I’m The Intercept’s editor-in-chief, and I need your help.

Litigation has become one of the few levers left to expose government repression, reveal what the government and corporate behemoths want hidden, and hold them to account. That fight is costing us. We've burned through our legal budget for the whole year, with four months still left to go.

Take our lawsuit in the Prairieland “antifa” terrorism case. Following a protest outside ICE's Prairieland Detention Center in Texas, a group of activists was sentenced to a combined 560-plus years in prison. Our government is convicting protesters of being terrorists, locking them up, and throwing away the key. The case is considered “the playbook” for how the Trump administration targets the left. We cannot let this effort to chill dissent play out — so we are suing to gain access to evidence that wasn’t presented to the jury.

Our legal counsel is a First Amendment expert who stretches every dollar we give him, including by persuading other lawyers in his network to take on major cases with us pro bono. But even lean litigation isn’t free. And with four months left in the year, we’ve already overspent.

So I’m turning to you, our readers, with an urgent plea during our fall fundraising drive: Will you chip in $5 so we can keep up our lawsuits challenging the government’s assault on dissent?

It’s not just Prairieland. Here’s what else we’re fighting:

ICE killings and violence. Since January, the government has failed to comply with open records law and provide us bodycam footage and documents related to the fatal shooting of Renee Good and 11 other incidents of ICE violence. After months of government stonewalling, we sued.

The Pentagon’s secret contracts with AI companies. Using open records law, we got our hands on hundreds of pages of documents about how Silicon Valley does business with the U.S. military. Inside, we found evidence the Pentagon asked OpenAI to design a model that would rarely turn down military commands. We’re suing for more.

Truth Social corruption. Last month, we sued Trump for enriching himself by illegally charging for early access to his Truth Social posts. The lawsuit aims to limit Trump from selling access to official government communications.

OpenAI theft of our work. We have a long-running lawsuit against OpenAI for using The Intercept’s journalism to train its AI models without pay or permission. Tech giants have already strip-mined the work of journalists, writers, artists — among millions of other creators — to build their models. Trump’s Department of Justice just told a court that’s fine. But we intend to hold OpenAI accountable and set a precedent that protects creative and journalistic work.

We also have numerous other Freedom of Information Act requests and appeals pending, and we’re spending more time and money than ever defending our reporting from those desperate to cover up information vital to the public interest.

We’ve got four months left in the year and no legal budget left to fight with. A gift of $5 helps keep our counsel — and the lawyers he’s recruited — in court, not on the sidelines.

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