At the end of Tuesday’s hearing of the House January 6 committee, Rep. Liz Cheney revealed yet one more bombshell from a congressional investigation that has been full of them.

Former President Donald Trump, Cheney said, called a witness who is planning to testify at a future House hearing, in an apparent attempt to influence their upcoming testimony. Cheney did not identify the witness but said that the committee was alerted about the call by the witness’s lawyer. Trump called the witness in the last few days — after the committee’s previous hearing, in which former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson delivered explosive testimony about Trump’s volatile behavior on January 6. The committee has referred the matter to the Justice Department for investigation into possible witness tampering by Trump.

The January 6 committee’s investigation into the insurrection and Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election has turned into perhaps the best congressional inquiry since the Church Committee’s legendary investigation of the intelligence community in the 1970s. The House committee has patiently and meticulously laid out the evidence of Trump’s illegal efforts to overturn the election and incite a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, making it clear, once and for all, that he was the puppet master behind the surging mob seeking to prevent the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.

In fact, the allegation of witness tampering by Trump is just the latest in a series of possible criminal acts disclosed by the committee. In seven hearings so far, the committee has portrayed the former president’s behavior as far worse than was previously known. The House committee has uncovered much more than the media ever expected and has provided mountains of evidence that should be used by the Justice Department to intensify its criminal investigation of Trump and his cronies.

During Tuesday’s hearing, the committee showed that Trump carefully planned to incite the mob to march on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, when Congress was meeting to certify the election results. In fact, the leaders of the rally held outside the White House on January 6 knew in advance that Trump was planning to urge the crowd to go to the Capitol. “POTUS is going to have us march there/the Capitol,” said Kylie Jane Kremer, a rally organizer, in a January 4, 2021, text message shown by the committee.

The committee also showed that Trump decided to incite the insurrection after all of his other illicit efforts to overturn the election had failed. Tuesday’s hearing focused in part on a bizarre meeting at the White House on December 18, 2020, in which Trump surrounded himself with conspiracy theorists, including attorney Sidney Powell and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, to discuss seizing voting machines. Pat Cipollone, Trump’s former White House lawyer, testified about how he fought the crazed ideas coming from the people whispering to Trump in his final days in the White House. Right after the marathon meeting ended in the middle of the night, Trump began to incite an insurrection. At 1:42 a.m. on December 19, he wrote a tweet urging his supporters to come to Washington. “Be there, will be wild.”

Tuesday’s astonishing hearing added to the portrait of an unhinged Trump that was sketched by Hutchinson in her June 28 hearing. Hutchinson, a key aide to Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, disclosed that Trump knew that some in the crowd on January 6 were armed and still urged them to go to the Capitol. She also revealed that Trump wanted to go to the Capitol to lead the crowd and that he tried to grab the steering wheel from a Secret Service agent when his detail refused to take him there.

The hearings of the January 6 committee, including Hutchinson’s testimony, have been must-see television, depicting Trump as a psychopath and a criminal who sought to turn the U.S. into a dictatorship.

The post Donald Trump Is Even More Unhinged Than We Thought appeared first on The Intercept .

For more than 100 years, the Espionage Act, one of the worst laws in American history, has stayed on the books, impervious to reform.

A relic of World War I, when the government sought to stifle anti-war dissent, the law is so vague and yet so draconian that it has become a handy weapon for federal prosecutors to use against a wide array of targets — often individuals considered politically dangerous by mainstream America. For generations, it was used against American communists ; in the 21st century, the Espionage Act has been repeatedly employed against whistleblowers who disclose embarrassing government secrets to the press. The Biden administration is now fighting to extradite Julian Assange , the WikiLeaks founder, so he can be tried under the Espionage Act, among other charges.

It’s easy to see why prosecutors love this antiquated law. Unlike other measures that might be used to prevent the disclosure of classified information, the Espionage Act carries extraordinarily heavy penalties, including life in prison. Prosecutors use the Espionage Act like a cudgel, convincing whistleblowers to plead guilty to a lesser charge, like mishandling classified information, to avoid a lengthy prison sentence. That way, prosecutors get quick convictions without going to trial.

Because prosecutors find the Espionage Act such a useful tool, it is probably not going away anytime soon. It is an abuse of the legal system, but the Justice Department has no incentive to stop using it.

The occasional efforts by members of Congress to reform the Espionage Act have never gotten very far. In recent years, Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, has tried , and failed, to change it; now Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat, is trying again. In an amendment to the massive 2022-23 Pentagon spending bill known as the National Defense Authorization Act, Tlaib would, among other things, allow whistleblowers charged in leak cases to defend themselves by arguing that their disclosures to the media were in the public interest.

One of the worst things about the current law is that there is no way for whistleblowers to argue in court that they had a valid, even laudable reason to reveal government secrets. They are not allowed to explain that what they did was designed to help the American people know the truth about the government’s actions. A so-called public interest defense would be thrown out of court.

That gap in the law led to hypocrisy and tragedy in the case of Reality Winner . The former National Security Agency contractor was arrested in 2017 for anonymously leaking to a news outlet an NSA document showing that Russian intelligence tried to hack into U.S. state-level voting systems during the 2016 election. But while Winner was in jail awaiting trial, the Senate intelligence committee issued a report revealing that federal officials did not adequately warn state officials of the threat to their voting systems from the Russian hackers. Instead, the Senate report found that state officials only found out about the hacking threat from the press . That meant that The Intercept, which published the document along with a story about its significance, provided a critical public service. But even as the Senate implicitly lauded Winner’s actions, she wasn’t allowed to make the same argument in her own defense . Winner eventually pleaded guilty to avoid a longer prison term. (The Press Freedom Defense Fund, of which I am the director, supported Winner’s legal defense. Like The Intercept, the fund is part of First Look Institute .)

Like previous efforts to reform the Espionage Act, Tlaib’s amendment is likely to be rejected, perhaps in the next few days, as the House Rules Committee considers hundreds of amendments to the Pentagon budget bill. (Since the Pentagon budget must pass every year, it gets decked out like a Christmas tree with measures totally unrelated to Pentagon spending. This year, it has become an especially attractive platform for conservative culture warriors. Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican and close ally of Donald Trump, has submitted an amendment that would express the sense of Congress “that combating extremism in the military should not be a top priority for the Department of Defense.”)

The Espionage Act will likely continue to withstand reform because few in Congress want to be labelled soft on national security. Like others who go against conventional wisdom, whistleblowers have very few allies.

The post Rashida Tlaib Is Trying to Fix the Espionage Act, but Whistleblowers Are Probably Out of Luck appeared first on The Intercept .

In 1982, an extremist group calling itself the Army of God kidnapped Dr. Hector Zevallos and his wife. Zevallos was an abortion provider in Edwardsville, Illinois, and his abduction signaled the rise of a new generation of white nationalist extremist groups, many of which made opposition to abortion their top priority.

Zevallos and his wife were eventually released, but the rightist Supreme Court succeeded in overturning Roe v. Wade last month thanks in part to decades of unrelenting violence by the Army of God and other anti-abortion extremists — violence that set the stage for the rise of the white nationalist domestic terror groups that threaten American democracy today. The Army of God was an early precursor to today’s pro-Trump paramilitary organizations.

Over the past four decades, the right-wing campaign against Roe v. Wade has been the most violent protest movement in modern American history. Despite recent complaints by conservatives about acts of violence associated with the George Floyd protests in 2020, no other recent social protest movement comes close to anti-abortion activists’ long record of violence.

Between 1977 and 2021, anti-abortion extremists committed at least 42 clinic bombings, 196 clinic arsons, and 11 murders of doctors and clinic staffers, according to data compiled by the National Abortion Federation.

The political side of the anti-abortion movement has only occasionally and very reluctantly condemned the violence, and instead has taken advantage of the intense media attention that clinic bombings and the murders of doctors have generated for their cause. Anti-abortion leaders have long considered terrorism a useful political tool, keeping up the pressure against legalized abortion while also attracting zealous new recruits. In the process, anti-abortion extremists have helped build a foundation for the pro-Trump extremist groups that are proliferating today.

To skirt the law, anti-abortion extremists have tended to form groups without much structure, making it more difficult for them to be sued by reproductive rights groups or investigated by law enforcement. The Army of God, for example, had such an amorphous framework that abortion rights activists and federal officials found it difficult to determine whether the organization really existed or not, despite investigations by a Justice Department anti-abortion violence task force and the FBI in the 1990s.

After Don Benny Anderson and two other men who had called themselves the Army of God were charged in the Zevallos kidnapping and sent to prison, the group’s name was widely used by other extremists throughout the anti-abortion underground. Yet the Army of God seemed to be nothing more than a nom de guerre, a name invoked by extremists who did not want to claim personal responsibility for major acts of violence. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, the author of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, received a threatening letter from the Army of God in 1984; as a result, security guards were assigned to protect him whenever he appeared in public.

But while the group lacked any apparent organization, there were real people committing real acts of violence in its name. And there were anti-abortion activists who worked hard to expand the Army of God’s reach. In fact, the group’s most potent weapon became a document known as the “ Army of God Manual ,” an anonymously written how-to guide to anti-abortion violence that circulated widely in the extremist underground. In the days before the internet, the manual was printed out and secretly distributed by hand or mail.

The Justice Department struggled to uncover the truth about the Army of God. In 1994, a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, investigating anti-abortion violence issued a subpoena to John Burt, a longtime extremist. When officials learned that Burt had a copy of the “Army of God Manual,” they flew back to his home with him to get it. The manual explained that the group’s soldiers did not usually communicate with each other or meet. “That is why the Feds will never stop this Army,” the manual states. “Never.”

Another extremist anti-abortion group that was fluid and shifting was the Lambs of Christ, founded by Norman Weslin, a former Green Beret who became a Catholic priest and was arrested at least 80 times for leading clinic blockades. James Kopp, who murdered the abortion provider Dr. Bernard Slepian in 1998 in Amherst, New York, was affiliated with the Lambs of Christ, but federal investigators were unable to connect any anti-abortion organization to Kopp’s killing of Slepian. Kopp fled to France, and a couple who were anti-abortion activists pleaded guilty to conspiring to help him avoid capture; he was ultimately sentenced to life in prison. Kopp’s nickname in the anti-abortion movement was “Atomic Dog,” a name mentioned in the Army of God manual.

The intentionally loose and informal organizational structure used by anti-abortion extremists has been adopted by pro-Trump white nationalist extremists as well.

The intentionally loose and informal organizational structure used by anti-abortion extremists has been adopted by pro-Trump white nationalist extremists as well. For example, extremist leader Thomas Rousseau was involved with a group called Vanguard America at the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. James Fields, who marched with Vanguard America at the rally, was arrested for driving his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer and wounding many others. Vanguard America’s connection to Fields was devastating, despite the group’s denials that he was really a member.

With Vanguard America mired in controversy, Rousseau simply quit the group and created a new, nearly identical one, now known as Patriot Front. Last month, 31 members of Patriot Front, including Rousseau, were arrested when police in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, stopped a U-Haul truck full of Patriot Front members , all dressed alike and wearing masks to hide their identities. They were on their way to start a riot at a Pride event in downtown Coeur d’Alene, police said. On July 2, about 100 masked members of Patriot Front marched through Boston , carrying metal shields and a banner saying “Reclaim America.” The group was accused of assaulting a Black man during their march.

Today, anti-abortion extremists and white nationalists are forging alliances, and the dividing lines between them are increasingly blurred.

The anti-abortion and white nationalist camps seemed to merge during the January 6 insurrection. Longtime anti-abortion extremist John Brockhoeft livestreamed himself outside the U.S. Capitol during the riot, claiming he was “ fighting for our beloved President Donald J. Trump .” In 1988, Brockhoeft was arrested outside an abortion clinic in Pensacola, Florida, after authorities, who had been tipped off by his wife, found explosives in his car. He later admitted to committing a series of arsons and bombings of abortion clinics in Ohio. Brockhoeft served seven years in prison.

Also at the Capitol on January 6 was Jason Storms, now the national director of Operation Save America — the current name for Operation Rescue, once the nation’s largest and most volatile anti-abortion protest organization. He was joined by other members of the group, which reported on its website that Storms and others had “ set up the Lord’s beachhead at this immense gathering. ”

“We went to DC, meeting other OSA brethren there to engage in worship, prayers of repentance, to preach the Word of God, the Gospel, and to explain to the thousands there why our nation is on the precipice of ruin,” the group’s website says.

White nationalist and anti-abortion extremists have bonded over their shared white Christian nationalism and their fears of white demographic decline . The “ great replacement ,” a conspiracy theory claiming that the U.S. government is seeking to replace white Americans with nonwhite immigrants, has motivated white nationalists to oppose abortion alongside with their opposition to immigration; some white nationalists only want abortion banned for white women.

Patriot Front members attended the January “March for Life” in Washington, which has long been the largest event of the anti-abortion movement, held annually on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision. They carried banners that read like something straight out of the Third Reich: “Strong families make strong nations.”

The post Anti-Abortion Zealots Were Precursor to Donald Trump’s Right-Wing Shock Troops appeared first on The Intercept .

Last spring, a van arrived at an inspection station near one of the gates at Fort Eustis in Newport News, Virginia. Military police noticed what looked like chemicals inside and that passengers were “displaying signs of illness.” Soon first responders arrived, donned protective gear, and, according to a military press release, searched “ the vehicle for possible CBRNE exposure ,” using the acronym for chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and high-yield explosives.

That “CBRNE exposure” wasn’t real — it was part of a training exercise. “My biggest takeaway is that all the agencies work well together,” Tim Scott, a lieutenant with the Fort Eustis Fire Department, said at the time, noting that coordination among multiple agencies was essential to ensuring that a similar real-world incident could be handled efficiently and effectively.

But an internal Army audit obtained exclusively by The Intercept indicates that a genuine CBRNE event might have ended in disaster.

The results of the audit, issued just days after the April 2021 exercise at Fort Eustis, were dismal. Investigators surveyed five Army bases to ascertain whether they were prepared to deal with an actual CBRNE emergency, like a chemical weapons accident or “ dirty bomb ” attack. In every case, they were not.

“The Army didn’t take the required actions to ensure that installation first responders had the necessary equipment and training to respond to a chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and high-yield explosive (CBRNE) incident at the five installations we reviewed,” according to the document, which was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. According to the audit, such failings likely exist across the Army, which operates around 1,800 bases, depots, and other sites worldwide , including storage facilities for America’s remaining chemical weapons and a research institute that works with lethal pathogens like anthrax and plague.

The audit placed the lion’s share of the blame on the emergency management branch of the headquarters of the Department of the Army for failing to provide “sufficient oversight.” The Army did not provide comment about the audit’s findings prior to publication. “None of us are familiar with the report or its contents so we will need to ask around, which may take some time,” spokesperson Richard Levine told The Intercept.

The audit, which was conducted from September 2019 through December 2020, found that the Army failed to provide enough required respiratory protection for all civilian first responders. At two bases, the Army also neglected to ensure that all civilian personnel completed CBRNE preparedness training.

The Army did not disclose the names of all five installations in the redacted document, but the audit mentions Kentucky’s Blue Grass Army Depot, where both explosive munitions and chemical weapons are stored; Fort Bliss in Texas , which is larger than the state of Rhode Island ; and Washington state’s Joint Base Lewis-McChord, which has a population of approximately 110,000 active-duty troops, family members, and civilian employees. The audit determined that civilian first responders at the latter two bases were also not using required National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health-approved respirators.

The auditors determined that the five installations were lacking a total of 241 pieces of equipment necessary for CBRNE response missions, including hand-held devices designed to detect chemical warfare agents , air-purifying gas masks , and hazmat boots. The investigators also “couldn’t determine the existence of six other items,” including additional chemical agent detectors and decontamination shelters, valued at more than $142,000.

When equipment was located by auditors, large quantities — 89 percent of 440 pieces that were collectively valued at around $1.2 million — were not listed in required documents, leaving the items “susceptible to loss or theft” or the Army in danger of purchasing “unnecessary or duplicate equipment.”

The investigators also found that key “personnel confirmed the lack of clear roles and responsibilities for assessing equipment requirements and documentation” and “weren’t provided specific guidance on determining, fielding, or sustaining” required gear. “These adverse conditions likely exist Armywide,” according to the audit, “and should be corrected.”

The audit’s findings come as the possibility of military CBRNE catastrophes is on the rise. The Defense Department recently announced plans to build nuclear microreactors to power far-flung, austere military bases. An earlier Army effort to field portable nuclear reactors resulted in an explosion and meltdown that killed three military personnel in Idaho in 1961.

Last year, the Defense Department warned that chemical and biological weapons “threats remain significant and are expanding at an exponentially accelerated pace.” The military also continues to store its own chemical weapons at the U.S. Army Pueblo Chemical Depot in Colorado as well as the Blue Grass Army Depot. (The last chemical agents in the U.S. stockpile are scheduled to be destroyed, under the Chemical Weapons Convention , by September 30, 2023.)

In 2019, due to safety concerns over insufficient decontamination methods, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shut down research at the Army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland, where work centers on toxins and germs, including so-called select agents such as the Ebola virus, smallpox, anthrax, plague, and the poison ricin. Work there resumed in 2020.

That same year, a fire and “ massive ” explosion destroyed the $1.2 billion amphibious assault ship USS Bonhomme Richard due to, among many issues, a disorganized federal and civilian response and Navy firefighters reportedly lacking the necessary equipment to battle the blaze.

The post Army Bases Shockingly Unprepared for Chemical, Biological Attacks appeared first on The Intercept .

The death of a French volunteer in Ukraine is the first clear evidence that there are at least some far-right extremists among the foreign fighters who have flocked there to fight Russian forces. Wilfried Bleriot, 32, was killed in action, according to Ukraine’s International Legion in a Facebook post on June 4, 2022. In the photo of Bleriot posted by the International Legion, which was formed after Russia’s February invasion and is open to volunteer fighters from all over the world, he displays front and center on his body armor the black-and-white patch of the so-called Misanthropic Division, said to be an overtly fascist volunteer wing of Ukraine’s ultranationalist Azov Battalion.

The Misanthropic Division’s violent, hate-filled Telegram channel was the first to announce Bleriot’s death, one day earlier, on June 3. The post said that he died on June 1 in Kharkiv and included a photo in which the thin and bearded Bleriot wears a T-shirt that says “Misanthropic Division” across the front.

In 2018, the Los Angeles Times described the Misanthropic Division as “one of many neo-Nazi groups that have mushroomed throughout Ukraine in recent years.” In 2020, the Daily Beast characterized it as “the militant foreign volunteer wing of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.” The Guardian, in 2014, also said that the Misanthropic Division “is linked to the Azov battalion.” There are few other mentions of it in the news archive.

Bleriot was a “man who fought bolshevism and antifascism all his life,” according to the Telegram post, a “brother-in-arms,” who died defending Europe and Ukraine from “Asiatic hordes.” Among members of the group chat, Bleriot has become a martyr, a fallen comrade to be mourned and celebrated. One meme shows a Black Sun wheel — an icon of Nazi occultism — behind his smiling face.

Bleriot was from Bayeux, a town in the north of France. In an interview with an Argentinian reporter, uploaded to Reddit on March 3, he identifies himself as a Norman, says that he is “ready to kill Russians,” and “ready to die.” He adds that he left behind two children at home, and starts to cry. Bleriot’s family could not be reached for comment. Efforts to reach French authorities for comment on whether Bleriot was known to them were also unsuccessful.

A spokesperson for the Azov Battalion, which began around 2014 as a far-right street gang and has since evolved into a professional special operations regiment of the Ukrainian army, did not immediately respond to an inquiry about Bleriot and the Misanthropic Division. But back in April, I met with Andriy Biletsky, the founder of the Azov movement, at their base in Kyiv. I had not heard of the Misanthropic Division then, but I did ask Biletsky about foreign fighters. “We have volunteers from different countries,” he told me. “We’ve had Europeans, Japanese, people from the Middle East.” He also mentioned Belarusian, Georgian, Russian, Croat, and British volunteers. He pointed out that some of them had been Jews. However, “I can assure you that there are no Americans,” he said. “Not even western Europeans for that matter,” he added, slightly contradicting himself.

The Azov base, in the semi-industrial outskirts of Kyiv, was in an abandoned Soviet factory compound. Inside the main building, a yellow flag with Azov’s notorious Wolfsangel symbol in the center hung from the rafters. In two places, there were Black Sun clocks on the walls; such sun wheels, or Sonnenrads , also found on the floor of Heinrich Himmler’s castle in Germany, are widely used by contemporary adherents of Nazi ideology to signal their Aryan supremacist beliefs. Azov apologists say that they are merely indigenous Ukrainian symbols that must be understood in an Eastern European context. In any case, the sun wheels, backlit by blue neon, certainly lent the Azov base a neo-Nazi aesthetic. There were soldiers in full battle gear walking around, looking as squared-away and intimidating as any in Ukraine, and two women who worked as secretaries. The ground floor was full of new recruits, exclusively young white men, speaking Ukrainian and Russian.

Since Azov formed about eight years ago, it has attracted relentless controversy for its quasi-fascist ideology, unapologetically espoused by Biletsky, and alleged abuses against the few minority groups that exist in Ukraine, including the Roma. There is plenty of photographic evidence of Azov fighters displaying Nazi symbols on the battlefield (often with the intent to troll Russia). Azov has tried to clean up its image in recent years and present itself as depoliticized, and it is now an official component of the Ukrainian military, not an independent militia. But it has far more autonomy than any other regiment of the army. It presents itself as an elite corps and has attained an extraordinary degree of prestige and admiration in the eyes of ordinary Ukrainians for its stalwart defense of Mariupol, its home base, which finally fell to the Russians on May 20, following a dramatic, three-month-long siege. Although many hundreds of Azov soldiers were taken prisoner, many more young Ukrainian men have signed up to replace them.

“Azov is growing,” Maksym Zhorin, the commander of an Azov special operations unit in Kyiv, told me in April. “Our emphasis is on the future.” He added, “It might sound weird, but the actions of the Russian federation have been beneficial for us.”

As I noted in a recent piece for Harper’s , when I left the base, I saw a small group of men hanging around outside the gate, and guessed from their appearance (paramilitary attire, neck tattoos, ball caps) that they were foreign volunteers. With several Azov soldiers standing next to my translator and me as we waited for a taxi, I didn’t think it wise to approach them, but I overheard them speaking English. The one phrase I caught distinctly, over the idling engine of an armored vehicle, was “foreign legion.” Also, who knows who was responsible for it, but “WHITE POWER” was spray-painted on the kiosk right in front of us, alongside the driveway — in English, no less.

Bleriot’s death, the possible existence of more extremists like him among the ranks of Ukraine’s foreign fighters, and the rise of Azov as an internal military power should not be taken as representative of Ukraine’s society, government, and armed forces as a whole. Russian propaganda would have people believe that Ukraine and its military are full of neo-Nazis and completely under the sway of radical Russophobes. These falsehoods evaporate as soon as you set foot in the country. Ukraine does have a notably vigorous and aggressive ultranationalist sector, but even Azov, the most powerful and influential far-right force, remains a fringe movement. Ukraine is one of the biggest countries in Europe and contains multitudes. Its president is Jewish, a former TV comedian. Before Russia invaded, issues like corruption and economic stagnation were much bigger problems in the lives of ordinary people than the specter of roving gangs of fascist youths. If the Russians were really worried about neo-Nazi, ultranationalist, and white-supremacist militants, they would look in their own country, where such movements flourish as much as, if not more than, in Ukraine.

Likewise, Bleriot should not be taken as representative of the Ukrainian Army’s International Legion. Amid the chaos of the first two months of the war, most of the foreigners who flocked to Ukraine to fight were turned away and went home. The International Legion only accepted those with substantial military experience, mostly from the U.S. and U.K. Bleriot, who told an Argentinian interviewer that he had served one year in the French army, would have barely made the cut. There’s little doubt that he claimed the Misanthropic Division’s neo-Nazi ideology, as articulated in spaces like its Telegram channel, but such extremists, isolated and small in number, also find their way into the U.S. military on a regular basis.

As for the Misanthropic Division, it’s hard to tell how real it is, and how sizable. The extent of its actual association with the Azov Battalion is also unclear. Take Bleriot, for example. There’s no indication that he was with any Azov unit when he died in Kharkiv, in the northeast of Ukraine, far from Azov’s main areas of operation in the south. It may be that the Misanthropic Division is not a real-world unit with a leader and a chain of command so much as a twisted military clique that anyone online can claim.

Images readily available on the internet show young men from the U.K., France, Germany, Spain, Poland, Portugal, Brazil, and elsewhere displaying the group’s piratical-looking flag, often in conjunction with other hate symbols, and it’s possible to find photos and videos of Ukrainian soldiers, who appear to be engaged in actual combat, sporting its various badges, patches, and T-shirts. It could be a cohesive military unit made up of foreign volunteers, sheltered under the wing of the Azov Battalion, but I can find no convincing evidence, at the moment, that it is anything more than a toxic Telegram meme popularized by Azov’s most black-pilled fanboys, only a few of whom may really be serving in the unit.

The loosely organized International Legion, which may not have any central command, is limited in its ability to vet volunteers.

The real question, when it comes to Ukraine’s foreign legion and some of the more distasteful characters that its international call-to-arms has attracted, is how much of a threat they pose to their countries of origin. The loosely organized International Legion, which may not have any central command, is limited in its ability to vet volunteers. Radical miscreants from all over the world who subscribe to the blood-and-soil ideology of neo-Nazi subcultures like the Misanthropic Division have a very real opportunity to travel to Ukraine, get military training, and participate in intense armed conflict against a technologically advanced enemy. If they survive, their combat experience could give them the confidence and ability to carry out acts of political violence in their home countries. This is clearly cause for concern at a time when incidents of hate crimes and domestic terrorism are on the rise.

In the same Facebook post of June 4 that announced Bleriot’s death, the International Legion also disclosed the death of Björn Benjamin Clavis, a German of unknown age. The photo of him shows a man who looks about 30 with buzzed hair in the uniform of Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Force. On the back of his right hand is an unmistakable tattoo of an Iron Cross, which the Anti-Defamation League describes as a “commonly-used hate symbol” favored by “neo-Nazis and other white supremacists.”

It’s possible that Clavis got the tattoo for innocuous reasons. It’s not that uncommon a symbol. The logo of the Independent Truck skateboard company, for example, looks a lot like an Iron Cross. So does the badge given out for marksmanship in the U.S. Army. However, the ADL’s analysis suggests that nonracist display of the Iron Cross mostly takes place in the United States. In Germany, where Clavis was from, it is very much associated with the Third Reich.

The post Foreign Fighters in Ukraine Could Be a Time Bomb for Their Home Countries appeared first on The Intercept .

With her surprise testimony at Tuesday’s hearing of the House January 6 committee, former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson broke open the inside story of the coup plotting that was underway at the White House before and during the insurrection, and in the process suddenly raised Donald Trump’s legal jeopardy.

Above all, Hutchinson, a former aide to Mark Meadows, Trump’s White House chief of staff, showed that Trump knew that many of his supporters who marched on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, were armed and dangerous, and still encouraged them to march on Congress. He even sought to go to the U.S. Capitol himself to lead them in person, and lunged at a Secret Service agent to try to take control of his presidential limousine so he could drive up to Capitol Hill to lead the armed mob.

Hutchinson’s stunning testimony, the most dramatic since the House hearings started, recalls that of Alexander Butterfield, the White House aide during Watergate who revealed to the Senate Watergate Committee that President Richard Nixon had a taping system in place in the Oval Office. Butterfield’s testimony suddenly changed the trajectory of the Watergate scandal and helped lead to Nixon’s 1974 resignation.

The January 6 hearings have disclosed far more than was previously known about Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, raising questions about why the Justice Department has not been as aggressive in its own inquiry. The success of the House hearings may finally be forcing the Justice Department to intensify its criminal investigation. Last week, the FBI raided the home of Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who sought to help Trump pressure state officials not to certify Biden’s win in Georgia; the Justice Department also seized the phone of John Eastman, a lawyer for Trump who wrote memos urging then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the presidential election during the congressional certification process.

During Tuesday’s hearing, Hutchinson painted a vivid picture of Trump’s insane behavior as he sought to prevent Joe Biden from assuming office. On the day of the insurrection, Hutchinson testified, Trump tried to force the Secret Service to drive him to the U.S. Capitol to take charge of the insurrection himself. Trump had incited the mob during a speech outside the White House, urging his supporters to go up to the Capitol while Congress was in the process of certifying the election. The crowd then followed his directions and marched to the Capitol.

Immediately after his speech to the crowd outside the White House, he tried to grab the steering wheel of his limousine from the Secret Service agent who was driving.

By that time, Trump was already furious that the Secret Service was refusing to let his heavily armed supporters into the secured area outside the White House. Hutchinson testified that Trump said that “they’re not here to hurt me. Take the fucking mags away,” referring to the metal detectors used to check for weapons. “Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here.”

Beyond January 6, Hutchinson also revealed that Trump was mentally unbalanced throughout the months in which he sought to overturn the election. She said that on December 1, 2020, Trump threw a plate with ketchup on it against a wall in the White House when he found out that Attorney General William Barr had just told the press that there was no significant voter fraud during the presidential election. She added that Trump had thrown objects in the White House before, including inside the Oval Office.

Hutchinson also said that Meadows did almost nothing to try to rein in Trump during the insurrection, and later sought a presidential pardon.

Hutchinson’s testimony came as Rep. Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican who is vice chair of the House committee, said that there is evidence of witness tampering against others speaking to the committee. Several witnesses have received phone calls and messages in which people tried to pressure them before testifying, Cheney said.

The post Hutchinson’s January 6 Testimony Was an Alexander Butterfield Moment appeared first on The Intercept .

“There is no place to hide,” said U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland during a surprise trip to Ukraine this week, announcing that a veteran prosecutor known for hunting down Nazis would lead American efforts to investigate Russian war crimes. “We will pursue every avenue available to make sure that those who are responsible for these atrocities are held accountable,” he added.

Garland didn’t need to travel 4,600 miles in pursuit of war criminals. If he wanted to hold those responsible for atrocities accountable, he could have stayed home.

In a suburban Maryland neighborhood, just over an hour away from Garland’s office, I once interviewed a U.S. Army veteran who confessed to shooting, in Vietnam, an unarmed elderly man in 1968. He didn’t just tell me. He told military criminal investigators in the early 1970s but was never charged or court-martialed. He retired from the Army in 1988.

The United States is awash in war criminals. Some are foreigners who fled accountability in their homelands. Most are homegrown. They live in places like Wheelersburg, Ohio (a confessed torturer), and Auburn, California (a West Point grad who presided over a massacre). Like these veterans, most have never been charged, much less tried or convicted. If Garland or Eli Rosenbaum, whom he tapped to lead the Ukraine War Crimes Accountability Team, want to find them, I can provide addresses.

I located those veterans through the records of a secret war crimes task force set up by the Pentagon during the Vietnam War. Today, even that bare modicum of accountability has vanished. It’s now anathema for the Defense Department to mention U.S. personnel and “war crimes” in the same breath.

Last month, a Pentagon investigation of a 2019 attack in Syria that killed dozens of people , including women and children, found “numerous policy compliance deficiencies” in the military’s initial review of the airstrike, but ultimately held that no one violated the laws of war and no disciplinary action was warranted.

The anonymous personnel involved in the Syria strike — including the F-15 pilot, drone crew , lawyers, analysts, and members of a Special Operations task force — are typical of Americans involved in civilian deaths during the 20-plus years of the so-called war on terror who have rarely been publicly identified, criminally investigated, or subjected to the scrutiny of anything like a war crimes accountability team. We generally don’t know their names though due to the work of journalists and nongovernmental organizations, we know their handiwork.

There was the August 2021 “ righteous strike ” against a terrorist target in Afghanistan that actually killed 10 civilians, seven of them children . There were the air and artillery attacks in Raqqa, Syria, that the Pentagon said killed 159 civilians, but Amnesty International and Airwars, a U.K.-based airstrike monitoring group, found had left more than 1,600 civilians dead . There was the drone strike that killed 30 pine nut farm workers in Afghanistan in 2019. An April 2018 attack in Somalia that killed a 22-year-old woman and her 4-year-old daughter . An airstrike in Libya, later that year, that killed 11 civilians . The attack that same year in Yemen that killed four civilians and left another, Adel Al Manthari, gravely injured . The seven separate attacks in Yemen by the United States — six drone strikes and one raid — between 2013 and 2020 that killed 36 members of the intertwined al Ameri and al Taisy families . And the military’s confidential assessments of more than 1,300 reports of civilian casualties from airstrikes in Iraq and Syria from 2014 to 2018, published as “ The Civilian Casualty Files ” by the New York Times late last year, among so much other evidence .

Last year, then-Pentagon (now National Security Council ) spokesperson John Kirby claimed that “no military in the world works as hard as we do to avoid civilian casualties.” Experts said otherwise. “Civilian protection is not prioritized. We’re not the best because we’re choosing not to be the best,” Larry Lewis, who spent a decade analyzing military operations for the U.S. government, told The Intercept. The seemingly endless number of known civilian casualty incidents that deserve an investigation or reinvestigation also indicates that Kirby’s spin just isn’t true . What’s also clear is that the Pentagon, as Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin put it in April, has no intention to “ re-litigate cases .”

This week, a leaked draft of House Armed Services Committee Chair Adam Smith’s version of the 2023 defense spending bill called for a Commission on Civilian Harm to investigate the human toll of 20-plus years of war. “At a minimum, the Commission has the potential to provide the most comprehensive assessment and accounting of civilian harm during the war on terror,” Brian Finucane, a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group, told The Intercept. A war crimes accountability team assembled by Garland could put iron in the commission’s glove.

Recently, Beth Van Schaack, the State Department’s ambassador at large for global criminal justice, noted that Russian war crimes were not the actions of “a rogue unit, but rather a pattern and practice across all the areas in which Russia’s forces are engaged.” She added that responsibility extended to “individuals up the chain of command who are aware that their subordinates are committing abuses and who failed to do what is necessary to either prevent those abuses or to punish the perpetrators.” To that end, before conducting investigations of civilian harm committed by drone pilots and special operators across war zones from Syria to Somalia, and Libya to Yemen, the U.S. should start with the original architects of the “war on terror” and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, including former President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

If Garland is truly outraged by “ heart-wrenching accounts of brutality and death ” and committed to pursuing “every avenue of accountability for those who commit war crimes,” he doesn’t need to dispatch investigators abroad. There are plenty of war criminals, hiding in plain sight, right here.

The post U.S. Vows to Hunt Russian War Criminals — but Gives a Pass to Its Own appeared first on The Intercept .

The Pentagon must step up its efforts to track and publicly report on civilians hurt and killed by U.S. military operations, according to an unreleased draft of the 2023 defense spending bill.

The Defense Department must establish a Commission on Civilian Harm and do more to mitigate the impact of civilian casualties, according to a draft version of the National Defense Authorization Act, or NDAA, for Fiscal Year 2023 obtained by The Intercept. The so-called chairman’s mark — House Armed Services Committee Chair Adam Smith’s version of the NDAA — contains legislation and funding recommendations that must still be considered, debated, and voted on. The House Armed Services Committee is slated to consider Smith’s draft of the bill and offer amendments later this week.

“These proposals reflect that after 20 years, the accumulation of reports — by you , by the New York Times , the excruciating reporting on the strike in Kabul last year — led Congress to a tipping point where they felt the need to legislate in order to better understand civilian harm and to do something about it,” Brian Finucane, a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group and former legal adviser to the State Department, told The Intercept.

While the civilian harm measures in the markup appear to constitute a major improvement, especially the requirement to set up the Commission and substantive changes to the Defense Department’s annual civilian casualty report , known colloquially as Section 1057, experts say they still fall short. There is also, they note, no guarantee that the measures will make it to the final version of the NDAA.

“It’s a good improvement, but we wish it went further,” said a Democratic congressional staffer familiar with the document. “We are pleased with the 1057 changes and the COE and Commission on Civilian Harm, and really hope those pieces stay in.”

The draft bill, which was shared with The Intercept prior to its public release this week, contains elements of directives set forth in Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s January memo directing subordinates to draw up a “ Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan ” that has yet to be released. The chairman’s mark also bears the imprint of legislation to overhaul the Pentagon’s civilian harm prevention, mitigation, reporting, and transparency policies , introduced in April by Reps. Jason Crow, D-Colo.; Ro Khanna, D-Calif.; Sara Jacobs, D-Calif.; and Tom Malinowski, D-N.J., as well as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.

The chairman’s mark contains proposed changes to the Pentagon’s “ Annual Report on Civilian Casualties ,” including new requirements to release geographic coordinates of attacks, justifications for the strikes, whether the military conducted any witness interviews or site visits, and information on the number of men, women, and children affected. This last mandate is especially crucial, said Heather Brandon-Smith, the legislative director for militarism and human rights for the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker group.

It “requires them to look at the human faces of these operations.”

“Obviously, it would all help assess compliance in terms of legal obligations regarding proportionality, but it also requires them to look at the human faces of these operations. These are real people who are being killed, so this is very important,” she told The Intercept. “All of these changes are really welcome and it’s fantastic that Chairman Smith has put them in his mark.”

The Commission on Civilian Harm, as detailed in the chairman’s mark, would be composed of 12 civilians not already employed by the government — including experts in human rights law, U.S. military operations, and other relevant topics — tasked to study the people affected by U.S. military operations as well as Pentagon policies, procedures, and regulations for the prevention, mitigation, and response to civilian harm over the entire so-called war on terror. Experts say it could be a game-changer.

“At a minimum, the commission has the potential to provide the most comprehensive assessment and accounting of civilian harm” since 2001, said Finucane. “There has been a lot of reporting by think tanks, the media, and NGOs on civilian harm, but the mandate of this commission would be very broad and comprehensive and could provide a holistic overview of the harm done by U.S. military operations over the last 20 years.”

The commission, whose members will be appointed by Congress, is tasked to investigate the “record of the United States with respect to civilian harm … by investigating a representative sample of incidents of civilian harm that occurred where the United States used military force (including incidents confirmed by media and civil society organizations and dismissed by the Department of Defense).” The body will be authorized to investigate whether civilian casualties have been concealed by the military, what mechanisms exist for whistleblowers, the effectiveness of oversight by the inspector general, and the accuracy of civilian harm estimates offered to the public. To this end, the group is empowered to conduct hearings and witness interviews, as well as review Defense Department documents and, if useful, visit the sites of U.S. attacks that hurt or killed noncombatants.

The commission also has a mandate to assess whether the military has implemented past recommendations to enhance the protection of civilians and minimize, investigate, and respond to civilian harm, from civil society organizations, Congress, the Pentagon, and other government agencies. The independent body is authorized to assess the responsiveness of the Defense Department to civilian harm allegations and to evaluate how well it has investigated incidents and compensated victims. The 12 members will also assess whether current civilian harm policies comply with international humanitarian and human rights law.

Experts were far less impressed with the bill’s language on the Center for Excellence in Civilian Harm Mitigation, which Austin mandated in his January memo and is directed to “institutionalize and advance knowledge, practices, and tools for preventing, mitigating, and responding to civilian harm.”

The bicameral April civilian harm bill proposed $25 million in annual funding for the center, but such language is absent from the chairman’s mark, along with many other details. “Unlike the legislation governing the commission, the provision on the Center of Excellence is very vague. It doesn’t specify who should be heading it up or what kind of expertise they should have,” said Brandon-Smith. “It also doesn’t come with any funding and it doesn’t specify that there should be new staff with expertise in the relevant areas.”

While experts were optimistic about the proposed changes in the chairman’s mark writ large, they remained cautious as to whether recommendations would be applied and institutional changes at the Defense Department would result. Even though he saw great promise in the Commission on Civilian Harm, Finucane offered a caveat. “The question of whether it will change anything is an open one. There have been a number of blue-ribbon commissions empowered by Congress over the years, which have issued reports that have been read by a half-dozen people and then quietly filed away,” he told The Intercept. “It’s hard to say whether or not the ultimate recommendations of this commission — were it ever to be established — would actually be implemented.”

The post Pentagon Must Do More to Mitigate Civilian Harm, Says House Armed Services Committee Chair appeared first on The Intercept .

Ryan Kelley, a Republican candidate for governor of Michigan, was arrested by the FBI on Thursday morning in connection with his involvement in the January 6 insurrection.

Kelley’s arrest provided a fitting lead-in to the first hearing of the House January 6 committee, televised live and in prime time on Thursday night. His arrest helped underscore the degree to which the Republican Party has been captured by the Trumpist forces that were behind the insurrection, and which today seem unashamed and determined to sabotage democracy again to try to usher in a right-wing, authoritarian government as soon as possible.

For those who have already chosen to forget, the January 6, 2021, insurrection was the worst domestic attack on the United States government since the Civil War, involving a mob of thousands who were hellbent on stopping the congressional certification of the election of Joe Biden as president in order to keep Donald Trump in power. Incited to march on the U.S. Capitol by Trump, the mob overwhelmed the police guarding the Capitol and succeeded in delaying the certification and nearly stopping it. In the process, the mob threatened the lives of members of Congress, who were forced to flee the House and Senate chambers.

For an attention-deficient nation, where few people remember anything that happened before last week’s verdict in the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard case, Thursday night’s hearing provided a gut-punch reminder of just how violent and dangerous the insurrection was, how close it came to overturning the 2020 presidential election, and how much of a threat to American democracy remains today from the right-wing furies unleashed by Trump.

For nearly a year, the House select committee has been investigating what happened on January 6 as well as the conspiracy behind it. It has conducted about 1,000 interviews to document the full and ugly story behind Trump’s obsessive, monthslong efforts to overturn the 2020 election, climaxing in the violence on January 6.

The committee’s leading members now say they have evidence that shows that Trump committed crimes in connection with the insurrection. Rep. Liz Cheney, the Wyoming Republican who is the committee’s vice chair, said during Thursday night’s hearing that Trump had a “sophisticated seven-part plan” to overturn the presidential election, which will be examined in future hearings. She also blamed Trump for inciting the riot on January 6, saying that “Trump summoned the mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack.”

Video footage aired during Thursday’s hearing backed that up, showing how the insurrectionists took their lead from Trump even as they were seeking to knock down fences, scale walls, and smash windows to get into the Capitol. One used a megaphone to read a Trump tweet criticizing Vice President Mike Pence for refusing to use his role as the presiding officer during the congressional certification process to overturn the election in Trump’s favor. In response, the mob chanted “Hang Mike Pence.”

In order to bring the story to life for the forgetful American public, the committee brought in James Goldston, a former network news executive, to help produce the hearings. The result was a compelling hearing that wove in videos of the insurrection that had never before been aired, along with videos of testimony from a wide range of officials, including some who said Trump didn’t want the insurrection to stop. In a video of his earlier interview with the committee, Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley also said that it was Pence, not Trump, who finally ordered National Guard troops to reinforce the police at the Capitol.

“There were two or three calls with Vice President Pence. He was very animated, and he issued very explicit, very direct, unambiguous orders. There was no question about that,” Milley said. “He was very animated, very direct, very firm to Secretary Miller. ‘Get the military down here, get the guard down here. Put down this situation, et cetera.’”

But Milley said he was told by the White House to say that it was Trump who ordered the troops to the Capitol.

Milley also said that Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows told him that “we have to kill the narrative that the vice president is making all the decisions.”

The most gripping moment of Thursday night’s hearing came during the live testimony of Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards, who was injured, knocked unconscious, and later hit with chemical spray as she tried to defend the Capitol. “I was called a lot of things,” she recalled. “I was called Nancy Pelosi’s dog.”

The hearing also showed the degree to which the extremist groups leading the insurrection, the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, took their lead from Trump personally. The Proud Boys were mobilized by Trump’s calls for their help during a presidential debate in 2020, when he said that the Proud Boys should “stand back and stand by.” Separately, the Justice Department has charged Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes , along with other members of their groups, with seditious conspiracy in connection with January 6. The sedition charges seem to represent a significant escalation in the Justice Department’s prosecution of those involved in the riot and come after months of criticism of Attorney General Merrick Garland for only bringing minor charges against low-level individuals who were in the mob.

The House committee plans to go beyond January 6 to examine Trump’s concerted effort to overturn the election. Former Attorney General William Barr said he told Trump that he had lost the election and that there was no evidence of significant voter fraud. “I repeatedly told the president in no uncertain terms that I did not see evidence of fraud, you know, that would have affected the outcome of the election,” Barr said in testimony to the committee, shown on video.

But Trump ignored the truth and kept pushing to overturn the election throughout the months between the election in November 2020 and Biden’s inauguration in January 2021. After Barr resigned, he tried to get rid of acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen in order to install a lackey, Jeffrey Clark, to get the Justice Department to back his efforts to overturn the election.

In addition to the investigations by the House committee and the Justice Department, prosecutors in Georgia are also investigating whether Trump violated Georgia election laws by his constant efforts to pressure Georgia officials to overturn the results in that state. The House committee is examining what happened in Georgia as well, and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger may testify before the committee in a future hearing.

Despite the historic importance of the insurrection, many reporters and pundits in the mainstream press spent the days leading up to the hearings downplaying their significance, as if they were ready to move on from reporting on the riot. One of their favorite journalistic devices has been to compare, negatively, the public’s interest in the January 6 hearings with the prominence of the Watergate hearings of the 1970s.

But for anyone who still doubts the importance of developing a comprehensive record of January 6 and Trump’s efforts to subvert democracy, all you need to do is see what Trump said Thursday. Trump said on his new “Truth Social” site that the insurrection was “not simply a protest, it represented the greatest movement in the history of our Country to Make America Great Again.”

The post Jan. 6 Hearings Seek to Remind a Forgetful Nation About the Day Donald Trump Almost Engineered a Coup appeared first on The Intercept .