ProPublica

by Eric Umansky

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The New York Police Department has tossed out hundreds of civilian complaints about police misconduct this year without looking at the evidence.

The cases were fully investigated and substantiated by the city’s police oversight agency, the Civilian Complaint Review Board, and sent to the NYPD for disciplinary action. They included officers wrongfully searching vehicles and homes, as well as using excessive force against New Yorkers.

In one instance, an officer punched a man in the groin, the oversight agency found. In another, an officer unjustifiably tackled a young man, and then another officer wrongly stopped and searched him, according to the CCRB.

The incident involving the young man was one of dozens of stop-and-frisk complaints the NYPD dismissed without review this year — a significant development given that the department is still under federal monitoring that a court imposed more than a decade ago over the controversial tactic.

The practice of killing cases without review began three years ago as a way to cope with escalating caseloads that were approaching a deadline for discipline. But ProPublica found it has become more frequent under Police Commissioner Edward Caban.

The commissioner may not be in his position for long. He is under pressure to resign after his phone was seized in a federal corruption investigation. He has also faced criticism for failing to hold officers accountable for misconduct.

Since he took office last July, the NYPD has ended without review more than 500 incidents, about half the cases the oversight board referred to it, according to an analysis of board data. That rate has climbed to nearly 60% this year. Under Caban’s predecessor, Keechant Sewell, the department faced roughly the same number of cases, but about 40% were tossed without review. (Neither Caban nor Sewell responded to requests for comment.)

The tactic is part of a broader pattern under Caban, who has repeatedly used the powers of his office to intervene in misconduct cases brought by the oversight agency. This summer, ProPublica and The New York Times detailed how the commissioner has used an authority known as “retention” to short-circuit some of the most serious cases, which otherwise would face public disciplinary trials.

In those instances, Caban and his staff reviewed the cases and “retained” the ones they believed the CCRB erred on, often ordering little to no discipline. Some episodes, like officers using chokeholds and beating protesters with batons, were so serious the board concluded the police had likely committed crimes.

With lower-profile matters, the board investigates and makes recommendations directly to the NYPD, which then decides what to do. The department has a policy of not reviewing most cases that arrive within three months — or 60 business days — of the statute of limitations for discipline.

“This is highly problematic and deeply troubling,” said City Council member Alexa Avilés, who has sponsored police reform legislation. “What the department is saying is that there’s not enough time, so they’re not going to do anything at all. They’re using the statute of limitations to avoid accountability.”

The NYPD does not disclose to the public or to the civilians who complained of abuse that it has terminated such cases. ProPublica obtained data on the practice from the CCRB.

In response to questions, the department issued a statement defending its policy, saying that “every case and officer is entitled to due process,” and that the CCRB had not given it enough time in these cases under the statute, which requires charges to be filed or discipline given within 18 months of an incident.

“The suggestion that the CCRB may take 486 days to review a case, but the Department may not take 60, reflects a lack of appreciation for the thorough effort, analysis, and diligent investigation these matters require,” the statement said.

When the CCRB sends a case to the NYPD, it hands over a full investigation, complete with evidence such as body-camera footage and a report summarizing its findings. NYPD lawyers then review the files.

“It’s irresponsible for the Department, and a disservice to its officers and to the people of the city of New York for the NYPD to claim it needs more than 60 days to review every case it receives from CCRB,” said the Rev. Fred Davie, who chaired the oversight board until two years ago. “Simply ignoring substantiated incidents of misconduct is truly untenable and indefensible.”

The CCRB did have a history of handling cases slowly, but that was due in large part to the NYPD withholding evidence from civilian investigators, a 2020 investigation by ProPublica found.

After police shot and killed a Bronx man in his own apartment in 2019, the department refused to share the body-camera footage with the oversight board for more than a year and a half. The delay prevented the CCRB from filing charges against the officers within the statute of limitations. (The department has since pledged to hand over body-camera footage within 90 days of a request from the board.)

This year, Caban announced that he would not impose any discipline in the killing. He approved an NYPD judge’s ruling that the oversight board had acted too late.

“The CCRB is not perfect, but its goal is clearly accountability,” said Chris Dunn, legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “The NYPD clearly does not have that goal. When a problem arises, the department’s default solution is to kill the case.”

The NYPD can act on cases that have little time left until the deadline. CCRB data shows the department has done so more than 600 times over the past three years.

Advocates for reform said they were particularly troubled by the revelation that, under Caban, the NYPD has killed dozens of civilians’ complaints about stop-and-frisks without review. The NYPD was ordered in 2013 by a federal judge to end a pattern of discriminatory and illegal behavior around the practice, where officers stop, question and frisk residents without reasonable suspicion.

“This is an end run,” said Shira Scheindlin, the former federal judge who issued the ruling that led to the federal consent decree.

Scheindlin told ProPublica the NYPD’s refusal to even review many stop-and-frisk cases shows the department is policing with impunity. “Accountability was the whole point of my decision,” she said. “Now they’re saying we can still do what we want on the street. That there will be no consequences for bad decisions.”

Since Eric Adams, a former police officer, became mayor, stop-and-frisks have climbed to their highest level in nearly a decade. And a federal monitor has found a continuing pattern of unconstitutional and undocumented stops. An earlier report from the federal monitor noted that the NYPD “failed to impose meaningful discipline” after the CCRB found misconduct. The monitor said the NYPD “must provide more deference” to agency investigations.

Adams, who struck a law-and-order image as mayor, has had a tense relationship with the CCRB, and he recently forced out its chair after she criticized the department’s response to board investigations. His administration also froze hiring at the agency.

The agency has said that because of understaffing it has had to close more than 700 cases of alleged misconduct this year without investigating them.

“What I would ask of City Hall, City Council and the police commissioner is whether this is really what they want to tell people in their communities — that citizens’ complaints will be thwarted by these technical and bureaucratic measures,” Davie said.

In response to ProPublica’s reporting this year, City Council members have called for the police commissioner to be stripped of the power of retention. Advocacy groups, like Black Lives Matter Greater New York, have called for Caban’s resignation. And still others, like LatinoJustice, have filed a lawsuit challenging the department’s practices around misconduct cases. (The NYPD did not respond to requests for comment about the lawmakers’ calls or the lawsuit.)

The mayor’s office pushed back against criticism.

“Mayor Adams has spent his career fighting for both public safety and police reform, and that’s why he and Commissioner Caban have been clear that they expect a Police Department that is professional, impartial, and just,” a spokesperson said in a statement. “The police commissioner and NYPD leadership continue to work diligently to ensure New Yorkers are both safe and policed fairly.”

So far this year, the department has killed more than 430 police misconduct cases without review, far more than it did in all of last year.

by Tim Golden

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From the start of U.S. investigations into the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the question of whether the Saudi government might have been involved has hovered over the case.

The FBI, after the most extensive criminal probe in its history, concluded that a low-level Saudi official who helped the first two hijackers in California met them by chance and aided them unwittingly. The CIA said it saw no evidence of a higher-level Saudi role. The bipartisan 9/11 commission adopted those findings. A small FBI team continued to dig into the question, turning up information that raised doubts about some of those conclusions.

But now, 23 years after the attacks, new evidence has emerged to suggest more strongly than ever that at least two Saudi officials deliberately assisted the first Qaida hijackers when they arrived in the United States in January 2000.

Whether the Saudis knew the men were terrorists remains unclear. But the new information shows that both officials worked with Saudi and other religious figures who had ties to al-Qaida and other extremist groups.

Most of the evidence has been gathered in a long-running federal lawsuit against the Saudi government by survivors of the attacks and relatives of those who died. That lawsuit has reached a critical moment, with a judge in New York preparing to rule on a Saudi motion to dismiss the case.

Already, though, information put forward in the plaintiffs’ case — which includes videos, telephone records and other documents that were collected soon after the attacks but were never shared with key investigators — argues for a fundamental reassessment of the Saudi government’s possible involvement with the hijackers.

The court files also raise questions about whether the FBI and CIA, which repeatedly dismissed the significance of Saudi links to the hijackers, mishandled or deliberately downplayed evidence of the kingdom’s possible complicity in the attacks that killed 2,977 people and injured thousands more.

“Why is this information coming out now?” asked retired FBI agent Daniel Gonzalez, who pursued the Saudi connections for almost 15 years. “We should have had all of this three or four weeks after 9/11.”

Saudi officials have long denied any involvement in the plot, emphasizing that they were at war with al-Qaida well before 2001.

They have also leaned on earlier U.S. assessments, especially the one-page summary of a joint FBI-CIA report that was publicly released by the Bush administration in 2005. That summary said there was no evidence that “the Saudi Government or members of the Saudi royal family knowingly provided support” for the attacks.

Pages of the report that were declassified in 2022 are more critical of the Saudi role, describing extensive Saudi funding for Islamic charities linked to al-Qaida and the reluctance of senior Saudi officials to cooperate with U.S. counterterrorism efforts.

The plaintiffs’ account still leaves significant gaps in the story of how two known al-Qaida operatives, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, avoided CIA surveillance overseas, flew into Los Angeles under their own names and then — despite speaking no English and ostensibly knowing no one — settled in Southern California to start preparing for the attacks.

Still, the lawsuit has exposed layers of contradictions and deceit in the Saudi government’s portrayal of Omar al-Bayoumi, a middle-aged Saudi graduate student in San Diego who was the central figure in the hijackers’ support network.

Almost immediately after the 9/11 attacks, FBI agents identified Bayoumi as having helped the two young Saudis rent an apartment, set up a bank account and take care of other needs. Bayoumi, then 42, was arrested on Sept. 21, 2001, in Birmingham, England, where he had moved to continue graduate studies in business. Scotland Yard terrorism investigators questioned him for a week in London as two FBI agents monitored the sessions.

Bayoumi dissembled from the start, newly released transcripts of the interrogations show. He said he barely remembered the two Qaida operatives, having met them by chance in a halal cafe in the Los Angeles suburb of Culver City, after he stopped at the Saudi Consulate to renew his passport. The evidence shows he actually renewed his passport the day before the encounter in the cafe, one of many indications that his meeting with the hijackers was planned.

After pressure from Saudi diplomats, Bayoumi was freed by the British authorities without being charged. U.S. officials did not try to have him extradited.

Two years later, in Saudi Arabia, Bayoumi sat for interviews with the FBI and the 9/11 commission that were overseen by Saudi intelligence officials. Again, he insisted that he was just being hospitable to the hijackers. He knew nothing of their plans, he said, and was opposed to violent jihad.

Gonzalez and other FBI agents were dubious. Though Bayoumi was supposedly a student, he did almost no studying. He was far more active in setting up a Saudi-funded mosque in San Diego and spreading money around the Muslim community. (The Saudi government paid him surreptitiously through an aviation-services company in Houston.)

FBI officials in Washington accepted the Saudi depiction of Bayoumi as an amiable, somewhat bumbling government accountant trying to improve his skills, and as a devout but moderate Muslim — and not a spy. The lead agent on the FBI team that investigated him, Jacqueline Maguire, told the 9/11 commission that by “all indications,” Bayoumi’s connection with the hijackers had been the result of “a random encounter” at the cafe.

The 9/11 commission accepted that assessment. The commission’s investigators noted Bayoumi’s “obliging and gregarious” manner in interviews and called him “an unlikely candidate for clandestine involvement with Islamist extremists.” The panel found “no credible evidence that he believed in violent extremism or knowingly aided extremist groups.”

But in 2017, the FBI concluded that Bayoumi was, in fact, a Saudi spy — although it kept that finding secret until 2022, after President Joe Biden ordered agencies to declassify more documents from the 9/11 files.

A page from an exhibit submitted by the plaintiffs in a long-running lawsuit against the Saudi government over the role it may have played in the 9/11 attacks. The exhibit contains screenshots from a video by a Saudi official, Omar al-Bayoumi, who toured Washington, D.C., in 1999. (Obtained by ProPublica from the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York)

Exactly whom in the Saudi government Bayoumi was working for remains unclear. FBI reports describe him as a “cooptee,” or part-time agent, of the Saudi intelligence service, but say he reported to the kingdom’s powerful former ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan. (Lawyers for the Saudi government have continued to repeat Bayoumi’s earlier denials that he ever had “any assignment” for Saudi intelligence.)

Another layer of Bayoumi’s hidden identity has emerged from documents, videotapes and other materials that were seized from his home and office at the time of his arrest in England. The plaintiffs had sought that information from the Justice Department for years but received almost nothing until the British authorities began sharing their copies of the material in 2023.

Although Saudi officials insist that Bayoumi merely volunteered at a local mosque, the British evidence points to his deeper collaboration with the Ministry of Islamic Affairs. The Saudi royals had established the ministry in 1993 as part of a governing pact with the powerful clergy. In return for political support, they gave the clerics effective control over domestic religious matters and funded their efforts to spread their fundamentalist Wahhabi brand of Islam overseas.

From the start of the FBI’s 9/11 investigation, agents pored over a short excerpt of a videotape recorded at a party that Bayoumi hosted for some two dozen Muslim men in February 2000, soon after Hazmi and Mihdhar arrived in San Diego.

It was another coincidence, Bayoumi claimed, that he held the event in the hijackers’ apartment. The two young Saudis had nothing really to do with the gathering, he said, but he needed to keep his wife and other women in his own apartment, sequestered from male guests according to conservative Muslim custom.

The FBI did not share a full copy of the VHS recording with either its own field agents or the 9/11 families, who sought it repeatedly. (An FBI spokesperson declined to comment on the bureau’s handling of the Bayoumi evidence.) But the full recording was provided to the plaintiffs by the British police last December.

The longer version casts Bayoumi’s gathering in a different light. Although the nominal guest of honor is a visiting Saudi cleric, the two hijackers are carefully introduced to the other guests and are seemingly at the center of the proceedings.

After identifying many of the party guests for the first time, the plaintiffs’ lawyers were able to document that many went on to play significant roles in the hijackers’ support network, helping them set up internet and telephone service, sign up for English classes and buy a used car.

“Bayoumi hand-picked these individuals because he knew and assessed that they were well-suited to provide the Al Qaeda operatives with important forms of support,” the lawyers wrote of the party guests.

Another videotape taken from Bayoumi’s Birmingham home is even more at odds with the image he conveyed to the FBI and the 9/11 commission. The video follows Bayoumi as he tours Washington, D.C., with two visiting Saudi clerics early in the summer of 1999.

Lawyers for the Saudi government called the recording an innocent souvenir — “a tourist video that includes footage of artwork, flowerbeds, and a squirrel on the White House lawn.” But the plaintiffs’ lawyers posit a more ominous purpose, especially as Bayoumi focuses on his main subject: an extensive presentation of the Capitol building, which is shown from a series of vantage points and in relation to other Washington landmarks.

“We greet you, the esteemed brothers, and we welcome you from Washington,” Bayoumi says on the video. Later, standing before the camera, he reports as “Omar al-Bayoumi from Capitol Hill, the Capitol building.”

The footage shows the Capitol from various angles, noting architectural features, entrances and the movement of security guards. Bayoumi sprinkles his narration with religious language and refers to a “plan.”

“Bayoumi’s video footage and his narration are not that of a tourist,” the plaintiffs contend in one court document, citing the analysis of a former FBI expert. The video, they add, “bears the hallmarks of terror planning operations identified by law enforcement and counterterrorism investigators in operational videos seized from terror groups including Al Qaeda.”

Lawyers for the Saudi government dismissed this conclusion as preposterous.

But the video’s timing is noteworthy. According to the 9/11 commission report, Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaida leaders began discussing their “planes operation” in the spring of 1999. Although they disagreed on which U.S. landmarks to strike, the report states, “all of them wanted to hit the Capitol.”

The two Saudi clerics who joined Bayoumi on the trip, Adel al-Sadhan and Mutaeb al-Sudairy, were so-called propagators — emissaries of the Islamic Affairs ministry sent to proselytize abroad. U.S. investigators later linked them to a handful of Islamist militants.

Another page from the plaintiffs’ exhibit shows two Saudi religious officials, Mutaeb al-Sudairy and Adel al-Sadhan, during a trip in the Washington, D.C., area with Bayoumi early in the summer of 1999. (Obtained by ProPublica from the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York)

Most notably, Sudairy, whom Bayoumi describes as the emir, or leader, of the Washington trip, spent several months living in Columbia, Missouri, with Ziyad Khaleel, a Palestinian-American al-Qaida member who delivered a satellite phone to bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1998. The Qaida leader used the phone to coordinate the deadly bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, FBI officials have said.

Sudairy and Sadhan, who had diplomatic status, had previously visited California, working with Bayoumi and staying at a small San Diego guesthouse where the hijackers later lived. Many new details of their travels were revealed in the British documents. The two Saudis had previously denied even knowing Bayoumi, one of many false claims in depositions coordinated by the Saudi government.

The new evidence also shows that Sadhan and Sudairy worked with the other key Saudi official linked to the hijackers, the cleric Fahad al-Thumairy. According to one FBI source, it was Thumairy, the 32-year-old imam of a prominent Saudi mosque in Culver City, who received the hijackers when they arrived on Jan. 15, 2000, and arranged for their temporary housing and other needs.

Thumairy, a Ministry of Islamic Affairs official who was also assigned to the Saudi consulate, insisted he had no memory of Hazmi and Mihdhar, although the three were seen together by several FBI informants. Thumairy also denied knowing Bayoumi, despite telephone records that show at least five dozen calls between them. Thumairy’s diplomatic visa was withdrawn by the State Department in 2003 because of his suspected involvement with terrorist activity.

In an extensive analysis of telephone records produced by the FBI and the British authorities, the plaintiffs also documented what they called patterns of coordination involving Bayoumi, Thumairy and other Saudi officials. (Lawyers for the Saudi government said the calls were about mundane religious matters.)

Two weeks before the hijackers’ arrival, for example, the records show calls among Bayoumi, Thumairy and the Islamic Affairs director at the Saudi Embassy in Washington. Bayoumi and Thumairy also made a number of calls around that time to a noted Yemeni American cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki, who later emerged as an important Qaida leader in Yemen.

It has long been known that Awlaki, who was killed by a U.S. drone strike in 2011, had some contact with Hazmi and Mihdhar in San Diego and met two other 9/11 hijackers after moving to a mosque in Falls Church, Virginia. But many FBI investigators believed he was radicalized well after 9/11 and may not have known the hijackers’ plans.

New evidence filed in the court case points to a more significant relationship. Awlaki appears to have met Hazmi and Mihdhar as soon as they arrived in San Diego. He joined Bayoumi in helping them rent an apartment and set up bank accounts, and he was seen by others to have served as a trusted spiritual advisor.

Awlaki’s worldview “matched quite closely to al-Qaida’s at the time,” said Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, a biographer of Awlaki who served as an expert for the plaintiffs. “The new information now becoming public, on top of what we already know about his teachings and associations, makes it reasonable to conclude that Awlaki knew the hijackers were part of the al-Qaeda network.”

by Pamela Colloff

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The Nashville, Tennessee, medical examiner who determined 24 years ago that Russell and Kaye Maze’s young son, Alex, was the victim of homicide — a finding that helped persuade a jury to send Russell to prison for life — now says he was wrong.

“I recant my trial testimony that Bryan Maze suffered from shaken baby syndrome,” Dr. Bruce Levy stated in a sworn affidavit, which used the child’s legal name. “If called to testify now, I would assert Bryan Maze’s brain, at the time of his death, showed no indication, to a reasonable degree of medical certainty, of prior trauma or abuse. Instead, the residual brain lesions viewed at autopsy more likely than not resulted from a natural disease process.”

Levy went on to state that he would now classify the child’s manner of death as “natural.”

In July, the Maze case was the subject of an in-depth article by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, which examined new scientific evidence that suggested Alex died not from shaking but an undiagnosed, underlying condition. That evidence first came to light when the Nashville district attorney’s office, through its conviction-review unit, began reinvestigating the case in 2023. The ProPublica-Times story explored the challenges in overturning convictions, even when prosecutors themselves determine that the underlying evidence no longer stands up to scrutiny.

Russell Maze stood trial twice. He was convicted before Alex’s death of aggravated child abuse and after Alex’s death of murder. He is currently serving a life sentence.

Levy’s affidavit, which was filed on Monday with the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals, marks a watershed moment in the Maze case. Because his trial testimony directly contributed to Russell’s conviction, Levy’s recantation will be hard for the courts to ignore. Whether this is enough to persuade the courts to set aside Russell’s conviction remains to be seen. But it offers a lifeline to a defendant whose chances of relief dramatically narrowed in May when a lower-court judge, after hearing two days of testimony from multiple experts who found no evidence that Alex had been shaken, nevertheless concluded, “The court does not find an injustice nor that the petitioner is actually innocent based on new scientific evidence.”

The affidavit also creates a highly unusual situation: Now both the DA’s office and the original medical examiner agree that the crime for which Russell was convicted never occurred.

At both of Russell’s trials, prosecutors presented evidence that they said showed Alex was a victim of shaken baby syndrome. The diagnosing doctor, Suzanne Starling, told jurors that internal bleeding around Alex’s brain and eyes indicated that he endured a ferocious act of violence by shaking. “You would be appalled at what this looked like,” she testified at Russell’s first trial. So forceful was the shaking, she added, that “children who fall from three or four floors onto concrete will get a similar brain injury.”

But in the years since the infant was rushed to the emergency room, shaken baby syndrome has come under increasing scrutiny. A growing body of research has demonstrated that the triad of symptoms doctors traditionally used to diagnose the syndrome — brain swelling and bleeding around the brain and behind the eyes — are not necessarily produced by shaking; a range of natural and accidental causes can generate the same symptoms.

“If called to testify today,” Levy stated in his affidavit, “I would refute the previous testimony of Dr. Suzanne Starling that Bryan Maze was definitely a victim of shaken baby syndrome and that there was no other explanation for his condition.”

Before reaching his new conclusion, Levy reviewed the original medical examiner’s file, which included his 2000 autopsy report, photos and slides. He also studied medical records that the CRU provided him this summer. Those records gave essential context about the health challenges that Alex faced before his father called 911 on May 3, 1999, to report that the 5-week-old had stopped breathing.

The records documented Alex’s first five weeks of life, which included 13 days in a neonatal intensive care unit, and health problems that spurred his parents to seek medical attention seven different times in the three weeks that followed. Levy also examined Kaye’s obstetric records, which documented her troubled pregnancy and Alex’s preterm birth.

“I do not believe many of these records were previously provided for my review,” Levy, who was the Nashville medical examiner for 13 years, wrote in the affidavit.

Levy also reviewed reports written by experts in the fields of pathology, radiology and neonatology, who reexamined the evidence in the case last year as part of the CRU’s probe.

Those experts testified at a hearing in March before Judge Steve Dozier, who had overseen Russell’s previous two trials. “Every single medical expert, using current science, confirms that Russell and Kaye Maze are actually innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted,” Nashville DA Glenn Funk told the judge. “It is my duty as district attorney to ask the court to vacate these convictions.”

At that hearing, Dozier pointedly asked about Levy, who — along with Starling, the diagnosing doctor — was not called to testify by the CRU. Its director, Sunny Eaton, and assistant DA Anna Hamilton chose to call medical experts who did not have a record to protect and who could approach the case with fresh eyes.

During the hearing, Dr. Darinka Mileusnic-Polchan, the chief medical examiner in Knox and Anderson counties, criticized Levy’s original work in the case. “He was a good pathologist,” she said, but she thought he had been “too busy to really dedicate enough time to study this case thoroughly.”

Dozier, who sometimes interrupted witnesses during the hearing with provocative questions, said pointedly, “You’re not busy?”

Mileusnic-Polchan explained that for forensic pathologists who are saddled with heavy workloads, “sometimes the easiest thing is just to copy and paste” previous medical conclusions. She suggested that if Levy had the opportunity to look at the case anew, and took more time with the evidence, that he would see what she saw. “I am almost certain if I were to bring Dr. Levy here and just kind of slow him down —”

“There is no way you can say that,” Dozier said. “Really?”

“I — I think that any pathologist looking at the brain slides —”

Dozier was skeptical of the notion that Levy would take a different stance. “He’s going to admit he was wrong?” the judge asked dismissively.

After two days of testimony and a forceful closing argument from Eaton — “The state got this wrong,” she told the judge — Dozier did not find that there was enough evidence to set aside Russell’s conviction.

Levy, Starling and Dozier did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

The CRU subsequently reached out to Levy and asked him to review the record, including Alex’s full medical history and Kaye’s obstetrics record. Levy could have upheld his previous position or written a more measured reappraisal. Instead, after reviewing all the evidence, he unequivocally rejected his original findings and testimony.

When Levy memorialized his conclusions in his affidavit, the CRU informed Jason Gichner of the Tennessee Innocence Project, who is representing Russell, and Melissa Dix and Daniel Horwitz, who are representing Kaye.

(Kaye, who was not home with her husband when their son became unresponsive in 1999, was charged with aggravated assault. After she was told that having an open criminal case would make it harder for her to regain custody of her son, she took an Alford plea to a reduced felony charge — a plea that allows defendants to accept punishment while maintaining their innocence. Kaye has asked that her conviction be vacated. Her appeal has been consolidated with her husband’s and will move through the courts with his.)

Levy’s affidavit comes as the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals considers whether Dozier was correct, this May, in finding that there was not enough new evidence to set aside Russell’s conviction.

Levy came to Nashville in 1997 to reform a medical examiner’s office that was plagued by backlogs and scandal, and he was praised for restoring integrity to the office. He also became the state’s chief medical examiner. But he lost both jobs after he was arrested in Mississippi in 2010 on a felony marijuana possession charge, for which he entered a pretrial diversion program. He subsequently pleaded guilty to a misconduct charge in Nashville after investigators found that some of the marijuana came from evidence bags from the medical examiner’s office. Levy is currently a professor of pathology and informatics at Geisinger Commonwealth School of Medicine in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

The Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals must now decide whether to remand the case back to the trial court, where Levy’s new findings would be presented and entered into evidence. Dozier would then have to weigh whether all of the evidence taken together — both the experts’ testimony from the March hearing and Levy’s new conclusions — is sufficient to vacate Russell’s conviction.

In the meantime, Russell remains at Trousdale Turner Correctional Center, a long-troubled prison run by private contractor CoreCivic. Last month, the U.S. Department of Justice launched a civil rights investigation that it said “will examine whether Tennessee protects those incarcerated at Trousdale Turner from harm, including physical violence and sexual abuse.”

“The safety and dignity of every person in our care is a top priority,” CoreCivic spokesperson Steven Owen said in a statement in August. “We take this matter very seriously and are committed to working closely with both TDOC and USDOJ officials to address areas of concern.”

by Hannah Bassett, Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, and Mary Hudetz, ProPublica, photography by Adriana Zehbrauskas, special to ProPublica

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Before her fifth birthday, Rainy had experienced a lifetime of trauma. As an infant, she witnessed violence at home before child welfare authorities intervened and her parents were incarcerated. Night terrors followed. Then, she endured the death of her great uncle who had taken on the role of dad.

She didn’t speak until she was nearly 5. Any separation from her great aunt-turned-adoptive mother, Lisa Enas, triggered panic attacks, and reminders of her great uncle’s death left her nearly inconsolable.

With counseling, however, Rainy, now age 7, with a long, thick braid and a bright smile, grew more joyful and independent. She could hold conversations and spend time away from Enas without panicking. She was selected for her school’s gifted and talented program. Home life on the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona, where her bedroom walls were lined with stuffed animals and family photos, steadied.

But that progress came to a halt last October, after a spiraling Medicaid scandal that targeted thousands of Native Americans exploded into public view.

Arizona officials announced they were investigating a massive fraud scheme in which people had been lured into fake substance abuse treatment programs, where providers exorbitantly billed Medicaid for treatments they did not deliver. Some were alleged to have kidnapped patients and held them against their will. The fraud has cost the state as much as $2.5 billion since 2019, state officials said.

In response, the Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System, or AHCCCS, terminated contracts with scores of facilities as authorities investigated them. The agency also swiftly suspended Medicaid reimbursements to hundreds of other providers that it accused mostly of overbilling or paperwork errors. Among those suspended was Desert Rain Behavioral Health Services, the Tempe provider that was treating Rainy and 260 other patients, all insured by the state Medicaid agency’s American Indian Health Program.

AHCCCS accused Desert Rain of overbilling and failing to have the license needed to treat children — allegations that the clinic would eventually resolve, but not before its ability to care for patients was disrupted.

When AHCCCS launched its investigation, officials said their top priority was the safety of patients like Rainy. Yet even as the agency says it considered whether people would lose behavioral health services before it took action, its efforts left hundreds without treatment or counseling, the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting and ProPublica have found.

The agency told the very behavioral health providers it accused of fraud that it was their responsibility to ensure patients continued to receive treatment, despite halting their reimbursements. Some closed. Others scaled back services or paid out of their own pocket while they challenged the allegations against them.

For patients, the state established a hotline to connect them to treatment, housing or transportation back to their communities. But it too has fallen short in addressing the fallout from the crisis.

AHCCCS said it had no record of what happened to the majority of the hotline’s 11,400 callers, largely because after six months it stopped tracking outcomes for people who did not stay in a hotel at the state’s expense. Of 4,100 people who received temporary lodging after calling the hotline, the state said only about 150 requested referrals to behavioral health centers. According to call data obtained by the news organizations, more than 575 ended up unsheltered, increasing their chances of relapse or even death.

In an interview, Marcus Johnson, AHCCCS’ deputy director of community engagement and regulatory affairs, said AHCCCS conducted outreach to make sure patients knew about the hotline. Yet advocates say far more people were unaware of the hotline or could not call it because they did not have phones.

“There’s always opportunity for us as an agency to improve,” Johnson said. “But like I said, we’ve done a great amount of outreach to try to get the word out as much as possible, not only to victims and our members, but also to all of the providers.”

Enas, Rainy’s adoptive mother, said no one ever told her about it as she struggled to find counseling for her daughter. (AZCIR and ProPublica are identifying Rainy, who does not share a last name with Enas, by her nickname to protect her privacy.)

Enas braids Rainy’s hair at the family home on the Gila River Indian Community.

Thirty behavioral health providers that AHCCCS has accused of fraud since the spring of 2023 have been cleared to again receive Medicaid reimbursements, though the agency cautioned providers that it could pursue further actions against them amid ongoing investigations. Most reached settlement agreements or proposed corrective action plans, according to records provided to the news organizations by AHCCCS.

Desert Rain, however, was among a handful of providers that did not have to compensate the state or rectify their practice, according to documents. After a four-month suspension, Desert Rain was informed in a February letter that it could resume receiving payments from the state because it had addressed the accusations.

AZCIR and ProPublica spoke to six of the 30 facilities that had their suspensions lifted. The suspensions, delayed payments and enhanced billing requirements resulting from the state crackdown have jeopardized their ability to stay in business, they said. Almost everyone who operated behavioral health facilities and spoke to the news organizations asked to remain anonymous out of concern they would be targeted by AHCCCS for criticizing the agency.

AHCCCS has maintained that its actions were necessary and appropriate to ensure bad actors could no longer exploit Medicaid. It also told the news organizations that it is always willing to help patients find providers.

Desert Rain owner Alexis James said that since the clinic was cleared, the state has largely denied or not processed its claims for patients insured by the American Indian Health Program. As a result, she is unable to serve her former patients. She said she is concerned many people from the Gila River Indian Community — and other Indigenous communities — have gone months without treatment because so many facilities have shut down or are not accepting new American Indian Health Program patients due to financial uncertainty.

“There are no providers available to see these clients who are higher risk, who are suicidal, who are high trauma,” James said. “What makes me so angry is it’s not anyone but the Indigenous population.”

Enas said she recognizes the state had to stem the widespread fraud but regrets it came at such a high cost. Rainy regressed without counseling, while Enas unsuccessfully sought help from AHCCCS and the local hospital.

The grief Rainy was learning to manage now overwhelms her more frequently. On a recent afternoon, within a matter of minutes, Rainy turned from chattering happily about her school day to sobbing as she looked over a favorite photo collage of her late adoptive father.

Enas comforts Rainy.

“I miss him so much,” Rainy cried. “Why did he have to die when I was 3?”

Enas held Rainy until the wave of sadness eventually passed. When they sat down at the dinner table, where Rainy announced she was joining the school color guard, Enas looked on with a mixture of pride, exhaustion and worry.

“I need to know, who is gonna actually help me?” Enas said. “Who’s going to actually listen to me? Who’s going to help my child? Because I’m fighting for her.”

A Crisis Goes Undetected

As early as 2020, state data showed a spike in billings for behavioral health care covered by the American Indian Health Program.

AHCCCS’ contracts with managed care organizations, like Mercy Care and UnitedHealthcare, use fixed rates for Medicaid reimbursement. But the American Indian Health Program — available only to American Indians and Alaska Natives — was different. Federal requirements led AHCCCS to structure the program under a “fee-for-service” model, which allowed health clinics and other providers to set their own rates and directly bill the agency. It also broadened access in areas not served by the network of insurance companies for a population that has historically faced significant barriers to health care. But it left the program vulnerable to fraud, experts say, much like other fee-for-service plans offered at the federal level.

“It was a claims shop,” AHCCCS’ Johnson said, noting the plan lacked safeguards used by managed care organizations to prevent waste, fraud and abuse.

One behavioral health clinic collected more than $200,000 a day on average through the American Indian Health Program, according to an audit of AHCCCS. The flood of cash spurred predatory recruitment of new Native American patients from across the country just as the federal government’s COVID-19 public health emergency allowed Medicaid programs to relax enrollment and screening requirements.

Will Humble, a former director of the Arizona Department of Health Services, said AHCCCS’ failure to monitor its management of Medicaid billing and reimbursements allowed the American Indian Health Program to “completely detonate.”

A view of neighbors’ houses from Enas and Rainy’s family home on the Gila River Indian Community

Reva Stewart, a community advocate in Phoenix who is Navajo, was, in the fall of 2022, among the first to sound the alarm on social media about providers’ recruitment efforts in the city and on reservations. For months, she had observed white vans pull up to city parks in search of new patients. She learned fraudulent providers were also sending vans to reservations across Arizona, New Mexico and Montana in search of patients.

Newly elected Gov. Katie Hobbs announced an initial wave of provider suspensions in May 2023. As the agency continued reviewing billing records for irregularities, more followed. Community members, patients and employees of licensed behavioral health providers had alerted authorities to the suspected fraud, said AHCCCS Director Carmen Heredia.

When suspended providers ignored the agency’s calls to ensure ongoing care, the agency said it sent demand letters and threatened legal action. AHCCCS has not pursued any provider for failing to transition patients’ care, saying it hasn’t needed to take that step.

“When our legal office has reached out to providers in this situation, they have complied,” Johnson said. “They have worked with us to transition care for their members.”

Thousands Call Asking for Help

State housing officials warned AHCCCS leadership nearly a year before it began suspending providers that reforms could trigger a surge in homelessness, according to emails reviewed by AZCIR and ProPublica. Indeed, many people faced homelessness as the state suspended behavioral health payments because some unscrupulous providers had housed patients just so they could bill for them, advocates say.

Patients in the roughly 25 suspended facilities outside the Phoenix area had few options for assistance once AHCCCS took action; the state hotline’s offer of temporary housing was limited to three hotels in the metro area.

Stewart said the state’s response has been inadequate for such a massive crisis that has rendered people homeless. She and other advocates, organized under the name Stolen People, Stolen Benefits, regularly traverse the Phoenix metro area with meals and sanitary kits to assist unhoused people who haven’t been helped. Many contact her directly.

Raquel Moody, who is from the Fort Apache Reservation in northeastern Arizona, recounted how at the height of the crisis she bounced from one fraudulent treatment home to the next. She had achieved sobriety in the past, before relapsing, and such treatment programs had helped her, including Another Level of Community Service, which served people just released from prison. (Another Level of Community Service is one of the 30 behavioral health providers that had its suspension lifted by AHCCCS after a monthslong investigation.)

From December 2022 to the end of 2023, Moody spent time in more than a half-dozen programs in the Phoenix area that promised, but never provided, treatment. Soon after arriving at each new facility, she realized legitimate treatment classes would not be offered. When she spoke up about it, the operators would kick her out.

Not only was there no treatment, she said, but lax operators made it more challenging to get sober. The owners of one facility downplayed her complaint that alcohol was being consumed in the house, claiming the drinking wasn’t harming other residents. They asked her to leave. Once, providers left her for days in an unfurnished home with nothing to do, which she described as a nightmare scenario for someone trying to overcome addiction.

“Some of us, we were looking for the right programs,” she said. “But during this whole scheme and everything, it was really hard. It was really hard to get sober.”

After the final home she was in was suspended in December 2023, no one from the state stepped in to help, she said.

She’s now in recovery and conducts homeless outreach with Stewart.

Desert Rain owner Alexis James “I’m Still Being Punished and Not Paid”

Following Desert Rain’s suspension in September 2023, James, the clinic’s owner, said she continued serving patients for as long as she could.

The clinic was roughly two years into treating Rainy, who had been diagnosed with prolonged grief, anxiety, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. It was a two-hour round trip to each appointment, but her progress made the drives worth it, Enas said.

Desert Rain, which opened 13 years ago, was one of several clinics that AHCCCS accused of treating children without the necessary state health department license. The Medicaid agency also said the treatment center had billed for some patients after their deaths and overbilled for certain mental health assessments and rehabilitation services.

As she fought the allegations, James laid off all but three of her 35 employees and coordinated with Gila River case managers to transfer most of the facility’s 260 patients to other providers. Many of the patients found that nearby facilities were also facing fraud allegations from the state and couldn’t treat them. James offered limited services at no cost to roughly half a dozen high-need clients, including Rainy.

Nearly every provider who spoke with AZCIR and ProPublica and had resolved their fraud allegations said they tried to serve clients for as long as they could without Medicaid reimbursements. James said she almost went bankrupt. She drew on personal funds to cover Medicaid patients’ treatment and took out high-interest loans that left her in financial peril.

State records show James cleared the allegations by providing evidence of an active license to work with kids and documentation explaining the handful of claims that were inadvertently submitted after a patient’s death during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when it often took days for word of a patient’s passing to reach outside the reservation’s hospital.

The agency also imposed a moratorium on new provider enrollments and enacted administrative reforms that included capping reimbursement rates for intensive outpatient treatment, and fingerprinting and background checks for more behavioral health providers under contract with AHCCCS. The agency also adopted more stringent billing procedures and revamped its process for reviewing claims.

Since the agency implemented the reforms, spending on American Indian Health Program services has declined by two-thirds, according to data released by AHCCCS in July.

“While there is still work to be done, this data reflects that our efforts to combat fraud are working,” Heredia said in a news release. “We have transformed AHCCCS into a new agency that puts our members first, and always strives to get them the help they need.”

This abrupt decrease in payments to providers also reflects the inability of patients like Rainy to get treatment.

In February, AHCCCS paid Desert Rain more than $140,000 for care provided prior to the suspension. But the agency has not reimbursed the clinic for any services billed under the American Indian Health Program since its reinstatement, according to James.

“I’m still being punished and not paid,” James said. “Essentially, we’re still suspended.”

Records reviewed by AZCIR and ProPublica showed that AHCCCS repeatedly pressed the facility to submit additional documentation required for claims to be approved. The agency also arranged a meeting to discuss the billing process. AHCCCS did not respond to questions about the agency’s billing decisions.

In a survey of 229 providers by the Arizona Behavioral Health Providers Association, an industry trade group, half of respondents reported anonymously this spring that they were close to shutting down due to issues with AHCCCS since the spring of 2023, including delayed reimbursements. Another 20% reported they had either already closed or were filing for bankruptcy. The data was presented to AHCCCS earlier this year.

Lynn Janson, a co-founder and CEO of the treatment center Milestone Recovery, described to lawmakers this year how a suspension had threatened the business she and her husband opened in 2021 with help from their daughter, a licensed clinician. Janson’s son had struggled with a methamphetamine addiction, she said, and it had been difficult to find a treatment program that would help him address childhood trauma that fueled his drug use. She opened the business to fill that void for others.

“My husband and I decided to move forward by creating a space focused on treating the trauma that is the root cause” of addiction, she said. “Fraud was never a motivating factor for us to enter this field.”

This spring, the state lifted Milestone’s suspension.

Twenty providers, not including Milestone, have filed notices of claim — precursors to lawsuits — against AHCCCS and state officials for wrongful suspension or termination. Four families have sued the Medicaid agency since April over the deaths of their loved ones while they were in the care of treatment centers. The state has denied culpability, saying state agencies, including AHCCCS, responded appropriately to past concerns about patient safety based on the information they had. AHCCCS declined to comment about the lawsuits.

Rainy plays on the trampoline at her family home. “It’s Like She’s Never Even Been to Counseling”

In April, James paused Rainy’s therapy altogether. She could no longer afford to provide counseling without reimbursement.

When AHCCCS learned that James was no longer providing care to Rainy, the agency sent a message reminding her that agency policy prohibits providers from turning away patients based on their enrollment in the American Indian Health Program. James replied, saying that she and her staff wanted to accept new patient referrals but couldn’t without payment. She never heard back.

To stay in business, James began accepting patients insured by plans other than the American Indian Health Program. Claims were promptly reviewed and reimbursed, James said, including by other Medicaid plans. Only AHCCCS’ American Indian Health Program has not reimbursed her claims.

The transition to working with patients outside of the Gila River community was bittersweet, James said, especially knowing that many of her former patients like Rainy were still searching for reliable treatment. “When I hear about the constant need that is still going on out there, it’s just really frustrating,” she said.

Enas said it has been painful to watch Rainy’s grief and trauma resurface over the past 10 months. She has tried her best to help Rainy process her emotions but said she isn’t equipped to address her daughter’s behavioral health challenges on her own.

“It’s like she’s never even been to counseling,” she said.

Rainy’s night terrors returned, with recurring dreams of her adoptive father dying. She continued to excel at school, but her teachers noticed worsening mood swings. On a visit to her adoptive father’s grave to bring him offerings of flowers and home-cooked food, Rainy lay by his headstone for hours, until dark. Unwilling to leave, Rainy cried and asked Enas how she could die so she could be with him again.

Rainy places solar lamps on the grave of her adoptive father on the Gila River Indian Community.

Enas tried everything she could think of to find care for her daughter. She contacted lawmakers, AHCCCS officials, health care administrators, school caseworkers and providers.

At one point, a patient advocate with the Gila River hospital in Sacaton, on the reservation, encouraged Enas to disenroll Rainy from the American Indian Health Program. The idea was that by switching to insurance provided by managed care organizations, Enas and Rainy would avoid issues related to AHCCCS’ handling of the insurance plan.

But changing her daughter’s insurance would be tedious and have broader repercussions. Enas would have to find a new allergist and primary care doctor because those providers, based on the reservation, accept only the American Indian Health Program. Switching back and forth also was not feasible when a single afternoon could involve juggling appointments or calls with multiple health care providers.

“We shouldn’t have to switch our plans so that way our kids can get the service that they need. That’s not right,” she said.

Enas and Rainy’s search has led back to where it began: Desert Rain. Recent income from privately insured patients has given James enough cushion to resume providing some services for free. In mid-August, Rainy returned for grief counseling sessions with James. Rainy’s other mental health disorders remain largely untreated.

Desert Rain is the best place for Rainy, Enas said, but she doesn’t know how long the treatment will last.

“Alexis is going to carry her for a little bit, and then she’s going to have to drop her again, because she’s not getting paid,” said Enas.

“How can AHCCCS do this to these kids, do this to my child?”

by Maya Miller and Annie Waldman

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

The Biden administration announced on Monday that it has finalized new regulations to strengthen protections for mental health care coverage and hold insurance companies accountable for unlawfully denying it.

The rules update the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, which was passed in 2008, requiring health insurance plans to provide the same access to mental health care as medical care. The new provisions will force health insurance plans to collect and report more robust data on how they limit and deny mental health claims. If disparities exist between mental and medical care, insurers will need to lay out how they are attempting to address these gaps.

“Mental health care is health care. But for far too many Americans, critical care and treatments are out of reach,” President Joe Biden said in a press release announcing the final rules. “There is no reason that breaking your arm should be treated differently than having a mental health condition.”

The updated rules seek to address a problem captured in numerous studies and reports and examined in a new level of detail in a recent ProPublica investigation.

Although nearly all Americans have health insurance, millions still can't access mental health care. ProPublica found that insurance companies have interfered with patient care, deployed aggressive audits and set reimbursement rates so low that providers felt they had no choice but to quit insurance networks. Our reporting also documented how consequences can be fatal when patients can’t find therapists or mental health treatment.

Federal regulators have struggled to police insurance companies. Nearly all of the recent reports that the Department of Labor has collected from insurers and health plans have lacked enough detail to determine companies’ compliance with the law, the department reported to Congress last year. Some states have passed laws to close those gaps in information, but we found mental health protections often depend on where one lives.

The new rules require insurers to collect and turn over outcomes data, like denial rates, to measure how often patients access care. The companies will have to disclose details on insurance networks, which may include how regularly patients go out of network for mental health treatment and how reimbursement rates are calculated for mental health providers.

The rules also clarify that patients have the right to access this data and require insurers and health plans to furnish records within 30 days of a request.

Republican U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., who chairs the Committee on Education and the Workforce, said the rules are too burdensome. “These rules do nothing to improve mental health care access and instead put paperwork over patients,” she said in an emailed statement.

But former U.S. Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy, who sponsored the 2008 parity bill and co-founded the mental health advocacy nonprofit The Kennedy Forum, said the new rules will protect access for patients. “This is an opportunity for consumers to finally have a seat at the table,” he told ProPublica.

The law applies to 175 million people who have private health insurance. Under the new rules, these protections will also cover people with health insurance through state and local governments, about 120,000 additional Americans.

The finalized regulations came after a yearlong review process, in which three departments — Treasury, Health and Human Services, and Labor — collected thousands of public comments. The departments had initially published proposed rules in August 2023. Some of the provisions will go into effect on Jan. 1, said Lisa Gomez, the assistant secretary of employee benefits security at the Department of Labor.

“People living with mental health conditions and substance use disorders continue to face greater barriers,” she said. “That’s not fair, it’s not right and it’s against the law.”

We’re Investigating Mental Health Care Access. Share Your Insights.

by Lisa Song

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Most of the products in the typical kitchen use plastics that are virtually impossible to recycle.

The film that acts as a lid on Dole Sunshine fruit bowls, the rings securing jars of McCormick dried herbs, the straws attached to Juicy Juice boxes, the bags that hold Cheez-Its and Cheerios — they’re all destined for the dumpster.

Now a trade group representing those brands and hundreds more is pressuring regulators to make plastic appear more environmentally friendly, a proposal experts say could worsen a crisis that is flooding the planet and our bodies with the toxic material.

The Consumer Brands Association believes companies should be able to stamp “recyclable” on products that are technically “capable” of being recycled, even if they’re all but guaranteed to end up in a landfill. As ProPublica previously reported, the group argued for a looser definition of “recyclable” in written comments to the Federal Trade Commission as the agency revises the Green Guides — guidelines for advertising products with sustainable attributes.

The association’s board of directors includes officials from some of the world’s richest companies, such as PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, Land O’Lakes, Keurig Dr Pepper, Hormel Foods Corporation, Molson Coors Beverage Company, Campbell Soup, Kellanova, Mondelez International, Conagra Brands, J.M. Smucker and Clorox.

Some of the companies own brands that project health, wellness and sustainability. That includes General Mills, owner of Annie’s macaroni and cheese; The Honest Co., whose soaps and baby wipes line the shelves at Whole Foods; and Colgate-Palmolive, which owns the natural deodorant Tom’s of Maine.

ProPublica contacted the 51 companies on the association’s board of directors to ask if they agreed with the trade group’s definition of “recyclable.” Most did not respond. None said they disagreed with the definition. Nine companies referred ProPublica back to the association.

“The makers of America’s household brands are committed to creating a more circular economy which is why the industry has set sustainability goals and invested in consumer education tools” with “detailed recycling instructions,” Joseph Aquilina, the association’s vice president and deputy general counsel, wrote in an email.

The Green Guides are meant to increase consumer trust in sustainable products. Though these guidelines are not laws, they serve as a national reference for companies and other government agencies for how to define terms like “compostable,” “nontoxic” and “recyclable.” The Federal Trade Commission is revising the guides for the first time since 2012.

Most of the plastic we encounter is functionally not recyclable. It’s too expensive or technically difficult to deal with the health risks posed by the dyes and flame retardants found in many products. Collecting, sorting, storing and shipping the plastic for reprocessing often costs much more than plowing it into a landfill. Though some newer technologies have pushed the boundaries of what’s possible, these plastic-recycling techniques are inefficient and exist in such limited quantities that experts say they can’t be relied upon. The reality is, only 5% of Americans’ discarded plastic gets recycled. And while soda bottles and milk jugs can be turned into new products, other common forms of plastic, like flimsy candy wrappers and chip bags, are destined for trash heaps and oceans, where they can linger for centuries without breaking down.

The current Green Guides allow companies to label products and packaging as “recyclable” if at least 60% of Americans have access to facilities that will take the material. As written, the guidelines don’t specify whether it’s enough for the facilities to simply collect and sort the items or if there needs to be a reasonable expectation that the material will be made into something new.

“The Green Guides have long set forth that items labeled as ‘recyclable’ are those which are capable of being recycled,” Aquilina, the association vice president, told ProPublica. “Any characterization suggesting Consumer Brands is pushing for a ‘looser definition’ is false.”

But the association seemed to disregard what the FTC said in a separate document released alongside the guides, which states that a truthful recyclable claim means that “a substantial majority of consumers or communities have access to facilities that will actually recycle, not accept and ultimately discard, the product.”

In its comments to the FTC, the association pushed back on that idea. The U.S. recycling system is decentralized, and manufacturers have no control over economic factors that might lead a recycler to change its mind about how it handles a certain type of plastic, the association wrote, adding that it was unrealistic to force brands to predict which products will be “ultimately recycled.”

The association represents sellers and will naturally seek more flexibility in its positions, Jef Richards, a professor of advertising and public relations at Michigan State University, said in an email. The “problem with defining ‘recyclable’ as anything that MIGHT be recycled is that I seriously doubt that’s how consumers define it.”

When consumer expectations fail to match what the advertiser is saying, “consumers are being deceived,” he added.

That deception has concrete impacts: Plastic bags that mistakenly end up at recycling centers can gum up machinery, start fires and contaminate bales of paper, which then can’t be recycled. The problem could get worse if the FTC listens to the Consumer Brands Association and allows companies to market plastic bags as “recyclable.”

Annie’s mac and cheese is one of the brands under the association’s umbrella that has a reputation for health and sustainability. Unlike most pasta companies, Annie’s avoids using plastic film to create windows in its pasta boxes. The brand also sells cheese crackers packaged in plastic that is clearly labeled as nonrecyclable, with a diagonal slash through the triangular “chasing arrows” symbol. Its parent company, General Mills, however, has promoted store drop-off recycling programs for one of its granola bar brands, Nature Valley. A Bloomberg News investigation found these programs have a spotty record, with much of the plastic ending up at landfills. The CEO of General Mills is a member of the association’s executive committee. Earlier this year, the investment firm Green Century filed a shareholder resolution asking General Mills to investigate how it could reduce its use of plastic packaging. The resolution also suggested that the company assess the effectiveness of drop-off recycling programs.

The Honest Co. similarly cultivates a sustainable reputation, including by avoiding two particularly problematic types of plastic in its packaging. Its website provides instructions on how to dispose of plastic packaging; product pages tell consumers to disassemble and rinse out containers and to “check with your local municipality for recyclability acceptance.” Tom’s of Maine uses similar language in fine print on its “first-of-its-kind recyclable toothpaste tube.” The tubes show the familiar chasing arrows recycling symbol accompanied by the words, “Once empty, replace cap and recycle.” Small letters on the edge of the tube read, “Your community may not yet accept tubes for recycling. Check locally.”

But regulators have warned that “check locally” caveats are vague. The Environmental Protection Agency told the FTC last year that the warning “has little value in assessing recyclability” and said companies should use clearer instructions to reduce “wishcycling” — tossing things into a curbside bin with the faint hope that they will get recycled. A group of state attorneys general suggested using more aggressive language: “NOT ROUTINELY RECYCLED — Please check with your local jurisdiction.”

“We’re proud of the leading role we’ve played in transforming tube packaging,” Rob Robinson, a marketing executive at Tom’s of Maine, said in an email. A “check locally” caveat appears on the toothpaste tube, the outer carton and the company website, he said.

Miriam Holsinger, co-president of Minnesota-based Eureka Recycling, said not every sorting center has the right equipment or staff training to recycle these tubes. “Until all toothpaste tubes are recyclable, it’s just not something that you can easily do.”

General Mills, The Honest Co. and Colgate-Palmolive didn’t return requests for comment.

Here’s a list of all the consumer packaged-goods companies with a membership on the Consumer Brands Association’s board of directors, listed alongside some of the brands that they own. The companies in bold responded to ProPublica’s inquiry by directing us back to the association. The others did not comment.

Abbott Nutrition (Ensure, Pedialyte, Similac)

B&G Foods Inc. (Crisco, Green Giant frozen foods, Cream of Wheat)

BellRing Brands Inc. (PowerBar, Premier Protein)

Bush Brothers & Co. (Bush’s baked beans and bean dip)

Campbell Soup Co. (Goldfish crackers, Kettle and Cape Cod potato chips)

Church & Dwight Co. Inc. (Arm & Hammer laundry detergent, Feline Pine cat litter)

The Clorox Co. (Clorox bleach, Pine-Sol, Burt’s Bees)

The Coca-Cola Co. (Dasani, Minute Maid, Schweppes, Sprite)

Colgate-Palmolive Co. (Colgate toothpaste, Softsoap, Tom’s of Maine)

Conagra Brands Inc. (Healthy Choice, Swiss Miss, Reddi-wip)

Danone (Danone and Oikos yogurts, Silk soy milk)

Del Monte Foods Inc. (College Inn broths, Del Monte fruit cups)

Dole Sunshine (Dole Whip, Dole fruit bowl snacks)

Ferrara (Jelly Belly, SweeTarts, Laffy Taffy, Nerds)

Ferrero USA Inc. (Nutella, Butterfinger, Crunch, Keebler, Famous Amos)

Flowers Foods Inc. (Nature’s Own, Dave’s Killer Bread, Wonder bread)

Freshpet (dog and cat food)

General Mills Inc. (Annie’s, Bisquick, Cheerios, Chex Mix, Nature Valley, Yoplait)

Georgia-Pacific LLC (Dixie cups and plates, Quilted Northern, Brawny)

Hain Celestial Group (Celestial Seasonings, Terra chips, Alba Botanica)

Harvest Hill Beverage Co. (SunnyD, Juicy Juice)

Henkel Corp. (Dial soap, Snuggle fabric softener)

The Honest Co. (Honest branded skin care, hair care and products for babies)

Hormel Foods Corp. (Skippy, Planters peanuts)

Idahoan Foods LLC (Idahoan packaged mashed potatoes)

J&J Snack Foods Corporation (Icee, Dippin’ Dots)

The J.M. Smucker Co. (Jif, Twinkies, Smucker’s jam)

Kellanova (Cheez-It, Eggo, Pringles)

Keurig Dr Pepper (Keurig coffee, 7UP, Canada Dry)

Land O’Lakes Inc. (Land O’Lakes butter, cheese and eggs)

McCall Farms (Veg-All, Princella)

McCormick & Co. Inc. (McCormick herbs and spices, Billy Bee honey)

Milo’s Tea Co. Inc. (Milo’s iced teas)

Molson Coors Beverage Co. (Blue Moon, Coors, Keystone Light)

Mondelez International Inc. (Clif, Oreo, Ritz)

Moody Dunbar Inc. (Dunbar’s canned vegetables, Nature’s Pride)

Morgan Foods Inc. (soups, beans, broths and sauces)

Nestle (Blue Bottle Coffee, Gerber, KitKat, Purina)

Nissin Foods (Cup Noodles, Top Ramen)

Ocean Spray Cranberries Inc. (juices and drinks)

PepsiCo Inc. (Aquafina, Doritos, Lipton, Quaker)

Post Holdings Inc. (Honey Bunches of Oats, Pebbles)

The Procter & Gamble Co. (Charmin, Tide, Gillette, Herbal Essences)

Reckitt (Enfamil, Lysol, Airborne)

Rich Products Corp. (Carvel, Coffee Rich)

Ripple Foods (dairy-free milks and protein shakes)

Sargento Foods (cheese and packaged snacks)

Schwan’s Co. (Tony’s, Mrs. Smith’s)

Tillamook County Creamery Association (cheese, ice cream, frozen meals)

Utz Brands Inc. (Utz and Boulder Canyon potato chips)

WK Kellogg Co. (Frosted Flakes, Froot Loops, Raisin Bran)

Do You Have Experience in or With the Plastics Industry? Tell Us About It.

by Max Blau, illustrations by Vanessa Saba, special to ProPublica

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This article contains descriptions of mental illness, alcohol addiction and suicidal ideation.

Early one morning in February 2023, before the sun rose over Phoenix, Ravi Coutinho went on a walk and, for a brief moment, thought about hurling his body in front of a moving bus. He had been feeling increasingly alone and depressed; anxious and unlovable; no longer sure if he was built for this world.

Several hours later, Ravi swiped open his iPhone and dialed the toll-free number on the back of his Ambetter insurance card. After navigating the automated voice system, he was routed to a friendly, fast-talking customer service rep with a slight foreign accent. His name was Giovanni.

“How can I help you today?” Giovanni asked.

“Hi, I am trying to find a psychiatric care provider,” Ravi said.

“So, you are looking for a primary care provider?” Giovanni asked.

“No,” Ravi replied, seeming confused. Ravi tried to clearly repeat himself. “Psy-chi-at-ric.”

“Psychiatric, all right, so, sure, I can definitely help you with that,” Giovanni said. “By the way, it is your first time calling in regards to this concern?”

Listen to this exchange.

Ravi paused. It was actually the sixth attempt to get someone, anyone, at Ambetter to give him or his mother the name of a therapist who accepted his insurance plan and could see him. Despite repeatedly searching the Ambetter portal and calling customer service, all they had turned up so far, he told Giovanni, were the names of two psychologists. One no longer took his insurance. The other, inexplicably, tested patients for Alzheimer’s disease and dementia and didn’t practice therapy at all.

“I’m a little concerned about all this,” Ravi said.

This had not been part of the plan Ravi had hatched a few months earlier to save his own life. Diagnosed with depression and anxiety, and living in the heart of Austin, Texas’ boisterous Sixth Street bar district, the 36-year-old former college golfer had become reliant on a dangerous form of self-medication.

His heavy drinking had cost him his marriage and was on the verge of destroying his liver and his livelihood. His therapist back in Texas had helped him understand how his mental illnesses were contributing to his addiction and vice versa. She had coached him through attempts to get sober.

He wanted to save his business, which sold dream vacations to golfers eager to play the world’s legendary courses. He wanted to fall in love again, even have a kid. He couldn’t do that when he was drinking a fifth of a gallon of liquor — the equivalent of nearly 17 shots — on any given day.

Ravi with a golf tournament trophy and playing a course in Scotland

When all else had failed, he and his therapist had discussed a radical move — relocating to the city where he’d spent his final years of high school. Phoenix symbolized a happier and healthier phase. They agreed that for the idea to work, he needed to find a new therapist there as quickly as possible and line up care in advance.

Ravi felt relieved when he signed up for an insurance plan right before the move. Ambetter wasn’t as well known as Blue Cross Blue Shield or UnitedHealthcare. But it was the most popular option on HealthCare.gov, the federal health insurance marketplace, covering more than 2 million people across the country. For $379 a month, his plan appeared to have a robust network of providers.

Frustrating phone calls like this one began to confirm for Ravi what countless customers — and even Arizona regulators — had already discovered: Appearances could be deceiving.

After misunderstanding Ravi’s request for a therapist, Giovanni pulled up an internal directory and told Ravi that he had found someone who could help him.

It was a psychiatrist who specialized in treating the elderly. This was strange, considering that Giovanni had asked Ravi to verify that he was born in 1986. “I mean, geriatric psychiatry is not …” Ravi responded, “I mean … I wouldn’t qualify for that.”

Listen to this exchange.

Annoyed but polite, Ravi asked Giovanni to email the provider list on the rep’s computer. He figured that having the list, which he was legally entitled to, would speed up the process of finding help.

But Giovanni said that he couldn’t email the list. The company that ran Ambetter would have to mail it.

“What do you mean, mail?” Ravi asked. “Like physically mail it?”

Listen to this exchange.

Ravi let out a deep, despondent sigh and asked how long that would take.

Seven to 10 business days to process, Giovanni responded, in addition to whatever time it would take for the list to be delivered. Ravi couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity.

“Nothing personal,” he told Giovanni. “But that’s not going to work.

“So I’m just gonna have to figure it out.”

Listen to this exchange.

This baffling inability to find help had tainted Ravi’s fresh start.

In the weeks before the call with Giovanni, Ravi had scrolled through Ambetter’s website, examining the portal of providers through his thick-rimmed glasses. He called one after the next, hoping to make an appointment as quickly as possible.

Of course, it was unreasonable to expect every therapist in Ambetter’s network to be able to accept him, especially in a state with an alarming shortage of them. But he couldn’t even find a primary care doctor who could see him within six weeks and refill his dwindling supply of antidepressants and antianxiety meds.

Days before he was supposed to move to Phoenix, he texted friends about his difficulties in finding care:

“Therapists have been 0-4.”

“Called ten places and nothing.”

“The insurance portal doesn’t know shit.”

Ravi didn’t know it, but he, like millions of Americans, was trapped in a “ghost network.” As some of those people have discovered, the providers listed in an insurer’s network have either retired or died. Many other providers have stopped accepting insurance — often because the companies made it excessively difficult for them to do so. Some just aren’t taking new patients. Insurers are often slow to remove them from directories, if they do so at all. It adds up to a bait and switch by insurance companies that leads customers to believe there are more options for care than actually exist.

Ambetter’s parent company, Centene, has been accused numerous times of presiding over ghost networks. One of the 25 largest corporations in America, Centene brings in more revenue than Disney, FedEx or PepsiCo, but it is less known because its hundreds of subsidiaries use different names. In addition to insuring the largest number of marketplace customers, it’s the biggest player in Medicaid managed care and a giant in Medicare Advantage, insurance for seniors that’s offered by private companies instead of the federal government.

ProPublica reached out to Centene and the subsidiary that oversaw Ravi’s plan more than two dozen times and sent them both a detailed list of questions. None of their media representatives responded.

In 2022, Illinois’ insurance director fined another subsidiary more than $1 million for mental health-related violations including providing customers with an outdated, inaccurate provider directory. The subsidiary “admitted in writing that they are not following Illinois statute” for updating the directory, according to a report from the state’s Insurance Department.

In a federal lawsuit filed in Illinois that same year, Ambetter customers alleged that Centene companies “intentionally and knowingly misrepresented” the number of in-network providers by publishing inaccurate directories. Centene lawyers wrote in a court filing that the company “denies that it made any misrepresentations to consumers.” The case is ongoing.

And in 2021, San Diego’s city attorney sued several Centene subsidiaries for “publishing and advertising provider information they know to be false and misleading” — over a quarter of those subsidiaries’ in-network psychiatrists were unable to see new patients, the complaint said. The city is appealing after a judge sided with Centene on technical grounds.

Even the subsidiary responsible for Ravi’s plan had gotten in trouble. Regulators with the Arizona Department of Insurance and Financial Institutions found in 2021 that Health Net of Arizona had failed to maintain accurate provider directories. The regulators did not fine Health Net of Arizona, which promised to address that violation. When ProPublica asked if the company had made those fixes, the department said in a statement that such information was considered “confidential.”

These were exactly the type of failures that Ravi’s mother, Barbara Webber, confronted as the head of an advocacy group that lobbied for greater health care access in New Mexico. From her Albuquerque apartment more than 300 miles away from her son’s new, 12th-floor studio, she listened to Ravi vent about how hard it was to find a therapist in Phoenix.

Ravi was Barbara’s only child, and they had always been close. In the seven years since Ravi’s dad died, they’d grown even closer. They talked on the phone nearly every day. Barbara was used to supporting Ravi from afar, ordering him healthy delivery dinners, reminding him to drink enough water and urging him to call crisis hotlines amid panic attacks. But when Ravi crashed at her apartment while waiting to move to Phoenix, she saw more of his struggles up close. At one point, she called 911 when she feared for his life.

Ravi with his mother, Barbara Webber, on a hike in Arizona in March 2023 and on a childhood trip with her to Lake Tahoe

Despite her desire and ability to help him, Ravi didn’t want to stay with his mom for any longer than necessary. He didn’t want to feel like a teenager again.

Barbara understood her son’s desire for independence, and when he first encountered insurance barriers, she drew from her expertise and coached him through ways to try to get past them. But by the middle of February, a few days after Ravi settled into his new place, there was no good news about his mental health care. She felt the need to step in.

So, she called Ambetter to try to get better information than what Ravi was looking at online. But Khem Padilla, a customer service rep who seemed to be working at a call center overseas, couldn’t help her find that information. She then asked Padilla to send referrals to therapists.

When Padilla followed up, he only sent phone numbers for mental health institutes, including one that exclusively served patients with autism. “I wish that everything will work together for you,” Padilla wrote in an email to Barbara and Ravi on what happened to be Valentine’s Day, “and [don’t] forget that you are Loved.”

Loneliness is one of the strongest forces for triggering a relapse in someone addicted to alcohol, and Ravi’s early days in Phoenix provided a dangerous dose.

His old friends were often busy with work and family. He hadn’t found his way to a new Alcoholics Anonymous group yet. And he struggled to find matches on dating apps. (“Phoenix Tinder is a wasteland,” he told one friend.) His only consistent companion was Finn, a half-Great Pyrenees with a thick coat of fluffy white hair, whom he took on long walks around the city. “His unconditional love brings me so much joy,” he’d told his mom.

Alone in his apartment with Finn, vodka within reach, Ravi felt guilty about calling his loved ones for help. Even though his mom and his friends would pick up the phone at just about any hour, Ravi hated the idea of bothering them.

But he couldn’t resist after he hung up with Giovanni, the customer service rep. That afternoon, Feb. 22, he fired off a frustrated text message to his mom.

“How is it this hard?!” Ravi seethed.

Barbara’s next move was to reach out to a member of her nonprofit board who happened to work for a Centene company. The board member helped pull strings in late February to get Ravi a care manager, a person who works for the insurer to help patients navigate access to providers. But not even his new care manager, Breona Smith, a licensed professional counselor based in Arizona, could connect him to a therapist.

She spent 16 minutes calling in-network providers to check if they could see him. Four couldn’t. One could. Instead of calling more, she sent along a single therapy referral. When Ravi called that office, the staff had to verify if they accepted Ambetter. But Ravi never heard back.

Smith did get him a referral for a psychiatric nurse practitioner who could refill his meds; he first saw him one month into his move. Ravi hoped that the office might be able to refer him to a therapist, but none of the three providers it ultimately passed along took Ambetter. One of them had stopped taking insurance a decade ago; another had only ever seen patients willing to pay cash.

Without therapy, Ravi’s descent took on a momentum of its own.

One day, he drank himself to sleep and woke up with a pillow full of blood from his nose. On another, he white-knuckled a version of do-it-yourself detox that caused violent vomiting.

A close friend from high school, David Stanfield, was watching it all unfold. Ravi had always made David feel like they could pick up where they’d last left things. But this new withdrawn person, who would break into a sweat on a crisp night in the 60s, was a far cry from the guy he once knew.

Ravi was beginning to remind David of his brother-in-law, who had died of a drug overdose a few years earlier. So when Ravi sent a series of distressing texts, indicating that he had relapsed, David and another friend staged an intervention and took Ravi to the hospital.

But Ravi resisted rehab that didn’t come with therapy. He wondered what good another detox would do if it didn’t help him combat the root causes of his addiction. He was also worried that it would get in the way of his ability to work; Ravi was still booking some golf vacations through his business and figured he would have to surrender his phone during a rehab stay.

Instead, Ravi sated his withdrawals by feeding his body more alcohol, giving way to a March whirlwind of blackouts, massive hangovers and despondent texts to friends. When Ravi showed up to a baseball game looking pale and disheveled, a friend’s young son turned to his dad and asked: Is Ravi OK?

By early April, almost two months had passed since Barbara’s first call to Ambetter alerting them that Ravi was having trouble finding a therapist. Ambetter was obligated by state law to provide one outside of its network if Ravi couldn’t find one in a “timely manner” — which, in Arizona, meant within 60 days.

Within that span, its own records showed, he’d wound up in the emergency room seeking treatment for alcohol withdrawal and called a crisis line after he had thought about ending his life. Yet despite 21 calls with Ravi and Barbara, adding up to five hours and 14 minutes, the insurer’s staff had not lined up a single therapy appointment.

Ravi with his dog, Finn, in March 2023

Smith called Ravi four times over two weeks, right as his mental health crisis worsened. When he didn’t respond, she closed his case on April 7. Smith did not respond to multiple requests for comment or to questions about what information she tried to share with Ravi on these calls.

As Ravi’s attempts to find a therapist slowed down, his descent accelerated.

There was the episode at a Phoenix Suns game when paramedics had to treat him for severe dehydration after he downed a bottle of vodka.

There was the time he left the dog food container open and Finn got extremely sick from eating a week’s worth of food.

As Ravi crossed into his fourth month in Phoenix, he sat alone in his parked Kia Forte, surrounded by nothing but the lonely quiet, and screamed at the top of his lungs.

Barbara didn’t expect to spend Mother’s Day with Ravi. But after he told his uncle that he was having visions again of jumping in front of a speeding bus, she boarded a last-minute flight to Phoenix and settled into his couch where she could watch him as he slept.

On the morning of May 13, she was roused by his flailing limbs. He was having a seizure. Paramedics rushed Ravi to the hospital, the second time in the past month and fourth since the year began. Doctors gave him benzodiazepines, Valium and Librium, to treat the seizures and anxiety caused by his alcohol withdrawal. “Mom,” Ravi told Barbara, “I don’t want to die.”

One kind of treatment suggested by hospital staff, an intensive outpatient program, seemed the best fit. It would allow Ravi access to his phone for his business purposes. But neither Ravi nor Barbara could get a list of in-network programs from Ambetter, nor could they find them in the portal.

As Ravi called every program he could locate in metro Phoenix, and failed to find a single one that took his insurance, Barbara decided to pester her board member again. (The board member did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

A few days later, someone with Centene provided the names of two in-network programs out of the dozens in Arizona. Only one offered the individual therapy Ravi was looking for.

That Friday, May 19, Barbara rode with Ravi to Scottsdale, where the intake staff at Pinnacle Peak Recovery drug-tested him. He tested positive for the benzodiazepines the hospital staff had administered following his seizure. Treatment programs sometimes restrict patients who test positive for those drugs because of the liability, experts told ProPublica. Pinnacle Peak Recovery’s staff urged Ravi to come back the following week. Barbara flew home, hopeful that Ravi would be admitted. (Pinnacle Peak Recovery did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

On Monday morning, Ravi wrote the date, May 22, on a sheet of paper. He tore it out of a notebook, held it up to the side of his face and took a selfie with it. It was a way of marking time as well as a milestone: the first day of his newfound, hopefully permanent sobriety.

Ravi took a selfie on May 22, 2023, to mark the first day of his new sobriety. (Courtesy of Barbara Webber)

When he returned to Pinnacle Peak, however, he tested positive again. The second rejection hurt more than the first. Three days later, Ravi went back a third time; the drugs were still in his system. “I don’t know what else to do,” he told Barbara over the phone. “I am screwed.”

The answer of what else could be done was, unbeknownst to Ravi, buried in the fine print of his own insurance policy. Ambetter’s contract promised to find an out-of-network treatment program and make it available to Ravi, so long as Ambetter’s own employees decided that it was in his “best interest.”

Even though Barbara hadn’t read the fine print either, she had a sense that Ambetter could do more to help Ravi. So she pulled up the number of the last Centene employee she’d spoken with.

In a text message, Barbara expressed concern that the window to get Ravi help was closing. She was certain that, without more medical support ahead of admission to a treatment program, Ravi was bound to relapse. If that happened, Barbara pleaded, there was a good chance that he would have another seizure. She warned that he might even die.

Barbara awaited word on what to do next. She got no response.

The following morning, May 27, she drafted a message to Ravi. She described her visceral memory of his recent seizure — waking to the sound of his screams, pounding on his chest after his heartbeat briefly stopped, calling 911, uncertain if he would survive. “Those few minutes are seared into my soul and will go with me til the end of my days,” she wrote.

Barbara also wrote that she wanted nothing more than for Ravi to be around for the rest of her years. She promised to support him no matter what. If he kept going, he could find peace with Finn and find someone to love. But he had to keep going — not for her, not for Finn, not for his friends, not for anyone else. “I love you,” she wrote, “but you must love yourself.”

She hit send. Ravi didn’t reply right away, which was unusual.

An hour passed, then another. As the afternoon gave way to evening, Barbara called three times, unable to reach him. She tried to reach Phoenix’s 911 dispatch but couldn’t get through.

Not knowing what else to do, Barbara called David, whom Ravi had asked to be his local emergency contact.

David had grown deeply frustrated with Ravi for not getting the care he needed. And he was worried for his friend. He agreed to call 911.

A police dispatcher sent an officer to knock on Ravi’s door. The officer could hear Finn barking from the other side. When no one answered, the officer called David, letting him know that the police couldn’t enter the apartment without the building’s security guard, who wasn’t around right then.

Unsatisfied, David and his fiancée, Aly Knauer, drove over to Ravi’s. A security guard, who had just gotten back from his rounds, was reluctant to let them into the apartment at first. But after David and Aly explained the urgency, the guard relented. They headed up to the 12th floor and turned the corner toward Ravi’s apartment.

When the guard unlocked the door, Finn squeezed past and darted out. As Aly grabbed Finn, David peered inside, calling out his friend’s name. Four empty vodka bottles were strewn across the apartment. The Murphy bed was folded up against the wall. No one seemed to be there.

David glanced toward the window that frames the Phoenix skyline and felt a sense of relief. His friend might still be alive.

When he turned to leave, he looked again at the bed. He realized it was slightly ajar. As he leaned closer, to see why the bed hadn’t fully locked into place, David spotted something jutting out from the gap between the mattress and the wall: a lifeless foot.

About the Reporting

This story was pieced together from more than 1,000 pages of Ravi’s medical records and insurance files; audio recordings of Ambetter customer service calls; police reports and photos; court filings from three states; reports from insurance regulators; Ravi’s texts, phone logs, social media messages and emails; and more than 25 hours of interviews with people who knew Ravi best.

It was also guided by a lengthy chronology of key events that Barbara had compiled in the months after her son’s death. One thing she couldn’t bring herself to do: read the autopsy report. She asked her sister to summarize the findings, which ProPublica obtained and reviewed. Ravi’s death was ruled an accident, likely due to complications from excessive drinking.

ProPublica sent a detailed account of Ravi’s attempts to get help to 12 legal, insurance and mental health experts. They independently identified a variety of problems, including Ambetter’s provider directory inaccuracies, its network inadequacy and its customer service shortcomings.

We’re Investigating Mental Health Care Access. Share Your Insights.

by Max Blau

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

It’s hard to know if your health insurance plan is as good as advertised. You pay a monthly premium to access a network of health providers. But call the numbers in your provider directory, and you’re bound to find ones who can’t — or won’t — see you.

These errors are at the heart of a ghost network. Some providers have moved, retired or even died; others left insurance networks because of low pay and intense scrutiny. Even though these providers no longer accept your insurance, their names may remain in the directory. When that happens, policyholders are left to believe that the plan has more options than actually exist.

“Any inaccuracy constitutes a ghost network,” said Abigail Burman, a consumer protection attorney who studies provider directory errors. “This is basic information. It needs to be right.”

Insurers’ failures to correct these errors have led to dire consequences for people seeking mental health care, as demonstrated by a recent ProPublica investigation of one man’s months of struggle to access treatment. Because of the widespread nature of ghost networks, some policyholders are more likely to pay out-of-network costs and face a greater chance of treatment delays — if they get treatment at all.

ProPublica spoke with experts, clinicians and advocates to understand the challenges posed by provider directory errors. They all suggested specific ways for policyholders to navigate a ghost network.

How much do insurers know about the errors in their directories? And what are they required to do about it?

Insurers have acknowledged the problem and in some cases have vowed to address it. AHIP, a national association of health insurers, said in a 2023 statement to the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance that insurers update provider directories through “regular phone calls, emails, online reminders, and in-person visits.” However, AHIP wrote that insurers can’t always quickly fix errors because providers sometimes fail to keep their own professional information up to date. (AHIP declined ProPublica’s request for an interview.)

But Dr. Robert Trestman, a Virginia psychiatrist who testified about ghost networks to the same committee, told ProPublica that insurers are able to track “every detail of finance” around things such as billing and coding. Because of that, he said, insurers’ failures “to set up a system for keeping track of who is in network or not is on them.”

But insurers haven’t had to make it a priority. Simon Haeder, a Texas A&M University professor who studies ghost networks, said that insurers have “very little incentive” to closely monitor directories. Unless tougher regulations are passed, he said, policyholders will continue to struggle with directories full of “inconsistent, outdated or incomplete data.”

For years, it has fallen to academic researchers and secret shopper surveys to reveal the pervasiveness of these errors. Lawmakers have passed bills and called for further reforms. In spite of that, the errors still plague policyholders.

I’m shopping for a plan. How do I know if it is as good as advertised?

Do your homework. In the absence of the insurer making it a priority to update its directory, the task of checking its accuracy falls to you. You can head to the website of the insurer whose health plan you’re interested in buying. Find the provider portal. Since an insurer may offer different networks for each plan, experts suggest double-checking that you’re only searching for providers available in the network that you want.

If you already have a provider, type in their name to see if that person is listed in-network. If you don’t have one, find a provider that’s listed as being in network and taking new patients, and who seems to meet your needs. From there, experts encourage reaching out directly to the provider to verify that both of those things are true.

“Verify, verify, verify,” said Dr. Jane Zhu, an associate professor at Oregon Health & Science University’s medical school who studies ghost networks. “Accuracy in behavioral health provider directories is akin to a coin flip.”

I already have a health plan. What should I do?

Don’t worry if you’ve paid for a plan or have one through your employer. There are other ways to minimize the perils of provider directory errors.

But experts say that you’ll need to arm yourself with some facts.

Track down your “Evidence of Coverage.” The document, which is typically about 100 pages long, outlines what your insurer must do to fulfill its contractual obligations. For instance, if you can’t access an in-network mental health provider within a certain period of time, the insurer may be on the hook for tracking down an out-of-network provider.

From there, you can call the insurer to find out if it handles your mental health benefits or if it has outsourced management of them. If those benefits are “carved out” from your plan, you may have to seek answers about provider directory errors from that subcontractor. (Should you encounter any errors in your directory, this information could come in handy.)

Experts say that by getting these answers, you’ll be able to better fight for your rights.

What should I do if I encounter provider directory errors?

Health care experts warn that you’re likely to encounter errors in your provider directory. They advise not to become discouraged when you do.

David Lloyd, chief policy officer with the mental health advocacy group Inseparable, suggests taking notes of the calls to providers. Did they answer the phone? Did they say they accept your plan? Do they see new patients? You can write all your notes down in this handy worksheet created by Cover My Mental Health, an Illinois-based consumer advocacy group. Take photos of the directory errors, too.

How many calls should I be expected to make?

Some policyholders have called at least 50 supposedly in-network providers in pursuit of an appointment. But experts say you shouldn’t have to contact that many. Burman suggests making a “reasonable effort.” To her, that means making five to 10 calls to providers listed in-network.

She and others note that if you’re in distress because of your mental health, you don’t have to call on your own.

“Ask a friend or family member for assistance and to help advocate for you,” said Wendell Potter, a former Cigna vice president who is now a consumer advocate.

None of my calls secured an appointment. What should I do now?

If you’ve made that reasonable effort and haven’t managed to lock down a provider, experts recommend making another call to your insurer. Inform the customer service rep that you couldn’t make an appointment with a listed provider despite multiple attempts. Request that the rep schedule an appointment for you. Then ask for the rep’s email address and put the request in writing — and ask the rep to reply the same way.

Meiram Bendat, a lawyer and psychotherapist in California, suggests reminding insurers that they “must share in the responsibility of identifying timely and geographically accessible providers.” The exact regulations depend on where you live and the kind of plan you have, so some research may be required before the call. In some instances, you can ask for a care manager and the insurer will assign an employee who can help secure a mental health appointment.

“Set the expectation that the customer service rep needs to solve this problem,” said Joe Feldman, founder of Cover My Mental Health.

If the rep doesn’t connect you with a provider, health insurance experts recommend asking the rep to file an administrative grievance. Persistence is key, Burman said. Be assertive. Demand the grievance be addressed — or escalated to a manager who will resolve your concern.

“Don’t feel like you’re the problem,” Burman said. “They are the problem for engaging in deceptive practices.”

My ghost network grievance hasn’t been resolved. Now what?

While waiting for your insurer to act, health insurance experts also encourage reaching out to your insurance regulator.

Finding that regulator can be a tricky task given America’s complex patchwork of insurance regulations. You’ll need to determine which government agency oversees your insurer. While more research is required to see who will be able help, experts point to the following agencies as a starting point:

1. If you purchased a plan from your state’s Health Insurance Marketplace, or have a fully insured plan through your private employer, you can get in touch with your state’s insurance department.
2. If you have a Medicaid plan, you can contact your state’s Medicaid agency.
3. If you are enrolled in Medicare, you can reach out to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
4. If you have a self-funded plan from your private employer or a health and welfare benefit plan from your union, you can try the U.S. Department of Labor’s Employee Benefits Security Administration.

Once you find the right agency, experts suggest that you prepare your complaint. You don’t have to write a new one from scratch. Gather information from your grievance, along with any other new developments, and submit that to the regulator.

Is there anything else I can do?

Yes, there are a few other ways. Whatever approach you take, Potter urges you to make noise, as if you are “a relentless squeaky wheel.”

If you are covered through an employer’s health plan, see if your human resources department can help talk to the insurer.

Or contact the constituency service offices of your federal and state elected lawmakers. They might be able to directly reach out, too.

Depending on where you live, there may even be legal services or consumer advocacy agencies that can help out as well.

“As a consumer, your superpower is not going away,” Burman said. “Your strongest weapon, in the face of a company that wants you to go away, is to not go away.”

We’re Investigating Mental Health Care Access. Share Your Insights.

by Jennifer Smith Richards and Jodi S. Cohen

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An Illinois school district that had the nation’s highest student arrest rate has agreed to change its disciplinary practices and provide help to those who missed class time while being punished.

The agreement with the U.S. Department of Education will end a federal civil rights investigation into the Four Rivers Special Education District that was launched following a 2022 ProPublica and Chicago Tribune investigation that found the district turned to police with stunning frequency to discipline students with disabilities.

Under the deal, students who were referred to police or sent to a “crisis room” multiple times during the past three academic years could be eligible for services including tutoring, counseling or remedial education.

Four Rivers operates one public school: the Garrison School, in west-central Illinois, for students in an eight-county area of the state who have severe emotional and behavioral disabilities; some also have autism or ADHD.

In announcing the agreement on Thursday, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights said it found that despite claiming to be a “supportive” school, Garrison routinely sent students to police for noncriminal conduct that could have been related to their disabilities — something explicitly prohibited by federal law.

In the 2021-22 school year, investigators found that students were sent to police 96 times — more than the total number of students enrolled that year — for reasons including “noncompliance,” “disruption,” “inappropriate language” and violating a phone policy. Students also “spent extensive time out of the classroom” even when police weren’t involved; one student was sent to a “crisis room” 143 times in one school year and spent four hours and 20 minutes there one day.

Under the agreement, Garrison employees should no longer call police for behaviors that a specialized school like Garrison “should be fully equipped to manage,” Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine E. Lhamon said in a written statement.

By Dec. 20, the school must meet about students who were sent to police or to the school’s seclusion room during the past three school years to determine whether they should be given additional services for what they missed and the harm they suffered. Those services would have to be provided within six months of the meeting, according to the agreement.

Four Rivers Director Tracey Fair did not comment on the agreement or respond to questions from ProPublica about plans to help students going forward. She previously told the Tribune and ProPublica that administrators call police only when students are being physically aggressive or in response to “ongoing” misbehavior. Fair signed the civil-rights agreement on Tuesday.

The agreement also requires the district to develop new policies governing when to use its crisis rooms — described by the Education Department as two bare rooms with cinderblock walls and tile floors — and provide those to the agency within 30 days. Additionally, the district will need to keep detailed documentation every time students are sent to police and provide training to all staff, including on when the use of law enforcement or a crisis room could violate federal law.

The ProPublica-Tribune investigation found school administrators had called the police to report student misbehavior every other school day, on average, for years. When police were brought to the school, staff members then regularly pressed charges against the students — some as young as 9.

Officers typically handcuffed students and took them to the Jacksonville police station, where they were fingerprinted, photographed and placed in a holding cell. The local newspaper in Jacksonville then printed a brief description of the arrest in its police blotter.

(Jacksonville Journal-Courier)

During the 2017-18 school year, half of all Garrison students were arrested. No school district in the country that year had a higher student arrest rate, according to federal data.

Olga Pribyl, who oversees the special-education law division of Equip for Equality, called the agreement “a wake-up call” that the school should be focused on training staff to help students avoid crisis situations. The group is the federally appointed watchdog for people with disabilities in Illinois.

“They should’ve been complying with the law, that’s the bottom line, and they weren’t,” she said. She said that, at a minimum, all students who were sent to police or put in the seclusion room should be offered counseling.

“There’s trauma involved whenever these types of restrictive practices are used on students and especially if they’re used frequently,” Pribyl said.

A mother named Lena, who pulled two of her children from Garrison, said she won’t seek help from the school even though her sons would be eligible under the new agreement. One of her sons was arrested at school.

“For people who are going to go there in the future or going there now, that’s great,” Lena said. (ProPublica and the Tribune are not including her last name to protect the privacy of her children.) “But for the kids whose lives have been altered completely, that doesn’t do any good.

“You are asking somebody to take their kid back to the place that harmed them.”

by Rob Davis, ProPublica, and Matthew Kish, The Oregonian/OregonLive

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Update, Sept. 13, 2024: All of the shareholder proposals at Nike’s Sept. 10 annual meeting failed. Those asking for reports on pay equity and sustainability goals received the largest share, each garnering about a quarter of the votes cast.

When Nike’s shareholders convene in a virtual meeting room on Tuesday, they will hear from dissatisfied investors who hope to shift the company’s approach to climate change, gender equity and labor rights using one of the only tools they have: transparency.

They’re offering a record number of proposals to make the company investigate the problems they perceive and report the results publicly.

But if history is any guide, none of the investors’ proposals will pass.

Every one of the 18 Nike shareholder proposals to reach a vote since at least 1996 has been rejected, according to news archives and securities filings reviewed by ProPublica and The Oregonian/OregonLive. As in past meetings, Nike’s board of directors — the majority of whom are selected by a holding company for co-founder Phil Knight’s stock — opposes this year’s measures.

The demands being made of Nike come from investment funds whose customers wish to back companies that deliver on corporate responsibility, an effort sometimes labeled “environmental, social and governance,” or ESG. Their uphill fight at annual meetings reveals limitations to the influence of shareholder activism on corporate policy.

Among the five proposals that Nike investors will decide on are those asking the world’s largest athletic apparel brand to explain its failure to cut carbon emissions and to evaluate ways to improve working conditions in its supply chain.

Lisa Hayles of Trillium Asset Management, a Boston-based sustainable investing firm that owned $11.7 million in Nike stock as of June 30, said Trillium and others have been “stonewalled” by Nike on questions about labor rights, including allegations that two of its suppliers owe $2.2 million in unpaid wages at two Asian factories shuttered during the pandemic. Nike has said it’s found no evidence to support the allegations.

Hayles said she also wants to know why the company eliminated 20% of its employees working full time on sustainability. The layoffs, first reported by The Oregonian/OregonLive and ProPublica, were part of a broader cost-saving effort but went deeper than cuts of 2% companywide and 7% at Nike’s Oregon headquarters.

“It’s very disappointing to see this lack of response, lack of engagement from the company, coupled with what we know about the layoffs and restructuring of the staff working on sustainability,” she said. “It calls into question: What is the company’s commitment?”

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ProPublica and The Oregonian/OregonLive plan to continue reporting on Nike and its sustainability work, including its overseas operations. Do you have information that we should know? Rob Davis can be reached by email at rob.davis@propublica.org and by phone, Signal or WhatsApp at 503-770-0665. Matthew Kish can be reached by email at mkish@oregonian.com, by phone at 503-221-4386, and on Signal at 971-319-3830.

The proposals mainly aim to change Nike’s response to climate change and its handling of women’s and workers’ rights. They also include one from a conservative think tank challenging the company’s support of LGBTQ+ organizations.

Nike declined an interview request. The company said in a statement: “We greatly value the opportunity to engage with and solicit feedback from our shareholders, and we believe that maintaining an open dialogue strengthens our approach to corporate governance practices and disclosures.” The company said it did not engage with the conservative think tank.

The company’s annual meetings are required by law and play out with scripted precision. Investors elect Nike’s board and have a chance to submit questions to top executives. But they aren’t handed a microphone by someone passing through the audience. Unlike meetings of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, which draw thousands of people to Omaha, Nebraska, Nike’s meetings are virtual and succinct. Last year’s finished in under 41 minutes.

The activists have to make their case quickly. A two-minute, 58-second audio clip by one activist shareholder group in 2023 appeared to have been edited to remove pauses between sentences. It finished playing just seconds before the polls closed for shareholder voting.

An individual or investment group needs to own only $25,000 in company stock to file a shareholder proposal. For longer-term shareholders, that threshold drops to $2,000, which is roughly 25 shares of Nike. The company is worth about $120 billion.

Investors possess few other ways to force changes at publicly traded companies. The federal Securities and Exchange Commission does not permit investors to micromanage. They can’t require a company to pay men and women the same. But they can try to compel it to say whether it does. Even when investor-led proposals don’t advance, activists say, a public airing of concerns can sometimes spark impact.

In 2018, after The Wall Street Journal and others reported on allegations about a boys’ club culture at Nike, representatives of Trillium asked the company to set diversity goals. Trillium withdrew the proposal after Nike committed to engaging and subsequently announced additional plans to increase the representation of women in its global workforce. (The company faces a sweeping lawsuit, filed in the wake of the 2018 news coverage, from female employees alleging gender discrimination; the company has denied the allegations in court filings.)

Trium Sustainable Innovators, a London-based fund, is behind the proposal asking Nike to explain its record on climate change. The investors want Nike to study and report on why it missed many of its 2020 climate targets and subsequently abandoned some of the metrics. Nike hasn’t seen its emissions budge in the past decade, despite promises to sharply reduce them.

Pointing to Nike statements that consumer preference and marketplace demand drove the 2020 misses, Trium’s proposal says Nike appears “to absolve itself of responsibility” and could have influenced demand through pricing, supply volume and product visibility.

“They will need to pay for carbon emissions one way or another,” Raphael Pitoun, a Trium portfolio manager, said in an interview. “Being so slow in carbon transition is a mistake.”

Pitoun did not specify how much Nike stock Trium owns but put the investment fund’s stake at “a few million dollars.”

Trium wrote three letters to Nike in 2023, then filed the shareholder proposal after the investors said they did not get answers to their questions, including on a call with Nike. Pitoun described the shareholder proposal as the last step in a two-year escalation process.

Nike, for its part, said the report Trium wants would be duplicative, writing in a securities filing that while it is now working toward achieving its 2025 targets, it is “also striving to do more.”

Two groups that advise institutional investors on how to vote on shareholder proposals, Glass Lewis and Institutional Shareholder Services, recommended approving the climate proposal. ISS also recommended a yes vote on a proposed study of gender- and race-based pay gaps at Nike.

The climate proposal and the Trillium labor proposal also got a boost on Thursday after Reuters reported that Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, which owns a $1.05 billion Nike stake, is backing them. The fund is Nike’s ninth-largest investor, according to the report.

While proposals like the ones facing Nike this month have grown more common in American business, they continue to face long odds, said Douglas Chia, president of Soundboard Governance and a former corporate secretary of Johnson & Johnson.

Chia, who also teaches at Rutgers Law School, said of Nike: “Companies where founders, someone like a Phil Knight, own a huge chunk, it’s very difficult.”

by Jake Pearson

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Update, Sept. 16, 2024: Judith Zbiegniewicz said she received a series of checks after this story was published. One was from New York Guardianship Services, which paid her $5,400 in compliance with the court order mentioned in this article. Zbiegniewicz said the company’s check was dated Aug. 30, the same day that ProPublica reached out to NYGS for comment. Separately, Carrington Mortgage Services paid Zbiegniewicz $5,000 and her husband $2,500 to honor a prior housing court settlement, as per the same court order. The lender sent the checks late last week, following ProPublica’s inquiries.

A New York judge has ordered one of the city’s most prominent guardianship companies to return thousands of dollars to an elderly woman for the court-mandated care and oversight it failed to provide her.

Supreme Court Justice Lee Mayersohn wrote in an Aug. 8 decision that the company, New York Guardianship Services, billed Judith Zbiegniewicz monthly but provided “minimal services, if any” for years, including at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

During that time, Zbiegniewicz, who was living under guardianship for depression and anxiety, said she and her husband spent a night on the streets, moved into a city shelter and finally found affordable housing on their own.

Zbiegniewicz and her decade-long journey through the state’s broken guardianship system were the subject of a ProPublica investigation earlier this year. The reporting showed how that system, which is plagued by chronic delays, lax regulation and minimal oversight, has failed to protect thousands of aging and sick New Yorkers who judges have declared incapable of managing their own affairs.

The people most affected are poor wards like Zbiegniewicz who have no friends or family willing to look after them — a group dubbed “the unbefriended” in industry parlance. To care for this group, the city relies on a network of nonprofits. New York Guardianship Services represented itself as one such group and was assigned by the court to be Zbiegniewicz’s guardian.

Despite its representations, NYGS, which serves hundreds of wards, is not actually registered as a nonprofit with state and federal authorities, ProPublica found.

For roughly a decade, the company paid itself from Zbiegniewicz’s bank account, even as she complained about deteriorating living conditions. The problems that she described — living with bedbugs, rats and no heat — persisted for years, and NYGS did little or nothing to fix them while it collected monthly stipends from her limited funds. She said that she eventually tried to reach Mayersohn to flag the neglect and hold NYGS accountable but that her attempts were unsuccessful. The judge’s secretary, she said, simply referred her calls back to the guardianship company.

That changed in June though, after Zbiegniewicz attended a hearing to formally dispute NYGS’ accounting — protests she had previously articulated in a letter to the judge. During a court appearance, she complained to Mayersohn about her time as a ward of NYGS. She said she told him that there was “no excuse for what they put me through.”

Mayersohn’s decision, informed by that hearing, requires the company to return $5,400 to Zbiegniewicz for some of the fees it took between January 2019 and July 2022, a stretch in which she effectively lived on her own outside the guardianship.

The order separately requires the bank that owned the rat-and-bedbug-infested Queens home where NYGS placed Zbiegniewicz to honor a prior housing court settlement, which it has yet to pay. Under the deal, the bank owes Zbiegniewicz $5,000. If it doesn’t pay, she can seek to reclaim the money in court, though Zbiegniewicz said she was skeptical that the effort and cost of doing so would be worth it. An attorney for the bank didn’t respond to a message seeking comment.

In an interview, Zbiegniewicz said that she was pleased with the ruling, but that she was more happy that Mayersohn finally heard directly from her. She also said that she wanted NYGS to be held to account for its actions.

“I got some kind of justice, but the justice would be if they would be taken out of guardianships completely because they do not do anything for the people,” she said.

As part of its reporting, ProPublica identified more than a dozen cases like Zbiegniewicz’s in which NYGS failed to meet the needs of those entrusted to its care. In one case, a woman who’d had two strokes was placed in a nursing home where she was left to sit in soiled diapers, a family member said. In another case, the company continued to collect payments for a man’s care even after he left the country and later died.

Brothers Sam and David Blau, who run NYGS, and a lawyer for the group did not respond to an email seeking comment on the judge’s decision. In response to ProPublica’s previous reporting, Sam Blau, the group’s chief financial officer, said that “we are accountable to the Court” and emphasized that the group’s financial paperwork was scrutinized by examiners who had the power to raise issues. He called the reporting “misguided, without full and proper context, filled with omissions and less than accurate information” but wouldn’t specify what his concerns were when asked. He declined to comment on any specific cases.

Zbiegniewicz credited ProPublica’s investigation for the judge’s action in her case — an uncommon occurrence in New York’s troubled guardianship system. But she also noted it took years of sustained protest on her part, a level of persistence that many ailing and elderly New Yorkers in guardianship cannot manage.

“I’ve done what I could, I feel good about it, the judge heard, you wrote things,” she said. “Maybe somebody will see and maybe somewhere, down the line, somebody will do something about it.”

by Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel

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The Dane County Sheriff’s Office in Wisconsin has agreed to make a series of reforms meant to ensure that residents who speak little or no English can get the services they need.

The agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice resolves a civil rights inquiry that followed ProPublica reporting last year on how the sheriff’s office had mistakenly blamed an immigrant worker for his son’s 2019 death on a dairy farm. The reporting revealed that a language barrier between the worker and a sheriff’s deputy had led to the misunderstanding.

Under the Civil Rights Act, agencies that receive federal funding, such as the sheriff’s office in Dane County, cannot discriminate against people because of their country of origin or ability to speak English. The Justice Department said that there was no finding of discrimination against the sheriff’s office and that it “fully cooperated” with the inquiry.

As part of the agreement, which was signed over the past week, Dane County says it will finalize a language access policy that includes staff training, quality controls and outreach initiatives, and will undergo a period of departmental monitoring. The new policy — which has been in progress for months — will set standards on when deputies can use children, bystanders and tools such as Google Translate to communicate with non-English speakers. It also creates a process to ensure that, after an emergency situation is over, deputies can confirm the accuracy of information that was gathered via unqualified interpreters.

José María Rodríguez Uriarte, the father of the dead boy, said he was relieved to learn of the agreement.

“I think this will really put pressure on police to obtain clearer translations when they can’t understand a person,” he told ProPublica in Spanish. “A lot of us get into a panic when we’re pulled over by the police or when something happens because of the language issue; we don’t know if officers are truly there to help us or, on the contrary, to harm us. So this is a good thing.”

ProPublica’s reporting had found that a different worker had accidentally killed Rodríguez’s son, a precocious 8-year-old named Jefferson. That worker told ProPublica that it was his first day on the job and that he’d received little training before operating a skid steer, a large piece of equipment used on the farm to scrape up cow manure; he said he wasn’t aware the boy was behind him when he put the machine in reverse.

Deputies never interviewed the man, who like the boy’s father was a recent immigrant from Nicaragua and didn’t speak English. A deputy on the scene who considered herself proficient in Spanish interviewed Rodríguez, but she made a grammatical mistake that led her to misunderstand his account of what actually happened.

In a statement, Dane County Sheriff Kalvin Barrett said his office is committed to equality and inclusion. “By proactively addressing language barriers, we are fostering a more connected community where everyone can fully participate,” he said. Last week, the department posted a page on its website about its efforts to improve language access and included the material in six languages, including English, Spanish and Hmong.

The agreement is part of a Justice Department initiative intended to help law enforcement agencies overcome language barriers to better serve communities and keep officers safe.

“To serve and protect all communities in the United States, our state and local law enforcement agencies must be able to communicate effectively with crime victims, witnesses, and other members of the public who do not speak fluent English,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement.

The story of what happened to Jefferson brought unprecedented attention to the plight of the mostly undocumented immigrant workers who milk cows and shovel manure in America’s Dairyland. Local and state officials began calling for reforms. In the months after ProPublica’s investigation was published, county officials allocated $8 million to create new housing for farmworkers and established a countywide coordinator position to help all departments implement language access plans and engage community members with limited English proficiency. Jefferson’s parents also reached a settlement with the farm where he died and its insurance company, neither of which admitted wrongdoing. The case had been scheduled for trial but was resolved weeks after the story was published.

Since his son’s death, Rodríguez has been working on another dairy farm in the area. He said he hopes to return to Nicaragua in December to be reunited with his remaining son, Jefferson’s younger brother, Yefari. The boy is now one year older than Jefferson was when he died.

Help ProPublica Reporters Investigate the Immigration System

by Andy Kroll, ProPublica, and Nick Surgey, Documented

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Ginni Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, privately heaped praise on a major religious-rights group for fighting efforts to reform the nation’s highest court — efforts sparked, in large part, by her husband’s ethical lapses.

Thomas expressed her appreciation in an email sent to Kelly Shackelford, an influential litigator whose clients have won cases at the Supreme Court. Shackelford runs the First Liberty Institute, a $25 million-a-year organization that describes itself as “the largest legal organization in the nation dedicated exclusively to defending religious liberty for all Americans.”

Shackelford read Thomas’ email aloud on a July 31 private call with his group’s top donors.

Thomas wrote that First Liberty’s opposition to court-reform proposals gave a boost to certain judges. According to Shackelford, Thomas wrote in all caps: “YOU GUYS HAVE FILLED THE SAILS OF MANY JUDGES. CAN I JUST TELL YOU, THANK YOU SO, SO, SO MUCH.”

Shackelford said he saw Thomas’ support as evidence that judges, who “can’t go out into the political sphere and fight,” were thankful for First Liberty’s work to block Supreme Court reform. “It’s neat that, you know, those of you on the call are a part of protecting the future of our court, and they really appreciate it,” he said.

Recording of a July 31 call between First Liberty Institute leadership and donors to the organization (Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

On the same call, Shackelford attacked Justice Elena Kagan as “treasonous” and “disloyal” after she endorsed an enforcement mechanism for the court’s newly adopted ethics code in a recent public appearance. He said that such an ethics code would “destroy the independence of the judiciary.” (This past weekend, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said she too was open to an enforceable ethics code for the Supreme Court.)

After the call, First Liberty sent a recording of the 45-minute conversation to some of its supporters. ProPublica and Documented obtained that recording.

Ginni Thomas did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

First Liberty Institute did not directly respond to ProPublica and Documented’s questions about the recording. Hiram Sasser, executive general counsel at First Liberty Institute, said in a statement: “First Liberty is extremely alarmed at the Leftist attacks on our democracy and judicial independence and is fighting to bring attention to this dangerous threat. It’s shameful that the political Left seems perfectly fine destroying democracy to achieve the court decisions they favor instead of working through democratic and constitutional means.”

The July 31 call led by Shackelford came shortly after President Joe Biden had announced support for a slate of far-reaching Supreme Court changes. Biden endorsed term limits for justices, a constitutional amendment reversing the court’s recent presidential immunity decision and a binding ethics code for the court’s nine members. Kagan’s comments came before Biden’s. She did not mention any of the structural proposals Biden endorsed.

On the donor call, Shackelford voiced strong opposition to various court reform proposals, including the ones floated by Biden, as well as expanding the size of the court. All of these proposals, Shackelford said, were part of “a dangerous attempt to really destroy the court, the Supreme Court.” This effort was led by “people in the progressive, extreme left” who were “upset by just a few cases,” he said.

Recording of a July 31 call between First Liberty Institute leadership and donors to the organization (Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

This is not the first time that a spouse of a Supreme Court justice injected themselves into controversial political matters. Ginni Thomas sent dozens of messages after the 2020 election that echoed then-President Donald Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud. In messages to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, Thomas said “Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History” and urged Trump to not concede the election. In emails to Arizona and Wisconsin lawmakers, she pleaded with them to fight back against supposed fraud and send a “clean slate of Electors.” She later wrote, “The nation’s eyes are on you now. … Please consider what will happen to the nation we all love if you do not stand up and lead.” (Thomas said in 2022 she regretted sending the inflammatory messages to Meadows.)

Martha-Ann Alito, the wife of Justice Samuel Alito, faced scrutiny for flying an upside-down American flag at the family’s Virginia home — a symbol used by the Stop the Steal movement that claimed the 2020 election had been stolen from Trump. The flag flew outside the Alito home as the Supreme Court was deciding whether to hear a case related to the 2020 election. (Samuel Alito told The New York Times he had no role in flying the flag. He said his wife did it in response to “a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”)

The push to change how the court functions grew after a series of ProPublica stories showed that wealthy Republican donors have showered Thomas and Alito with free gifts and travel that they failed to disclose. Following ProPublica’s reporting, Thomas amended past disclosure reports, and the Supreme Court adopted the ethics code, its first ever.

Thomas and Alito have said they weren’t required to disclose free flights or hospitality from friends.

First Liberty has been at the forefront of a decadeslong and successful effort to expand the First Amendment rights of religious groups, even as those interests can collide with other constitutional principles like maintaining the separation of church and state or providing equal protection for protected classes.

In the last several years, First Liberty has notched big victories. In June 2022, the Supreme Court’s six conservatives ruled in favor of several Maine families represented by First Liberty and the Institute for Justice, a libertarian-leaning legal advocacy group, when it struck down the state’s ban on using public funding to pay for religious schooling. Days later, the six conservatives ruled again in favor of a First Liberty plaintiff — in this case, a former football coach at a Washington state public high school who had been fired for praying on the field after games. The conservative majority said the coach had been wrongly removed from his job, a decision hailed by religious groups and criticized by some experts who said it would now be more difficult for public schools to keep education separate from religion.

First Liberty has also represented a bakery in Oregon whose owners refused to make a cake for a same-sex wedding, citing their religious beliefs; religious groups that opposed the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate; and nearly three dozen Navy SEALs and military members who refused to be vaccinated for the virus on the basis of their faith. In all the cases, First Liberty’s plaintiffs won partial or full victories in lower courts or at the Supreme Court.

Shackelford, who is First Liberty’s president and CEO, has led the group for nearly three decades. His influence extends into the broader conservative movement. House Speaker Mike Johnson, a former First Liberty attorney, once called Shackelford a mentor. Shackelford has served as vice president of the Council for National Policy, an umbrella group that brings together conservative leaders and deep-pocketed donors. He also works closely with Ziklag, the secretive network of ultrawealthy conservative Christians that aims to “take dominion” over every major sphere of influence in American culture. According to internal Ziklag newsletters obtained by ProPublica and Documented, Shackelford has participated in Supreme Court prep sessions and appeared on strategy conference calls organized by the group.

On the July 31 donor call, Shackelford kept the focus squarely on the mounting calls to reform the Supreme Court. In addition to Biden’s proposals, several groups, including prominent liberal legal outfits, have proposed other changes including term limits and stronger ethics guidelines. And earlier in July, the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law said it had received a $30 million gift from the private-equity investor Jim Kohlberg to create a new project that will “seek reform of the Supreme Court.”

Shackelford described all of this — Kagan’s speech, Biden’s announcement, the $30 million donation — as if it was a coordinated effort. “They’re doing everything in their power,” he told the donors. “They’re hitting from every direction.” The “extreme left,” he explained, was “upset by just a few cases, but that’s all they need to say, ‘We’re ready to totally’ — they would call ‘reform’ or ‘restructure’ the court — but almost everything they propose would actually destroy the court.”

Recording of a July 31 call between First Liberty Institute leadership and donors to the organization (Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

He aimed his fiercest criticism on the donor call at Kagan. “That is incredible, somewhat treasonous, what Kagan did,” Shackelford said. “The chief justice rules the court. They’re trying to keep the other branches’ hands off of them. And then you’ve got Kagan from the inside really being somewhat disloyal and somewhat treasonous in what she’s doing.”

Shackelford accused ProPublica of being part of a campaign to “delegitimize or get rid of the court.” He said that the ethics lapses unearthed by ProPublica’s reporting were “false” and “baseless,” even though they helped spark the creation of a new ethics code and led to Thomas filing new financial disclosure forms, in effect admitting that he had failed to disclose certain gifts.

ProPublica stands behind all of the stories in its “Friends of the Court” series. Donors do not have access to stories ahead of their publication, and they have no say over coverage decisions.

Turning to what his donors could do to help, Shackelford said that prayer was at the top of the list. “This is a spiritual battle,” he said. “Because the evil that will occur if we lose the rule of law is beyond, I think, what any of us can even think through.”

Recording of a July 31 call between First Liberty Institute leadership and donors to the organization (Obtained by ProPublica and Documented)

But First Liberty needed more than prayer — it also needed money. “We need resources to be able to do a bunch of the things that will make a difference between now and the next six months. And that turned out to be key last time,” he said, referring to a similar instance in 2021 and 2022.

Near the start of the Biden presidency, he said, First Liberty raised $3 million to run a campaign that sought to block efforts to add more justices to the high court and to reform or eliminate the filibuster in the U.S. Senate. Getting rid of the filibuster then would’ve removed the 60-vote procedural hurdle that currently exists for most types of legislation.

According to Shackelford, First Liberty conducted polling, ran advertisements, worked with social media influencers and urged Congress to oppose these changes. In particular, Shackelford said, his group focused its activities on convincing Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to oppose filibuster reform.

In the end, both senators did just that. “We stopped this from happening,” Shackelford said. (Spokespeople for Manchin and Sinema did not respond to requests for comment.)

But now, he went on, First Liberty needed more money if it wanted to mount a similar campaign to stop Supreme Court reform. He mentioned the Brennan Center’s recent $30 million gift and then asked, “Where’s our, you know, $10 million guy or gal?”

And to anyone who wondered about the odds that Supreme Court reform would actually happen, Shackelford responded: “I don't know. I mean, 25%? 30%? Whatever it is, it’s amazing how big that is when you consider that our country will be over and the rule of law will be over.”

Before the call ended, Shackelford wanted his “very top supporters” to know that they had the support in this fight from key figures in high places. He said that a First Liberty staffer based in Washington, D.C., had recently been in a meeting with Ginni Thomas. Afterward, Thomas sent the email that praised First Liberty for joining the fight against Supreme Court reform.

“‘Great to meet through the meetings today,’” Thomas wrote, according to Shackelford, who read the email aloud to the donors. “‘I cannot adequately express enough appreciation for you guys pulling into reacting to the Biden effort on the Supreme Court,” she said, adding, “Many were so depressed at the lack of response by R’s and conservatives” to recent court-reform proposals. The rest of Thomas’ email, Shackelford said, was the all-caps gratitude.

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Do you have any information about the Supreme Court and efforts to block court reform that we should know? Andy Kroll can be reached by email at andy.kroll@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 202-215-6203.

by Marilyn W. Thompson

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Judge Aileen M. Cannon has shown bias in handling criminal charges against former President Donald Trump and should be reversed and removed from the case to “preserve the appearance of justice,” a public interest group argued in a legal filing on Tuesday.

The brief filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and joined by a retired federal judge and two constitutional lawyers is a direct legal assault on Cannon’s decision to throw out special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump for alleged mishandling of classified documents. CREW is a nonpartisan open-government advocacy group that has been at the vanguard of fighting Trump in various legal battles.

The brief argues that Cannon’s decision “hinged on ignoring the plain text of four federal statutes,” dismissing “a landmark Supreme Court opinion confirming the Attorney General’s power to appoint a Special Counsel.”

CREW writes that “a reasonable member of the public could conclude, as many have, that the dismissal was the culmination of Judge Cannon’s many efforts to undermine and derail the prosecution of this case.”

In a stunning July 15 ruling, Cannon wrote that Attorney General Merrick Garland exceeded his authority by appointing Smith as special counsel without congressional approval and violated the Constitution’s separation of powers. “The Special Counsel’s position effectively usurps that important legislative authority,” she said. Critics say that decision was incorrect and disregarded years of legal precedent, including a landmark Supreme Court ruling.

Smith appealed her decision to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, but he stopped short of asking that Cannon be removed if the case is remanded.

Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge from Massachusetts, was one of several parties who joined CREW as a friend of the court. She told ProPublica she decided after analyzing Cannon’s decision that it could not be explained by her caseload or inexperience.

“It was clearly bias,” said Gertner, who is a senior lecturer at Harvard Law School, citing repeated rulings from Cannon that were favorable to Trump’s attorneys. “And with this Supreme Court, there’s no ceiling. All precedents are up for grabs.”

Federal statutes governing reassignment of cases give appellate courts authority to ask the chief judge in a district to move the case if the original judge “has engaged in conduct that gives rise to the appearance of impropriety or a lack of impartiality.” The brief cites several precedents, but reassignment based on judicial bias is uncommon.

Cannon, 43, was appointed to the Fort Pierce courthouse in the Southern District of Florida by Trump in November 2020, after he lost the election to Joe Biden. She was randomly assigned to the Trump document-handling case in 2022.

In May, the circuit’s Judicial Council dismissed several misconduct complaints against Cannon, alleging that she deliberately slowed down the Trump case and that she should have recused herself from the case as a Trump appointee. The panel said it would not discipline a judge unless it found a pattern of slowness in numerous cases and did not require her recusal based on her appointment. At the time, Chief Judge William H. Pryor Jr. cut off what he called an orchestrated campaign that brought in more than 1,000 letters seeking her removal.

Cannon’s sudden decision to throw out Smith’s case came on the opening day of the Republican National Convention, and Trump praised her in his acceptance speech as a “highly respected federal judge” willing to stand up against what he has called Smith’s “witch hunts.”

Represented by San Francisco lawyer Steven A. Hirsch of Keker, Van Nest & Peters, CREW described Cannon’s decision to end the case as “the culmination of many efforts to undermine and derail the prosecution.” It cited a series of unprecedented rulings over many months in which Cannon appeared to create “a parallel legal universe for former presidents” and crossed the line “to active judicial interference and advocacy” for Trump.

CREW criticized Cannon for adopting a lone concurrence from Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in an immunity case against Trump and, shortly afterward, rendering a 93-page opinion that echoed the justice’s position that Smith’s prosecutions violated the Constitution.

CREW details “dramatic and unusual” controversies during Cannon’s case that offer the appeals court “more-than-adequate grounds to reassign the case upon remand.”

The 11th Circuit has taken the unusual step of reversing Cannon twice during the course of the case, including a harsh rebuke in December 2022 of her decision to appoint a special master to screen classified documents.

Cannon approved the appointment of a senior federal judge in New York and various federal consultants to examine materials seized from Mar-a-Lago in Florida. Smith had complained to the appeals court that a special master was unnecessary and slowed down the prosecution.

“If the court reverses Judge Aileen M. Cannon’s ruling in this matter, it will be the third time in under three years that it has had to do so in a seemingly straightforward case about a former president’s unauthorized possession of government documents,” CREW argued.

If you have information about Judge Aileen M. Cannon you would like to share, please contact Marilyn W. Thompson at marilyn.thompson@propublica.org or call 917-512-0243.

Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

by James Bandler, ProPublica, A.C. Thompson, ProPublica and FRONTLINE, and Karina Meier, FRONTLINE

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This story is part of a collaboration between FRONTLINE and ProPublica that includes an upcoming documentary.

In late December, a 26-year-old construction worker in Sarasota County, Florida, used his phone to send a flurry of ominous online posts.

Alexander Lightner, tapping away on his Samsung Galaxy, announced his intention to commit mass murder, according to federal court records. He used the coded language of a new breed of neo-Nazis who call themselves Accelerationists. Lightner wrote that he planned to become a “saint” — the term followers use for someone who advances their racist cause through lethal acts of terror — and to set a new “Highscore,” or death toll.

Lightner launched what federal prosecutors allege were threats on Telegram, the sprawling, no-holds-barred platform that has become a hive for the movement. Accelerationists aim to speed the collapse of modern civilization and create a white ethno-state from the ashes of today’s democracies. Deep in the chatter of the platform’s roughly 900 million users, these extremists have created a constellation of Telegram channels where they encourage followers like Lightner to assassinate political leaders, sabotage power stations and railways, and commit mass murder.

A week after firing off his alleged threats on Telegram, Lightner woke up from a nap at his home to his father’s shouts: “Whoa, whoa, whoa. What’s this? Are these people here for us?”

Lightner threw an illegal, homemade silencer into a laundry basket, according to a summary of his interview with federal agents. Then he stepped into the sunlight. In his front yard, agents in camouflage and body armor pointed rifles at him. An armored vehicle faced his family home, its massive battering ram aimed at the front door.

An FBI agent asked Lightner if he knew why federal agents were at his door.

Lightner answered simply: “Telegram,” according to court records.

FBI bodycam video shows Alexander Lightner’s arrest at his Florida home. (Obtained by ProPublica)

Late last month, Telegram burst into the news with another arrest related to alleged criminal activity on the giant messaging and social media platform. This time, the man in police custody was the company’s founder, Pavel Durov. French authorities detained the Russian-born billionaire after his plane touched down at an airport a few miles north of Paris.

French prosecutors issued preliminary charges against Durov last Wednesday related to alleged criminal activity on his platform. The allegations include organized fraud, drug trafficking and possession of pornographic images of minors, as well as refusal to cooperate with authorities, according to a press release by the Paris public prosecutor.

David-Olivier Kaminski, a lawyer for Durov, could not be reached for comment. French news reports quoted him saying that it was “totally absurd to think that the person in charge of a social network could be implicated in criminal acts that don’t concern him, directly or indirectly.”

The platform Durov created has long been both applauded and derided for its extreme commitment to free speech and for rebuffing inquiries from both U.S. and foreign law enforcement agencies, which have sought to gather information about alleged criminal activity on the platform.

“They are exceedingly unhelpful,” said Rebecca Weiner, the New York Police Department’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism. Weiner, who oversees one of the world’s largest metropolitan counterterrorism units, said the platform was notable for “being a center of gravity for a wide range of extremist content” and for its “unwillingness to work with law enforcement.”

Telegram’s ease of use, its huge public channels and the ability to encrypt private conversations have helped fuel its global appeal. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky used the app to rally his compatriots to repel the Russian invasion. Activists in Hong Kong turned to Telegram to organize demonstrations against a repressive law. In Belarus, pro-democracy forces used the platform to fight back against election fraud.

But the platform has also served as the online home of the Russian mercenary company Wagner Group, which has posted gruesome videos of extrajudicial killings. In April, the British government targeted the Terrorgram Collective, a subset of Telegram users who promote racially and ethnically motivated terrorism to people like Lightner, making it a crime to support or belong to the group. And more recently, the service played a key role in fomenting the anti-immigrant riots that swept across the United Kingdom.

ProPublica and FRONTLINE have been investigating Telegram’s role in a string of recent alleged far-right acts of sabotage and murder, and how the company’s inaction allowed extremists to plan and even advertise their crimes. Researchers have long warned that Telegram routinely allows extremists to share propaganda aimed at inciting violence, noting that the Islamic State group and al-Qaida were able to use the service for years with little interference.

“Telegram plays a key role in the perpetuation of militant accelerationism,” said Michael Loadenthal, a research professor at the University of Cincinnati and director of the Prosecution Project, which tracks felony cases involving political violence in the U.S. The company, he said, “has shown that deplatforming violent and hateful content is not its priority.”

Before Durov’s arrest, a Telegram spokesperson responded to questions from ProPublica and FRONTLINE in messages on the platform. The spokesperson said that the company bars users from calling for acts of violence, adding that moderators remove millions of pieces of harmful content from the platform every day. “As Telegram grows, it will continue to solve potential moderation problems with efficiency, innovation and respect for privacy and free speech,” the spokesperson, who used the name Remi Vaughn, said in the messages.

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov in 2016 (Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Yet ProPublica and FRONTLINE found that Telegram today is the main nexus of far-right Accelerationist crime. Law enforcement agencies on both sides of the Atlantic have interrupted a series of criminal schemes, including:

• In July, a Georgian man accused of leading an Accelerationist terror group was arrested in Europe for allegedly soliciting people to carry out murders and bombings in the U.S. Michail Chkhikvishvili allegedly used Telegram to communicate and distribute his group’s propaganda and is facing charges in New York. He is being held in Moldova pending extradition, according to Wired. ProPublica and FRONTLINE could not locate counsel for him.

• The same month, federal prosecutors charged an Accelerationist named Andrew Takhistov with plotting to destroy an energy facility in New Jersey. They allege he used Telegram to incite racial violence and share a how-to guide for white supremacist terrorism that included instructions on the use of Mylar balloons and Molotov cocktails to damage power substations. An attorney for Takhistov did not respond to a request for comment.

• In June, Manhattan prosecutors announced charges against Hayden Espinosa, accusing the Texas man of selling illegal guns and firearm components through a Telegram channel aimed at white supremacists and Accelerationists. Espinosa allegedly used a contraband phone to sell weapons and gun parts while incarcerated in federal prison. He has pleaded not guilty.

• A judge in England recently sentenced a British man to eight years in prison for plotting to carry out a suicide bombing at a synagogue. According to the Crown Prosecution Service, 19-year-old Mason Reynolds was “the administrator of a Telegram channel which shared far right extremist, antisemitic and racist views, as well as manuals on bomb building and how to 3D print firearms.”

• Brandon Russell, a former leader of the Atomwaffen Division, a now-defunct neo-Nazi group tied to five murders, was charged last year with planning an attack aimed at disabling the power system in Baltimore. Russell and a co-defendant, Sarah Beth Clendaniel, used Telegram to organize the sabotage scheme, according to prosecutors. Clendaniel has pleaded guilty; Russell faces trial later this year. Attorneys for the duo declined to comment.

And then there is Lightner. U.S. prosecutors say in court filings that Lightner went to Telegram to discuss his plans to use a .308-caliber rifle to kill as many people as possible. He remains in jail awaiting trial on federal charges of making threats online and possessing an illegal silencer. He has pleaded not guilty. His attorney declined to comment.

Before Lightner’s arrest, he told an agent from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that he was “blackout drunk” at the time of the posts, distraught over a bad breakup. “I was broken and really upset. And I went drinking, and then I did some stupid thing online,” he said, according to a recording of the conversation. He told other agents that he was not planning an act of violence but just wanted someone to notice him and care.

Lightner told federal agents that he started using Telegram in 2015, about two years after the platform launched. The online service grew steadily over the next few years, with the majority of users coming from outside the U.S. Then in 2021, Telegram’s growth exploded after its rival WhatsApp announced a new privacy policy. Some users feared WhatsApp was poised to begin sharing their confidential messages with parent company Facebook, now called Meta. In a Telegram post, Durov boasted that his platform was experiencing “the largest digital migration in human history,” claiming that 25 million new users joined Telegram in 72 hours.

That same month, in the U.S., Telegram got a bump in users when major social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter ousted former President Donald Trump and many of his most ardent supporters in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection. Today, Telegram is heavily favored by right-wing extremists, including QAnon followers, Proud Boys, militia members, and white supremacist groups like Patriot Front and the Active Clubs.

Axel Neff, who helped start Telegram, said the company’s core team of about 60 employees, 30 of whom are engineers, is too small to monitor the platform for criminal conduct. “Think about the size of Telegram. There are about a billion users on Telegram every month. A billion!” he said. “Telegram is a massive, massive community. … They are not staffed — and they do not have the capacity — to monitor everything that goes on there.”

Neff said it would be “professional suicide” for Telegram, which has marketed itself as a bastion of unfettered speech, to make a serious effort to moderate content. “I don’t think it is something [Durov] will ever do.”

The company’s privacy policy puts strict parameters around cooperation with law enforcement: “If Telegram receives a court order that confirms you’re a terror suspect, we may disclose your IP address and phone number to the relevant authorities. So far, this has never happened.”

Telegram ignores requests for information from government agencies that aren’t “in line with our values of freedom of speech and protecting people’s private correspondence,” Durov told Tucker Carlson in an interview with the former Fox News host earlier this year. Durov noted that Telegram refused to cooperate with the U.S. congressional committee probing the events of Jan. 6, 2021.

Telegram stores “very limited data” on its users, the Telegram spokesperson told ProPublica and FRONTLINE. “In most cases it is impossible for Telegram to access this data in order to provide it for the authorities,” the spokesperson said. “Police, governments and users are able to report content to Telegram they believe is illegal. Telegram processes these reports according to its terms of service.”

ProPublica and FRONTLINE found that much of the most disturbing content is posted in channels maintained by violent, right-wing Accelerationists, whose ideas have attracted neo-Nazis, Charles Manson admirers and anti-government revolutionaries.

The Terrorgram Collective, the group of Telegram users targeted by the British government’s crackdown, is an alliance of Accelerationists who use an ever-evolving array of Telegram channels to promote terrorism. The group has produced at least three e-books, including a manual celebrating white supremacist mass killers that court documents show was found at Lightner’s home in Florida.

David Skiffington, a former British counterterrorism specialist for London’s Metropolitan Police, said the “proliferation of extremist content” on Telegram “cannot be overstated.”

Other social media platforms such as Steam, Discord and Gab also host extremist-related content, Skiffington said. “But Telegram is by far the most widely used and accessible.”

Skiffington, who now runs the counterterrorism consulting firm DBA Insights, has been monitoring the Terrorgram Collective for years. He said the group’s influencers encourage “angry, white, lonely vulnerable individuals … to commit real-world acts of violence.”

It’s unclear how many people are part of the collective, though law enforcement has arrested individuals in Slovakia, Canada and the U.S. who are allegedly linked to the group.

In Florida, Lightner — or someone using his username, “Death.” — participated in at least 17 extremist Telegram channels, according to an analysis by Miro Dittrich, a co-founder of the Center for Monitoring, Analysis and Strategy, a German organization that studies online disinformation and extremism. Three of the channels were part of the Terrorgram network.

On the day of his arrest, Lightner was asked by a federal agent to explain his most explosive Telegram postings. At first, Lightner said he did not remember the online threats. But when a federal agent read the words back to him, Lightner said he had never seriously considered an act of violence. But he added that he knew that in making the Telegram postings, he was “playing with fire.”

Doris Burke of ProPublica and Tom Jennings and Annie Wong of FRONTLINE contributed reporting.

by Robin Urevich, Capital & Main

This article was produced in partnership with Capital & Main, which was a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in 2022-23. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

In the midst of an ongoing housing emergency, the city of Los Angeles has struggled to keep rent-controlled housing, which includes some of the city’s most affordable dwelling units, from turning into short-term rentals. Even though a 2018 law prohibits such conversions, enforcement has been lax.

“Except in a handful of cases, we’re not actually doing that enforcement work in a meaningful way,” said Los Angeles City Councilmember Nithya Raman, who chairs the council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee and is working on recommendations to tighten enforcement.

For locals who want to keep their neighborhoods residential or visitors who want to avoid inadvertently booking a unit that skirts local law, navigating the Wild West that is LA’s vacation-rental market can be a challenge. This story covers some signs to watch out for and offers a quick two-step guide you can use to make sure your potential home share — or your neighbor’s — isn’t an illegally converted rent-controlled apartment.

Legally, LA hosts can offer only their own “primary residences” for short stays, and only if those dwellings are not covered by the city’s rent-control law. (Some 660,000 housing units in LA are rent controlled, meaning annual rent increases are capped — usually at about 4% for existing tenants.)

The LA Home-Sharing Ordinance, which took effect in 2019, bars rent-controlled properties from being used for short-term rentals. (Document illustration by Capital & Main) Hiding in Plain Sight

In July, a Capital & Main and ProPublica investigation found that at least 63 rent-controlled buildings that were advertised on booking sites last spring were in apparent violation of the city’s Home-Sharing Ordinance.

The listings hide in plain sight on vacation platforms like Booking.com and Hotels.com, making it hard to distinguish legitimate rentals from those that operate illegally.

Banana Bungalow and Redline Venice are among more than a dozen LA establishments that look and operate like hotels but are classified as rent-controlled apartment buildings. (Screenshot by Capital & Main)

The news organizations found at least 15 rent-controlled buildings — including Banana Bungalow and Redline Venice — that used outdoor signs or online ads to brand themselves as hotels or hostels. According to city law, their rent-controlled status would make them ineligible for use as vacation rentals.

The owners of the 34-unit Banana Bungalow and the four-room Redline Venice didn’t return phone calls. Mark Wurm, the owner of the Venice Beach Hostel, said, “They have it wrong,” referring to the city’s classification of his building as rent controlled. Wurm said the building had long been used as a hotel.

Traditional home shares that don’t purport to be hotels, like those listed on Airbnb or other vacation platforms, also sometimes skirt the law.

One Renter’s Eye-Opening Experience

In May, Rhys Atkinson-Whipps, an Australian transplant, told Capital & Main that he entered LA’s short-term rental market when his apartment underwent major repairs. He said he booked several rentals for weeklong or shorter stays because he expected the repairs to be completed sooner than they were. Atkinson-Whipps, who works at a Hollywood shelter for homeless youth, said he found that the home shares he booked were not always what they seemed.

One listing promised an apartment in Hollywood. But after booking it, Atkinson-Whipps said, he learned it was in Koreatown — miles from where the listing said it was. He thought the bait and switch was sketchy. “You book one place and you turn up somewhere else,” Atkinson-Whipps said. “It’s like you have no power at all.” The listing has since been taken down, he said.

Sometimes listings display more desirable neighborhoods than their actual locations, with the correct details revealed only after booking. In other cases, properties are listed in neighboring cities to evade LA’s home-sharing rules, according to a report by Better Neighbors LA, a nonprofit watchdog group that monitors short-term rentals.

A Los Angeles resident said he booked what was listed as a “cute studio” at this rent-controlled building in Hollywood while his home was undergoing repairs. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Atkinson-Whipps said he also rented a Hollywood apartment that Airbnb listed as a “cute studio.” It turned out to be part of a 14-unit building listed in the Housing Department’s database as rent controlled, which would make it off-limits for short-term rentals.

The owner of the building, which is on Harold Way in Hollywood, is listed as DND ES Properties. A man who identified himself as Edward Dratver, a manager of the company, denied that any of its units are listed on Airbnb. “No,” he said. “Something’s wrong. Some mistake,” Dratver said before quickly ending the call.

However, the apartment was advertised on the site in August despite Airbnb’s 2019 agreement with the city that it would remove illegal listings.

The number of Airbnb listings that aren’t registered with the city for home sharing is on the rise, up from 277 in August 2023 to more than 900 currently, according to Better Neighbors LA. The group cited its analysis of data from Inside Airbnb, a research and advocacy organization that is critical of Airbnb. A planning department report to the City Council noted that as of February, 58% of all the short-term rental listings in the city didn’t comply with city law. These buildings have typically received warning letters from the city planning department.

Airbnb declined to provide a response for this story.

Some Listings Include Fake Credentials

Hotels.com and Booking.com also feature a number of rent-controlled properties that appear to be ineligible for home sharing. But Capital & Main found that Booking.com — the third-largest vacation rental platform in the city — includes listings that say the properties are legally registered with the city for home sharing when they’re not.

Several Booking.com listings include nonexistent, expired or completely fabricated home-sharing registration numbers. Others include a “fine print” section in which hosts wrongly claim that a home-sharing registration isn’t required for their properties.

This loft on Hollywood Boulevard was advertised on Booking.com with apparently fake registration numbers. (Screenshot by ProPublica. Address blurred by ProPublica.)

A unit advertised on Booking.com as the “Savana Spectacular Loft” — an apartment in a rent-controlled building — appeared to have city permission to operate because the listing included three home-sharing registration numbers. But none of the registration numbers exist, according to the LA planning department’s home-sharing lookup tool. In fact, listing multiple registration numbers is likely an indication that something is amiss, because the city issues only one home-sharing registration per property owner.

A Booking.com listing included multiple nonexistent city registration numbers. (Document illustration by Capital & Main)

At Realty Center Management Inc., which manages the building, a representative said the company would not comment.

Booking.com did not respond to an email requesting comment on the registration numbers and the company’s procedures for determining if listings comply with local law. Media representatives at Hotels.com also didn’t respond to emails inquiring about listings of rent-controlled properties.

The registration number listed for this building on Booking.com is two digits too long to be an official city registration number. (Screenshot by ProPublica. Address blurred by ProPublica.)

A mile from the beach, the Booking.com listing for a “Venice Beach Gem” features mountain and ocean views and a tennis court.

The ad displays a Los Angeles home-sharing registration number, but it contains too many digits and lacks the required letters found in city-issued registrations. The units for rent on the site are located in a rent-controlled apartment building, according to the Housing Department’s database, and cannot legally be registered for home sharing.

The city fined the Venice Beach units’ owner twice in 2021 for advertising short-term rentals without an official registration. The fines haven’t been paid, according to the city attorney’s website of administrative citations. Still, the units were listed on Booking.com last month.

The property owner didn’t return Capital & Main’s calls.

In some cases, renters, not building owners, have been accused of listing illegal short-term rentals. LA City Attorney Hydee Feldstein Soto recently sued several people she says earned more than $4 million by leasing apartments for the sole purpose of offering unregistered short-term rentals, some of them in rent-controlled buildings. The defendants have denied the allegations in court filings.

Under the home-sharing law, booking platforms can be fined $1,000 per day for accepting bookings for properties that don’t have official registrations.

In 2022, the city settled a lawsuit against Vrbo for $150,000, accusing it of processing thousands of illegal bookings. The company agreed to remove illegal listings from the platform. A spokesperson for Vrbo’s owner, Expedia, said the company is working “to help drive a high rate of compliance with local laws.”

The City Council’s Housing and Homelessness Committee is expected to consider recommendations for improving home-sharing enforcement in September.

Meanwhile, for vacationers and locals who want to check the legality of a short-term rental, Capital & Main and ProPublica prepared a two-step guide to researching potential listings before you book:

How Can You Tell If Your LA Vacation Rental Is Legit?

1. Find out if your rental is covered by the LA Rent Stabilization Ordinance by texting the letters “RSO” to the LA Housing Department at 855-880-7368 and following the prompts. If the property is subject to the Rent Stabilization Ordinance, it is likely not allowed to be rented out for short-term stays.

2. Look up whether the rental is registered under the city’s Home Sharing Ordinance. You can find the property address or home-sharing registration number using the city’s records portal. If the unit is not registered, the owner has either not applied for the city-required registration or may have sidestepped the city’s rules on short-term rentals.

You can contact the LA Home Sharing Complaint Line to report a suspected illegal short-term rental at 213-267-7788 or email planning.home-sharing@lacity.org. The reporters at Capital & Main would also love to hear about any potentially illegal short-term rentals you find; contact them at info@capitalandmain.com.

Haru Coryne contributed reporting.

by Charles Ornstein

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Every fall, I spend an evening in my investigative reporting class extolling the virtues of searching court records. Lawsuits can shine a light on allegations of misconduct, discrimination or liability against businesses, powerful individuals and government agencies.

Legal filings and court hearings often reveal closely guarded secrets that individuals and corporations would rather remain outside the public record. Citing court records, ProPublica and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution recently reported on how a powerful Atlanta movie executive who had been lauded for his diversity efforts had shared racist and antisemitic views in text messages. (After the article was published, the executive sent a statement that included an apology and noted that the texts were never intended to be shared publicly.) We also relied on court records last year for a story about a litigator’s battle against Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana to pay for the proton therapy his doctor recommended to fight his throat cancer.

Over the past few years, however, I’ve had a unique vantage point: as a defendant who prevailed in a lengthy libel case.

I have always been careful to emphasize to my students that, while legal documents can be valuable, they contain a string of unproven allegations that need to be verified. Of course, some lawsuits end in verdicts against the defendants. But many are ultimately dismissed by judges or appeals courts or are abandoned by plaintiffs. Sometimes cases are settled because the cost of defending against them would be higher than paying for them to go away. Sometimes they are settled because a defendant accepts some responsibility. I always tell my students to make sure they know the outcome of any lawsuit they cite in a story.

My experience left me acutely aware how even when you win a lawsuit, you can still lose, and also how court records rarely tell the whole story.

In May 2018, Mike Hixenbaugh, then of the Houston Chronicle, and I wrote a series of articles about the troubled heart transplant program at Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center in Houston. One of those articles was about a pioneering surgeon, Dr. O.H. “Bud” Frazier. As we reported, Frazier contributed to many breakthroughs in his quest to develop a permanent mechanical replacement for the human heart, but he also was accused of violating federal research rules and skirting ethical guidelines.

Frazier sued us in July of that year, alleging that the articles included errors and misleading statements “calculated to falsely portray Dr. Frazier as an inhumane physician.”

The lawsuit was dismissed a few weeks ago, six years after it was filed, after a Texas appeals court ruled that our investigation provided a “fair, true, and impartial account” of accusations against him.

ProPublica and the Chronicle’s parent company, Hearst, supported us throughout the litigation, which was incredible, but the process still took a major toll. Cases like these cost news organizations like ProPublica hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend against. Journalist defendants have to spend dozens of hours gathering materials and working with lawyers. And, in my case, I was denied a mortgage because I truthfully checked the box indicating that I was a defendant in a lawsuit.

More than that, I realized that the way defendants are portrayed by plaintiffs in court papers — callous, sloppy, wrong — can bear little resemblance to reality. For our story on Frazier, we reviewed lawsuit records. But, as I teach my students, we didn’t stop there. We also relied on federal inspection reports, medical journal disclosures, a report to members of the hospital’s board of directors and an array of interviews. And we reached out to Frazier and his lawyer, engaging in conversations and emails to ensure they would have a chance to respond to everything we said about him. We had recordings and transcriptions of some of our interviews, and we included links to many of our primary sources in the article itself. (Note to other journalists: I would strongly recommend this.)

This case also was a lesson in how lower courts sometimes get it wrong. I had long taught that rulings from judges can be a powerful way to validate facts, but my experience challenged those views, or at least added a big caveat to them.

We thought we were fortunate that the case was filed in a state that has a law barring lawsuits brought to silence public criticism. The 2011 Texas Citizens Participation Act allows for speedy dismissals of what the Texas Supreme Court has defined as “retaliatory lawsuits that seek to intimidate or silence (citizens) on matters of public concern” or “chill First Amendment rights.”

Two months after Frazier filed suit against us, our lawyers filed a motion in Harris County District Court to dismiss the case. After a hearing, the judge denied our motion and adopted the plaintiff’s findings of fact saying that “Dr. Frazier has met his burden of proving by clear and specific evidence his prima facie case of defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress.”

Our lawyers filed an appeal, saying the court had erred in its decision. In January 2020, we won. The appeals court cited errors by the district court judge (who lost his reelection bid in 2018) and sent the case back for further proceedings. Frazier appealed to the Texas Supreme Court, but it didn’t take the case.

The case returned to the lower court in 2021, and the following year, a new judge once again ruled against us. Our lawyers appealed again. And in April of this year, the appeals court ordered the lower court to dismiss the case. That’s what happened on July 29 after Frazier’s lawyers filed a “notice of non-suit,” meaning they would not appeal.

The litigation wore on me. Not only did I have to scramble to get a new mortgage lender, but I also lost sleep, had trouble focusing and felt a pit in my stomach any time I received a note from our lawyers.

ProPublica, too, paid a price. Though we reached a settlement with Frazier in which he paid a portion of our attorneys fees (in that settlement we agreed not to disclose how much), our insurer still covered the vast majority of the cost — after we met the deductible. Our insurance rates have skyrocketed. All of our new cases carry a much higher deductible.

I reached out to David Berg, Frazier’s lawyer in the case, to understand how the lawsuit affected his client. In a written statement, he noted that Frazier, who was 78 in 2018 when the initial story was published, had a rapid heart rate three days after the article appeared, which sent him to the hospital. He also noted that two different judges had sided with Frazier.

“Those findings were reversed in the court of appeals, but the media winning a defamation action is hardly news,” Berg wrote. “What is news is what Bud accomplished in the operating room, as opposed to the courtroom, just last month, with a device that may well save millions of lives of patients with failing hearts.”

He also said in response to my question: “Mr. Ornstein inquired about the effect of the litigation on Dr. Frazier. The article haunts him. One can only hope that the rest of Bud’s life will contain even more awards and honors by his peers, and they are already legion; that’s what a doctor who has done so much deserves. Not malicious articles.” (You can read his full statement.)

Including the Frazier case, ProPublica and its journalists have been sued at least six times for libel and defamation since our start 16 years ago. We have not lost or paid money to defendants in any of them. In 2010, a federal judge in Louisiana issued a ruling that effectively ended a libel suit filed by a doctor mentioned in “The Deadly Choices at Memorial.” In 2016, a federal district judge in Phoenix threw out a case accusing us and the Center for Investigative Reporting of defaming a government contractor. In 2018, a Brooklyn judge dismissed a libel suit against two reporters related to a 2015 investigation into a group of for-profit nursing homes.

In 2023, a New York appeals court sided with a freelance journalist in a defamation suit about an article we ran chronicling the downfall of a Fortune 500 CEO. And this May, a Texas appeals court sided with ProPublica and The Texas Tribune in a disparagement lawsuit filed by a health care services company that was the subject of a 2020 article. Those two cases are still ongoing, and we’ll continue to defend our journalism.

Defending these cases required time and money, and ProPublica’s experience isn’t unique. In a 2021 op-ed in Columbia Journalism Review, D. Victoria Baranetsky and Alexandra Gutierrez described the fallout of a lawsuit against Reveal, run by the Center for Investigative Reporting: “Reveal will never be able to recover the time that could have been spent on reporting, or forget the stress that a multi-million-dollar lawsuit inflicts on its employees,” they wrote.

As I prepare for my investigative class this fall, I will once again highlight the value of reviewing lawsuits when researching an article. But I’ll spend a few extra minutes on my experience and the caveats.

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

by Robert Faturechi, Justin Elliott and Alex Mierjeski

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

A congressman intervened to help former President Donald Trump’s social media company jump the line for a difficult-to-obtain foreign-worker visa to bring a company executive to the U.S., according to interviews and records reviewed by ProPublica.

A former staffer for Rep. Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican, said the congressman personally instructed her to help Trump Media, even though she thought it was inappropriate to mix politics with the office’s constituent services duties.

“I specifically did not want to do this,” Bacon’s former director of special projects, Makenzie Cartwright, told ProPublica when asked about emails showing the lawmaker’s intervention. “It was specifically the congressman that suggested I needed to deal with it.”

“Thank you so much for your help on making sure we push this forward,” the company’s chief operating officer wrote to another Bacon staffer in January 2022, according to an email reviewed by ProPublica. “I will make sure to thank the congressman as well!”

Trump Media, which now accounts for roughly half of Trump’s net worth, presents conflicts of interests for the former president, according to ethics experts. While there have been concerns about donors and special interests seeking to curry favor with the Republican candidate for president, this is the first known instance of a politician helping Trump in a private matter involving his social media business.

And it shows that as Trump has presented himself as an immigration hawk, his company has sought special treatment to bring its own foreign executive to the United States.

His administration generally pushed U.S. companies to hire Americans over foreign workers and instituted policies that made it harder to secure visas for skilled workers. Trump’s current platform pledges to “strengthen Buy American and Hire American Policies.”

Trump Media’s relationship with the executive, a software developer in North Macedonia, began in part because American candidates for the same work were more expensive, according to a person involved.

Dan Berger, an immigration attorney who handles such cases, called Trump Media’s hiring of a foreign worker “hypocritical.”

“It got harder in every way possible,” he said of the visa cases he handled during the Trump administration. “It was just one thing after another.”

Before Trump Media reached out to Bacon’s office, the company had already helped get the executive, Vladimir Novachki, approved for the visa. But a backlog at the American embassy in the Balkan nation was causing severe delays in scheduling interviews for Macedonians to finalize the process.

Bacon’s office helped fix the problem for Trump’s company, according to the person involved. Last year, Novachki, who had moved to Florida, was named Trump Media’s chief technology officer.

Bacon’s intervention on behalf of Trump’s company came at the same time Trump was talking publicly about recruiting a primary challenger against the moderate Republican congressman.

“Is there favoritism being extended to the potential president?” said Virginia Canter, a former government ethics lawyer. “Was there some sort of concern of what happens if you don’t make the call?”

“It’s a classic conflict of interest,” she said.

It’s common for companies to ask members of Congress to help speed along such applications. But they typically do so when the applicant or company is based in the lawmaker’s district. Trump Media, headquartered in Sarasota, Florida, is far outside of Bacon’s Nebraska district.

In response to questions from ProPublica, Bacon’s spokesperson said the office was barred from discussing the details of the case because of privacy concerns, but said Trump Media was not given special treatment. The request, the spokesperson said, came from a Trump Media employee who lived in Bacon’s district.

“This case was not treated any differently than the hundreds of cases we process every year” at multiple federal agencies, the spokesperson said. “Politics don’t come into play for official congressional work.”

A spokesperson for Trump Media declined to answer detailed questions but said in a statement: “ProPublica has grotesquely manufactured this hit piece by fabricating statements, misusing stolen communications containing our employee’s private information, and maliciously insinuating wrongdoing where categorically none exists.”

The hiring of a foreign chief technology officer is part of a larger effort by Trump’s company to source labor abroad, interviews and records show. Trump Media has contracted with a foreign outsourcing firm, according to invoices, and multiple people based abroad list jobs at Trump’s company on their LinkedIn profiles, even as Trump has promised to “stop outsourcing” and “punish” companies that send jobs overseas.

A Trump campaign spokesperson said in a statement that “when President Trump is back in the White House, he will enforce our immigration laws and deport illegal immigrants.” The spokesperson added that “Trump has always been in favor of allowing in thoroughly vetted highly skilled immigrants who do not undercut American wages.”

A lawyer for Trump Media sent ProPublica a letter threatening a lawsuit and accusing the outlet of intending “to publish yet another hit piece on the company that includes false, misleading, and defamatory statements.”

Novachki got his start coding in grade school when he came across a textbook that taught basic concepts without requiring access to the internet. He went on to develop an app, called Skopje Taximeter, that allowed residents of North Macedonia’s capital city to use their smartphones to track their own cab fares.

But his biggest break came when he got a job at Cosmic Development, a Canadian IT and tech outsourcing company with offices in North Macedonia. The firm was co-founded by Chris Pavlovski, who also started the video platform Rumble, which has become a popular alternative to YouTube among American conservatives and which partners with Trump Media. Novachki quickly rose through the ranks.

As a Cosmic employee, Novachki, who didn’t respond to requests for comment, began working with Trump’s company in its early days. Pavlovski recommended him as someone who could build a prototype of the company’s Truth Social platform cheaper than American bidders, according to a person with knowledge of the process.

Trump Media and Novachki applied for a visa reserved for those with “extraordinary ability” in their fields, known as an O-1.

The Department of Homeland Security had approved his application, but before he and his family could come to the United States, they needed an appointment with the American embassy in North Macedonia to finalize the process. In January 2022, emails show, the embassy notified Novachki that his interview was scheduled for December 2023.

But Trump Media wanted Novachki in Florida sooner: “It is extremely important for Vlad to be in the United States so he can work side-by-side [with] other high-level technology executives to ensure our product and tech stack functions well,” one of its executives wrote in an email at the time.

One of Trump Media’s executives, Andrew Northwall, a Nebraska political consultant, reached out to Bacon’s office.

An aide to the congressman replied promptly, assuring the former president’s company that Bacon’s office would get to work: “We will follow up with the proper officials about your concerns.”

The request from the former president’s company came at a delicate moment in Bacon and Trump’s relationship. Bacon had supported Trump in both his presidential campaigns up until that point. But he was also willing to buck his own party at times, criticizing Trump’s actions during the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, for example, and voting for President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill.

That vote prompted Trump to release a statement in January 2022 raising the specter of a primary challenge against Bacon that year: “Anyone want to run for Congress against Don Bacon in Nebraska?”

The emails from Trump’s company asking for help from Bacon’s office came a couple weeks later. Canter, the ethics expert, said the timing made the request more troubling, potentially increasing the pressure on Bacon to help. (No significant primary challenger materialized, but Trump did not support Bacon in his race.)

Records show Bacon’s office quickly went into motion, gathering the forms and rationales it would need to push the case forward with the State Department.

When ProPublica first reached out to Cartwright, Bacon’s former director of special projects, she initially said she had only a faint recollection about the case. She called back hours later unsolicited and in a brief conversation shared some details about her role. She recalled that someone had called the congressman to ask for his intervention and that the request was not treated like typical pleas for help from constituents.

“It was higher-level than your average Joe,” she said.

Cartwright did not say if she told Bacon or anyone else that she thought it was inappropriate for her to work on the request. She asked that the article not include her name, but ProPublica did not agree to that request.

The next day, a spokesperson for Bacon reached out to ProPublica and accused a reporter of harassing the former aide and of misrepresenting her statements about the Trump Media visa: “Ms. Cartwright has informed us she didn’t say this to you and that you twisted/misrepresented her words.”

Asked about that claim, Cartwright said in a text message “you misrepresented what I said” and said she worked hundreds of cases at Bacon’s office and all of them were “via the direction of Mr. Bacon, as we have been directed to help constituents.”

In his letter to ProPublica, the Trump Media lawyer said the company “utilized standard constituent services, offered and performed by every member of Congress to obtain legislative assistance in connection with Mr. Novachki’s visa application.” The letter added that portraying the company as “having acted inappropriately” would be “categorically false” and “defamatory.”

If Trump is elected again, not only would his companies potentially get an inside edge in influencing the government to further their interests, but ethics experts have also warned that his more than $2 billion stake in Trump Media could become a path to influencing him. Advertisers, vendors or investors who have political agendas could be in a position to use the social media enterprise to get favorable treatment.

Last month, ProPublica reported that the company quietly entered into a business deal with a major Republican donor who has interests before the federal government.

The Trump administration was sometimes hostile to the various types of visas reserved for skilled foreigners. Immigration lawyers complained during his term that visas with subjective criteria, such as the O-1, became more challenging to obtain. Vetting of an applicant’s acclaim in their field got more vigorous, they said. The Trump administration also stopped deferring to prior approvals for applicants looking to extend their visas.

Most significantly, in 2020 amid the pandemic, Trump enacted restrictions blocking entry to people seeking O-1 and similar visas. The Trump administration said the moves were made to slow the spread of the virus and protect Americans jobs during uncertain times, but immigration advocates alleged the administration was using the pandemic as a pretext to crack down on legal immigration.

Trump has at times expressed more openness to skilled immigrants. A couple months ago, for example, Trump said during a podcast hosted by Silicon Valley venture capitalists that he would allow foreign students at American universities to stay after they graduate.

Trump Media’s reliance on labor from abroad extends beyond Novachki. ProPublica obtained an invoice showing at least one other employee working for Trump Media through the foreign outsourcing firm Cosmic. The LinkedIn pages of five other people, who describe themselves as based in the Balkans, mention working for Trump Media in tasks including software engineering and customer support.

Cosmic did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump in the past has been accused of straying from his immigration platform in his own affairs.

Earlier this year, the Associated Press reported that Trump Media had successfully applied for an H-1B visa, a more common visa generally reserved for those who have specific degrees. The company told reporters at the time that the application was made by prior management and that current management “swiftly terminated the process” when it learned of it.

And Melania Trump, after she had married Donald Trump, sponsored her mother’s application to immigrate from Slovenia and get permanent residency in the U.S. Trump has criticized this so-called “chain migration” — immigrants applying to have their relatives follow them into the country.

“CHAIN MIGRATION must end now!” he once tweeted. “Some people come in, and they bring their whole family with them, who can be truly evil. NOT ACCEPTABLE!”

Do you have any information about Trump Media that we should know? Robert Faturechi can be reached by email at robert.faturechi@propublica.org and by Signal or WhatsApp at 213-271-7217. Justin Elliott can be reached by email at justin@propublica.org or by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240.

by Lisa Song

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The Environmental Protection Agency has taken the first ever federal action against a system that misleads consumers about the recycled content in plastic products.

A ProPublica investigation in June showed how the plastics industry uses a controversial accounting method called mass balance to advertise plastic products as 20% or 30% recycled even if they physically contain less than 1% recycled content.

It involves a number shuffle, done only on paper, that inflates the advertised recycledness of one product by reducing the advertised recycledness of another, often less lucrative, product. Done purely for marketing, it has been criticized by environmentalists as a greenwashing tactic.

According to an EPA policy released this month, companies that want the federal government’s stamp of approval for their sustainable products can no longer use such convoluted math.

The EPA’s Safer Choice standard is a voluntary program that allows manufacturers to affix a “Safer Choice” label to their dish soap, laundry detergent and other products. The roughly 1,800 products that have earned that distinction include household cleaners sold in grocery stores and more niche products like industrial carpet stain removers. Until now, the program’s criteria have focused on encouraging brands to reduce their use of toxic chemicals. But the updated standard, released on Aug. 8, strengthens requirements for sustainable packaging as well; plastic packaging must contain at least 15% postconsumer recycled content.

A key requirement: The content must be determined “by weight,” effectively forbidding the mathematical sleight of hand.

“This is the turning point” that will allow us to start killing the “hoax” of mass balance, said Jan Dell, a chemical engineer who founded The Last Beach Cleanup, a nonprofit fighting plastic pollution.

It’s the latest of several Biden administration actions to tackle the plastic crisis, which is smothering communities, oceans and even our bodies with toxic material that doesn’t break down in nature. Last month, the White House announced that the federal government — the world’s largest buyer of consumer products — would stop purchasing single-use plastic by 2035. Reuters also reported that U.S. negotiators would support global limits on plastic production in ongoing talks for a United Nations plastics treaty.

This EPA decision shows that President Joe Biden’s team is adopting more aggressive policies to curb plastic, said Anthony Schiavo, senior director at Lux Research. Schiavo’s company analyzes global trends in emerging petrochemical and plastics technologies.

The new requirement effectively shuts out of the program any product made through a much-heralded chemical recycling technology called pyrolysis, which ProPublica’s investigation revealed to be so inefficient that it cannot yield more than 10% recycled content. In practice, it yields far less. Mass balance has been key to marketing those products and the technology.

A prominent plastics industry trade group defended mass balance and cited its use in other products like paper and fair-trade chocolate. “Mass balance is a widely accepted accounting tool used by a variety of industries that would encourage more recycled content in the overall economy,” Adam Peer, the American Chemistry Council’s senior director of plastics sustainability, said in an email.

The EPA gives annual awards to participants that have done particularly well in its program. Those recognized in 2023, for instance, included The Clorox Co., Rust-Oleum, Ecos and Seventh Generation, which grew their inventories of less-toxic cleaning products and educated consumers about the Safer Choice program.

ProPublica asked these four companies whether it would be difficult to transition to plastic packaging that meets the 15% threshold. None responded to requests for comment.

The EPA did not comment directly on the policy’s implications for pyrolysis or mass balance. The agency instead referred ProPublica to comments it made last year to the Federal Trade Commission about mass balance, calling it deceptive and advising against promoting it. “It would be clearer to focus on calculations that involve the actual amount of material used,” the agency told the FTC.

After an earlier version of the EPA policy, posted in November, left the door open for the use of mass balance, activists including Dell warned the agency about the accounting method’s flaws. And a group of state and local officials, including the attorneys general of 11 states, shared similar reservations on how the EPA should define recycled content.

In response to those comments, the EPA wrote that the final policy was written to “respect this consumer expectation” that “products with labels indicating use of recycled content contain post-consumer recycled content.”

“Common sense has prevailed here,” said Peter Blair, who co-wrote the activists’ comments with Dell. Blair, policy and advocacy director at the environmental group Just Zero, said he was thrilled that the EPA’s final decision prioritized “truthful, accurate” labeling of recycled content for a program that’s not explicitly about plastic.

The activists’ campaign reflects the mounting pressure to scrutinize and regulate how plastic — especially plastic recycled via newer technologies — is marketed. European regulators have banned the most extreme version of mass balance. And the FTC is updating the Green Guides, which spell out how companies can advertise recycled content in sustainable products. Those officials, too, are considering whether to allow mass balance.

Blair hopes the EPA decision sets a precedent for where the federal government will stand.

by Brandon Roberts

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When Congress held hearings in December 2023 to investigate allegations of campus antisemitism, they brought in the presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania. At the same time, ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer got surges of traffic to pages for all three universities. When the same congressional committee held further hearings in April and brought in now-former Columbia University president Nemat Shafik, traffic to the university’s page on the site peaked.

When The New York Times published an article in August about the CEO of GLAAD’s pattern of lavish spending, including luxury travel and home office renovations, we noticed a corresponding spike in traffic to the page for the organization’s finances. It was the most-viewed organization on the site for two days straight. GLAAD spokesperson Rich Ferraro defended the organization’s spending, saying the trips were business expenses that furthered the group’s advocacy goals and the office improvements aided the CEO’s many on-camera appearances.

This is a pattern we’ve noticed again and again: When news about a nonprofit breaks, people turn to Nonprofit Explorer to check its finances themselves. Today, we’re adding a new feature, called Trending Nonprofits, to highlight those organizations that may be in the news or be getting shared a lot on social media. The feature, which will appear on the Nonprofit Explorer homepage, lists the eight organizations with the most unique views and will update multiple times per day.

Sharp temporary jumps in traffic due to breaking news events account for some organizations’ appearance on the list, but longer-term trends are also reflected. The Heritage Foundation, for example, was the most-viewed nonprofit for most of July thanks to ongoing reporting that dug into its controversial Project 2025 playbook, including ProPublica’s own release of Project 2025 training videos. The group did not respond to a request for comment.

The most consistently popular organization on Nonprofit Explorer is the Stephen Siller Tunnel To Towers Foundation, a nonprofit that’s notable for hosting large charity events like a 5K run through the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel to the former site of the World Trade Center complex. It has been the most-viewed charity for 120 days in the past year.

The organization’s stated purpose is to use donated funds to purchase homes for the families of fallen military service members and first responders. These types of activities get media coverage, which consistently puts them among the top three most-visited organizations on the site. Just as traffic to the organization’s Nonprofit Explorer page was slowing down in June of 2024, it shot back into the top position when The New York Times reported that the nonprofit was the primary source of revenue for former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s internet show “America’s Mayor Live.” According to reports, the show brought in approximately $16,000 a month for one of Giuliani’s companies, and the former mayor was accused of attempting to conceal that revenue stream in bankruptcy court. A spokesperson for Giuliani told the paper he was “proud to partner” with the charity. Neither Giuliani nor the Tunnel to Towers foundation responded to requests for comment.

We know that reporters and others often use Nonprofit Explorer to research organizations, so to avoid letting a small number of people push a nonprofit onto the trending list, we count only unique visitors to an organization’s page. This means that repeated views from the same people will not cause a nonprofit to trend.

We hope you enjoy using the feature as much as we do. It can be a great signal that it might be time to go digging into a nonprofit further.

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