,” said Roeder, the statehouse representative. “Jordan Wood was not a CD2 resident until very recently, and I personally look sideways at someone who moves into a district in order to run in that district. And I count Paul LePage as well.”

LePage, who announced his candidacy for the House seat in May, is making his second attempt at a political comeback after badly losing his 2024 bid to retake his old job as governor from incumbent Democrat Janet Mills.

The post Dem in Maine House Primary Funneled PAC Money to Republicans appeared first on The Intercept.

According to the Human Rights Activists News Agency, the attacks killed at least 333 civilians across 18 provinces of Iran in at least 59 incidents. In response, Iran launched a barrage of missile and drone attacks at U.S. and Israeli targets, both military and civilian, across the region.

The Intercept spoke with Ryan Costello, policy director at the National Iranian American Council, to make sense of what led to the attack on Iran, what we know so far, and how the situation might unfold in the days and weeks to come.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

What have we seen today in Iran and in the wider region?

Trump has entered us into a major regime change war against Iran, and from what we know so far, it seems like hundreds of Iranians have been killed, with a plurality of those deaths taking place at a girls’ school where at least dozens, maybe over 100 people were killed.

We don’t know exactly why that school was bombed, whether it’s a case of bad intelligence or misfire or something. But those were among the very first casualties of the war, and that really underscores the life-and-death stakes here as the war is unfolding.

It’s just such a tragic loss, and it wouldn’t have happened if Trump had not made the decision to go to war. So, you know, regardless of what the reason was — whether faulty intelligence or misfire or whatever — those girls can’t come back. And that just really underscores the stakes of war, and why so many people try to prevent war from breaking out.

The Iranian government just confirmed the death of Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei. What does his death mean for Iran and the country’s position in the region?

Khamenei has been at the top of the Islamic Republic for decades here, and a big, huge part of each consequential decision that Iran has made for decades. Even before he was officially supreme leader, he was the president, and he was a key adviser to the first Supreme Leader, [Ruhollah] Khomeini. So he’s one of the original revolutionaries of the Islamic Republic. In a lot of ways, Iran wouldn’t be where it is today without him, and that cuts both ways. A lot of people think he’s held the country back. He’s been responsible for major human rights violations, and then has, you know, more or less picked a fight with the United States and put the country into a major trap here.

There’s only been one Supreme Leader succession before, and that was from Khomeini to Khamenei in 1989. And so it’s been a very long time, but there are processes in place. There’s a whole body whose whole job is basically to sit around and wait to choose the next Supreme Leader. It’s called the Assembly of Experts, and it’s made up of very senior figures in the Iranian establishment. It’s a little unclear whether they would do so immediately or would do so later, but at some point they will convene and consider who the next Supreme Leader will be. 

[Editor’s note: After this article was published, Iranian officials announced that a council of high-ranking jurists would rule in Khameni’s stead until a new leader is chosen.]

This happening during wartime throws a lot of questions into the air, but we will see, ultimately, what the system comes up with. Khamenei appears to have prepared for succession within the Islamic Republic and has been directing different decision-makers to appoint assessors and have a plan of operation so that events can continue and the system can move on, even in the circumstances of his death.

Will it make a difference the fact that he was killed in an attack, rather than dying of natural causes, in how the succession might play out or in who is picked?

I think there is a concern that, you know, if you’re choosing a leader during wartime, is that going to end up being somebody who is more dogmatic and rigid ideologically? Or is it going to be someone who’s more pragmatic and might work to try to end the crisis? We won’t know until the person is chosen and they start to make certain decisions.

Trump has made clear that the goal of this operation is regime change, and has called on the people of Iran to seize power and on the security forces to work toward a transition. What are we actually seeing at this moment, and what might we expect to see in the coming days and weeks?

It does seem like they want to do regime change, but a kind of stand-off regime change, where they don’t put boots on the ground, per se, and then they encourage people on the ground to rise up and overthrow the government for them.

One situation that comes to mind is in 1991, where George H.W. Bush stopped at repelling the Iraqis from Kuwait, and then encouraged Iraqis to rise up. And tens of thousands of people were slaughtered by Hussein’s regime in the wake of that call to rise up. I think there’s a clear historical parallel to Trump’s approach to Iran thus far, where a lot of Iranians have already been killed after Trump encouraged them to rise up.

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Even after strikes, you have to assume that at least elements of the Iranian government will maintain a monopoly on the use of force — meaning they still get the guns, and the Iranian people don’t. If this all leads to something where democracy somehow flows from bombs, well, we’ll see. I don’t think that’s a particularly likely scenario.

The [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] remains the strongest actor within Iran, both in terms of military capability and organization. Obviously, they have absorbed a lot of the blows in the initial U.S. strikes, but I think they are far and away the most powerful actor inside the system. So essentially, if the theocrats in the Iranian system are taken out, the IRGC are the ones in charge of much of Iran’s response and defense, and are best situated to fill any political and governmental void that may take place.

Based on how today played out, what can we divine about the logic of the Trump administration going into these strikes? What did they want to accomplish?

I think probably a lot of Americans were taken by surprise by this. But for those who read the news, you saw the biggest build-up in the Middle East since the Iraq War. And I think, reading the signs, it was either there would be a deal or a war.

This played out very similarly to June, where the diplomacy seems to have been a ruse. Trump seems to have been convinced by Benjamin Netanyahu to attack Iran months ago, probably predating the protests and so forth.

Essentially, they’re high off the Maduro operation. They thought: Hey, here’s an adversary that is weak — there’s never going to be a better time to strike. I don’t know if they ever considered the diplomatic option. It seems like it’s quite possible that it was just a ruse to try to lure the Iranians into thinking they might get a deal. 

You mentioned the U.S. abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. In that case, the Trump administration quickly replaced Maduro with a puppet government. Does the Trump administration have its eyes on specific successors in Iran? 

There have been a lot of reports of strikes targeting critics of the regime, such as Mir Hussain Mousavi, the Green Movement leader. His house, where he’s essentially been under house arrest for 15 years, was targeted in some of the initial strikes. That apparent eagerness to target past political leaders who may have had a falling out with the current government seems to be a signal that they’re trying to eliminate any potential people who could actually transition to democracy but still be a nationalist figure. I don’t know if they have someone picked out or if they don’t care, but I would guess that if that’s actually been part of the strike pattern that they have someone figured out that would be a pushover for U.S. and Israeli interests.

What does it tell other actors on the world stage that the U.S. and Israel carried out the attack amidst ongoing negotiations? And what message does it send to other major powers?

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This tells any potential adversaries of the U.S.: Get nuclear weapons. Hedging is not a strategy, and giving up your program like [Muammar] Gaddafi is not a strategy. The only successful strategy is what Kim Jong Un did, which is to get nuclear weapons. He’s the only surviving despot of the so-called axis of evil.

It just seems like the Wild West in the international system right now. It’s just “might makes right.” That is also a message that will be heard by other global powers like Russia or China that might have designs on smaller, weaker states out there. If the U.S. is saying “might makes right,” they say, “OK, if that’s how you want to play it, then we’ll pursue our own interests too.”

There has been considerable unrest in Iran over the past month, with massive protests against the government and a brutal crackdown that has killed thousands. Given that opposition to the government, what do you think the reaction might be inside Iran to the attacks?

Iranians have long been caught between authoritarianism of their own government and militarism of foreign powers, and this is a pretty clear-cut example of that. You have this horrible crackdown from the Iranian government in January, and then a major military attack from the United States, all within 40 days of each other.

I think there has been a growing contingent inside Iran of people who are for military intervention. I don’t know how widespread that is, but I think it’s certainly something that unbiased observers have witnessed over the years. Certainly a significant majority of the population does not like the Islamic Republic and would like it gone. But then you get to the question of who endorses military force and how widespread that is — I don’t think that is a majority of the population. And if it were that, once the bombs started falling, that support would evaporate pretty quickly. I think a lot of the people on the streets who participated in the protests did so for domestic reasons and also would oppose the U.S. bombing the country.

What can we expect to see in the coming days and weeks?

Trump seems to think this will be over in a couple of weeks. I have no idea if that’s realistic. I would probably take the over, at least in terms of the reverberations from this incident, which are going to be enormous. I think those will likely be measured in years rather than weeks.

This is probably in the realm of dangerous speculation, but I feel like the Iranian government is going to have a harder ideological edge to it, and that, if you take out the upper echelons of the leadership, the people that are going to fill those roles are, I think, still steeped in a good bit of the ideology of the Islamic Revolution and opposition to U.S. hegemony, and have lived through so many confrontations with the West and with the U.S. in particular. 

So it’s possible that they could replicate the Venezuela situation to some degree. But my assumption is that the people who step into the void are going to be more of Khamenei’s ilk, and may have less restraint as well, particularly on the nuclear program. Who knows where the nuclear program will be when all is said and done, but I think there will be very little holding Iranian leadership back from pursuing a nuclear weapon if any trace of the current government survives this.

Update: March 1, 2026

An editor’s note was added after Iranian officials announced that a council of jurists would rule until a new leader is chosen.

The post The U.S. and Israel Killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. What Comes Next? appeared first on The Intercept.