Fearless, Adversarial Journalism – Spoken Edition

As Jennifer Pinckney took the stand Wednesday morning at the federal courthouse in downtown Charleston, prosecutors passedher a photo labeled Government Exhibit 753. She smiled. It was a picture of her late husband, Clementa C. Pinckney. A prominent minister and state senator, there was no shortage of photos of him. But this one was different. He was at home, asleep on the couch. He wore sweatpants and a plain white T-shirt. His older daughter, Eliana, was curled up at his shoulder.

Former California Attorney General Kamala Harris on Wednesday vaguely acknowledged The Intercept’s report about her declining to prosecute Steven Mnuchin’s OneWest Bank for foreclosure violations in 2013, but offered no explanation. “It’s a decision my office made,” she said, in response to questions from The Hill shortly after being sworn in as California’s newest U.S. senator.

Hours after an Israeli army medic was convicted on Wednesday of manslaughter, for executing a wounded Palestinian suspect last year in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron, Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called for the soldier to be pardoned. Netanyahu’s move completed a full retreat from his initial position.

The U.S. State Department confirmed on January 5 that the man the U.S. government once claimed was the target of the drone strike that killed American teenager Abdulrahman Awlaki in 2011 in Yemen is alive. The department announced that it has designated Ibrahim al Banna “a Specially Designated Global Terrorist (SDGT) under Executive Order (E.O.) 13224.” The U.S. is offering a $5 million reward for information leading to al Banna’s killing or capture.

A trio of GOP senators have introduced legislation that would cut security,construction, and maintenance funds for U.S. embassies around the world in half until the president moves the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. In 1995, Congress passed a law requiring the federal government to move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama all campaigned onrelocating the embassy and executing this law.

After the U.S. government published a report on Russia’s cyber attacks against the U.S. election system, and included a list of computers that were allegedly used by Russian hackers, I became curious if any of these hackers had visited my personal blog. The U.S.

In the past six weeks, the Washington Post published two blockbuster stories about the Russian threat that went viral: one on how Russia is behind a massive explosion of “fake news,” the other on how it invaded the U.S. electric grid. Both articles were fundamentally false.

OneWest Bank, which Donald Trump’s treasury secretary nominee Steven Mnuchin ran from 2009 to 2015, repeatedly broke California’s foreclosure laws during that period, according to a previously undisclosed 2013 memo from top prosecutors in the state attorney general’s office.

The Obama administration’s final moves onthe Israeli-Palestinian issue — a symbolic resolution allowing the United Nations Security Council to condemn Israeli settlementsand a speech by Secretary of State John Kerry warning that the settlement project could permanently end the two-state solution — has sparked a critical backlash from the country’s supporters.

The Washington Post on Friday reportedagenuinely alarming event: Russian hackers have penetrated the U.S. power system through an electrical grid in Vermont.

Although the United States has just elected a new president whose promise to make America great “again” evoked an unspecified, presumably more glorious past, Americans’ appreciation of their own history, and particularly its most damning chapters, is limited at best. The country’s long history of racial violence can hardly be denied, but that history is regularly erased from public commemoration.

In 2016, The Intercept published some 1,800 stories. We covered everything from secrecy and corruption in politics to misuses of technology, attacks on civil liberties, environmental crimes, the police state, military adventurism, and the frequent failure of mainstream media to accurately report on and reflect the world around us. Here are 12 piecesthat we recommend revisiting on the cusp of 2017.

Julian Assange is a deeply polarizing figure. Many admire him and many despise him (into which category one falls in any given year typicallydepends on one’s feelings aboutthe subject of his most recent publication of leaked documents). But one’s views of Assange are completely irrelevant to this article, which is not about Assange.