The law is one of more than 30 introduced in recent years — at least six have been enacted — to make it easier to remove or restrict elected prosecutors who lawmakers disagree with, particularly targeting those district attorneys implementing criminal justice reforms and prosecuting police misconduct. 

The order said that the court would not review proposed rules governing a new commission with the power to discipline and remove elected prosecutors, including Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who indicted Trump. Without such a review, the agency can’t operate. 

“While we celebrate this as a victory, we remain steadfast in our commitment to fight any future attempts to undermine the will of Georgia voters and the independence of the prosecutors who they choose to represent them,” DeKalb County District Attorney Sherry Boston said in a statement on the order. 

One member of the Georgia state House who helped push the bill through, Rep. Houston Gaines, told the Associated Press that he and fellow Republicans planned to keep pushing the bill until the commission’s rules were approved and prosecutors could be removed. “As soon as the legislature can address this final issue from the court, rogue prosecutors will be held accountable,” Gaines said.

Bills to restrict the authority of prosecutors have proliferated in recent years since reform prosecutors started winning office in greater numbers. The bills tended not to pass in previous years, but in the era of Trump, the George Floyd protest movement, and perceptions about increased crime, polarized legislatures have passed the measures more swiftly. 

The Georgia law passed with support in both chambers. While many of the laws passed in recent years targeted prosecutors who took steps like implementing bail reform or declining to charge for drug possession, Willis became a target under the Georgia law after she indicted Trump in August. 

Immediately after the indictment, Georgia Republicans said they would use the law to remove Willis from office. Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed the bill into law in May, making Georgia one of at least five states to sign into law a bill to restrict or undermine prosecutors since 2017. Kemp’s office did not respond to a request for comment. 

More than a third of states have tried to pass such bills, a total of 30 pieces of legislation over the same period.

Boston, the DeKalb County district attorney, is one of four elected prosecutors in Georgia who sued in August to stop the law from going into effect. The plaintiffs emphasized the law could be used to restrict the authority of prosecutors across the political spectrum, not just reformers. 

Conservative Towaliga Judicial Circuit District Attorney Jonathan Adams also supported the complaint because of his concerns over how it could be used to restrict prosecutors who exercise various forms of discretion afforded to the office of the prosecutor, regardless of their ideological position. Adams said he had already rescinded guidelines not to prosecute certain adultery crimes still on the books in Georgia over fear that it might make him vulnerable to removal under the new law. 

“I have already received threats that members of the public plan to file superfluous, unsubstantial complaints against me under SB92,” he wrote. “This comes after I have received death threats and had my home address disseminated online.” 

While the court has authority to regulate the practice of law by district attorneys, it had “grave doubts” that it had constitutional power to take action on the draft standards and rules of the prosecutorial commission. “Because we are under no legal directive to take action, the most prudent course for us is to decline to take action without conclusively deciding any constitutional question,” the court order read. 

The commission can’t start its work without review from the court. 

“The Georgia Supreme Court recognized what we have said throughout this litigation: SB 92 is a flawed law,” said Josh Rosenthal, legal director at the Public Rights Project, which led the suit against the law. 

“We are grateful that as a result of this decision, district attorneys throughout Georgia are not subject to removal for deciding how to best promote safety and justice,” he said. “The Georgia Supreme Court’s decision leaves the PAQC” — Prosecuting Attorneys Qualifications Commission — “without authority to act on any complaint. Without approved rules, the Commission cannot lawfully investigate or discipline prosecutors across the state. This is an important victory for communities’ ability to choose their vision for safety and justice and a district attorney that will reflect those views.”

The post Georgia Supreme Court Blocks GOP Attack on Trump Prosecutor — For Now appeared first on The Intercept.

That figure is on track to exceed $100 million by the end of the year — but even that total doesn’t capture how much the city has to spend in cases where its cops are accused of everything from causing car accidents to beating innocent people.

The $100 million figure does not include lawsuits settled by the city prior to litigation, which reached $30 million in the first nine months of this year, according to data obtained from the office of the New York City Comptroller through a public records request. Pre-litigation settlements from July 2022 through September of this year totaled $50 million — meaning the city’s payouts in such suits since July 2022, including those settled after litigation, rose to a total of around $280 million.

“It says something that it’s just such a high amount even before people get to file in civil court,” said Jennvine Wong, staff attorney with the Cop Accountability Project at the Legal Aid Society, which provides public defense in New York City. ”And all it does is it helps obscure police misconduct.”

The information about pre-litigation settlements provided to The Intercept through a public records request included settlements ranging from $1.8 million to $119. The comptroller’s office did not have immediately available data on the amount paid in pre-litigation settlements prior to July 2022. 

In response to questions, an NYPD spokesperson pointed to a comptroller report that showed an 11 percent decrease in claims from 2021 to 2022, and a 52 percent drop in claims filed with the comptroller against the NYPD since 2013. 

“The NYPD carefully analyzes this information as well as trends in litigation against the Department,” said an NYPD spokesperson who did not provide their name. “When it comes to litigation data, the NYPD is seeing similar success in the declining numbers. There has been a nearly 20% reduction in police action filings against the NYPD from 2021 to 2022, and a nearly 65% reduction since 2013.”

The report notes that while the number of tort claims filed against the NYPD declined from 2021 to 2022, the amount of payouts increased by 14 percent, from $208.1 million to $237.2 million. 

Earlier this year, The Intercept reported that a new NYPD website dedicated to “transparency” around police misconduct and payouts leaves out cops accused of wrongdoing and only covers a fraction of the millions the city pays out in such cases. The website only includes those cases where there are findings of guilt, even as the police pay out millions of dollars precisely to avoid convictions and other findings of wrongdoing. 

Some of the police officers left out of the transparency database have been named in multiple misconduct lawsuits. In some of the cases, rather than receiving public scrutiny through the database, the NYPD cops have received promotions.

Correction: November 27, 2023, 4:22 p.m.
Due to an editing error, the previous headline incorrectly referenced the amount of time the NYPD paid out $30 million in pre-litigation settlements. It reached that number in the first nine months of this year, not six months.

The post NYPD Paid Out $30 Million in Misconduct Cases Before Litigation in First Nine Months of 2023 appeared first on The Intercept.

Frankel, first elected to Congress in 2012 and a CPC member since at least 2016, had been considering leaving the caucus for several weeks, according to one source. She was one of at least six caucus members who voted earlier this month to censure Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich. 

Frankel’s departure is a symptom of a larger split growing within the caucus over the congressional response to the war in Gaza. It comes despite the fact that the CPC rarely takes public positions on Israel–Palestine, given the deep divides within the caucus, and has not taken a position on the current crisis. But the tensions and animosities produced within the progressive coalition broadly are great enough that her decision to leave is not a surprise. 

Many of the 22 Democrats who voted to censure Tlaib, including Frankel, have received major contributions from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. The pro-Israel lobbying group is recruiting challengers to Tlaib and other Squad members for being out of step with a hawkish, pro-Israel line that demands unconditional support. The resolution censured Tlaib for “calling for the destruction of the state of Israel” and claimed promoting “false narratives” about the October 7 Hamas attack. 

Progressive caucus leaders met earlier this month with House Democratic leadership to encourage them to keep the pro-Israel lobby from spending to oust progressive incumbents this cycle. Asked last month about news that groups including AIPAC, Democratic Majority for Israel, and Mainstream Democrats PAC were considering primarying Tlaib and Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., who led the ceasefire resolution in the House, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., said, “Outside groups are gonna do what outside groups are gonna do. I think House Democrats are going to continue to support each other.”

Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, lobbied Democratic leadership to encourage the primary challenges against critics of Israel, he told a political science class at American University, according to a student in the class. Cuellar has twice faced a primary challenger backed by Justice Democrats, which helped elect the Squad. 

Frankel is the former mayor of West Palm Beach and has been an unapologetic supporter of Israel throughout her career, celebrating, for instance, former President Donald Trump’s provocative decision to move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. “The President’s announcement today is consistent with current U.S. law and reaffirms what we already know: Jerusalem is the eternal capital of the Jewish people and the State of Israel,” she said at the time. She fought against President Barack Obama’s signature foreign policy accomplishment, the Iran nuclear deal, which AIPAC worked hard to undermine. The hawkish posture won out, and Trump withdrew from the deal. Backers of the deal warned that tearing it up would only increase conflict and instability in the region. 

The progressive caucus is chaired by Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., who faced harsh criticism in July for calling Israel a racist state, comments that she later walked back under pressure.

Frankel and the CPC did not immediately respond to requests for comment. 

The post Florida Democrat Who Voted to Censure Rep. Rashida Tlaib Quits Progressive Caucus appeared first on The Intercept.

Philadelphia City Council member and Minority Leader Brian O’Neill, the last remaining Republican on the council after this month’s elections, fired an administrative assistant in his office in April 2017, less than six months after she accused a co-worker of sexual harassment, according to court documents.

The administrative assistant, Linda Trush, sued the city in 2021 and alleged that she was repeatedly sexually harassed by a co-worker and subjected to a hostile work environment before being unlawfully terminated from her job. In her suit, Trush said she was retaliated against after reporting “severe and pervasive sexual harassment” and taking medical leave for mental health treatment as a result of the alleged harassment. (Trush’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.) 

“Despite Plaintiff’s aforesaid excellent performance, her work environment was tainted by the severe and pervasive sexual harassment that she was subjected to in 2014,” the lawsuit says, “and the retaliation that followed once she complained of the same.”

The city responded to the suit in January 2022 denying Trush’s allegations of harassment. Earlier, the city stated that it was “unable to substantiate” the harassment claim. The case is still pending. “As this lawsuit is in active litigation, the City declines to comment at this time,” Ava Schwemler, director of communications for the City of Philadelphia Law Department, which is representing the city, said in a statement to The Intercept. (O’Neill did not respond to a request for comment.)

O’Neill represents northeast Philadelphia and was first elected to the City Council in 1979.

Two of the council’s seven at-large seats are reserved for nonmajority parties and had historically gone to Republicans. In 2019, Working Families Party candidate Kendra Brooks was elected to one of the slots, making history as the first candidate outside the two major parties to hold a council seat in a century. After Brooks and Nicolas O’Rourke, another WFP candidate, won at-large seats in this month’s election, O’Neill is the last remaining Republican on the council.

While the WFP campaigned on shutting out GOP council candidates, the Philadelphia Democratic Party openly opposed the party’s candidates in this cycle. The week before the election, Philadelphia Democratic City Committee Chair Bob Brady emailed city ward leaders and threatened to expel those who had signed onto a letter supporting Brooks and O’Rourke unless they recanted before the election.

City Democrats backed O’Neill’s challenger Gary Masino, leader of the Sheet Metal Workers union. Masino lost to O’Neill by 22 points.

“You Will Lose Your Job”

O’Neill’s office hired Trush in 2010. Trush said she was harassed by a co-worker on multiple occasions starting in 2014 and that the harassment continued until the co-worker was moved to a different department in 2015, according to court documents filed in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

Trush claimed that on different occasions, the co-worker kissed her face, put his hands down her pants, and told her to kiss his genitals. When she refused his advances and threatened to report him, according to Trush’s suit, the co-worker told her, “If you report me, trust me you will lose your job over me first. They will believe me, not you.”

Shortly after her co-worker’s transfer, Trush said she experienced a decline in mental health including depression and panic attacks that led to a post-traumatic stress breakdown in November 2016. Trush told her husband about the harassment, and he contacted O’Neill by text message and asked him to investigate and take action. Following her husband’s outreach, Trush reported the harassment to O’Neill, and, according to Trush’s complaint, O’Neill told both Trush and her husband that the co-worker was a “predator who needed to be stopped.” (The city, in its response in court, said, “Councilman O’Neill stated that if what Plaintiff’s husband told him is true, then Shain is a predator, and Councilman O’Neill stated that the allegations should be reported to the police.”)

After reporting the alleged harassment, Trush requested and took a leave of absence, which she said in her suit was for mental health treatment. (In its response, the city only admitted she took leave, not the impetus.) She left work for three months and returned in February 2017. Upon her return to work, Trush learned that the office had not begun an investigation into her report of sexual harassment and that she would be returning to work in the same office with the co-worker she had reported. Trush complained and asked that her co-worker be moved to another office. Instead, the office reassigned her to its City Hall location, an hour from her home.

Trush alleged that the new office environment was hostile too. She was told she would no longer report directly to O’Neill as she had for the last six years, but to his executive assistant. She said office management refused to move her office supplies and items to the new location and that she was not given an employee access card, meaning she had to obtain a visitor’s pass every day and use public restrooms instead of employee restrooms.

After several requests for an update on her report of harassment, Trush said she received a letter from a human resources representative who said they had completed the investigation and could not substantiate Trush’s claims.

A week later, O’Neill informed Trush she was being reassigned to a new department. Trush asked O’Neill to reconsider the change and to accommodate her ongoing mental and physical health treatment stemming from the alleged harassment. She told O’Neill she believed the reassignment was retaliation for her complaint. One month after being reassigned, Trush was given a letter stating that after “an internal staff review,” her employment was being terminated. Trush asked her new manager why she was being terminated, who replied, “You know why,” according to the lawsuit. When Trush asked the manager to explain, they replied, “Maybe you shouldn’t have made a complaint.”

The post Last Republican on Philly City Council Fired Staffer Who Reported Sexual Harassment, Says Lawsuit appeared first on The Intercept.

Two of the organizations sent cease-and-desist letters to union shops considering resolutions calling for a ceasefire. Another group called staffers into meetings with human resources for using work channels to share links about Palestine and proposing to do fundraising for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund in lieu of an annual holiday party.

Management at several of the offices said statements on Gaza under consideration by their unions were jeopardizing funding. Pro-Israel activists launched a petition to defund the Bronx Defenders after its union issued a statement opposing Israel’s “genocidal intent in Gaza.” Public defender offices across the country are already severely underfunded. While most rely heavily on public funding, many also receive support from private institutions, including major law firms. Several firms have responded to criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza by rescinding job offers and threatening to curb recruiting efforts at law schools. 

On Thursday, ahead of the unionwide vote on a statement, the Legal Aid Society called a staff meeting. According to a partial recording of the meeting obtained by The Intercept, Chief Executive Officer Twyla Carter said the resolution’s language was antisemitic. Staff could vote how they wanted, she said, but she had an obligation to warn them about the impact on the organization’s work. 

Four law firms had already threatened to pull funding from the office over the resolution, Carter said. In discouraging union members to vote for the statement, she said, “I’m not trying to lose a dime.” 

A vote on the union resolution was halted by a court on Friday after members of the organizations, including union membership, sued. The union received the restraining order before it was over and could not tally the results.

The suppression of speech at publicly funded legal defense agencies comes as governments and workplaces around the world have disciplined and fired staffers for criticizing Israel’s nonstop bombing of Gaza. Suppression of speech about Palestine has come in the form of bans on rallies and vigils, suspensions of student groups, doxxing and death threats, and the cancellation of television interviews with Palestinian commentators. 

“Unions must act where the U.S. government will not. I proudly support Palestinian liberation and self-determination.”

The fight brewing in public defender offices escalated after recent union efforts to issue statements condemning the killing of Palestinian civilians. Since Hamas killed 1,200 Israelis last month, mostly civilians, Israel has killed more than 11,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, one out of every 200 people. 

“Unions must act where the U.S. government will not,” said Sophia Gurulé, a staff attorney in the immigration practice at the Bronx Defenders and a member of the Bronx Defenders Union – UAW Local 2325. “I proudly support Palestinian liberation and self-determination.” 

Stop the Count

The legal fight revolved around a statement from the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys – UAW Local 2325, which covers more than 25 organizations, including the Bronx Defenders, Brooklyn Defender Services, Neighborhood Defender Service, and the Legal Aid Society of New York City. Staffers across the four offices, as well as the New York County Defender Services, which is not represented by the union, have been retaliated against, reprimanded, surveilled, and encouraged to oppose the union resolution. 

The staffers spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional retaliation. In total, the five agencies provide legal and social services to more than 360,000 people each year.

The resolution expresses solidarity with Palestinians, calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, and demands an end to Israel’s occupation, decrying apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. With a “yes” vote, the union would also oppose future military aid to Israel and endorse the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel. 

At the Legal Aid all-staff meeting on Thursday, Carter, the CEO, said the resolution was antisemitic. “These statements call for the elimination of the state of Israel and the annihilation of the Jewish people,” Carter said. “You don’t have to agree, but that’s how some of our colleagues feel, and some of our supporters.”

“Accusing Israel of being an apartheid state and of genocide are all dog whistles for antisemitism,” she said. She suggested Jewish readers of the statement might see it the same way Black people would see pro-police sloganeering: “And, again, as a Black woman, my closest analogy is hearing how people talk about ‘blue lives matter’ or other things that land on me differently.”

“Accusing Israel of being an apartheid state and of genocide are all dog whistles for antisemitism.”

In a statement to The Intercept, the Legal Aid Society said it has a long-standing policy against taking positions on international political events and that it was focused on its mission to provide legal services to low-income New Yorkers. The organization said it rejected the union’s resolution, found it antisemitic, and hoped union members would vote against it: “The resolution is laden with coded antisemitic language and thinly veiled calls for the destruction of the State of Israel. At a time when our attorneys and staff should be united in support of the people we serve, the resolution does not advance the legal interests of our clients, does not comport with our mission and values, and is divisive and hurtful.”

Several hours after the meeting on Thursday, attorneys at the Legal Aid Society of Nassau County sued in New York State Supreme Court to stop the vote, saying it posed an ethical dilemma for attorneys that would make it “impossible for them to properly do their job as Public Defenders.” 

On Friday, the court granted a temporary restraining order enjoining the vote. Voting had gotten underway at 9 a.m. and only 15 minutes were left on the clock when the injunction was issued. The tally never got underway.

Cease-and-Desist Letters

On October 18, two days before the union at Bronx Defenders issued a statement opposing Israel’s occupation, ethnic cleansing, and “genocidal intent in Gaza,” management at the group sent a cease-and-desist letter warning that it would enforce trademark rights against any use of the organization’s name in the forthcoming statement. 

On Wednesday, the Bronx Defenders issued its own statement distancing itself from the union. The group said its union’s statement did not recognize the humanity of Israelis and was not consistent with the values or mission of the Bronx Defenders. 

Bronx Defenders staffers also reported to the union that human resources informed them that their draft emails were in violation of policies on internal communications. Management later apologized and said they hadn’t intended to look at staffers’ drafts. (Asked for comment, the Bronx Defenders referred The Intercept to its Wednesday statement.)

As staff at the Neighborhood Defender Services, a public defense group covering Harlem, considered putting out a union statement on Gaza in early November, they also received a cease-and-desist letter. The letter came attached to an email from managing director Alice Fontier, who said a public statement on Israel and Gaza fell outside the scope of the organization’s work. The attached letter, from an outside law firm, urged the union not to use Neighborhood Defender Services or any other trademarked nomenclature.

“We have seen the impact of a similar statement issued by Union members at the Bronx Defenders,” said the attached cease-and-desist letter. The letter noted that the petition to defund the Bronx Defenders had already gathered more than 1,500 signatures and was picked up by the New York Post, “which, unfortunately, is read widely by those in power in New York City government.” The city, the letter said, would soon be considering two major funding proposals for Neighborhood Defender Services. 

Neighborhood Defender Services’s Helmis Ortega Santana, who helped write the union’s draft statement, resigned on November 6 as union president after receiving the cease-and-desist letter. In his resignation letter, Santana said he was concerned that the statement would jeopardize the organization’s funding and its ability to serve clients, as well as ongoing contract negotiations.

Policies against international political speech in work channels weren’t previously enforced around discussion of the war in Ukraine, participation with pro-Israel groups, or international migration issues, according to public defense staffers who spoke to The Intercept. Now, these policies are being enforced for the first time in the case of speech related to Palestine, staffers said. Several of the public defense group have a record of putting out statements on major political events, including police brutality such as the murder of George Floyd, the movement to abolish U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and former President Donald Trump’s “Muslim ban.”

In the Legal Aid staff meeting Thursday ahead of the union vote, Carter referred to an organizational policy to “not talk about sociopolitical views or anything outside of our mission and our clients.”

Correction: November 17, 2023, 11:32 p.m. ET
This article previously stated that Lisa Ohta, who is the president of the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, was a plaintiff in a suit brought against the union. Ohta was named as a defendant.

The post Public Defenders Get Restraining Order to Block Their Own Union From Voting on Gaza Statement appeared first on The Intercept.

The letter, sent on Wednesday, urges Sanders to introduce a Senate companion bill to a ceasefire resolution introduced last month in the House of Representatives. The Sanders convention delegates also called on him to support an end to the Israeli blockade of Gaza, the occupation of Palestinian land, U.S. military funding for war crimes against Palestinians, and the expansion of Israeli settlements. 

“Palestinians require more than just a ‘humanitarian pause.’”

“We’ve progressed beyond the stage of seeking mere condemnations or symbolic gestures,” the delegates wrote. “We concur with your assertion that these ‘unspeakable crimes’ must cease and that ‘the bombs and missiles from both sides’ should be halted. But Palestinians require more than just a ‘humanitarian pause.’” 

The House resolution was introduced by by Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo.; Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.; André Carson, D-Ind.; Summer Lee, D-Pa.; and Delia Ramirez, D-Ill. The House resolution now has 18 co-sponsors. So far, at least 31 members of Congress, including Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., have come out in favor of a ceasefire — although Durbin and others conditioned their calls on the release of Israeli prisoners in Gaza. 

The letter comes three weeks after hundreds of Sanders presidential campaign alumni sent a letter urging the senator to back a ceasefire. Since that letter’s release, Sanders has all but supported a ceasefire: calling for a humanitarian pause; to “stop the bombing”; and saying Congress, the Biden administration, and the world “must take action.”

“We Need Him Now, More Than Ever”

Sanders’s delegates delivered the letter to the Vermont senator one day after more than 115 former staffers for President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama — including former Biden chief of staff Ron Klain and former Treasury Secretary and Harvard University President Lawrence Summers — applauded Biden for his “staunch support of Israel.” The former top administration officials lauded Biden’s proposed $14.3 billion in military aid for Israel. 

It also follows a decision by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D. N.Y., and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., to join Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, R-La., and Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, at Tuesday’s March for Israel in Washington, D.C., where the quartet proclaimed, “We stand with Israel.” 

Hours later, Israel invaded Al-Shifa hospital, the Gaza Strip’s largest hospital, where thousands of displaced and injured civilians were trapped, including dozens of premature babies. 

Wednesday is the fifth consecutive day that the Gaza Ministry of Health has been unable to update its death toll, owing to a lack of fuel and power that has totaled the health care system, making tallying the dead and communications nearly impossible. The last time the ministry updated the death toll, on Friday, Israel had killed 11,078 people.

“As a Jewish person of conscience watching Israeli genocide in real time, I say, not in my name, not with my tax dollars, shall Israel bomb and deprive a trapped population, half of them children, of water, food, medicine and fuel,” said Marcy Winograd, a 2020 Sanders delegate from California’s 24th congressional district, and a co-founding member of the Los Angeles chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. “As a Jewish member of Congress, Senator Sanders’ voice would be particularly persuasive in demanding an end to Israel’s violations of international law that shock the world to leave us feeling unmoored from our own humanity.”

The latest letter adds to a growing opposition among Democrats against unconditional U.S. support for Israel. Over a dozen former Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., campaign staffers, 411 current congressional staffers, 400-plus current Biden administration employees, 500-plus former Biden campaign alumni, 133 Obama staffers and appointees, and 260 former presidential campaign staffers for Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., issued statements demanding support for a ceasefire. More have since signed on.

“From coastal cities to rural valleys like mine, millions of young people turned their attention to politics for the first time in 2016 and 2020 because we shared Bernie’s vision for peace and justice,” said Taran Samarth, a student organizer and 2020 Sanders delegate from Pennsylvania. “We need him now, more than ever, to champion those values once more and call for a ceasefire in the face of the Biden administration’s unconditional support for the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”

The post More Than 300 DNC Delegates for Bernie Sanders Push Senator to Call for Ceasefire in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

Last week, Hochul’s office relented, telling reporters that the funder was the UJA-Federation of New York, a Jewish philanthropy that has supported dozens of similar trips for elected officials, including, recently, New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Citing a delay in a state ethics office review, Hochul’s office said it would cover the $12,000 cost after all. 

UJA-Federation of New York belongs to a sprawling network of tax-exempt charities under the umbrella of the Jewish Federations of North America, or JFNA. In addition to funding Jewish community groups, federation chapters have also been accused of sending millions in tax-exempt dollars to organizations that support Israel’s illegal settlement program in the occupied West Bank. According to published reports and an Intercept review of recent tax filings, UJA itself has provided more than half a million dollars since 2018 to groups that support Israeli settlements. 

The arrangement has come under scrutiny in recent years for funneling publicly subsidized money to settlements in Israel that are considered to be illegal under international law, part of Israel’s increasingly successful efforts to foreclose the possibility of a contiguous future Palestinian state.

Eva Borgwardt, the national spokesperson for the American Jewish anti-occupation group IfNotNow, said that funding settlements diminishes hopes for peace between Palestinians and Israelis. 

“The UJA has helped destroy any semblance of a ‘peace process’ or possibility of a two state solution.”

“The UJA has helped destroy any semblance of a ‘peace process’ or possibility of a two state solution, instead deepening a violent apartheid reality for Palestinians with no end in sight,” Borgwardt told The Intercept. While funding groups operating in settlements, UJA has not supported efforts to de-escalate the current war, Borgwardt said: “If the UJA and Governor Hochul are concerned about safety for Israelis and hostage returns, they should join us in calling for an immediate ceasefire, release of the hostages, a de-escalation, and an end to the conditions of occupation, apartheid and siege that led to the current nightmare.”

In response to questions about the trip and UJA’s funding of groups operating in or supporting settlements, Hochul’s office sent a statement shared with reporters last week. The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment or questions about the payment arrangement for the trip. 

While JFNA, the umbrella group, has in the past said it has a policy not to fund investments in the occupied Palestinian territories, individual federations have said they don’t have guidelines for distinguishing grants made over the so-called Green Line that demarcates Israel’s internationally recognized borders.

“Jewish Federations’ long-standing policy is that we do not allocate funds for capital investments beyond the Green Line,” JFNA, the umbrella group, said in a statement. “We are also adamant that the incredible support we provide for humanitarian aid, medical assistance, helping victims of terror, and building a stronger, more tolerant, and more accepting civil society should not be denied to those who may need it based on their address.”

In many cases, the cash goes to groups that carry out activities on both sides of the so-called Green Line, including groups that do humanitarian work, with the destination of funds sometimes reported in tax filings and other times not. Grants to groups that work on both sides of the Green Line defray other costs, enabling greater resources to flow into settlements or supporting their expansion.

UJA has directed funds to a wide array of groups in Israel. Among them are organizations promoting Arab–Israeli cooperation and supporting Arab inclusion in Israeli society. The group has also given to Zionist educational and policy organizations. Many recipients of UJA cash are not involved in the settlements, but the group has also donated money to organizations, both in Israel and stateside, that support and participate in the settlement project. (UJA did not respond to a request for comment.)

Since 2018, UJA has given sums totaling in the six figures to groups supporting settlement activity in the West Bank, according to media reports, UJA reports, and tax filings. Through JFNA, New York’s UJA gave nearly $23,000 last year to Ohr Torah Stone, a modern Orthodox Jewish movement founded in the West Bank settlement of Efrat and operates schools in settlements.

The group gave at least $105,000 to Nefesh B’Nefesh, a group that promotes American immigration to Israel and has encouraged migrants to move to the West Bank. American Friends of Or National Missions, a New York-based nonprofit that helps expand existing settlements in Israel and establish new ones in the West Bank, received $45,000 from UJA, earmarked for information centers in the Negev and Galilee, areas inside the Green Line. And, in 2019, the group gave $10,000 to the Jewish National Fund, which has financed settlement activity for decades and purchased land from Palestinians to hand it to settlers.

And UJA has donated at least $350,000 to Kedma, earmarked for “building resilience in the Gaza envelope,” an area inside Israel’s internationally recognized border that abuts the occupied Gaza Strip. Kedma provides housing for gap year students, including in Israeli settlements, and administers scholarship and volunteer programs. Among the volunteering tasks, according to Haaretz, is working security for ranches used by settlers to seize large swaths of land for so-called hilltop settlements — those considered illegal even under Israeli law.

In recent weeks, ideological settlers in the West Bank, emboldened by the Israeli government’s response to Hamas’s deadly surprise attack and armed with state-issued rifles, have killed at least 100 Palestinians and displaced at least 13 entire communities.

The roughly 150 independent U.S. nonprofits under the umbrella of the Jewish Federations of North America came under heightened scrutiny after a 2017 Haaretz investigation revealed that some had sent millions of effectively subsidized dollars to settlements, including to extremist settler groups in the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. 

While most federation funds are spent within the United States, the federations have historically also donated around 10 percent or more of their disbursed funds to Israel, both directly and through other U.S. nonprofits that route the money to Israel. Local federations gave at least $6 million to Israeli settlements between 2012 and 2015, Haaretz reported.

The transfer of millions of tax-exempt dollars to settlements in Palestine through private U.S. foundations has raised questions among nonprofit, legal, and foreign policy experts. The U.S., for its part, officially opposes Israeli settlements and their expansion, though the donations are thought to not run afoul of laws governing tax-exempt charities.

Local leaders have tried to stem the flow of private cash to the settlements. In May, New York State Assembly member Zohran Mamdani and Sen. Jabari Brisport, both Democrats, introduced the Not on Our Dime Act to prohibit nonprofits in New York from supporting Israeli settlement activity. The proposal would empower the state attorney general to impose penalties on violators. The bill was met with stiff opposition from the legislators’ Democratic colleagues.

Overall, charities in the U.S. funneled more than $220 million in tax-exempt money to settler organizations in Israel between 2009 and 2013, another Haaretz investigation found. Funds to Israel were transferred through some 50 U.S.-based organizations, including the Hebron Fund and the New York-based Central Fund of Israel.

Federations under the JFNA umbrella haven’t always been able to support West Bank settlements. In the 2000s, the group changed its rules to allow federations to send humanitarian aid to any Israelis, opening the door for local chapters to funnel millions past the Green Line that separates Israel’s internationally recognized territory from occupied Palestinian lands. Since then, as settlers have forced more and more Palestinians out of their homes and off their land, the JFNA has relaxed other restrictions on operations in the West Bank.

In June, JFNA and the UJA-Federation, among other organizations, co-sponsored a conference in New York City promoting Israeli settlements, The Forward reported. The event featured Israeli ministers, Zionist leaders, and heads of settlement councils, who partook in panels on how to spread the Israeli presence in the West Bank.

In 2016, JFNA’s board voted to allow federation-sponsored trips to visit West Bank settlements. Between 2014 and 2021, UJA-Federation also gave at least $12 million to Birthright programs, which have been criticized for regularly taking participants into Israeli-occupied territories without notifying them, including the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Golan Heights, whose annexation from Syria is not internationally recognized. (JFNA told The Forward it had not seen a copy of the conference programming before agreeing to take part.)

During Adams’s UJA-Federation-organized excursion, he met with Yisrael Gantz, chair of the Binyamin Regional Council, which governs roughly 50 Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. The visit drew criticisms, including from liberal pro-Israel advocacy organization J Street.

The UJA-Federation is a “partner” organization and the primary funder of another Israel excursion-sponsoring organization: the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York. The council has taken over 1,500 public officials on “study tours” to Israel, according to its website. On the trips, Israeli military representatives accompany participants on visits to “strategic locales,” like the West Bank “Security Barrier” and a town near the Gaza Strip. The junkets also frequently venture into the West Bank beyond the wall, including Efrat, a purportedly “liberal” settlement where nearly half of the residents voted for an extremist far-right party last year.

The trips have shaped elected officials’ politics. Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y. — one of Congress’s most aggressive Israel backers, including strident support of the ongoing Israeli military campaign that has killed more than 8,000 Palestinians in Gaza — credits his views on Israel–Palestine to a 2015 trip he took as a city council member. The trip was co-organized by the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York and UJA-Federation.

“There’s a false narrative that I am pro-Israel because of ‘the Jewish lobby’ or ‘Jewish money’ or whatever antisemitic tropes critics wish to invoke,” Torres, whose top campaign contributor is America’s flagship Israel lobby group, tweeted on Tuesday. “Left unmentioned is the fact that I have been pro-Israel for nearly a decade—long before I ever thought of running for Congress.”

While smearing critics of his pro-Israel positions as antisemitic and racist, Torres cited the trip paid for by the two New York charities.

The post Kathy Hochul’s Israel Trip Bankrolled by Group Funding Illegal Settlements appeared first on The Intercept.

The debate over the bill comes two weeks after its sponsor said U.S. officials should make all efforts to slow down any humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza and suggested that there is no distinction between civilians — including children — and the militant group Hamas that massacred some 1,300 Israelis in an October 7 surprise attack.

The original text in the bill — the Hamas International Financing Prevention Act, or H.R. 340 — allowed a humanitarian exemption to provide food, medicine, and medical devices to civilians in Gaza. During committee markup, Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., the sponsor, offered an amendment to remove the language and replace it with a provision that would require President Joe Biden to issue a case-by-case waiver to approve humanitarian aid transfers.

“Any assistance should be slowed down — any assistance,” Mast had said in a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on the bill last month. “Because I would challenge anybody in here to point to me, which Palestinian is Hamas, and which one is an innocent civilian? Which is the child that was poking other Israeli children?” — a reference to a viral video allegedly showing Palestinian boys prodding an Israeli Jewish hostage in Gaza — “And which ones exactly are the innocent ones? … It should absolutely be every effort made to slow down any perceived assistance that’s going there.”

“Any assistance should be slowed down — any assistance.”

Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., offered another amendment to reinstate the exception allowing for ease of humanitarian aid transfers. The Jacobs amendment was voted down on party lines after the American Israel Public Affairs Committee sent out a recommendation urging members to vote against it. (AIPAC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

During floor debate on the resolution on Wednesday, Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, said he was appalled by Mast’s comments during the committee hearing last month and that the decision to remove the provision “amounts to intentional collective punishment.”

While he unequivocally condemned the October 7 attack and fully supported past sanctions on Hamas, Castro said, there is a distinction between Hamas and innocent Palestinian civilians. “Our efforts to hold Hamas accountable must not come at the expense of those innocent civilians,” he said.

The State Department and the Treasury Department supported the original bill language to exempt humanitarian aid deliveries for food, medicine, and life-saving supplies from broader restrictions, he added. “At times here, we need to speculate about the motivations behind specific legislation and legislative decisions. In this case, however, it’s part of the committee record,” Castro said, going on to quote Mast’s committee hearing remarks.

“The decision to intentionally remove this provision was a choice to hurt people in Gaza who are not responsible for this conflict,” Castro said, adding that he would support the bill if its original humanitarian exemption were restored. “But I cannot in good faith support a bill that amounts to intentional collective punishment against the people of Gaza, nearly half of whom are children.”

Mast replied by doubling down and claiming that no Palestinian is innocent. “I would encourage the other side to not so lightly throw around the idea of innocent Palestinian civilians, as is frequently said,” Mast said. “I don’t think we would so lightly throw around the term ‘innocent Nazi civilians’ during World War II. It is not a far stretch to say there are very few innocent Palestinian civilians.” Members who vote for the resolution might not understand that the bill slows down rather than eases the transfer of humanitarian aid, according to two senior Democratic staffers familiar with the bill, given that the language replaced the original humanitarian aid exemption with a waiver provision.

A vote on the bill is scheduled for this evening.

The post GOP Representative Denies Existence of “Innocent Palestinian Civilians” and Tries to Hobble Aid to Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

The open letter comes as Fetterman, a consistent supporter of Israel, has defended its war on Gaza and is the latest effort by former or current U.S. government employees urging an end to the violence.

On Thursday, Fetterman joined 35 other senators in pushing for “the swift implementation of sustained access for humanitarian aid, including water and medical supplies, to save innocent civilian lives in Gaza,” yet he has been dismissive of his congressional colleagues’ calls for a ceasefire.

“Now is not the time to talk about a ceasefire,” Fetterman posted a few days after 13 House Democrats introduced a resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire. “We must support Israel in efforts to eliminate the Hamas terrorists who slaughtered innocent men, women, and children. Hamas does not want peace, they want to destroy Israel.” (The ceasefire resolution now has 18 co-sponsors, including Florida Rep. Maxwell Frost, who signed on Friday.)

The former Fetterman campaign staffers, who called for an end to unconditional arms support to Israel and signed the letter as “Fetterman Alumni for Peace,” said they were speaking out because of the role they played in getting Fetterman elected. They published the letter anonymously out of fear of professional reprisal.

“On the trail,” they wrote, “your overarching promise was to ‘Forgotten Communities’ – people and places that get overlooked, written off, and left behind. You can’t be a champion of forgotten communities if you cheerlead this war and the consequent destruction of Palestinian communities at home and abroad.”

The letter is the latest in a spate of objections from official Washington and its orbit. Earlier this week, 411 current congressional staffers and 260 former Elizabeth Warren presidential campaign staffers issued statements demanding support for a ceasefire, while an 11-year State Department official resigned due to his moral disagreements with the Biden administration’s approach to the conflict.

On Thursday, activists staged a protest at Fetterman’s Philadelphia office, calling on him to support a ceasefire. They later said they were expelled from the office, though the senator’s Chief of Staff Adam Jentleson argued that that was not the case.

When asked online whether Fetterman would join the calls for a ceasefire, Jentleson simply responded, “No.” He also derided the letter signed by 411 congressional staff urging their bosses to join the call for a ceasefire. “The thing about being a staffer is that no one elected you to represent them,” Jentleson said. 

There does, however, appear to be broad public support for a ceasefire. On Friday, the progressive polling firm Data for Progress released the results of a survey that found that 66 percent of all likely voters and 80 percent of Democrats are in favor of a ceasefire. Israel’s assault on Gaza has so far killed nearly 3,800 people, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.

Fetterman’s staunch support for Israel goes back to his 2022 campaign. During his primary race against Rep. Conor Lamb, as The Intercept previously reported, Fetterman allowed the Democratic Majority for Israel to guide his platform on Israel and Palestine. DMFI had spent the campaign season dropping millions of dollars in opposition to progressive Democrats critical of U.S. support for Israel, and Fetterman succeeded in avoiding their ire.

Speaking with Jewish Insider during the campaign, Fetterman said he wanted to go out of his way “to make sure it’s absolutely clear” that the views he held on Israel “in no way go along the lines of some of the more fringe or extreme wings of our party.”

“I would also respectfully say that I’m not really a progressive in that sense,” Fetterman said, stressing that he supported U.S. aid to Israel “without any additional conditions.”

The post Sen. John Fetterman’s Former Campaign Staffers Urge Him to Support Israel–Hamas Ceasefire appeared first on The Intercept.

“They’re kind of failing upwards when they’re not only staying in the department but they’re also being promoted,” said Jennvine Wong, staff attorney with the Cop Accountability Project at the Legal Aid Society, a public defense organization in New York City. Last month, Legal Aid released an analysis of data on settlements in cases alleging police misconduct. 

NYPD Sgt. David Grieco, a cop with the street nickname of “Bullethead,” was named in at least 17 suits between his hiring in 2006 and his first promotion in 2016. After advancing to the rank of sergeant in 2017, he was named in at least eight more suits. That promotion came less than one week after Grieco was named in his 28th suit. Since his last promotion, Grieco has been named in at least 27 additional lawsuits. Payouts for suits naming Grieco exceeded $1 million this year.

Few of the officers named in lawsuits, and none in this story, ever face judgments in court — criminal or civil. New York City, whose lawyers defend NYPD cops, often arrange out-of-court settlements, paying huge sums to make cases going away under the frequent condition that the police admit no wrongdoing. The city has already paid out more than $50 million in lawsuits in the first half of this year. (The police did not respond to a request for comment.)

Grieco is not the only officer who the NYPD promoted after being named in multiple lawsuits alleging misconduct. The NYPD has a history of promoting officers who have been found to lie in cases or engage in misconduct. 

Detective Specialist Wilfredo Benitez was hired in 2008 as a police officer. Over the next nine years, Benitez was named in at least nine suits alleging misconduct. He was promoted to detective in 2017 and has been named in at least 11 additional suits since then. Settlements in suits naming Benitez have paid more than $480,000. 

Lt. Henry Daverin started at the NYPD in 2008 and promoted to sergeant in 2013. Daverin was named in at least 19 suits between 2013 and 2017, when he was promoted to his current role as lieutenant. Settled police misconduct suits that named Daverin have paid out at least $1.5 million since 2013. 

Detective Jodi Brown joined the force as a police officer in 2005. He was named in at least seven suits alleging misconduct between then and his first promotion to detective in 2015. Since then, Brown has been named in at least 30 more suits that have paid a total of $1.3 million in settlements. 

Detective Abdiel Anderson was hired as a police officer in 2003. He was named in two lawsuits shortly afterward. In 2008, he was promoted to detective. Anderson has been named in at least 43 suits since then, with settled cases paying out more than half a million dollars. 

Detective Eugene Keller first became a police officer in 2012 and was named in at least three lawsuits over the next decade. Keller was promoted to detective last year. Suits naming him have paid more than $4.1 million. 

“You have officers that are just repeatedly costing the city quite a lot.”

The promotions given to cops repeatedly named in lawsuits that have cost the city tens of millions of dollars suggest that the department isn’t invested in addressing misconduct. 

“It just becomes a cost of doing business,” Wong said. “That’s a problem.”

Police officers who carry out misconduct don’t come out of nowhere, Wong said. “You have officers that are just repeatedly costing the city quite a lot,” she said. 

Findings of liability in civil suits trigger investigations by the NYPD, but with most suits settled, there is often nothing to trigger that response, Wong said. 

Considering the number of lawsuits, though, it stretches credulity to suggest that nothing is amiss simply because there are no judgments in court or internal investigations, Wong said: “It shows a pattern of misconduct.”

The post NYPD Cops Sued for Misconduct Cost City Millions in Settlements — Then Get Promotions appeared first on The Intercept.

“They are running out of body bags,” Tlaib said through tears in a press conference Monday. “We all know collective punishment of Palestinians is a war crime. The answer to war crimes can never be more war crimes.” It is a disgrace, Tlaib added, that Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the majority of Congress have not even mentioned the possibility of a ceasefire. 

The resolution comes after two earlier efforts in the House both fell short of calling for an end to violence. The first — a bipartisan resolution led by Reps. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, and Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y., and supported by over 420 members of Congress — did not even mention Palestinian civilians. As of Monday, the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza reports that at least 2,808 Palestinians have been killed, while 10,859 have been wounded.

The second, a letter led by Reps. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and Mark Pocan, D-Wis., urged Biden to push for access to food and water in Gaza and ensure Israel follows international law but similarly fell short of calling for a ceasefire. Sources said the letter excluded that language because doing so would have reduced the number of signers from 55 to a dozen or fewer.

The “pro-peace, pro-Israel” J Street threatened to withhold endorsements from members who refused to sign onto the McCaul–Meeks resolution. J Street was once considered an alternative group to support progressive members who did not agree with hard-line and unconditional stances of pro-Israel support like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee or Democratic Majority for Israel. As The Intercept reported, J Street’s stance on the ongoing war has frustrated both former and current staffers who said its mission has been compromised. 

“What we are hearing from Dems right now is even worse than the typical anti-Palestinian narrative we always hear from the government. Israeli officials have openly admitted to genocidal intent, and Democrats are deliberately silent,” said one Democratic staffer who requested anonymity to speak freely. “They are willing accomplices to what is happening and what will happen in the coming days. Those of us staffers who have Palestinian family — or are Palestinians themselves — are totally abandoned and isolated here.” 

Below are the 13 representatives who support an immediate deescalation and ceasefire as of Monday afternoon:

Cori Bush
Rashida Tlaib
André Carson
Summer Lee
Delia Ramirez
Jamaal Bowman
Bonnie Watson Coleman
Jesus “Chuy” Garcia
Jonathan Jackson
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Ilhan Omar
Ayanna Pressley
Nydia Velázquez

The post 13 House Democrats Call for Immediate Ceasefire in Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

The resolution, however, does not mention Palestinian civilians, who face an ongoing siege of medieval proportions — with Israeli forces cutting off access to food, water, and electricity — and calls for further restricting and scrutinizing imports because of Hamas’s use of bulldozers and other rudimentary equipment to break down the border fence with Israel. 

The lack of any attempt in the resolution to urge Israel to avoid civilian casualties, as the Palestinian territory stares down an apocalyptic and ongoing massacre, has led to a small pocket of resistance to the resolution among a handful of Democrats. 

The liberal organization J Street is working to break down that resistance. J Street, which dubs itself both “pro-peace and pro-Israel,” often serves as a counterweight to the more hawkish American Israel Public Affairs Committee. On this resolution, however, there’s no daylight between the two. 

J Street has been warning Democrats that if they don’t sponsor the McCaul–Meeks resolution, they will lose the group’s endorsement come reelection time, according to sources familiar with the position J Street has been relaying to members of Congress.

Asked for comment, J Street confirmed it has made the resolution a priority, providing a statement from Kevin Rachlin, vice president of government affairs:

An important part of being in political partnership is ensuring that one’s core values are shared — especially in moments of crisis. We have been reaching out to all of our endorsed candidates to let them know that for J Street, a pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy organization, signing on to the broad-based congressional resolution that condemns Hamas, and states support for the State and people of Israel, is a deeply important affirmation of one of our core values. We are urging our endorsed candidates and all Members of Congress to vote yes on this resolution if and when it is brought to a vote. 

While the resolution has yet to officially pass, Israel has been buoyed by the United States’s continual assurance of unwavering support. On Thursday, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin remarked that American military aid would remain unconditional, though President Joe Biden, in his more recent remarks, made an aboutface, and has begun to insist that civilian lives be protected in Gaza. On a call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday, Biden said that “it is really important that Israel, with all the anger and frustration … that exists, is that they operate by the rules of war.” The resolution J Street insists all Democrats support does not include the type of admonition now being made by Biden himself.

On the Hill, Democratic leadership has declined to defend members who’ve urged a ceasefire — among them the holdouts from the McCaul-Meeks resolution — when they have come under attack.

Human Rights Watch has confirmed that Israel, in its airstrikes, has been using white phosphorus in violation of international law — an ordinance prohibited particularly for its risk of threatening civilians and surrounding buildings and structures. On Thursday, Israel’s Air Force boasted on Twitter of its use of 6,000 bombs to raze entire city blocks — or, as the military put it, “terrorist targets” — in Gaza; the account posted accompanying photos depicting the rows of buildings leveled by Israeli strikes.

Later Thursday, Israel ordered 1.1 million people in northern Gaza to leave the area within 24 hours, in what is believed to be a warning of a looming ground invasion. Human rights organizations as well as the United Nations have called such a rushed evacuation impossible. Nevertheless, Israel has stuck by its order to evacuate half the territory, which houses Gaza’s main hospital. 

Some 70 of the Gazan civilians who heeded the orders to flee were reportedly bombed and killed by Israel anyhow. Israel has also killed at least seven journalists.

Israeli strikes have killed at least 1,900 people in Gaza, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, since Hamas’s attack, which itself killed more than 1,000 Israelis, many of them civilians.

J Street has also expressed support for a 55-signature letter, led by Reps. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., and Mark Pocan, D-Wis., urging the Biden administration to work to ensure that people in Gaza have access to food, water, and electricity, and that Israel follows international law. The letter discouraged hate crimes against both Jews and Muslims and asked Biden to guarantee that any supplemental funding requests include aid for Palestinians and Israelis.

The signatories of the smaller letter, signed by just 26 percent of the Democratic caucus, also condemned Hamas’s attack and stated that Israel has the right to defend itself — but they wrote that Israel’s response must acknowledge the millions of Palestinian civilians in Gaza “who themselves are victims of Hamas.”

The post J Street to Democrats: Back Resolution Supporting Gaza War or Lose Endorsement appeared first on The Intercept.

The latest dustup speaks to a growing rift between Democrats on Israel and Palestine and the party’s long-standing reluctance to criticize human rights abuses by the Israeli government. 

According to two Democrats familiar with the meeting, Gottheimer got into tense arguments with several of his colleagues.

In Wednesday’s caucus meeting, according to two sources, a member discussed wanting both Jewish and Muslim constituents to feel comfortable attending events to support each other, and that they had heard Muslim clerics did not attend a vigil on Tuesday night in their district. 

Sitting in the back of the room and speaking to another attendee, Gottheimer made a remark. Some present thought he was responding to comments from the front of the room and saying Muslim clerics felt guilty. Gottheimer’s comment left many in the room stunned, according to a member in the room.

According to two sources with knowledge of the meeting, Gottheimer was heard saying, “It’s because they’re guilty.” A Democrat in the room said that, after making his remark, Gottheimer could be seen having an animated discussion about it with Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas.

“Despite an anti-Israel fueled smear campaign, Congressman Gottheimer never said anything about Muslims in today’s caucus meeting, a community he cares deeply about,” said Gottheimer’s spokesperson Chris D’Aloia. “Congressman Gottheimer said that the Members of Congress who have not yet condemned Hamas terrorists should feel guilty.”

“Comments like these endanger the entire American Muslim community.”

Progressive advocates called for action. “I urge Democratic leadership to take action against Congressman Gottheimer, whose comments will only serve to embolden violent Islamophobes and extremists around the country who already have a history of sending death threats to Muslim members of Congress,” said Usamah Andrabi, the head of communications at Justice Democrats. “Comments like these endanger the entire American Muslim community.” 

D’Aloia, the spokesperson, said Gottheimer does not blame Palestinians for the crimes of Hamas. “Congressman Gottheimer is furious and deeply disappointed with Members of Congress who have yet to condemn Hamas terrorists,” D’Aloia said. “Congressman Gottheimer said that those Members who have not condemned Hamas terrorists should indeed feel guilty. Of course, Congressman Gottheimer doesn’t blame innocent Palestinian civilians — he blames the terrorists.”

Democratic leaders remained quiet after Gottheimer attacked Reps. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Cori Bush, D-Mo., over the weekend following statements they made mourning the loss of Israeli and Palestinian lives and calling for an end to violence and Israeli apartheid. Gottheimer, a staunchly pro-Israel Democrat with close ties to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, said he was “sickened” by statements from Tlaib and Bush over the weekend.

Update: October 11, 2023, 8:15 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to include what sources with knowledge of the meeting heard Rep. Josh Gottheimer say and a Democrat in the room’s observation that, after his remark, Gottheimer had an animated discussion about it with Rep. Greg Casar. In addition, this story has been updated to include a statement made by Gottheimer’s spokesperson after publication.

The post In Tense Closed-Door Meeting on Gaza, Josh Gottheimer Comment on Muslims Sparks Fury appeared first on The Intercept.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., released the statement on Sunday, the day after Hamas bulldozed through the barbed-wire fence that separates Gaza from Israeli territory and massacred civilians, including attendees at a music festival. Israel responded by bombing Gazan villages and a refugee camp, and on Monday ordered a complete siege of the Gaza Strip. 

“I grieve the Palestinian and Israeli lives lost yesterday, today, and every day,” Tlaib said in her statement, going on to say that the end of Israel’s occupation of Palestine would create a just future for everyone.

“The failure to recognize the violent reality of living under siege, occupation, and apartheid makes no one safer,” she said. “We cannot ignore the humanity in each other. As long as our country provides billions in unconditional funding to support the apartheid government, this heartbreaking cycle of violence will continue.”

Tlaib’s comments drew swift attacks from not only Republicans but also her fellow Democrats, including Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J.,. On Sunday, Gottheimer let loose on Tlaib and Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., who in a statement on Saturday said she mourned the Israeli and Palestinian lives lost, calling for a ceasefire as well as an end to Israeli military occupation and apartheid. 

“It sickens me that while Israelis clean the blood of their family members shot in their homes,” Gottheimer told Jewish Insider, “they believe Congress should strip U.S. funding to our democratic ally and allow innocent civilians to suffer.”

In recent decades, as the Israeli government increasingly and sometimes openly sided with Republicans in Washington, the Democratic establishment’s relationship with the Jewish state became strained. But the carnage of recent days in Israel, with Palestinian militants launching large-scale coordinated attacks on civilians, has shown that the party’s deference to the pro-Israel lobby is still intact. 

“On this issue, there always tend to be special rules,” said Matt Duss, executive vice-president at the Center for International Policy and former foreign policy adviser to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. 

“I think all people should condemn the Hamas attacks, and we have called for that. At the same time, it’s kind of offensive that some Democrats are using this moment, with further massive loss of lives at stake, to attack other Democrats for their own political advantage,” Duss said. “It is notable how some elements of a party that prides itself on racial justice and equality and standing up for the less powerful can’t seem to tolerate any expressions of sympathy for civilians when those civilians are Palestinians.” 

For some progressive Democrats, the party leadership’s response to the attacks against Tlaib, Bush, and others reflects the reinvigoration among top Democrats of a blind fealty to Israel that ignores the existence of Palestinians and the systematic destruction of the occupied Gaza Strip.

“It is Democratic leadership’s job to protect their members,” said a Democratic staffer who asked for anonymity to speak freely. The staffer said the members under attack merely staked out their stances and the centrist and pro-Israel Democrats should do the same, but avoid going after their colleagues: “The question is, to leadership: Are they going to put up with this? With members going out of their way, not to state their position, or not to state their support for Israel and condemnation of Hamas, but to slam members of their own party?”

The attacks are coming from Democrats who retain close ties to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the flagship of the Israel lobby groups. Gottheimer is one of the top recipients in Congress of money from the group.

Meanwhile, members of the leadership remaining silent on the political broadsides are also close to AIPAC. House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., a staunch AIPAC ally, has taken nearly half a million dollars from the group since last year; he also led an AIPAC-sponsored trip to Israel for incoming House Democrats. (Gottheimer and Jeffries did not respond to requests for comment.)

Progressive activists on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict said Tlaib and Bush stood out as two of the only members of Congress to call for an end to the violence and mourn both Israeli and Palestinian lives.

“There have been almost no members of Congress who have so much as even acknowledged the fact that, in addition to the horrific killing of Israeli civilians, there have been Palestinian civilians who have been killed by the Israeli military and by Israeli settlers,” said Beth Miller, political director of the progressive anti-occupation group Jewish Voice for Peace Action.

“What they said should not have been remotely controversial,” Miller said. “And the fact that people like Josh Gottheimer — who has spent his career moving us further and further away from any possible future where both Palestinians and Israelis can be free and safe — that he would dare attack them for mourning both Palestinian and Israeli lives shows how far and wildly off base he is and how much he is beating the drums of war right now.” 

U.S. aid to Israel — Israel is one of the largest overall recipient of military assistance — has long been the central agenda item for Washington’s influential pro-Israel lobby groups, chief among them AIPAC.

Like Gottheimer himself, the group has attacked Democratic candidates and officials who criticize human rights abuses in Israel and Palestine, even going after the incumbents that Democratic leadership says it’s committed to protecting. AIPAC is recruiting candidates to run primary challenges against several incumbent Democrats who have criticized U.S. support for Israeli military operations, including Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.; Summer Lee, D-Pa.; and Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y. 

“Clearly there is an extremely aggressive effort to prevent more members of Congress from representing what we know is the view of actually a majority of Democrats,” Duss said. “Which is that Palestinian lives have value just as Israeli lives have value. That Palestinians have rights just as Israelis have rights. That Palestinian civilians should be protected just as Israeli civilians should be protected. And that U.S. policy should reflect those facts. That is unacceptable, unfortunately, to conservative elements of the party.” 

Gottheimer, for his part, has helped lead Democratic efforts to protect incumbents from primary challenges alongside Jeffries. The members attacking Bush and Tlaib are also partnering with groups seeking to oust members of Congress who speak about human rights abuses in Palestine, said the Democratic staffer.

“Democrats are quick to condemn women of color when they speak out on Palestinian rights, but are unwilling to publicly push back against their members essentially calling for the genocide of Palestinians or attacking the only Palestinian in Congress — who literally has her grandmother in the crosshairs,” they said. “These members are actively being targeted by groups like AIPAC using the same talking points.” 

Other top Democratic AIPAC recipients — including Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y, and Rep. Haley Stevens, D-Mich. — attacked Tlaib this week. “U.S. aid to Israel is and should be unconditional,” Torres said in a statement. “Shame on anyone who glorifies as ‘resistance’ the largest single-day mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust. It is reprehensible and repulsive.” (Later, on the social media site X, Torres defended Tlaib when she was attacked for hanging a Palestinian flag outside her office.)

Stevens, who unseated progressive Israel critic and Jewish Democrat Rep. Andy Levin last year with help from AIPAC — which spent more than $4 million on ads attacking Levin and boosting her — joined the attacks. “We must continue to come together as a Congress and a country to disavow terrorism and support the Jewish state, our democratic ally, Israel,” Stevens told Jewish Insider in response to Tlaib’s comments. “Israel has a right to exist and defend herself.” (Torrres and Stephens did not respond to requests for comment.)

“We’re seeing our members of Congress, we’re seeing the Biden administration beating the drums of war,” said Miller, of Jewish Voice for Peace Action. “And Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush are trying to hold a sane, anti-war line and they’re being attacked for it by their own party.”

The post Tlaib and Bush Called to End Violence in Israel and Gaza. Then Fellow Democrats Attacked. appeared first on The Intercept.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consolidation and Collapse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Need to Future-proof”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Layoffs were announced in September, just over a year before the 2024 elections. The influential Democratic Party-aligned organization cut five staff members from the training and community engagement team, which ran outreach to grassroots candidates and voters; two people from the digital team; and another person on the state and local campaigns team. Several staff members who were laid off and not part of the union were asked to sign nondisclosure agreements in order to receive severance. Last week, EMILY’s List shut down Run to Win, its national recruitment and training program.

“Staff trainings like the ones EMILY’s List has run for years are essential for high quality campaigns.”

A source with knowledge of the layoffs, who asked for anonymity to protect their professional relationships, said Butler billed the layoffs as part of a change in the organization’s scope and scale, but that they signaled a major shift in priorities away from outreach to grassroots candidates in the lead-up to a critical election year. 

“Staff trainings like the ones EMILY’s List has run for years are essential for high quality campaigns,” said Gabe Tobias, the co-founder of Movement School, a sister organization of Justice Democrats. “Scaling these back going into a critical election year would be a big loss for Democratic candidates up and down the ballot.”

The layoffs came on the heels of broader organizational restructuring in the spring. EMILY’s List cut the position of vice president of research and split the department in two. Another source with knowledge of the restructuring, who requested anonymity for the same reason, said staff was told at the time of the restructuring that there would not be layoffs.

Layoffs in September cut people who weren’t fundraising or working with an endorsed candidate.

Two months before the layoffs, EMILY’s List announced one of its biggest priorities for 2024: a plan to spend tens of millions of dollars to back the reelection of Vice President Kamala Harris, a close ally of Butler’s. A portion of the group’s limited resources will go to boosting Harris as her approval ratings drag below that of her predecessors. 

EMILY’s List also runs a separate Twitter account, “Madam Vice President,” dedicated to pumping up Harris’s image. Butler, who joined EMILY’s List in September 2021, was senior adviser to Harris’s 2020 presidential campaign. EMILY’s List spent $10 million backing Harris after her vice presidential nomination that year. 

“At this time, we are prioritizing our resources to the efforts most central to the EMILYs List’s mission: electing a diverse group Democratic pro-choice women in targeted seats,” said EMILY’s List spokesperson Christina Reynolds. “This required another look at our budget for the cycle, revisiting our focus and our scope and making some tough choices, including having to cut specific functions and lay off some valued colleagues.”

The second source said they were puzzled by other financial decisions in the lead-up to layoffs, which were first reported by HuffPost shortly after The Intercept made a press inquiry. The source said there were questions about spending on conferences and consultants. They said Butler and former Executive Director Emily Cain, who left in April, had trouble attracting big donors during a widespread Democratic fundraising slump, but that the organization found success in appealing to older and more moderate voters through Harris.

During a time when staff across the Democratic fundraising spectrum are having trouble connecting with donors, Harris’s role as the first female vice president plays well, they said. Consultants on contract for EMILY’s List worked on Harris’s brand and frequently posted content praising her on both the pro-Harris and main organizational Twitter accounts. 

“All the Kamala stuff does really, really well,” they said. “I think part of it is like, the base is eating it up any Kamala graphics we’re putting out.”

“Caught Us Off Guard”

EMILY’s List’s restructuring began in the spring. Twelve departments were merged into five to reduce the number of siloed functions within the organization. In April, Cain left, and vice president of campaigns Jessica Mackler and Reynolds, the vice president of communications, were promoted to senior vice presidents in their departments. (Cain started a consulting company in July.) 

The role of vice president of research was replaced with a senior director of research, and the former vice president of research left in March. The department was split across two others: campaign and opposition research, and communications and fact-checking research. Several research staff later left on their own. The organization also hired a new senior vice president and chief of staff, Michelle White, who joined in July. 

Butler’s background as a labor leader made her handling of the organization’s restructuring and later news of layoffs more disappointing, said a former EMILY’s List employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect personal relationships. Prior to joining EMILY’s List, Butler was director for public policy and campaigns at Airbnb. She was previously president of both the SEIU California State Council and the state’s largest union, SEIU Local 2015, which represents home care and nursing home workers.

The former employee disagreed with Butler’s approach to the restructuring, relying on outside consultants rather than on the employees doing the organization’s work. 

“It caught us off guard for sure,” the source said. “She comes from such a prominent labor background, I and my team members definitely expected more of her.” 

Since the restructuring, the group has spent more time talking about Harris. In June, Butler told Politico that EMILY’s List was focused on reminding voters why they should support the vice president. 

“We’re going to tell the story about who she is, what she’s done, support her at every turn and really push back against the massive misinformation and disinformation that’s been directed towards her since she’s been elected,” Butler said.

Boosting Harris makes sense for a fundraising organization dedicated to electing women, the second source said. It still struck them as odd how many resources were dedicated to backing Harris in a position that’s an afterthought for many voters.

“EMILY’s List is doing a lot of stuff for the vice president, which I always thought was weird,” they said. “I know the vice president is an elected position, I just don’t really view it that way.”

The post Laphonza Butler’s EMILY’s List Spends Millions on Kamala Harris While Laying Off Grassroots Staff appeared first on The Intercept.

New York Police Department Sgt. David Grieco — his actual name — had reached a milestone: Police misconduct lawsuits naming him as a defendant had exceeded $1 million in settlement payouts. Since the raft of news stories, Grieco has been named in at least two additional suits, according to publicly available information as of July, and payouts in complaints naming him have now reached $1,099,825. 

In the 13 years it took for Grieco to be named in 48 suits alleging police misconduct, he’s been promoted twice. In 2016, he was elevated from officer to detective and, a year later, to sergeant. 

The New York Police Department’s officer profile database, meanwhile, lists no applicable entries for disciplinary history in Grieco’s profile. 

The NYPD launched the portal in 2021 after a federal appeals court issued a ruling allowing city officials to release police discipline records. The department has since touted the new page as a move toward transparency, said Jennvine Wong, staff attorney with the Cop Accountability Project at the Legal Aid Society, a public defense organization in New York City. Wong said the department’s limitations on what counts as misconduct — reflected in an analysis of lawsuit settlement data provided to The Intercept by the Legal Aid Society — undermines any of those stated transparency goals. 

“If you look up a lot of these officers, especially the ones who are most sued, you’re not going to see that they necessarily have a lengthy misconduct history or disciplinary history,” Wong said. “That’s because the NYPD defines misconduct very narrowly. And in that sense, I think what we’re looking at is really problematic because it allows these kinds of officers to continue to act with impunity.”

Meanwhile, the city is consistently paying out millions in misconduct settlements designed to avoid findings of guilt, which, therefore, never appear on the NYPD profiles database. 

Of the 10 NYPD officers named in the most lawsuits — facing a collective 245 suits in the last decade, with total payouts of more than $7 million — only one is listed for misconduct in the police profile database.

Narrow Definition of Misconduct

Disciplinary histories listed in the NYPD officer profile site only include certain findings against officers. Police face allegations of wrongdoing from the public in both civil court cases and through a civilian complaint board. 

The misconduct is only listed on the NYPD profile site if there are charges and corresponding penalties resulting from pleas of guilt, nolo contendere — accepting a conviction without admitting guilt — or a guilty finding after trial. 

The database also lists allegations of misconduct that are substantiated and result in “Schedule C” discipline by commanding officers, a category of discipline for wrongdoing that includes accidental firearm discharge, failure to comply with direction, vehicle pursuits outside of department policy guidelines, and violation of social media guidelines. 

In the civilian complaint process, discipline is left up to commanding officers in the department, leading to criticisms that, even in the cases where the officer is found culpable, the punishments meted out remain lax.

A separate database for civilian complaints lists recommendations for discipline from the Civilian Complaint Review Board but also fails to include settled suits.

An NYPD spokesperson said that many of the suits settled by New York City reflected older cases and not the department’s current character. 

“The NYPD carefully analyzes allegations in civil lawsuits as well as trends in litigation against the Department,” said the NYPD spokesperson, who declined to give their name. “A substantial portion of the payouts in 2023 relate to a number of wrongful convictions that occurred decades ago. These cases, and the resulting payments, do not speak to the NYPD’s policies and practices today.” 

The spokesperson pointed to a 20 percent drop in misconduct allegations from 2020 — the year of the NYPD’s brutal crackdown on the George Floyd protests — to 2022 and said that, compared to 2013, complaints had fallen by half. 

The NYPD spokesperson did not respond to a question about why the portal did not list disciplinary information for officers repeatedly named in lawsuits. 

Dozens of Suits, Millions in Settlements

Some of the officers involved in misconduct allegations have been the subject of multiple civilian complaints, Wong said. 

“The question is, as a civilian, as a taxpayer, what are we doing?” she said. “Why are we still employing folks that are costing the city hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in civil lawsuit settlements for police misconduct? What kind of message are we sending when we not only allow them to escape any kind of accountability for their actions, but actually reward them?” 

The 10 officers most named in civil suits going back to 2013 — the 245 suits that paid out a total of $7.2 million — include Grieco; Detectives Daniel Rivera, Abdiel Anderson, Jodi Brown, Waliur Rahman, Ricardo Bocachica, and Wilfredo Benitez; Lt. Henry Daverin; police officer William Schumacher; and former Assistant Chief of Detectives Christopher McCormack, who retired last month. 

Of the 10, Daverin is the only person whose department profile lists any disciplinary history. He has a total of 16 allegations and zero charges.

At least seven of the officers have each been named in more than 20 suits, and another three have each been named in 19 cases. 

Other cops have been named in fewer suits that netted higher total payouts. Since 2013, officer Pedro Rodriguez has been named in at least three suits that have paid out a total of $12 million. Four other officers have each been named in multiple suits that have paid out upward of $8 million, and five more officers have each been named in suits that paid more than $4 million. 

In the first half of 2023, New York City paid more than $50 million in lawsuits alleging police misconduct by members of the NYPD.

Payouts from suits that won the biggest sums since 2013 exceed $68 million. That number is dwarfed by payouts this year alone. In the first half of 2023, New York City paid more than $50 million in lawsuits alleging police misconduct by members of the NYPD. The figure is on track to exceed $100 million by the end of the year and does not include matters settled with the city comptroller prior to formal legal proceedings. 

All of the officers most named in lawsuits and named in suits with the highest payouts are still on the force except McCormack. 

The comptroller’s office said it did not yet have data on payments on matters settled with the office outside of court and that a report for fiscal year 2023 will be published early next year.

The post NYPD “Transparency” Site Leaves Out Misconduct Lawsuits Settled for Millions appeared first on The Intercept.

The CBC has been silent on the AIPAC bid to challenge at least three of its members who are part of the so-called Squad, a loose group of progressive representatives. According to media reports and The Intercept’s investigation, the only incumbents AIPAC has targeted so far in this election cycle are CBC members.

The CBC’s silence on the electoral challenges reflects the divide among Democrats on Israel — with progressives increasingly willing to buck Capitol Hill orthodoxies and speak up for Palestinian rights — and fundraising dynamics among caucus members. AIPAC has endorsed more than half of CBC members. The AIPAC-backed members of the caucus, some 31 lawmakers, have received a previously unreported total of at least $3.6 million from AIPAC since February 2022, according to Federal Election Commission records.

“AIPAC and its Republican donors are intentionally targeting progressive members of the Congressional Black Caucus with right-wing primary challenges.”

The silence has given rise to calls for the CBC to speak up for members under attack — especially given AIPAC’s propensity for directing Republican money to challenge incumbent progressive Democrats in primaries.

“AIPAC and its Republican donors are intentionally targeting progressive members of the Congressional Black Caucus with right-wing primary challenges,” said Alexandra Rojas, the executive director of Justice Democrats, which backed all five CBC members from the Squad. “The CBC — and every caucus in Congress — has the opportunity now to demonstrate their power and stand up for all incumbents against AIPAC’s role in funneling GOP dollars into Democratic primaries.”

AIPAC is seeking to challenge CBC members Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., because of their support for putting restrictions on U.S. aid to Israel, Jewish Insider reported last month.

According to three sources with knowledge of the recruiting process, who asked for anonymity to protect professional relationships, AIPAC asked Pittsburgh-area Democrat Lindsay Powell to challenge Rep. Summer Lee, D-Penn.; Powell declined. Allegheny County Controller Corey O’Connor also declined an AIPAC invitation to challenge Lee, according to two of the sources. (Powell declined to comment, and O’Connor did not respond to a request for comment.)

Bhavini Patel, a council member in the city of Edgewood, Pennsylvania, is reportedly planning to run against Lee. Jewish Insider reported that it was unable to confirm if AIPAC had met with Patel. (Patel did not respond to a request for comment.)

While AIPAC declined to respond to specific questions about its involvement in the challenges against CBC members, the pro-Israel lobby defended its record supporting Black candidates for Congress.

“AIPAC proudly endorsed more than half the Black Caucus last cycle and United Democracy Project” — an AIPAC-backed super PAC — “helped ensure pro-Israel African American Democrats in Ohio, North Carolina, and Maryland won their elections,” an AIPAC spokesperson said in a statement to The Intercept. “While we have not made any decisions on specific races this cycle, we are constantly evaluating every seat held by a detractor of the U.S.-Israel relationship, and we base our assessments exclusively on their anti-Israel votes and statements.”

The CBC did not respond to a request for comment.

Old Guard Versus the Squad

Five Black progressive officials have joined the CBC’s ranks since 2019. Their additions strained already shifting dynamics in the caucus, which has long been governed by traditional structures of seniority and patronage.

The caucus has sometimes stood against the new crop of rising Black progressives. The CBC bet against Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., in 2018 and backed her white incumbent opponent, former Rep. Mike Capuano; Pressley won and joined the CBC. Bowman angered the old guard of the caucus when he endorsed progressive candidate Cori Bush in her 2020 primary in Missouri against Rep. William Lacy Clay, a centrist who had been a CBC member for two decades. Bush also won and joined the CBC.

Divisions on Israel in the CBC, however, go beyond election alliances to policy stances and votes. Since taking office, progressive CBC members — including Omar, Bowman, Lee, Bush, and Pressley — have criticized human rights abuses against Palestinians or voted against military aid to Israel. They were among the 10 House Democrats who voted against a July resolution to absolve Israel of being an apartheid state. The critical stance on U.S. support for Israel drew AIPAC’s ire, with the group ramping up its efforts to challenge the CBC incumbents.

AIPAC’s shifting campaign strategy presents contradictions for the CBC. The caucus’s leaders have close relationships with AIPAC, but the group has also historically put an emphasis on the importance of protecting incumbents.

Since 2022, the CBC’s top AIPAC recipients include Rep. Glenn Ivey, D-Md., who has taken $756,000 from the group; House Democratic Caucus Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., who has taken $485,300; Rep. Valerie Foushee, D-N.C., who has taken $456,800; Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., who has taken $459,900; and Rep. Shontel Brown, D-Ohio, who has taken $349,600.

Jeffries, who has led congressional efforts to protect incumbents against primary challengers, is a close ally of AIPAC, as are CBC leader Rep. Steven Horsford, D-Nev., and CBC PAC leader Rep. Gregory Meeks. CBC members have regularly led and attended AIPAC’s annual trips to Israel, conferences, and other events. (Horsford, Meeks, and CBC PAC did not provide comment for this story.)

The alliance has put CBC members at odds. Omar and Bush joined other progressives in protesting an official congressional address by Israel President Isaac Herzog in July amid efforts to radically politicize the country’s judiciary system. Jeffries said he welcomed Herzog “with open arms.” The next month, he led AIPAC’s annual congressional delegation to Israel.

More centrist CBC members and their political allies have been involved in combatting progressive gains in the Democratic Party. In June 2021, Jeffries, along with Reps. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., and Terri Sewell, D-Ala., another recipient of AIPAC cash, launched Team Blue PAC to protect Democratic members facing primary challenges from their left. And last June, Democratic operatives closely aligned with CBC leaders launched a new dark-money group to fend off primary challengers.

In their individual capacities, however, some of the centrist CBC members are supporting their progressive colleagues. After news broke that AIPAC was recruiting Omar’s challenger, Jeffries endorsed her last month.

For some observers, Jeffries’s ascendency in Democratic leadership, and many CBC members’ support of it, complicates the political calculus. To invite a fight with an influential group like AIPAC could prove folly for Jeffries, souring relationships in the wider Democratic caucus where the group still holds sway. “Some of the older members have trouble letting go,” said one senior Democratic strategist who requested anonymity in order to speak freely. “And I think more than anything, they want a Black speaker of the House, not protecting progressive members.”

Jeffries’s spokesperson Christie Stephenson declined to say whether Jeffries planned to endorse Lee and Bowman but said Jeffries would keep backing Democratic incumbents across the political spectrum.

“Leader Hakeem Jeffries intends to continue his practice of supporting the reelection of every single House Democratic incumbent,” she said, “from the most progressive to the most centrist, and all points in between.”

AIPAC’s Republican Money

The rift between AIPAC and progressive CBC members reflects a broader disconnect between more senior and moderate CBC members and the caucus’s small but growing progressive wing. Those frictions have bled into other recent primary elections. CBC members reportedly pushed former Rep. Mondaire Jones to run against Bowman last year. Bowman is one of the five progressive Squad members who are also part of the CBC.

“The CBC should be sounding the alarm and should be concerned,” said Democratic strategist Camille Rivera, a partner at New Deal Strategies. “We need to be very careful about letting power and influence change the overall goal of the caucus, which is to protect Black incumbents and expand representation, especially those that have been doing the work and representing their constituents. We shouldn’t let any entity try to divide and conquer.”

AIPAC’s attacks on Black progressives are not new. The group funneled money from GOP donors to back the more centrist Brown’s successful House campaigns against Ohio progressive Nina Turner. And the group spent $4 million to try to thwart Lee’s insurgent 2022 campaign.

Even powerful progressives have fallen amid the Israel lobby’s attacks. Endorsements from former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., weren’t enough to help former Rep. Donna Edwards, D- Md., overcome the $6 million AIPAC spent against her in her bid to reclaim her House seat. Pelosi, a pro-Israel stalwart and at the time the speaker of the House, rebuked AIPAC for its attacks against Edwards. Her opponent, Ivey, the top CBC recipient of AIPAC cash, won the primary by 16 points and went on to win the general election by a landslide.

AIPAC’s strategy fits into a larger trend of Republicans and Democrats teaming up to defeat progressive candidates critical of U.S. support to Israel. Republican donors poured last-minute cash into former New York Rep. Eliot Engel’s reelection campaign in the face of Bowman’s insurgent 2018 challenge. Pennsylvania billionaire Jeffrey Yass, a major GOP donor and funder of the Israeli think tank leading the rightward lurch in the country’s judiciary, also funded a PAC run by Democrats and dedicated to challenging progressives in Democratic primaries.

Lee told The Intercept that AIPAC used Republican money to fund ads meant to discourage Black voters from coming out on Election Day.

“AIPAC funneled money from Republican billionaires to spend $5 million attacking me with baseless lies and racist tactics.”

“AIPAC funneled money from Republican billionaires to spend $5 million attacking me with baseless lies and racist tactics,” Lee said. She said political ads accused her of having ties to far-right figures like former President Donald Trump “in order to keep Black voters from showing up to vote.”

Lee drew a contrast to AIPAC’s support for scores of “insurrectionist” Republicans who supported election denial and “shared the same goals as a mob of armed white supremacists and antisemites.”

“Now they’re targeting Black incumbent champions for poor, working-class, Black folks in districts where they’ve never been represented,” she said. “These attacks add fuel to the fire of fascism tearing away the history, civil rights, and lives of Black Americans, who are the base of the Democratic party.”

The post AIPAC Targets Black Democrats — While the Congressional Black Caucus Stays Silent appeared first on The Intercept.

The race presents a unique opportunity to fill a safely blue seat with a new candidate for the first time in 16 years. If Alsobrooks is successful, she would become Maryland’s first Black senator. While Democrats have embraced Alsobrooks’s historic campaign with enthusiasm, however, her record on criminal justice has largely gone overlooked.

During past campaigns for Prince George’s state’s attorney, Alsobrooks positioned herself as staunchly “tough-on-crime.” In addition to pushing the notion that cannabis decriminalization led to drug dealers murdering each other, she has supported DNA collection of people without criminal convictions, putting police in schools, and harsh penalties in a variety of situations, among other positions opposed by justice system reformers. 

Now, however, in her bid for Senate, she’s refashioning herself as one of the reformers — despite continuing to support some of the same punitive policies she championed as her county’s top prosecutor. 

When Alsobrooks ran for state’s attorney, people were hungry for tough-on-crime policies, said Qiana Johnson, a local criminal justice reform advocate, who wants Alsobrooks to be open about how those policies failed.

“Angela Alsobrooks should embrace being a prosecutor and engaging in those tough-on-crime theories, because she can attest to the fact that she was there and endorsed it when it didn’t work,” said Johnson. “It’s OK to say that, but to pretend as if she’s always been a reformer — that’s clearly not the case.” 

“Angela Alsobrooks should embrace being a prosecutor and engaging in those tough-on-crime theories, because she can attest to the fact that she was there and endorsed it when it didn’t work.”

Alsobrooks is widely considered a leader in the race. She has received endorsements from much of Maryland’s Democratic establishment, including Sen. Chris Van Hollen, former House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, and a host of other national and state-level politicians, as well as a raft of powerful Democratic-aligned political action groups. The race is to fill the seat of Sen. Ben Cardin, who announced in May that he would not seek reelection after three terms in office. (He has not made any endorsements in the race, and his spokesperson Sue Walitsky told The Intercept he currently has no plans to endorse in the May 2024 primary.)

Alsobrooks served as state’s attorney from 2011 to 2018. In that time, she emphasized severe punishments, including seeking the death penalty in the years before Maryland outlawed it and supporting the increase of mandatory minimum sentences for people convicted of illegal gun possession. Her tough-on-crime views also included the claim that cannabis decriminalization was linked to murders in her county.

“The decriminalization of marijuana has really driven the violence we have seen this year in Prince George’s,” Alsobrooks said in a 2015 interview with NPR. “What we’re seeing is they’re fighting for turf. The marijuana dealers are fighting.”

Campaign spokesperson Gina Ford said in a statement to The Intercept that Alsobrooks made the remarks after county police officials claimed the state’s 2014 law decriminalizing cannabis had contributed to a homicide spike. Existing research, however, has not supported similar claims.

“Angela’s focus has always been on keeping our communities safe from violence, not prosecuting adults possessing marijuana for personal use,” wrote Ford. “Her comments then and her belief today is that violent criminals should be aggressively targeted by law enforcement and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

DNA Collection Without Convictions

As state’s attorney, Alsobrooks supported collecting DNA information from people who had been arrested but not convicted of a crime. In 2012, she said she hoped the Maryland Supreme Court would reconsider a decision that declared such practices unconstitutional. 

Civil liberties advocates have long warned about the pitfalls of using biometric data, including technological flaws that could lead to racial bias and the erosion of constitutional rights. Among the concerns are the authorities having a universal DNA database. While DNA collection by police began as a targeted program for only people with certain convictions, wider dragnets like those pursued by Alsobrooks have led to a ballooning of DNA samples held by the authorities; the FBI-maintained national database now holds more than 21 million DNA profiles.

More than a decade after her initial DNA push, Alsobrooks’s approach to the issue appears to be unchanged. In February, when Maryland lawmakers considered enhancing privacy restrictions in the collection of biometric data, Alsobrooks testified in opposition. Alongside the Prince George’s County Police Department, Maryland Chiefs of Police Association and the Maryland Sheriffs’ Association, and the Maryland Sheriffs’ Association, she argued that a bill regulating private use of biometric data would hinder law enforcement’s ability to solve crimes. 

Asked if Alsobrooks would support the collection of biometric data by police if elected senator, Ford said she is “focused on protecting Marylanders from violent crime and searches consistent with our 4th amendment rights are a critical tool in keeping Marylanders safe.” Asked if Alsobrooks still supports collecting DNA from people not convicted of a crime, Ford said that “collecting records like fingerprints and DNA swabs is a valuable tool in catching and prosecuting violent criminals involving cold cases related to rapes and murders.” 

Alsobrooks also opposed removing school resource officers in Prince George’s County Public Schools, even though the presence of such officers has been shown to exacerbate the school-to-prison pipeline and lead to harsher punishments for kids. While she embraced a rehabilitative approach for juveniles in the criminal justice system, including smaller, localized alternatives to traditional juvenile detention centers, she emphasized harsh sentences for kids who committed violent crimes. “I support the rehabilitation focused approach to juvenile justice,” Alsobrooks’s 2010 campaign website said. “However, violent offenders of any sort will be punished.” 

Ford said it was not true that Alsobrooks pushed for harsh sentences for juveniles but would not say if she supports charging juveniles as adults. “Angela has always been focused on protecting Marylanders from violent crimes and believes these decisions shouldn’t be made lightly or often but should be considered on a case-by-case basis depending on the facts,” she said.

Ford pointed to Alsobrooks’s work on police reform, including establishing a police reform working group in the summer of 2020 and hiring a reform-minded police chief. She noted that Alsobrooks started other programs to give first-time, nonviolent offenders a second chance and to ease reentry for formerly incarcerated people. 

In June, Alsobrooks vetoed $250,000 in funding for a program that would have provided social services, mental health support, education, and job training to young offenders while they’re still in jail to prevent recidivism. The program was proposed by Prince George’s County Council Member Edward Burroughs, who previously coordinated juvenile diversion programs at the state’s attorney’s office and served on the county school board. Burroughs said Alsobrooks issued her first veto against funding the program because he isn’t supporting her Senate campaign. 

“She vetoed it because I was not supporting her for the Senate,” Burroughs said. “And I think that’s unconscionable to have a political decision made on something that is so important.” Ford said the claim was “absurd.” She said Alsobrooks had allocated millions toward youth and reentry programs and vetoed the amendment because it would have taken money from county workers’ pension funds.

Burroughs said he shared the excitement of having a Black woman running for the Senate but that Alsobrooks’s record is disqualifying.

“It’s an amazing goal of so many elected officials in Maryland to elect a woman, a Black woman, to the Senate,” he said. “When you examine her record as state’s attorney and county executive closely, it is clear that in so many areas there are significant, significant concerns that show a pattern of a disregard for working people and families, that show a disregard for meaningful juvenile justice reform and uplifting young people in a tangible way.”

“We know that no matter who we put into that office, we’re going to have to hold them accountable.”

The rush to get behind Alsobrooks’s campaign because of its historic nature speaks to a broader failure to adequately scrutinize her record, said Johnson, the local reform advocate, who heads Life After Release, an organization led by formerly incarcerated women and founded the accountability group Courtwatch PG. 

“That’s the unfortunate thing for most voters where we are. We rush to back a candidate that looks like us, sounds like us, and is aesthetically pleasing,” she said. “We know that no matter who we put into that office, we’re going to have to hold them accountable.”

The post Leading Democrat in Maryland Senate Race Once Blamed Murders On Decriminalized Pot appeared first on The Intercept.

The case is the latest step in a yearslong conservative fight to dismantle the CFPB. At least 13 states, including red states like Arkansas and Georgia, have limited or made payday lending illegal, and others have passed recent ballot initiatives to crack down on the industry. 

“The attorney generals are collecting millions of dollars in campaign contributions to undermine the only serious effort to regulate payday loans.”

Despite widespread approval among Republican voters to regulate or prohibit payday lending, Republican officials in more than 20 states are backing industry groups in the suit. All but two of the 28 members of the Republican Attorneys General Association, or RAGA, sought to intervene in the case. The move came after payday lending and banking industry groups regulated and fined by the CFPB poured out millions of dollars in campaign contributions, according to an analysis of the donations set to be published Wednesday by the watchdog group Accountable.US.

“These are states where supermajorities of Republican voters disapprove of payday lending and want meaningful regulation,” said Chris Peterson, a professor at the University of Utah College of Law who previously advised CFPB’s director and worked in the agency’s enforcement office. “But the attorney generals are collecting millions of dollars in campaign contributions to undermine the only serious effort to regulate payday loans. The hypocrisy is galling.” 

The groups that sued — the Community Financial Services Association of America and the Consumer Service Alliance of Texas — objected to a rule prohibiting payday lenders from saddling consumers with overdraft fees by charging people with insufficient account funds multiple times after a first transaction failed. They argued that the CFPB’s funding structure was unconstitutional and that Congress has to authorize any withdrawals of money from the Treasury Department. The Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments in the case on October 3.

Groups regulated by the CFPB and others that supported the original suit have given at least $7.7 million to RAGA since April 2018, when industry associations first sued the agency over the automatic withdrawal rule. Since the suit was filed, payday lenders and banks regulated by the CFPB have given RAGA more than $3.2 million, and groups that filed amicus briefs supporting the suit have given RAGA more than $4.5 million, according to Accountable.US. (The CFPB, RAGA, and the Community Financial Services Association of America did not respond to requests for comment.)

In July, 26 Republican attorneys and RAGA members signed a petition asking the Supreme Court to allow them to intervene in the case on behalf of the lending industry. The court denied the petition last week. 

“As this Court has recognized before, consumer protection is the States’ traditional domain,” the Republican attorneys general wrote in their petition. “Given how the States have engaged with consumer-protection issues for so long, they have a special understanding of how an unbounded CFPB can damage the consumer-financial markets—and impair the States’ own abilities to regulate those markets.”

RAGA Goes Far Right

RAGA’s activity has grown increasingly politicized in recent years, since former President Donald Trump won office. The association pushed lawsuits friendly to industry donors and received at least $9.5 million from a group with close ties to conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo, The Guardian reported in June.

Though industry contributions given to RAGA are not staggering, races for attorney general are relatively cheap compared to the stratospheric levels of funding in some national elections — usually costing between tens of thousands and a few million dollars. The donations of nearly $8 million from payday lenders and banks also represent a significant chunk of RAGA’s annual haul. The group raised $24.8 million last year, and its Democratic counterpart raised $25.5 million. 

Major donors to RAGA since the 2018 suit against CFPB include the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform, Bank of America, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Visa, Mastercard, the student loan servicer Navient, the for-profit University of Phoenix, TitleMax, and Community Choice Financial, which serves “unbanked and underbanked consumers.” INFiN, another alliance of financial services industry groups that Community Financial Services Association of America helped create in 2020, gave RAGA $40,000 last year. 

It’s anyone’s guess how the court might rule in the case, but conservative justices might consider how a decision favoring the lending industry could impact broader national policy. A ruling that CFPB’s funding structure is unconstitutional could have future implications for policy impacting other institutions with similar funding structures like the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, which sets the country’s monetary policy.

A decade ago, the argument that CFPB’s funding structure was unconstitutional might not have stood up in court, but Trump’s remaking of the federal judiciary has emboldened pro-industry groups to try their luck. 

The argument is part of a political effort to curb the federal government’s authority to regulate predatory lenders, Peterson said. “In many cases against the CFPB,” he said, “one of the things we’re seeing is that arguments that would have been dismissed as outside the mainstream 10 or 15 years ago are starting to get traction among judges recently appointed to the federal bench.”

The post Payday Lenders Gave Millions to Republican Group That Backed Supreme Court Suit to Annihilate CFPB appeared first on The Intercept.