AIPAC has been funneling money into the campaign of Dr. Ala Stanford in Pennsylvania’s 3rd congressional district, before the next slate of Democratic primaries, new federal campaign filings reveal.

Stanford has denied taking AIPAC money in the race for an open Philadelphia seat, but the records show the pro-Israel group has been secretly routing money directly to her campaign and into a super PAC supporting her that backs candidates who are involved in science or medicine. The structure allows Stanford, a pediatrician, to distance herself from the group’s increasingly toxic political reputation with the American public, while still benefiting from its cash outlays.

The super PAC is called 314 Action Fund, and as of April 21, had spent more than $2.6 million boosting Stanford, according to the latest filings. The group’s most recent monthly filing reveals a $500,000 donation from Kimbark Foundation, a group whose only other donation is $500,000 to EDW Action Fund, another PAC that has previously acted as an AIPAC shell organization. In the 2024 cycle, AIPAC used EDW Action to secretly funnel money to support Maxine Dexter, also a pediatrician, in her race against Susheela Jayapal in Oregon. It’s stated purpose is to elect pro-choice Democratic women. 314 Action has reported just $2.8 million in independent expenditures, meaning their support for Stanford represents the bulk of their independent spending so far.

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Stanford has also taken in more than $27,000 through Democracy Engine from major AIPAC donors in the first quarter of 2026; Democracy Engine is a vehicle used by AIPAC to bundle donor money and funnel it to preferred candidates.

Stanford raised eyebrows when she made the argument that referring to Israel’s genocide in Gaza as a genocide was tantamount to using the “N-word,” calling it “the G-word.”

“I know when you use the G-word how hurtful it is to a group of people,” she said. “It’s like someone saying the N-word around me.” She was recently pressed on her answer, and doubled down, saying, “For Israelis who’ve been accused of committing it, it’s hurtful for them.”

Neither Stanford nor AIPAC responded to requests for comment. Asked about reporting from 2024 that AIPAC was using 314 Action as a subsidiary to donate to candidates outside of its name or ideological affiliation, Stanford denied taking any money from AIPAC, whether directly or funneled through 314 Action, in a candidate forum on March 30: “That’s not me. Not to my [campaign].”

Erik Polyak, 314 Action executive director, declined to respond to detailed questions from Drop Site, and instead spoke generally about its pro-science mission, while noting accurately that the group has on occasion gone up against AIPAC. While that’s true, it doesn’t speak to the Philadelphia race. “314 Action’s only mission is to elect doctors and scientists,” Polyak said. “Founded in 2016, we have existed for ten years and provide operational, financial and communications support to help STEM candidates run winning campaigns.”

Polyak noted that 314 Action had supported Daniel Biss in the recent Chicago race, while AIPAC was backing Laura Fine. That 314 Action is not always aligned with AIPAC can make them more useful when they are.

In 2024, Polyak vociferously denied 314 Action was funneling money from AIPAC. “The day before the May 21 primary election in Oregon, 314 Action’s executive director Erik Polyak wrote on Twitter that he was waiting on [Drop Site] reporter Ryan Grim to issue a retraction,” reported the news outlet Sludge. “The tweet showed a screenshot of 314 Action’s FEC filing information for April, which did not show an AIPAC-affiliated group. When 314 Action’s next monthly FEC filing was released on June 20, it showed the $1 million donation from UDP.”

Polyak this cycle is not attempting such a strident denial, as campaign finance records will continue to be released, though many of them will be too late to inform voters ahead of the primary.

Stanford on Thursday announced endorsements from Democratic Reps. Madeleine Dean and Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania. She faces Sharif Street Jr., a local machine-backed state legislator, and State Rep. Chris Rabb, who has the support of DSA-Philly, Justice Democrats, and a growing number of progressive Democrats like Reps. Jamie Raskin and Ro Khanna.

EDW was created on December 22, 2023 and in May 2024 was given $100,000 by United Democracy Project (UDP), AIPAC’s official super PAC, which it spent in the Dexter-Jayapal race. That same month, UDP sent $1 million to 314 Action and $1.3 to “Voters for Responsive Government.” The three super PACs combined to swamp Jayapal, making Dexter a member of Congress. In the 2026 cycle, AIPAC funneled more than $10 million into Illinois Democratic primaries, spending heavily to back Fine in one primary. But AIPAC’s shell PACs—called “Elect Chicago Women” and “Affordable Chicago Now”—were outed as fronts for the pro-Israel group. In swept EDW Action Fund.

The Kimbark Foundation registered as a Delaware nonprofit on December 19, 2025. On February 23, 2026, Kimbark transferred $500,000 to EDW Action Fund, which in March disclosed it was spending on behalf of Laura Fine. In March 2026, Kimbark transferred $500,000 to 314 Action Fund.

On March 10, according to the new FEC filings, 314 Action transferred $2,000,000 to 314 Action Fund, further obscuring the origin of the money. (Not all of 314 Action Fund’s money comes from AIPAC or its donors, of course; for instance, Nobel Prize winner Drew Weissman gave $240,000 in March to the group and also donated directly to Stanford. What makes 314 Action valuable as a pass-through vehicle is that some of its money is authentically related to pro-science politics, while at other times it disguises money for AIPAC. Other AIPAC shells act only as shells.)

Margot Pritzker, wife of Tom Pritzker, recently ousted from his role as head of Hyatt due to his links to Jeffrey Epstein, gave $50,000 to 314 Action Fund on January 21, 2026.

This tactic, also used in the New Jersey 11th district special election—in that race a popup group called the Guzman Foundation did the work— involves creating new 501(c)4 organizations that previously didn’t exist specifically in order to hide money and its ideological ties, giving cover to pro-Israel Democrats who want to avoid the group’s toxicity.

In NJ-11, that strategy ultimately failed, sending former Bernie Sanders’ aide Analilia Meijia to Congress. The Guzman foundation was eventually linked to the billionaire financier Robert Granieri, of Jane Street Capital. An entity called Article One Inc. had spent $350,000 to back the AIPAC candidate in that New Jersey race. Article One Inc. had previously formed a joint fundraising committee with Article One Victory, which was also funded by Granieri.

In April 2024, Granieri participated in the AIPAC play against Jayapal in Oregon, giving 314 Action Fund $350,000. The fall before, he gave $250,000 to AIPAC’s super PAC UDP.

Not enough information exists yet about the Kimbark Foundation to identify its donor.

Stanford has also received 27 individual donations through the Democracy Engine donation platform. The Guardian exposed Democracy Engine for covertly distributing AIPAC money in 2024, describing the group as “a donation platform that allows unpopular PACs to obscure their donations and lists AIPAC as a client on its LinkedIn page.”

AIPAC has ended up being a lucrative client for Democracy Engine at that. FEC reports show that in 2025 to 2026 alone, AIPAC paid Democracy Engine more than $1.42 million for “processing fees” and “technological services.”

AIPAC is not the only organization able to use Democracy Engine, but the donors who used it for Stanford have also been major donors to AIPAC. A number of the individuals financially backing new AIPAC-aligned shadow PACs have also been repeat donors directly to AIPAC, other shadow PACs and AIPAC-endorsed candidates. Jeffrey Snyder, a member of the AIPAC Board of Directors, donated $2,000 to Ala Stanford through Democracy Engine, $25,000 to United Democracy Project and $5,500 directly to AIPAC in February 2025. Real estate executive Scott Copeland followed suit, donating $1,500 to Stanford through Democracy Engine, $8,500 directly to AIPAC in 2025, and he too contributed to other passthrough organizations like United Democracy Project and Elect Chicago Women during the March Illinois primaries.

Andrew Milstein, president of the Bacchetta Foundation, a nonprofit organization that has issued philanthropic grants to the Anti-Defamation League and other pro-Israel groups, donated $3,500 to Stanford through Democracy Engine and $25,000 to Democracy Engine itself. He also made maximum contributions to AIPAC candidates including Laura Fine, Rep. Haley Stevens, Donna Miller, and Melissa Bean.

AIPAC donors’ secret attempts to continue propping up pro-Israel candidates through obfuscated methods comes as Democratic primary voters, in poll after poll, have rejected Israel’s influence over U.S foreign policy and bribery tactics on Capitol Hill. A new poll in Michigan commissioned by Drop Site and Zeteo and conducted by Data For Progress found that 64% of likely Democratic primary voters are less likely to support candidates who receive donations from AIPAC, while just 10% said they are more likely. A CNN poll recently found that Democratic voters who identify as “liberal” have a -74 point net favorability of Israel, as compared to -26 points in 2022, and those who identify as “not liberal” have a -55 point net favorability of the country, as compared to +3 in 2022.

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Two Iranian women remain in immigration detention, arrested earlier this month on accusations of being the niece and grandniece of Qasem Soleimani, despite no connection to the late Iranian military commander. Drop Site reviewed Iranian birth records, identification papers, a family will, and other personal documents and found no connection whatsoever to him or his extended family. One of the women is now seriously ill in a Texas facility, her chronic blood condition left effectively untreated.

On March 8, right-wing activist Laura Loomer posted on X calling for the deportation of a woman she claimed was Soleimani’s niece. The commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Maj. Gen. Soleimani was assassinated by a U.S. drone strike, ordered by U.S. President Donald Trump, in Baghdad on January 3, 2020. The day after Loomer’s original post, she tagged Secretary of State Marco Rubio on X, claiming to have reported the woman to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for “posting content sympathetic to the Iranian regime and Ayatollah.”

On April 3, Hamideh Soleimani Afshar and her daughter, Sarina Hosseiny, were taken into custody by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at their home outside Los Angeles. Rubio issued a statement headlined, “Secretary Rubio Revokes Green Cards of Foreign Nationals with Ties to Iranian Terror Regime,” identifying them as “the niece and grand niece of deceased Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Major General Qasem Soleimani” and describing them as “green card holders living lavishly in the United States.”

The claims made headline news in the U.S., while triggering immediate denials from Soleimani’s family that the two women were relatives of the military commander. The Trump administration has gone largely quiet about the women’s cases since their arrest, as they remain in ICE detention pending deportation to Iran.

As attention has faded, the situation for the women has turned dire at the South Texas ICE Processing Center in San Antonio, particularly for Hamideh, 47, who lives with autoimmune hemolytic anemia, which requires regular treatment and blood transfusions she isn’t getting.

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As a student in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Hamideh was active in protest movements in Iran, and, she says, even spent a week in prison after getting arrested at one demonstration. Sarina, in a phone interview from the ICE facility where they are being held, said that her mother—not one to hold back her opinions—was most looking forward to having “freedom of speech” when she moved here to the United States. She remains opposed to the son of the former Shah, Reza Pahlavi, as well as Trump’s current war. “She’s kind of a passionate person overall, and she thought that she was going to come here and be able to talk freely when she’s been threatened and imprisoned in Iran for speaking about politics, and now she’s again in prison for speaking out about politics,” she told Drop Site.

They were forced to leave Iran under duress after Sarina took part in a dance performance on vacation in Turkey at the age of 12. The dance competition was filmed and later aired by the satellite channel “TV Persia” and her dance went viral. (Two of her performances are still viewable on YouTube.) The channel is illegal in Iran but many residents have access to it. She said she was expelled from her public school, only to enroll in a private school and later to be expelled from that one, too, when the scandal recirculated. Some of her more conservative family members, who had connections to the government, beat and threatened her mother, Hosseiny said, and the situation became increasingly unbearable. At 14, she came to the United States on a student visa and the two of them applied for asylum.

In terms of its alignment with how the United States professes to see its place in the world, and the claims it makes about Iran’s treatment of women and girls, it’s hard to think of an asylum claim that would more neatly fit into the American agenda.

Sarina translated for her mother, who added that she doesn’t know where to turn if the U.S. isn’t safe either. “We came to America to seek calm and to feel safe and protected from that regime,” Hamideh said, according to her daughter’s translation. “And now we’re being treated almost the same—even worse than there. We’ve been here for three weeks now. I don’t know where to go from here.”

Sarina, 25, has also spoken with friends outside the detention facility, conveying that her mother has been denied the treatment she needs, is regularly in and out of consciousness, with dangerously low hemoglobin levels. Her mother recently passed out and was left unconscious on the floor for over ten minutes, Sarina reported to her friend Shawna Ruhland.

“She’s basically just trapped in there watching her mom die,” Ruhland said of Sarina. Ruhland, who served for eight years in the U.S. military, has set up a GoFundMe to help cover the family’s legal bill, which Drop Site verified is legitimate. (Update: GoFundMe had not yet approved the fundraiser, so she started a different on here.)

The South Texas ICE Processing Center, where the women are being held, declined to provide information on them other than to confirm they were in custody; their attorney, Sam Faragalla, did not respond to requests for comment.

Both were legal permanent residents until Rubio revoked their legal status. A State Department spokesperson, in an odd statement, said the government stood by its determination. “While we do not comment on matters of classified intelligence, we remain certain of the Secretary’s determination,” said Assistant Secretary Dylan Johnson. “If ‘Drop Site News’ is aware of anti-American green card holders with ties to terrorists presently in the United States, we would gladly investigate those individuals for possible termination of legal status and deportation.”

A review of personal documentation undercuts the allegation of a personal connection to Soleimani. Birth certificates from Iran, collected by the family, lay out a documented family tree spanning multiple generations with no connection to Qassem Soleimani, or even to relatives of the late general. Drop Site also reviewed other personal identification documents, including passports, family photographs, and work documentation from both Iran and the U.S. that strongly contradict the allegations that the two women were connected to the late Iranian military commander, or living lavishly from any connection to the Iranian government.

In order for Qasem Soleimani to be Hamideh’s uncle, based on her last name, he would need to be the brother of Hamideh’s father, Ali Soleimani-Afshar, who was born in Tehran in 1947. Yet according to the documents, Soleimani-Afshar had no brothers at all and his father died in the early 50s. Gen. Soleimani was born years later—in 1957—in a small village in the southern province of Kerman. Ali Soleimani-Afshar’s parents died in his childhood. Historical passport documents also show that Soleimani-Afshar’s family origins go back generations to the city of Yazd in central Iran, a province away from the roots of Gen. Soleimani.

The late general is also known to have two brothers, Sohrab and Hossein, who have previously given interviews about their upbringing in rural Kerman that identify themselves as his only brothers and make no mention of a connection to Ali Soleimani-Afshar.

Qassem Soleimani’s own family in Iran issued numerous strident denials that they had any relation to the late general. Soleimani’s youngest daughter, Zeinab Soleimani, a well-known political figure inside Iran, said in Iranian media that the State Department’s allegations were “false” and that “the individuals arrested in the United States have no connection whatsoever to our family.” Another daughter, Narjes Soleimani, went further in a separate statement, adding that, “To this day, no member of the Soleimani family, nor any relative of General Soleimani, has resided in the United States.”

To be clear, even if the women were in fact distantly related to Soleimani, such a link would not, under any version of justice, make them guilty of anything. While the U.S. says spouses and children of alleged terrorists can be detained, the law deems arresting other relatives inadmissible. The U.S. recently took immigration action against leading Emory University cancer researcher Dr. Fatemeh Ardeshir-Larijani, simply for being the daughter of Ali Larijani, a top Iranian official and Kantian scholar assassinated by the U.S. and Israel in March, along with his son. She was out of the country at the time her legal permanent resident status was stripped and barred from re-entering. Emory fired her.

In the wake of their detention, the State Department said that the asylum claim filed by the two Los Angeles women was undercut by the fact that they had visited Iran in subsequent years.

In general, a grant of asylum is indeed called into question if the asylum seeker travels back to the country where they have claimed they are unsafe, immigration lawyers say. Hosseiny said that because they are not political dissidents wanted by the government, but rather a girl and her mother who had pushed the boundaries of gender politics in a repressive environment, they deemed the trips home safe enough. She said that she had informed the government about the trip and there was no objection until they were arrested years later. “They’re about to lose everything that they’ve built here, because no one’s willing to help,” said Demi Uredi, a friend of Sarina, who is figuring out how to pay the mortgage for their house or sell it entirely.

Patrick Taurel, an immigration attorney at Grossman Young & Hammond, questioned the merits of the arrest. “Based on what I have seen firsthand as an immigration lawyer… I would not be surprised if the recent targeting of Iranians is based on shoddy and unreliable evidence,” he said. “That was true in the Mahmoud Khalil case and the cases of the other Palestinian dissidents; that was true with my client, Reginald Boulos; and that could well be true here. Congress must rein in this power.”

Sarina’s friends also disputed characterizations by the State Department that the family had been living lavishly in the United States, pointing out that they had been behind on mortgage payments and that they had been relying on the support of friends to pay for legal support in ICE detention. The jewelry and handbags flaunted on Instagram and highlighted by the U.S. government were, like much else in North Hollywood, entirely fake, her friends said.

“They’re not blood money, like regime trust fund kids, none of this is true whatsoever,” said Uredi.

In the meantime, Sarina’s mother is at severe risk. “The only thing that they can do is a blood transfusion with a match, because she has a severe anemia,” said Uredi. “And Sarina might be a match, but they’re like, we don’t even have the equipment here to do this for you. And that was two weeks ago, and now this week, they’re like, Yeah, we still don’t have the equipment. They just put her on antibiotics. That’s not going to save her life.”

Loomer, reached for comment, was unmoved, insisting the women were indeed related, but that it didn’t matter either way. “I want all Islamic immigrants deported. I don’t support any of their asylum claims,” she said.

Areeba Fatima contributed reporting.

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On the eve of the tenuous ceasefire reached between the United States, Israel, and Iran, the number of ballistic missile interceptors left in Israel’s arsenal had dwindled to “double digits,” according to a Trump administration source with knowledge of the situation.

The critical shortage had led Israeli military officials to be significantly more selective when confronting ballistic missile attacks from Iran as well as from Yemen, which recently entered the conflict in a limited fashion. “They’re having to pick and choose what they shoot down,” the official told Drop Site.

The White House referred questions about the dwindling stockpile to the Israeli military. “Refer you to the IDF,” said a White House spokesperson. The IDF told Drop Site “we are checking” but was still working on an answer by the time this article was published, and couldn’t estimate when such an answer might come. When it does, we will update this article.

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The number of missile defense interceptors that a country has remaining is typically treated as highly classified information because of what it reveals about their capacity to continue a war. Despite not being forthcoming about these figures, it has still been possible to estimate Israeli reserves based on knowledge of prewar stockpiles and estimates of expenditures during the current conflict.

A recent analysis by The Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies, a London-based think tank with ties to British intelligence, spells out the difficulty facing Israeli defenses. Drawing on data from the Payne Institute for Public Policy to calculate pre-war stocks, RUSI did the basic math to find that by March 24, Israel had expended 122 of its 150 Arrow 2 and Arrow 3 missiles, as well as 22 of its 48 THAAD missiles.

These interceptors are both expensive and time-consuming to replace. Each Arrow interceptor costs $2-3 million dollars and takes months to produce, whereas a THAAD interceptor, which can stop a ballistic missile in its terminal descent phase, costs a staggering $12 million per unit. In many cases, multiple interceptors are required to confront a single ballistic missile. Iran is also believed to be deploying their missiles in a strategy deliberately aimed at draining Israeli defenses—firing older models in earlier waves to help eliminate interceptor stockpiles, and effectively putting a “down payment” on the impact of future attacks that can take place with more advanced models once interceptor capacity is depleted.

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Information about missile impacts and damage in Israel during the current war is subject to intense military censorship, making it difficult to verify the effect of Iranian attacks on the country. But an April 6 research paper published by JP Morgan and citing figures from the Jewish Institute for National Security (JINSA) stated that missile impact rates targeting Israel had risen from 3% during the first two weeks of the war to 27%. That increase is believed to be in part due to an Iranian decision to begin deploying missiles with cluster warheads at Israeli targets, leading to smaller, dispersed impacts, but also forcing Israel to expend more interceptor munitions defending against each attack.

On Monday, the Jerusalem Post reported that the Israeli Ministry of Defense planned to hasten its production of new Arrow missiles. But replenishing stockpiles is a matter of years, not weeks. Iran also fired more than 500 ballistic missiles at Israel during the 12-Day War in June 2025, significantly depleting Israeli inventory even before the current war.

On the same day that JP Morgan issued its report, a ballistic missile struck a residential building in the city of Haifa, killing four people. The victims of that attack were killed by the kinetic energy of the missile itself which did not actually detonate—likely sparing the lives of many more people in what would have been its blast radius.

The decreasing supply of interceptors has also meant that Israel is becoming increasingly dependent on the missile defense capabilities of the U.S. Navy, which has stationed destroyers in the region. The recent departure of the U.S.S. Gerald Ford carrier strike group has hampered that capacity.

The U.S. is believed to have fired 431 of its 2,500 Navy Aegis missiles, designed for ballistic missile interception, making them a savior of last resort when it came to Israeli defense, according to RUSI.

In addition to defending Israel, the U.S. military has been forced to allocate huge amounts of its own limited interceptor stocks to defend the Gulf Arab states. This has meant drawing down from munition stockpiles intended to support deterrence against China as part of the “Asian Pivot” long-planned by the U.S. defense establishment. The drain on interceptors comes after the U.S. also reportedly used up roughly 25% of its THAAD interceptor inventory—between 100 to 150 missiles—along with an unknown number of Patriot and SM-3 missiles defending Israel during the 12-Day War.

Apart from being expensive, missile interceptors are notoriously slow to produce. Earlier this year, Lockheed Martin signed a deal with the Pentagon to increase its annual production from 96 per year to 400. But this increase is expected to be staggered over the next seven years, and will do little to improve capacity in the short-term. The U.S. procured only 12 THAAD interceptors in 2025, and was scheduled to receive a paltry 37 this year.

Israel has insisted throughout the war that it is not running low on interceptors, even as a greater number of Iranian missile attacks have impacted targets inside the country or been allowed to fall in “open areas” of the country.

The Israeli theory of war had been based on a quick victory that rapidly diminished the rate of Iranian missile launches by hitting stockpiles and missile launch vehicles to knock them out of the fighting. Despite those efforts, and the tremendous assistance of the U.S. in this campaign, Iranian missile launches have remained steady for weeks, as launchers and underground missile bases have proven difficult to destroy by aerial attacks. The addition of Hezbollah and Ansar Allah to the war has added a further strain on Israeli defenses.

This week, in the face of escalating questions about its missile defense stockpiles as the war has dragged on, the Israeli defense ministry announced plans to scale up production while denying it had a problem. “Israel has sufficient interceptors to protect its citizens, and the current move is intended to ensure continued operational freedom and the necessary endurance,” said defense minister Israel Katz in a statement.

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Gulf sovereign wealth funds are undertaking a sweeping review of American investments, driven by a combination of commercial necessity and political recalibration driven by the Iran war, according to sources familiar with deliberations around the high-level financing deals.

In particular, the planned merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Brothers Discovery, made possible as a result of Gulf financing, is getting a new look. A postponed meeting of the board of the Qatar Investment Authority will reconvene within the next week as the fund recalibrates its investment approach, a source with knowledge of the deliberations said. “Even from a purely, purely numbers perspective, you have to look at this again,” said the industry source, asking for anonymity to speak freely about investment matters rarely discussed publicly.

No announcement from the meeting is expected, the source said, as the Qataris are unwilling to unilaterally back out of the deal without Saudi Arabia also doing so. Withdrawing from the deal would be seen as a political shot against both Israel and the United States, which Qatar feels it can not undertake alone under the current circumstances.

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The merger between the two media conglomerates was announced on February 27, 2026. The next day, the U.S. and Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran, which responded, as promised, by attacking Gulf countries hosting U.S. bases. Those same Gulf countries are the primary financial backers of the merger, according to documents on file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Wealth funds connected to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates pledged $24 billion to back the deal, which cost nearly $111 billion.

Under the current scenario, the Paramount deal remains likely to go through, but that could change if the war goes on for another month or longer and Gulf oil and gas assets come under even greater attack. Trump has turned his attention to Iran’s oil infrastructure, and Iran has pledged to retaliate by targeting Gulf oil and gas assets in response. Yet even the current circumstances are forcing a deeper look at the entire suite of deals in the sovereign wealth funds’ portfolios. A Paramount spokesperson declined to comment. Spokespersons for the Public Investment Fund (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia), L’imad Holding Company PJSC (UAE), and Qatar Investment Authority (Qatar) did not respond to requests for comment.

At risk is the heart of the U.S. economy, which is currently fueled by the growth of AI companies and the data centers that power them. Harvard economist Jason Furman calculated that more than 90% of GDP growth in the first half of 2025 was driven by AI and related investments. Much of the data center buildout is powered by Gulf financing, while U.S. companies are also building out heavily in the Gulf.

All of that is now uncertain. “The story is not just deals specifically, but if you look at all the AI data centers and all that growth that’s coming in the next few years, where’s most of that capital coming from?” he said. “A lot of it is coming from the Gulf. And if the Gulf—not politically, but even just from a financial perspective—cannot commit that, what’s the knock on effects on those companies and the U.S. economy? I don’t think anyone has done that math, but there is something there absolutely.”

“Hyperscalers”—referring to major companies like OpenAI—“are fine, those guys are huge, they can afford it, but what about the next level?” he said, referring to a sweeping class of companies that could go under without Gulf support.

A second source with close relationships to key Gulf leaders said that Gulf countries are looking closely at all of the deals that have struck, given the new financial realities at play.

In early March, the Financial Times reported that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and Kuwait were collectively reviewing investments with an eye toward canceling some, citing a Gulf official. “A number of Gulf countries have begun an internal review to determine whether force majeure clauses can be invoked in current contracts, while also reviewing current and future investment commitments in order to alleviate some of the anticipated economic strain from the current war,” the official told the FT. “Especially if the war and related expenses continue at the same pace.”

The war and related expenses have not merely continued but accelerated. The industry source said that divestment would likely happen quietly, but it was an inevitability. “Just mathematically, it will have to happen,” he said. “I don’t think it will be obvious, I don’t think it will be messaged that way. But I think it will just happen. And then as things build up again, then people are gonna wonder, if it’s the same people that are involved now or later, you’re gonna question, are they gonna do the same thing again? Are they gonna think about diversifying? That’s the question.”

Gulf investors, he said, “just won’t be able to do the scale they were committed to.”

Paramount is run by David Ellison, the son of Oracle founder Larry Ellison, one of the world’s wealthiest men and the largest donor to the nonprofit Friends of the IDF. Larry Ellison put up billions to cover his son’s merger with Warner Brothers. The Ellisons bought Bari Weiss’s The Free Press and handed her the reins to CBS News, driven by David Ellison’s admiration for her support for Israel. Weiss has cheerled the war, disturbing journalists in her newsroom, even as it threatens her patron’s media empire. The acquisition of Warner Brothers will also give Ellison control of CNN.

Ultimately, even if QIA’s preference in the end is to exit the deal, the fund will stay in unless Saudi also departs.“It’s not a Qatar decision. It’s not a Saudi-UAE decision. It’s a Saudi decision, because all three countries have to commit for the deal to make sense, unless you can find other investors from Asia,” the industry source said. Chinese wealth fund Tencent had previously been involved, but dropped out so that the transaction would not have to undergo U.S. federal scrutiny on national security grounds.

The most likely outcome of the upcoming meeting, the industry insider said, will be for the fund to continue a wait-and-see approach, knowing the political and economic situations are rapidly evolving. “If Saudi goes in, Qatar will follow. If Saudi doesn’t go in, Qatar won’t follow, they’ll just delay, delay, delay, and see what happens. Everyone can still say, ‘No, no, we’re committed, we’re committed.’ And there’s a million ways, if this continues another month, you could force majeure, you could do whatever.”

A Qatari source with insight into the process also said that the deal was still heavily likely to go through.

Trump’s decision to humiliate MBS publicly has thrown a wrench into the relationship with Saudi Arabia. At a Saudi-backed investment conference, Trump riffed on his relationship with the crown prince. “A short time ago we were together and he looked at me and he said, ‘You know, one year ago you were a dead country. Now, you’re the hottest country anywhere in the world,” Trump said. “He didn’t think this was going to happen. He didn’t think he’d be kissing my ass, he really didn’t. He thought it’d be just another American president that was a loser with a country that was going downhill, but now he has to be nice to me. You tell him he better be nice to me, he’s gotta be.”

At the same conference, Saudi’s wealth fund announced a 15% cut in capital investment.

Trump ally Steve Bannon piled on. “Maybe we can get a couple or three of those princes in uniform,” he said on his podcast, The War Room. “Got any kids in special forces? Let’s line up those royal families and see how big they’re talking.”

The insult has contributed to the air of uncertainty surrounding the Paramount financing, the industry source said. “Look, that thing that happened a couple days ago is not a small thing. I mean, we know MBS. That was a pretty insulting move. I don’t know if the word’s ‘petty,’ but he’d be willing to move drastically based on emotions,” he said.

He said that most in the industry were still stuck in a fog-of-war scenario and hadn’t gamed out longterm scenarios. Trump, he said, didn’t seem to have thought things through either, particularly as it related to the president’s promise to supply Europe energy. “The knock on effects are tremendous, because who will supply the LNG and the gas to Europe the next few years? It’s the U.S. But who also needs that gas to grow the data centers? It’s the U.S. So something has to give.” Access to helium, an essential component for the AI industry, is also at risk as a result of the war.

The major players—China, Russia, and even Saudi Arabia—are all incentivized to keep it going, he said.

Saudi Arabia is “not as affected by this war as people may think, their spot prices went up, they, logistically, they’re the hub for everything now,” he said. “It’s making up the difference.”

“If you think about who’s really incentivized to deescalate right now, not many. Iran’s happy for this to continue. Israel’s happy for it to continue. U.S. doesn’t seem to care. It doesn’t affect them. And you have China, China maybe doesn’t want it but Russia is benefitting like more than anybody. So it’s really Qatar that needs to just deescalate for their own security. Kuwait’s fucked. Bahrain’s fucked, but they’re not really players.”

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Justice Democrats is endorsing two new candidates on Monday, throwing its weight behind Saikat Chakrabarty in San Francisco and Adam Hamawy in New Jersey. Both candidates, for their own reasons, threaten to have outsized importance if they make it to Congress, and both are running in open seats vacating by a retiring Democrat.

Chakrabarti was himself a co-founder of Justice Democrats and went on to be the first chief of staff to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). Chakrabarti was driven out of Washington by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who objected to his hard-charging approach, which had included helping to organize an occupation of Pelosi’s office during freshman orientation. Chakrabarti initially filed to challenge Pelosi directly, but Pelosi has since announced her retirement. Ocasio-Cortez has not yet endorsed Chakrabarti; winning the backing of Justice Democrats could be a step in that direction. Chakrabarti faces state legislator Scott Wiener.

Chakrabarti being thrown out of Washington by Pelosi for being too aggressive as a chief of staff and returning as a member of Congress replacing Pelosi would rattle the lower chamber in a major way. Chakrabarti is also unusual among Democrats in presenting a full-spectrum populist economic agenda that goes far beyond checking the boxes of Medicare for All and the Green New Deal.

In New Jersey, Dr. Adam Hamawy is running in an open seat to replace retiring Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman. Hamawy, a renowned surgeon, served as an Army doctor in Iraq, where he treated countless wounded veterans. By happenstance, one of them was Tammy Duckworth, who is now a senator from Illinois. Duckworth lost both legs when her helicopter crashed. As a senator, she worked to come to Hamawy’s rescue when he and a delegation of American and British doctors were trapped by Israel in European Hospital in Khan Younis in May 2024. As supplies of food and water ran low, Duckworth joined global calls for Israel to allow the medical workers to leave.

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Hamawy was among three of the 20 doctors who refused to evacuate until Israel agreed to allow a new rotation to replace them. Leaving without being replaced would leave the hospital short on staff, but importantly, Hamawy understood that Israel would be less likely to attack the hospital with Western doctors inside it. “A decision for some of us to stay was consistent with our American values,” Hamawy said at the time. “We came in as a team and we do not leave anyone behind. If all and only the Americans left at once, what would that say about us as a nation?”

Hamawy was invited to be Watson Coleman’s guest at the State of the Union, and spoke with members of Congress about what he saw in Gaza. Now a candidate for Congress, he represents a particularly powerful threat to Israeli propaganda narratives, as he can speak from direct experience and, by virtue of his status as a celebrated Army veteran, can’t easily have his patriotism questioned.

Hamawy is facing Sue Altman, who previously ran in a nearby district and benefited from significant support from the AIPAC-linked group Democratic Majority for Israel. She has now distanced herself from the pro-Israel organization, and her time as head of the New Jersey Working Families Party gives her some progressive credibility in the district. Whether that reputation can survive growing awareness of her previous alliance with AIPAC will likely determine the outcome of the race, as the district is heavily Democratic. Justice Democrats and the WFP often work in coalition to support the same candidates; JD’s decision to endorse against a top WFP official will put WFP’s independent expenditure arm in a tricky situation, leaving them either to abandon their longtime ally or spend money against another ally—potentially landing them on the same side of the race as AIPAC’s money.

Justice Democrats Executive Director Alexandra Rojas, a co-founder of the group, and a key figure in the election of Ocasio-Cortez, announced this week she would transition out of her role as ED to become chair of the board at the end of this cycle.

Chakrabarti, meanwhile, has the personal capacity to mostly self-fund his campaign. As I covered in my book We’ve Got People, Chakrabarti was the second engineer at Stripe, and his stock options made him an extremely rich young man. Repulsed by the wealth inequality he saw around him, he quit Stripe before he was fully vested—an extraordinarily rare move—and volunteered for the first Bernie Sanders campaign, becoming a key player in the organization’s distributed volunteer operation. After the campaign, he co-founded Brand New Congress, an effort to oust every member of Congress, which then birthed Justice Democrats.

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I learned then how much went into it—the permits, making all the signs, finding enough port-a-johns, getting the word out, the bus coordination—and it turned into the largest antiwar demonstration the city had seen since Vietnam. The next morning I raced for the Washington Post—the print version was still all that mattered—and was stunned to see it buried on something like page A17. (It’s still online, you can read it here.)

The media’s refusal to cover antiwar sentiments with the seriousness I thought they deserved, combined with their credulous coverage of weapons of mass destruction, drove me to consider becoming a journalist myself for the first time. Somebody needed to do it honestly, I remember thinking. (I also did not think Saddam Hussein had WMDs, and all I had to go on was what I read in The Nation or heard on Democracy Now. So anybody who tells you it was impossible to know is just wrong.)

Reporting honestly on war is, of course, essential to what we’ve built here at Drop Site, and the last month we’ve seen the largest growth in subscribers since the month we launched in 2024. If you’re one of those new subscribers, thank you, and welcome, we hope you appreciate what you’ll be reading, though it certainly won’t be enjoyable.

If you haven’t yet made the leap from unpaid to paid, consider doing that today as a signal of support for the work we’re doing. You can also, as always, make a one-time or recurring contribution that is tax deductible (to the fullest extent of the law).

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Amodei, meanwhile, took a different path after the war. The student newspaper reported that someone dressed as Saddam Hussein at a spring 2003 frat party mocked Amodei by thanking him for his support. He transferred to Stanford, and his antiwar activity seems to have heavily tapered off. Instead, he threw himself into developing what he has promised will be an ethical AI. (The jury is still out on whether that’s possible.) That commitment clashed headlong with the Pentagon recently; after Amodei inquired as to whether his tech was used to kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, our “War Secretary” lashed out at him. Anthropic and the Pentagon then battled over whether the company’s product could be used for autonomous armed drones or for mass surveillance.

Amodei refused, and the Pentagon severed its links with Anthropic—with a six-month period of conscious uncoupling. In the meantime, the former antiwar organizer’s tech is playing a critical role in another U.S. war in the Middle East. Owen Lavine’s story on this odd chapter of Amodei’s life is below.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei at the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi on February 19, 2026. Photo by Ludovic MARIN / AFP via Getty Images.

The Untold Story of Dario Amodei’s Antiwar Past, as His AI Tech is Used for a New Middle East War

Story by Owen Lavine

It was March 3, 2003. The Bush administration was beating the drums of war. An invasion of Iraq was certain. Dario Amodei was in his second year at Caltech where he was studying physics. After penning a column pushing back on an “unfair” student flier claiming Martin Luther King Jr. was supportive of Zionism, Amodei came out swinging against the looming invasion of Iraq, and his “apathetic” fellow students.

“Anti-War Protest: Most Students Apathetic Towards World Politics by Dario Amodei” read the top of page 5 of The California Tech.

Amodei opens the column referencing social critic Neil Postman’s theory that “the greatest danger American democracy faces is not an Orwellian dictatorship but a culture that makes politics and public discourse irrelevant.”

“Living at Caltech is a forceful reminder that Postman was right,” Amodei went on.

Amodei lamented that, as the Bush administration saber-rattled over Saddam’s regime, he “rarely heard the subject mentioned in casual conversation.”

Driving deeper, Amodei pointed out that “several hundred” people are on the “interest list” for an anti-war campus organization named the Peaceful Justice Coalition, yet, a leader of the group told him “only a handful of them are consistently active.”

“The problem isn’t that everyone is just peachy with the idea of bombing Iraq; it’s that most people are opposed in principle but refuse to give one millisecond of their time to the issue,” Amodei added.

Amodei gives a crystal clear forecast of how the invasion of Iraq will be a complete failure too, quoting then-NATO Supreme Commander Wesley Clark who told a CNN interviewer in 2002 that a war in Iraq could “supercharge recruiting for Al Qaeda.”

“We should never let ourselves be reduced to amoral technicians who run the machines of war as casually as we do our computations,” Amodei went on.

Amodei ends the article by asking proponents of the war to “challenge us” at an anti-war action the following Wednesday.

The March 10 paper described the action as a “small group” with counter-protestors, according to Amodei, who was identified as an “organizer” of the Peaceful Justice Coalition. Across from the Peaceful Justice Coalition, proponents of the war held signs reading “Give War a Chance,” and, “Go back to work, hippies.”

“As scientists, we’re not in some ivory tower,” Amodei was quoted in the paper saying at the protest.

Ten days later, coalition forces invaded Iraq. Amodei and the Peaceful Justice Coalition vented their frustration at a “peace forum” on March 30, hosted by then Congressman Adam Schiff. The article states Schiff, who voted in favor of the Iraq war, gave a “controversial speech.”

“He further noted that while war can be cruel, peace can be terrible as well,” it added. “In addition, he asserted that ‘never has diplomacy deterred a tyrant.’”

Schiff was reportedly interrupted by “outbursts.” Amodei maintained the need for “civility” but “understood ‘how frustrating it is to have your heartfelt pleas fall on deaf ears.’” Amodei qualified that protests were “especially important,” though, noting the “connection of science with the military.”

As the school year drew to an end, Amodei didn’t pen another column nor did The California Tech note him at any other actions against the Iraq war.

In late spring, at a Caltech frat party, a character dressed as Saddam Hussein shook “anti-war advocate” Amodei’s hand and “thanked” him for his “support” as student paper’s 2003 commencement issue retells.

The next semester, Amodei would transfer to Stanford. As legendary Caltech Physics Professor Tom Trombello recalled when asked about Amodei leaving Caltech, “With Dario, it was very important that he not stick it out. This is a national treasure.”

In March, Anthropic was labelled a “supply chain risk” by the Pentagon after the company missed a deadline to meet the Pentagon’s demands to allow them to use Anthropic’s Claude large language model for autonomous weapons systems and mass surveillance.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a statement that Anthropic could not, “in good conscience,” accede to the Pentagon’s demands that his company drop safeguards embedded in its large language models. Amodei also drew redlines around Anthropic’s products being used for mass domestic surveillance technology and fully autonomous weapons systems by the Pentagon.

Anthropic was already a prime target for White House AI Czar David Sacks who claimed “Anthropic’s agenda” was to “backdoor Woke AI and other AI regulations through Blue states like California,” in an October X post.

“This is not surprising since Anthropic hired the Biden AI team, which gave us Biden’s Woke AI executive order and the Biden Diffusion Rule,” Sacks added, referring to a Biden-era rule issued by the Commerce Department which restricted some advanced computer chip sales to China.

Amodei pushed back on Sacks’ characterization of Anthropic, indirectly calling out the “recent uptick in inaccurate claims about Anthropic’s policy stances.” Amodei added that the Trump administration and Anthropic were aligned on “key areas of AI policy.”

Amodei has also been critical of “authoritarian” governments in the Middle East, and the Trump administration’s decision to sell some advanced computer chips to China.

In a leaked memo from last year, Amodei reportedly said the company had “vociferously pushed for not allowing big data centers in the Middle East.” Amodei added that “without a central authority blocking them, there’s a race to the bottom where companies gain a lot of advantage by getting deeper and deeper in bed with the Middle East.”

“The basis of our opposition to large training clusters in the Middle East, or to shipping [NVIDIA] H20’s to China, is that the ‘supply chain’ of Al is dangerous to hand to authoritarian governments,” Amodei went on. “These governments can use it to gain military dominance or to gain leverage over democratic countries.”

Amodei’s criticism has been echoed by Democratic lawmakers, such as Democratic Senator from Virginia, Tim Kaine.

“We do not sell our most advanced security critical technology to adversaries,” Kaine told the Senate floor in a December speech, referencing President Trump’s greenlight on NVIDIA H200 chip sales to China.

However, Anthropic’s relationship with the Trump administration really soured after the January raid to kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.

Following the raid, Anthropic reportedly had consternations about their products being used during the raid—Claude, the company’s flagship model was used. Anthropic had previously signed a $200 million contract with the Department of Defense.

“Anthropic asked whether their software was used for the raid to capture Maduro, which caused real concerns across the Department of War indicating that they might not approve if it was,” an official with knowledge of the situation told Axios in February.

The Pentagon then initiated a “review” of Anthropic, which culminated in the frontier AI lab being

labelled a “supply chain risk” on March 4. Anthropic has now sued the Pentagon, claiming the relevant statute, 10 USC 3252: Requirements for information relating to supply chain risk, “exists to protect the government rather than to punish a supplier.”

In another leaked memo from the same day the Pentagon labelled Anthropic a supply chain risk, Amodei reportedly stated, “The real reasons DoW and the Trump admin do not like us is that we haven’t donated to Trump (while OpenAI/Greg [Brockman] have donated a lot), we haven’t given dictator-style praise to Trump (while Sam [Altman] has).”

Anthropic recently gave $20 million to Public First Action, an AI-safety focused group led by former Congressmen Brad Carson and Chris Stewart. One of their key issues is blocking a Republican-led push—that was nearly snuck into the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—to block state level AI regulations. Public First Action hasn’t endorsed a slate of candidates, but they are dumping $450,000 into former Palantir employee and New York State assemblyman Alex Bores’s bid for New York’s 11th congressional district. Bores is facing $1.1 million in attack ads from pro-AI PAC, Leading Our Future, which is backed by Marc Andreessen, an unofficial adviser of the President, and OpenAI President Greg Brockman, who donated $25 million to pro-Trump super PAC MAGA Inc., among others.

A spokesperson for the Bores campaign declined to comment when asked for Bores’ position on the Biden administration’s diffusion rule, another issue Public First Action and Anthropic are aligned on.

It’s noteworthy, too, that Public First Action’s platform—and a key Amodei criticism of the White House—is Trump’s decision to allow China to buy some NVIDIA chips that could be used to run artificial intelligence models.

“There are some elements of the government, some government officials who are not aware, who don’t seem to get it, who still think this is an economic race to diffuse our technology to different parts of the world,” Amodei said at the Anthropic Futures Forum last year, referring to export controls on chips. “Some of the elements in government don’t get it, and are doing exactly the wrong things.”

Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment.

The company scored an early victory in federal court on Tuesday as they sue the Pentagon.

“It looks like an attempt to cripple Anthropic,” District Court for the Northern District Of California Judge Rita F. Lin said of the Pentagon’s labeling of Anthropic as a supply chain risk. Lin appeared to concur with Amodei’s reading that the Pentagon’s labeling of Anthropic as a supply chain risk wasn’t motivated by a concern the company posed a genuine “risk” to the supply chain.

Lin said the Pentagon’s actions “don’t seem to be really tailored to a stated national security concern.”

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HAVANA, Cuba—The Cuban government is prepared to discuss offering “lump sum” compensation to Americans and American firms that saw property nationalized after the 1959 revolution, Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Fernandez de Cossio told Drop Site News in an interview.

The “lump sum” agreement—meaning that Cuba would pay the U.S., which would then handle the claims—would need to be a part of a broader “holistic” deal that would address U.S. sanctions and the blockade and also allow for an amount of American investment in Cuba that previously had been forbidden, he said.

Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel revealed last week that his government was in direct talks with the United States. After the New York Times reported that the U.S. officials are pushing for the ouster of Díaz-Canel, Cuba rejected outright the possibility that the Cuban president’s role or the Communist-run political system is up for negotiation.

After the revolution, Cuba negotiated lump sum compensation agreements with countries such as Canada, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Spain, and France, but the United States refused to participate, planning to overthrow Fidel Castro’s government instead.

“[Cuba made] lump sum agreements with the six governments whose property was nationalized in Cuba, all of them had compensation schemes, all of them were compensated with the exception of the U.S.,” said Cossio.

Had compensation been accepted by the United States in the 1960s, Fernandez de Cossio said, studies show the final payments would have been made by the 1980s. The Cuban government today lacks the reserves to make major compensation payments, but with the lifting of the embargo, economic growth could produce revenue that could finance such an arrangement.

Nearly 6,000 American individuals and businesses have filed claims for nationalized property, according to U.S. government data and industry estimates gathered by Bloomberg. With interest, the certified claims are now estimated to total approximately $9 billion.

Compensation, he added, should not just go one way.

“We’re ready to sit down with the United States and discuss these issues; but Cuba also has claims,” Cossio told Drop Site. “We believe the Cuban people and the Cuban nation requires, or deserves, to be compensated for the damage done by the economic blockade, by the invasion, by terrorism, by assassinations, by actions, violent actions against the economy.”

Cuban Vice Prime Minister Óscar Pérez-Oliva Fraga announced Monday a sweeping package of measures expanding the economic role of Cubans residing abroad that would allow them to own and invest in private business for the first time since the revolution, including the possibility of large-scale investments by foreign capital in key sectors of the economy, as well as the participation of Cubans residing abroad in the national financial system.

“We are not talking about specific businesses. The doors of our country are open to the participation of the Cuban community residing abroad,” Pérez told the Cuban news program Mesa Redonda in an interview.

Fernandez do Cossio said in his interview with Drop Site, that the scope of what is now being offered far exceeds what has been possible in the past. While it’s hard to imagine Costco or Starbucks on the island, he said that the freedom of political movement that would come from a lifting of the embargo would open up new possibilities in terms of economic and political reforms. Trump himself long ago registered the trademark for Trump Hotel Havana, according to Cuban government records, and a new agreement would pave the way for such a development.

Pérez, who also serves as minister of foreign trade and investment, said in his comments that Cuba was taking steps to reduce red tape for foreign investment and added that Cubans abroad would also be afforded the opportunity to invest in development projects and funds in Cuba.

The official said Cuba would welcome investment by U.S. firms but specified that it is U.S. law that does not permit this.

“It would take a very bold step by the U.S. government to overhaul that legislation and let American companies trade freely with Cuba and invest in our country,” said Pérez.

“The U.S. government, if it wants, can make exceptions so that whoever wants to invest specifically or in general would never go to court,” Cossio told Drop Site News.

Both Cossio and the Cuban deputy prime minister made reference to the Helms-Burton Act, a key piece of U.S. legislation that strengthened and codified the economic blockade against Cuba. This legislation allows U.S. citizens, including Cuban-Americans, to file lawsuits in U.S. federal courts against any company that “traffics” in property confiscated by the Cuban government after the 1959 revolution. Cuban-American judges in Miami have interpreted the law extremely liberally in a way that has staunched investment for fear of litigation.

By putting compensation on the table in talks with the U.S., Cuba is looking to assuage concerns from elements of the Cuban exile community who may seek to scuttle a potential deal by threatening lawsuits. Cuba’s olive branch to Cubans living abroad aligns with recent rhetoric from U.S. President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly talked about Cuban Americans who want to “return and assist” their homeland.

Any diplomatic agreement between the United States and Cuba is likely to face fierce opposition from hardline exile factions who prioritize regime change over all. Danny Valdes from Cuban Americans for Cuba, an upstart organization that was formed to challenge the hardline exile narrative, told Drop Site he expects this faction of the Cuban community to attempt to “sabotage” any diplomatic breakthrough.

“My experience with these folks is that their number one priority is revenge against the regime,” said Valdes, who grew up with his Cuban family in Miami, a hotbed of radical counterrevolutionary activity and the home of notable regime-change advocates in Trump’s orbit.

The organizer and activist, who travelled to Cuba as part of the “Nuestra America Convoy” to deliver humanitarian aid, said the current discussions that would allow for U.S. investment would nonetheless align with U.S. aims for the island country.

“I think it’s pretty obvious that the goal of the United States is to build a private sector that can also contest for political power down the road,” said Valdes.

Trump has talked about a “friendly takeover” of Cuba, while Francis Donovan, head of U.S. Southern Command, recently told lawmakers in a Senate hearing that the military was not actively planning an attempted invasion of Cuba. Valdes argues that given the quagmire the U.S. already finds itself in its aggression against Iran, the military option in Cuba seems less likely.

Cossio, for his part, says that despite Trump’s penchant for attacking countries in the midst of talks, the Cuban government sees “no alternative” to direct dialogue with the U.S. “We believe it’s the only way in which we can find solutions to the issues between Cuba and the United States; and we truly believe that they could be found, we don’t think that our two countries should live forever in hostility,” Cossio told Drop Site.

The State Department referred Drop Site to Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s remarks in the Oval Office. Rubio—a long-time advocate of regime change in Cuba—said the economic measures announced Monday were insufficient and suggested that what the country needed was “new people in charge.”

The U.S. has fully blocked oil from reaching the island for three months—both an act of war and a war crime—producing dire shortages. On Friday night, power went out throughout much of Havana, and on Saturday night, power went out again, this time across the entire nation. On Sunday, as power was being restored, Drop Site’s Ryan Grim visited William Soler Pediatric Hospital, and spoke with doctors, nurses, and the parents of children in intensive care about what it’s like to suffer a blackout in an ICU.

William Soler Pediatric Hospital. Photos: Ryan Grim

Hospitals by design are the last to lose power in Cuba, but with a nationwide blackout, even they go down. Each hospital has a generator, but there’s a dangerous lag between the power going out and the generator kicking in, and the nurses described racing to the babies and children on ventilators to hand pump the machine until the generator kicked in.

A nurse explains the ventilator in William Soler Pediatric Hospital’s ICU.

A special thanks to independent U.S. news organization Belly of the Beast, whose reporters based in Cuba helped us get access to hospitals and other facilities so we could get a better understanding of how the full-spectrum oil blockade is impacting the health system. (Sign up for their newsletter here and/or join their Patreon and send them a donation.) I’ll be back home tomorrow and will have more to say on what I saw here in the coming days, but for now I wanted to share the dispatch below.

Reporting like this isn’t cheap, but if it can help stave off a war on Cuba and bring the people of our two countries closer together, it’s worth it. If you can support it by becoming a paying subscriber, please do. Or if you’re already a subscriber, consider making a one-time or recurring contribution. Thanks as always for your support.

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But all of this polling, done by reputable survey companies and paid for by mainstream media outlets, has conspicuously avoiding asking tough questions about the motivations behind the war. Or, at least, we found it conspicuous.

Nobody, for instance, has surveyed the American public to ask them whether they believe this war is being fought in the interests of the American public or on behalf of Israel. And nobody has asked whether Trump launched the war to distract the public from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. Indeed, anybody at an American news organization who even suggested asking such questions would at best never be invited back to the Zoom call, and more likely would find their key card no longer working at the front desk.

Doing sophisticated polling that follows best practices is an expensive endeavor, which is why it’s usually left to major media with major budgets. But thanks to the generous support of our readers, we decided it’s something we can afford, too, and we teamed up with our friends at Zeteo to split the costs of a national survey of likely American voters, one that allowed us to ask the kinds of questions we’re interested in, and that we believe you’ll be interested in too.

We hope to do more of these in the future, particularly if there’s reader interest. In fact, one way we gauge that is by looking at how many readers decide to become donors or paying subscribers after reading a particular article.

So if you’d like to see us do more of these, vote by upgrading to a paid subscription or, if you’re already a subscriber, throw us a few bucks as a one-time or charitable contribution.

If you have suggestions for future survey questions, post them in the comment section below, which is reserved for paid subs.

A majority of likely American voters believe that Donald Trump launched the war on Iran at least in part to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal that had engulfed his presidency, according to a new survey.

The survey found that a solid 52-40 majority of voters agreed with the statement, with the other 8% saying they were unsure as to his motivations. The findings will come as little surprise to a public that has morphed Trump’s codename for the war, Operation Epic Fury, into “Operation Epstein Fury.”

The belief that Trump is trying to knock Epstein off the front pages by going to war with Iran is most strongly held, unsurprisingly, by Democrats, who agree with the statement by an 81-14 margin. For those under 45, it is approaching an article of faith, with a 66%-26% majority agreeing with the idea. But even a quarter of Republicans told pollsters Trump launched the war as a distraction from Epstein.

The survey of 1,272 likely voters, using a national web panel of respondents, was conducted from March 6 to March 8 by Data for Progress, and paid for by Drop Site News and Zeteo. We put the survey into the field in order to be able to ask the American people the kind of questions mainstream news organizations shy away from. The precise wording of the questions can be found here, with breakdowns among party, race, gender, and age.

The public’s belief that Trump waged the ongoing war to distract from the Epstein scandal was branded as antisemitic this week by the Anti-Defamation League and the Washington Post, which said the viral claim owed its popularity to a “pro-Iran propaganda network.”

“Pretty quickly after the conflict began, this conspiratorial rebranding of Operation Epic Fury into ‘Operation Epstein Fury’ started circulating on social media platforms,” Oren Segal, the ADL’s “senior vice president of counter-extremism and intelligence,” told the Post. An ADL report said the phrase “Epstein Fury” has been mentioned more than 90,000 times by roughly 60,000 accounts. The Post did not explain why it was antisemitic to believe that Trump launched the war to distract from the Epstein scandal beyond noting that Epstein was Jewish.

The Post recently laid off its entire Middle East team. Nevertheless, according to the Post, Iranians are trying to undermine American support for the war by linking it to Epstein. “To erode public support for the joint U.S.-Israel military operation, Iranian state media has sought to portray those countries’ leaders as part of a corrupt and depraved ‘Epstein class’ or ‘Epstein regime,’” the paper reported, claiming that the “the message is spreading through generically named ‘news’ accounts” shilling for Iran. The term “Epstein class” was in fact first used by American Democratic politicians such as Sen. Jon Ossoff, who is Jewish, and Rep. Ro Khanna, who is not.

Israel’s Influence

The survey also probed the question of Israeli influence over Trump’s decisionmaking. Americans were split over the question of Trump’s loyalty, with 47% saying he is more responsive to the American people than to Israel, and 46% saying he was more responsive to Israel.

Among independents, a crucial voting block that swung the election to Trump, half—50-44%—said that Trump prioritizes Israeli interests over Americans’. Among Republicans, 17% said the same. Democrats overwhelmingly held that view, 75-17%.

Asked if the Trump administration was pursuing its war with Iran “primarily for American interests” or “primarily for Israeli interest,” the public was also divided, but half—50-41%—said that he was considering America first. Another 9% said they didn’t know.

Still, no president has ever gone into war with 41% of the country convinced he was doing so on behalf of a foreign country, putting Trump and Israel’s war in uncharted territory.

Electoral Backlash

The survey found that Americans are sour on it, with 55% saying they disapproved; among those 39% said they strongly disapproved, while just 42% approved. This result is in line with other polls on the war.

Overwhelmingly, voters believe the war will make their lives worse. The survey was in the field before the wild volatility in the oil market, but even then, 49% of voters said the war “will make my life more difficult” compared to just 10% who said they’d see an improvement. One third said it would have no impact.

More pressing for Washington, however, may be the public’s attitude toward politicians and candidates who support the war or support emergency supplemental funding for the war, which Trump has requested. The survey asked whether voters would be more likely or less likely to vote for a congressional candidate in 2026 or a presidential candidate in 2028 if they support the war or support new war funding.

For Democratic voters, the question is existential. A candidate who supports the war will be badly punished by primary voters in the 2026 congressional elections, with voters saying they’d be 79% less likely to support them, a number that held roughly the same for 2028 presidential candidates.

Republicans, however, would be more likely to support a pro-war candidate by a net 39 points, with only 20% saying it would make them less likely to back the candidate for president.

In the general election, this means voters would be less likely to support a congressional candidate by 19 points; roughly the same result holds for candidates who vote for war spending. Among presidential candidates, the number is negative 19.

Ballistic Missiles

Still, the poll found contradictory views among Americans. By a net margin of 70 points—83-13%—voters said it was important to them that Iran be prevented from possessing ballistic missiles capable of reaching Israel. (In hindsight, the word “prevent” may have been the wrong one to use, since Iran already possesses such weapons.)

Asked if Iran should be allowed to possess ballistic missiles “because countries have a right to defend themselves,” only 13% agreed, while 14% said it’s “not a concern of the United States.” The remaining two-thirds said that they should be prevented from having them.

Girls’ Elementary School Strike

Finally, we asked how much voters had read, seen, or heard about the attack on the girls’ school in southern Iran, which killed more than 180 people, mostly young girls.

A full 32% said they had heard nothing at all, and another 23% said they had heard “a little.” Some 29% said they’d heard “some,” and 16% had heard “a lot.”

Of those who had heard of it, 70% believed it was the work of either Israel, the U.S., or the U.S. and Israel together. A quarter of Americans believes Iran hit the school—a theory that was promoted by Trump and a cadre of war defenders without evidence. Republicans are the only demographic where a substantial portion holds that view, with 45% blaming Iran, 45% blaming the U.S. and/or Israel, and 10% unsure.

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House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries will whip votes in support of the War Powers Resolution this week, multiple Democratic sources told Drop Site News.

Whipping the vote means that Democratic leaders will apply pressure to colleagues to vote in support of the resolution to constrain Trump’s war ambitions, making defections more costly internally. The whip team is run by the party’s number two in the House, Rep. Katherine Clark of Massachusetts.

The decision comes after a group of progressive Democrats urged leadership to break with their recent practice of allowing Democrats freely to back Trump administration policies, which began when 46 Democrats broke ranks to support the Laken Riley Act and set the stage for Trump’s mass deportation.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), told Drop Site that leadership should not allow the WPR to be “a vote of conscience”—a term used to describe a vote that isn’t whipped in the House—because it goes to the core of the powers of Congress. “This is not a vote of conscience, this is a vote about the Constitution and Article 1 responsibilities for members of Congress,” she said.

The House is tentatively scheduled to begin debate on Wednesday and vote on Thursday.

On Saturday, CPC members were briefed privately on Iran by Ben Rhodes, formerly the national security adviser for President Barack Obama, and a host on the popular Pod Save the World, according to a CPC source.

The resolution from Democratic Reps. Ro Khanna and Republican Thomas Massie is being publicly opposed by at least four Democrats: Jared Moskowitz of southeastern Florida, Josh Gottheimer of northern New Jersey, Tom Suozzi of Long Island, and Greg Landsman of Cincinnati. Republican Warren Davidson, also of Ohio, however, has signaled he may break ranks and support it.

Moskowitz is facing a primary challenge and Gottheimer may also face one if he bucks his party on the war resolution; the deadline to file as a challenger to him is March 23.

Democratic Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, a co-author of the parallel War Powers Resolution in the Senate, said that none of the classified intelligence he’s received as a senior member of both the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and Senate Armed Services committee has revealed an imminent threat to the United States that would justify the war President Trump started in Iran.

After Secretary of State Marco Rubio briefed lawmakers on Monday, Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) concurred with Kaine, saying there was no evidence that Iran was going to strike the U.S. first. Warner, one of the most pro-Israel Democrats, said that “there was a threat to Israel” and so “we were in uncharted territory.”

Pentagon officials within the Trump administration have, per Reuters, privately corroborated Kaine’s assertion, acknowledging in closed-door briefings with congressional staff that there was no intelligence suggesting Iran planned to attack U.S. forces first.

Nevertheless, Sen. John Fetterman, the Pennsylvania Democrat who has become notorious in Washington for bucking his party on foreign policy, has joined the aforementioned war supporters in the House in also publicly announcing his intention to oppose the War Powers Resolution. He appears to be alone among Democrats in the Senate.

Fetterman baselessly asserted in a Sunday appearance on CNN that Trump exhausted diplomatic efforts to arrive at firm agreements barring Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons, despite Omani Foreign Minister Badr bin Hamad Albusaidi, who was mediating negotiations with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, suggesting a peace agreement was within reach when the U.S. struck Iran.

“They could have possibly acquired a [nuclear] bomb if we weren’t [to] bomb back in June,” Fetterman said. “So yeah there is a threat. It’s not imminent that could happen right now but it’s one that I think it’s entirely appropriate to deal with it.”

Prominent anti-war progressives in Congress have issued scathing criticisms of the American-Israeli joint operation and both called upon Congress to reconvene and assert its war powers to end Operation Epic Fury.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) called President Trump’s strikes “unlawful” and “unnecessary,” committing to vote “Yes” on the War Powers Resolution, while Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) said these actions constitute an “illegal war of aggression,” emphasizing that the Trump administration has already killed children and risks igniting a catastrophic regional conflict.

Tlaib, the only Palestinian-American member of Congress, also issued a more sweeping condemnation of U.S. foreign policy, rejecting the framing of the war as an effort to usher in democracy, attacking U.S. sanction policy, chiding President Trump for ignoring public opposition to a new war, and saying “you cannot ‘free’ people by killing them.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told Drop Site on Monday, “Israel should not be directing American war policy. That’s something the American Congress should be doing.” Rubio on Monday claimed that Israel had indeed forced the U.S. to attack. “We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action, we knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces,” said Rubio. That left Trump no choice, he said, but to join Israel in the attack.

Correction, March 3: Ben Rhodes is a host of Pod Save the World, not Pod Save America.

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Javier Milei Is Set to Roll Back Argentina’s Historically Strong Labor Rights

Story by Sam Carliner

Argentina’s Chamber of Deputies passed a bill Friday that would massively overhaul the country’s labor relations in an unprecedented rollback of workers’ rights. The 135-115 vote came after a marathon midnight session lasting from Thursday into Friday as trade unions again wielded their ability to bring out striking workers across Argentina and shut down ports, public transit, schools, and hospitals to protest the bill.

The lead-up to the vote was marked by the country’s fourth general strike since President Javier Milei took office. The CGT, the country’s largest federation of trade unions, called the 24-hour work stoppage following weeks of growing outrage as more and more workers learned of the severity of the attacks in the labor reform. The country, which has a unionization rate of around 27% nationally, was brought to a standstill.

Julián Aguirre, Director of the International Relations Secretariat from the CTA Autómoma labor federation which represents workers in industries ranging from healthcare to sugar production, told Drop Site that the reform has broader implications for labor in Latin America.

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“It sets a worrying precedent for the region,” Aguirre said. “Argentina today is a laboratory for a project that is not only economic but also social and cultural. In this case it aims to dismantle 100 years of labor rights in Argentina.”

The bill will return to the Senate on February 27 and labor leaders have pledged to maintain their protests. Although the bill is expected to become law, the right-wing Argentine government will have to face off with an increasingly mobilized and militant labor movement.

Argentina has generally been considered to have some of the strongest labor rights in the region. The bill includes a barrage of pro-big business measures which would make it cheaper and easier for employers to fire workers, standardize a 12-hour workday, reduce overtime pay and severance, and restrict paid time off. This is characteristic of the “Chainsaw Agenda” which is at the center of president Javier Milei’s economic policy. The bill also restricts workers’ rights to strike and engage in collective bargaining. The lower house eliminated one of the more controversial proposals that would have reduced by half the salaries of workers on leave due to injury or illness.

Businesses have already begun laying off workers in anticipation of the law. Just days before the vote, FATE, the largest tire factory in the country, announced it would be closing after over half a century of operations, firing hundreds of workers in the process. In response, a group of workers entered the factory and set up an occupation on the roof, which is ongoing at this time of writing.

Victory Ottobino, a FATE worker of three years who is participating in the occupation, told Drop Site that the closure is connected to Milei’s larger agenda.

“There are already hundreds of thousands of people who have been laid off across the country, mainly as a result of this government’s economic policy, a government that is totally aligned with the Trump administration in the United States, with the policies of financial capital, the IMF, etc.”

The occupation at FATE draws from recent history in Argentina. At the start of the 2000s, there was a wave of occupations in which workers took control of factories throughout the country, fighting for several years to bring them under workers’ control. Raúl Godoy, a labor leader who led the worker takeover of Zanon, a ceramics factory, told Drop Site that this history still inspires workers.

“This is a fight that is open and etched in the historical memory of the workers of our country,” Godoy said. “They are a very important achievement and a symbol in the face of closures: to occupy, to produce, to resist, and to have an alternative from the workers.”

Milei’s U.S.-Backed Agenda

Milei campaigned in 2023 as an outsider who would improve the living conditions of workers. His campaign took advantage of economic concerns in a country plagued by runaway inflation, fueled largely by an imposing debt from the International Monetary Fund.

As president, he has been attempting to completely reorganize Argentina’s economy for the benefit of big business by gutting long-standing protections for workers, privatizing public services, and opening the country to foreign capital, with a focus on attracting U.S. investment. Milei’s policies have not only worsened living conditions for most Argentines but have also gutted the country’s small and medium businesses. The new labor reform is the most extreme measure to date.

While many workers and small business owners voted for Milei, his administration has seen growing discontent reflected in plummeting approval ratings and large protests.

Despite this, Milei’s party received a boost in recent parliamentary elections. The win was largely the result of direct interference by the United States, with Trump announcing days before the election that he would condition $40 billion in aid to Argentina on Milei’s party La Libertad Avanza (Freedom Advances) winning sufficient seats to push forward liberalization of the country.

Milei’s party did not have enough votes in the Chamber of Deputies to pass the labor reform on their own. The vote passed with the support of other right-wing parties including Propuesta Republicana (Republican Proposal) and Unión Cívica Radical (Radical Civic Union).

In addition, several Peronist deputies provided the numbers needed to pass the bill. Some voted in favor of the bill after modifications had been made; others didn’t vote for it, but their presence allowed for the necessary quorum needed for the debate to commence. Peronism is the country’s longstanding populist movement which ranges from center-right to center-left. Many different groups, often with conflicting interests, make up the base of Peronism, which partially explains some of the representatives helping to advance the bill.

Aguirre told Drop Site that there is a “divorce” between the growing opposition in the streets and the political representatives in Congress.

“In all these demonstrations that have been massive on many occasions—whether to repudiate the attack on the university system, to repudiate the attack on the public health system—they have been massive marches, but they have perhaps not yet found a national leadership with a proposal that represents them.”

Worker Opposition

Along with the strike, workers, socialists, and broader activist sectors engaged in combative protests. On the morning of February 19, protesters set up several roadblocks at major transit arteries including the Pan-American Highway and the Pueyrredón Bridge. Early in the afternoon, a large crowd convened outside of Congress, enduring a militarized police presence which has been a staple of Milei’s repressive response to opposition. Later into the night neighborhoods were filled with the sound of cacerolazos, a popular protest in which people bang on pots and pans.

The day marked the culmination of outrage that had grown in waves since Milei first began preparing to pass the labor reform at the start of January. Just one week before the Deputies held their vote, the public became aware of Article 44, a section of the bill which undermined sick leave, rapidly increasing outrage over the reform.

Godoy told Drop Site that more left-wing sectors of the labor movement had launched a campaign to inform workers about the impact of the labor reform and organize for unions to take action against it.

“Campaigns were held in plazas, on beaches, in vacation spots, on trains, in subways, in public squares to inform the union leadership, the official union offices, especially the CGT, about the seriousness of this situation,” said Godoy.

Unlike previous work stoppages, the latest strike saw all of the country’s trade union confederations “set aside partisan and ideological differences in pursuit of a common goal,” according to Aguirre, with chatter among trade unions that the time has come for an indefinite general strike.

The ongoing occupation at FATE shows another side of the labor movement, in which some workers are responding spontaneously to the impact of Milei’s policies. In January, Lustramax, a cleaning and paper goods manufacturer, tried to illegally fire several workers known for their union activity, which resulted in a factory occupation and ended in the workers getting their jobs back.

Ottobino, the FATE worker, told Drop Site that these initiatives play an important role in activating the labor movement.

“All these sectors and movements that exist and are being monitored and attacked by the government must join forces to develop a widespread struggle to impose on the union bureaucracy until we bring down the economic plan of the government of the big bosses and the IMF,” said Ottobino.

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LEWISTON, Maine—The day after Janet Mills launched her Senate campaign in mid-October, she made a major announcement that spoke to the energy behind her effort to blunt the momentum of oysterman Graham Platner: She had raised a million dollars in the first 24 hours, with “98 percent of the donations $100 or less.”

But Mills has now filed her fundraising records publicly, and the numbers paint a different picture.

According to records filed with the Federal Election Commission, Mills raised $465,000 in what are known as “itemized contributions” within the first day of her campaign. To be itemized, the contribution is generally at least $200. That would suggest 46.5% of her $1 million came from larger contributions—and not those giving less than $100.

The clever ambiguity in the wording of “percent of donations,” however, could also mean that out of every 100 donors, only two were donations over $100. In other words, when Mills’s campaign wrote that only 2 percent were from those giving over $100, she’s counting a donation of $5 and a maximum contribution of $3,500 as one each. In Mills’ case, she raised the maximum allowable amount from 36 people on the first day.

But if the million-dollar claim is true, it also suggests her campaign has sputtered out. Let’s assume that she raised, as she claimed, at least $535,000 in small contributions in the first 24 hours. That’s not bad at all, even if it’s not the million from small donors that was strongly implied.

The problem is that for the entire fourth quarter of 2025, she raised just $822,000 in small contributions. That would mean that, after raising more than a half million in one day from regular people, she raised just $287,000 more over the next two and a half months. As a candidate, some drop off after launch day is expected, but to drop that far and that fast raises major concerns about how much momentum there is behind her bid, especially considering that the Democratic Party in Washington has turned on its small-dollar fundraising program for Mills. The party has carpet-bombed inboxes on her behalf, but people seem not to be responding.

The Mills campaign did not respond when asked to clarify these day-one fundraising issues.

In-state fundraising data this quarter tells a similarly worrying story for the Mills campaign. It’s nice to get money from California, but that doesn’t tell you anything about how popular you are in Maine. While the governor leads her U.S. Senate opponent Graham Platner in total dollars from within Maine, about $700,000 to $500,000, Platner has a significant advantage in volume of small-dollar donations across the state.

The quarterly report shows Platner with 2,119 donations below $150 this quarter. Gov. Mills had 1,075 small-dollar donations, about half of Platner’s base. So Mills is beating Platner when it comes to the wealthiest Mainers, while Platner is beating her handily among regular people. The problem for Mills is that she will quickly run out of rich people at the polls.

In southern Maine counties, where more than 53% of registered Democratic Primary voters live, Platner had almost three times as many small-dollar contributions as Mills. In the remaining central and northern Maine counties, Platner nearly doubles Mills in small-dollar donations, despite—or perhaps because of—Mills’s long history in the state.

“25,609 Mainers have already volunteered for or donated to our campaign,” the Platner Campaign said in a February 5 post on Twitter. “For context: Only 63,384 people voted for Janet Mills in the 2018 primary.”

The lack of enthusiasm gleaned from Mills’s fundraising data matches on-the-ground accounts from Maine. During the ICE surge, Gov. Mills’s approach to opposing the federal agency’s presence left community leaders feeling unaligned with her campaign.

Mills Out

On January 24, the morning that federal agents murdered VA nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, more than 500 Mainers packed into the former St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church, a towering gothic brick structure overlooking Lewiston’s Kennedy Park.

Despite sub-zero conditions, the crowd gathered for the state’s first large-scale ICE protest, an “ICE THEM OUT” rally. That week, masked federal agents launched “Operation Catch of the Day,” a mass deportation campaign aimed at the nearly 6,000 Somalis who live in Maine. By operation’s end, the administration claimed to arrest over 200 “immigrant offenders.” Many of these Mainers are now being held at a Massachusetts facility attorneys found to have “inhumane” conditions.

The Lewiston event featured many of the state’s prominent Democratic politicians.

Speakers included Platner, as well as gubernatorial candidates Shenna Bellows, Troy Jackson, Hannah Pingree, and Angus King III; Lewiston Mayor Carl Sheline and Portland Mayor Mark Dion, the leaders of Maine’s two largest cities; and Rep. Chellie Pingree.

Gov. Mills was notably absent.

“Governor Mills did not reach out to me, or to the organizing team ahead of the January 24 rally, and none of her staff contacted us either,” Former Lewiston city councilor and lead organizer of the ICE THEM OUT protest Safiya Khalid told Drop Site News. “There was no indication of interest from the Governor or her team.”

The day ICE launched its Maine operation, Mills was caught jetting off to California. Dinner invitations obtained by Axios reveal Mills planned to attend a trio of big-money Senate fundraisers in San Francisco and the Silicon Valley on Wednesday, and the East Bay on Thursday. The Wednesday invitation described an “intimate dinner” in San Francisco’s financial district. Suggested donations ranged from $1,000 to $7,000—the maximum donation for both the primary and general.

“Governor Mills has been focused on leading our state through this moment by standing up to Donald Trump, calling out Susan Collins’ failures, and most importantly working to defend Maine people,” said campaign spokesperson Tommy Garcia in a statement. Garcia was also employed by the state Democratic party. “Maine people know Janet Mills has their back and is focused on keeping Maine safe, not scoring political points.”

The campaign also provided Drop Site a bulleted list with links to several press statements highlighting actions Gov. Mills has recently taken against ICE. This list included details on requesting a meeting with Trump, writing a letter to the administration, and “slamming” Congress for advancing DHS funding without any reforms or measures.

For Khalid, who in 2019 overcame waves of racist smears to become the first Somali-American and youngest person ever elected to the Lewiston City Council, more meaningful actions would involve a structural “end to militarized enforcement models that destabilize communities.”

“We need leaders who are unequivocal in defending marginalized and vulnerable communities, not leaders who remain within the comfort of the political establishment,” Khalid said, “If you are running for office, you should be clear about whether you support dismantling an agency that has caused documented harm across this country.”

Platner, who spoke in Lewiston alongside Khalid, similarly believes the agency’s “institutional culture and total lack of accountability” cannot be reformed. He described the ongoing Chuck Schumer-led DHS negotiations as “acquiescence.”

“It just goes to show how out of step leadership in the Democratic Party is with membership,” Platner told Drop Site News. “I’ve been going all over the state of Maine. Every Democrat I talk to thinks ICE needs to be dismantled. People don’t think this agency deserves a single dime.”

“We watched Renee Good and Alex Pretti get shot from effectively every single possible angle,” Platner continued. “The idea one more camera would change that is insane.”

On January 30, six days after Mills was a no-show at the Lewiston rally, a city-wide service worker strike took place in Portland, Maine’s largest city. Almost 200 businesses shut their doors to protest ICE. Thousands of people marched through the city, ending at the Sailor and Soldier statue, a monument honoring Mainers who died defending our country during the Civil War, clearly symbolic of the current political moment.

At this event, one of the largest protests in Portland’s history, Mills was again absent. That evening, Mills was photographed dining at Scales, an upscale seafood restaurant in Portland’s gentrified Old Port District. The pictures from Mills dinner have now been viewed millions of times across platforms.

“Statements are not the same as standing with impacted communities. If elected officials say they oppose aggressive ICE tactics, that opposition should be visible and consistent,” Khalid said. “Right now, many people do not feel that level of alignment from the governor.”

Correction, February 14, 2026: Tommy Garcia, the Mills spokesperson, is no longer employed by the state Democratic party.

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Read his dispatch here.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, President Trump claims that negotiations are underway to resolve the standoff. That, it turns out, is simply false—a lie being told to him by Secretary of State Marco Rubio as part of his ambitious play to overthrow the Cuban government.

The story below is written by Noah Kulwin, who reported from Havana; Granados Ceja, who reported from Mexico City; and myself. This kind of reporting isn’t cheap, but is made available to the public for free thanks to readers who fund Drop Site News.

Help us keep pushing by making a tax-deductible donation today.

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To hear President Donald Trump tell it, the United States is deep in negotiations with Cuban government officials as the U.S. applies maximum pressure to the island. “We’re talking to the people from Cuba, the highest people in Cuba, to see what happens,” Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Sunday, February 1. “I think we’re going to make a deal with Cuba.”

Cuban leaders, meanwhile, have said they are open to negotiations on everything from human rights to democracy to tourism and direct foreign investment. Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel said in a recent press conference that Cuba is willing to engage in dialogue with the United States on any issue, provided talks take place without pressure or preconditions, on the basis of respect for Cuban sovereignty. Senior Cuban leaders reiterated to Drop Site that the government is serious about being open to wide-ranging talks. And Trump is no stranger to the island’s potential for American companies, having himself long held a registered trademark for a Trump Havana property that he has annually renewed.

All the evidence would seem to suggest that the opportunity for Trump to strike a historic deal is at hand. But, despite the president’s claims, there are and have been no negotiations involving high-level officials between Havana and Washington, according to five Cuban and American officials, all of whom asked for anonymity given the sensitivity of the Cuba-U.S. relationship.

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When it comes to Trump’s claims of those talks, it turns out he isn’t lying. Instead, sources tell Drop Site, he’s being lied to. “He’s saying that because that’s what Marco is telling him,” said a senior Trump official, referring to an internal effort by Secretary of State Marco Rubio to make Trump believe that the U.S. and Cuba are engaged in serious negotiations without ever doing so. The idea, the source said, is that in a few weeks or months, Rubio will be able to claim that the talks were futile because of Cuban intransigence. With diplomatic off-ramps being blocked, this would make Rubio’s vision of regime change the only path forward for an administration loath to reverse course on anything.

Asked about the fact that Rubio is misleading Trump about talks that aren’t going on, the State Department’s press office stood by the claim that such negotiations are indeed happening, forwarding along comment from an administration official: “As the President stated, we are talking to Cuba, whose leaders should make a deal. Cuba is a failing nation whose rulers have had a major setback with the loss of support from Venezuela and with Mexico ceasing to send them oil.” The statement offered no evidence the talks are taking place, named no officials participating, no dates of any meetings, nor did it identify a location where the supposed talks are happening.

Trump, meanwhile, has indicated he isn’t interested in an ideological confrontation with Cuba. This, sources suggest, is one way to understand why, after kidnapping Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the U.S. has made Venezuela roll back key Chávez-era oil legislation via a reform that opens up the country to foreign investment instead of changing its regime. Rubio, meanwhile, pushed hard internally for a full regime change in Venezuela, but had to settle for merely removing Maduro. Ultimately, though, for Rubio, the real prize has always been Cuba.

The Cuban-American Rubio answers to a political base in south Florida that would revolt if he struck any deal normalizing relations with the communist government—and who, ultimately, would have the power to undo him. Rubio’s rise through Florida and national politics — which now has him on the cusp of the Oval Office — has been accompanied by a string of corruption scandals, yet with unified support back home, he has managed to emerge with a relatively clean reputation nationally. If Trump successfully lands a deal with the Cuban government that Rubio would have to sign off on, Rubio would be left to either betray his life’s cause and that of his backers in Miami, or resign in protest.

For Rubio’s opponents inside the administration, the moment represents an opportunity to make Cuba into his Waterloo.

No Dialogue

In the wake of Trump’s claims of high-level talks, confused Cuban officials insisted to Drop Site that no such talks were then underway, but that they were eager for them to start. Misinformation in the media, however, has muddied the situation.

On February 2, the day after Trump’s comments, Politico highlighted a report that the son of Raúl Castro had traveled to Mexico City for talks with the Central Intelligence Agency and asked in a headline: “Could a Castro become our man in Havana?”

The article, however, is sourced to 14YMedio, a news outlet run by Havana-based dissident blogger Yoani Sánchez, which itself based its reporting on a single, fantastical Facebook post made by a Spain-based Cuban journalist. Yet the Politico report began circulating in Washington and has been accepted as fact. Senior Cuban officials tell Drop Site there are no talks going on in Mexico or anywhere else.

“At the moment, we’ve had some exchanges of messages, but we cannot say we have set a bilateral dialogue at this moment,” Cuba’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Carlos Fernandez de Cossio affirmed in a CNN interview this past Wednesday. “Most things in Cuba dealing with the United States are linked to the highest level. It’s a large issue for us, so there’s no decision, no action taken that doesn’t involve the high level of government in Cuba.”

A “senior State Department official” told the New York Times recently that contact between the Cuban and U.S. government was “not substantive” and merely discussed migrant repatriation. Elaborating, a senior Cuban official told Drop Site that the contacts are purely technical, with the U.S. telling Cuban officials when flights with deported migrants would be heading to Havana, and Cuban officials acknowledging receipt of the message.

An article on Wednesday in the Spanish outlet ABC Internacional added to the confusion, claiming that Mexican official Efraín Guadarrama is facilitating the talks. A well-placed source with direct knowledge tells Drop Site Guadarrama is doing no such thing.

In the wake of the abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, top Cuban government officials have become increasingly interested in wide-ranging talks with the Trump administration—talks that could even include Rubio, a longtime foe of the government, multiple Cuban officials tell Drop Site. The only red line, they said, is that the island’s sovereignty is not up for negotiation.

Havana’s desire for talks, bordering on desperation, has been signaled to the United States through a variety of channels, including through press statements and recent interviews with the Associated Press and CNN. “Cuba reiterates its willingness to sustain a respectful and reciprocal dialogue with the Government of the United States,” the Cuban foreign ministry said in a February 1 release, “directed toward concrete outcomes, grounded in mutual interest and international law.”

The ministry added that Cuba was willing to “broaden” the scope of talks, saying the country “firmly rejects being portrayed as a threat to the security of the United States. It has never engaged in hostile actions against that country, nor will it permit its territory to be used against any other nation. Cuba, on the contrary, is prepared to resume and broaden bilateral cooperation with the United States in addressing shared transnational threats, while unwaveringly defending its sovereignty and independence.”

In an interview with Newsweek, Cuban Permanent Representative to the U.N. Ernesto Soberón Guzmán said Cuba would be happy to work with Trump on immigration, drug interdiction, health research—he noted Trump’s praise for Cuba’s relatively lower rates of autism—and other areas.

In addition to the ongoing economic crisis, the proximate cause for Cuban concern is an executive order issued on January 29 by President Donald Trump threatening heavy tariffs on “any other country that directly or indirectly sells or otherwise provides any oil to Cuba.”

Though not mentioned by name, the tariff threat is aimed at Mexico, whose state oil company has in recent years been the primary supplier of oil to the small island nation located 90 miles off the southern coast of Florida. In response, Mexico’s state oil company, PEMEX, has reportedly suspended at least one planned shipment of oil to its Cuban ally, leaving Cuba with an estimated two to three weeks’ worth of oil to keep the country running.

Overburdened, underfueled, and obsolete, Cuba’s electricity grid is barely hanging on, while the Cuban government publicly says it is preparing to administer life in the country with almost zero power. On Friday, ministers began to roll out a nationwide energy rationing plan. The measures include cutting mass transit, slashing individual gasoline allotments, and reducing in-person days for secondary school students. While Americans sat down for Super Bowl Sunday, Cuban authorities told airlines there was only one day’s supply of aviation fuel left in the country. On Monday, the U.S. intercepted an oil tanker as far away as the Indian Ocean for allegedly planning to ship fuel to Cuba.

Read more from Drop Site on Cuba’s oil crisis here.

At a lengthy press conference this past Thursday, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel reiterated his country’s emphatic openness to negotiation with the United States without “pressure” or “preconditions.” Broadcasted on TV and radio around the world, Díaz-Canel’s comments were made, as one Wall Street Journal reporter observed, “with an audience of one in Washington”—Donald Trump.

“We are a country of peace,” Díaz-Canel said. “We are not a threat to the United States.”

Noah Kulwin reported from Havana, José Luis Granados Ceja reported from Mexico City, and Ryan Grim reported from Washington, D.C.

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With Israel’s reputation reaching record lows among Democrats, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is resorting to ever more sophisticated methods to support its preferred candidates while cloaking its own involvement.

The amount of money that the premier pro-Israel organization is able to spend in elections is extraordinarily valuable to candidates who would otherwise have little chance of winning. But it now comes with a catch: If voters know the money comes from an organization advocating on behalf of Israel, it can do more harm than good.

AIPAC road-tested its stealth approach in a 2024 House primary in Oregon that pitted Susheela Jayapal, the sister of Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), against physician Maxine Dexter. Dexter raised relatively little money throughout much of her campaign, then saw a last-minute deluge organized by AIPAC coupled with outside spending through super PACs, which themselves turned out to be funded by AIPAC. The timing of the donations meant that there was no meaningful transparency before voters went to the polls, and Dexter expressed a mixture of ignorance and umbrage when her opponents suggested the money actually came from AIPAC.

The main super PAC in question (named 314 Action) explicitly denied that any funding came from AIPAC—a claim revealed as a flagrant lie once disclosure records finally became public. But by then, Dexter had triumphed and was on her way to Congress.

Campaign staffers expect AIPAC to continue using the tactic in this year’s primaries. “In these districts where we have a progressive primary fight, you’re going to see AIPAC put out a network of shell PACs, putting money into races without putting their name on it,” said Usamah Andrabi of the progressive campaign group Justice Democrats.

And indeed, the same pattern is emerging in three competitive House primaries in Illinois. The pieces of the puzzle can be found in the campaign disclosures of House candidates Laura Fine, a state legislator running in Illinois’s Ninth Congressional District for the open seat vacated by Rep. Jan Schakowsky on the North Side of Chicago and its northern suburbs; Donna Miller, a Cook County commissioner running in Illinois’s Second District to replace Rep. Robin Kelly on Chicago’s South Side and southern suburbs; and Melissa Bean, a banker and former member of Congress making a comeback in Illinois’s Eighth District in the western suburbs of Chicago. Bean is also running for an open seat to replace Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, who like Kelly is running for Senate.

Putting the pieces together, it is clear that AIPAC is again funding super PACs in order to secretly funnel money to its preferred candidates, while also coordinating donors to give to those candidates directly.

Miller is running in a race that features an attempted political comeback by Jesse Jackson Jr., and Fine is squaring off against progressive Daniel Biss and Kat Abughazaleh, who became a national figure after she was indicted by the Trump Justice Department for her role in anti-ICE protests. Bean is facing Junaid Ahmed, who supports ending all military aid to Israel.

A look at Miller, Fine, and Bean’s filings betrays an impressively coordinated operation at work. Sixty-five donors who previously gave to AIPAC or its affiliated super PAC United Democracy Project (UDP) have given to both Miller and Fine. These donors delivered $88,066.66 to the Fine campaign. They also contributed $119,746.33 to Miller. A whopping 237 former AIPAC/UDP donors have given to both Miller and Bean, contributing $396,288.01 to Bean and $429,083.00 to Miller. Forty-four of these donors have given to all three candidates, sending a total of $208,753.33 to them.

Several of the donations were given to the candidates on the same day, by the same donors, for the same amounts.

“This coordinated effort by Trump and AIPAC donors to buy multiple congressional seats in Illinois should be alarming to anyone who cares about the integrity of our democracy,” said Matthew Fisch, campaign manager for Robert Peters, who is running against Miller in IL-02.

ALL THREE OF AIPAC DONORS’ Illinois candidates are benefiting from new pop-up super PACs with anodyne-sounding names. Affordable Chicago Now! is supporting Miller, and Elect Chicago Women is supporting Fine and Bean.

The super PACs, whose donors are currently secret, were both organized in January and began rolling out television ads in the last week. The spots (here’s Fine’s, here’s Miller’s, and here’s Bean’s) are generic positive biographical ads. The total ad buys appear to be in the millions of dollars. Illinois primaries will be held March 17, and the names of the funders of the super PACs will not have to be released until near or even after that date.

The ads do not mention support for Israel. Neither AIPAC, UDP, nor indirectly associated PAC Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI), which often supports the same candidates, have endorsed or spent money in these three races. But Jewish Insider and several others have reported that AIPAC appears to be behind the pop-up super PACs. AIPAC, United Democracy Project, and the two shell PACs did not return requests for comment.

The need to hide the super PAC ball was made more apparent on Thursday night, after the results of a special congressional primary election in New Jersey to replace Mikie Sherrill, who was elected governor last November. Former Rep. Tom Malinowski faced a direct onslaught of $2 million in UDP ads, and DMFI quietly endorsed former Lt. Gov. Tahesha Way. But with most votes in, Malinowski was a close second to Analilia Mejia, the least-friendly candidate to AIPAC in the race, who benefited from the attack ads on her top opponent. Way finished a distant third.

The same ad buyer handling the Illinois super PAC ads bought ads for AIPAC in that Thursday election in New Jersey.

In Donna Miller’s case, the support, both direct and indirect, came not a moment too soon. In the 11-candidate field in IL-02, she was something of an afterthought, having raised only around $242,000 for her campaign prior to the fourth quarter of 2025, not enough to be taken seriously. Suddenly, she took in over $1 million last quarter, according to her Federal Election Commission report filed on January 31, much of it coming in toward the end of the quarter. The haul immediately made Miller a leading contender in the race.

As with the case of Dexter, Miller’s opponents quickly suspected something unusual was going on. Her opponent Peters’s campaign found that 83 percent of her total haul in the fourth quarter, about $875,000, came from people who gave to AIPAC or UDP within the last four years, a fact that’s confirmed by the raw data at the FEC website.

Miller’s donors were feeling particularly generous on New Year’s Eve: 198 of those donations came on December 31, 2025.

Miller has not made any statements about Israel on her website, and the “red box” on her site that identifies preferred messages for outside campaigns to use does not include foreign policy or Israeli foreign aid, either. But something is obviously attracting longtime AIPAC donors to her campaign.

“The fact that the people who want Donald Trump to be president also want Donna Miller in Congress says a whole lot about Donna Miller,” said Matthew Fisch, the campaign manager for Peters.

Those donors come not just from Illinois but from across the country, including Arizona, California, Texas, Florida, New York, Ohio, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Virginia, Washington, Kansas, Delaware, Minnesota, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Tennessee, Missouri, Nevada, and Michigan. Nearly $39,000 came from donors who also contributed to Donald Trump in his elections.

By cross-referencing this data with data from Laura Fine’s FEC disclosures, you can see that many of Miller’s donors have also given to Fine’s campaign. Fine has also lagged her primary opponents in fundraising; her campaign touted an internal poll this week showing her in a tie at the top of the race, though other campaigns’ polls and independent polling show her behind.

A substantial number of Fine’s donations also come from AIPAC donors, and AIPAC has done a bit less to obscure its support for her, even if the super PAC backing her is called “Elect Chicago Women.” In December, AIPAC board president Michael Tuchin held a fundraiser for Fine and multiple emails from AIPAC asking donors to give money to Fine have been leaked.

Five AIPAC donors—Timothy Wuliger, Gadi Maier, Susan Hammer, William Silverstein, and Mark Gerstein—gave maximum donations of $3,500 to both Miller and Fine. Two other donors—the husband-and-wife team of Jerry and Alexis Bednyak—“double-maxed” to Miller and Fine, meaning that they gave a maximum $3,500 donation for both the primary and the general election. The Bednyaks are major donors to AIPAC, according to the website Track AIPAC, with $100,000 in lifetime donations to the organization. Jerry Bednyak co-founded ticket reseller Vivid Seats and is a managing partner with Skybox Capital.

Other crossover donors gave varying amounts ranging from $250 to $3,500 to each candidate. In all, 65 donors contributed to AIPAC, Laura Fine, and Donna Miller. Some, like Moises Woldenberg of San Antonio, Texas, Rachel Albert of Middlebury, Connecticut, and Jeffrey Drake of Evanston, Illinois, gave the same amounts to Fine and Miller on the same day (December 31, 2025).

“This is the same right-wing dark-money machine that has spent years attacking our democracy and propping up January 6 insurrectionists for office,” said Kat Abughazaleh, one of Fine’s leading opponents.

There are even more significant crossovers between Miller’s donors and donors to Melissa Bean, who was once called Wall Street’s favorite Democrat when she served in Congress from 2005 to 2011. Her name recognition and massive fundraising ability as a former banker have vaulted her to the top of the pack in the crowded race. She has the support of the centrist New Democrats, along with a substantial number of AIPAC donors.

An incredible 45 AIPAC donors maxed out to both Miller and Bean, while Bednyak and his wife double-maxed out to both of them, as they did for Fine. Aside from the Bednyaks, only Gadi Maier of Paradise Valley, Arizona, maxed out to Bean, Miller, and Fine.

The vast majority of Bean and Miller donors gave the same amounts to both candidates, even with weird numbers like $613 (the number of mitzvot in the Torah, from Martin Lurie of Newton, Massachusetts) or $1166.67 (Rada Burdeen of Winnetka, Illinois). That suggests that these donors were encouraged to split their donations to Bean and Miller through some sort of email communication. To have 237 donors shared by both campaigns, with hundreds of thousands of dollars contributed, is hard to write off as a coincidence.

“This is the AIPAC playbook on how to control Congress,” said Bean opponent Junaid Ahmed in a statement. “They’ll spend big money now and then expect my opponent to send billions in aid and weapons to Israel when she’s in Congress. This is exactly what’s wrong with our politics.”

The Fine, Miller, and Bean campaigns have not yet responded to a request for comment. But Daniel Biss confronted Fine about her AIPAC support at a candidate forum on Wednesday. Biss has claimed that nearly $60,000 in Fine donations come from Trump donors, more money than she raised last quarter from constituents inside the district. Fine responded, “I don’t know who a Trump donor is who’s donating.” After the forum, Fine told reporters that she would “love to know who’s funding” the ads.

DONATIONS TO INDIVIDUAL CANDIDATES can be more powerful than super PAC donations. Though candidate donations have limits ($3,500 for both the primary and general elections) relative to unlimited and secret super PACs, candidates get much more favorable ad placement rates, sometimes by a factor of ten, thanks to a 1972 law.

Therefore it makes sense for organizations that want to influence elections to use all channels—including super PACs, outside spending, and funneling donors directly to candidates—to give their preferred candidates resources.

AIPAC has coordinated donor support for its candidates in the past, beyond Maxine Dexter. In 2024, it was the largest source of Republican donors for Democratic candidates in primary races, according to Politico. In addition to Miller and Fine, AIPAC donors are supporting another candidate for an open seat in Illinois, Jason Friedman in the Seventh Congressional District, who is trying to replace retiring Rep. Danny Davis.

There’s nothing illegal about organizations encouraging donors to support certain candidates. The Progressive Change Campaign Committee this week endorsed Peters in the Second District race and Biss in the Ninth District, and is “mobilizing its national grassroots network” to support those candidates by asking its supporters to donate to them directly.

The PCCC is doing this publicly, however, whereas AIPAC has not even endorsed these particular candidates publicly as of yet. And the potential amount of money AIPAC can funnel from big donors with the ability to max out to campaigns is much bigger than a grassroots mobilization.

Combined with the suspected shell super PACs, it represents an all-out effort by AIPAC to get their candidates who presumably agree with their desires for unconditional support for Israel into Congress.

Hannah Riddle, director of candidate services for the PCCC, said in a statement, “These early primaries are indicative of the exact fight we’re seeing for the future of the Democratic Party. Are we going to nominate candidates who are paid for by corporations and special interests, or are we going to invest in candidates who will inspire voters, name those special interests, and fight against them?”

Riddle added, “If Miller and Fine have any integrity, they should return the money and denounce these dark money Super PACs.”

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Flights to and from Iran were canceled en masse last week, as the country prepared for another round of U.S. airstrikes. Those attacks may still be in the offing, but have yet to materialize.

Now, flights have resumed, and one protestor, who had spent the last month in Iran, and has participated in previous rounds of protest, agreed to sit down for an interview on the condition that we protect her identity. We reviewed travel documents and verified other elements of her account where we could, including with footage she and her friends took at the marches. Much of the footage, some of which is included in the interview, shows overturned dumpsters and tires set aflame. The Financial Times reported that witnesses to the uprising observed groups of black-clad, well-organized men going from dumpster to dumpster, setting them on fire, while the woman we interviewed did not see that directly. Videos of the uprising, as well as testimony reported by FT, show “armed agitators” firing into crowds and at security services.

Her account does not claim to be comprehensive; no single account could be. She is not part of a professional activist network, but she was visiting Iran in order to spend time with family. The interview presents a first-hand perspective of a person directly involved with the protests—from someone who is opposed to the government there, but is also opposed to the bombing of Iran and is not a supporter of the U.S. or Israel, countries that have played a role in the unrest and have made no secret of their designs toward Iran. The New York Times has reported that “a ragtag network of activists, developers and engineers pierced Iran’s digital barricades” and with the help of the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA-adjacent American funding mechanism, managed to build a transnational network that smuggled some 50,000 Starlink devices into Iran, which is about $40,000,000 of hardware for that “ragtag” band.

In our interview, the woman recounts a massive march in Tehran of nearly unprecedented size on Thursday, January 8, which she saw meet very little security service resistance. Elsewhere in the city, reports suggest it did turn violent. That march was followed by another on Friday, at which her friends saw people fall from gunfire but she did not. On Saturday, the government sent text messages to the public warning that another demonstration would be met with force. “Saturday was – I don’t think I’ll ever forget Saturday,” she told me. After the massacre, the city went quiet. Since then, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has said that “several thousand” people were killed in the protests. The death toll includes demonstrators, some armed and, Khamenei argued, trained by foreign adversaries, as well as personnel from Iran’s security services.

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Watch her first-hand account here.

Give him a warm welcome by following him on Twitter if you still use that godforsaken platform. (Speaking of Twitter, last night Vice President J.D. Vance used his account there to come after me as somebody “incapable of not lying” about the killing of Renee Good. Of course, he lied himself in the same post.)

This week on Breaking Points, if you missed it, we talked about the history of Cuba’s defense of Angola against an invasion by apartheid South Africa, their largest foreign intervention by far. U.S. funding for Angolan insurgents wound up becoming an under-appreciated piece of Iran-Contra, where Jeffrey Epstein cut his teeth. Watch our interview with Blowback podcast host Noah Kulwin here.

Today’s story is written by Ed Augustin and Reed Lindsay, and published in collaboration with the news outlet Belly of the Beast, an independent media organization that covers Cuba and U.S.-Cuba relations. Augustin and Lindsay examine the history and future of the relationship between Cuba and Venezuela in the wake of the U.S. kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro. Read some of Ed’s previous reporting for Drop Site here.

In listening to Blowback’s season on the history of the Angolan civil war in order to prepare for the interview with Kulwin, I was struck by how significant a role corrupt news coverage played in allowing U.S. policy there to unfold as it did and how critical it was when good coverage intervened – such as by Seymour Hersh and others, who exposed the CIA’s dirty war or the war crimes and use of child soldiers by Jonas Savimbi, our man in Angola. If the U.S. role had been documented more thoroughly, and if the genuinely deranged nature of Savimbi had been exposed early, hundreds of thousands of Angolan lives may have been saved and the country could have gotten on with its economic development.

Good, honest, and timely journalism can change history. Being reminded of that made me that much prouder of the work we’re doing here at Drop Site, and that much more grateful to the tens of thousands of you who have donated your hard-earned money to make it possible.

Now that it’s a new year, forgive us as we come back asking again. If you haven’t yet become a paid subscriber, please consider doing so.

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If you can make a separate tax-deductible contribution of any amount, that helps immensely, too.

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The Cuban government has now confirmed that 32 of its nationals were killed in Venezuela trying to protect Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores when they were abducted by U.S. Special Forces on Saturday. Below, we break down what we know so far and talk to Cubans about how they’re reacting to the news.

We also take a deep dive into why these Cubans were in Venezuela in the first place — and why claims that they were an army “propping up” Maduro don’t hold up.

—Ryan Grim

In Havana, Hope That a Lack of Oil Staves Off a U.S. Attack

Story by Ed Augustin and Reed Lindsay

Cubans observed two official days of mourning earlier this week after a contingent of its security forces were massacred guarding Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Flags were flown at half-mast, and concerts were canceled.

“No country has the right to invade another,” one woman told us on the streets of Havana. “Those Cubans were there at the request of the Venezuelan government to protect Maduro…The blood we’ve shed unites us.”

Are people on the island afraid that Cuba could be next?

“I’ll be honest with you…a little,” said one.

“Everyone knows it’s about oil. I don’t think they’ll come and bomb Cuba,” hoped another.

“We’ve lived under threat our entire lives, even [of] an invasion. And we defeated them,” said a third. (Watch the interviews here.)

“What's happening to Venezuela could happen to any Latin American country,” said a 19-year-old studying microbiology at university to work in healthcare. “I want to graduate. But you never know what will happen in three years, even if Donald Trump will still be president.”

One hundred people, including civilians and security forces, were killed in the U.S. attack on Venezuela, according to the country’s interior minister, Diosdado Cabello.

The Guardian reports it took the U.S. two hours and twenty-eight minutes from the time its helicopters touched down in Maduro’s compound in Caracas at 2:01 a.m. to seize the president and his wife. Maduro, the paper reported, had tightened his security measures leading up to his abduction and was relying on Cuban bodyguards.

But the lack of a response from the Venezuelan military and the disparity in the death toll—the U.S. reported no casualties—have fueled speculation abroad about betrayal.

Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodríguez fired General Javier Marcano Tábata, who headed the Directorate General of Military Counter-Intelligence and was responsible for Maduro’s security. Rodríguez herself has come under question due to a report that she and her brother and head of the National Assembly Jorge Rodríguez had been leading talks in Qatar with the Trump administration about a “more acceptable” alternative to Maduro in the months leading up to the U.S. attack.

The imbalance in casualties, however, may have more mundane explanations.

“The Americans obviously came in with a great deal of firepower and simply overwhelmed them,” said Hal Klepak, Professor Emeritus of History and Strategy at the Royal Military College of Canada. “That’s an American tactic throughout Latin American history over almost two centuries. You don’t go in with the minimum; you go in with the maximum.”

Venezuela’s Defense Minister Vladímir Padrino on Sunday read a statement from the Bolivarian Armed Forces, accusing the Trump administration of “murdering in cold blood a large part of their security team, soldiers and innocent citizens.”

On Tuesday, Cuba published the headshots, names, ranks, and ages of the 32 Cuban officers killed by the U.S. The list included colonels, lieutenants, majors, captains, and reservists ranging in age from 26 to 60.

What Were Cuban Security Forces Doing in Venezuela?

After the election of socialist President Hugo Chávez in 1998, Venezuela quickly became Cuba’s closest ally. Very early in his term, Chávez signed alongside Fidel Castro the Cuba-Venezuela Comprehensive Cooperation Agreement that saw Cuban specialists lend their expertise inside of Venezuela in the fields of culture, education, health, and more. Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world, but its healthcare system had always faced medicine and staff shortages. Cuba sent thousands of doctors and nurses to work in Venezuela, where they were paid many times the tiny salaries they earned in Cuba. In exchange, Venezuela shipped oil to Cuba.

This relationship, in the hands of hardline forces in South Florida, became fodder for longtime advocates of regime change in Havana and Caracas. Venezuela was routinely accused of propping up Cuba and, when it was necessary for the narrative, Cuba was accused of doing the same for Venezuela.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has tried to depict the Cuban medical missions as “forced labor” and expanded an existing visa restriction policy relating to Cuba’s overseas medical missions targeting foreign government officials to dissuade countries from signing similar agreements with Cuba.

For years, U.S. officials complained that oil-rich Venezuela was propping up Cuba with subsidized oil. Then, in 2019, the first Trump administration flipped the script.

That year, Trump called Maduro a “Cuban puppet.” Then-Vice President Mike Pence accused Cuba of keeping the Venezuelan people “hostage.” U.S. Special Representative for Venezuela Elliot Abrams said Venezuela was a “colony” of Cuba, and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed the island was “the true imperialist power in Venezuela.”

Then National Security Adviser John Bolton, who oversaw a failed effort with Rubio, then a senator, to bring about regime change in Venezuela, claimed there were as many as 25,000 Cuban “thugs” propping up the Maduro government. “Maduro would fall by midnight” if not for the Cubans, Bolton told reporters in April 2019. (For more see the second episode of Belly of the Beast’s award-winning documentary series, The War on Cuba).

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado likened the presence of Cuban advisors inside Venezuela to an “invasion” and made it part of her push for U.S. military intervention inside her country. No credible evidence was ever presented that Cuba had thousands of troops in Venezuela.

“I don’t think it’s any mystery that we are not big fans of the Cuban regime, who, by the way, are the ones that were propping up Maduro,” Rubio told NBC’s “Meet the Press” last Sunday.

The vast majority of Cubans who have gone to Venezuela have served as doctors and nurses, as well as teachers and sports coaches. One of them is Dr. Lyhen Fernández Baez, a urologist, who was recently interviewed by her daughter, Belly of the Beast journalist Liz Oliva Fernández, about her experience serving on a medical mission in Venezuela.

Manufacturing a Security Crisis

For months, the Trump administration said its deadly boat strikes and military build-up in the Caribbean were aimed at fighting “narcoterrorism.” The Justice Department claimed Maduro was leading a drug cartel called “Cartel de los Soles.”

But this week, the administration quietly dropped that claim in a revised indictment, acknowledging that the so-called cartel isn’t a real drug-trafficking organization—even as Maduro still faces narcoterrorism and drug trafficking charges in a federal court.

Concocting far-fetched accusations to legitimize hostility has been the U.S. government’s playbook for decades when it comes to Venezuela—and Cuba. For example, the island occupies multiple State Department blacklists, accused of carrying out human trafficking via its medical missions and even sponsoring terrorism despite consensus to the contrary in the U.S. intelligence community.

The two countries’ close relationship has also provided fodder for neoconservatives like Abrams and Bolton, who both have decades of experience scheming up ways of overthrowing governments around the world.

Abrams, convicted for “withholding information from Congress” during the Iran-Contra Affair, was “the crucial figure” in Washington during the bungled Venezuela coup d’état that briefly deposed President Hugo Chávez from power in 2002, according to The Guardian. (The New York Times on Wednesday released a 52-minute interview with Abrams to help their readers understand “what is actually happening in Venezuela.”)

Bolton, who once falsely claimed that Cuba was developing biological weapons, argued in 2019 that Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela form a “troika of tyranny” and a “triangle of terror” in the Western Hemisphere, reminiscent of the “axis of evil” rhetoric he employed during the George W. Bush years.

Led by Bolton and Abrams, the Trump administration did not abandon the claim that Venezuela propped up Cuba; it simply doubled down on its inverse. U.S. officials have toggled between portraying Caracas as Havana’s benefactor and Havana as Caracas’s puppet master—contradictory narratives that nonetheless converged on the same policy goal: sweeping “maximum pressure” sanctions on both countries, including measures aimed at cutting Venezuelan oil exports.

“Patently False” Claims

Security experts say U.S. government claims about Cuba’s influence in Venezuela are grossly exaggerated. Ben Rhodes, a former U.S. deputy national security advisor who played a key role in negotiating the normalization of U.S.-Cuba relations during President Barack Obama’s second term, has disputed the claim that Cuban military personnel in Venezuela numbered in the tens of thousands.

“The only way you get to those numbers is to count doctors as security officials,” Rhodes told us in an interview back in 2019.

“The number of Cuban security officials alleged by the U.S. government was patently false,” said Fulton Armstrong, who served as the National Intelligence Officer for Latin America from 2000 to 2004. “The vast majority are civilian doctors, teachers, and coaches, and many are women.”

“We know that there were indeed Cubans in Maduro’s security detail, but perhaps now, we can also put to rest that the Cubans ‘ran’ Venezuela’s security plan because they apparently didn’t have any indication of the attack until it was upon them,” he added.

Cuban-Venezuelan cooperation deepened after the 2002 coup, with the Cubans assisting in the creation of security services and military intelligence capacity in Venezuela, according to Klepak, the former NATO analyst who also served as an advisor to the foreign and defense ministers of Canada.

He added that Cuban officers have long been posted in limited numbers within the Venezuelan armed forces’ command system, and that in recent years they’ve been connected to natural disaster relief efforts.

“The UN has often hailed Cuba’s [disaster response] system as the best or one of the best in the world and a model for other countries. Venezuela is prone to natural disasters, but its forces had a dismal record for dealing with them. Thus, asking Cuba for assistance was obvious,” he said. “But the idea that this tiny military presence is in any way an occupying army or that it is anything like 1,000 people, never mind 25,000 people, is simply politically motivated.”

“Bolton’s continued emphasis [of Cuba’s presence] says more about the Trump White House than Venezuela,” Rhodes said in 2019. “They have an agenda to go after both Venezuela and Cuba…their approach seems to be nakedly political and ideological — using regime change in Venezuela as an entry point to pursue regime change in Cuba.”

This approach is unchanged with Rubio steering U.S. policy in the region.

Cuba’s Long History of Resisting U.S. Intervention

It’s not surprising that Venezuela would turn to Cuba for help in defending itself from U.S. aggression.

The island has weathered a U.S.-backed invasion, acts of sabotage, repeated terrorist attacks, and numerous assassination attempts on Fidel Castro. Cuba’s intelligence service is renowned, in particular for repeatedly outmaneuvering the CIA.

Decades ago, Cuba was also known for an “internationalist” military that punched above its weight, sending military contingents to face off against U.S.-backed forces in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.

While Abrams was secretly arming right-wing paramilitaries to overthrow the left-wing Sandinista government in Nicaragua in the 1980s, Cuba sent their Marxist allies military advisors.

When the leftist New Jewel Movement came to power on the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada after it won independence from Britain, Cuba sent intelligence operatives and troops to support the fledgling government. The Reagan administration called Grenada a “Cuban-Soviet colony” in 1983 and invaded it.

Cuba’s most successful foreign military intervention was in Angola, where Cuban soldiers fought with the left-wing People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola. From 1975 to 1991, Cuba deployed hundreds of thousands of troops to the country—by far the largest overseas military engagement ever conducted by a Latin American country. Cuba was credited with helping bring about the fall of apartheid in South Africa.

“The Cuban internationalists have made a contribution to African independence, freedom and justice unparalleled for its principled and selfless character,” said Nelson Mandela during a visit to Cuba in 1991.

But when the Soviet Union disintegrated, Cuba’s economy went into a tailspin, and the foreign military interventions ended.

“The Cuban armed forces were cut massively from between 270,000–290,000 in the 1980s to between 55,000–60,000,” said Klepak, adding that the armed forces have been reduced to a home defense force with little to no capacity to project force beyond the island.

An Inconvenient Truth for Regime Changers

Over the years, Cuba has become one of the U.S. government’s most reliable security partners in the Caribbean.

Since the 1990s, Cuban and U.S. armed forces have collaborated closely on counternarcotics operations and efforts to stop illegal migration, according to Klepak. Cuba’s strategy, Klepak argues, has been to build confidence, “to create a body of people in the U.S. government who see Cuba as a natural and effective ally in security issues.”

With the days of large-scale Cuban military internationalism long gone, regime changers are left with an inconvenient truth. According to Klepak, “however much both sides try to downplay it, until the [first] Trump administration, the closest security relationship that Cuba had was with the United States of America.”

Now, with Maduro out of the picture and nearly three dozen Cubans dead, the claims that Cuba is propping up Venezuela appear more absurd than ever.

The opposite claim—that Venezuela is propping up Cuba—may also no longer be true.

In 2025, Venezuela was shipping less than 30,000 barrels a day to the island, about 70% less than what it was sending a decade earlier. This fuel lifeline has been further cut in recent weeks as the Trump administration ordered “a total and complete blockade” of sanctioned oil tankers. In recent years Mexico has become the primary supplier of oil to Cuba, with President Claudia Sheinbaum portraying the shipments as part of her government’s humanitarian efforts in the Caribbean and a longstanding policy of Mexico.

The U.S. is placing extraordinary pressure on the interim administration in Venezuela to cut ties with Cuba and it is not clear yet what will happen to other aspects of the two countries’ relationship, and whether the Cuban doctors, nurses, and teachers who are serving on humanitarian missions in Venezuela will be forced to return home.

If they are, they may be replaced by U.S. oil executives. Rubio said on Wednesday that the administration was about to finalize a deal with the Venezuelan government to “take all the oil,” adding that the U.S. had “a lot of leverage” because of its continuing blockade on Venezuelan oil exports.

Meanwhile, the heads of ExxonMobil, Chevron, and ConocoPhillips met with Trump Friday to discuss his plans to “run” Venezuela and control its oil industry.

At the meeting, Trump continued to vex those looking for an end-game behind his assault. “We are open for business,” he said. “China can buy all the oil they want from us, there or in the United States. Russia can get all the oil they need from us.”

Amba Guerguerian and Liz Oliva Fernández contributed to this article.

At a recent military technology conference in Tel Aviv, Israeli weapons companies made some of their most explicit remarks yet connecting the value of their products to the real-world testing of that firepower on Palestinians in Gaza. A recording of the conference remarks was obtained by Drop Site News and includes comments from the president and CEO of the Israel Aerospace Industries as well as executives at Elbit Systems, RAFAEL Advanced Defense Systems, and others. The conference was called DefenseTech Week and was held in early December. Drop Site shared the audio with independent news outlets in Brazil, Ireland, Australia, and elsewhere; those outlets will be producing their own investigations.

The Israeli weapons industry has previously come in for criticism for its willingness to boast that its products are “lab tested” on human beings under occupation, most prominently by Australian journalist Anthony Lowenstein. His book, The Palestine Laboratory, was adapted into a Drop Site podcast last year.

The newly uncovered remarks suggest that, rather than having been chastened by global condemnation for the genocide in Gaza, the nation’s weapons industry is emboldened by it. “The war that we faced in the last two years enables most of our products to become valid for the rest of the world,” boasted Boaz Levy, head of Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), on day one of the conference. “Starting with Gaza and moving on to Iran and to Yemen, I would say that many, many products of IAI were there.”

The military itself was well represented at the gathering. Major General (Res.) Amir Baram is director general of the Israel Ministry of Defense and also gave remarks on the first day. “These are not lab projects or powerpoint concepts,” he said. “They are combat proven systems. This is what defense tech means in Israel and this has redefined Israel’s global identity. For years, Israel was known worldwide as a cyber nation. Today, we have evolved into a true defense tech nation.”

Gili Drob-Heistein, executive director of the Blavatnik Interdisciplinary Cyber Research Center, said that the two years of unleashing Israeli weapons technology on Palestinians had helped transition Israel from a “startup nation” to a global player in the defense industry. “Israel is known for being the startup nation and we all believe that defense tech has the potential to become the next big economic engine for Israel and beyond,” he said. “Israel’s technological leadership combined with smartness, boldness, and out of the box thinking continues to yield astonishing results, as we’ve seen recently on the battlefield during a war that was forced upon us on multiple different fronts simultaneously. Many of the technologies have both military and civilian applications.”

Data on global arms sales suggests the boasting at the conference reflects genuine upward trends for Israel’s weapons industry, with three Israeli arms companies increasing their combined weapons revenues by 16 per cent to $16.2 billion, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI). “The growing backlash over Israel’s actions in Gaza seems to have had little impact on interest in Israeli weapons,” said Zubaida Karim, researcher with the SIPRI Military Expenditure and Arms Production Programme.

Elbit Systems, the Israel weapons company that reportedly signed a multi-billion deal with the United Arab Emirates, was also heavily represented at the conference. Executive Vice President Yehoshua Yehuda boasted of “combat proven technologies” that allowed people to be struck even when “the targets are less than a pixel.”

The UAE is financing and arming the Rapid Support Forces in Sudan, a militant group carrying out a campaign of mass slaughter that is on track to eclipse the genocide in Gaza if it hasn’t already.

Israeli weapons are playing an increasing role in global conflict, Levy told the audience. “Eighty percent of our activity is really for export—only 20 percent of our activity goes to the Israeli market,” he said. “I think that all of the things that we learned during this war in Israel impacts our future business capabilities. And IAI as of now has $27 billion of new orders and has something like $7 billion of sales every year.”

At the same time, the weapons makers did acknowledge that a growing boycott was a threat to their business. “I think Israel is experiencing a boycott,” said Shlomo Toaff, executive vice president of the General Manager Air & Missile Defense Systems Division of RAFAEL Advanced Defense Systems Ltd. “We’ve seen it in the Paris air show last June where we were shut down by the French.”

“This is something that we have to take into account when we’re talking about what we’re doing here in the industry,” he said.

One piece of that strategy involved destroying the journalistic outlets that had organized themselves around the Corbynist energy, and to do so, the faction created astroturf organizations that claimed to be objectively rooting out “fake news.”

That faction eventually succeeded in electing Sir Keir Starmer prime minister, but doing so required political deception on a historic scale, resulting inevitably in his historic unpopularity. The right-wing takeover is not a matter of if, but when, and Starmer may wind up being the last Labour prime minister ever.

Along the way, Starmer’s faction also waged a secret war on conservative news outlets, as well. The censorship campaign targeting political opponents has morphed into an alarming attack on speech rights in the UK, focused on critics of Israel but broadly encompassing a wide range of expression.

Holden lays out just how it happened in his piece below, which is adapted from his book—get a copy here—and expanded with additional reporting.

—Ryan Grim

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Keir Starmer Machine Ran a Secret Campaign to Demonetize Breitbart News and Other Opposition Outlets

Story by Paul Holden

As Keir Starmer rose to power in Britain, the political machine responsible for his rise ran a behind-the-scenes campaign to demonetize the U.S. news outlet Breitbart. The attacks on Breitbart were part of a targeted campaign against media outlets on both the left and right considered hostile to the centrist faction of the Labour Party, according to a trove of documents that expose the operation. Many of the documents were revealed for the first time in my recent book – called “The Fraud: Keir Starmer, Morgan McSweeney and the Crisis of British Democracy” – and are expanded on significantly there.

The campaign succeeded in effectively destroying the left-wing British outlet The Canary, which is only now recovering. Breitbart News persists.

The project was run through an organization called Stop Funding Fake News (SFFN). SFFN was incubated and resourced by a think-tank called Labour Together under the guise of fighting misinformation and “fake news.” Between 2018 and 2020, the anodyne-seeming think-tank received £739,000 in donations that it failed to report to the UK Electoral Commission, in violation of electoral law. Labour Together was found guilty and fined in September 2021 for the offense.

Morgan McSweeney, now Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, was Labour Together’s company secretary during this period. He also listed himself on LinkedIn as Labour Together’s “Managing Director.” In October 2024, the prominent UK journalist Andrew Marr commented that McSweeney held a position “of unparalleled power in Labour Party history.”

Before it was unmasked as a partisan political project, SFFN claimed to be organized by an anonymous group of concerned citizens who were inspired by a project in the United States called Sleeping Giants, a demonetizing campaign launched against Breitbart by workers in the U.S. tech industry in 2016.

Neither McSweeney nor Labour Together responded to questions sent to them in 2023 and 2024 about how Labour Together’s resources were used to incubate SFFN and a sister outfit called Center for Countering Digital Hate, or CCDH, which now hosts SFFN’s campaign. It is also not known whether all of Labour Together’s directors were aware that Labour Together’s resources were used to create SFFN. Jon Cruddas, one director, was flummoxed when I asked him about CCDH in 2023. Two other directors, Sir Trevor Chinn and the MP Lisa Nandy, have not commented. But it is known that at least one other director of Labour Together was aware: Steve Reed MP, now a senior member of Starmer’s Cabinet.

Stop Funding Fake News

With this pot of unlawfully undeclared funding, McSweeney and his allies blew up British politics, with a blast radius that extended across the pond to the United States. They did this in three ways.

First, they launched an undeclared war on the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn. A primary vector of this attack was to covertly inflame the “antisemitism crisis” that dogged Corbyn’s leadership for years.

The second was to incubate the leadership of Sir Keir Starmer, who, with McSweeney’s guidance, became Corbyn’s successor. Labour Together has claimed credit for helping Starmer win the leadership of the Labour Party in April 2020. McSweeney served as Starmer’s campaign chief for the Labour leadership campaign in 2020 and was appointed to a series of senior positions in Starmer’s office and the Labour Party thereafter. Three months after Starmer was elected prime minister in July 2024, McSweeney was appointed his chief of staff.

The third was to launch an astroturf campaign that mounted a ferocious attack on non-conformist media and free speech on both sides of the Atlantic. The campaign was catalyzed by a desire to demonetize and delegitimize outlets who reported sympathetically on factional opponents of McSweeney and his allies, or which were seen as important parts of the information networks that sustained support for Corbynism. It then mutated into a broader campaign against U.S. outlets linked to the alt-right.

That campaign directly sought to “cancel” outlets reporting favorably on Nigel Farage and the Brexit Party. It also made several ad-hominem attacks on U.S. President Donald Trump personally and sought to ensure that Breitbart was barred from receiving any advertising at all from the UK’s Cabinet office.

This was all conducted behind a veil of misdirection and secrecy. SFFN refused to reveal the identities of any of its controlling minds, claiming fear of reprisals. Instead, SFFN confected the image that it was a campaign run by “friends” and activists, strongly implying that it was a grassroots campaign of ordinary people. In reality, SFFN was set up by well-connected political actors with the purpose of elevating Starmer, including McSweeney, mobilizing resources provided by millionaire and pro-Israel donors.

The previously undisclosed attack on Breitbart was launched before Donald Trump returned to the presidency. His restoration presents a new political challenge for Starmer in the wake of the role played by Starmer’s chief of staff in creating SFFN. It also comes on the back of a furor about how the BBC, the UK’s state-run broadcaster, had edited clips of a speech Trump delivered on January 6, 2021. That furor has led to a number of high-level resignations at the organization. Trump has threatened to sue the BBC for a billion dollars in damages.

It has been widely reported that McSweeney was central in the creation of SFFN, which flowed from his political ambitions to defeat the left-wing of the Labour Party and the media ecosystem that supported it. But since then, attempts have been made to distance McSweeney from CCDH and SFFN’s murky history.

In 2024, Matt Taibbi and Paul Thacker reported on emails leaked from within CCDH. They showed that, for over a year, CCDH’s internal team meetings included the action item: ‘kill Musk’s Twitter.’ ‘This is war,’ Musk posted in response. In the furor that followed, The Guardian was told that McSweeney had played no operational role in CCDH, which now claims ownership of the SFFN project. Imran Ahmed, who later claimed credit for both SFFN and CCDH on Twitter, claimed that McSweeney had simply gifted him a “shell company” (Brixton Endeavours) that was then converted into CCDH, and which later absorbed SFFN . The response was canny in not stipulating whether McSweeney had any operational role in SFFN.

Even so, the idea that McSweeney played no “operational role” in CCDH is odd. Between 2018 and September 2019, McSweeney was the sole director of the company called Brixton Endeavours, which was subsequently renamed CCDH. He remained a director of CCDH until April 2020, a role in which he did things like sign off on CCDH’s accounts to the UK’s business registry, Companies House. He also listed himself as a CCDH director on LinkedIn for years. CCDH was registered to the same address as Labour Together. Imran Ahmed, now the CEO of CCDH, also literally worked alongside McSweeney in Labour Together’s small South London office while they were both creating SFFN.

Breitbart News

Breitbart became a focused target of SFFN in October 2019.

On October 2, 2019, a now-deleted X user Slaro Vekonai (@slarethestoic) tagged the UK Parliament’s Twitter account. “You may not know it, but you advertise on Breitbart, a toxic and extremist American site. Can you please adjust your programmatic ad buy so your ads don’t show up there due to retargeting? Thank you! @slpng_giants @SFFNews.” SFFN picked up the allegation and amplified it shortly thereafter, posting a short evidentiary thread accusing Breitbart of being a “bigoted, conspiracist fake news site.” As the original account no longer exists, it has been impossible to establish if Slaro Vekonai was a real person or a sock puppet account.

Within hours, a Press Association journalist contacted Parliament, citing the thread. Parliament announced it was suspending the ads. Two days later, an anti-Corbynite Labour MP, Mary Creagh, wrote to the Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, then the speaker of the House of Commons, demanding that Parliament agree to suspend advertising on Breitbart, which she called a “home to misogyny, homophobia, anti-Semitism, islamophobia [sic], racism and wild conspiracy theories.” Creagh cited how other advertisers had already pulled their advertising from a list of websites – all of them SFFN targets. ‘Fantastic news that @UKParliament have paused their advertising,’ SFFN tweeted.

Two weeks after its success with the parliament, SFFN claimed another win in demonetizing Breitbart and other sites. On the 18^th of October 2019, SFFN posted that they had contacted an unnamed journalist about how the UK’s Cabinet Office was advertising on its target websites. The journalist found out that the Cabinet Office “now implemented a ‘whitelist’ meaning the government now only advertises on pre-approved websites. The Canary, Evolve, Rebel, Politicalite, Breitbart etc no longer receive government advertising.” The post ended with three handclap emojis. “Good to see government use its authority to set an example against these dishonest & hateful websites.”

SFFN bookended its thread with an animated GIF of Al Gore asking, ‘What were you thinking?!?’ Indeed.

The attack went far beyond government spending. In June 2020, a booster of SFFN’s campaign tagged Ford’s UK twitter account, noting that its ads were appearing on Breitbart. Ford UK’s twitter account responded that it was “investigating the ad placement” and confirmed that Ford “does not share the views expressed on the website.” By 2021, SFFN expanded to target Breitbart’s YouTube account. “Breitbart, who have: consistently denied climate change, promoted sexism, published racist conspiracy theories have a monetised YouTube channel,” SFFN complained in July.

SFFN encouraged advertisers generally to block their ads from appearing on Breitbart’s YouTube content. In order to scale up its demonetization campaign, SFFN hosted an excel spreadsheet “blocklist” on its website for years. It listed the URLs of “fake news” websites that advertisers could import into their Google AdSense profiles to block sites en masse from receiving their advertising. This included Breitbart and a host of other alt-right and conservative U.S. sites such as Zero Hedge, The Federalist and American Thinker from 2020 onwards, alongside The Canary and Evolve Politics. SFFN also provided a handy “how-to” guide for advertisers and brands, walking them through how they could add SFFN’s targets to their own personalised blocklist. By December 2020, the list had expanded to include 28 sites, including two platforms linked to the far-right British agitator, Tommy Robinson, most notably Rebel News.

Another of SFFN’s initial targets was the right-wing UK website Westmonster, which had been set up and funded by Arron Banks, a controversial pro-Brexit campaigner. SFFN accused Westmonster of being a “propaganda channel” for the Brexit Party and its leader, Nigel Farage. The Brexit Party was renamed Reform UK. On current polling, Reform is set to form the next UK government with Farage as leader. SFFN claimed that Westmonster’s coverage of Farage and the Brexit Party was disproportionate. The campaign’s evidentiary threads included allusive imagery of Farage standing with Trump, accusing Trump of peddling “toxic post-truth politics.” In one remarkable thread from May 2019, SFFN urged readers not to vote for Brexit Party candidates in the UK’s upcoming European Parliament elections.

SFFN also accused Westmonster of fueling “anger & hatred” towards migrants by “publishing a stream of scare stories about immigrants in other European countries [which] deliberately create the impression of hordes of violent foreigners on the doorstep of Britain.” In April 2019, SFFN said Westmonster “stoke[d] fear of migrants” because it included stories about Channel Crossings - journeys made by asylum seekers on make-shift boats across the English Channel to seek refuge in the UK.

This could open McSweeney and the Labour government up to charges of hypocrisy: just two weeks ago, Starmer’s government, with McSweeney said to play a prominent role, introduced punitive reforms to the UK’s asylum system, citing reducing Channel Crossings as a key objective.

Astroturfing

This is, without hyperbole, an extraordinary situation – and a huge political gift to the likes of Reform, Farage, Trump, and Tommy Robinson. Because it is now incontrovertible that an astroturf campaign set up by the current chief of staff to the UK Prime Minister was responsible for “cancelling” news websites reporting sympathetically on their views.

Stop Funding Fake News was launched in March 2019, although preparatory work had started earlier. Its website domain was registered in January 2019. In February 2019, Morgan McSweeney and Imran Ahmed hosted a visit from Rachel Riley, the flaxen-haired mathematics brainiac on the popular quiz show Countdown. She was brought to Labour Together’s office in South London by Adam Langleben, a leading light in the Jewish Labour Movement (JLM), an affiliate of the Labour Party that had previously been largely dormant before being reactivated to challenge Corbynism. McSweeney would end up working closely with JLM.

McSweeney and Ahmed asked if Riley would front a campaign to tackle The Canary. She agreed “with alacrity,” according to an account by two Sunday Times journalists. Her celebrity endorsement lifted SFFN out of obscurity and powered its success. She would later become a patron of CCDH and now lists herself on X as an “ambassador” of the organization.

SFFN launched on March 5, 2019 on Twitter, supported by a barebones website. It would explain to Twitter readers that it sought to tackle “fake news” and hate, especially antisemitism and Islamophobia. In a helpful exchange, SFFN explained that “fake news… means lies & deliberate misleading, particularly when designed to fuel hate.” It was a plainly defamatory allegation to make of anyone, let alone media outlets whose success was predicated on reader’s trust.

But SFFN were protected from legal challenge, or any sort of scrutiny, by a veil of anonymity. SFFN refused, for the first year of its operation, to reveal the identity of the individuals who ran it. Its website explained that ‘we would like to be open about our identities, but doing so could put our activists at risk.’ It thus presented itself as a group of anonymous activists inspired by Sleeping Giants.

It was an impression burnished by fawning interviews. In April 2019, for example, SFFN was profiled in the Jewish News, described as a “small group of friends” and “activists.”

But SFFN was, itself, a form of fake news. It was about as far away from a simple group of grassroots activists as could be imagined. Instead, it had been formed by McSweeney, now the most powerful unelected official in British politics; Ahmed, a former Labour Party spin-doctor; and endorsed by Steve Reed, a sitting MP. It was also launched with resources provided by Labour Together, which was, at the time, being generously funded by millionaire donors with a history of donating to figures from the Labour Party’s right-wing, and whose sizeable donations were not being reported to the Electoral Commission in violation of electoral law.

One of Labour Together’s two major donors during this period was Sir Trevor Chinn, a major advocate for Israel. ‘I spent my entire life working for Israel,’ Chinn told a 2013 meeting of Labour Friends of Israel, a lobby group linked to the Labour Party. In 2024, Chinn was awarded the Israeli Presidential Medal of Honour by Isaac Herzog, the country’s highest honour. The medal is given to individuals who have made a significant contribution to the state of Israel ‘or humanity.’ Chinn was appointed a director of Labour Together in March 2016, a position he held until September 2024.

As noted above, it is not known if Chinn was aware that Labour Together resources were being used to help set up SFFN or CCDH, despite being a director of Labour Together. What is known is that in 2020, Steve Reed’s personal Parliamentary assistant, Owain Mumford, drafted a briefing setting out ‘Steve’s Record in Fighting Antisemitism’, which was intended to be given to a journalist from the Jewish Chronicle for a profile of Reed that ultimately never materialised. Mumford’s briefing claimed that Reed had personally sought advice from the Jewish Leadership Council (JLC) in setting up CCDH. Chinn was the Vice-President of the JLC, which had been fiercely critical of Corbyn.The JLC did not respond to questions about the accuracy of Mumford’s briefing when I put it to them for an article for Taibbi in 2024.

SFFN was a quintessential example of astroturfing. As a useful academic article from 2019 explains, astroturfing involves “a centrally coordinated disinformation campaign in which participants pretend to be ordinary citizens acting independently.” Astroturfing can ‘influence electoral outcomes and other forms of political behaviour.’ SFFN was thus an astroturf campaign of disinformation tackling disinformation.

SFFN’s methodology was simple. It posted lengthy threads of ‘evidence’, mostly made up of screenshots of article headlines, that were pieced together in an effort to prove that its target websites were spreading ‘lies’ designed to foster ‘hate.’ Most attention, however, was focused on The Canary.

The Canary

Despite much sneering from more mainstream outlets at its tabloid tone, The Canary was a serious media outlet: it was one of the few outlets fact-checking the “antisemitism crisis” narrative that undermined the credibility of the Labour Party under Corbyn. It was independently regulated by Impress, the only media regulator to be approved by the Independent Press Review Board, which had been created by royal charter to fulfil the recommendations of the Leveson inquiry. By the time SFFN had launched, The Canary had published its 10,000th article.

SFFN repeatedly accused The Canary of antisemitism. But Impress would later clear The Canary of being antisemitic, having instituted an investigation following public pressure. It confirmed that The Canary was “not sensationalist” and did not use language “likely to provoke hatred or put a person or group in fear.”

The Canary dropped its advertising-based funding model (although this was also at least in part due to changes to Facebook’s algorithm). A bustling and diverse newsroom of muck-raking journalists was pared back. SFFN bragged about its role in this financial catastrophe, both at the time and in cloyingly self-congratulatory conference speeches.

The plaudits raining down on SFFN, and the associated snide commentary about The Canary from online influencers, had toxified the brand. The Canary staff who were there at the time recount, with a still-fresh sense of injury, how the rest of the left commentariat rushed to distance themselves. I have little doubt that one of the best metrics of the success of the SFFN campaign was that it isolated The Canary from the “respectable” mainstream left. They were, in the wretched parlance of the Labour left, rendered as cranks.

One insider at The Canary told me of how, prior to the SFFN campaign, The Canary was in talks with at least one major broadcaster about joint projects. It would have been a major breakthrough, both in terms of reach and credibility. The insider wondered whether SFFN campaign’s lurid portrayal of The Canary had made the brand toxic to mainstream partners.

SFFN’s successes were soon celebrated. In December 2019, in the wake of Boris Johnson’s crushing victory over Jeremy Corbyn, the commentator Ian Dunt wrote about the threats to the “values that liberal internationalists hold dear” in the New European, a flagship pro-EU magazine. Dunt believed that these values were due to come under a unique five-year assault under Johnson. Dunt urged “resistance” while also highlighting campaigns that deserved support, including SFFN.

“Stop Funding Fake News uses a shoestring budget to put pressure on advertisers to distance themselves from fake news outlets on the left and right, to extraordinary effect,” Dunt enthused. “Their work has seen many of these sites go out of business altogether and helped reaffirm the sense of shared objective reality in politics.”You read that right: “objective reality in politics” was being restored by an astroturf campaign created by political operatives, and backed by a sitting MP, which was attempting to demonetize a legitimate, regulated media outlet. When one right-wing SFFN target, Politicalite, hit back with a cease-and-desist letter, the group responded by crying poverty. SFFN claimed their scant resources meant they were unable to respond to the counter attack.

Politicalite’s letter clearly had not passed the desk of a competent lawyer; nor was it served on any person, as there was no public information as to who was behind SFFN. “We’re not scared,” SFFN nevertheless bravely puffed, “but we’re just a group of activists with no legal support.”

The fundraiser, live for a single day, raised £2,090. Donors were told it would establish a legal defense fund that would “pay for legal advice on the merits of any threat” and “defend against threats and take action against vexatious harassers.”

I contacted Jordan James Kendall, the editor of Politicalite, in 2023. He confirmed that he had not received any response to his letter.

In fairness to Dunt, at the time he wrote those words and backed the SFFN fundraiser, there was no indication that SFFN was anything other than what it said it was – a group of well-meaning grassroots activists tackling hate. It would take another two months for any relationship between SFFN and CCDH to be acknowledged.

On the 4^th of May 2020, SFFN discreetly added a note to its website saying, “From May 4, 2020, SFFN has been a project of CCDH.” The timing was telling – it was the same day that electronic forms were filed with Companies House indicating that McSweeney had resigned from CCDH on April 6, 2020.

As a result, SFFN, whose connection to CCDH was hidden for over a year, could now be integrated into its heroic retellings. In May 2020, CCDH’s updated website pompously explained that it was a “not-for-profit NGO… that seeks to disrupt the architecture of online hate and misinformation” that was fuelling a “digital counter-Enlightenment.” SFFN was cited as an example of one of CCDH’s “practicable, efficient and scalable strategies and tactics to counter hate and misinformation globally.” Ahmed’s contemporaneous biography celebrated how Ahmed “frequently appears in the media as an expert in online malignant behaviour (identity-based hate; misinformation; extremism; fake news; trolling; and social media).” No, I don’t know what that means either.

In October 2020, Ahmed was invited to attend a U.S. State Department conference on antisemitism to tell CCDH’s story of activism. Ahmed’s speech was useful, in that he confirmed that “we”—as in, CCDH—”put together a program called stop funding fake news” designed to tackle sites like The Canary that were, in Ahmed’s retelling, “just racist misinformation repackaged for a new generation.”

“And we thought, well, what are the weak points in each of these?”Ahmed explained. “The weak points in the news sites was that they’re expensive to run, and so they relied on advertising.” SFFN undermined that advertising revenue, Ahmed explained, so that “within a couple of months, you can completely eviscerate the economic base of a website.”

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Following that thread, we can report today that Trump asked his intelligence community to gather a list of drug-related targets inside Venezuela. The problem: Venezuela isn’t really a significant player in drug trafficking, so the list that came back mostly included targets inside Colombia and Mexico—the kind of frightening escalation where a pretext for U.S. aggression spirals into reckless imperial wars. Recall that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld argued shortly after the 9/11 attacks that the U.S. ought to go after Iraq not because it was responsible for taking down the Twin Towers, but because Iraq was a more “target-rich environment” than Afghanistan. Indeed, Colombia and Mexico have more drug-related targets, but does that mean the U.S. should bomb them? Drop Site’s new article on this can be found below.

The story below is reported with my Breaking Points colleague Saagar Enjeti, a co-host and co-founder of the program. The show airs Monday through Friday mornings, and you can subscribe here.

On Friday morning, we interviewed Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner in a wide-ranging conversation that probed his feelings on U.S. imperialism in the context of his own experience serving in combat and later doing private security for the ambassador in Kabul. We also covered Drop Site’s latest investigation into Jeffrey Epstein and the Mossad.

Drop Site contributor Meghnad Bose, meanwhile, reports a piece with journalist Biplob Das on how billionaire donors are making an expensive eleventh-hour effort aiming to prevent Zohran Mamdani from becoming the next mayor of New York City. In the final days, the approach of the Cuomo campaign’s backers has been unconventional in some ways: a major pro-Cuomo super PAC, funded by billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars calling Cuomo “flawed,” and amplifying a tweet that starts by saying “Cuomo murdered my husband,” while asking New Yorkers to vote for him despite his drawbacks.

A data analysis of campaign finances by Bose and Das shows that, as of today, independent expenditures backing Cuomo are more than seven times the amount of outside money put behind Mamdani. That is, in large part, because more than half of the total independent expenditures so far in the election have been made by Fix The City, a super PAC to which Michael Bloomberg has contributed close to $10 million. Read more about their findings in the article below.

As always, we can’t do this kind of reporting without your support. We now have more than 13,000 paying subscribers and have gotten small donations from more than 22,000 readers. But we need to pump those numbers up to make this news organization sustainable over the long haul. If you can upgrade to a paid subscription or make a one-time or recurring contribution, please do so this weekend.

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—Ryan Grim

U.S. Expanded Drug-Cartel Target List to Include Colombian Sites Amid Rubio Push for Venezuelan Regime Change

Trump has not made a decision on where or whether to launch strikes on land, with a diplomatic solution still possible.

Story by Ryan Grim and Saagar Enjeti

Secretary of State Marco Rubio has expanded his push for regime change in Venezuela to include cartel-linked targets in Colombia and Mexico, according to sources in the Trump administration and on Capitol Hill with knowledge of the unfolding situation.

Rubio’s drive toward war has been predicated on claims that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is involved in the drug trade, including trafficking fentanyl to the U.S. But American intelligence officials have briefed President Donald Trump to the contrary, alerting him to the fact that little to no fentanyl flows from Venezuela to the United States.

At an Oval Office meeting in early October, Trump administration officials and top generals discussed escalating the pressure on Venezuela to go beyond the semi-regular attacks on boats in the Caribbean where fourteen boats have been struck, killing at least 57 people. The discussed plans include striking on land inside Venezuela, a source at the high-level gathering told Drop Site. The same October 2 meeting included a previously reported directive from President Trump, who dialed his special envoy Richard Grenell into the call, telling him to cut off diplomatic communications with Maduro. That order was previously reported by the New York Times.

In the wake of the meeting, the intelligence community was tasked with coming up with a more tangible list of targets on land. The problem, however, was that because of Venezuela’s lack of significant involvement in the drug trade, the sites were largely in Colombia and Mexico, though did include small sites along the Colombia-Venezuela border, a zone relatively not under state control and where coca-growing flourishes.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., was briefed by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth on the new list of hard targets inside Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico in early October, and lobbied fellow senators on expanding the war to include drug-related sites in Colombia, a source with knowledge of his conversations told Drop Site.

Graham alluded to his understanding of the battle plans in a recent interview on CBS News Face the Nation. “We’re not gonna sit on the sidelines and watch boats full of drugs come into our country,” Graham said. “We’re gonna blow them up and kill the people who want to poison America. And we’re now gonna expand our operations, I think, to the land. So please be clear about what I’m saying today. President Donald Trump sees Venezuela and Colombia as direct threats to our country, because they house narcoterrorist organizations.”

“President Trump’s made a decision that Maduro, the leader of Venezuela, is an indicted drug trafficker—that it’s time for him to go, that Venezuela and Colombia have been safe havens for narco-terrorists for too long,” Graham continued. “President Trump told me yesterday that he plans to brief members of Congress when he gets back from Asia about future potential military operations against Venezuela and Colombia. So there will be a congressional briefing about a potential expanding from the sea to the land.”

The interviewer noted that Indiana Republican Sen. Todd Young had pushed back against this notion. “What exactly is the end game? Because you’re talking about regime change in Venezuela,” CBS’s Margaret Brennan said. “The President says this is about drug boats.”

“Well, I think the end game is to make sure that Venezuela and Colombia cannot be used to poison America,” Graham said, again adding Colombia to the conversation.

Trump on Friday said he was not planning to strike inside Venezuela, contradicting reports he was preparing military targets in Venezuela as well as his claims from last week, when he said, “the land is going to be next.”

The Pentagon held a GOP-only briefing on Wednesday, ostensibly to discuss the airstrikes on boats. But those present were also told about the new list of targets inside Colombia, spooking several Republicans worried about mission creep, according to sources familiar. Sen. Mike Rounds from South Dakota, who serves on the intel committee, was one such Republican. It was “unfortunate” Democrats were not allowed in the briefing, he told reporters, adding that he advised the White House those briefings should be bi-partisan. Rounds did not publicly mention that the briefing included a drawn up list of targets inside Colombia.

Asked about the briefing and the inclusion of targets inside Colombia, Pentagon Chief Spokesman Sean Parnell chided lawmakers for leaking. “This morning, the Department held several committee briefings to ensure continued transparency with lawmakers,” Parnell told Drop Site. “The Department is deeply concerned that members of Congress are making public statements regarding information received in a classified briefing. The Department considers any unauthorized disclosure of classified information as [a] serious breach of national security.”

A spokesperson for Rounds said, “On Wednesday, Senator Rounds was invited to a classified briefing regarding military strikes in the Caribbean. This briefing was held in response to a request. A representative from the White House called Senator Rounds on Thursday morning to inform him that, in addition to the nine briefings that have now been provided to Congress on the activities in the Caribbean, the administration is working to provide another classified briefing for members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, as was requested by a bipartisan group of Senators. Senator Rounds found Wednesday’s briefing satisfactory and informative, and he looks forward to his colleagues receiving additional information.” The Pentagon referred questions about the Oval Office meeting to the White House, which did not respond to a request for comment.

Around the same time that the Pentagon and intelligence community were drawing up lists of targets inside Colombia and Mexico and striking boats in the Caribbean, Adm. Alvin Holsey, the SOUTHCOM commander, threatened to quit, and was subsequently pushed out. (A Pentagon spokesperson forwarded Hegseth’s statement at the time.)

This week, Lieutenant General JP McGee, who was director for strategy, plans, and policy (J-5) on the Joint Staff, took early retirement. As J-5 director, McGee reported directly to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was responsible for implementing policy. “I know he was uncomfortable with this,” said a source close to McGee. CNN reported that McGee was pushed out of his position amid widespread disagreements with Hegseth, including over Caribbean policy. Parnell rejected the claim. “General McGee is retiring, and the War Department is grateful for his service. CNN’s claims regarding his retirement are 100% fake news,” he said.

On Thursday, Pentagon lawyers declined to show up for a closed-door House-side briefing to discuss the legal rationale for the airstrikes on boats. Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., said that the Pentagon had “pulled the lawyers,” but a source told Drop Site that their absence was driven more by their own concerns about the legality of the policy rather than the Pentagon insisting they not attend.

President Trump, meanwhile, has become convinced that Venezuela is not a source of fentanyl, driving a shift in recent strikes by the U.S. military to the Pacific ocean targeting alleged traffickers transiting from Colombia to Mexico, undercutting previous justifications for targeting Maduro. Those boats, according to intelligence assessments, may have been carrying cocaine, if anything. Colombian President Gustavo Petro said at least one of the strikes was a Colombian family fishing boat.

Beyond active U.S. military strikes, the Trump administration continues to fund a vast array of Venezuelan opposition groups, government documents reviewed by Drop Site reveal. That includes some $50 million dollars set aside in the latest appropriations bill for the next fiscal year for “democracy programs for Venezuela.”

These funds mirror the mountains of money sent to Venezuelan opposition groups amounting to at least $213 million in the last five years, per an internal USAID assessment reviewed by Drop Site.

The documents also note that the U.S. spent $18 million specifically in 2024 on Venezuelan opposition groups, including on the global travel of recent Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Corina Machado. Machado has aligned herself with the Trump administration in recent months in a bid to see herself installed as the new leader of Venezuela, vocally supporting U.S.-backed regime change efforts and bolstering claims that Maduro is involved with drug trafficking and the criminal gang Tren De Aragua.

Despite disbanding USAID in February 2025, the Trump administration redirected some $400 million dollars in recent months to combat ideologically opposed governments in Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua, according to the assessment.

The State Department referred questions on USAID to the Office of Management and Budget, which did not respond to a request for comment.

Maduro, in recent months, has been irked at accusations that he invaded the U.S. with migrants, noting to interlocutors that it was the U.S. that funded advertisements throughout Latin America newspapers encouraging Venezuelan migration. One such contract reviewed by Drop Site revealed a USAID contract beginning in September 2023 and ending in July 2024 with Colombian newspaper El País whose purpose was “to disseminate a new narrative about the Venezuelan migrant population.” The grant required the paper to “document and make visible success stories of migrants accessing the formal market, using formats and media regularly consulted by business groups.”

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The Money Versus Mamdani in the Final Stretch of NYC Mayoral Race

Unpacking the expensive eleventh-hour efforts by billionaires targeting Zohran Mamdani.

Story by Meghnad Bose and Biplob Das

Former Governor of New York and mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo’s billionaire donors have launched an expensive eleventh-hour effort to disparage his electoral opponent, Zohran Mamdani, splurging on attack ads against the Democratic nominee. The late surge drove independent campaign expenses in this election over the $50 million mark on Thursday, with more than $12 million spent in the second half of October alone.

Independent expenses are those made by groups such as super PACs, and the groups are not supposed to coordinate with a candidate’s campaign. However, over the course of this NYC mayoral election, Cuomo’s campaign was hit with two separate penalties totalling $1.3 million for suspected coordination with Fix The City, a super PAC backing him.

Since early voting began on October 25, two billionaire-backed, anti-Mamdani super PACs—Fix The City and Defend NYC—have shelled out over $2.6 million in campaign ads, out of which nearly $2 million has been spent on attacking the Democratic nominee.

An analysis by Drop Site News shows that as of Thursday, independent expenses backing Cuomo were more than seven times the amount of money put behind Mamdani. Cuomo has exceeded Mamdani by a staggering $36 million in outside support. The difference highlights just how much independent expenses can skew the overall financial support behind a candidate.

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Subtracting independent expenses, the Mamdani and Cuomo campaigns are on a more even financial footing, partly due to matching funds from the city. Mamdani’s campaign has had $17 million at its disposal, of which $13 million came from public funds, while Cuomo’s campaign has had $14 million available, of which $8 million was from public funds.

Yet, once the independent expenses are added, the total amount backing Cuomo or targeting Mamdani totals $56 million—close to two and a half times of the amount backing Mamdani or attacking Cuomo.

The largest super PAC supporting Cuomo, Fix The City, has alone spent $28 million, or 55% of all independent expenses in the election. The super PAC has already raised an additional $7.2 million, which is likely to be infused in the days leading up to polls closing on November 4.

The $51 million in independent expenses in this NYC mayoral race, with still a few days left for polls to close, is already 160% of the total independent spending amount in the 2021 election. In 2017, independent spending was less than $250k, and in 2013, the amount was just over $8 million.

Billionaires who support Cuomo and the messages they buy

Super PACs targeting Mamdani have been boosted in recent days by big-buck donations from several billionaires.

Michael Bloomberg, former NYC Mayor and billionaire, contributed $1.5 million to Fix The City on Wednesday, four days into early voting. This latest contribution took the total amount he has given to Fix The City, the biggest anti-Mamdani super PAC, to $9.8 million. In 2023-2024, Bloomberg was the single biggest individual contributor to Democrats, backing them with more than $60 million, according to an analysis of Federal Election Commission data by OpenSecrets.

On Tuesday, a week from Election Day, Ronald Lauder, former chairman of Estée Lauder International, and his wife Jo Carole Lauder, contributed $500,000 to Fix The City, taking their total contributions towards the super PAC to $1.5 million. Ronald is also a Trump donor, and in March this year, he gave $5 million to a pro-Trump PAC named MAGA Inc.

Ronald is also the longtime president of the World Jewish Congress. On its website, WJC states, “Since the October 7th terrorist attacks against Israel, we have intensified our efforts to defend the Jewish state in the hallways of the United Nations in New York to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, and around the globe, WJC advocates for Israel.” The WJC website calls Israel “a beacon of democracy and innovation in a volatile region” and says the country contributes to global progress in fields such as humanitarian aid.

William P. Lauder, Ronald’s nephew and chair of the board of directors of The Estée Lauder Companies, has contributed $1 million to Fix The City. And William’s brother Gary, managing director of Lauder Partners, also contributed $25,000 to Fix The City.

The four members of the Lauder family have spent over $2.5 million to target Mamdani and back Cuomo in the mayoral race.

Joe Gebbia, cofounder of Airbnb, who was appointed by the Trump administration to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and as a chief design officer at the National Design Studio earlier this year, donated $1 million each to both Fix The City and Defend NYC on October 15.

Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund manager of Pershing Square Capital and a prominent supporter of Donald Trump, contributed $1 million to the anti-Mamdani super PAC Defend NYC on October 14, and $250,000 to Fix The City on October 15 taking his total spending to $1.75 million.

In the lead-up to the mayoral primary in June, Mamdani had accused Fix The City of artificially lengthening and darkening his beard in a mailer attacking him. Mamdani, a Muslim candidate, had called the act “blatant Islamophobia.” Fix The City had spent nearly $9,000 on that mailer.

The latest infusion of big money in the general election has largely been spent on ads vilifying Mamdani on the airwaves and across social media. Some of these last-gasp efforts have taken an unconventional approach. After two days of early voting, a text message sent by Defend NYC, backed by billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, called Cuomo “flawed” but urged New Yorkers to vote for him “to stop communism from coming to NYC.”

The following day, the same super PAC sent out a text which began with a tweet that said “Cuomo murdered my husband and I am voting for him. That’s how bad things are in New York”—one of two messages on which a combined million dollars was spent by Defend NYC. The message went on to say, “We know what she means… And if she can do it, you can do it too. If you do, we will defeat Mamdani together.”

On Monday, Defend NYC spent $250,000 on a text message blast that said “🚨President Trump weighed in! 🚨He said what we already know: This race is between Andrew Cuomo or Zohran Mamdani and Cuomo is the ONLY choice for mayor. Cuomo is flawed but we have to do our civic duty and vote for him to stop communism from coming to NYC.”

A day later, Fix The City spent $1.15 million on a television ad that called Mamdani’s ideas “radically dangerous”.

The spending patterns of outside groups backing Cuomo and Mamdani show two drastically different approaches: while groups backing Mamdani have spent an overwhelming proportion of their resources on positive messaging about his agenda, those backing Cuomo have spent close to half of their resources in attacking Mamdani.

Groups favorable to Mamdani spent 83% of their money on efforts listed as supporting him, and only 17% on expenses classified as opposing Cuomo, according to a Drop Site analysis of data shared by the New York City Campaign Finance Board. In stark contrast, independent spending favorable to Cuomo focused considerably on attacking Mamdani, with 42% of the funds, or around $18 million, spent on targeting the Democratic nominee. Only $1.8 million, or 3.5% of the independent expenditures, were categorized as either supporting or opposing Curtis Sliwa, the Republican nominee.

The latest polls show Mamdani ahead of Cuomo, with the Democratic nominee holding a double-digit lead. With less than a hundred hours to go before polls close on Tuesday, the flow of the big bucks into the election is unlikely to stop.

In the final stretch of this race, it’s money versus Mamdani.

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U.S. intelligence has assessed that little to none of the fentanyl trafficked to the United States is being produced in Venezuela, despite recent claims from the Trump administration, a senior U.S. official directly familiar with the matter tells Drop Site.

The official noted that many of the boats targeted for strikes by the Trump administration do not even have the requisite gasoline or motor capacity to reach U.S. waters, dramatically undercutting claims by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. The claim is backed up by recent comments made by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who similarly noted that zero fentanyl is produced in Venezuela.

Despite the lack of intelligence linking Venezuela with fentanyl production, the Trump administration has made alleged Venezuelan drug trafficking the casus belli in its drive to overthrow the government of Nicolas Maduro. On Thursday, President Donald Trump referred to possible ground action, claiming at a press conference that the “sea drugs” coming in are “5% of what they were a year ago. So now they’re coming in by land.” “The land is going to be next,” he said, indicating he was willing to bypass congressional approval. On Friday, the U.S. announced it is sending an aircraft carrier to Latin America in a further escalation.

Two sources familiar with discussions at the White House note that Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a long time proponent of regime change in Venezuela, has been the driving force behind the aggressive military and rhetorical posture toward the Maduro regime.

Toward that end, Secretary Rubio—also in charge of the remnants of the U.S. Agency for International Development—has redirected millions of dollars in money previously allocated for “pro-democracy” measures in Venezuela and the surrounding countries, a thinly veiled effort to prep the region for war.

Rubio cycled through multiple arguments for regime change in Venezuela during the early months of the administration, largely based around human rights and election concerns, which were unconvincing to Trump. After assuming a position on the National Security Council in the spring, Rubio then presented a new argument to Trump: that Maduro was a narcoterrorist drug trafficker, based on a 2020 indictment by the Department of Justice under the first Trump administration over alleged cocaine trafficking.

The official noted Trump’s personal distaste for drugs and a campaign pledge to use the US military against Mexican drug cartels as an important impetus for Trump greenlighting recent strikes. With Trump unable so far to carry out attacks on Mexican cartels, strikes seen as political untenable, Rubio effectively steered his gaze to Maduro. The potential of access to Venezuela’s vast oil resources made the argument that much easier.

Rubio’s policy was most recently at a crossroads, after Maduro offered to turn over those oil resources to the U.S. in exchange for a cessation of hostilities. Trump acknowledged the offer in a recent appearance saying Maduro “offered everything. You know why? Because he doesn’t want to fuck around with the United States.”

Trump rejected the offer after being swayed by arguments from Rubio that the best way to secure Venezuela’s oil reserves was to facilitate regime change in Venezuela and make a better deal with a new government, the sources said. A recent U.S. government assessment of Venezuelan oil exports to China found nearly half a million barrels a day, a small fraction of the country’s total capacity which Trump is turning down in the immediate term.

The CIA did not respond to requests for comment. “President Trump promised to secure our border, combat narco-terrorists, and stop the flow of deadly drugs into our country,” said Tommy Pigott, principal deputy spokesperson for the State Department. “He is doing just that, and the Department continues to fund counternarcotics and law enforcement programs that support that goal. Maduro is not the legitimate leader of Venezuela; he’s a fugitive of American justice who undermines regional security and poisons Americans.”

Foreign policy under Trump has come to be dominated by a group known inside the administration as the Gang of Five, sources said, consisting of Rubio; Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff; Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff; Steve Witkoff, Trump’s all-around envoy; and Vice President J.D. Vance. War Secretary Pete Hegseth, in a bid for internal relevance, has eagerly executed Rubio’s strategy, regularly striking boats he claims without evidence are carrying drugs, burning the passengers alive. On Thursday, sitting beside Trump, Hegseth promised a forever war against drugs. “Our generation spent the better part of two decades hunting Al Qaeda, hunting ISIS. As the president said, this is the ISIS, this is the Al Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere... our message to these foreign terrorist organizations is that we will treat you like we treated Al Qaeda... We will kill you.”

Heavy Combat Boats to Colombia

How exactly Rubio is spending the “pro-democracy” funds from USAID, and from which buckets, is not made clear in federal disclosures. But a flurry of contracts in neighboring countries indicates a surge of military preparation in Colombia.

Much of the U.S.-backed resistance to Maduro—including the disastrous “Operation Gideon” coup attempt in May 2020—has been based out of Colombia and Guyana. In late September, the U.S. State Department’s international law enforcement arm signed a two-year, $4.8 million “Colombia virtual shooting range” contract with the Arizona-based VirTra, Inc. There were also two foreign military sales through the U.S. Coast Guard: $1.73 million for an undisclosed number of 21-foot boats, signed on September 12, and $3.8 million for eight 25-foot “heavy combat riverine boats,” signed four days later. The Arlington branch of the international consulting firm Deloitte also received a three-year, $3 million contract with the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Energy Resources for services in Colombia on September 30, following years of mineral advisory work in the region.

While the contracts indicate millions being poured into Colombia, the wave of funding could now be undermined by President Gustav Petro’s recent condemnation of a lethal September 15 U.S. airstrike on a fishing boat in Colombian waters.

On October 3, Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodriguez, accused Exxon of funding a military assault in the region. The charge came less than two weeks after the Texas-based oil company announced a $6.8 billion expansion of its work in Guyana, which is engaged in a longstanding border dispute with Venezuela regarding the Essequibo region. “Guyana has opened the doors to the American, the U.S. invader, and the military aggression against our region,” stated Rodriguez, before adding that Exxon was “financing the Guyana government” for the action. (By contrast, the Maduro government has a longstanding, friendly relationship with Exxon’s fellow Houston-area competitor Chevron, which is responsible for nearly one quarter of the country’s oil production.)

The CIA has also sought a foot in the media. The CIA’s embattled former Paris chief of station, Dale Bendler, recently retroactively registered as a foreign agent for Armando Capriles, whom he described as the CEO of Cadena Capriles, which is the former name of the parent company of the popular Venezuelan newspaper Ultimas Noticias. According to Bendler’s foreign agent registration, he attempted to recruit Capriles as an asset of an “OGA”—“Other Government Agency” – in exchange for leniency against U.S. sanctions in 2019. (It’s not clear whether he succeeded in picking up Armando as an asset.)

Public contracting records further highlight long-running U.S. special operations activities in the region. The Texas-based information warfare contractor Madison Springfield, Inc. (MSI) engaged in a one-year, $458,915 “Guyana Ghost Men assessment” study for U.S. Army Special Operations Command beginning in September 2021. Prior to the completion of the study, MSI was covertly acquired by the San Francisco-based gig-work intelligence collection firm Premise Data, which itself received a $498,701 subcontract through USAID on information collection in Venezuela 35 days prior to the failed Operation Gideon coup attempt, according to public disclosures. Following Premise’s financial failure, both companies were acquired by the Alexandria-based special operations contractor Culmen International in August.

“Democracy Promotion”

The U.S. government has attempted to overthrow the socialist government of Venezuela for decades, including through USAID’s Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI), according to a widely noted leaked U.S. diplomatic cable from 2006. The cable detailed OTI’s five-point strategy to oppose Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chavez, as: “1) Strengthening Democratic Institutions, 2) Penetrating Chavez’ Political Base, 3) Dividing Chavismo, 4) Protecting Vital US business, and 5) Isolating Chavez internationally.“

The U.S.’s quasi-overt international political action arm, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), has the challenging task of funding nonprofits and journalists in a manner which, on the one hand, advances U.S. foreign policy goals, and on the other, allows grantees to still claim independence. Even President Trump’s first administration reportedly expressed frustration with a covert “democracy promotion” campaign by the CIA against Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro in 2019 being ‘indistinguishable’ from its overt counterparts.

Before hamhandedly attempting to overthrow Maduro, NED boasted support for both an award-winning “Petrofraude” investigation into Maduro from the Bogota-based Connectas and a social media campaign supporting Maduro’s opposition, #SetThemFree. (Founded in 2012 as an offshoot of a Harvard fellowship, Connectas has prominently disclosed its NED funding dating back to at least 2013 but is less transparent about having received at least $88,000 from the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, which works closely with international police agencies, including on activities such as wiretaps.)

NED again publicly noted its work with Connectas in the lead-up to Maduro’s third inauguration, highlighting the outlet’s “Operation Retweet” campaign to anonymously disseminate critical journalism through AI-powered avatars. The same press release noted that NED “swiftly deployed a three-pronged contingency plan: supporting political organizers to mobilize grassroots networks, providing emergency assistance—including relocation, safe houses, and medical and psychological services—for those at risk, and backing core civil society groups offering legal, technical, and humanitarian aid to political prisoners and their families.”

The U.S. State Department and the now-defunct USAID have for years redacted the names of political action fundees in sensitive regions from public contracting records, citing commitments to prevent harm. NED itself accelerated from retroactively deleting millions of dollars in Ukraine grants in 2022 to publicly ending its default disclosure of grant recipients through a new “duty of care” policy in April 2025.

The new Trump administration gutted the majority of USAID’s political action programs during its first months in office, with a few anti-communist programs in Cuba being partially preserved as a rare exception. A leaked list of AID program cuts published by POLITICO revealed that the “America First” cancellations included the end of a $6.2 million grant to Partners of the Americas, Inc. which promised to “Ensure a smooth transition from government-controlled food distribution system under the Maduro regime to a market-based food system under a new Venezuelan government.” Maduro’s food subsidization program, the Local Committees for Supply and Production, better known as CLAP, was aggressively targeted with U.S. sanctions during Trump’s first administration, and one of the program’s leaders was extradited to Miami.

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Story by Maha Hussaini and Ryan Grim

GAZA CITY—In August, The Free Press (FP), a news organization acquired Monday by Paramount for roughly $150 million, announced that it had conducted an investigation into the cases of a dozen Palestinians whose photographs were published in mainstream U.S. media outlets as examples of starvation and malnutrition in Gaza. That investigation, which the FP used as evidence the famine in Gaza is overblown, was woefully incomplete.

On Monday, FP founding editor Bari Weiss was named editor in chief of CBS News, and pledged in an email to staff to bring a sense of journalistic rigor to the newsroom. In an unusual setup, Weiss will be reporting directly to Paramount Skydance chairman and CEO David Ellison rather than up through the news division. If the FP probe into the dozen Palestinians is any indication of what’s to come, the editorial standards at CBS News may be about to collapse.

The Free Press claimed dereliction on the part of the mainstream media. “We did something so simple it’s shocking that no other journalist bothered to do it,” announced FP reporter Olivia Reingold, describing how she and her colleague Tanya Lukyanova used Google to search for news articles and interviews about the children featured in photographs. “[I]n every instance, they were already facing grave situations because of their health, irrespective of any third-party action,” the outlet reported.

“In leaving out that context, the outlets presented an incomplete story,” The Free Press wrote in an editorial defending their coverage. “We are proud of the report and the reporters who tracked it down. In doing so, Olivia Reingold and Tanya Lukyanova performed a public service.”

The investigation represented journalism at its finest, the outlet argued. “In a normal time, this is the kind of work that would be praised by our peers for getting to ground truth,” reads the editorial, calling the Google-based investigation “sober, meticulous work.” Weiss and other FP writers even touted the article as an example of the virtues of their approach to journalism in a series of lectures.

David Ellison, heir to the fortune of his father, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, is said to have been attracted to Weiss and The Free Press specifically for the outlet’s pro-Israel stance. Dylan Byers, who broke news of the FP sale for Puck, reported that Ellison was “smitten by Bari’s unwavering support of Israel and preoccupation with the rise of antisemitism—issues that are as near and dear to David’s father, Larry, as they are to Paramount’s outgoing owner.”

Facing blowback for minimizing the famine in Gaza, The Free Press responded by saying that critics of the article, including Drop Site, are “journalists who oppose actual journalism.”

Weiss added: “You’ll notice one important aspect about the uproar: No one is disputing the facts in our piece.”

Well, we are. The Free Press claims in its investigation to have looked at the cases of 12 Palestinian’s photographs, as well as the child, Muhammad Zakariya Ayyouba Al-Mutawaq who appeared prominently in a New York Times article—and whose story they questioned in a previous Free Press article. Yet instead of reporting on the 12 Palestinians they claimed to have looked into, the article in fact only addresses nine, or arguably ten, an inexplicable discrepancy, and doesn’t provide original reporting on any of the cases.

Drop Site asked FP reporter Reingold and editor Weiss if the outlet attempted to contact any of the people or their family members whose health conditions they reported on. Neither responded to a request for comment.

The FP article probed the cases of nine Palestinians: Maryam Dawas, Youssef Matar, Hamza Mishmish, Najwa Hussein Hajjaj, Mosab al-Debs, Atef Abu Khater, Abdullah Hani Muhammad Abu Zarqa, Karam Khaled Al-Jamal, and Osama Al-Raqab. It also references another unnamed case, saying the Washington Post published an outdated photo of a malnourished child, which Drop Site identified as eight-year-old Jana Ayad.

For Drop Site, Gaza-based journalist Maha Hussaini looked into the backstories of those cases highlighted by the Free Press to examine whether the claim—namely that starvation did not drive their deteriorating health condition—was accurate. Hussaini tracked down families of three of them before her reporting was cut short by her own forced displacement from Gaza City amid a concentrated Israeli military offensive: Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Mutawaq, Najwa Hussein Hajjaj, and Hamza Ismail Mishmish.

What she found is that their underlying health conditions did not drive the deterioration of their health. Instead, it was the lack of access to food and medicine that drove their acute medical crises. Such is the hallmark of a famine. The first to fall victim are generally those who had underlying conditions to begin with; those Palestinians were managing their conditions before the restrictions took hold, but the starvation drove their decline. Additionally, it is difficult to separate their underlying health difficulties from the conditions under which their mothers lived while pregnant and in the first weeks and months of their lives.

The fact that so many children in Gaza have such pre-existing conditions by no means exonerates the Israeli siege, but rather is further evidence of its harm. While Gaza has been under an Israeli blockade since 2007, Israel began severely restricting the amount of aid allowed into Gaza in October 2023. On March 2 of this year, Israel cut off all entry of food, medicine, fuel and other supplies, only partially lifting the blockade in late May, while continuing extreme restrictions. By the summer, starvation was widespread. By late August, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, the world’s leading expert on food crises that is used by the UN, declared the governorate of Gaza to be in the grip of the most extreme form of famine, the severity of conditions in North Gaza governorate to be similar or worse, and the thresholds for famine in the Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis governorates soon to be crossed.

The families spoke to Drop Site openly about the medical histories of their children and siblings and shared before-and-after photos and other evidence to back up their claims. That any parent would have to do so is its own injustice and indignity—an insult on top of the injury they are already suffering.

But it’s important to do, particularly as the work Bari Weiss has done at The Free Press will now be supercharged with an infusion of resources. What she considers to be legitimate journalism takes on increased import.

Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Mutawaq

The child at the center of the controversy amplified by the FP is Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Mutawaq, who is now 22 months old. Under pressure, The New York Times posted an update to a July article featuring the child: “After publication of the article, The Times learned from his doctor that Mohammed also had pre-existing health problems.”

Additional context, however, demonstrates that Israel’s assault on and siege of Gaza was in fact more responsible for his condition, not less. His difficulties began even before he was born. In the final two months of her pregnancy, his mother, Hedaya al-Mutawaq, was subject to relentless Israeli bombardment in Jabaliya, in northern Gaza, and forced to displace multiple times. Eventually, she gave birth to Muhammad, her second child, during one of Gaza’s harshest nights of attacks in December 2023.

The baby was born with slight muscle weakness and an apparent neurological condition. But despite the dire conditions in Gaza, his parents ensured he received extensive medical care, including several physiotherapy sessions. “He showed remarkable progress that even doctors found surprising. He began to sit alone, then crawl, and eventually stand on his own,” Al-Mutawaq told Drop Site.

For Muhammad to continue his healthy development, he either needed nutrition from his mother or through supplements specifically designed for infants. Breast feeding became impossible as his mother faced malnutrition as a result of the lack of food available in Gaza. “I suffered from malnutrition around two months after I gave birth to him, and he stopped breastfeeding,” his mother said. “At that time, his father was still with us and could acquire milk, so despite the harsh conditions, Muhammad began growing as a healthy child. At one point, he was even chubby.”

Muhammad’s father, Zakariya, was killed in an Israeli attack on Deir al-Balah in central Gaza on October 28, 2024, before Muhammad turned one.

After her husband’s death, Al-Mutawaq struggled to secure basic necessities for her children.

“I couldn’t consistently get milk or diapers, but people continued to support me, bringing milk from time to time. I was still able to provide food for him until the occupation sealed the borders and enforced starvation in March,” Al-Mutawaq said.

When Israel imposed a full-spectrum blockade in March, Muhammad was just 15 months old. “Until the end of March, Muhammad’s health was still good, he weighed around nine kilograms. But since then, his health has deteriorated week by week. He lost roughly one kilogram every month. Today, at 19 months old, he weighs only six kilograms,” she said, showing Drop Site photographs and videos before and after.

Muhammad was admitted to the hospital for several days and diagnosed with severe acute malnutrition, the most extreme and life-threatening form of malnutrition.

“They say that the skeletal body of Muhammad is due to another health condition,” Al-Mutawaq said. “But if so, why isn’t this skeletal body visible in his photos only a couple of months ago? Why did he become like this only after Israel started starving us?”

The family has also come under scrutiny due to a photograph of Muhammad’s older brother, whose malnutrition did not appear to be as severe. His mother insists that his brother also suffers from malnutrition.

“His brother is older, and we could feed him whatever was available. Even so, he lost much of his weight, and his spinal cord began to show. Muhammad, however, needed milk and baby formula that were completely unavailable,” Al-Mutawaq explained.

“No one in our family looked like this before the starvation. We all weighed more and were healthier, even though we had been enduring a starvation policy since the beginning of the war. The one that began in March was by far the harshest.”

After the New York Times, under pressure, updated its story to note the pre-existing medical condition, the FP described the report as “beginning to unravel,” subtitling their story, “The paper’s blockbuster story on Gaza starvation gets a correction [sic]. But the damage has already been done.”

Najwa Hussein Hajjaj

While The Free Press claimed it looked into “viral” images of starvation in Gaza, they were not all viral. A photo of Najwa Hussain Hajjaj, for instance, was just one from a slideshow that accompanied a CNN article.

Hajjaj, a six-year-old girl from the Shejaiya neighborhood in eastern Gaza City, was diagnosed with severe malnutrition following months of Israeli military attacks and the tightening blockade.

Citing Hajjaj’s parents in an interview with Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, The Free Press suggested that her esophageal stenosis, rather than Israel’s imposed starvation, was responsible for her condition.

However, Drop Site interviewed her mother, who is currently accompanying her on a medical evacuation in Jordan, to clarify her exact condition.

“Before the war started, we had taken her to the hospital, and she was diagnosed with esophageal stenosis. Her condition had not yet worsened, and a surgery was scheduled for December 4, 2023,” said Islam Hajjaj, Najwa’s mother. “But of course, with hospitals being bombed, others overwhelmed with victims, and a lack of equipment, her surgery was canceled. This is when our own war with her condition began.”

Hajjaj said that her child started vomiting and was unable to eat, while no supplements or medical fluids were available to compensate for the food she could not consume.

“Doctors told us that medical fluids were not always available due to the complete closure. They could provide some fluids only when her condition worsened, just to keep her alive. But because of the overwhelming number of children suffering from malnutrition and the scarcity of medical supplies, they could not administer fluids consistently,” she added.

“We tried to secure her proper food for her condition like pureed vegetables, yogurt, juice, or soft cheese, but none of these was available during the starvation campaign. We couldn’t secure anything but lentils.”

The girl’s parents desperately tried to arrange surgery for her, but none of the hospitals across the Gaza Strip had the necessary equipment, as Israel restricted medical supplies from entering.

According to her mother, she was finally admitted for a medical evacuation in July, after many long months of trying to evacuate her for treatment. Since then, she has undergone three surgeries.

Hamza Ismail Mishmish

The Free Press doubted the credibility of an NPR article published on July 29, arguing that the emaciated body of 25-year-old Hamza Ismail Mishmish, from Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, was actually the result of pre-existing health conditions, citing a previous interview his mother gave to the Palestinian state news agency Wafa.

Drop Site approached the family for further details on Mishmish’s condition and confirmed that while he does suffer from cerebral palsy, this was not the reason his health had rapidly deteriorated over the past months.

“Hamza was born with cerebral palsy and congenital anomalies and had lived with this condition for years. We used to follow up with doctors, and he survived all these years on nutritional supplements and vitamins,” Shadi, Mishmish’s brother, told Drop Site.

“During the war, we faced difficulties securing his nutritional supplements, and it was impossible to compensate with fresh food. With the borders closed, and even when international aid was allowed in, all we could find was canned food. But in the recent months of starvation, his condition rapidly deteriorated.”

Shadi added that although his brother’s body appeared thin before the war, “one can clearly see the difference between how he looked then and how he looks now.”

“The recent starvation made us completely helpless towards his condition. Food supplements were completely unavailable, even canned food disappeared, and we couldn’t even secure wheat flour for bread,” he said.

Mishmish’s condition is not able to withstand prolonged malnutrition, his brother said: “Hamza’s body is weak; he is like a baby in the process of building muscles. He constantly needs vegetables, meat, fruits, milk, and eggs. If he goes without proper nutrition for a prolonged period, his muscles are severely affected, and his entire body begins to break down.”

Since Israel sealed the Gaza Strip’s borders on March 2, even the partial openings since late May for international aid and goods have not allowed meat or eggs to enter.

On just two occasions, limited amounts of frozen chicken reached southern Gaza, but with prices soaring to around $100 per chicken, the vast majority of residents could not afford it.

Mishmish’s family added that his health has been further worsened by the family’s conditions in displacement, forcing him to live in a makeshift tent after their home was bombed.

“This tent cannot protect him from the scorching heat in summer or the freezing cold in winter. In cold weather, we cannot keep him warm, so his body develops infections, his feet swell, and his entire body weakens. We would need at least three weeks to help him recover from these symptoms,” Shadi continued.

“All of these circumstances combined are why his body has never been the same since the war.”

When it comes to the others cited in the FP article, elementary scrutiny, even without direct interviews with parents or friends, sheds light on the FP’s reporting. Though the FP says all the people it investigated were facing serious issues “irrespective of any third-party action,” Mosab al-Debs, a 14-year-old teenage boy, had part of his skull removed due to an injury caused by an Israeli shell explosion, which the FP cites. The Israeli military, of course, is not a “third party” to the conflict.

Indeed, in all these cases, it could be said that the children and adults suffering from malnutrition and starvation had a universal complicating factor: Israel’s attacks on their very way of life.

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