President Biden was sworn into office Wednesday under the shadow of the Jan. 6 insurrection with a pledge to take down the kind of extremists who took over the Capitol. To help lead that effort, he has tapped a distinguished veteran of the War on Terror—an appointment that raises the question of whether the new administration will draw from a disastrous conflict with jihadists to confront […]
Spencer Ackerman
27 posts
The Trumpist mob that descended on Washington to coerce lawmakers into illegally overturning an election in favor of its loser was shocked to meet resistance from police. Had they not been the ones waving Blue Lives Matter flags ever since Ferguson, the ones defending police every time an officer knelt on a Black neck, bodyslammed a Black teenage girl, shot a Black 12-year old boy dead […]
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is calling on the head of the Capitol Police to be fired for the security failure that saw Trump supporters violently invade the Capitol building, leading to police shooting at least one insurrectionist. “There was a failure at the top of the Capitol Police, and I think Mr. [Steven] Sund — he hasn’t even called us,” Pelosi said at a press conference […]
An early-morning explosion in downtown Nashville is believed to be “an intentional act,” according to the city’s police. Imagery from the scene showed black smoke shooting up from a burning car. Nashville fire personnel reported taking three people to area hospitals with non critical injuries. But the blast knocked down trees and blew out windows from multiple storefronts nearby the Cumberland River. Video making its way […]
PATRICK BAZ/AFP via Getty Iraqis, of course, recognized President Trump’s clemency for the four Blackwater contractors who murdered 17 men, women and children at Baghdad’s Nisour Square for what it is. It is the latest reminder that they possess no rights, no matter how basic, the ascendant global superpower is bound to respect. The Iraqi Foreign Ministry, reacting to Trump’s Tuesday night pardons of four convicted […]
First the coronavirus spread inside the Lyons, New Jersey, long-term Veterans Affairs facility and ravaged residents and staff. Then came what workers and veterans described as indifference and neglect from Lyons administrators as the bodies piled up and the lockdown dragged on. But to them, the worst part, the part that is ongoing nine months into the COVID-19 outbreak in America, has been watching people who […]
It’s more likely than not, as of this writing, that Joe Biden will defeat Donald Trump once the final votes are counted. That is only a half a victory for the alliance of centrist Democrats and national security veterans known colloquially as the #Resistance. That loose coalition, influential amongst Democratic elites and prominent on social media, was looking not only for a Biden victory but a […]
Despite President Trump’s claimed antipathy to Mideast wars, he has dramatically escalated U.S. counterterrorism activity in Yemen, far beyond the levels he inherited from Barack Obama, according to a new assessment from a leading counterterrorism watchdog. A just-released report from Airwars, one of the most persistent researchers of wars waged under a veil of official secrecy, finds that the U.S. military and CIA launched up to […]
Texas highways are not and have never been strewn with homemade bombs. Yet Texas police have over 100 MRAPs, the armored vehicle with a blast-resistant hull that U.S. service members drove in Iraq and Afghanistan. Tennessee cops have 86 more. Ohio police have 43. It’s just one measure of how militarized American policing has become since 9/11. And it’s a component of a larger one. Police […]
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement guard at an immigration jail in Virginia knelt dangerously on the upper back of a man already bleeding from his head, two detained men who said they saw the disturbing incident told The Daily Beast. “It was like seeing George Floyd all over again,” said one detainee, whom The Daily Beast will call Glenn. Since the incident on Monday, July 13, […]
A day after President Donald Trump announced that over 200 federal officers will swarm into Chicago, representatives of the city’s Black Lives Matter chapter and affiliated movements have filed a lawsuit to prevent what they consider the repression to come. Black Lives Matter v. Wolf, filed on Thursday in Chicago federal court, seeks an injunction “permanently enjoining” Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security personnel […]
The surge has come home. Using language borrowed from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, President Trump on Wednesday unveiled an open-ended deployment of Justice Department, FBI, and Homeland Security officers to Chicago—a place whites have often described in euphemistic and racist terms—and, to a lesser extent, Albuquerque. Trump, joined by Attorney General Bill Barr, Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Chad Wolf and FBI Director Chris […]
The first person the U.S. government ever detained indefinitely under the 2001 Patriot Act has gone free. Adham Amin Hassoun, whose Kafkaesque experience during the 9/11 era turned him into the U.S.’ first post-conviction terrorism detainee, has left the U.S. for an unnamed country, his lawyers said. After Hassoun’s conviction expired in 2017, the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department had sought unreviewable authority […]
At the end of April, Florida federal Judge Marcia Cooke ruled that Immigration and Customs Enforcement prisons were such a tinderbox for the novel coronavirus that ICE had to begin efforts at letting people out. The dangers of the pandemic inside three immigrant-detention centers in the state threatened to put ICE on the wrong side of constitutional prohibitions on cruel and unusual punishment. Thousands of miles […]
Not long before Christmas in 2017, Vladimir Putin, the former KGB officer turned Russian leader, did something uncharacteristic. He praised the CIA. Russian security officials had arrested people on suspicion of plotting terrorist attacks on St. Petersburg sites that included the majestic Kazan Cathedral. Intelligence warning of the allegedly imminent assault attacks came not from Russian sources, but from Langley. “The information received from the CIA […]
The rise of a former deputy CIA director on Joe Biden’s transition team is drawing furious objection from the left—to the shock of her colleagues in the Obama administration, who believe Avril Haines’ record in government ought to endear her to progressives. In late June, the Biden campaign announced that Haines, an attorney who served as deputy director of the CIA from 2013 to 2015, will […]
It would be hard for any attorney general to withstand a deputy attorney general of the same party calling him “the greatest threat in my lifetime to our rule of law.” It would be harder still to withstand congressional testimony from two serving Justice Department prosecutors about his subordination of justice to the wishes of the president. But Bill Barr had a fantastic day in Congress […]
One of the prosecutors who quit the Roger Stone case in disgust over interference from Attorney General Bill Barr will tell the House Judiciary Committee that the “highest levels of the Department” wanted to spare Stone, a friend of the president’s, years of prison time. “What I heard—repeatedly—was that Roger Stone was being treated differently from any other defendant because of his relationship to the President,” […]
Just eight months after the Trump administration invoked an obscure provision of the 2001 Patriot Act to hold him indefinitely, Adham Amin Hassoun is on the verge of taking his first free breath in 18 years, after a federal judge raised “serious concerns about governmental conduct” in the now-junked case against him. “There’s nothing that tastes better than freedom,” Hassoun, 58, told The Daily Beast from […]
Navy Capt. Brett Crozier has been vindicated after warning of a dire coronavirus outbreak aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt—just not by the Navy, which on Friday announced that it will not reverse Crozier’s firing for the infraction of trying to save his sailors’ lives. Instead, the Navy leadership implied that Crozier was responsible for the outbreak that he loudly warned he needed urgent help from the […]
The Trump administration is taking seriously a shocking claim from its enemy in Afghanistan that the Taliban foiled an Islamic State plot to assassinate a senior U.S. diplomat, U.S. officials confirm to The Daily Beast. Officials said they’re investigating an assertion, made in a recent Taliban video, that the local branch of the so-called Islamic State recruited two men to murder Zalmay Khalilzad, the State Department’s […]
Monday’s landmark ruling by the Supreme Court that LGBTQ discrimination is illegal sex discrimination means that the U.S. military is now the last employer discriminating against transgender people. While the ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County doesn’t automatically kill the military’s transgender service ban, several attorneys said today’s ruling is the ban’s death knell —including one who will soon argue against the ban in court later. […]
At least some of the highly alarming, unidentified federal police auxiliaries deployed within the nation’s capital will stand down, according to representatives from the Department of Homeland Security. “CBP is demobilizing personnel and they will be returning to their routine duties,” a spokesperson for Customs and Border Patrol told The Daily Beast on Monday. An Immigration and Customs Enforcement official told The Daily Beast that its […]
Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are pressing Attorney General William Barr and his former aide, the acting head of the Drug Enforcement Agency, to end its spying on people protesting against institutional racism in policing. Not only do Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Homeland Security Subcommittee Chair Karen Bass (D-CA) say the DEA’s apparent surveillance is unwarranted, they point out that the DEA has a […]
As President Trump walked through Lafayette Park shortly after police, backed by National Guardsmen, used tear gas and rubber bullets on peaceful protesters, there was a man in uniform accompanying him. He was not just any man and he wore not just any uniform. He was Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the senior-most officer in the U.S. military. He […]
John Durham, the federal prosecutor assigned by Attorney General William Barr assigned to review Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia probe, still hasn’t interviewed at least five key potential witnesses or targets, multiple sources familiar with the issue told The Daily Beast. According to four sources familiar with the developing probe, Durham has yet to interview several former senior officials involved in the origins of the intelligence and law […]
Days after the Justice Department controversially dropped charges against Mike Flynn, Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is set to expand a highly political Justice Department’s surveillance authorities during a vote this week to renew the 2001 PATRIOT Act. Under cover of redressing what President Trump and his allies call the FBI’s “witch hunt” over collusion with the Kremlin, McConnell, via an amendment to the PATRIOT […]