The Intercept Briefing: Daily Summaries Delivered

“We Will Find You and We Will Kill You”

RSVP for The Intercept Briefing Podcast’s Live Conversation on Gaza. Sign up to join us on Tuesday, May 19, at 5 p.m. ET/2 p.m. PT.Join The Intercept Briefing podcast for a special live episode taping with Intercept journalist Jonah Valdez and Tariq Kenney-Shawa, an Al-Shabaka U.S. policy fellow and co-host of Al-Shabaka’s Policy Lab series.Show description:In 16 pages, the Trump administration’s new official counterterrorism strategy outlines in broad terms who it views as terrorist threats and priority targets, ranging from anti-fascist activists to ISIS and so-called narco-terrorists. The line “We will find you, and we will kill you” appears in the memo.“[The] strategy brings together Trump's war on the wider world, which stretches from interventions and wars in Yemen and Somalia to Venezuela and the Caribbean Sea,” says Intercept senior reporter Nick Turse. “It combines it with the administration's war on dissent at home which has also been lethal, as we saw on the streets of Minneapolis. ... We can consider this strategy a new declaration of war by the Trump administration on its enemies both foreign and domestic, both real and imagined.”This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington and colleagues Turse and Noah Hurowitz, who covers federal law enforcement, dissect how the Trump administration is painting anyone it wants to go after — state and non-state actors — as terrorists. “Fundamentally, this document is a list of the administration's enemies and a promise of what they're going to do to them,” says Hurowitz. “This anti-terror imperative makes for a very flexible and useful means of tamping down on dissent.”“We're not just talking about rhetoric here,” says Washington. “We've seen the administration actually use these terms in action when it comes to the boat strikes in the Caribbean and Pacific that killed nearly 200 people as of early May.” “The actual legal justification for the strikes is, like so much else, secret,” says Turse, who has been covering the attacks on so-called narco-terrorists. “We're talking about a fake war in which the enemies aren't even read into the fact that they're in an armed conflict with the United States.” He adds, “It's really built on a quarter-century of executive overreach and targeted killings around the world. It's the price of Congress allowing Presidents Bush, Obama, Biden, and Trump to hunt and kill people by drone from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and Somalia. It took this legally dubious, at best, post-9/11 drone war and laid the groundwork for a completely illegal one in the Caribbean and the Pacific Ocean.”“Say what you will about the people around President Trump,” Hurowitz notes, “but they have proved very adept at finding levers of power and levers of pain to go after their enemies.”For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Supreme Court Ends Multiracial Democracy as We Know It

The U.S. Supreme Court dealt a fatal blow to the Voting Rights Act, triggering a new wave of redistricting fights in the midst of midterm primary elections. Last week, the court struck down a Louisiana congressional map with a second majority-Black district. The decision requires there to be evidence of intentional racism to prove that a map is discriminatory, making it nearly impossible to successfully challenge racial gerrymandering. Following the 6-3 decision along partisan lines, Louisiana suspended its already active congressional primary, throwing out cast ballots. Alabama’s Republican governor took steps to gerrymander her state's maps ahead of November elections. Tennessee GOP leaders also convened a special session to eliminate the last remaining Democratic stronghold in the state, home to Memphis, a majority-Black city and district; the new map would split Memphis into three districts and further split Nashville and the surrounding counties into five districts. On Thursday, Tennessee Gov. Lee signed a bill that repealed a state law prohibiting mid-decade redistricting, and the new map was passed by Tennessee Republicans.“The primary goal of what they're doing. It is to dilute Black political voting power and representation, and it's starting at the U.S. congressional level,” state Rep. Justin J. Pearson tells The Intercept Briefing. The Democratic Tennessee state representative for Memphis is running for U.S. Congress in the district at the heart of the state’s re-districting fight. “When you look across the South, the truth is about at least a dozen seats are likely to be taken in this very racist redistricting era that we are in, but it won't stop there," Pearson says. "We have over 200 legislative seats in the House and the Senate that are also likely to be eliminated through racist redistricting that is happening.” Voting rights journalist and author Ari Berman says SCOTUS’s latest blow to voters’ rights is a “power grab.”This week on the podcast, Berman and Pearson speak to host Jessica Washington about how the latest Supreme Court decision bolsters President Donald Trump and Republicans' aims to take control of voting in the country.“This is now the third major decision by the Roberts court gutting the Voting Rights Act,” says Berman. “You can't understand this latest attack on the Voting Rights Act unless you understand the attacks that came before it, and how this is part of a pattern. ... This is part of a larger conservative counterrevolution against the civil rights movement of the 1960s.”Berman says that this ruling could bring us back to the “dark days” before the Voting Rights Act made the United States a “multiracial democracy.” Now you look at what's going to happen in these places, in places like Tennessee, in places like Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi. If they eliminate all of their Black members of Congress, that's going to make politics a white-only game." Pearson says that the Supreme Court’s assertion that these protections are no longer necessary is a lie. “The hatred that hung us on lynching trees did not disappear. It dissipated into institutions of power, into state houses, into governor's mansions, into the U.S. Senate, into the U.S. House, into the presidency of the United States,” says Pearson. “Everybody has to do more than they are currently doing in this moment in time in order for us to preserve this modicum of a democratic constitutional republic. … Because what is likely to happen is the most significant purging of Black political power and elected Black leaders since the end of Reconstruction.”For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.Keep our investigations free and fearless at <a href

Another Assassination Attempt, More Fertilizer for Conspiracy Theories

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner last weekend became the site of the third failed attempt to assassinate President Donald Trump. “I remember the feeling was very similar to when it was clear that the House had been invaded on January 6, 2021,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., who was in attendance, tells The Intercept Briefing. “Everybody was afraid that somebody had come in with an AR-15 or something like that.”This week on the podcast, host Akela Lacy speaks to Raskin about his experience at the dinner and later being asked by CNN’s Dana Bash about whether he’s thinking twice about his “heated rhetoric” toward Trump. “It was curious that, in the wake of this terrible episode, that she would try to equate the way that Democrats talk and the way that President Trump talks,” says Raskin. “He calls people crazy, insane. He calls people evil, wicked. He will buttonhole reporters and tell them that they're stupid, they're ugly. ... But we try to keep it at the level of policies and their actions.” Some examples, which Raskin discusses, is his forthcoming investigation into Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner’s role in the administration and conflicts of interest, and his fight in Congress to stop the reauthorization of warrantless surveillance on Americans.After this latest assassination attempt on Trump’s life, claims that it was staged flooded the internet, from comments section to social media posts to videos of influencers dissecting alleged evidence.“We are so conditioned to distrust what we are being told by authorities that people immediately began concocting conspiracy theories about it even before we even knew what had happened. Whether it was a shooting or just dishes breaking,” says journalist Mike Rothschild. He’s the author of “The Storm is Upon Us,” the first complete book on the QAnon conspiracy movement, and more recently, a 200-year history of conspiracy theories called “Jewish Space Lasers.”Rothschild joins Lacy to unpack the growing world of conspiracy theories that question whether the multiple assassination attempts against Trump were staged. They also dive into other conspiracy theories currently capturing the public imagination, such as the dead and missing scientists and a wildfire in Georgia. “This is one of our more fun and disturbing interviews,” says Lacy.For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

“Me Too” Comes Back To Congress

It’s primary season, this time against a backdrop of heightened concerns and awareness of powerful figures skirting accountability for sexual abuse and misconduct. Survivors of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein have “made accountability for sexual abuse and sexual violence an electoral issue,” says Intercept politics reporter Jessica Washington. One of the biggest stories to shake up politics in recent weeks are sexual assault allegations that upended Rep. Eric Swalwell’s bid to become the next governor of California, forcing the Democratic front-runner to also resign from his House seat. “You also have to give some credit to Democrats as well for immediately moving on these allegations very swiftly,” says Washington.This week on The Intercept Briefing, Washington and Intercept senior politics reporter Akela Lacy speak to host Jordan Uhl about the themes emerging this midterm election season. They talk about how the crowded California gubernatorial race is boosting Republicans to the top of the ticket to why powerful factions of the Democratic Party are hyperfixating on Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, rather than leveraging Trump’s sinking approval rating. “This is about not wanting to share power with the left,” notes Washington.They also discuss what makes a candidate or elected official a progressive. “We've seen a lot of candidates, particularly 2028 candidates, whether senatorial or gubernatorial, who have had long-standing relationships with AIPAC or demonstrated pro-Israel policy records like Rahm Emanuel, Cory Booker, Josh Shapiro, Ruben Gallego, all come out now against AIPAC or distancing themselves from AIPAC,” says Lacy. “It doesn’t really matter if you’re rejecting AIPAC money, if you aren’t changing any of the policies that you adopt with respect to how the U.S. treats Israel.”For all that and more listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When Anti-War Candidates Become War-Monger Presidents

Sen. Bernie Sanders forced a vote on Wednesday to block the sales of bombs and bulldozers to Israel. The resolutions failed mostly along party lines with a handful of defections to the Republican side, but a record number of Democrats voted against sending weapons to Israel. “A supermajority of Democrats oppose this war, are generally against America's global military interventions,” former Sanders foreign policy adviser Matt Duss tells The Intercept Briefing. Yet Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., joined 11 Democrats in voting against the measure to block the sale of 1,000-pound bombs to Israel, and seven Democrats against the sale of bulldozers used in Israel’s military occupations.“We do have a Democratic Party leadership that still is part of this very small — and thankfully dwindling, though not fast enough — hawkish faction that is wedded to this idea of American global military domination,” says Duss.This week on the podcast, Duss speaks to host Akela Lacy about how Democrats should use the overwhelming unpopularity of the war to push an anti-war agenda that brings about real change. “There's a real constituency here for this message,” says Duss, “We need a foreign policy for this era that is based around building peace rather than making war, that is focused on foreign policy that benefits American communities and American workers, but also does not export insecurity and poverty onto others in the world. And I think this is a really opportune moment.”The watershed moment in the Senate came against the backdrop of President Donald Trump’s hyper-aggressive military adventurism.“My concern about blaming this all on Israel is that it lets Washington off the hook,” says Duss. “We have a foreign policy establishment that is addicted to militarism, that is addicted to war, who work at think tanks that are largely funded by the military–industrial complex. They are funded by weapons manufacturers. We have a political class that is really deeply committed to an almost religious degree to American primacy in the world, to American global hegemony. Which means that we are up in everyone's business all over the place all the time.”“This Iran war is the most egregious and horrible expression of trends in our foreign policy that have been building for a long time, so are these boat strikes,” he says, referring to the Trump administration’s ongoing assassinations of alleged drug traffickers. “We've been killing people with flying robots in the Middle East and Africa and elsewhere for decades now.”Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Amy Goodman on the Media’s “Access of Evil”

Vote here to help The Intercept Briefing win its first Webby Award for best news and politics podcast.Show description: As talks to end the U.S.–Israel war on Iran break down and President Donald Trump demands a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, journalist Amy Goodman says that in times of war and conflicts, “What I care about is the answer, and I care that people in this country don't get health care at the same time that money goes to kill others in another country.”This week on The Intercept Briefing, Goodman speaks to host Akela Lacy about a new documentary called “Steal This Story, Please!” The documentary follows Goodman’s life, journalism career, and the building of the independent news program “Democracy Now!” which just celebrated its 30th year. Recalling times when networks used their video footage, says Goodman, “I encourage that. Steal this story, please. It's a failure if it's an exclusive. We are covering these critical issues of the day, and we want to ensure that these stories get out because independent media is essential to the functioning of a democratic society.”Many journalists and news outlets don’t ask tough questions to maintain what she calls the “access of evil — trading truth for access,” and to that, Goodman says, “Then it's not worth being there at all. It's our job to hold those in power to account.” She adds, “We can't have weapons manufacturers, who provide millions to networks to advertise determining our coverage of war. We can't have oil, gas, and coal companies determining our coverage of climate change, or banks and other financial institutions determining how we cover inequality. We need an independent media.”Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Putting Fuel on a Ceasefire: Israel Tries to Kill U.S.–Iran Talks

Vote here to help The Intercept Briefing win its first Webby Award for best news and politics podcast.Show description: Vice President JD Vance is set to lead renewed negotiations with Iran this weekend to bring an end to the U.S.–Israel war on the country that stretched into a second month. The talks come after a roller coaster of a week, which began with President Donald Trump threatening genocidal war crimes against Iran. “A whole civilization will die tonight,” he wrote on social media, “never to be brought back again.” Trump urged Iran to make a deal with the U.S. and fully open the Strait of Hormuz by Tuesday at 8 p.m. ET. Then, shortly before the deadline, Trump took to social media again to say Iran and the U.S. had reached a two-week ceasefire agreement brokered by Pakistan. Trump said the U.S. received a workable 10-point plan from Iran to begin negotiations on a durable ending to the war. In the meantime, Iran said it would allow for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz. Israel, however, immediately intensified its attacks on Lebanon, jeopardizing the already tenuous ceasefire. More than 300 people were killed in Lebanon by Israeli airstrikes the day after the ceasefire was announced. The terms of the plan are not yet clear but there are some key factors for Iran, says Narges Bajoghli, a professor of Middle East Studies at Johns Hopkins University. “One is that Iran is asking for non-aggression from the United States into the future. It won't take the United States's word for it. It's already been burned by the U.S. multiple times,” Bajoghil tells The Intercept Briefing. “Then the other big thing is sanctions relief.” But “Iran's biggest red line is its sovereignty and independence.”This week on the podcast, Bajoghil speaks to senior Intercept editor Ali Gharib about the path that led the U.S. back to the negotiating table with Iran. This war has proven, Bajoghil says, “both to the decision-makers in Iran, to the Iranian population, and then more importantly to the international world, is that Iran's real deterrence actually doesn't come from a potential nuclear bomb, but it comes from the ability to be able to stop or regulate traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.” She notes, “In many ways, what actually has potentially led to this ceasefire is the fact that Iran is able to create a chokehold over 20 percent of the world's oil and gas trade. That is an extremely powerful weapon that they have in their hands and in many ways can force shifts to happen geopolitically in a much faster way than a nuclear bomb can.”Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.Keep our investigations free and fearless at theintercept.com/join. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Trump’s Holy War Abroad and at Home