In 2019, Erik Prince, the founder of the notorious mercenary firm Blackwater and a prominent Donald Trump supporter, aided a plot to move U.S.-made attack helicopters, weapons, and other military equipment from Jordan to a renegade commander fighting for control of… Read More ›
Tag Archive for ‘Special Investigations’
How Iran Tried to Recruit Spies Against the U.S. in Iraq
The Iraqi had a lot to prove to his Iranian spy handler. For years, the Iraqi had secretly spied for Iran, providing valuable intelligence about American operations in Iraq. But when the United States withdrew most of its troops and… Read More ›
Millions of Leaked Police Files Detail Suffocating Surveillance of China's Uyghur Minority
The order came through a police automation system in Ürümqi, the largest city in China’s northwest Xinjiang region. The system had distributed a report — an “intelligence information judgment,” as local authorities called it — that the female relative of… Read More ›
Border Patrol Politicization Was Explicit Under Trump. It's Up to Biden to Contain It.
The National Border Patrol Council’s Twitter account was firing on all cylinders. The union, which represents roughly 18,000 Border Patrol agents, spent October and early November feeding its followers an unending stream of hardcore “Make America Great Again” election content…. Read More ›
Facebook Lets Vietnam's Cyberarmy Target Dissidents, Rejecting a Celebrity's Plea
For the past two years, Do Nguyen Mai Khoi has been trying painfully, futilely, to get Facebook to care about Vietnam. The Vietnamese singer and pro-democracy activist, known best simply as Mai Khoi, has tried tirelessly to warn the company of a… Read More ›
A U.S.-Backed Militia That Kills Children May Be America's Exit Strategy From Its Longest War
The buzz of a drone at night was the first sign of trouble. Next came the roar of a larger, low-flying aircraft, which alerted residents of the Afghan village of Omar Khail that soldiers were nearby. Men in camouflage moved… Read More ›
Congress Has the Power to Override Supreme Court Rulings. Here’s How.
From 1979 until her retirement in 1998, Lilly Ledbetter worked at Goodyear Tire and Rubber’s plant in Gadsden, Alabama. Once she had left the job, she learned a disturbing fact. When Ledbetter had started, her supervisor salary was comparable to… Read More ›
Move Over, Hunter Biden. Meet Eric Branstad, the China Ambassador’s Son Who Got Rich in Trump’s Swamp.
In April 2018, the Trump administration banned Chinese telecom equipment giant ZTE from buying American-made parts, threatening to cripple the company’s worldwide operations. An opening salvo in Trump’s trade war with China, the measure was extreme. But ZTE had violated… Read More ›
Online lenders are preying on desperate borrowers and could trigger a new consumer financial crisis
The economic cataclysm brought on by the coronavirus caught American consumers in an extremely precarious position — one that was evident well before more than 50 million people filed for unemployment. By the end of last year, Americans had racked… Read More ›
Sen. Thom Tillis is an avatar for the GOP’s reactionary turn to the right. Now, his proximity to Trump could consume him.
This past April, Thom Tillis sat down for an interview with a conservative radio host in North Carolina, where the first-term senator is struggling in his bid for reelection. Tillis has been unable to create much of an independent following among… Read More ›