Luke Goldstein is a reporter with the Lever. He is an investigative journalist based in Washington, DC, who was most recently a writing fellow at the American Prospect and was with the Open Markets Institute before that.
A crypto super PAC is intervening in a competitive Maryland Democratic primary to back Adrian Boafo, a lobbyist who has been working for cloud-computing tech firm Oracle while simultaneously serving as a state lawmaker.
A pro-Israel group is set to spend half a million dollars in a California congressional primary to boost the campaign of Jasmeet Bains, who recently walked back comments calling the Gaza war a genocide. Democratic Party leadership is also backing Bains.
The Trump administration has hired a team of private debt collectors — known for widespread abuses when previously hired to collect federal student debt — to hound immigrants slapped with new multimillion-dollar civil penalties for not leaving the US.
A new influence network of PACs, rich donors, and consultants is taking advantage of increasingly threadbare campaign finance law to pour millions into Democratic campaigns, aiming to elect leaders committed to returning the party to the “moderate” middle.
Artificial intelligence has a history of making poor regulatory decisions with disastrous effects on people’s lives. Newly released documents show the Trump administration sought to deploy a powerful AI tool to accelerate its deregulation spree.
Ascendant DC think tank Searchlight Institute, pushing Democrats to the center, has ties to megadonor Simone Coxe, whose Nvidia-linked money could boost AI-backed efforts to defend data center build-outs and limit AI regulation.
One of the Pentagon’s top officials driving the decision to blacklist Anthropic for refusing to allow its algorithms to be used for mass surveillance has a multimillion-dollar stake in one of the company’s competitors.
A new Trump administration contracting clause would require AI companies like Anthropic to make their technology available to federal agencies “for any lawful government purpose” — even for uses their systems are designed to prevent.
David Rivera, a longtime close friend of Secretary of State Marco Rubio, is facing federal charges for allegedly acting as a foreign agent for Venezuela. The trial and its revelations about foreign influence are poised to bedevil the Trump administration.
Implementation of the White House’s return-to-office directive will be aided by the tech firm Palantir. It remains unclear why a spy-tech company should be tasked with things like “employee seat assignments.”
Claiming to be working to stop corporate landlords from buying up single-family homes, an industry-backed GOP senator is circulating legislation that could block states from regulating the institutional investors purchasing hundreds of thousands of homes.
Lucrative deals selling empty warehouses to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the Trump administration’s mass deportation machine are being quietly facilitated by a handful of powerful real estate brokers.
To reduce ICE misconduct, Democratic legislators propose that its agents be required to wear body cameras. Evidence of body camera efficacy is remarkably thin, but weapons technology companies are set to make millions from the “reform.”
Wall Street and the crypto industry are engaged in a legislative battle over which business interests will get to fleece more of their customers’ money, with big banks hoping to close a loophole that allows cryptocurrencies to pay interest to investors.
Donald Trump has long claimed he wants to lower credit card interest rates. His regulators are intervening in a legal battle to do the opposite.
The Federal Reserve has quietly delivered nearly half a trillion dollars to Wall Street with few strings attached over the past few months. These cash infusions could signal instability in the broader financial sector.
Before Donald Trump’s capture of Nicolás Maduro, corporations filed lawsuits against Venezuela seeking damages tied to state nationalization, international sanctions, and political instability. A Trump-installed government could tilt the courts in their favor.
Driven by the AI boom, chip manufacturers are pivoting production lines toward megacorporate clients. The move will make consumer electronics even less affordable.
Google recently paid state lawmakers upward of $2,000 as “gifts” to cover their attendance at a secret all-inclusive summit with “educational” sessions discussing artificial intelligence and other issues that many of these officials will soon be voting on.
After a Southwest Airlines software meltdown stranded two million customers over Christmas three years ago, the Department of Transportation imposed a $140 million fine. The Trump administration just let the airline off the hook for its remaining payments.