Fearless, Adversarial Journalism – Spoken Edition

Twelve jurors walkedinto the federal courthouse in Tucson Tuesday afternoon with a problem. Two weeks after the U.S. government began to argue its case in the prosecution of Scott Warren, a border-based humanitarian aid volunteer accused of two counts of felony harboring and one count of conspiracy, the jurors could not come to a unanimous decision as to whether he was innocent or guilty.

On the night of June 20, the United States will mark a grim milestone: the 1,500th execution since the return of the death penalty in 1976. Forty-two-year-old Marion Wilson Jr. is scheduled to die by lethal injection on Thursday at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson. A clemency hearing will take place in Atlanta beforehand, but the execution will almost certainly proceed.

As the Trump administration ratchets up tensions with Iran, escalating fears that the United States is looking for a possible path to another war in the Middle East, several Democratic presidential contenders are standing firm in their rejection of the White House’s attempts to create a legal rationale for war.

A law key topreventing state welfare agencies from separating Indigenous children from their families is at risk of being overturned thanks to the yearslong effort of a network of libertarian and right-wing organizations. In the 1970s, between a quarter and a third of Indigenous children across the United States had been removed from their homes.

In April 2018, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat before members of both houses of Congress and told them his company respected the privacy of the roughly two billion people who use it.

Bit by bit, President Donald Trump’s story of winning concessions on immigration enforcement from Mexico is falling apart. Last weekend, Trump announced that the U.S. and Mexico “reached a signed agreement” to stem the flow of mostly Central American migrants entering the U.S. through its southern border — the fruits, the administration suggested, of his threats to impose tariffs against the U.S.’s southern neighbor.

The Intercept Brasil today published three explosive exposés showing highly controversial, politicized, and legally dubious internal discussions and secret actions by the Operation Car Wash anti-corruption task force of prosecutors, led by the chief prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol, along with then-Judge Sergio Moro, now the powerful and internationally celebratedjustice minister for Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.

In preparation for Wednesday’s hearing on Medicare for All before the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, the panel’s chair met privately with Democrats to lay out how he wants it to unfold. Rep. Richard Neal, a Massachusetts Democrat who has been in office since 1989, told the Democrats on the panel that he didn’t want the phrase “Medicare for All” to be used.

We Build the Wall, the crowdfunded, ultra-right group that put up a multimillion-dollar border wall just west of El Paso in southern New Mexico, has said that it only builds on private land. But earlier this month, the group extended its wall onto government land — without asking first for government permission. The extension is a wall with a locking gate thathas closed a federal road next to the Rio Grande, at the intersection of Mexico, Texas, and New Mexico.

Operatives at a controversial cybersecurity firm working for the United Arab Emirates government discussed targeting The Intercept and breaching the computers of its employees, according to two sources, including a member of the hacking team who said they were present for a meetingto plan for such an attack. The cybersecurity firm, DarkMatter, brought ex-National Security Agency hackers and other U.S.

A member of Project Veritas gave testimony in a federal court case indicating that the right-wing group, known for its undercover videos, violates Facebook policies designed to counter systematic deception by Russian troll farms and other groups. The deposition raises questions over whether Facebook will deter American operatives who use the platform to strategically deceive and damage political opponents as vigorously as it has Iranian and Russian propagandists.

In January 2017, three days before President Donald Trump’s inauguration, a businessman from the United Arab Emirateswas invited to a lavish dinner planned by Trump’s longtime ally Thomas J. Barrack Jr., who was chair of the president’s inaugural committee. Theguest list placed Rashid al-Malik, a onetime business associate of Barrack’s, amid more than 100 foreign diplomatsand top members of the incoming administration.

A large trove of documents furnished exclusively to The Intercept Brasil reveals serious ethical violations and legally prohibited collaboration between the judge and prosecutors who last year convicted and imprisoned former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva on corruption charges — a conviction that resulted in Lula being barred from the 2018 presidential election.

In 2018, President Donald Trump was seeking to jettison the landmark nuclear deal that his predecessor had signed with Iran in 2015, and he was looking for ways to win over a skeptical press. The White House claimed that the nuclear deal had allowed Iran to increase its military budget, and Washington Post reporters Salvador Rizzo and Meg Kelly asked for a source. In response, the White House passed along an article published in Forbes by a writer named Heshmat Alavi.

In late May, Guatemala’sinterior minister held a press conference to announce that he was reviewing the public’s right to access the country’s Historical Archive of the National Police, citing security concerns and suggesting that it was time for his agency, which oversees the country’s security forces, to take the archive back from the Ministry of Culture. This is no featureless bureaucratic debate.