At a Black History Month event in New Rochelle over the weekend, George Latimer said Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., whom he is challenging in a Democratic primary, was taking money from the Palestinian militant group Hamas, a U.S.-designated foreign terror organization. On Tuesday, Bowman’s campaign threatened to sue Latimer for defamation over the remarks and demanded he retract them.
Latimer’s comments came when a constituent, who requested anonymity for personal safety, approached the Democratic challenger with two questions: Why was he running, and why was he taking money from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee? AIPAC had recruited him to run for the congressional seat and, as The Intercept previously reported, is Latimer’s largest campaign funder.
When the constituent said Latimer was “taking money from the devil,” Latimer responded that Bowman was too — that the incumbent was “taking money from Hamas.”
The incendiary charge came in a Democratic primary where AIPAC is playing an outsized role in trying to oust a progressive member of the Squad. The flagship Israel lobby’s quest to unseat Democratic incumbents and replace them with centrist and moderate candidates who vigorously support Israel has become the most prominent theme of the 2024 primary season.
“It’s outright disturbing and dangerous that he has doubled down on his Islamophobic comments,” Bowman said in a statement to The Intercept. “He should apologize to a community he continues to vilify and endanger, not double down on hatred.”
Latimer had offered his broadside against Bowman with little proof. Challenged on the comment, which was first reported by the website Black Westchester, the constituent asked Latimer to offer proof and Latimer took their email. AJ Woodson, who runs Black Westchester and wrote the article, confirmed the constituent’s account of the remarks, which Woodson witnessed from several feet away.
Latimer later sent the constituent a link to an article from the right-wing news website Washington Free Beacon with the headline “They Endorsed Hamas Terrorism. Then They Hosted a Big-Ticker Fundraiser for Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush.” While the article points to controversial remarks made about the October 7 Hamas attack by groups with ties to the campaign donors — one organization, for instance, said acts of resistance should not be condemned — it does not allege that any of the fundraiser’s participants are linked to Hamas in any way.
When asked by the press about his allegation, Latimer did not deny the remarks and again sought to tie Bowman to Hamas. “Let me set the record straight – my opponent takes money from those who endorse Hamas’ terrorism, those who try to justify the murdering of children, the kidnapping of civilian hostages, and the raping of women as acts of ‘resistance,’” Latimer said in statement to City & State. (Latimer did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.)
Republicans for Latimer
Latimer’s comments were part of a strategy by his campaign and AIPAC to stoke fear about Bowman among Westchester’s Jewish residents, said the constituent who confronted the candidate.
“It’s sort of like the northeast version of the southern strategy.”
“It’s sort of like the northeast version of the southern strategy,” they said. “Now the Latimer strategy, or more like the AIPAC strategy, is to link progressives who may want a ceasefire and that recognize what’s in Gaza is terrible, to link them in a racist way to Hamas, when that is not what they’re engaged in.”
Woodson, the Black Westchester writer, was a vendor at the New Rochelle event and said he also spoke to Latimer about frustration that his campaign was courting Republican voters.
AIPAC endorsed Latimer’s campaign just days after he held a fundraiser hosted by a Republican donor who supported former President Donald Trump. An AIPAC donor has also encouraged Jewish Republicans to switch parties to vote in the primary against Bowman.
“I’m against the Republicans telling all their members to register as Democrats so they can vote against Bowman in the Democratic primary,” Woodson said. “If Democrats feel that Latimer is the right candidate, then they should be free to vote for him without outside interference from hundreds or thousands of Republican voters in the Democratic primary.”
AIPAC has ramped up its attacks on members of Congress who have criticized U.S. military support for Israel and voted for a ceasefire resolution introduced in October. Bowman is one of AIPAC’s main targets this cycle, along with other members of the Squad including Reps. Cori Bush, D-Mo.; Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.; and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.
The Israel lobby group has played a bigger role in congressional elections in recent cycles and launched a Super PAC that plans to spend $100 million against the Squad this year. During the 2020 cycle, AIAPC endorsed more than 100 Republicans who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
A pro-Israel group closely aligned with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee is putting tens of thousands of dollars into Tom Suozzi’s race to win back his old seat in Congress.
The political action committee of Democratic Majority for Israel has spent $40,000 on Suozzi’s campaign, mostly on ads, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission. Suozzi is running in a February 13 special election to fill the House seat in New York’s 3rd Congressional District vacated by former Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., who was expelled from Congress after receiving a federal indictment for fraud and money laundering.
Suozzi, a mainstay of centrist Democratic Party politics, gave up his House seat in 2021 to run for governor of New York, making enemies along the way and leaving a solidly blue seat open for Santos, who won a surprise victory.
DMFI is one of several pro-Israel groups that has spent millions to fight progressives in congressional elections in recent cycles. In November, the group ran ads attacking Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., for criticizing Israel’s human rights abuses, voting against additional funding for weapons to Israel, and opposing a resolution to support Israel after the October 7 attack without mentioning Palestinians killed in the retaliation.
Suozzi is a staunch supporter of Israel and is leaning into his pro-Israel bona fides. His opponent, Republican candidate Mazi Pilip, also has pro-Israel credentials: She served in the Israel Defense Forces. On Tuesday, Suozzi bucked President Joe Biden and Democratic Party leaders when he announced his support for a House Republican bill that would give additional assistance to Israel.
“DMFI PAC is working hard to help Tom Suozzi defeat his Republican opponent. Democratic Majority for Israel’s chair hosted him on a trip to Israel in December. DMFI PAC is running an ad campaign for him and is undertaking other efforts as well,” said Rachel Rosen, chief communications officer for DMFI PAC.
As Santos’s story started to unravel and Suozzi and other Democrats tested the district’s waters, others voiced concerns about welcoming a conservative Democrat who had cozied up to Republicans and already cost the party a key House seat.
Suozzi’s conservative backers argue that he has the best shot at winning back the district and helping Democrats regain seats they lost unexpectedly in 2022. Other Democrats, however, are worried that Suozzi would vote with Republicans anyway. He has supported positions opposing abortion rights and flirted with conservative positions on issues like criminal justice reform, LGBTQ+ issues, and immigration.
“With the platform Suozzi is running on, the Republicans will win even if they lose.”
“The best way to beat an opponent in an election is to offer an alternative vision and Suozzi has chosen to campaign as a weaker version of the Republican candidate,” said Will Bailey, an organizer with New York Communities for Change, who handles the group’s Long Island work. (Suozzi’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)
Suozzi’s campaign declined support from the left-leaning Working Families Party and sent out mailers picturing him with former New York Republican Rep. Peter King. That’s a losing strategy for Democrats in the long term, Bailey said: “With the platform Suozzi is running on, the Republicans will win even if they lose.”
Centrist Stalwart
Suozzi’s career has been inseparable from his centrism; he was, for instance, the vice chair of the House Problem Solvers Caucus during his last stint in Congress. Those positions have helped win him support from the mainstream of the Democratic Party: His name was added to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s Red to Blue plan last month.
Suozzi has the support of key moderate Democratic leaders, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., who appeared beside Suozzi during a campaign event on Saturday, and New York State Democratic Party Chair Jay Jacobs, who also chairs the Nassau County Democratic Party.
The centrist group No Labels, which has attracted Democrats’ ire for its perceived Republican bent, said that Suozzi was the best pick in the New York special election. In December, Santos became the first Republican House member to be expelled from Congress. Three days later, No Labels — which has courted Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., and is preparing to run a third-party candidate in the 2024 presidential election — held a call with Suozzi about winning his seat back.
The former Representative had to work to mend fences with other Democrats after his gubernatorial primary bid against Gov. Kathy Hochul in 2022. He had ignored pleas from party leaders to keep his House seat and help Democrats keep their majority in Washington and ended up coming in third place in the gubernatorial primary, behind New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who ran to Suozzi’s left.
Biden had carried Suozzi’s former district by 8 percentage points in 2020, but in the 2022 general election the seat flipped red and helped Republicans retake the House. Santos, a Republican who lied about much of his biography and resume, won by about the same margin Biden had two years earlier, before being expelled.
Hochul turned out to be a key obstacle to Suozzi’s attempted return to the House. She had considered trying to block Suozzi’s nomination to run in the special election, but he eventually won her blessing by promising not to waver on support for abortion rights or to attack the party in campaign ads.
After losing the 2022 gubernatorial race, Suozzi became co-chair of the lobbying firm Actum in February. The firm’s clients include many Democrats but have also numbered among right-wing world leaders including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The group’s managing director helped orchestrate the antisemitic global conspiracy theory attacking billionaire philanthropist George Soros.
Actum is led by Republicans, including Mick Mulvaney, who was chief of staff and budget director for former President Donald Trump, and Mike McKeon, a Republican who was senior communications adviser for Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 presidential campaign. (Suozzi is not a registered lobbyist in his role at Actum.)
Flirting With Conservative Lines
Suozzi’s positions on issues like abortion rights and LGBTQ+ issues have caused consternation among Democrats.
Abortion rights group NARAL Pro-Choice America had opposed Suozzi in his 2013 campaign for Nassau County executive but endorsed him last week under its new name, Reproductive Freedom for All. While he says he supports the right to abortion and had a 100 percent rating from Planned Parenthood Action Fund in Congress, Suozzi previously sought to curtail abortions as county executive and supported banning federal funding for abortions in the Hyde Amendment.
Suozzi is endorsed by Planned Parenthood Action Fund. He has also attacked his GOP opponent for refusing to promise to codify Roe v. Wade.
Other Democrats were wary of positions Suozzi had taken during the gubernatorial primary against Hochul, when he attacked the Democratic Party and aligned himself with Republicans. Suozzi ran a conservative campaign that included personal attacks on Hochul and echoes of Republican attacks on crime, criminal justice reforms, and corruption, including promises to remove rogue district attorneys and roll back bail reforms.
At one point, he described Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, which bans classroom talk about sexual orientation and gender identity for children in kindergarten through the third grade, as “reasonable.” After uproar over his comments, Suozzi backtracked and said he opposed the bill and supported LGBT families.
In his new campaign for the House, Suozzi is focused on lowering the cost of living, fixing the “immigration crisis,” addressing climate change in the Long Island Sound, public safety, reproductive rights, and support for Israel and Ukraine. He has won endorsements from several labor, environmental, abortion rights, and gun control groups, including Communication Workers of America, the Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund, Moms Demand Action, and the Human Rights Campaign PAC.
After recruiting Westchester County Executive George Latimer to run against Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s PAC is also bankrolling Latimer’s campaign.
AIPAC has given more than $600,000 in total to Latimer’s campaign — 42 percent of his total $1.4 million in contributions so far — according to filings with the Federal Election Commission submitted Wednesday night.
The heavy spending in Bowman’s district is part of AIPAC’s wider plans to spend at least $100 million to oust progressive Democrats in the House. The members, known as the Squad, are regular critics of Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinians and U.S. military funding for the ongoing assault on Gaza. (Latimer’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
“This report makes it clear that George Latimer’s campaign to unseat Jamaal Bowman is heavily funded by the same Republican megadonors who’ve spent millions to elect Donald Trump,” Bill Neidhardt, an adviser to Bowman’s campaign, said in a statement to The Intercept. “There is a direct connection between Latimer and the upper echelons of the Republican party.”
Latimer’s race against Bowman has attracted Republican support. The county executive held a fundraiser hosted by a donor to Republicans including former President Donald Trump last month. AIPAC officially endorsed Latimer’s campaign days later. The Intercept reported in December that one AIPAC donor encouraged Jewish Republicans to switch parties to vote in the primary to oust Bowman.
AIPAC has played an outsized role in in campaign finance in recent years, since it started giving directly to federal candidates. In addition to its PAC, the group launched a super PAC, United Democracy Project, that spent millions against progressive candidates in 2022. During that election season, AIPAC came under fire for attacking Democrats while it endorsed more than 100 Republicans who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. (AIPAC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
This cycle, the flagship Israel lobby group ramped up its attacks on Squad members who criticize Israel and supported a congressional ceasefire resolution in Gaza. In addition to Bowman, AIPAC has tried to recruit challengers to oust Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.; Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich.; and Summer Lee, D-Pa.
The group began urging Latimer to challenge Bowman last year after he and other progressive members boycotted a congressional address by Israeli President Isaac Herzog.
Bowman had previously been endorsed by J Street, an advocacy group that positions itself as a liberal alternative to AIPAC. But the group withdrew its endorsement of Bowman on Friday and said his rhetoric on Gaza had “crossed a line.”
Latimer’s other major donors include venture capitalists, private equity partners, attorneys, and consultants. The contributors included political strategist Bradley Tusk, who gave the maximum of $6,600; oil trader Shai Barnea, who has given $5,000; and Michael Benn, a partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, a corporate law firm, who gave $3,300.
The leading challenger to progressive Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa., said her campaign was encouraging independents and Republicans to re-register as Democrats so that they can vote against Lee in the primary. The comments came during a fundraiser Monday night hosted by several U.S.-based groups linked to India’s far-right Hindu nationalist movement.
Bhavini Patel, a borough council member in Edgewood, Pennsylvania, told supporters on the fundraising call that she could help take down the progressive Squad by leveraging support from right-wing Hindu and pro-Israel supporters.
During the fundraiser, which was attended by 30 people on Zoom and first reported on by Pittsburgh City Paper, Patel spoke of plans to tap into Republican support for her campaign, attract national spending, and eventually take down the progressive Democratic incumbents.
“We are making really strong efforts within the Jewish community, within the Hindu community, to encourage people registered as independents and Republicans to re-register as Democrats for the primary.”
“We are making really strong efforts within the Jewish community, within the Hindu community, to encourage people registered as independents and Republicans to re-register as Democrats for the primary,” Patel said.
Asked about non-Democratic voting in the primary, Patel said the primary is closed but that, because the district leaned heavily blue, the primary election would be competitive whereas the general would not be. Attendees concurred that Patel could leverage Republican support.
“She is so fringe and so extreme,” Patel said of Lee. “There are many Republicans who see that in this district.”
Targeting the Squad
Patel portrayed her race as part of a broader moderate response to the growing popularity of the progressive Squad in Congress, singling out Reps. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Ilhan Omar, D-Minn. Patel attacked Lee as having consistently associated herself with members of the Squad — naming Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others as “the most fringe, extreme members of Congress.”
In response to questions from The Intercept about the fundraiser’s hosts, Patel campaign manager Andrew DeCarlo said it was racially insensitive to attack Hindu nationalist groups and their supporters. While Patel supporters described her as a moderate during the fundraiser, DeCarlo said Patel had always been a progressive Democrat.
“It’s racially insensitive to attack Hindu Americans who are politically involved and who have supported a number of progressive and liberal democrats, such as Governor Wes Moore (MD) and Lieutenant Governor Aruna Miller (MD), Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi (IL), and State Rep. Padma Kuppa (MI),” DeCarlo said in a statement. “Any insinuation that it is an extreme group is also racially tone-deaf. As she said clearly on the call, Bhavini Patel is a lifelong principled progressive Democrat who is building a diverse coalition that reflects this district.”
Prominent members of the Hindu right in the U.S. have organized and fundraised for Democratic politicians in recent years, including Krishnamoorthi, former Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, former Texas congressional candidate Sri Preston Kulkarni, and Maryland Lt. Gov. Aruna Miller.
The Patel fundraiser was hosted by several political action committees — including Americans4Hindus, founded in response to what it identifies as anti-Hindu sentiment among progressive Democrats — and people linked to the Hindu nationalist movement and involved in organizing efforts to support India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party. One of the hosts, Ramesh Bhutada, is vice president of Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh, the U.S. wing of the fascist paramilitary group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which is an affiliate of the BJP.
Among them are several people and groups linked to the Hindu American Foundation, which lobbies Congress to counter criticism of minority suppression in India. Some Hindu American PAC board members are involved with the Hindu American Foundation. One of the individual hosts of the event was Rishi Bhutada, Ramesh Bhutada’s son and the treasurer of Hindu American PAC; he also sits on the board of directors for the Hindu American Foundation. Rishi Bhutada was also the official spokesperson for Modi’s 2019 Houston rally with then-President Donald Trump.
“The people who are against us are insane,” Mihir Meghani, a chair of Hindu American PAC and a co-founder of the Hindu American Foundation, said at the fundraiser. “If we don’t get Bhavini elected, we’re gonna have 10 to 20 years of someone like Ilhan Omar or Rashida Tlaib. This is our chance. We need to max out or we need to show up in these crucial races.”
According to campaign filings with the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday, Patel’s campaign has raked in money from donors who have also given to Republican candidates including Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Sens. Ted Cruz and Rick Scott, Rep. Steve Scalise, and others.
Hindu Nationalists for Israel
During the fundraiser, Patel sought to raise money by singling out the Squad. “This is the first race in the cycle of Squad members who are being primary challenged,” Patel said. Early investments in her campaign, she said, would pay off later, noting that she had already attracted national coverage in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Politico.
“It will allow us to put this race on the national map and help us to position ourselves to attract national funding, and really make this race more competitive than it is now,” Patel said. She said her campaign planned to begin running TV ads in February.
Many observers think outside money in the race is likely. Pro-Israel groups spent $5 million in a failed bid to keep Lee out of the House in 2022. One of the groups, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, tried and failed to recruit two candidates to run against her. (Patel has not said whether she was recruited by AIPAC, but the group has been in touch with her campaign, according to a source with knowledge of the race.)
Patel said at the fundraiser that Lee boycotted a congressional address by Modi, has taken votes against Israel even prior to the October 7 Hamas attacks, and that her foreign policy stances had negative implications for U.S. relationships with Israel and India.
Israel was a major issue at the fundraiser. “She’s called for a ceasefire,” Patel said, referring to Israel’s war on Gaza.
Representatives from pro-Israel groups were also in attendance at the fundraiser. Julie Paris, Mid-Atlantic regional director for StandWithUs, a pro-Israel group that has worked to silence criticismon college campuses of Israel’s human rights abuses, was a co-host and had a speaking slot. “We need a strong woman who will come in and understand the challenge that America is facing right now,” Paris said, “and also understand the importance of the U.S.–Israel relationship and the U.S–India relationship.”
“Israel is doing India’s work right now, and we support it.”
Hot-button issues in the South Asian American community were also front and center. In one case, also related to the Squad, Patel also said she would oppose a resolution introduced by Omar that condemns human rights violations and religious right violations in India, including those targeting religious and cultural minorities like Muslims, Sikhs, and Dalits.
Some attendees, however, made a direct connection between attendees’ pro-Israel and their own Hindu nationalist agendas. One drew a parallel between the October 7 attack and the conflict in Kashmir in 1990, a hotly debated period in the history of the disputed province that has led to three wars between India and Pakistan. Another attendee agreed: “Israel is doing India’s work right now, and we support it.”
Just two years ago, conservative justices appointed to the Florida Supreme Court by Gov. Ron DeSantis repeatedly quashed efforts to move toward legalized recreational cannabis.
The court, which DeSantis has stacked with allies, issued three rulings in as many months that blocked the expansion of access in the state’s medical cannabis industry, one case relating to regulations and two to ballot initiatives. The rulings were in line with conservatives in Florida, including DeSantis and Republican Attorney General Ashley Moody, who broadly oppose pot legalization.
The current battle at hand is a ballot initiative that would legalize recreational cannabis — a newer version of the initiatives that were struck down two years ago by the judges of the state Supreme Court, including DeSantis loyalists.
This time, however, things might be different: Earlier this week, just days before dropping out of the Republican presidential primary, DeSantis conceded that the court was likely to approve the measure.
What’s different? Not DeSantis. Under the governor’s direction, Moody is fighting to keep the measure off the 2024 ballot.
Instead, what has shifted in the last two years is the appearance of new players who stand to benefit the most from the impact of legalization — especially the major GOP donors now invested in the state’s burgeoning legal cannabis industry. Several major Republican donors are invested in the tightly regulated medical cannabis companies that stand to reap windfall profits if recreational weed is legalized and they expand their businesses.
“Clearly there are economic motives here, including for Republican donors, to maintain the current system of vertical integration.”
Democratic state Rep. Anna Eskamani, who has helped lead the push to legalize weed, said Republicans are changing their tune for financial reasons.
“We should absolutely legalize recreational cannabis — my preference is for the system to be more open to everyday people and allow folks to grow their own cannabis versus have to purchase it from a distributor,” Eskamani told The Intercept. “Clearly there are economic motives here, including for Republican donors, to maintain the current system of vertical integration and legalize cannabis for recreational use.”
With GOP donors coming around to legal weed, Republican apparatchiks and even judges have shifted their stances. At least two justices close to DeSantis have signaled that they might rule against the governor’s position.
Florida Chief Justice Carlos Muñiz swears in a member of the House of Representatives in Tallahassee, Fla., on Jan. 9, 2024. Photo: Gary McCullough/AP
Chief Justice Carlos Muñiz, a DeSantis appointee, and Justice Charles Canady, whose wife is DeSantis’s pick to be the next Florida state House speaker, suggested in oral arguments in November that they disagreed with the state’s position.
Lawyers for the state had said the ballot language was misleading because it didn’t clarify that even if Florida legalized cannabis, it would still be illegal under federal law. The judges questioned the idea. Canady said he did not understand how a voter could be confused by the ballot language as proposed. “I’m baffled by the argument,” he said. “Maybe it’s just me.”
Grand Old Pot Industry
The owners of several of the state’s biggest medical cannabis companies have contributed to myriad of Republican causes. They have given to DeSantis’s campaigns, including his state PAC, before his presidential campaign converted it to a federal committee. And they have spread their money around the party, giving to state Republicans, including the state Republican Party, state legislative campaigns, and related committees.
Among the companies whose top officials are major GOP donors is Trulieve. One of Florida’s biggest cannabis companies and one of the first to receive a coveted medical license, Trulieve is also bankrolling the ballot initiative to legalize recreational weed.
Trulieve company officials have given at least $41 million to Republicans and Democrats in Florida since 2017 and at least $25,000 to DeSantis’s state PAC in 2020. They also donated $450,000 to the state Republican Party since 2019, including $125,000 five months before DeSantis’s 2022 reelection and another $100,000 in November.
According to disclosures, Trulieve is responsible for 97 percent — $38 million — of the total funding to the political action committee sponsoring the recreational ballot initiative, Smart & Safe Florida. The PAC is run by David Bellamy, a musician and half of the country-pop duo the Bellamy Brothers.
Like all the 22 tightly regulated medical cannabis companies licensed by the state, Trulieve is already expanding production to prepare should voters approve the ballot measure.
Surterra Wellness, another of the state’s biggest medical cannabis firms, has given at least $63,000 to DeSantis state PACs since his 2018 campaign. Surterra’s former chief executive officer, William Wrigley Jr. II, of the Wrigley candy empire, gave $100,000 to the pro-DeSantis super PAC Never Back Down in June, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission. His firm, Palm Beach Enterprises, gave another $100,000 on the same day. (Surterra became part of Parallel, another cannabis firm, in 2019. Wrigley left Surterra in 2021.)
Hackney Nursery, another major cannabis company in the state, gave $10,000 to DeSantis’s state PAC in 2021. Other cannabis companies including Planet 13 Holdings, Curaleaf, Cresco Labs, and its subsidiary VidaCann have also given more than $112,000 to state Republicans and GOP committees since 2018.
In oral arguments last month, the state and the Florida Chamber of Commerce argued that Canady and other justices had ruled against similar cases. During the court’s last reviews of ballot language on the issue in 2021, Canady and Muñiz were among five justices who ruled to prohibit voters from considering a ballot measure on legal cannabis. They concluded that two previous measures included misleading language and should not appear on the ballot because they failed to comply with state law. Both justices said the language currently before the court was different.
The court will decide by April whether voters can consider the measure, which would decriminalize personal cannabis use for adults and allow the state to expand licensing beyond medical facilities to allow recreational companies to produce, distribute, and sell cannabis. If approved, it would go into effect in May 2025.
For now, medical sales are exempt from Florida’s sales tax, but the levy would apply if the state were to legalize recreational. According to a financial impact analysis published in July by the Financial Impact Estimating Conference, comprised of economists from DeSantis’s office and the state legislature, legalization would boost state sales tax revenue at least $200 million a year.
Rep. Bill Foster, an Illinois Democrat, agreed to three debates in his primary election race against Qasim Rashid, an insurgent progressive. Foster later dropped out of the other two debates, citing conflicting events. The first and only time Foster appeared alongside Rashid, the decadelong incumbent left halfway through the candidate forum, claiming he had another obligation.
Rashid said Foster is reluctant to defend his own record. Among other issues, the incumbent had criticized Israel’s war against Palestinians in Gaza but stopped short of calling for a ceasefire. Protesters were at the forum to express their displeasure with Foster and Rep. Sean Casten, a Democrat from a neighboring district, who also attended, for refusing to call for a ceasefire.
“Fundamentally, they realize that he wants them to vote for a record that even he isn’t willing to defend.”
“Voters are upset,” Rashid told The Intercept, said of Foster’s refusal to debate. “Fundamentally, they realize that he wants them to vote for a record that even he isn’t willing to defend.”
The March 19 Democratic primary in the suburbs and rural towns northwest of Chicago could become another congressional race where Israel plays an outsized role. Rashid is running on a broader progressive platform — hitting Foster for being out of touch with Democrats in the district and his acceptance of money from corporate PACs, fossil fuel companies, and the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries — but the ceasefire debate looms large.
Observers anticipate that Israel issues will attract outside money from lobbying groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee that are preparing to spend record amounts to defend Democrats that toe their line. And Foster had already amassed support from pro-Israel donors: One of his top contributors this cycle is the private equality group Apollo Global Management, whose CEO Marc Rowan helped orchestrate the ousting of the president and board chair at the University of Pennsylvania over Israel’s war on Gaza. (Foster’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)
Newman, who is supporting Rashid’s campaign, told The Intercept that the threat of spending from groups like AIPAC and its ally,Democratic Majority for Israel, is scaring incumbents into submission and deepening schisms within the Democratic Party.
“In the last 3 months I’ve talked to several MOCs” — members of Congress — “who live in absolute fear of AIPAC and DMFI working against them or primarying them,” Newman said by text. “More than anything else I’m deeply concerned about how AIPAC, Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI) and their 20 affiliate PACs are putting a huge wedge in the Democratic Party, particularly in the House.”
AIPAC Waiting in the Wings
For decades, AIPAC played an influential role in Middle Eastern policy by sending its legions to lobby members of Congress in their offices and only organizing campaign donations informally among members. In recent years, however, the group transformed its spending on congressional elections with the launch of a new super PAC in the last election cycle.
The direct influence on money in politics has exacerbated partisan rifts that have emerged around Israel and AIPAC. Democratic voters, for their part, are shifting away from AIPAC’s uncompromising positions on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict — especially as a majority of Americans came to support the ceasefire that AIPAC opposes.
Amid the current flare-up of violence, even some more centrist Democrats have found themselves unable to stay in lockstep with AIPAC, which frowns on virtually all criticism of Israel. In Illinois’s 11th Congressional District, for instance, Rashid acknowledged that Foster has also been a vocal critic of Israel. With the death toll in Gaza mounting, Foster has expressed concern about Benjamin Netanyahu’s military strategy and said there was a “special place in hell” for the prime minister, but stopped short of calling for a ceasefire.
Foster’s record, Rashid said, is more notable for the things he has not done. He voted for two measures expressing support for Israel, but neither of them mentioned Palestinians killed by Israeli forces. Foster is not a co-sponsor of the ceasefire resolution introduced in October nor a resolution introduced by another Illinois Democrat, Ramirez, that honored a 6-year-old boy, Wadee Alfayoumi, who was killed in Plainfield in an alleged hate crime during the first week of Israel’s war on Gaza.
Fostercriticizes Israel’s actions, Rashid said, but won’t take the steps necessary to end the bloodshed in Gaza — namely supporting a ceasefire.
“The big difference between he and I is not on a question of whether international law is being violated. We both agree with that,” Rashid said. “The difference is that I have the integrity to say it and demand action.”
Foster has long had support from J Street, a pro-Israel advocacy group that positions itself as a liberal alternative to AIPAC. Until this week, J Street had resisted pressure, both internal and external, to call for a ceasefire, even threatening to pull endorsements from members who did so. The group announced support for a “negotiated stop” to violence in Gaza on Monday.
J Street said in a statement to The Intercept that it’s proud to endorse Foster again this year. Foster has “been a champion for pro-Israel, pro-peace, pro-democracy values on Capitol Hill since his election in 2008,” J Street spokesperson Tali DeGroot told The Intercept, pointing to his support for the now-defunct 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which was supported by J Street but opposed by AIPAC, the Israeli government, and a clutch of hawkish Democrats.
“We’ve seen the polling. Eighty percent of Democrats want a ceasefire.”
Rashid’s campaign has been careful to tread lightly on the Israel question while pushing unequivocally for a ceasefire. His approach has been to focus on ending the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip and tap into majority support for a ceasefire among Democratic voters. “We’ve seen the polling. Eighty percent of Democrats want a ceasefire,” Rashid said. “Even a majority of Republicans and Independents want a ceasefire. For us, this is basic integrity.”
Foster has been in office for a decade and faced few challengers in recent years. Foster’s last opponent in the 2020 Democratic primary, Rachel Ventura, received 41 percent of the vote.
Rashid works at a Chicago law firm and grew up in the area, which he recently returned to. In 2020, he ran as the Democratic candidate in the general election for Virginia’s 1st Congressional District and lost to Republican Rep. Robert Wittman.
Rashid raised $305,000 in the third quarter of 2023 — $10,000 more than Foster — and had $114,000 cash on hand. Foster has $1.3 million cash on hand and $1 million in debts, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission. Rashid said his campaign had received more than 10,000 individual contributions. In the Democratic primary, a large cash intervention by AIPAC or one of its allies could play a major part.
Rashid, for his part, said he was ready for the challenges: “I have immense confidence in voters that they’re sick and tired of the mudslinging and the negativity and these outside lobbyist organizations meddling in our races.”
Expecting an onslaught of spending from pro-Israel groups, Democratic Pennsylvania Rep. Summer Lee’s campaign announced Thursday it had raised over $1 million, dwarfing typical fundraising numbers in Democratic primaries.
Lee, a member of the progressive Squad in Congress, does not take money from corporate PACs, and more than 90 percent of the contributions were made in increments of less than $250, according to her campaign.
Lee is one of the major targets of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee this cycle. The group plans to spend at least $100 million to oust critics of U.S. military support for Israel from Congress.
“A Republican-funded Super PAC threatened to spend $100 million against us — and our grassroots people-powered movement has responded loud and clear,” Lee said in a statement Thursday. “I am so proud of the multigenerational, mulitracial movement we have built in Western Pennsylvania to protect and expand our democracy — it is our greatest defense against the dark money Super PACs and corporate lobbies who seek to undermine it.”
AIPAC tried and failed to recruit several challengers to run against Lee, The Intercept reported last year. Lee overcame $5 million in AIPAC spending against her 2022 campaign.
Candidates’ 2024 fundraising disclosures are due to the Federal Election Commission on Wednesday. Lee’s top challenger, Bhavini Patel, a borough council member in Edgewood, Pennsylvania, announced earlier this month that her campaign had raised more than $310,000 in the final quarter of last year.
Patel has not said whether AIPAC recruited her to challenge Lee, but her campaign is in touch with the group, according to a source familiar with the race. (Patel’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
Lee’s fundraising news comes a week after she won an endorsement from the top three Democrats in the House leadership, including Minority Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., a major ally and recipient of money from AIPAC.
With Israel’s war in Gaza still raging, AIPAC and other major Republican and Democratic donors have pledged to try to oust Lee and other progressive members of the Squad over their criticism of U.S. military support for Israel.
When asked about AIPAC’s efforts, Jeffries has not criticized AIPAC by name but said Democrats would continue to back their incumbents.
A Chicago Democrat who has served in the House of Representatives for three decades is facing renewed scrutiny over his handling of campaign resources, according to a complaint submitted last week to the House Ethics Committee and obtained by The Intercept.
While it’s not unusual for the committee to receive superfluous complaints from frustrated constituents, this is not the first time the office has been questioned about its use of official funds.
Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill., formally announced in June he would run for reelection, marking the start of his 14th congressional campaign since he first took office in 1997 — and what is expected to be a hotly contested six-way primary.
Davis misused his congressional resources by spending funds from his office to amplify his electoral campaign, according to the complaint, which was submitted to the House Ethics Committee last week by a constituent, Tellis L. Parnell Sr. Various laws and ethics rules bar the use of official funds for incumbents’ election races.
Parnell alleged in his complaint that Davis’s congressional office violated House ethics rules by purchasing its first radio and billboard ads in the last six years just after he announced his reelection campaign.
“There is reason to believe that Congressman Daniel K. Davis has used funds from his Congressional office to purchase television and radio advertising to bolster his election in violation of either the spirit or actual law and House Ethics guidelines,” Parnell wrote. He requested a congressional investigation.
Parnell said he came across information about Davis’s official spending after a conversation with a friend who had done political work with Davis’s campaign. Parnell said he was not affiliated with any of Davis’s opponents.
Davis raised eyebrows last cycle when he used state committee funds to boost his congressional work, The Intercept reported.
The ads last year came at a time when critics say Davis’s long tenure has led him to lose touch with constituents and flounder in the face of deadly gun violence in Chicago.
One of Davis’s five challengers in the March 19 Democratic primary, anti-gun violence activist Kina Collins, came within seven points of ousting him in 2022. Two other primary candidates are running to Davis’s right and arguing that he’s not supportive enough of Israel.
Davis’s office said it follows all applicable House ethics rules and that the ads were unrelated to Davis’s campaign. His chief of staff, Tumia Romero, said Democratic leadership issued recommendations for House offices to use their remaining budgets to boost the party’s work on infrastructure and other issues.
“There’s a lot coming out of the government these days regarding the infrastructure act and all these kinds of things, and the only way that we can communicate to the 735,000 people in our district is through mass communications,” Romero said.
She said she had not received a copy of the complaint from the House Ethics Committee and declined to comment on a copy provided to the office by The Intercept.
“The people that are making these complaints,” Romero said, “what they need to think about are the people that are poor in our district, the people that don’t have health care, that’s what they need to worry about.”
Restrictions on Official Funds
Members of Congress are allowed to spend public funds to communicate with the public about their official duties, but there are legal restrictions and rules. Congressional offices, for instance, are subject to blackout dates 60 days before either a primary or general election during which they are prohibited from sending unsolicited mass communications.
Davis, however, is not accused of violating that rule, Instead, the complaint alleges that his Washington office’s profligate spending in the six months leading up to the January 19 start of the blackout for the Chicago-area primary raised questions.
During the period, which coincides with the first six months after Davis announced his reelection bid in June, his congressional office reported spending at least $42,000 on 27 ad purchases, the largest total number of ads purchased by the office in the last six years.
The ads tallied more than 2,000 individual spots across radio, television, digital, phone, text, billboard, and direct mail. The ad buys marked the first purchases in the last six years by his congressional office for distribution on radio and billboards. In contrast to the recent purchases, the office purchased one mail ad in 2022, five ads in 2021, zero ads in 2020, 17 ads in 2019, and zero ads in 2018.
“As a constituent, I’m concerned when I see my taxpayer dollars being used on campaign materials right before a competitive election,” Parnell told The Intercept. “I don’t think it’s right that taxpayers foot the bill for a PR campaign and it’s this kind of politics that we need to move on from. We need new leadership, it’s time for a change.”
“I don’t think it’s right that taxpayers foot the bill for a PR campaign.”
While the ads published by the House under public disclosure guidelines don’t explicitly mention Davis’s reelection campaign, their intent and timing appears intended to boost his image ahead of a major primary challenge, the complaint alleges, especially given the fact that his office has not previously used official funds for radio, television, or billboard ads, according to House records from 2018 to 2023.
The ads range from information about flooding in the district to the office’s sponsorship of a back-to-school event for local students. Most of the ads boost Davis’s congressional work, touting that Davis is “working for you, putting people over politics.” The ads are careful to direct constituents to his congressional office to clarify that the office paid for the ad materials.
The ads were approved under House communications standards that require a determination to be made by congressional staff as to whether the ad content constituted official business and was therefore eligible as franked mail, meaning mail paid for with public funds rather than campaign dollars.
Two other mailers received by constituents the day before the blackout period, images of which were provided to The Intercept, use pictures that also appear on Davis’s campaign website, which House rules prohibit. (Observers on Twitter speculated that the images were produced with the help of artificial intelligence.)
Romero, Davis’s chief of staff, said the government did not pay for the mailer and declined to comment further.
A small group of organizers rallied outside of New York City Hall on Wednesday to call on Mayor Eric Adams not to veto a series of bills that would ban the use of solitary confinement in city jails and increase oversight over police stops and searches.
The push by grassroots reform groups to ban solitary confinement comes in response to a surge in recent years of deaths in city jails, including several cases of people who had been detained in solitary confinement. Families of people killed as a result of stops by New York Police Department officers have also urged the mayor to sign the policing measures into law.
Advocates and officials working on the reforms expect Adams, who has publicly opposed the bills, to veto at least two of the measures this week. He has until Friday to do so, or the measures will pass into law.
The battle pits a pro-police mayor, an NYPD veteran himself, against a progressive City Council, which approved the three bills last month by large margins during its last meeting of 2023. The fight is the latest in a well-trod pattern of centrist Democrats or Republicans fighting back against popular and democratically enacted welfare reforms. In New York, City Council leaders and members said they have the votes to override the mayor’s veto.
“We are prepared to override the mayor’s veto,” council member Crystal Hudson, who sponsored a bill to strengthen laws around consenting to a search, told The Intercept. “The City Council is the city’s legislative body. The body has spoken.” The council would have 30 days from a mayoral veto to issue an override.
“The City Council is the city’s legislative body. The body has spoken.”
For advocates, the murmurs about an Adams veto and his own comments Wednesday and Thursday disparaging the measures are disheartening.
“Stops are increasing, the number of police killings are increasing, the racial disparity in who is being stopped is increasing,” said Samah Sisay, staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, part of the coalition of more than 100 groups backing the police accountability measures. “It feels like in a lot of ways, a lot of the progress that was made post-Floyd, post the stop-and-frisk litigation in 2013 — it feels like a lot of that is being reverted.”
Sisay added, “This is the time when the mayor should really be thinking about how this heightened transparency could increase safety and well-being of Black and brown New Yorkers, but instead they’re engaged in fear-mongering and spreading of misinformation about what the bill does.”
Some of the city’s major political personality clashes are also at play. Adams has publicly lambasted one of the police accountability package’s high-profile backers, New York City Public Advocate Jumaane Williams. Adams claimed Williams didn’t ride the subway and lived in a fort with private police escorts. The fight devolved into a feud over who was the real New Yorker.
Adams, who has backed solitary confinement in the past, has said the bill to end the practice would foster “fear.” The city’s corrections officers union has also opposed the bill, saying it would put jail staff at risk.
Adams’s office told The Intercept he had not yet determined whether he would veto the bills. “The mayor has yet to say whether he will veto the bills,” deputy mayor for communications Fabien Levy said in a statement. Levy referred other questions about the bills to comments from the mayor during a Tuesday press conference, in which the mayor said the bill to end solitary confinement would jeopardize the safety of both staff and people incarcerated in city jails. Asked by a reporter if he would veto the bill, Adams said he hoped the council would reconsider the measure.
“Falsehoods and Fear-Mongering”
The two policing bills would address calls for accountability from families of people killed by New York Police Department officers during low-level police stops.
The mothers of Eric Garner, Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Anthony Baez, and many others wrote a letter to the mayor in December calling on him to sign the package into law. They highlighted what they called a “misinformation campaign” being waged against the consent search bill and urged the mayor not to engage in the same tactics.
The mothers of police killing victims were joined by a coalition of criminal justice reform organizations, labor unions, and civil liberties groups including Communities United for Police Reform, the Center for Constitutional Rights, VOCAL-NY, the Bronx Defenders, and 1199 SEIU United Healthcare Workers East.
Several of the same groups also backed the bill to end solitary confinement, along with the #HALTsolitary Campaign and the mother of Brandon Rodriguez, who died by suicide in solitary confinement at New York City’s Rikers Island jail complex in 2021.
Hudson, council member Alexa Avilés, and Williams, the public advocate, backed the package of police accountability measures. One of the bills would expand reporting on consent searches by NYPD officers. The other would require NYPD officers to publicly report all investigative stops of civilians.
On the campaign trail, Adams had expressed support for improving transparency and accountability in the department. The NYPD, for its part, had previously only asked for minor changes to the consent search bill.
“I’m not sure what’s changed between candidate Adams and now Mayor Adams,” Avilés told The Intercept. “What is clear is he and the NYPD are now working the media circuit spreading falsehoods and fear-mongering about a common sense bill.”
Williams also sponsored the measure to end solitary confinement, which requires all people incarcerated in city jails to have at least 14 hours per day out of their cell in spaces shared with other people.
Adams has publicly attacked Williams over the series of policing bills, including during an announcement alongside NYPD Commissioner Edward Caban earlier this month. Williams retorted that Adams lives in New Jersey, harnessing a long-standing attack against the mayor.
The back and forth stems in part from a rivalry between Adams and Williams, who has publicly considered running for mayor. In the event Adams is removed from office, Williams would take over at City Hall. A federal investigation probing Adams’s 2021 campaign has fueled the tension between the offices.
Claims by Adams, his administration, and police that opposition to the measures are in the interest of public safety are misleading to the public, said Sisay, the Center for Constitutional Rights attorney.
“In reality,” Sisay said, “if they truly cared about safety and the well-being of Black and brown New Yorkers, they would really be trying to figure out how to make the NYPD more transparent and accountable.”
Bucking pro-Israel lobby groups, the top three members of House Democratic leadership endorsed Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa., on Wednesday. Like other progressive members of the Squad, pro-Israel groups are seeking to oust Lee in 2024.
Members of the House Democratic leadership have mostly remained close to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee even as it sought to unseat Democratic incumbents. On Wednesday, though, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., bucked AIPAC, a major donor, and endorsed Lee. House Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., and House Minority Whip Katherine Clark, D-Mass., joined Jeffries in the endorsement.
“A civil rights champion, advocate for organized labor and the first Black woman to represent Pennsylvania in Congress, Summer Lee has worked tirelessly to deliver for working families,” the three leaders said in a statement Wednesday morning. They added that Lee had fought for good union jobs and reproductive rights since her first day in Congress and would help oppose “the extreme MAGA Republican agenda” in Pennsylvania.
The endorsements are among the first by House Democratic leadership for a progressive incumbent facing attacks from AIPAC and other pro-Israel lobbying groups in 2024. Jeffries endorsed Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., in August amid news that AIPAC was recruiting candidates to challenge her.
The endorsements are among the first by House Democratic leadership for a progressive incumbent facing attacks from AIPAC.
AIPAC has also tried to recruit candidates to challenge Lee and other progressive lawmakers who’ve led calls for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to U.S. military funding for Israel since its recent war killed more than 20,000 Palestinians. In Lee’s race, two people declined AIPAC’s efforts to recruit them to challenge the incumbent in the 2024 Democratic primary, The Intercept reported last year.
AIPAC spent$5 million against Lee’s 2022 campaign, including on mailers picturing her with former President Donald Trump, claiming shewasn’t really a Democrat.
The same year, AIPAC faced heavy criticisms from Democrats for endorsing more than 100 Republicans who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
AIPAC and its close ally,Democratic Majority for Israel, have ramped up attacks against progressive lawmakers since the siege on Gaza began. Members of the Squad and a handful of other Democrats have led measures calling for a ceasefire and voted against a measure that pledged support for Israel and did not mention Palestinians killed.
Attacks on Progressive Democrats
The show of support for Lee from House Democratic leadership comes as conservative Democrats have attacked Squad members and major party donors have signaled their intentions to target incumbents who are critical of Israel.
Mainstream Democrats PAC, funded by billionaire Democratic donor Reid Hoffman, is reportedly considering teaming up with AIPAC and DMFI to target Squad members including Reps. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Cori Bush, D-Mo., who led a ceasefire resolution in October. The resolution immediately drew attacks from conservative Democrats, along with AIPAC and DMFI, including a new ad in November that attacked Tlaib.
In addition to Lee, AIPAC has sought to recruit challengers to Bush, Tlaib, Omar, and Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y.
AIPAC has emerged as one of the largest players in electoral politics. The group spent millions against progressives in 2022 and reportedly plans to spend $100 million in 2024.
Jeffries had said he would back all Democratic incumbents, but the endorsement of Lee stood in contrast to his previous tone on attacks against Squad members.
The minority leader had previously issued muted responses to news about plans by AIPAC, DMFI, and Mainstream Democrats’ efforts to oust Squad members. Asked to respond to the attacks during a press conference in November, Jeffries said, “Outside groups are gonna do what outside groups are gonna do. I think House Democrats are going to continue to support each other.”
In a statement touting the new endorsements, Lee noted her work to invest in infrastructure, union jobs, and STEM, as well as her use of progressive policies to rebuild support for Democrats in the western part of the state.
“Our progressive movement is creating a blueprint, not just for Western Pennsylvania, but for our entire country for what it looks like to beat Trumpism by leading with compassion and equity and justice,” Lee said in the statement, released Wednesday morning. Lee’s primary opponents include Bhavini Patel, a borough council member in Edgewood, Pennsylvania, and Laurie MacDonald, who leads a victims services organization in Pennsylvania anddescribes herself as a moderate.
Few U.S. colleges have generated more controversy for their response to Israel’s war on Gaza than the University of Pennsylvania. Penn’s president Liz Magill faced criticism for her answers about hypothetical scenarios of antisemitism posed during a congressional hearing by Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., who has herself faced criticism for embracing antisemitic conspiracy theories.
Stefanik’s line of questioning last month was part of a wider campaign in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel: demonizing pro-Palestine activism. Stefanik conflated calls for “intifada” — an Arabic word for “uprising” — with antisemitic attacks and asked Magill, along with other university presidents, if these purported calls for the genocide of Jews constituted harassment. Magill, by all accounts, stumbled through a non-answer.
Under pressure from billionaire donors and pro-Israel lobby groups, Magill and Penn board chair Scott Bok resigned four days after the hearing.
News of the resignations was framed as part of the university’s failure to handle antisemitism on campus in the wake of October 7. But the effort to oust Magill began months before the Hamas attack, according to public letters and people familiar with the fight over Israel and Palestine at Penn. As early as August, Magill had drawn the ire of pro-Israel lobbying groups, nonprofits, and university donors after rebuffing their efforts to cancel a literary festival on campus called Palestine Writes.
The story of what happened at Penn was distorted to obscure the earlier round of anti-Palestinian attacks against the literary festival, said Radhika Sainath, a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal who works on speech and academic freedom. Palestine Legal advised the festival and urged Magill to resist censoring the event.
Sainath, who attended the festival to conduct research for a novel, said that media reports ran with unverified claims that Palestine Writes had stoked antisemitism, even suggesting that the festival was linked to the Hamas attack.
“You could really see how pretty much every newspaper was just adopting the framework of these Israel lobby groups as a given, as if the festival was antisemitic,” she said. “People were just really upset in part about a large number of Palestinians potentially coming to campus to talk about Palestinian literature.”
That coverage amplified the attacks that led to the congressional hearings, eventually precipitating Magill’s resignation. University officials squandered an opportunity to correct false claims that students had called for the genocide of Jewish people, Sainath said: “They kind of went along with it and fell into this trap.”
A banner for the University of Pennsylvania on campus in Philadelphia on Dec. 8, 2023. Photo: Michelle Gustafson/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Over the summer, wealthy donors, along with local and national Jewish groups, lined up to take issue with the university’s plans to host a festival in September celebrating Palestinian authors.
One of the leaders of the informal network of critics was Marc Rowan, CEO of the investment firm Apollo Global Management. Rowan serves as advisory board chair of the university’s Wharton School, which he attended, and was previously a member of Penn’s board of trustees. He also chairs the board of the UJA-Federation of New York, an influential Jewish group involved in pro-Israel advocacy.
Another major force against the festival was billionaire Republican donor Ronald Lauder, also a Wharton alum, who pushed Magill to cancel Palestine Writes in a meeting in Philadelphia and two subsequent phone calls.
The Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia and the Anti-Defamation League of Philadelphia sent two letters to Magill in August complaining of “a high likelihood” that the festival would “promote inflammatory and antisemitic narratives about Israel.” They alleged that some of the speakers, including Marc Lamont Hill; Noura Erakat; Maysoon Zayid; Huwaida Arraf; Roger Waters; and the festival’s executive director, Susan Abulhawa, had a “history of antisemitism,” citing criticisms of Zionism and Israel’s human rights abuses. The groups said the university should issue a statement “questioning the judgment” of the departments working with the festival, which included Penn’s English, near Eastern languages and civilizations, and cinema and media studies departments.
Festival organizers pushed back. In a September 2 letter to Magill and other university leaders, Abulhawa described the complaints as part of “a campaign to discredit and denigrate” the literature festival. “We categorically reject this cynical, sinister, and ahistorical conflation of bigotry with the moral repudiation of a foreign state’s criminality, particularly as most of us are victims of that state,” she wrote. “Every instance of the examples listed in the original letter refers to Zionism, Zionists, or Israel. Situating those individual Palestinians and our allies in league with actual antisemites is wholly irresponsible and dangerous.”
Ten days later, Magill and other university leaders issued a statement distancing Penn from the festival, citing concerns raised about certain speakers “who have a documented and troubling history of engaging in antisemitism by speaking and acting in ways that denigrate Jewish people.” The university condemned antisemitism, the officials wrote, but supported the free exchange of ideas. “This includes the expression of views that are controversial and even those that are incompatible with our institutional values.”
When it became clear that Palestine Writes would go forward as planned, Rowan, Lauder, and other trustees organized an open letter to Magill reiterating concerns about the festival. The letter eventually gained more than 4,000 signatories, including prominent alumni.
The festival began on September 22 and went off mostly without a hitch, despite threats against organizers and at least two high-profile attendees who were kept from attending in person. Gary Younge, a sociology professor at the University of Manchester; Waters of Pink Floyd; and author Viet Thanh Nguyen were scheduled as plenary speakers. Nguyen was the only one of the three who could attend in person. Younge said his visa was inexplicably revoked prior to his trip to the U.S., and Waters said the university prohibited him from stepping on campus; he spoke to the festival online from the Philadelphia Airport. The university countered that Waters was originally set to attend virtually and a last-minute change would have required additional security. Festival organizers disputed the university’s account.
Attendees and festival board members who spoke to The Intercept described Palestine Writes as a multigenerational, multicultural event that welcomed everyone and fostered an important cultural space on campus, particularly for Palestinian students.
But in the weeks following October 7, media outlets and critics linked the festival to the Hamas attack and said it had fomented an unsafe campus environment for Jewish students. In a letter to the university newspaper published October 12, Rowan and other donors called on Magill and Bok to resign and urged alumni to “close the checkbooks” and halt donations. “It took less than two weeks to go from the Palestine Writes Literary Festival on UPenn’s campus to the barbaric slaughter and kidnapping of Israelis,” Rowan wrote.
Appearing on CNBC, Rowan said his appeal to alumni was a “difficult call for a place that I love for the last 40 years.” He insisted the issue wasn’t about free speech, which he supported — it was about university leaders saying they condemned antisemitism but allowing the literature festival to happen.
“There has been a gathering storm around these issues,” Rowan said. “Microaggressions are condemned with extreme moral outrage, and yet violence — particularly violence against Jews, antisemitism — seems to have found a place of tolerance on the campus, protected by free speech.” Magill was “not capable of exercising moral leadership,” he said, “because she feels academic pressure and peer pressure.”
Lauder threatened to cut additional funding in a letter to Magill on October 17, saying that she was forcing him to reexamine his financial support “absent unsatisfactory measures to address antisemitism at the university.” The letter brought him great sorrow, Lauder wrote. “I am so sorry you did not cancel the event.”
That university administrators, media outlets, and politicians accepted that narrative uncritically underscored the hysteria of the moment, said Bill Mullen, a board member of Palestine Writes. “It’s amazing to me that people can get away with this without being fact-checked,” he said. “You just have to say antisemitism and you terrify people into not asking questions.”
“The attack on Palestine Writes was a very targeted attack on Palestinian writers and intellectuals. And since October 7, we have literally seen Israel murdering Palestinian poets and writers and journalists,” Mullen added. “They wanted to silence these voices.”
After Magill and Bok resigned, Julie Platt, vice chair of the university board, was named interim board chair. Platt also serves as board chair of the Jewish Federations of North America. Penn named J. Larry Jameson, the dean of its medical school, as interim president.
Since the resignations, the university has further aligned itself with pro-Israel lobbying groups and donors. Last week, a delegation of faculty took a three-day “solidarity tour” of Israel that included meetings with Israeli government officials and a visit to the Gaza envelope.
Rowan, meanwhile, has sought to guide a transformation at Penn. Days after Magill’s resignation, he sent a letter to trustees raising concerns about the university’s culture and “political orientation,” warning that it had “allowed for preferred versus free speech” and asking how the university considered “viewpoint diversity” in hiring.
An anonymous petition circulated that called on the university to fire three faculty members who had protested in support of Gaza on campus, including festival organizer Huda Fakhreddine, an associate professor of Arabic literature; her husband, a poet and professor of creative writing; and another professor of Persian literature. Fakhreddine, one of several Penn faculty named in the congressional hearing, said that she has since been doxxed and received death threats.
At its annual convention last week in Philadelphia, the Modern Language Association’s Delegate Assembly passed an emergency motion defending speech on Palestine and supporting Fakhreddine and others at Penn facing retaliation for criticizing Israel’s war on Gaza.
University faculty have pushed back against interference by donors and trustees. The executive committee of Penn’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors called on the university to address harassment, intimidation, and threats against faculty and warned of “the chilling effects of statements by trustees, donors, and university administrators on teaching, learning, and scholarship.”
Palestine Writes is now battling a court order that it remove from its website a logo for the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, which had awarded a grant to the organization for an initiative unrelated to the festival. After the dustup over the festival reached the mainstream, the council sent a cease-and-desist letter, which was immediately published by the Anti-Defamation League with unredacted contact information for Abulhawa. In November, a judge on the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas ordered the logo removed, saying she understood why the council would not want to be affiliated with the festival in the current political climate.
The issue reached the office of Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who publicly denounced Magill and the university after the congressional hearing. The governor’s office represented the arts council in court proceedings against the festival.
“It was just so eye-opening to me that something as simple as a literature festival could be so threatening to pro-Israel supporters,” said Marie Kelly, a board member for Palestine Writes. The festival was a historic celebration and affirmation of Palestinian culture, Kelly said. “That’s not anything that any pro-Israel academic, millionaire, or politician can take away.”
In its first endorsement of the 2024 cycle, the progressive group responsible for helping to elect the Squad is backing an incumbent candidate whose early call for a ceasefire in Gaza and vocal support for Palestinian victims is likely to draw attacks from well-funded pro-Israel groups.
Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., is one of the few incumbents in Congress to win an endorsement from Justice Democrats without first having been backed in a primary or first being recruited by the group to run for office. The endorsement reflects a shifting strategy for the group, which has typically focused its resources on backing insurgent candidates in key primaries and, like other progressive groups, is operating in a strained fundraising environment and reduced staff after layoffs last year.
The choice to back Ramirez signals that Justice Democrats is doubling down its support for congressional progressives who won’t cave to the pro-Israel lobby, even as they face an onslaught of spending by groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC.
Recruiting progressive challengers to take on corporate Democratic incumbents and run for open seats is still important to the organization, said Usamah Andrabi, head of communications for Justice Democrats. “But also, there’s a lot of work to be done on the Hill itself,” he added. “This is just an expansion of our strategy to say there are members in Congress that we can organize around, too, that have already been elected so that despite the hundred-million-dollar threat that AIPAC and its super PAC, the United Democracy Project, is leveraging against a handful of Black and brown progressives, we are not going to ever stop ensuring that the Squad is growing.”
Ramirez was one of the first members of Congress to call for a ceasefire in Gaza and to co-sponsor a ceasefire resolution introduced by Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo. Such calls have brought a rash of attacks and efforts to oust members of the Squad, including Bush and Reps. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., and Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., who were all elected with backing from Justice Democrats. Since Israel launched an unprecedented assault on Gaza in response to a surprise attack by Hamas, AIPAC has ramped up its targeting of members who have criticized the destruction and called for a ceasefire. The group plans to spend $100 million in Democratic primaries this cycle with a focus on ousting members of the Squad who have opposed the siege on Gaza and called to end U.S. military support for Israel.
In 2021, AIPAC launched a super PAC, the United Democracy Project, which spent millions against progressive candidates that cycle, including $3 million against the Justice Democrats-backed Rep. Summer Lee, D-Penn., who nonetheless won her election and took office last year. AIPAC has tried to recruit several challengers to run against Lee — at least two have declined, The Intercept reported last year.
Justice Democrats’ endorsement of Ramirez is part of its strategy to combat those forces, knowing that the group and its progressive network will likely always be outspent by its opponents.
“Now more than ever we have seen members of Congress be threatened and react to AIPAC’s far-right extremism and their million-dollar primary threats,” Andrabi said. “And it takes a lot of courage and moral clarity to stand up to a super PAC like that and stand up for the voices of innocent Palestinians and Israelis alike.”
Ramirez was firstelected to Illinois’s 3rd Congressional District in 2022 following an open primary in which she overcame heavy spending by Chicago’s Democratic machine in support of her top opponent, a moderate City Council member. Ramirez also faced outside spending from Democratic Majority for Israel, a pro-Israel lobbying group with ties to AIPAC, and Mainstream Democrats PAC, a group funded by billionaire Reid Hoffman that is now considering targeting Squad members in 2024. Backed by Chicago unions, Planned Parenthood, and J Street, a lobbying group that has positioned itself as a liberal alternative to AIPAC, Ramirez campaigned on making the economy work for immigrants and working-class families.
Since taking office a year ago, Ramirez has sponsored legislation to strengthen tenants rights, support student veterans, and bolster funding for the consumer protection watchdog the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. A month after taking office, she was selected by the Working Families Party, which backed her 2022 campaign, to deliver a response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address.
She has also shown a willingness to dissent from the Washington orthodoxy on unconditionally supporting Israel, even before the ongoing war during which Israel has killed more than 20,000 Palestinians. In July, she was one of only two representatives who joined some members of the Squad in voting against a controversial resolution declaring that Israel is not a racist or apartheid state.
In October, after an Illinois man killed 6-year-old Wadee Alfayoumi in an alleged hate crime during the first week of Israel’s war on Gaza, Ramirez sponsored a resolution honoring the Palestinian American boy. (The resolution has three co-sponsors.) Ramirez was also one of 10 members to vote against a resolution supporting Israel in October.
As she continues to oppose the war in Gaza, Ramirez is focusing her 2024 campaign on support for tenants rights, Medicare for All, abortion rights, and creating a pathway to citizenship for recipients of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. She is currently running unopposed in the March 19 Democratic primary, and the only current Republican candidate, attorney and former police officer John Booras, is running unopposed in the GOP primary.
“For too long, our government has worked overtime for corporate lobbies and Super PACs at the expense of working families—it’s time to put people over profits,” Ramirez said in a statement. “Together with Justice Democrats, we are ready to take on that fight and finally deliver on everything from comprehensive immigration reform to housing justice and healthcare for all.”
Justice Democrats has backed close to 100 candidates since it was founded in 2017. In 2018, the group endorsed nearly 80 candidates, but it has since opted to endorse a smaller number of candidates with better chances of winning. Seven of its candidates won election in 2018, including three incumbents and the four insurgents who went on to create the Squad. Three candidates backed by the group won office in 2020, and two more won the next cycle. Andrabi said the group has not decided how many candidates it will back this year.
While Republicans and Democrats funding pro-Israel lobbying groups have banded together to support efforts to oust progressives, elsewhere, Democratic and progressive efforts have been hampered by a fundraising slump. Layoffs last year hit several organizations across the Democratic political spectrum from EMILY’s List to the voter file firm NGP VAN to Justice Democrats, which laid off 12 of its 20 employees between June and August last year.
The Florida Supreme Court on Wednesday heard oral arguments in a case about Gov. Ron DeSantis’s suspension earlier this summer of an elected Florida district attorney over allegations that she neglected her duties. State Attorney Monique Worrell, the suspended municipal prosecutor in Orange and Osceola counties, petitioned the court to reinstate her.
During the hearing, justices on the court vacillated between contradictory positions, arguing on the one hand that they weren’t there to litigate the facts of DeSantis’s claims against Worrell, and on the other suggesting that she neglected prosecutorial duties.
As part of his remaking of Florida’s government, DeSantis has stacked the court with his allies and pressured it to enact his political agenda. For DeSantis, the court is yet another venue for expanding his authority and fanning the flames of a right-wing culture war by attacking criminal justice reform.
Worrell won election in 2020 with an overwhelming victory against a “law-and-order” opponent. She ran on addressing mass incarceration, restoring public trust in the office, and serving victims. DeSantis suspended Worrell in August, making her the second prosecutor he removed from office over political disagreements.
The attacks on prosecutors have far-reaching implications for the future of the criminal justice system and how state lawmakers exercise their authority and undermine the will of voters who elected reformers, Worrell’s attorney Laura Ferguson said during the arguments.
“If a governor were able to remove a prosecutor of a different political party simply because they disagreed with their policies and categorize that as a neglect of duty or incompetence,” Ferguson said, “then that will have a substantial chilling effect on how state attorneys perform their roles or their willingness to serve.”
In one exchange during the hearing, Ferguson said DeSantis’s allegations that the district attorney had “practices or policies” to not prosecute certain categories of crimes were false and that she considered cases individually.
Justice Charles Canady, whose wife is a DeSantis ally, interrupted Ferguson. “That’s not what’s alleged though,” Canady said. “What’s alleged, to kind of sum it up, is that she has policies that under-prosecute certain categories.”
“The order infers and speculates about policies,” Ferguson said in response.
“It makes assertions, it makes allegations,” Canady replied. “It doesn’t have to prove it.” He said a trial in the Florida Senate over Worrell’s removal — on hold because of the Supreme Court challenge — would adjudicate those claims.
The attempt to remove elected prosecutors in Florida is part of a nationwide trend of Republicans looking to gain favor with the electorate through punitive, though potentially anti-democratic, policies. At least 17 states have launched similar efforts to curb the rise of reform-minded prosecutors who won office in increasing numbers since the mid-2010s.
Prior to winning the office, Worrell had worked under outgoing State Attorney Aramis Ayala. Ayala — a prosecutor who, like Worrell, is a Black woman — fell victim to the growing push to oust or limit the authority of elected reformers when former Florida Gov. Rick Scott removed her for refusing to seek the death penalty.
Monique Worrell holds a press conference outside her former office in the Orange County Courthouse complex on Aug. 9, 2023, in Florida. Photo: Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/Orlando Sentinel/Tribune News Service via Getty Images
Monique Worrell v. Ron D. DeSantis
DeSantis said he suspended Worrell for incompetence and “neglecting her duty to faithfully prosecute crime.” He appointed retired Judge Andrew Bain, a Federalist Society member, to replace her. A year earlier, DeSantis suspended Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren after he said he would not charge people who sought abortions under the state’s new abortion ban.
The suspensions are widely seen as part of DeSantis’s effort to remake the state and its criminal justice system in his own image and to his political advantage — a remaking that extends all the way up to the Supreme Court. The conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo aided DeSantis’s efforts on the courts by leading a secret panel of advisers to vet the judicial nominees before they take office.
DeSantis has also worked to bring justices who took the bench prior to his term into his fold. Canady’s wife, Jennifer, for instance, was elected last year to the Florida House. She has emerged as a close DeSantis ally in the legislature, co-sponsoring his signature six-week abortion ban. She is already in line to be the next speaker, with DeSantis’s help.
The governor has also been accused of orchestrating a “judicial gerrymander.” His allies in the Florida House requested that the court consider a plan to redraw and consolidate judicial districts; the court created a commission to do so in June. Worrell’s reelection chances, for example, would be severely impacted in a proposed redrawn district that waters down the progressive vote. The project would also advance DeSantis’s political agenda: His office worked behind the scenes with police to tarnish the reputations of both Worrell and Warren, the Daily Beast reported.
The battle for the independence of the judiciary was on full display during Wednesday’s hearing. Worrell’s attorney argued that DeSantis had exceeded his constitutional authority in suspending her without specifying acts in which Worrell had neglected her prosecutorial duty.
The order does not list examples of policies that neglect prosecutorial duty, Ferguson argued: “It just speculates that because she ran on a particular platform, she must have certain policies. They can’t identify a single policy,” she said. “The order talks about how her office ‘discourages,’ which doesn’t sound like a policy. It talks about ‘practices,’ but can’t identify a single example.”
“This is a governor who has used his suspension order with great frequency and in an unprecedented way and targeted those of a different political party.”
DeSantis’s lawyer argued that Worrell’s petition was not justiciable, meaning it referred to matters outside the court’s jurisdiction.
Chief Justice Carlos Muñiz asked if the governor’s office planned to specify policies and practices that proved neglect. DeSantis’s lawyer said the governor’s office had authority to remove a prosecutor if it could only show they weren’t effective at prosecuting crime.
Worrell’s record on prison admission was “abysmal,” the DeSantis lawyer said. Even if she had no specific objectionable policies, such data would be grounds to remove her. “If there was nothing specific she was doing, she just was just not effective at prosecuting crime, we think that that would be enough,” he argued. But that was not a question for the high court to decide.
“It’s remarkable that the governor’s lead argument is that this court cannot review whether his order is constitutional,” Ferguson said. “This is a governor who has used his suspension order with great frequency and in an unprecedented way and targeted those of a different political party.”
On Wednesday, Georgia’s highest court effectively blocked legislators from using a new law to remove the prosecutor who indicted former President Donald Trump.
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 New York Police Department has been making headlines for the huge settlements paid out by the city in misconduct cases. In the first half of 2023, New York City paid more than $50 million in lawsuits alleging misconduct by members of the NYPD.
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.
Rep. Lois Frankel, D-Fla., quit the Congressional Progressive Caucus over an internal split on Israel’s siege on Gaza, according to two sources familiar with her quiet departure. Like many Democrats, Frankel has proclaimed “unwavering support for Israel,” while other caucus members are pushing a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
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 office of a Philadelphia City Council member fired a staff member who took medical leave for mental health treatment after a complaint that she was sexually harassed by another staffer.
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.”
Five groups providing public defender services in New York City are cracking down on speech about Palestine. Leadership at the groups are pushing back on statements or internal communications that reference the siege on Gaza, and at least one staffer has been forced to resign.
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 havedisciplined 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 group’s union. “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, including the president of the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys, 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 Hermes 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.”
Three-hundred thirty delegates to the Democratic National Convention who backed Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., in his 2016 and 2020 presidential bids sent a letter to the senator urging him to introduce a resolution for a ceasefire in Gaza.
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.’”
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.”
After her “solidarity mission” following the October 7 Hamas surprise attack, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul initially declined to say who covered the cost for the journey to Israel. Her administration would only say it was a “nonprofit that works with the Jewish community.”
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 dollarssince 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.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams meets with Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister of Israel, in Jerusalem on Aug. 22, 2023. Photo: Michael Appleton/Mayoral Photography Office
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.
Congress is considering a bill that would significantly slow down humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip amid ongoing airstrikes and a ground invasion by Israel that have left at least 8,000 dead and strained critical resources in the already besieged Palestinian territory.
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.
New York City is on track to fork over more than $100 million this year in payouts for lawsuits alleging police misconduct against members of the New York City Police Department. Twenty of the officers stand out over the last decade for being named in the most suits or being named in suits with the highest payouts. Of the 20, the department has promoted at least 16 of the officers, some more than once.
“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.”
In a heated exchange during a closed-door Democratic caucus meeting on Wednesday, Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., allegedly made an off-color remark to another member during a broader discussion on Muslim clerics attending Jewish events that “stunned” his colleagues, according to three sources with knowledge of the meeting.
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.
“Comments like these endanger the entire American Muslim community.”
“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 the progressive group Justice Democrats. “Comments like these endanger the entire American Muslim community.”
In a statement to The Intercept, Gottheimer spokesperson Chris D’Aloia said the member of Congress 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.
The only Palestinian American member of Congress is under attack from her Democratic colleagues after she issued a statement that condemned a “heartbreaking cycle of violence” in Israel and Palestine and called for an end to the Israeli occupation.
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 openlysided 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.”
A man cries while carrying the body of a Palestinian child, killed in an Israeli airstrike, in front of a morgue ahead of his burial in Khan Yunis, Gaza, on Oct. 11, 2023. Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib/Picture Alliance via Getty Images
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 Democraticefforts 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 only Palestinian American member of Congress is under attack from her Democratic colleagues after she issued a statement that condemned a “heartbreaking cycle of violence” in Israel and Palestine and called for an end to the Israeli occupation.
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 openlysided 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.”
A man cries while carrying the body of a Palestinian child, killed in an Israeli airstrike, in front of a morgue ahead of his burial in Khan Yunis, Gaza, on Oct. 11, 2023. Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib/Picture Alliance via Getty Images
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 Democraticefforts 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 company in charge of the Democratic Party’s prized campaign technology tools announced its second round of layoffs injust under a year on September 6, slashing a total of nearly 350 jobs this year just as the 2024 elections ramp up.
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 assistant to the president for strategic research 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.”
A photo illustration of the Apax Partners private equity firm logo.
Photo: Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Gett
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 aslew 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?”
Senate Democratic leadership members pose for a group photo at the U.S. Capitol on Dec. 8, 2022.
Photo: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
“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 sinceHoward Dean andObama harnessed what was, at the time, thecutting-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.”
On Monday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom appointed EMILY’s List President Laphonza Butler to the U.S. Senate. Butler will fill the seat of former Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who died on Friday. The news came less than a month after Butler’s organization, EMILY’s List, laid off eight people, citing budget deficits ahead of a major election year.
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.”
Last year, a series of headlines in New York City buzzed with excitement about a cop with the street nickname of “Bullethead.”
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 American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the country’s most influential pro-Israel lobbying group, is recruiting candidates to challenge progressive members of the Congressional Black Caucus in primaries next year.
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 Insiderreported 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 includeRep. 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 membersreportedly 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.”
Eight months before Maryland voters will cast their ballots in a rare U.S. Senate primary, the bulk of the state’s Democratic machine has already consolidated behind one candidate. Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks emerged as a front-runner shortly after announcing her candidacy, garnering endorsements from major Democratic officials and organizations before her campaign had any issue platforms listed on its website.
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.”
