The Intercept Briefing

Republican Rep. Thomas Massie was decisively ousted on Tuesday night in his Kentucky primary, a win for President Donald Trump, who had launched an all-out attack on the congressman for his role in pushing for the release of the Epstein files. But in Pennsylvania, the left had a lot to celebrate. Chris Rabb won by nearly 15 points in Philadelphia in a major win for progressives. And Bob Brooks, a...

RSVP for The Intercept Briefing Podcast’s Live Conversation on Gaza. Sign up to join us on Tuesday, May 19, at 5 p.m. ET/2 p.m. PT . Join The Intercept Briefing podcast for a special live episode taping with Intercept journalist Jonah Valdez and Tariq Kenney-Shawa, an Al-Shabaka U.S. policy fellow and co-host of Al-Shabaka’s Policy Lab series. Show description: In 16 pages, the Trump administratio...

The U.S. Supreme Court dealt a fatal blow to the Voting Rights Act, triggering a new wave of redistricting fights in the midst of midterm primary elections. Last week, the court struck down a Louisiana congressional map with a second majority-Black district. The decision requires there to be evidence of intentional racism to prove that a map is discriminatory, making it nearly impossible to succes...

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 someth...

It’s primary season, this time against a backdrop of heightened concerns and awareness of powerful figures skirting accountability for sexual abuse and misconduct. Survivors of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein have “made accountability for sexual abuse and sexual violence an electoral issue,” says Intercept politics reporter Jessica Washington.  One of the biggest stories to shake up po...

Sen. Bernie Sanders forced a vote on Wednesday to block the sales of bombs and bulldozers to Israel. The resolutions failed mostly along party lines with a handful of defections to the Republican side, but a record number of Democrats voted against sending weapons to Israel.   “A supermajority of Democrats oppose this war, are generally against America's global military interventions,” f...

Vote here to help The Intercept Briefing win its first Webby Award for best news and politics podcast. Show description: As talks to end the U.S.–Israel war on Iran break down and President Donald Trump demands a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, journalist Amy Goodman says that in times of war and conflicts, “What I care about is the answer, and I care that people in this country don't get...

Vote here to help The Intercept Briefing win its first Webby Award for best news and politics podcast. Show description: Vice President JD Vance is set to lead renewed negotiations with Iran this weekend to bring an end to the U.S.–Israel war on the country that stretched into a second month. The talks come after a roller coaster of a week, which began with President Donald Trump threatening genoc...

Vote here to help The Intercept Briefing win its first Webby Award for best news and politics podcast. Show description: After more than a month into the U.S.–Israel conflict with Iran , President Donald Trump addressed the nation directly for the first time on Wednesday about why he dragged the country into an unprovoked illegal war. During his wide-ranging speech, Trump made numerous false claim...

Donald Trump’s second term has been broadly defined by an overwhelming sense of chaos. Every week the U.S. finds itself in a new crisis of the president’s making. The war in Iran and the broader Middle East is stretching into its fourth week, as the administration prepares to send thousands of troops to the region for a possible ground invasion . The U.S. oil blockade on Cuba has plunged the count...

From the White House to Iran’s former crown prince, proponents of the U.S.–Israel war on Iran sell it to the American people — and Iranians themselves — as a crusade for liberation. Instead, the regime remains in place as the death toll grows, environmental hazards proliferate, and civilian infrastructure is decimated.  As if the destruction inside Iran itself wasn't enough, the war is starti...

In the last few days, President Donald Trump has said that the U.S-Israel war on Iran will end soon, after oil prices jumped and the growing regional conflict continued to shake markets . After a wave of heavy bombardments throughout Iran, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth promised another round, “The most fighters, the most bombers, the most strikes.”  “Hegseth has, yes, said that it's going to...

The Israel–U.S. military campaign in Iran has killed more than 1,000 people since the assault began on February 28. A war powers resolution in the Senate to curb President Donald Trump’s ability to drag the U.S. into the war failed on Wednesday. Similarly, a measure in the House failed on Thursday.  “This war is just a few days old and it's escalating really quickly,” says Ali Gharib, senior...

“The deliberate cruelty that they found humor in stood out to me,” says Jordan Uhl of Donald Trump’s Tuesday evening State of the Union. This week on the Intercept Briefing, co-hosts Uhl, Akela Lacy, and Jessica Washington disentangle Trump’s nearly two-hour-long speech so you don’t have to.  “This is who these people are. In some ways, they're trying to sugarcoat what they're doing, but in o...

Cuba is spiraling into a humanitarian crisis. The country’s long-standing economic and political turmoil reached new heights this week as the effects of the Trump administration’s oil blockade took hold. The president’s targeting of Cuba is part of the administration’s broader attacks on the region, where the U.S. kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores earlier this...

Cut through the noise with The Intercept’s reporters as they tackle the most urgent issues of the moment. The Briefing is a weekly podcast delivering incisive political analysis and deep investigative reporting, hosted by The Intercept’s journalists and contributors including Jessica Washington, Akela Lacy, and Jordan Uhl. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Attorney General Pam Bondi testified before the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday, defending the Justice Department’s widely criticized rollout of the Epstein files against accusations that her department is shielding powerful men, including President Donald Trump, at the expense of survivors.  Democrats, who reviewed the unredacted files for the first time this week, revealed that the n...

The word “terrorist” wasn’t coined on September 11, 2001, but the defining event of the early 21st century ushered it in as the United States’ go-to term for demonizing outsiders and dissenters alike. The so-called “war on terror” transformed the way the U.S. wields power at home and abroad, enabling mass surveillance and a crackdown on the right to free speech. It became reflexive for the U.S. to...

In the two months Minnesota has been under siege by federal agents, immigration officers have shot and killed two U.S. citizens, poet and artist Renee Good and ICU nurse Alex Pretti . Local and state law enforcement say they’ve been blocked from properly investigating the shootings of Good and Pretti.  “The federal government has blocked our state BCA, so that's the Bureau of Criminal Apprehe...

The people of Iran are in the midst of one of the country’s biggest uprisings — and harshest government crackdowns — since the Iranian Revolution.  It started with shopkeepers in bazaars closing their doors at the end of December in protest of the plummeting Iranian rial and economic distress. But demonstrations soon spread to universities and across the country to every single province. Work...

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent Jonathan Ross fatally shot Renee Good , a 37-year-old mother of three, in Minneapolis last week, unleashing a wave of anti-ICE protests and sentiment throughout Minnesota and the rest of the United States.  On Wednesday evening, federal immigration agents shot and wounded a man in Minneapolis, adding to the tension in the Twin Cities. President Donald...

How long will the United States claim control over Venezuela? “Only time will tell,” President Donald Trump told the New York Times on Wednesday — potentially years. U.S. troops invaded the country over the weekend, kidnapping President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. Maduro and Flores pleaded not guilty to narco-terrorism charges in New York on Monday. They now sit in a Brooklyn jail,...

After OpenAI CEO Sam Altman launched ChatGPT in 2022, the race for dominance in the field of artificial intelligence hit warp speed. Silicon Valley has poured billions of dollars into developing AI, building data centers, and promising a future free from the chains of unfulfilling work across the globe. But in “Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI,” tech reporter Karen Hao pu...

We're excited to share another episode of The Intercept’s new podcast Collateral Damage . The investigative series examines the half-century-long war on drugs, its enduring ripple effects, and the devastating consequences of building a massive war machine aimed at the public itself. Hosted by Radley Balko , an investigative journalist who has been covering the drug war and the criminal justice sys...

The most defining feature of Donald Trump’s first year back in office has been the brutality of his deportation machine and his administration's numerous attempts to upend due process. Back in March, the Trump administration wrongly deported Kilmar Ábrego Garcia to a notoriously violent prison in El Salvador. Ábrego Garcia’s legal status protected him from deportation to his home country for fear...