Justice
Prosecutors Buried Evidence and Misled the Court. Ten Years Later, They Got a Slap on the Wrist.
After ruling that federal prosecutors withheld key evidence resulting in a defendant’s wrongful imprisonment, D.C.’s top court took nearly a decade to decide on an appropriate sanction. In December, after extensive hearings, the D.C. Court of Appeals gave two prosecutors a year of probation plus a stern warning not to commit any further misconduct, or they would be suspended from practicing law for six months.
Both prosecutors, Mary Chris Dobbie and Reagan Taylor, still work for the Justice Department, according to media reports and other records. One of their former supervisors, Jeffrey Ragsdale, currently leads the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, which oversees investigations into alleged prosecutorial misconduct.
Under the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brady v. Maryland, prosecutors have a constitutional obligation to disclose exculpatory evidence to defense attorneys. At the trial for two defendants accused of assaulting an officer during a jailhouse brawl, Dobbie and Taylor withheld unequivocal evidence that their lead witness, a corrections officer, had a history of filing false reports. Based on the officer’s testimony, one defendant was imprisoned for more than four years before his conviction was reversed.
In 2021, the D.C. Board on Professional Responsibility, a disciplinary panel appointed by the appeals court, unanimously recommended a six-month suspension for Dobbie and Taylor. But in a divided opinion, the court ratcheted down the sanction to probation based on “one overriding mitigating circumstance”: the “deficient conduct” of Ragsdale and another supervisor, John Roth, who later served as inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security. There were no ethics charges or misconduct findings for either supervisor.
Reached by phone, Roth declined to comment, saying that he was not aware of the decision. Attorneys for Dobbie and Taylor did not respond to multiple requests for comment, nor did Ragsdale. The Justice Department also failed to respond.
The dissenting judge, Joshua Deahl, argued that Dobbie and Taylor “should face real consequences for their actions.”
“The board comes to us — despite innumerable favorable inferences drawn in respondents’ favor — with the rare recommendation of an actual suspension that at least comes close to reflecting the gravity of this serious prosecutorial misconduct,” Deahl wrote. “Yet this court balks.”
Deahl noted a dissonance between how courts treat prosecutors’ ethical violations versus misconduct by private attorneys, who are routinely disbarred or suspended for actions like dipping into client funds.
“That is too harsh a result, the majority concludes, when prosecutors intentionally suppress evidence in violation of the Constitution and thereby secure felony convictions resulting in years of unjust imprisonment,” wrote Deahl, who was appointed by President Donald Trump in 2019 and served as a public defender before joining the bench.
Even this relatively lenient sanction is a rarity for federal prosecutors. And the protracted timeline — a year of probation more than 14 years after the violation — illustrates systemic shortcomings in current accountability mechanisms.
“The dramatic delay is all the more troubling,” Bruce Green, a Fordham Law School professor who studies prosecutorial ethics, told The Intercept, because “the disciplinary process is the principal way of holding prosecutors publicly accountable for misconduct.”
In Green’s view, the court appeared to be grasping for reasons not to suspend Dobbie and Taylor. He read the majority’s opinion as “looking for something to say to mitigate the sanction, and the best they could do was to put some of the blame on inadequate supervision.”
A “Faxing Mishap”
By the prosecutors’ account, the constitutional violations could largely be blamed on an uncooperative fax machine.
In 2009, weeks before two defendants went on trial for assaults at a D.C. jail, the line prosecutors, Dobbie and Taylor, learned that their “lead identification witness” had a serious credibility issue: Officer Angelo Childs had recently been demoted after he maced a man in custody who was already restrained. Childs then submitted a false incident report suggesting that the man was acting violently, as well as a false disciplinary report charging the man with assaulting an officer and a K9. Security footage contradicted both reports.
Dobbie and Taylor received a 10-page report from the corrections department about Childs’s discipline, including a findings section on the final page. They had a clear constitutional obligation to disclose this information to the defendants, which “should not have been a hard call for the government,” the appeals court ruled in 2014.
The report was “powerfully impeaching,” the court noted. “It did not simply establish that Officer Childs had a track record for untruthfulness. It established that he was willing to make false reports implicating inmates in assaults on law enforcement agents — the precise context of this case.”
“This is a witness we intend to call at trial who now has a veracity issue.”
Instead of promptly disclosing the report, the prosecutors sought their supervisors’ guidance. They first consulted Ragsdale, then chief of the felony major crimes section of the U.S. Attorney’s Office in D.C. Ragsdale passed the request to his supervisor, John Roth, who at the time headed a committee that advised on whether to call law enforcement officers to the stand when their credibility was in question. “This is a witness we intend to call at trial who now has a veracity issue,” Ragsdale wrote in an email to Roth.
Less than two weeks before trial, Roth and Ragsdale provided instructions to the line prosecutors that the appeals court majority called “inaccurate,” “regrettable,” and “deficient.”
Roth “cavalierly” questioned the corrections department’s findings that Childs had lied, a disciplinary committee later found. “Not sure that the DOC conclusion that he lied is supported by the record, but I will leave it to you folks to hash out,” Roth, who did not consult any underlying evidence, wrote in an email. Still, he directed the prosecutors to “disclose the report” and “litigate its admissibility” at trial. While this represented an antagonistic approach to handling evidence of dishonesty by the government’s key witness, at least it would have given the defense the opportunity to argue in favor of sharing the information with jurors.
This is where Ragsdale “played a role in this case going awry,” according to the appeals court majority. He directed Dobbie and Taylor to file the report under seal with the court, instead of disclosing it to the defense directly, along with a motion arguing that the defendants should not be allowed to ask the officer about it on the stand.
Five days before trial, the prosecutors filed a “misleading and factually incomplete motion,” the appeals court ruled, along with a sealed copy of the first five pages of the report. The most damning information about Childs started on the sixth page, and the findings were at the very end.
The motion noted that the corrections department “may” have made “potentially adverse credibility findings” about Childs’s incident report, but it entirely omitted the fact that the officer had been demoted, used excessive force, and filed a false disciplinary report. Echoing Roth, the prosecutors expressed unfounded skepticism about the report’s accuracy.
When the judge sought confirmation that the version the prosecutors filed was complete, Dobbie answered that the copy she brought to court was also just five pages. Taylor, meanwhile, had a copy of the full 10-page report with her but said nothing. Based on the prosecutors’ assurances that they had accurately summarized the contents, the judge repeatedly denied the defendants access to the report itself.
The D.C. court majority attributed this omission to an unintentional faxing error, which the dissenting judge called “far from the most natural inference.” The disciplinary committee “cut Dobbie and Taylor repeated breaks,” Deahl wrote, “crediting their testimony that their actions were mistakes, despite strong evidence to the contrary.”
Based on the officer’s testimony at trial, both defendants were convicted and sentenced to more than five years in prison. They obtained the damning report three months after they were convicted, but it took another four years for the D.C. Court of Appeals to rule that the prosecutors unconstitutionally withheld it. The court reversed the conviction of one defendant; the other acknowledged that he had been correctly identified.
The court was “left with many questions about the government’s behavior,” the judges wrote. How could the prosecutors fail to realize that half the report was missing, “particularly when the trial court specifically asked if the five-page copy it had in hand was the complete report?”
A view of the D.C. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 18, 2020.
Photo: Graeme Sloan/Sipa via AP Images
Watered-Down Discipline
The court’s scathing reversal in 2014 set off two disciplinary investigations.
The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility opened an investigation, the results of which have not been made public. For decades, OPR, now led by Ragsdale, has faced intense criticism over its abysmal transparency. Green, the expert in prosecutorial ethics, called the office “the roach motel of the Justice Department,” while a former U.S. attorney for D.C. said it was “known as the Bermuda Triangle of complaints against prosecutors.”
The D.C. Office of Disciplinary Counsel, which serves as the chief prosecutor for attorney disciplinary matters in D.C., launched a separate, more transparent inquiry soon after the court’s reversal. Five years later, the office filed a disciplinary petition against the line prosecutors with the Board on Professional Responsibility. Dobbie and Taylor expressed remorse for not turning over the report but argued that their actions constituted mistakes of inexperience rather than ethical violations. At the time of the trial, Dobbie had been a federal prosecutor for a few years and Taylor for a little over a year.
In January 2021, after a disciplinary committee agreed that Dobbie and Taylor had committed misconduct by withholding the report, the full Board on Professional Responsibility recommended a six-month suspension.
The appeals court, however, shifted the blame and watered down the discipline. The divided court ruled in December that the errors of Roth and Ragsdale, who were not themselves at risk of professional penalty, weighed against the line prosecutors’ suspension. Dobbie and Reagan “should not, and probably do not, shoulder full responsibility,” Judge Loren AliKhan wrote for the majority.
The Justice Department “could hold its prosecutors publicly accountable if it wanted to.”
In a brief supporting the line prosecutors, the Justice Department argued that any sanction at all was “unwarranted,” urging the court not to “blink away” the supervisors’ role. The Justice Department did not answer questions from The Intercept about OPR’s inquiry into the case or how the court’s decision reflected on Ragsdale’s fitness to oversee misconduct investigations for all federal prosecutors.
Michael P. Heiskell, president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, told The Intercept that “deficient conduct of experienced supervisors deserves much harsher condemnation” than the appeals court gave.
“I’m happy there’s a sanction,” said Shawn Armbrust, executive director of the Mid-Atlantic Innocence Project, which filed a brief urging the court to impose the six-month suspension. “There are a lot of jurisdictions that wouldn’t even do that.”
This decadelong disciplinary saga brought Green back to his central critique: We have very little insight into how the Justice Department itself is policing federal prosecutors. The department “could hold its prosecutors publicly accountable if it wanted to” through OPR, Green said, “but it doesn’t.”
The post Prosecutors Buried Evidence and Misled the Court. Ten Years Later, They Got a Slap on the Wrist. appeared first on The Intercept.
German Media Giant Axel Springer Makes Money on Israel’s Illegal Settlements
One of the ways Germany sought to deal with its dark 20th-century past is its so-called Staatsräson — literally its reason of state — to support Israel. The commitment, which permeates German mass media, intensified after Hamas’s October 7 attack and the subsequent Israeli war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Axel Springer SE, Europe’s largest publisher, typifies the approach. The owners of Bild, Germany’s leading newspaper, Springer takes an unwavering pro-Israel stance. “God bless the IDF,” Die Welt, a Springer-owned German daily, declared in a recent editorial. And the company’s CEO wrote in Springer-owned Politico that the chants of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” were tantamount to calling for genocide against Jews, a position in line with the German government’s November declaration that the slogan was illegal.
Defending Israel against criticisms of human rights violations, however, is one thing. Making money off those violations is another. Yet that’s exactly what Springer appears to be doing. Springer’s Israeli classified ads website Yad2 — the largest Craigslist-like classifieds site in the country — publishes real estate listings across Israel, including rental apartments and sales in Israeli settlements that are considered illegal under international law.
In December, Yad2 took out its own advertisement in an Israeli business paper to promote home sales on its site. “From the River to the Sea,” the ad, which appeared in The Marker, says in English, depicting a map of Israel and Palestine with pins dropped all over. The map has no “Green Line” or other markings separating Israel’s internationally recognized borders and occupied Palestinian territory. Below the co-opted protest slogan, the ad continues in Hebrew: “Yad2 helps you look forward and build a future in your next home in Israel.”
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Yad2’s advertisement may be, as many commenters saw it, a cheeky reference to the pro-Palestinian rhetoric, but it also points to how Springer makes money off Israel’s settlement enterprise. Like Craigslist, many individuals can post ads for free on Yad2, but some categories of advertisers — including real estate brokers or dealers — need to pay to put up listings.
“Advertising on the website is free for private users,” a representative for Yad2 said in response to an inquiry. “Business users are required to pay according to the terms of the site.” Paid listings, which are highlighted on the site, allow advertisers to increase their reach, they added.
The Intercept found thousands of apartments for sale and for rent in illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian West Bank. Of those, more than 1,000 were paid ads from brokerage houses — meaning Yad2, and therefore Axel Springer, made money on them. Some of the ads, according to an expert who scanned the listings for The Intercept, are for homes in so-called outposts, or settlements considered illegal under even Israeli law; other home listings appear on private Palestinian land that was seized by the Israeli military for security purposes but now hosts Jewish settlers.
Israel’s War on Gaza
Publishing ads that promote real estate deals in Israeli settlements is both contributing to and benefiting from human rights abuses, said Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director at Human Rights Watch, which has concluded that Israel’s occupation and settlement enterprise contribute to an apartheid system.
“The land these settlements are built on has been expropriated from Palestinians,” Shakir said. “Ultimately, our call would be for the company to end its activities that are contributing to grave human rights abuses.”
Shakir noted that Palestinians — including stateless Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, as well as those from Jerusalem or Israel proper who hold Israeli IDs or citizenship — cannot in practice buy or rent in Jewish-only settlements.
“Discrimination has no place at Axel Springer,” said a spokesperson for the company. “This is clearly regulated in our Code of Conduct, which applies to all companies at Axel Springer and is available in several languages, including Hebrew. Axel Springer speaks out clearly — also in the essentials — against any kind of racism. Yad2’s terms of use explicitly state that no one may be discriminated against on the basis of gender, religion, ethnicity or age.” (In fact, Yad2’s terms of use prohibit users from posting “harassing, insulting, hostile, threatening, rude, racist character or content” but don’t explicitly bar discrimination.) Springer did not respond to questions about paid and unpaid advertising for settlement homes on Yad2.
For Shakir, the classified ads for homes in Israeli settlements not only profit off discrimination, but also enable the entire Israeli settlement project by making housing markets in the West Bank viable.
“Companies engaging in this are benefiting from a system that systematically discriminates against Palestinians, that denies them building permits and resources and roads and infrastructure,” he told The Intercept. “They’re also helping to make settlements more sustainable economically and thus further entrench the settlements practice.”
A picture taken from the Palestinian village of Karmah shows the Jewish settlement of Otniel on June 22, 2020.
Photo: Hazem Bader/AFP via Getty Images
Yad2 in the Settlements
Since its founding in 2005, Yad2 has become Israel’s top online platform for classified ads. A user can look up anything from animals to weapons. The site’s initial growth, however, was on the strength of its property ads and used car sales — which remain its most popular categories for ads, featured prominently at the top of the site.
The tab for apartment sales leads users to a huge number of real estate listings, including for approximately 1,300 apartments and commercial spaces in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank alone, as of mid-January. Yad2 users can also find around 1,000 available rental apartments in Jewish-only settlements. Of those, paid posts from brokerages make up more than 800 sale listings, more than 100 rental listings, and more than 100 commercial real estate listings. The website features a map searchable by region — a map where Palestinian villages and towns seem to not exist.
The Yad2 listings encompass properties available for purchase or rent in some of the most ideologically extreme settlements in the West Bank, including Kochav Ha’Shachar, Kedumim, Talmon, Shilo, Eli, Psagot, Tekoa, Otniel, and Susiya. These settlements, like most of the Israeli housing development in the West Bank, exclusively cater to Jewish Israelis. Property acquisition or rentals within their gated communities often hinges on an internal approval process influenced, in part, by ideological considerations.
Israeli settlements are considered illegal under international law, which prohibits the transfer by an occupying army of its own civilians into occupied territory, according to the United Nations Security Council, other international bodies, and every nation in the world except for Israel and, as of the Trump administration, the U.S. The settlements are a key catalyst for escalating violence, killings, and routine house demolitions inflicted on Palestinians in the occupied territories. Israel distinguishes between settlements it considers to be legal, which make up the vast majority of settlements that exist in the West Bank, and unauthorized settlements known as outposts that are illegal even by the country’s own laws.
Yad2’s real estate listings promote properties in such outposts. As of last week, for instance, there were two listings for apartments in the community Bat Ayn B, north of the Palestinian city of Hebron, which Dror Etkes, an expert on Israeli settlements, said was a West Bank outpost that is unauthorized by the Israeli government. Neither of the ads were paid listings from brokerage houses. The recently removed one offered 500 square meters of land and a four-room unrenovated house, priced at 1.5 million shekels, or around $400,000. The other, still live, is for 700 square meters of land for 1.3 million shekels, or around $350,000.
“Israel made a decision many years ago to sacrifice the rule of law for land grabbing and intensifying its settler presence in the West Bank.”
Another posting, according to Etkes, lists land near the existing outpost Ma’ale Rehav’am, in a separate outpost unofficially named Nachal David 224, that was seized from Palestinians and put directly up for sale. (The ads for properties in Bat Ayn B and Nachal David 224 are privately placed listings, meaning the seller is not required to pay for the listing but can do so to promote it.)
Etkes, who founded Kerem Navot, an Israeli organization dedicated to monitoring settlement construction in the West Bank, also located two listings for land in settlements that was taken by the Israeli military in the 1970s for security reasons but is now being sold by brokerages in paid ads on Yad2.
The failure to distinguish between outposts and those settlements considered legal by Israel itself is routine in the country, said Etkes. “Israel made a decision many years ago to sacrifice the rule of law for land grabbing and intensifying its settler presence in the West Bank,” he said. “The law is treated as less than a recommendation.”
Etkes pointed out that, among other politicians, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and Simcha Rothman, a member of the Knesset who heads the Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee, reside in settlement homes that even Israeli law considers to be illegally constructed.
Springer’s revenue from ads for West Bank settlements homes isn’t limited to extant homes. Yad2’s sub-website, Yad1, also features an ad to buy into a construction project in the West Bank settlement of Ariel. Run by Israeli construction firm Ram Aderet, the project boasts accommodations for dozens of families, spanning buildings between three and eight floors, with four- to six-room apartments. Yad1 marketed the development under a geographic subsection titled “Judea and Samaria,” a term for the West Bank favored by Israel’s pro-settler right.
In another subsection, Yad1 markets apartments across Israel–Palestine exclusively for the religious Jewish population — something the company faced scrutiny for earlier this year in the Israeli media.
“This violates obligations under the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights,” said Human Right Watch’s Shakir.
The rights group previously pressured the home-rental giant Airbnb into removing of rentals in West Bank settlements from its platform, though the listings were eventually restored.
Airbnb was among the companies listed in a 2020 U.N. human rights release on firms involved in business with Israeli settlements. According to Shakir, the same logic applies to a platform like Yad2: Companies operating in settlements are profiting off the ongoing Israeli occupation.
Pointing to the horrors of Israel’s war in Gaza, Shakir noted that unchecked impunity for human rights abuses can escalate into even more severe violations. “We’ve repeatedly sounded the alarm on settlement construction and associated human rights abuses, which Human Rights Watch has identified as crimes against humanity, apartheid, and persecution,” Shakir said. “The key takeaway here is the imperative for ending impunity and ensuring accountability for grave abuses.”
The post German Media Giant Axel Springer Makes Money on Israel’s Illegal Settlements appeared first on The Intercept.
St. Louis County Prosecutor Seeks to Vacate Death Penalty Conviction of Marcellus Williams
St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell is seeking to vacate the conviction of Marcellus Williams, who was sent to Missouri’s death row in 2001 for a murder he swore he did not commit.
Forensic testing of the knife used to murder Felicia Anne Gayle Picus, a beloved former newspaper reporter, revealed male DNA that did not belong to Williams. That evidence, which supports Williams’s innocence claim, has never been reviewed by any court, Bell noted in a newly filed motion. “This never-before-considered evidence, when paired with the relative paucity of other, credible evidence supporting guilt … casts inexorable doubt on Mr. Williams’s conviction and sentence,” the motion reads.
Bell is invoking a relatively new provision of Missouri law that allows prosecutors to intervene in cases when they have “information that the convicted person may be innocent.” Bell asked the St. Louis County Circuit Court, where Williams was convicted, to set a hearing to consider the DNA evidence and other serious flaws in the case against Williams, including poor defense lawyering at trial and misconduct by prosecutors, who stuck qualified individuals from the jury pool because they were Black.
Bell’s office is also reviewing the police investigation of Williams to determine if it was “intentionally or recklessly deficient” and is conducting a probe into an “alternate perpetrator.” That inquiry involves forensic testing, which will take time, the motion notes. Still, Bell believes it is his duty now to ask the court to “correct this manifest injustice by seeking a hearing on the newfound evidence and the integrity of Mr. Williams’s conviction.” The request is all the more urgent because Missouri’s attorney general has asked the state Supreme Court to set a date for Williams’s execution.
Picus’s husband, Dan, came home from work on August 11, 1998, to find his wife dead. The former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter had been stabbed repeatedly, and the murder weapon, a knife from the couple’s kitchen, was left lodged in her neck. The house was full of forensic evidence: There were pubic hairs found near the body, bloody fingerprints on a wall, and a trail of bloody shoeprints. The kitchen had been ransacked, and closets and drawers upstairs had been opened. Not much of value was taken; Picus’s wedding ring and $400 in cash were still in her walk-in closet. But a few items were missing, among them Picus’s wallet and Dan’s old Apple laptop computer.
Despite the wealth of physical evidence, the case quickly stalled out. It wasn’t until months later, after Picus’s family posted a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of her killer, that a jailhouse informant named Henry Cole came forward with a story about his former cellmate, Marcellus Williams, whom he said had confessed to the murder. Police subsequently secured a second informant, Laura Asaro, Williams’s former girlfriend, who also claimed Williams was responsible.
There was ample reason for police and prosecutors to be wary of the accounts: The informants were both facing prison time for unrelated crimes and had a history of ratting on others to save themselves. Many of the details Cole and Asaro offered shifted over the course of questioning, while others did not match the crime. Nonetheless, Williams was charged with Picus’s murder. When Cole’s support for the endeavor appeared to flag before trial, prosecutors encouraged Dan to pay him $5,000 to secure his testimony.
Although Cole and Asaro were the foundation of the state’s case against Williams, painting him as a ruthless killer, their stories contradicted the physical evidence. Asaro claimed Williams had scratches on his face the day of the murder, yet no foreign DNA was recovered from under Picus’s fingernails. The bloody shoeprints in the house were a different size than Williams’s feet, and the pubic hairs found near Picus’s body didn’t belong to Williams. In his trial testimony, Cole claimed that Williams bragged about wearing gloves during the murder, despite the bloody fingerprints left behind. The fingerprints lifted by investigators were deemed unusable by the state and destroyed before the defense had a chance to analyze them.
The Apple computer, however, was eventually recovered by police. According to Asaro, Williams had given his grandfather’s neighbor the computer in exchange for crack cocaine. At trial, the neighbor denied that account, saying he’d paid Williams cash for the laptop. What the jury didn’t know was that the man also said Williams was pawning the computer for Asaro.
According to Bell’s motion, Williams’s trial attorneys provided him with ineffective representation by failing to call witnesses who could have undercut the credibility of Cole and Asaro. Among those witnesses was Cole’s son, Johnifer, who said that while Cole was locked up with Williams, he’d written Johnifer a letter to report that he had a “caper” going on and “something big” was coming.
Williams’s conviction was also tarnished by the prosecutors, who illegally struck several potential Black jurors from service. In one instance, a prosecutor said they hadn’t rejected the juror because he was Black, but because he “looked very similar” to the defendant. (The prosecutor also claimed he struck the juror because he was a mail processing supervisor for the postal service, and postal employees are “very liberal.” He did not use the same logic to disqualify a white postal employee.)
The St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office has a well-documented history of striking Black jurors from serving on death penalty cases, Bell noted in his motion. The prosecutors who handled Williams’s case have had at least two other death penalty convictions reversed by the Missouri Supreme Court based on such violations.
Williams’s lawyers requested DNA testing of crime scene evidence prior to his trial, but the court denied it. It wasn’t until 2015 — on the eve of Williams’s first execution date — that the Missouri Supreme Court stayed the case and ordered testing of the murder weapon, which ultimately revealed unknown male DNA. The court reset Williams’s execution for August 2017 without considering the impact of the DNA results on his conviction.
The Midwest Innocence Project, which represents Williams, turned to Missouri’s then-Gov. Eric Greitens, asking that he halt the execution and convene what’s known as a board of inquiry to investigate the case. On the day Williams was set to die, Greitens issued an executive order granting the request.
Greitens empaneled a five-member board of retired judges to “assess the credibility and weight of all the evidence.” The board was given subpoena power and tasked with making a final report to the governor “as to whether or not Williams should be executed or his sentenced of death commuted.”
Over the intervening years, the Midwest Innocence Project provided the board with a host of information and suggestions for lines of inquiry. Then, last June, Greitens’s successor, Gov. Mike Parson, abruptly dissolved the board of inquiry before it could report the findings of its investigation. It was time to move on, Parson said. The following day, Attorney General Andrew Bailey asked the Missouri Supreme Court to set an execution date for Williams.
The Midwest Innocence Project has sued to block the governor from disbanding the board. Parson’s order violated state statute, the lawyers argued, which requires a board of inquiry to issue a final report to the governor’s office. The dispute is pending before the Missouri Supreme Court.
In the meantime, Bell’s office and lawyers for Williams have asked the Missouri Supreme Court to hold off on setting an execution date while the St. Louis County Circuit Court considers Bell’s motion.
Until recently, what Bell is asking — for a judge to overturn a faulty conviction — would have been impossible. Prior to 2021, state law precluded local prosecutors from taking action to overturn wrongful convictions perpetrated by their predecessors.
The Missouri Attorney General’s Office has long expressed a perverse hostility to the plight of the wrongfully convicted. Back in 2003, the state Supreme Court considered the case of Joseph Amrine, who was on death row for a murder he did not commit. Amrine, who had exhausted his normal course of appeals, sought to press his innocence claim. The attorney general’s office argued that the court could not consider such a claim and Amrine’s execution was warranted. Was the office suggesting that “if we find that Mr. Amrine is actually innocent, he should be executed?” Judge Laura Denvir Stith asked. “That’s correct, your honor,” the assistant attorney general replied. The court later ruled in Amrine’s favor.
The office also fought back in the case of Lamar Johnson, who was sent to prison in 1994 for a murder he swore he didn’t commit. Kim Gardner, former elected prosecutor for the city of St. Louis, concluded that Johnson was innocent, but Attorney General Eric Schmitt, now a U.S. senator, insisted Gardner lacked the power to do anything about it. Gardner persisted in her efforts, landing the case before the Missouri Supreme Court in 2020, where the attorney general argued that giving a local prosecutor the power to right a wrongful conviction had “the potential to undermine public confidence” in the criminal legal system.
It took nearly two decades after the Amrine decision for the state legislature to pass the statute that allows prosecutors like Gardner and Bell to intervene in wrongful convictions. The first test of the new law came in late 2021, when Kansas City elected prosecutor Jean Peters Baker sought to overturn the more than 40-year-old wrongful conviction of Kevin Strickland. Baker’s efforts were ultimately successful, but not without a fight. During a court hearing on the case, lawyers for the attorney general’s office threw out myriad reasons Strickland should remain locked up. None were persuasive and the presiding judge freed Strickland just before Thanksgiving.
In one of her final acts before being ousted amid a political feud with the attorney general’s office, Gardner invoked the new law in Johnson’s case; he was exonerated last February.
If history is any guide, the attorney general’s office will oppose Bell and fight to keep Williams locked up despite the crumbling nature of the state’s case. The office has yet to issue a public response to Bell’s motion.
The “indirect evidence used to convict Mr. Williams has become increasingly unreliable,” Bell’s motion reads. “This, when considered alongside the new DNA expert testimony, undermines confidence in Mr. Williams’s conviction and accompanying death sentence.”
While the attorney general’s office has argued that challenging the righteousness of a conviction somehow tarnishes confidence in the system, Bell’s motion takes the opposite stance: “Public confidence in the justice system is restored, not undermined, when a prosecutor is accountable for a wrongful or constitutionally infirm conviction.”
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Major Florida GOP Donors Stand to Make Windfall Profits If Recreational Cannabis Is Legalized
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.
The post Major Florida GOP Donors Stand to Make Windfall Profits If Recreational Cannabis Is Legalized appeared first on The Intercept.
Dear Biden Apologists: Reproductive Justice Means Fighting for Gaza’s Women and Children
A pro-Palestinian demonstrator interrupts President Joe Biden’s remarks during a campaign event in support of abortion rights at George Mason University in Manassas, Va., on Jan. 23, 2024.
Photo: Craig Hudson/Sipa via AP Images
Protesters calling for an end to Israel’s war on Gaza confronted President Joe Biden earlier this week at his first major campaign rally, a Virginia event focused on abortion rights. As Biden spoke in favor of returning the baseline yet crucial protections of Roe v. Wade, demonstrators interrupted him every few sentences, shouting, “Genocide Joe!” and “ceasefire now!” One called out, “Israel kills two mothers every hour!”
In response, other crowd members cheered for the president and chanted, “Four more years!” — a particularly callous response to calls for an end to indiscriminate mass slaughter.
The event crystallized a false choice at the center of Biden’s presidential bid. As a rematch with Donald Trump looms, mainstream Democrats invoke the precarious state of U.S. reproductive rights to scold those who object to Biden based on his unending support for Israel’s genocidal war. Left-wing calls for a ceasefire in Gaza have been framed as a roadblock, one that stands in conflict with Biden’s fight to protect abortion access from further Republican decimation.
But feminists who protest Biden over Gaza — even those who say they will likely not vote for him — are not blind to the dangers of a second Trump presidency. They are not myopic single-issue voters, willing to throw reproductive rights under the bus. Feminists opposing Biden in the name of Palestinian liberation are highlighting the cynicism of a Democratic campaign running on women’s rights at home while enabling the systematic annihilation of women and children abroad.
Humanitarian agencies this month reported a 300 percent rise in the miscarriage rate in Gaza since Israel’s bombardment began. More than 10,000 children have been killed, and there is not a safe place in the besieged strip for a person to give birth. More than half of Gaza’s hospitals are completely shuttered, and the rest are barely functional; cesarean sections are performed without anesthesia. Alongside a lack of clean water, food, and medical supplies, menstrual products are largely inaccessible to Palestinians in Gaza, of whom 1.7 million have been internally displaced. The protester who shouted out “Israel kills two mothers every hour” was citing statistics from a case brought by South Africa this month, charging Israel with genocide at the International Court of Justice.
Apologists for the president are demanding that for the sake of our own imperiled reproductive freedoms, we must disregard the very meaning of reproductive justice when applied to the people of Gaza.
Young voters, in particular, are not convinced. “I think it would be hypocritical of me to use reproductive rights as a way to justify voting for Biden,” said Saba Saed, a young woman from Michigan, when interviewed by CBS’s “Face the Nation” last week. “Biden is aiding and sending military aid to Israel, which is airstriking Gaza and blocking humanitarian aid leading to women there who are pregnant either getting C-sections without anesthesia, not being able to be provided with prenatal care.”
After Saed’s interview clip drew ire from some Biden supporters, she posted a follow-up on X: “Biden caring about reproductive rights,” she wrote, “should be because he believes we need to have them, not because it guarantees votes.”
There can be no doubt that a Trump presidency and a Republican-led Congress would see an end to the shreds of abortion protections currently in place in this country. Just this week, Republicans in Tennessee and Oklahoma introduced travel ban bills that would make it a felony to help a minor leave the state to access abortion care. Nearly 65,000 pregnancies associated with rape occurred in the 14 states that have enacted abortion bans since the Dobbs decision to overturn Roe in 2022.
Biden warning’s that it could get far worse under Trump is as uninspiring as it is gravely real. It is all the more grim coming from a sitting president, who, in his own words, is “not big on abortion” and failed to expand federal abortion protections and provisions to their fullest possible extent in his current term.
Israel’s War on Gaza
The Roe v. Wade decision itself was always limited in its ability to support the bodily autonomy, health, and safety of women, particularly women of color. In the years following the 1973 ruling, Black feminist organizers led the demand for a framework of “reproductive justice” beyond reproductive rights, which encompasses far more than the right to end a pregnancy.
The fight for reproductive justice is the fight to produce, reproduce, and sustain life in conditions of freedom and safety — the very conditions the current administration is rendering impossible, from its own borders to Gaza. Accessing abortion in Palestine was extremely challenging prior to the war; now the challenge is staying alive to navigate any such choices and challenges at all.
Accessing abortion in Palestine was extremely challenging prior to the war; now the challenge is staying alive to navigate any such choices and challenges at all.
Asking feminists to limit their concerns to abortion access in the U.S. is to push a liberal nationalist feminism that simply inverts the Christo-fascism of white women Trump voters. Both are predicated on exclusionary border regimes, scarcity logic, and violence against women.
It’s not a good argument, however true it might be, that Trump would be just as devastating for Palestine. Inconvenient as it may be for his apologists, it is Biden who is currently president and who could at any point choose to be accountable to the vast majority of Democratic voters who want a ceasefire. It is Biden who claims to stand for women’s rights. It is not his protesters who are inconsistent on matters of justice. As Saed, the voter from Michigan interviewed on CBS, tweeted, “Do not blame me, blame Biden.”
The post Dear Biden Apologists: Reproductive Justice Means Fighting for Gaza’s Women and Children appeared first on The Intercept.
Will the Supreme Court Force Oklahoma to Kill Richard Glossip?
For the last four months, Richard Glossip and his wife, Lea, have had a regular Monday ritual. Glossip calls Lea from his death row cell first thing in the morning. Lea makes coffee in her Oklahoma City apartment while they talk. And then she opens the computer. “We would open the docket and check the orders list from the Supreme Court,” she said. “It’s always a huge moment that’s wrapped up with so many emotions and this kind of terrifying anticipation.”
In May, the court blocked Glossip’s looming execution while it decided whether to take up his most recent appeal. The couple knew that a decision wouldn’t come before the fall. But fall came and went as they dutifully made their weekly docket checks. Glossip’s case just wasn’t there. The court kept putting off its decision. Over time, they grew comfortable not knowing, relieved to be able to enjoy the holidays in relative peace after a long and stressful year.
Then on January 22, there it was. “All of a sudden, I said, ‘It’s there. I see Glossip.’” The court had decided to review the case. “I told him, ‘It’s granted! It’s granted!’”
Lea felt a rush of emotion. “It was really overwhelming.” She told Glossip to call his lawyer, Don Knight. “We’re going to Washington,” Knight responded.
The truth is that the situation is both a blessing and a curse. Glossip has learned the hard way not to put his faith in the Supreme Court. Nearly 10 years ago, Glossip was the named plaintiff in a challenge to Oklahoma’s controversial new lethal injection protocol. After oral arguments in the spring of 2015, the justices quickly dismissed concerns that the method could amount to torture. The ruling greased the wheels for Glossip’s execution, which would have gone forward later that year if not for a last-minute revelation that the state had procured the wrong combination of drugs, forcing it to call things off. The state later revealed that it had already used the same erroneous protocol to execute a different man.
The fallout over Glossip’s near-execution was swift. The state issued a moratorium on executions and an independent bipartisan commission was formed to study Oklahoma’s death penalty from top to bottom. In 2017, the commission issued a sweeping indictment of the system. Among its conclusions: The state of Oklahoma had condemned innocent people to death. The commission also offered a host of recommendations for reform; to date, virtually none of them have been implemented. In 2021, Oklahoma restarted executions using the same three-drug protocol as before.
Meanwhile, Glossip’s case began to draw more national attention — particularly after Investigation Discovery aired documentarian Joe Berlinger’s four-part series on the case. “Killing Richard Glossip,” which was inspired by The Intercept’s reporting, revealed evidence that undercut the state’s case against Glossip, while prompting new witnesses to come forward with information that bolstered his innocence claim. It also galvanized an unlikely contingent of supporters: Powerful state Republican lawmakers became convinced that Glossip was innocent. Determined to save him from execution, they rallied support among their peers and convinced the law firm Reed Smith to undertake a sweeping reinvestigation of the case.
The resulting 343-page report, released in 2022, painted the clearest picture to date of Glossip’s wrongful conviction. Among its revelations were stunning instances of prosecutorial misconduct. Nevertheless, no sooner had the explosive findings been made public than the state set a fourth execution date for Glossip.
That Glossip is alive today is thanks in no small part to the Oklahoma’s attorney general, Gentner Drummond, who took office in early 2023. In the first weeks of his term Drummond announced a separate independent inquiry into Glossip’s case by a former elected district attorney and GOP state lawmaker Rex Duncan. Duncan’s report highlighted additional instances of prosecutorial misconduct, prompting Drummond to conclude that the state could not stand by Glossip’s conviction — let alone his execution. In April 2023, Drummond took the unprecedented step of asking the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to vacate Glossip’s conviction. But the court refused, setting the stage for Glossip’s appeal to the Supreme Court. In a statement, Drummond applauded the justices’ decision to take Glossip’s case. “As Oklahoma’s chief law officer, I will continue fighting to ensure justice is done in this case and every other.”
Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond arrives to testify during the House Homeland Security Committee on Jan. 10, 2024.
Photo: Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images
Glossip was twice tried and sentenced to death for the January 1997 murder of Barry Van Treese inside a seedy Best Budget Inn that Van Treese owned on the outskirts of Oklahoma City. No physical evidence linked Glossip, the motel’s 34-year-old manager, to the crime. Instead, the case against him was built almost entirely on the testimony of 19-year-old Justin Sneed, who worked at the motel as a handyman.
Sneed admitted to murdering Van Treese but claimed that he was coerced by Glossip. On Sneed’s word alone, prosecutors theorized that Glossip wanted Van Treese dead so he could take over operations of the low-rent motel. At trial, they painted Sneed as powerless to resist Glossip’s commands. In exchange for testifying against Glossip, Sneed avoided the death penalty and was sentenced to life without parole.
Glossip has maintained his innocence, and over the years, evidence of his wrongful conviction has mounted. New evidence suggests that Sneed, a chronic drug user with a violent streak, initially planned to rob Van Treese, then killed him when the plan went sideways. Sneed implicated Glossip in this scheme during a coercive police interrogation. Witnesses who were ignored by police and prosecutors have since come forward to say that Sneed was cunning and manipulative and quite capable of killing a man on his own.
Murder at the Motel
The multiple inquiries into Glossip’s case have exposed startling police and prosecutorial misconduct. The state destroyed a box of crucial evidence before Glossip was retried in 2004, and prosecutors suppressed evidence that Sneed sought to recant his incriminating testimony. Notes found in the state’s case file also reveal that prosecutors knew that portions of Sneed’s testimony were false.
Sneed had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and prescribed lithium to manage it by a psychiatrist who evaluated him at the Oklahoma City Jail. At trial, Sneed denied that the evaluation ever took place and said he had no idea why he was given lithium. “I never seen no psychiatrist or anything,” Sneed testified. The prosecutors, who knew about Sneed’s diagnosis, failed to correct his testimony. This failure is in part what animated Drummond’s conclusion that Glossip’s conviction could not stand.
“There is no dispute that Sneed was the state’s key witness at the second trial. If Sneed had accurately disclosed that he had seen a psychiatrist, then the defense would have likely learned … the true reason for Sneed’s lithium prescription,” Drummond wrote in his motion asking the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to vacate Glossip’s conviction. “With this information plus Sneed’s history of drug addiction, the state believes that a qualified defense attorney likely could have attacked Sneed’s ability to properly recall key facts at the second trial.”
“The state has reached the difficult conclusion that the conviction of Glossip was obtained with the benefit of material misstatements to the jury by its key witness,” Drummond wrote.
The court dismissed Drummond’s conclusions, rejecting the idea that Sneed’s statement was false and suggesting that he was “more than likely in denial of his mental health disorders.” The defense didn’t cross-examine Sneed about his diagnosis, the court speculated, because doing so would have demonstrated that he was “mentally vulnerable to Glossip’s manipulation and control.” The ruling cleared the way for the state to set a new execution date for Glossip. Knight, his attorney, vowed to appeal to the Supreme Court, calling it “unconscionable” for the OCCA to “attempt to force the state to move forward with this execution” given the attorney general himself agreed that the state’s star witness had been discredited. The Supreme Court stayed Glossip’s execution just days before he was set to die.
Lea and Richard Glossip at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary on May 5, 2023.
Courtesy of Lea Glossip
In the rare number of death penalty cases that reach the Supreme Court, state attorneys general are typically in the position of defending the conviction. Glossip’s return to Washington is extraordinary in that Drummond has made clear to the justices that he supports Glossip’s bid to overturn the case.
“Regrettably, the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals refused to accept the state’s confession of error, instead reaching the extraordinary conclusion that Glossip’s execution must go forward,” Drummond wrote. “That decision cannot be the final word in this case.”
Drummond argued that the OCCA was wrong on both the facts and the law. Since Sneed was the “sole inculpatory witness” against Glossip, the state had a constitutional duty to turn over information about Sneed’s mental health diagnosis to the defense and a similar duty to correct his misleading testimony.
“The OCCA’s decision cannot be reconciled with this court’s precedents, the record in this case, or bedrock principles,” Drummond wrote.
Without Drummond to defend Glossip’s conviction, the state’s powerful prosecutors group, the Oklahoma District Attorneys Association, has stepped into the void. In a friend-of-the-court brief, they argue that the prosecutors in the case did nothing wrong, Sneed’s testimony was immaterial to Glossip’s conviction, there were no constitutional violations, and the OCCA was right to dismiss the case as little more than a frivolous attempt to delay Glossip’s execution. They accuse Drummond of being duped by an activist agenda. “Glossip and his abolitionist supporters are attempting to create the specter of an innocent person being executed, so that they can further their campaign against the death penalty.”
“These people will not admit that they’re wrong.”
Former Oklahoma County District Attorney David Prater, whose office oversaw Glossip’s prosecution, has staunchly defended the conviction, dismissing all evidence to the contrary as nothing more than a “bullshit PR campaign.”
Knight dismisses the DA’s brief as an unserious argument driven by political grievance. “This is us against the District Attorney’s Council,” Knight said. “These people will not admit that they’re wrong. And they can’t stand the fact that Drummond did admit that they were wrong.”
Oral arguments before the Supreme Court will likely take place in the fall. The court has never been solicitous of capital cases and has become even less so in recent years as its ideology has lurched to the right. Still, as he waits for his case to be presented a second time, Glossip feels perhaps more hopeful than ever. “Rich’s whole experience has been the ultimate loss of faith in the system,” Lea Glossip said. To see so many people willing to step up and fight for him has done much to restore his belief that he may finally walk out of prison one day. After the past year of unrelenting execution dates, “we are beyond grateful.”
For Knight, who has spent the better part of a decade fighting to keep his client alive, the court’s decision to take the case was a hard-won victory in a saga marked by exhilarating highs and devastating lows. But it’s not over yet. “I will feel vindicated the day Rich walks out of prison. I will feel vindicated then. Until then I can’t say because who knows what they’ll do.”
The post Will the Supreme Court Force Oklahoma to Kill Richard Glossip? appeared first on The Intercept.
FBI Overstepped Authority in Warrantless Search of Hundreds of Safe Deposit Boxes, Court Rules
The FBI overstepped its constitutional authority when agents searched hundreds of safe deposit boxes without warrants in 2021, a federal appeals court ruled. The court compared the FBI’s tactics to the kind of indiscriminate searches that led to the enactment of the Bill of Rights in the first place.
In March 2021, the FBI raided U.S. Private Vaults, a safe deposit box company in Beverly Hills, California. The company marketed its services around client anonymity and privacy, which appealed to gambling rings and drug operations, but also customers who were unable to get a deposit box at their bank or simply mistrusted banks and preferred to store their valuables elsewhere.
The FBI seized millions of dollars in cash from the deposit boxes, plus a mix of jewelry, personal effects, and documents such as wills and prenuptial agreements.
In litigation filed in federal district court in May 2021, victims of the raid argued that the FBI’s search “flagrantly” violated their Fourth Amendment rights. In October 2022, the trial judge ruled there was no Fourth Amendment violation.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously reversed the lower court’s decision on Tuesday. The court ruled that the FBI exceeded the bounds of a warrant obtained prior to the raid, which explicitly did not authorize any “criminal search or seizure” of the boxes’ actual contents.
The FBI’s warrant application omitted key details of the raid plan, including that the special agent in charge had directed agents to open every box, preserve fingerprint evidence, inventory the contents, and have drug dogs sniff all cash.
“If there remained any doubt regarding whether the government conducted a ‘criminal search or seizure,’” the 9th Circuit ruled, “that doubt is put to rest by the fact the government has already used some of the information from inside the boxes to obtain additional warrants to further its investigation and begin new ones.”
At oral argument in December, one of the three judges on the 9th Circuit panel called the FBI’s search of each safe deposit box without probable cause “egregious” and “outrageous.” Another likened the FBI’s actions to the maligned “general warrants” and “writs of assistance” issued in colonial times, which authorized British officials to search colonists’ homes indiscriminately for smuggled tea and other items.
The 9th Circuit’s opinion repeated these concerns. The court found it “particularly troubling” that the government “failed to explain” why its arguments “would not open the door to the kinds of ‘writs of assistance’ the British authorities used prior to the Founding to conduct limitless searches of an individual’s personal belongings.”
“It was those very abuses of power, after all, that led to adoption of the Fourth Amendment in the first place,” the court ruled.
Five days after being grilled at oral argument, the government tried to make the case go away without a precedent-setting ruling that the FBI’s actions were unconstitutional. Government attorneys filed a motion asking the 9th Circuit to give the plaintiffs what they wanted: an order to destroy records of the FBI’s search.
The government had fought against destruction of the records for more than two years, and plaintiffs’ attorneys were surprised by the about-face, which they called an attempt to “sweep a massive constitutional violation under the rug.”
The government did not, however, concede that the FBI’s raid was flawed. Instead, the government told the 9th Circuit that it wanted “to avoid a published judicial opinion impugning the actions or good faith motivations of law enforcement in this highly unusual case, in which a company was aiding criminality and protecting criminals by operating a vault of anonymous safe-deposit boxes.”
On Tuesday, the 9th Circuit issued the ruling the government feared, while also ordering the FBI to destroy records of the search, including copies in its evidence databases.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District of California declined to comment on the specifics of the ruling. “We are prepared to destroy records of the inventory search, which is the relief sought by the plaintiffs,” said Thom Mrozek, the office’s director of media relations.
“Today’s opinion draws a line in the sand,” said Rob Johnson, an attorney at the Institute for Justice, the libertarian nonprofit representing the plaintiffs. “If this had come out the other way, the government could have exported this raid as a model across the country. Now, the government is on notice its actions violated the Fourth Amendment.”
The post FBI Overstepped Authority in Warrantless Search of Hundreds of Safe Deposit Boxes, Court Rules appeared first on The Intercept.
Alabama Plans to Carry Out the First Execution Using Nitrogen Gas. A Lot Could Go Wrong.
The first time Jeff Rieber said goodbye to his longtime friend Kenneth Eugene Smith, the two men hugged and cried, their embrace inhibited by Smith’s handcuffs. The pair had spent roughly 30 years together on Alabama’s death row at Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, first bonding over their interest in the law and love of rock ‘n’ roll, then learning each other’s secrets and weaknesses and sharing the connection that came with witnessing more than 50 of their neighbors taken to the death chamber. But friends on the row came with an expiration date, and Smith’s had arrived.
As Smith’s execution began that evening in November 2022, the building shook as Rieber and his neighbors banged on the steel doors of their cells, a tradition meant to show solidarity. It usually took a while for news of an execution’s outcome to reach death row. Sometimes that came in the form of watching a body being loaded into a coroner’s vehicle. Smith, however, left the death chamber alive. Officials had called off his execution.
“I was blown away,” Rieber told The Intercept in a telephone interview. The celebration that erupted on death row soon turned to anger as they learned that executioners had stuck Smith with needles for two hours as they tried, and failed, to establish IV access to deliver lethal drugs. Smith was the second person in Alabama that year, and the third in four years, to survive execution because of problems finding a vein. Smith is “universally loved” on death row, Rieber said, and his neighbors were upset about what happened. “There was a lot of anger, a lot of unrest, a lot of tension. And the tension is building again.”
Alabama is slated to execute Smith on January 25. This time, the state is planning to suffocate him with nitrogen gas, an untested method that has never been used in an execution. Experts retained by Smith’s lawyers have warned that Alabama’s protocol could cause Smith to suffer a stroke, choke to death on vomit, or be left in a vegetative state.
The Alabama Department of Corrections, or ADOC, is planning to administer the gas through a hose hooked up to a respirator mask, but the state has kept many of the specifics a secret. “Within seconds, Smith will have no available oxygen to breathe inside the mask,” a court document filed last month by the office of Attorney General Steve Marshall stated. “That will render him unconscious and cause death.”
“Alabama has chosen to pick somebody they just tortured to use as a guinea pig for a brand-new method.”
In the face of the unknown, the state has offered little scientific evidence or expertise to assuage concerns, primarily relying on internal tests to ensure the system will work as planned. Smith’s lawyers, who are challenging the execution method, have accused the department of flouting safety guidelines and ignoring warnings from an expert in assisted suicide about the unreliability of the equipment they intend to use. In depositions, ADOC officials have acknowledged foregoing medical advice that could protect against problems arising during the execution.
Rieber likened Smith’s execution to a science experiment. “Alabama has chosen to pick somebody they just tortured to use as a guinea pig for a brand-new method because the one they used before didn’t work,” he said.
Alabama’s lethal injection chamber at Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Ala., on Oct. 7, 2002.
Photo: Dave Martin/AP
Smith was sentenced to death for his role in a 1988 murder-for-hire plot. Charles Sennett, a minister in the Church of Christ, recruited Smith and John Forrest Parker to kill his wife, Elizabeth, at their home in northwestern Alabama. The pair were paid $900 each, court documents show. Sennett died by suicide a week after the killing. Parker was sentenced to death and executed in 2010.
Smith was convicted of capital murder in 1989, but the courts ordered that his case be retried because the prosecution had illegally struck Black jurors. At his second trial, in 1996, the jury voted 11-1 to spare Smith’s life and sentence him to life without parole. Because judicial override was legal in Alabama until 2017, however, the judge was able to quash the jury’s recommendation and sentence him to death.
Alabama’s first attempt to carry out Smith’s death sentence was part of a string of botched executions in the state. Executioners jabbed needles in Smith’s arms and hands, according to a filing by his lawyers, then tilted the gurney in an “inverse crucifixion position.” They injected him with an “unknown substance” believed to be a sedative or anesthetic, the lawyers wrote, arguing that the execution subjected Smith to cruel and unusual punishment. The state denied placing Smith in this position or administering a sedative, which would run afoul of official policy. An executioner proceeded to use a large needle to try to establish IV access in Smith’s collarbone. The experience left Smith with “severe physical pain and emotional trauma,” he wrote in an affidavit.
Alabama lawmakers authorized nitrogen hypoxia as an execution method in 2018 after legal challenges alleging that condemned people had remained awake during painful lethal injections held up the state’s ability to carry out death sentences. The move followed the passage of similar bills in Oklahoma and Mississippi. Former Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian asked his legislature to adopt the method after watching the BBC documentary “How to Kill a Human Being,” which followed a British Parliament member-turned-journalist in his search for the perfect execution method. “It’s foolproof,” Christian said of nitrogen hypoxia.
The method works by depriving the brain of oxygen and replacing it with nitrogen, an odorless gas that makes up 78 percent of the earth’s atmosphere but is lethal when inhaled on its own. Nitrogen poisoning has killed nearly 100 people since 1992 in accidents at industrial plants, laboratories, and medical facilities. Since introducing nitrogen hypoxia as an execution method, however, neither Oklahoma nor Mississippi has come up with a way to carry it out. Oklahoma has reverted to lethal injection.
ADOC released a heavily redacted protocol last summer that detailed how it would carry out Smith’s execution.
The execution team will strap the mask on Smith’s face and monitor his oxygen levels with a pulse oximeter. Smith will pray and deliver his final statement with the mask on, according to the protocol. Officials then plan to administer nitrogen gas for either 15 minutes or five minutes after a flat line shows that Smith’s heart has stopped beating.
Not much is known about the architects of ADOC’s plans. Officials have been tight-lipped about the manufacturer of the system, making it difficult to evaluate its efficacy. They have also kept the nitrogen supplier a secret, although the gas is widely available for purchase. The state has entered into publicly available contracts with just two companies related to the use of nitrogen gas, and both have denied creating the protocol.
In 2019, officials hired FDR Safety, a workplace safety consultancy in Tennessee, to “research process methods,” “conduct task-based risk assessment,” “develop job instructions including safety requirements,” and “conduct hazard communication training.” The company terminated its contract in 2022 after pressure from anti-death penalty activists. Alabama refused to disclose its contract with FDR Safety or any reports the company drafted. Chief Operating Officer Steve Hawkins has maintained that his employees did not work on the execution protocol.
“The work that FDR Safety performed was limited to protecting the health and safety of the guards who work for the Alabama Department of Corrections,” Hawkins said in a statement at the time. “It was in no way associated directly with the protocols used to administer capital punishment.
Officials also tapped Daniel Buffington, a Florida pharmacist and founder of the drug consulting firm Clinical Pharmacology Services, to consult on nitrogen gas. An investigation we conducted for ProPublica found that Buffington made at least $354,000 testifying in favor of states’ lethal injection protocols between 2015 and 2023 and that his testimony “seemed to be exaggerating or misrepresenting the scope of what he could do as a licensed pharmacist.” (Buffington contested the investigation’s findings.)
In a 2022 interview, Buffington told us that he was asked by Alabama to answer questions “for a very brief period of time … about the pharmacology of the substances.” He said he did not perform any work on the state’s protocol.
The attorney general’s office and ADOC did not respond to questions from The Intercept about the development of the execution protocol.
The Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, Ala., on Jan. 27, 2022.
Photo: Jay Reeves/AP
As director of the assisted suicide organization Exit International, retired physician Philip Nitschke has spent more than two decades developing expertise in elective death procedures via lethal drugs, poisons, and gases like nitrogen, earning him the moniker “Dr. Death.”
Nitschke recently developed a euthanasia pod, an enclosed device that fills with nitrogen with the push of a button. But the way Alabama planned to conduct its nitrogen executions alarmed him. His work in the assisted suicide movement taught him that masks were ineffective, he said, because they failed to protect against leaks that could introduce outside oxygen. It was his opinion that the execution method would not bring about a “peaceful, reliable death.”
Facial hair could break the mask’s seal, Nitschke said, prolonging the process of dying even when people were fully cooperative. In other instances, facial muscles relaxed once unconsciousness kicked in, loosening the mask. In Alabama, Nitschke warned, these problems could prohibit enough nitrogen from reaching Smith and leave him in a vegetative state with permanent brain damage.
“Problems of mask fit, facial hair, and dynamic changes associated with alteration of the user’s facial and or muscle tone (as consciousness is lost or the person speaks) have been found to be unsolvable,” Nitschke, whom Smith’s team retained as an expert witness, wrote in a November court declaration. “The smallest air leak greatly increases the time to loss of consciousness and uncertainty regarding the outcome.”
Officials have dismissed those concerns. ADOC Commissioner John Hamm testified in a December deposition that he wasn’t aware that the mask needed to be airtight, a claim that Smith’s lawyers say contradicts the user manual.
Another doctor retained by Smith’s legal team warned that oxygen leaking into the mask could cause Smith to suffer a stroke or be left brain dead, which the state rejected as speculative. The doctor also said that Smith might vomit inside the mask, causing him to die by choking. Hamm said that his team considered that possibility but did not seek medical advice to mitigate the risk and will not intervene if Smith vomits once nitrogen starts flowing.
“If the person vomits while the nitrogen is engaged, we know that we cannot remove that mask,” ADOC Regional Director Cynthia Stewart confirmed in a December deposition.
“So you just let them sit there with the vomit in the mask?” Smith’s lawyer asked.
“They won’t know,” she replied. “They will be unconscious and probably deceased.”
Public documents show that officials have relied on state employees to conduct tests to ensure the protocol will work as intended.
After Nitschke laid out his initial concerns about Alabama’s protocol, Stewart wrote in an affidavit that she had “observed multiple persons wearing the mask with supplied breathing air, and none have reported any problems breathing.” She added, “I have also worn the mask under these conditions, and I was able to breathe comfortably.”
But the circumstances Stewart described would be drastically different than those during an execution, Smith’s lawyers argued, because the employees were breathing oxygen rather than nitrogen and were not experiencing the feelings associated with being executed. “Defendants’ evidence amounts to nothing more than their assurances that nothing will go wrong,” they wrote.
In an experiment conducted in August, ADOC officials placed the mask on top of sheets and a towel, according to a brief submitted by Smith’s legal team in December. An oxygen monitor was positioned beneath the mask to “document how quickly the oxygen decreased in the mask after the introduction of nitrogen,” a relevant metric to determine how quickly someone might become unconscious.
Dr. Joseph Antognini, a retired anesthesiologist who regularly testifies on behalf of states defending new execution methods, observed this demonstration and evaluated the nitrogen system at Holman. Antognini “did not find any issues related to how the air and nitrogen will be delivered,” Smith’s lawyers wrote, but he had limited experience administering gasses through a mask and did not evaluate how the mask would fit on Smith.
“I think that the trials effectively show very little at all, and I wouldn’t be drawing too much comfort from it.”
Nitschke said his fears about Alabama’s new method were confirmed when Smith’s lawyers invited him to Holman last month to evaluate the system for himself.
He was given the chance to replicate Smith’s experience up until the introduction of nitrogen. After climbing onto the execution gurney and having the mask strapped onto his head, it filled with oxygen, he told The Intercept. Nitschke discovered that by simply straining his jaw, he could displace the mask’s straps, a feature he said could introduce an oxygen leak.
Nitschke also said he was shown about a half dozen videos of tests that Alabama had conducted on the mask. He remained unconvinced that the execution would proceed as planned.
“I think that the trials effectively show very little at all, and I wouldn’t be drawing too much comfort from it,” he said. Referring to state officials, he added, “I’m surprised that they provide them with much comfort.”
Kenneth Eugene Smith pictured with his spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeff Hood, on Jan. 22, 2024.
Photo: Courtesy Jeff Hood
Smith’s lawyers are continuing to challenge the state’s use of nitrogen hypoxia in the courts. Last week, they filed an appeal with the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals after a lower court judge rejected Smith’s claims that he had been unfairly singled out for execution and the method violated his constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. Meanwhile, they asked the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay to review whether it’s constitutional for officials to try to execute Smith twice. “It will be only the second time in U.S. history that a state follows through with a second execution attempt after a previous, failed attempt,” the lawyers wrote.
Smith’s legal team is also urging Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey to halt Smith’s execution because of proposed legislation that would give people sentenced to death by judicial override a chance at resentencing. As governor, Ivey has the power to grant Smith clemency. Since taking office in 2017, however, she has overseen 13 executions and rejected all clemency applications submitted by people on death row, including Smith’s.
In an emailed statement to The Intercept on Monday, Ivey said that the current law on judicial override “honors the promises made to the family members of capital murder victims who have long waited for closure and justice.” She was optimistic about Alabama becoming the first state to carry out an execution with nitrogen. “This method has been thoroughly vetted,” she said. “I am confident we are ready to move forward.”
Smith has been nauseous and vomiting, according to a medical report filed by his lawyers. Doctors have prescribed him an anti-nausea medication. A judge on Monday refused to consider how that would weigh on his execution.
If the courts greenlight Smith’s execution, Smith’s spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeff Hood, will be present in the execution chamber. Hood invited the governor to join him, he said, but has not received a response.
Rieber plans to do what he always does. He’ll join others on death row in beating on the doors around 6 p.m., then try not to pay attention to the clock. It’s customary for people scheduled for execution to give away their belongings. Smith, an artist, gave Rieber two paintings. One, of a red betta fish, Smith painted recently. The other, of puppies, Smith made in the 1990s, when the two men first became friends. The paintings hang opposite one another in Rieber’s cell, an arrangement he hopes will protect them from fading in the sun.
Rieber knows his opinion of Alabama’s turn to nitrogen gas might ring hollow because he’s on death row for killing someone himself. But he shared it anyway. “Every time there’s a change in method, it’s always supposed to be a more humane method,” he said. “We’re waiting for people to understand that it’s not the method that’s humane or inhumane. It’s the killing of other citizens.”
“There’s not a method they can come up with that’s going to make people happy and content with killing.”
This story was supported by a grant from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights, in conjunction with Arnold Ventures.
The post Alabama Plans to Carry Out the First Execution Using Nitrogen Gas. A Lot Could Go Wrong. appeared first on The Intercept.
Inflation is always and eveywhere a conflict phenomenon
I was lured into a recent talk by The Monetary Policy Institute organised by Canadian professor Louis Philippe Rochon. As Stephanie Kelton had been invited and the title was, as above, “Inflation is always and everywhere a conflict phenominon”, I thought it was worth attending. So too did Steve Keen. The principal lecture was by... Read more
In Video From Gaza, Former CEO of Pegasus Spyware Firm Announces Millions for New Venture
It was an unusual place for a tech company to announce a successful $33 million round of venture capital fundraising. But, on November 7, former NSO Group CEO Shalev Hulio and two colleagues stood in the Gaza Strip, stared into a laptop’s built-in webcam, and did exactly that.
“We are here on the Gaza border,” said Hulio, the Israeli entrepreneur, on a little-noted YouTube video released by his new start-up, Dream Security. Hulio, a reservist who had been called up for duty, appeared in the video with a gun slung over his shoulder.
“It’s very emotional,” he said. “After all of us being here, some of us reserves, some of us helping the government in many other ways, I think that doing it here is a great message to the high-tech community and the people of Israel.”
Hulio, who stepped down from his role at NSO in August 2022, was sending a clear signal: He was back.
After a rocky few years, marred by revelations about the role of NSO’s spyware in human rights abuses and the company’s blacklisting by the U.S. government, Hulio and his team were using the moment — timed exactly one month after Hamas’s attack — to announce lofty ambitions for their new cybersecurity firm, Dream Security.
“Israeli high-tech is not only here to stay, but will grow better out of this,” said Michael Eisenberg, an Israeli American venture capitalist and Dream co-founder, in the promo video. “It’s going to deliver on time, wherever it’s needed, to whatever country or whatever company it’s needed at.”
Their new project is another cybersecurity company. Instead of phone hacking, though, Dream — an acronym for “Detect, Respond, and Management” — offers cyber protection for so-called critical infrastructure, such as energy installations.
Dream Security builds on the successful team NSO put together, with talent brought on board from the embattled spyware firm. At least a dozen of NSO’s top officials and staffers, along with an early investor in both NSO and Dream, followed Hulio to Dream since its founding last year.
Lawyers for Dream Security who responded to The Intercept’s request for comment said the companies were distinct entities. “The only connection between the two entities is Mr. Hulio and a small portion of talented employees who previously worked at NSO Group,” said Thomas Clare, a lawyer for Dream, in a letter. Liron Bruck, a spokesperson for NSO Group, told The Intercept, “The two companies are not involved in any way.”
“It’s worrying. It seems like a new way to whitewash NSO’s image and past record.”
Now, with so many NSO people gathered under a new banner, critics are concerned that their old firm’s scandals will be forgotten.
“It’s worrying,” said Natalia Krapiva, tech-legal counsel at Access Now, a digital rights advocacy group. “It seems like a new way to whitewash NSO’s image and past record.”
At the same time, NSO Group is also using Israel’s war effort to try and revamp its own reputation. After Pegasus, NSO’s phone hacking software, was exposed for its role in human rights abuses and the firm was blacklisted in the U.S., the company suffered years of financial troubles. In the new year, it seemed to be bouncing back, with Israeli media reporting on its expansion and reorganization.
Clare, Dream’s lawyer, stressed that Hulio was no longer affiliated with NSO. “Currently, Mr. Hulio holds no interest in NSO Group—not as an officer, employee, or stockholder,” Clare wrote to The Intercept. “Since Dream Security’s foundation in late 2022, he has exclusively led the company.”
With Hulio at its helm, Dream boasts an eclectic and influential leadership team with connections to various far-right figures in Israel, Europe, and the U.S. — and an ambitious plan to leverage their ties to dominate the cybersecurity sector.
A view of the entrance of the Israeli cyber company NSO Group branch in the Arava Desert on Nov. 11, 2021, in Sapir, Israel.
Photo: Amir Levy/Getty Images
New Mission, Same Executives
Hulio has said that, with Dream, he moved from the “attack side to defense” — focusing on defending infrastructure, including gas and oil installations. A jargon-laden blurb for the company brags that it delivers surveillance to detect threats and an unspecified “power to respond fast.”
“Dream Security’s product is a defensive cybersecurity solution to protect critical infrastructure and state-level assets,” Clare said. “Dream Security is not involved in the creation, marketing, or sale of any spyware or other malware product.”
Clare said that Dream’s mission is “to enable decision-makers to act promptly and efficiently against any actual and potential cyber threats, such as malware attacks committed by states, terrorist organizations, and hacker groups, among others.”
Kathryn Humphrey, another Dream lawyer and an associate at Clare’s firm, said in one of a series of emails, “Dream Security is not involved with offensive cyber, nor does it have an intention of becoming involved with offensive cyber. Dream Security is developing the world’s best AI-based defensive cyber security platform, and that is its only mission.”
The Intercept found that 13 former NSO staffers now work at Dream Security — about a fifth of the new company.
The mission may be new, but Dream is staffed in part by NSO veterans. A recent report from the Israeli business press said Dream has 70 employees, 60 of them in Israel. The Intercept found that 13 former NSO staffers now work at Dream Security — about a fifth of the new company.
“Dream Security recruited the best talent to achieve its goal of becoming the globally leading AI-based cyber security company,” said Humphrey in a letter to The Intercept. “A small minority is top talent from NSO Group, including executives and other employees.”
In addition to Hulio himself, former top NSO officials permeate the upper echelons of Dream. From the heads of sales to human resources to their legal departments, at least seven former executives from NSO now hold positions at Dream in the same jobs. Five additional Dream employees — from security researchers to software engineers and marketing designers — formerly worked at NSO.
Dream’s lawyers told The Intercept that the “only overlap” between the companies were Hulio and former NSO employees, but other people tie NSO history and Dream’s present together. In one case, it was familial: Gil Dolev, one of Dream’s founders, is the brother of Shiri Dolev, who, according to NSO spokesperson Bruck, was NSO Group’s president until last year. (Shiri Dolev did not respond to a request for comment.)
The two companies also share at least one investor. Eddy Shalev, the first investor in NSO, told The Intercept he had put money into Dream. “I was an early investor in NSO,” Shalev said. “I am no longer involved with NSO. I did invest in Dream Security.”
Asked about Shalev’s investments in Dream and NSO, Humphrey said, “While Eddy Shalev is a valued investor, he is not a major investor—his investment is roughly 1% of the overall amount invested in Dream Security.”
Former Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz arrives at court on the first day of his trial in Vienna on Oct. 18, 2023. Kurz is charged with making false statements to a parliamentary inquiry into alleged corruption in his first government.
Photo: Heinz-Peter Bader/AP
Austria’s Mini-Trump
From its inception, Dream Security’s strategy was based around an in-house connection to the international right. Former Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, dubbed “Austria’s mini-Trump,” is a Dream co-founder.
The former chancellor was forced to step down from the Austrian government in October 2021, facing corruption allegations and he remains on trial for related charges.
Along the way, Kurz had made powerful friends. He reportedly has relationships with top officials around Europe and the U.S., including right-wing Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán, and Jared Kushner, former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and former top adviser. Last year, Kurz joined Kushner on the honorary advisory council to the Abraham Accords Peace Institute, a group set up to foster normalization between Israel and Gulf monarchies like the United Arab Emirates — the very authoritarians that used NSO’s Pegasus software to crack down on dissidents.
For all his connections to powerful politicians, experts said Kurz was never purely an ideologue. “Kurz is really a political professional,” said Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik, a professor of Austrian politics at the University of Vienna. “He never struck anybody as extremely convicted of anything. I think his personal career and business were always the number one priority.”
“Kurz is really a political professional. … I think his personal career and business were always the number one priority.”
Once Kurz was out of government, he pivoted to the world of tech investment. He first met the cyber-spying titan Peter Thiel in 2017 and landed a job at one of the far-right billionaire’s firms, Thiel Capital, in 2021. Thiel, one of the largest donors to right-wing causes in the U.S., is deeply involved in the world of spy tech: His company Palantir, which allows for the sorting and exploitation of masses of data, helped empower and expand the U.S. government’s international spy machine.
When Dream’s creation was announced, Kurz’s connections to Thiel — and therefore Palantir — raised alarms. In the European Parliament, lawmakers in the Committee of Inquiry to investigate the use of Pegasus and equivalent surveillance spyware took note.
“The cooperation between Kurz and Hulio constitutes an indirect but alarming connection between the spyware industry and Peter Thiel and his firm Palantir,” said a committee report earlier this year. (Thiel is not involved with NSO or Dream, a person familiar with his business told The Intercept.)
In November, nearly 80 percent of the European Parliament voted to condemn the European Commission for not doing enough to tackle spyware abuse, including NSO’s Pegasus software, across member states.
Questions have cropped up about whether Dream will, like NSO before it, sell powerful cybersecurity tools to authoritarian governments who might use them for nefarious purposes.
Asked by the Israeli business publication Globes about where Dream would sell its wares, Kurz said, “This is a company that was founded in Israel and is currently looking to the European market.”
According to Globes, Kurz was brought on to open doors to European governments. Dream has said that its customers already include the cybersecurity authority of one major European country, though it has declined to say which.
Over time, Europe has become a strong market for commercial cybersecurity firms. Sophie in ’t Veld, a European parliamentarian from the Netherlands who led the charge on the Pegasus committee resolution, told The Intercept, “Europe is paradise for this kind of business.”
The Israeli Right
Dream’s right-wing network is nowhere more concentrated than in Israel itself. Venture capitalist Dovi Frances, a major Republican donor who led Dream’s recent $33 million fundraising round, is close to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And Lior Atar, head of cyber security at the Israeli Ministry of Energy for six years, was directly plucked from his government role to join Dream earlier this year.
Dream officials’ entanglement with the Israeli right also extends to grassroots right-wing movements. Two investors and Hulio are involved in a ground-level organization considered to be Israel’s largest militia, HaShomer HaChadash, or “the new guardians.” A Zionist education nonprofit established in 2007, HaShomer HaChadash says it safeguards Israel’s agricultural lands, largely along the Gaza border.
“I look forward to building Dream, against all odds, to become the world’s largest cybersecurity company. Mark my word: It fucking will be.”
Eisenberg, the Dream co-founder, chairs HaShomer HaChadash’s board. Hulio became a HaShomer HaChadash board member in May 2017 — a month before NSO Group was put up for sale for $1 billion — and has donated nearly $100,000 to the group. (Neither Dream nor HaShomer HaChadash responded to questions about whether Hulio remains on the board.) Another Dream investor, Noam Lanir, has also been vocal about his own contributions to the organization, according to Haaretz.
HaShomer HaChadash has a budget of approximately $33 million in 2022, of which over $5 million came from the government, according to documents filed with the Israeli Corporations Authority. The group is staffed in part by volunteers as well as active-duty personnel detailed from the Israeli military.
“They seem like a mainstream organization,” said Ran Cohen, chair of the Democratic Bloc, which monitors anti-democratic incitement in Israel. “But in reality, the origins of their agenda is rooted in the right wing. They have also been active in illegal outposts in the West Bank.”
For Dream, HaShomer HaChadash is but one node of its prolific links to the right at home and abroad. With those connections and the business chops that brought the world NSO Group, Dream — as the name itself suggests — has large ambitions. “I look forward to building Dream, against all odds, to become the world’s largest cybersecurity company,” Frances, the VC, said from the U.S. in the YouTube video announcing the successful fundraising drive. “Mark my word: It fucking will be.”
The post In Video From Gaza, Former CEO of Pegasus Spyware Firm Announces Millions for New Venture appeared first on The Intercept.