The Intercept

Graham Platner Handed Centrist Dems a Bruising Defeat in Maine

U.S. Senate candidate Graham Platner speaks during a campaign event with the Maine AFL-CIO, on May 1, 2026, in Portland, Maine. Photo: Graeme Sloan/Getty Images Eoin Higgins is the author of “Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voice on the Left.” The Democratic Party’s centrist wing is doing a 180 on Maine senatorial hopeful Graham Platner after Gov. Janet Mills dropped out of the race — a major setback for their side in an ongoing intraparty war for the future of the party. The June primary was shaping up to be another proxy fight for the ongoing power struggle between the party’s progressive and centrist wings. Sen. Bernie Sanders, along with Elizabeth Warren, Ruben Gallego, and Martin Heinrich, backed Platner early on; Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, as well as EMILY’s List, threw their support behind Mills. But the Democratic voters of Maine didn’t appear interested in a protracted back and forth, nor were they impressed by the party establishment’s perceived shoehorning-in of Mills as an alternative to an upstart, energetic, young candidate they already liked. Some more mainstream Democrats already get that, like Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who previously

Musk Warns of Killer AI — While He and the Rest of Silicon Valley Cash In on AI That Kills

The bitter courtroom brawl between Elon Musk and Sam Altman captivating the tech industry this week revolves in no small part around fears that artificial intelligence technologies both men are building could spiral out of control and exterminate humanity. Such far-looking scenarios obscure the fact that tech companies are enlisting to kill today. Musk’s break with OpenAI, which he co-founded in 2015, is in a sense a lawsuit about safety. He contends that Altman betrayed the company’s original nonprofit mission of safely and responsibly pursuing artificial intelligence for the public benefit by converting it into the revenue-maximizing behemoth it has become. According to Musk, the stakes of this are existential for the human race: “It could kill us all,” he testified on Tuesday. “We don’t want to have a ‘Terminator’ outcome.” The AI safety community frequently invokes these dystopian scenarios to both warn the public about the technology’s risks and implicitly boast of its great power. While such a science-fiction future may lay ahead, these warnings overlook the deadly present. Artificial intelligence is already targeting humans with the blessing of Musk and his rivals. Musk and others who caution about an uprising of sentient killer machines are anticipating the emergence

Another Assassination Attempt, More Fertilizer for Conspiracy Theories

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner last weekend became the site of the third failed attempt to assassinate President Donald Trump. “I remember the feeling was very similar to when it was clear that the House had been invaded on January 6, 2021,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., who was in attendance, tells The Intercept Briefing. “Everybody was afraid that somebody had come in with an AR-15 or something like that.” This week on the podcast, host Akela Lacy speaks to Raskin about his experience at the dinner and later being asked by CNN’s Dana Bash about whether he’s thinking twice about his “heated rhetoric” toward Trump. “It was curious that, in the wake of this terrible episode, that she would try to equate the way that Democrats talk and the way that President Trump talks,” says Raskin. “He calls people crazy, insane. He calls people evil, wicked. He will buttonhole reporters and tell them that they’re stupid, they’re ugly. … But we try to keep it at the level of policies and their actions.” Some examples, which Raskin discusses, is his forthcoming investigation into Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner’s role in the administration and conflicts of interest, and his fight in Congress

FBI Redirected a Quarter of Staff to Target Immigrants Under Trump’s Deportation Push

The Federal Bureau of Investigation multiplied the number of employees assigned to immigration by a factor of 23 in the first nine months of the second Trump administration, The Intercept has found. There were 279 FBI personnel working on “immigration-related matters” before Trump took office in January 2025, according to bureau records The Intercept obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. By September, that number had ballooned to more than 6,500. In total, 9,161 people at the FBI worked on immigration between Trump’s inauguration and September 7 of last year, out of a total of 38,000 FBI employees. “That is a huge, huge number of people,” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council who has testified before Congress on the cost of mass deportations. “This is just a somewhat shocking scale that we’re looking at.” The flood of FBI personnel into immigration work came in the early days of the tenure of Director Kash Patel, who has shown a willingness to follow Trump’s orders without question or exception. According to David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, the redirection may have hampered the FBI’s ability to perform criminal investigative work. “We’re

Trump Bulldozed a 1,000-Year-Old Archeological Site to Make Room for a Second Border Wall

A rare archaeological site in the Sonoran Desert was bulldozed by a Department of Homeland Security contractor involved in building the latest sections of Donald Trump’s border wall, according to multiple sources briefed on the incident. The area, in a remote corner of Arizona’s Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, is a roughly 280-by-50-foot etching in the desert sand known as an intaglio. Last Thursday, without any notice, a contractor working for DHS cut a roughly 60-foot swath across the middle of the intaglio, doing irreparable damage to the 1,000-year-old artifact. “I liken it to destroying the Nazca lines — something that culturally we should have been relishing and promoting.” Cabeza Prieta, one of the largest wilderness areas outside of Alaska, also encompasses lands sacred to the Tohono O’odham Nation, which borders the refuge to the east. The O’odham have fought to prevent border wall construction across their reservation and during Trump’s first term largely prevailed; they also managed to protect the intaglio and a nearby burial site that they consider to be part of their ancestral lands. “I liken it to destroying the Nazca lines — something that culturally we should have been relishing and promoting. Not destroying,” Rick Martynec,

Democratic Leaders Wanted to Control the Maine Senate Race. Their Pick Just Dropped Out.

The Democratic Party’s pick for Maine senator suspended her candidacy on Thursday. Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, who entered the race as the establishment pick and assumed favorite, announced her campaign did not have the financial resources to continue. Mills’s exit less than six weeks before the June primary clears the path for populist candidate Graham Platner, now the presumed nominee, to face off against incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins in the November general election after the party worked to subdue Platner’s campaign. The Democratic Party’s decision to wade into the primary at all had reignited a criticism that the Democratic establishment would stop at nothing to keep progressives out of Congress. “The Democratic establishment — and especially calcified Senate leadership — is learning in real time that they are wildly out of touch with what Democratic primary voters want,” said Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run for Something, which recruits young progressive candidates for office. “The establishment simply doesn’t have the juice (or the trust) anymore.” By the time Mills, 78, ended her campaign on Thursday, party leaders had changed their tune on Platner. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who backed Mills early in the race, released a statement with New

We Need to Kick Prediction Market Betting Out of Journalism While We Still Can

A Polymarket pop-up media exhibit shows data relating to potential political candidates popularity on March 20, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Photo: Alex Kent/The Washington Post via Getty Images Jonathan Reiss is a co-founder of the Media and Democracy Project. Every time you turn around recently, it feels like there’s new reporting about insiders cashing in on prediction markets. On Thursday, a U.S. Army Special Forces soldier who was involved in the raid to capture Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela was arrested on charges that he used classified information to make more than $400,000 by betting on the operation before it happened. In the hours before the U.S. attacked Iran, hundreds of anonymous bets over $1,000 were placed on the U.S. striking Iran by the next day, which the New York Times said suggested that some users might’ve “seen the strike coming.” Prediction markets, such as industry leaders Polymarket and Kalshi, have exploded in popularity. They create or exacerbate an array of problems, but at the Media and Democracy Project, or MAD, we believe they have the potential to severely harm the way news is reported, perceived, and engaged with — threats that deserve far more attention from the public. MAD calls

How Trump’s America Produces Normie Assassins

Donald Trump speaks during a press conference after a shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner on April 25, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Photo: Andrew Leyden/Getty Images As more and more information is published about the suspect in the latest possible assassination attempt on President Donald Trump, commentators are in a typical scramble to assign an ideology or clear politics to the 31-year-old man. There’s not a lot to glean so far about Cole Tomas Allen of Torrance, California. A since-deleted Bluesky account reportedly linked to the suspect included run-of-the-mill criticisms of the Trump administration; he lists himself as a self-employed video game designer and part-time teacher. According to reports, he studied mechanical engineering and computer science, was part of a Christian fellowship, and also a nerdy-sounding club for students to have battles with foam toys. He reportedly donated $25 to ActBlue in 2024 earmarked for Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign. He was a registered voter with “no party preference” in California. From the evidence available so far, the suspect seems to be a normie. Trump’s regime can give rise to a normie suspected assassin because the brutality and violence it has so wholly normalized, and the impunity it has reveled

Meet the Four Democrats Who’ll Decide If Trump Gets His Domestic Spying Law

A messy fight over whether the U.S. government can conduct warrantless surveillance of American citizens could come down to whether four Democrats endorse Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson’s latest plan. Johnson was stymied this month when he attempted to push through a reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The roadblock came thanks to opposition from most Democrats, plus 20 hard-right members of the GOP caucus. The four Democrats are Reps. Gottheimer, Suozzi, Gluesenkamp Perez, and Golden Still, four Democrats crossed party lines to vote for a procedural motion to advance the bill, despite instructions from House Democratic leaders to the contrary. Whether those four support Johnson during a vote this week could prove crucial. The four Democrats are Reps. Josh Gottheimer and Tom Suozzi of New Jersey, Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington, and Jared Golden of Maine, who is not seeking reelection this year. None responded to requests for comment. One advocate said the outcome of the vote could hinge on their decision. “It all comes down to those four and where they are going to land,” said Hajar Hammado, a senior policy adviser at the left-leaning advocacy group Demand Progress, “and if they are going

“We Knew They Were Paying Informants”: SPLC Donors Reject Trump DOJ Fraud Claims

More than a dozen donors to the Southern Poverty Law Center feel that a recent Department of Justice indictment accusing the group of defrauding contributors by paying informants is farcical, the donors told The Intercept. “It’s simultaneously infuriating and laughable that they’re charging the SPLC with funding hate groups,” said Mary Wynne Kling, an Alabama native and longtime supporter of the group. Pointing to the SPLC’s long-standing work battling extremist groups, which included bankrupting the United Klans of America, she added, “We knew they were paying informants.” The indictment, filed Tuesday in the SPLC’s home state of Alabama, charged the group with fraud for funding hate groups and with money laundering for setting up fictitious business entities to route payments to informants. SPLC leadership has denied the allegations. Kling and over a dozen other donors to the group told The Intercept that by using its money to root out information on hate groups, the SPLC was doing exactly what they hoped it would with their dollars. Originally founded in 1971 as a civil rights-focused legal clinic, the SPLC struck on a lasting strategy of direct confrontation with hate groups in 1979. It soon shifted its focus entirely toward combating the

Palantir Is Helping Trump’s IRS Conduct “Massive-Scale” Data Mining

military contractor Palantir is helping the IRS analyze dozens of different data sets on Americans to investigate a broad range of financial crimes, according to records shared with The Intercept. Since 2018, the Internal Revenue Service’s Criminal Investigation division has used Palantir’s Lead and Case Analytics platform to aggregate and analyze a sprawling list of sensitive federal databases and data sets. Public records detailing Palantir’s IRS contract, obtained by the nonprofit watchdog group American Oversight and shared exclusively with The Intercept, reveal the immense volume of data plugged into the military contractor’s software. The LCA uses both Palantir’s Gotham and Foundry applications to facilitate “analysis of massive-scale data to find the needle in the hay stack,” the contract paperwork says. Documents indicate the IRS has paid Palantir over $130 million for these services to date. Palantir’s LCA is ostensibly directed toward cracking down on fraud, money laundering, and other financial crimes. According to a 2024 agency privacy impact assessment, IRS “Special agents and investigative analysts … utilize the platform to find, analyze, and visualize connections between disparate sets of data to generate leads, identify schemes, uncover tax fraud, and conduct money laundering and forfeiture investigative activities.” The IRS use of