ProPublica

by Megan O’Matz

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.

They are squat, stationary and seemingly innocuous. But ever since the high drama of the 2020 presidential election, humble drop boxes have been more than a receptacle of absentee ballots; they’ve morphed into a vessel for emotion, suspicion and even conspiracy theories.

In the battleground state of Wisconsin, especially, the mere presence of these sidewalk containers has inspired political activists and community leaders to plot against them, to call on people to watch them around the clock and even to hijack them.

They’ve been the subject of two state Supreme Court decisions, as well as legal memos, local council deliberations, press conferences and much hand-wringing.

Wausau Mayor Doug Diny was so leery of the box outside City Hall that he absconded with it on a Sunday in September, isolating it in his office. It had not yet been secured to the ground, he said, and so he wanted to keep it safe. The escapade was met with a backlash but also won the mayor some admirers online before he returned it.

“COURAGE IS CONTAGIOUS! WELL DONE SIR!” one person wrote on the conservative social media site Gettr.

Wausau Mayor Doug Diny removed the ballot box outside City Hall and brought it to his office. (Courtesy of Doug Diny)

As early voting for the November election begins and Wisconsinites receive their absentee ballots, they have choices on how to return them. Mail them. Deliver them in person to the municipal clerk. Or, in some communities, deposit them in a drop box, typically located outside a municipal building, library, community center or fire station.

Though election experts say the choices are designed to make voting a simple act, the use of drop boxes has been anything but uncomplicated since the 2020 election, when receptacles in Wisconsin and around the country became flash points for baseless conspiracy theories of election fraud. A discredited, but popular, documentary — “2000 Mules” — linked them to ballot stuffing, while a backlash grew over nonprofit funding that helped clerks make voting easier through a variety of measures, including drop boxes.

The movie’s distributor, Salem Media Group Inc., removed it from circulation in May and, in response to a lawsuit, issued a public apology to a Georgia voter for falsely depicting him as having voted illegally. A federal judge dismissed Salem Media Group as a defendant, but the litigation is proceeding against the filmmaker and others.

With all that fuss in the background, Wisconsin’s conservative-leaning Supreme Court outlawed the boxes in 2022. But then this summer, with the court now controlled by liberals, justices ruled them lawful, determining that municipal clerks could offer secure drop boxes in their communities if they wished.

In 2022, the Wisconsin Supreme Court banned absentee ballot drop boxes, after which the city of Madison partnered with New York-based artist Jenny Holzer to post messages on its 14 boxes with information on how to vote and return an absentee ballot. In 2024, the boxes were ruled lawful again. (Scott Bauer/AP Images)

The court’s latest ruling made clear it’s up to each municipal clerk’s discretion whether to offer drop boxes for voters. But the decision has done little to change minds about the boxes or end any confusion about whether they’re a boon to democracy or a tool for chicanery.

This year, four of Wisconsin’s largest cities are using drop boxes — Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay and Racine. But numerous locales that offered drop boxes in 2020, including Kenosha, the fourth-largest city in the state, have determined they will not this year.

Voters have been getting mixed messages from right-wing activists and politicians about whether to use drop boxes, as the GOP continues to sow distrust in elections while, at the same time, urging supporters to vote early — by any means.

“Look, I’m not a fan of drop boxes, as is no great surprise, but if you have to have them, this is not a bad situation,” Catherine Engelbrecht, founder of True the Vote, which has fostered doubt about election integrity and helped inspire “2000 Mules,” said on a video posted to social media on Sept. 30. It showed her giving a brief tour of a drop box in Madison, Wisconsin’s capital and a bastion of Democrats.

With the camera trained on one of the boxes, Engelbrecht extolled that “the slot is really small, so that’s a good thing,” and that “most of these drop boxes appear to be close to fire stations,” which she also declared a good thing. About a week later, she wrote in a newsletter that True the Vote had collected exact drop box locations statewide and was working to arrange livestream video feeds of them.

Unlike in 2020 when Trump warned against the use of absentee ballots, this year he is urging supporters to “swamp the vote.” And the Wisconsin Republican Party is not discouraging voters from using ballot drop boxes if they are available in their community and are secure.

Still, Wisconsin’s GOP candidate for the U.S. Senate, Eric Hovde, has urged citizen surveillance brigades to watch the boxes. “Who’s watching to see how many illegal ballots are being stuffed?” Hovde told supporters in July, according to a recording of his remarks obtained by The Washington Post. “Look, we’re probably going to have to have — make sure that there’s somebody standing by a drop box everywhere.”

Most boxes have security cameras trained on them. Those surveillance tapes could be used as purported evidence in legal cases if Trump loses on Nov. 5.

Already, Engelbrecht has filed a public records request with the Dane County Clerk’s Office for “copies of video recordings from security cameras used to surveil all exterior and interior ballot drop boxes in Dane County for the November 2024 Election.” The county, whose seat is Madison, does not have access to camera footage, which is kept by municipalities, the county clerk told ProPublica.

After this year’s state Supreme Court ruling allowing the drop boxes, the Wisconsin Elections Commission issued guidance to the state’s roughly 1,800 municipal clerks recommending more than a dozen security practices related to the boxes.

The instructions include that they be “affixed to the ground or the side of the building,” “sturdy enough to withstand the elements,” “located in a well-lit area,” “equipped with unique locks or seals” and “emptied often.”

The commission recommended that clerks keep a record of the times and dates of retrieval, number of ballots retrieved and the names of the people doing the retrieving.

It also referred clerks to federal guidelines.

But even with updated guidelines in place and ballot harvesting prohibited in Wisconsin (individuals can only submit their own ballot, unless helping a disabled person), concerns persist.

In August in Dodge County, some 60 miles northwest of Milwaukee, the sheriff, Dale Schmidt, emailed three town clerks, telling them he had “serious concerns” about drop boxes, according to records obtained by the news site WisPolitics. “I strongly encourage you to avoid using a drop box,” he wrote. The sheriff asked the clerks numerous questions about the boxes, explaining that: “Even if set up the best way possible to avoid the potential for fraudulent activity, criminal activity many times finds ways to subvert even the best plans.”

Two of the clerks — from the towns of Ashippun and Beaver Dam — replied to the sheriff that they would not use them and the clerk from Hustisford told Wisconsin Public Radio that, while she received Schmidt’s email, the town board had already decided against using a drop box out of security concerns. In an email to ProPublica, Schmidt said, “No one was intimidated into choosing not to use the boxes and none of them had heartburn over not using them.”

Brittany Vulich, Wisconsin campaign manager for the nonpartisan voting rights group All Voting is Local, is bothered by how mayors, council members and other officials are seeking to influence these decisions. She notes that municipal clerks — the vast majority of whom are women — are the top election officials in each municipality.

“It’s the undermining of their authority. It’s the undermining of their office,” she said. “It’s the undermining of their autonomy to do their job and to make that decision on whether to use drop boxes or not. And that is what is very alarming.”

Other towns have also balked.

In the city of Brookfield, the Common Council took up a resolution Aug. 20 and voted 10-4 not to have a drop box after reviewing a memo by City Attorney Jenna Merten who found the recommended precautions burdensome.

“The guidance states that for unstaffed 24-hour ballot drop boxes, the City would need a video surveillance camera and storage of the video footage, as well as decals, extra keys and security seals,” she wrote. “Removing the ballots from the drop box would require at least two people and the completion of chain of custody logs.”

During the debate, Alderman Gary Mahkorn, an opponent of drop boxes, argued that they served a purpose during the COVID-19 pandemic but then “became a hugely political issue, and that’s what makes me want to, you know, puke in a way.” He worried that “the further we get away from people trusting our elections, the more our democracy is at stake.”

Instead of having drop boxes, the city will have extended voting hours, 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., most weekdays during in-person absentee voting for the two weeks prior to the election.

In Wausau, the box that Diny took to his office is back, bolted to the ground and being used for early voting.

At first, Diny resisted pressure from the city clerk and members of the City Council to return it. The clerk, Kaitlyn Bernarde, reported the matter to the Marathon County District Attorney’s Office and the state elections commission. And Diny arranged to have the clerk reclaim it.

The Wisconsin Department of Justice is investigating. There have been no charges. Diny told ProPublica he believes he did nothing wrong, saying: “None of this was done in a nefarious, secret way.”

At a City Council meeting on Tuesday night, Diny attempted to force a vote on allocating additional funds for drop-box security. But the council showed no interest.

During the public comment period, residents both praised and lambasted the mayor. One local resident rose to say, “Arguing about a box is dumb.”

by Lomi Kriel and Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Zach Despart, Terri Langford, Pooja Salhotra and Kayla Guo, The Texas Tribune

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 is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

City officials in Uvalde, Texas, released another trove of videos on Tuesday from officers responding to the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting, footage that they had previously failed to divulge as part of a legal settlement with news organizations suing for access.

The new material included at least 10 police body camera videos and nearly 40 dashboard videos that largely affirm prior reporting by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and FRONTLINE detailing law enforcement’s failures to engage the teen shooter who killed 19 children and two teachers. Officers only confronted the gunman 77 minutes after he began firing, a delay that U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said cost lives.

In one 30-minute video released Tuesday, officers lined up in the school hallway as they prepared to breach a classroom door about an hour after the shooter first entered the building. The footage, while not new, showed a slightly different angle from what had previously been released. In it, victims are completely blurred, but their cries and screams can be heard and blood is visible in the hallway. The video also shows officers performing chest compressions on a victim on the sidewalk.

In another video, an officer wearing a body camera is crying at points, telling someone on the phone: “They’re just kids. It’s fucked up.” He adds, “I just never thought shit like that would happen here.” Another officer asks if he should take his weapon from him and tells him to sit down and “relax.” That seven-minute video after the breach shows medics working on someone in an ambulance.

The news organizations previously reported in an investigation with The Washington Post that officers initially treated teacher Eva Mireles, who was shot in Room 112, on a sidewalk because they did not see any ambulances, although two were parked just past the corner of the building. Mireles, one of three victims who still had a pulse when she was rescued, died in an ambulance that never left the school.

Much of the other body camera footage shows officers waiting around after the breach or clearing classrooms that are empty, offering little revelatory detail. Officers are also seen outside the school responding to questions from bystanders.

Dashboard videos also offered few new details, showing police officers idling in patrol cars outside of Robb Elementary. Some officers paced the parking lot and communicated inaudibly through radios and cellphones. One video shows a television crew arriving at the scene, and others show ambulances and parents waiting as helicopters circle overhead.

In August, as part of the settlement, the city released hundreds of records and videos to media organizations, which similarly largely confirmed prior reporting. But days after releasing those records, city officials acknowledged that an officer with the Uvalde Police Department had informed the agency that some of his body camera footage was missing.

Police Chief Homer Delgado ordered an audit of the department’s servers, which revealed even more videos had not been turned over. He shared those with District Attorney Christina Mitchell, who is overseeing a criminal investigation into the botched response, and ordered his own internal probe into how the lapse occurred.

In an emailed statement late Tuesday, city officials said that the internal investigation uncovered not only “technological issues,” but an “unintentional lack of proper due diligence by the officer who served as custodian” of the police department’s records. City officials said that the officer, whom they did not name, faced disciplinary action and retired from the department. They said the investigation found “no evidence of any intentional effort to withhold information.” They added that the department is working to improve its internal record-keeping procedures and overcome technological hurdles so that “such an oversight does not occur again.”

The Uvalde Leader-News reported last month that former city police Sgt. Donald Page faced disciplinary action related to the withheld footage and subsequently resigned. Page’s attorney declined to answer most questions but wrote in an email to the Tribune and ProPublica that the veteran officer in fact retired. Page oversaw operations including dispatch and evidence technicians, according to his interview with investigators and the city’s report into the shooting, and was in plain clothes that day. It is unclear whether he was wearing his own body camera. It does not seem to be part of any released footage.

Former Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin on Tuesday praised the city police for releasing the material. He called on other law enforcement agencies to follow suit.

“It should have been done from day one,” said McLaughlin, who is currently running for the Texas House. “I was frustrated when I found out we had something we had overlooked, but everybody needs to release their stuff. … It’s the only way these families are going to get some closure.”

It is unclear whether the new footage would alter Mitchell’s investigation. She did not respond to requests for comment Tuesday.

A grand jury in June indicted former Uvalde school district police Chief Pete Arredondo and school resource officer Adrian Gonzales on felony child endangerment charges. Footage released in August and on Tuesday comes from city police officers, not school district officers, so it does not include any video from Arredondo or Gonzales. None of the school district officers were wearing body cameras that day because the department did not own any, Arredondo later told investigators. He also dropped his school-issued radio as he rushed into the school.

According to the school district’s active shooter plan, Arredondo was supposed to take charge. His indictment alleges in part that he failed to follow his training and gave directions that impeded the response, endangering children. Gonzales, who along with Arredondo was among the first officers on scene, “failed to otherwise act in a way to impede the shooter until after the shooter entered rooms 111 and 112,” according to his indictment.

Experts have said their cases face an uphill battle as no officers in recent history have been found guilty of inaction in mass shootings. Both men pleaded not guilty, and the next hearing is set for December. No Uvalde Police Department officers have been charged.

News organizations, including the Tribune and ProPublica, sued several local and state agencies more than two years ago for records related to the shooting. The city settled with the news organizations, agreeing to provide records requested under the state’s Public Information Act. But three other government agencies — the Texas Department of Public Safety, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District and the Uvalde County Sheriff’s Office — continue fighting against any release of their records.

More than two years after the shooting, victims’ relatives have said that they still feel like there has been little accountability or transparency. They said that they feel betrayed and as if government agencies attempted a “cover-up.”

Across the country, the news organizations found, more states require active shooter training for teachers and students than they do for the officers expected to protect them. At least 37 states have laws mandating that schools conduct active shooter-related drills, most of them annually. Texas was the only state to require repeat training for officers as of this year, 16 hours every two years, in a mandate that only came about after the Uvalde massacre.

Experts said repeated training was necessary for these high-pressure responses, and a Justice Department review into the Uvalde response this year recommended at least eight hours of annual active shooter training for every officer in the country.

In all, nearly 400 officers from about two dozen agencies responded to the shooting. Yet despite at least seven investigations launched after the massacre, only about a dozen officers have been fired, suspended or retired.

One of those, Texas Ranger Christopher Ryan Kindell, was reinstated in August after fighting his termination.

by Miranda Green, Floodlight, Jennifer Smith Richards, ProPublica, and Priyanjana Bengani, Tow Center for Digital Journalism, and photography by Sarahbeth Maney, ProPublica

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. This story was co-published with the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.

Word tends to spread fast in rural Knox County, Ohio. But misinformation has spread faster.

The first article in the Mount Vernon News last fall about a planned solar farm simply noted that residents were “expressing their concern.” But soon the county’s only newspaper was packed with stories about solar energy that almost uniformly criticized the project and quoted its opponents.

Then a new “grassroots” organization materialized and invited locals to an elaborate event billed as a town hall, with a keynote speaker who denied that humans cause climate change.

Someone sent text messages to residents urging them to “stop the solar invasion” and elect two county commission candidates who opposed the solar farm. And one day this past March, residents received an unfamiliar newspaper that contained only articles attacking Frasier Solar, a large project that would replace hundreds of acres of corn and soybeans with the equivalent of 630 football fields of solar panels.

To many in the deep-red central Ohio community, it seemed that solar had become the focus of news and politics. They were right. Fossil fuel interests were secretly working to shape the conversation in Knox County.

Rural Knox County, Ohio, is home to extensive farmland and has deep ties to the gas industry.

Each cog in the anti-solar machine — the opposition group, the texts, the newspaper, the energy publication — was linked to the others through finances and overlapping agendas, an investigation by Floodlight, ProPublica and The Tow Center for Digital Journalism found.

The campaign against solar power benefited from a confluence of two powerful forces funded by oil and gas interests. A former executive at Ariel Corporation, the county’s largest employer and one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of methane gas compressors, was working behind the scenes. And helping in a more public way is the Mount Vernon News, a newspaper now in the hands of Metric Media, which operates websites that reportedly engage in pay-to-play coverage.

Ariel and the former executive did not respond to requests for comment. Metric Media’s leader did not answer questions for this story; he has previously denied that his news outlets are partisan.

Across the country, the oil and gas industry and power companies have exploited a struggling news industry and a fraught political process to fight the transition to clean energy and maximize profits, Floodlight and its partners have reported. In Florida, two power companies paid a consulting firm to hire newspapers to attack a pro-solar politician. In Alabama, the state’s largest monopoly electric company purchased a historic Black newspaper, then didn’t write about soaring power bills. In California, Chevron launched its own newsroom when other papers shuttered; it doesn’t cover itself critically.

In Mount Vernon, a city of 17,000 where the local university named its new sports complex CH4 after the chemical formula for methane, a variety of tactics have been deployed simultaneously, creating an anti-solar echo chamber.

First image: Mount Vernon Nazarene University’s CH4 Stadium was partially funded by Ariel Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Ariel Corporation, one of the world’s biggest manufacturers of methane gas compressors. Second image: A plaque on the stadium explains that, like the chemical bonds in methane, the bond between the university and Ariel is strong.

Residents are bombarded with dubious claims: Solar panels are toxic. Their construction depletes the soil and floods fields and depresses home values. China is using them to invade. The campaign has stoked their skepticism and ignited their passions. It intensified the debate in a conservative county that prizes its roots in the gas industry.

Bright yellow “No Industrial Solar” yard signs have sprung up everywhere, competing with a smattering of green “Yes Solar” ones. Citizens packed local government meetings. More than 4,000 public comments, both for and against, were filed with the state regulator that will decide if the solar project can be built — triple the number for any previous solar project in Ohio. And all those opinions have drowned out the voices of the nine landowners, mostly farmers, who’ve signed leases with Frasier’s developer and for whom a total of about $60 million is at stake.

“People are so radicalized and they’re not thinking clearly,” said Rich Piar, a third-generation farmer who hopes to secure his financial future by leasing a portion of his 1,650 acres to Open Road Renewables, the Texas-based company developing the Frasier Solar project.

The Yellowbud Solar project in Pickaway County, Ohio, shown in 2022, became operational last year. It is about 90 miles southwest of Knox County. (Dan Gearino/Inside Climate News)

Politicians who didn’t forcefully denounce the solar project were attacked in Mount Vernon News stories. Thom Collier, a long-serving Republican on the county commission who thinks landowners should be able to choose whether to use their property for solar infrastructure, ultimately lost his reelection bid after a barrage of misleading coverage about his stance on solar.

“I pin this on one or two people from Ariel and some close friends that they have,” Collier said of the anti-solar offensive. “They determined it didn’t matter how much money it would take, they were going to fight this and make it ugly, and they have.”

“They Want Everybody to Buy Gas”

Just 20 days after Knox Smart Development was registered as an LLC in Ohio, the anti-solar group hosted a town hall at a historic Georgian revival theater in Mount Vernon with 1,000 red velvet seats. Attendees were offered free food and alcohol.

The November 2023 event centered on a presentation from Steve Goreham, who argues global warming is natural and who is the author of several books, including “The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.”

“When I think of a town hall meeting, I think of a meeting where everybody from the community can go, everybody has their say. That’s not how their meeting was,” said Kathy Gamble, who said organizers only reluctantly agreed to let her in. She’s pro-solar and not quiet about it.

The town hall established Knox Smart Development as a leading voice against the Frasier Solar project. The group calls itself a simple grassroots defender of Knox County.

It isn’t.

The man who registered the group as a business — and who is its sole member and spokesperson — was an Ariel Corporation employee two decades ago and remained an acquaintance of a top executive there, Tom Rastin. The group’s website was owned for a time by a woman working as an executive assistant at Ariel.

And one of Knox Smart Development’s larger funders is Rastin, a Republican megadonor and a retired executive vice president at Ariel, according to records and sworn testimony. Rastin’s father-in-law founded Ariel and, until recently, Rastin and his wife, Karen Buchwald Wright, led the company. Wright is still the chairman, and her son operates it now. Rastin and Wright did not respond to questions for this story.

The group’s founder, Jared Yost, said in an email that Rastin has not tried to steer its activism. “As a local resident, I believe he should be allowed to donate to whatever cause he aligns with, regardless of his former employment, and to state otherwise is to suggest Mr. Rastin should be censored,” Yost wrote in an email. He said the group relies on volunteers and “our intentions are genuine.”

He added: “The oil and gas industry is not involved in our fight.”

Ariel Corporation expanded in 2017, adding a training center for employees and customers near its headquarters in Mount Vernon, Ohio.

The town hall event headliner, Goreham, said he appeared as a favor to Rastin and Wright. In 2019, he had dinner with the couple when Goreham and his wife were passing through town from Illinois on a road trip to their second home in Virginia Beach. Goreham said that he and Rastin connected over their mutual feelings on the benefits of gas. He said he was glad to accept the invitation to speak at the anti-Frasier Solar event.

“First off, it’s in his county there. Mount Vernon is his city where he lives and where they are based,” said Goreham. “They’re pretty much opposed to renewables and they want everybody to buy gas. That’s their business.”

Goreham says he wasn’t paid to speak, but Wright bought 200 copies of his latest book, “Green Breakdown: The Coming Renewable Energy Failure,” which warns about a net-zero-emissions agenda that will cause energy grids to fail. Local officials were given copies of the book that included a personal note from Wright: “Hello! Given the significant misinformation surrounding solar and wind arrays, I bought you this book that really lays out the facts.” She signed the note “Karen Wright, Chairman — Ariel Corporation.”

Shortly after the group was formed, Knox Smart Development’s “No Solar” ads became a fixture on the Mount Vernon News website and in the paper.

“You Believe People”

The Mount Vernon News had been owned by the same family since 1939, and for decades it chronicled local doings from city council meetings to the county fair.

At its height in the early 2000s, before newspapers started hemorrhaging advertising revenue and readers, the News employed about 15 full-time local reporters. An orange Maine coon cat named Scoop roamed the newsroom.

But by 2020, the News was barely hanging on. Its reporters were still using clunky 20-year-old computers. The back wall of the building was falling down and needed $250,000 in repairs. Kay Culbertson, who owned both the paper and the building, said that she knew it was time to sell. Paying for the repairs would be impossible; even making payroll was a stretch.

First image: The former Mount Vernon News building, home to the paper since 1939, sits empty. Second image: The paper’s new owners opened an office in the Woodward Opera House, a historic downtown building that the Ariel Foundation helped renovate.

An acquaintance of Culberston’s connected her with Metric Media, part of an eight-company network operating more than 1,100 online local news sites. These sites have been described by media researchers and journalists as “pink slime,” named for a filler in processed meat. The final product looks natural, but it’s been tampered with.

A Syracuse University researcher concluded in a journal article published in February that sites like Metric’s “that seem like original news outlets and that appeal to local identity are filling the void” left by the decline of local news. And The Washington Post reported last year that Republican campaigns requested customized news stories that appeared on Metric-owned sites.

Both conservative and liberal pink slime sites exist. But Metric is run by Brian Timpone, an Illinois-based former broadcast reporter who has contributed tens of thousands of dollars to conservative campaigns and causes. Timpone’s ventures have been criticized for using foreign-based writers to produce material. Some also have been accused of plagiarism and fabricating quotes. Timpone has blamed the problems on foreign writers providing content, and he apologized to readers.

Metric Media’s nonprofit arm has received $1.4 million “for general operations” from DonorsTrust, a dark-money group that has received significant funding from Charles and David Koch, who made their billions in oil pipelines and refineries. The eight-company network that Metric is part of also has ties to conservative billionaires, including oil-and-gas-industry titan Tim Dunn, shipping magnate Richard Uihlein and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. (Political groups that organize as nonprofits do not have to disclose donors, which is why they’re called “dark money.”)

DonorsTrust CEO and President Lawson R. Bader said in an email that the organization makes about 4,000 grants a year and that it does not dictate how those donations are spent.

Timpone responded to a request for an interview by writing, “We at the Mount Vernon News are now also working on a story — about Pro Publica and Floodlight’s efforts to promote taxpayer-funded ‘solar energy’ businesses in Central Ohio.” He did not respond to detailed questions.

But in interviews, he has said his business keeps local news alive when many outlets are scaling back or shutting down. Timpone told the Deseret News in Utah that his sites have no political leaning and are “data-driven and fact-centric.”

Research and news investigations have found that Timpone’s publications tend to champion conservative causes and politicians; they often are linked to mysterious newspapers distributed during key elections.

Culbertson and assistant publisher Liz Lutwick said in an interview that they knew little about Metric Media before the sale. But the company’s promises sounded good and, Lutwick said, “You believe people.”

“They were going to keep everything the same for a while. Lo and behold, they didn’t,” Culbertson said.

Metric paid at least $1 million for the Mount Vernon News, the first time it had purchased an established news organization printing a local paper. When the new owners visited the paper after the sale, they told the staff they’d stop printing every day and would no longer provide benefits; instead, employees would become contractors. Half the staff quit on the spot.

“It was awful. You feel like you’ve betrayed people,” Culbertson said.

“We Call It the Solar Times”

Today, the Mount Vernon News only publishes once a week and has no local reporters or photographers.

“It’s obvious when you read the stories, either they’re AI-generated or they’re written by somebody who’s sitting in an office in Chicago who has never been here,” said Bill Davis, a sports editor who said he worked at the paper from 2010 to 2019.

Since Metric took over, only 11% of stories credited the work to authors working for Metric or its sister companies. Most of what it publishes are press releases or content submitted by companies and community groups, according to an analysis by the Tow Center, ProPublica and Floodlight.

After the sale, residents said they could no longer get timely obituaries — people were buried by the time funeral announcements were published — but they could read a lot about endangered farmland and concerns that the sun’s reflection off solar panels could blind nearby pilots.

Even Mount Vernon’s mayor, who was once a sports reporter at the paper, said he stopped reading it. Tanner Salyers, a former Mount Vernon city council member who now oversees public safety for the city, said quality dropped after the sale. “Then Frasier kicked up and they were like, ‘No more news.’ We call it the Solar Times.”

Over the last 12 months, the paper has published at least 52 online news stories on solar energy — 42 of them about the Frasier proposal, the analysis found. Of the 40 print editions published this year, 17 have featured front-page stories about solar. And though the paper has occasionally run a pro-solar letter to the editor, nearly all of the stories slanted anti-solar, according to an analysis of coverage by Floodlight, ProPublica and the Tow Center.

The paper began publishing a weekly opinion column called “Afternoon TEA” — TEA being an acronym for The Empowerment Alliance, a dark-money gas advocacy group Rastin leads.

The columns extolled the superiority of gas as a fuel source.

It isn’t clear if The Empowerment Alliance paid the Mount Vernon News to run the “Afternoon TEA” columns. But tax filings show that since 2020 The Empowerment Alliance has spent at least $6.3 million on a “public education campaign,” which included publishing “Afternoon TEA.” The goal was to promote “the importance of natural gas to the economy and national energy independence.”

One of The Empowerment Alliance’s stated goals is “fighting the nonsense of turning corn fields into solar fields.” It has financed online advertisements attacking President Joe Biden’s energy policies and spearheaded an Ohio bill that defined gas as a “green” fuel source.

Half of the Frasier stories published in the Mount Vernon News over the past year have mentioned Knox Smart Development, the anti-solar group linked to Rastin. Articles often quoted people or cited work from a Koch-backed think tank, The Buckeye Institute, but did not interview Frasier or farmers willing to lease land to it.

The Buckeye Institute is part of the State Policy Network, a group of think tanks that has received millions in funding from organizations connected to the Koch family. Rastin’s wife has served as a director on the State Policy Network board, and in 2019 she gave it $700,000, according to a tax record that typically would’ve been redacted but was posted to a government site.

The Mount Vernon News and pro-gas political groups also were working to influence local elections. The text messages that boosted anti-solar candidates were from a conservative Ohio PAC tied to a group that ran a pro-gas campaign.

And, leading up to the primary, a newspaper called the Ohio Energy Reporter was mailed to Knox County homes. The 8-page paper reprinted several Mount Vernon News stories on solar and featured other articles with headlines including “Ohio’s coming ‘solar trash wave’” and “Could the Texas Power Crisis happen in Ohio?”

A summer issue of the Mount Vernon News on the floor of the paper’s business office, where one local employee now works. There are no local reporters or photographers.

The publication did not disclose its owners. The Floodlight, ProPublica and Tow Center investigation used source code from the website, its IP address and business mailing addresses to confirm that it is a product of the wider Metric Media network.

The stories the Mount Vernon News published began undermining politicians who were seen as insufficiently anti-solar and boosting the profiles of solar power’s outspoken critics.

In one article, the News accused Mount Vernon Mayor Matthew Starr of bowing to “energy activists” and pledging to try to remove natural gas from the city. It was not true. Starr was furious and asked the editors to take down the article, but they would not.

And in nearly a dozen stories that mentioned Collier, the county commissioner who was later ousted, the paper consistently misused a comment he’d given about newly placed solar panels at the county jail to falsely insinuate he supported the Frasier project.

Collier was never interviewed for those stories. Yet the paper ran a story devoted entirely to anti-solar commissioner candidate Drenda Keesee, a megachurch pastor who’d never run for office before; the article said she had “emerged as a vocal opponent of solar projects encroaching on the community.” Keesee, whose property would border a portion of the solar site, was the only source in the story.

She won the primary against Collier and is unopposed in the November general election.

Drenda Keesee, right, is a pastor at Faith Life Church and a candidate for a seat on the Knox County Commission. Keesee, who’s running on an anti-solar platform, attended a Ohio Power Siting Board hearing in Columbus in August. “You Can’t Eat Solar Panels”

For the community, the debate over solar has been passionate and persistent. What it hasn’t always been is civil. Yard signs have been stolen. Insults hurled. Middle fingers extended. Friendships frayed.

“Other than solar, we don’t have any problems with each other,” said Kathy Gamble, who runs the pro-solar group Knox County For Responsible Solar.

Many people in the community say they don’t view the debate through the lens of climate science or fossil fuels; they care about land rights and preserving rural life. Members of Preserve Knox County, an anti-solar group with several members whose land borders the proposed solar arrays, said they worry the solar project will scare off the sandhill cranes and bald eagles that visit their backyards.

Many members are distrustful of Biden’s renewable energy initiatives; they are staunch supporters of former President Donald Trump, who questions the scientific consensus that the climate is undergoing dangerous changes. They also don’t trust the solar developer’s promises to plant enough trees to block the panels from view. And they don’t want to lose the farmland that gives the area its agricultural identity.

“You can’t eat solar panels,” said Jim Boeshart, whose home would be adjacent to solar arrays.

Keith Strait, a farmer who lives not far from Boeshart, agreed: “Let’s face it,” he said, pointing at the ground, “They’re not making any more of this. There will be a time when there won’t be any farm left. Where’re you going to get your food from?”

Keith Strait, a farmer in Knox County, said, “I don’t like it,” of the solar proposal. “They’re taking away a lot of farm ground.” Knox County residents Connie and Jim Boeshart, who live next to property where solar panels would be built if the Frasier Solar project is approved, attend an Ohio Power Siting Board hearing in August. Rich Piar stands near his cornfield in Knox County.

The farmers who want to lease their land feel their voices have been lost in the debate. For them, a 40-year land contract with Frasier Solar would be steady income. One farmer said he could make four times as much money per acre leasing to the solar project as he’d make renting to another farmer.

Rich Piar, the third-generation farmer, is looking to the solar panels as a retirement plan. He said he has no one to take over the operation when he retires, and he doesn’t think anyone should dictate what he does with his land or when he stops farming.

“Most farmers’ exit strategy is their health,” Piar said. “I don’t want to have that kind of predetermined exit strategy.” He went to one of the public meetings about Frasier but said it was so packed he didn’t get to speak until almost midnight.

In August, the Ohio Power Siting Board, which will rule on whether the project can be built, held a final hearing to accept evidence from both sides. One of the attorneys who spoke on behalf of a farmer who is leasing land for the project was from the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. (The Tow Center also is based at Columbia, but its work is separate.)

Frasier lawyers cross-examined Knox Smart Development spokesperson Jared Yost at the hearing, where he testified that Rastin, the retired Ariel executive, was one of the group’s biggest donors. To Open Road Renewables’ vice president of development, Craig Adair, the confirmation pierced the veil.

First image: Jared Yost, founder of Knox Smart Development, testifies in August during an Ohio Power Siting Board hearing about his group’s opposition to the Frasier Solar project. Second image: Craig Adair, vice president of development at Open Road Renewables, the company developing the Frasier project, testifies at the hearing.

Everything changed, Adair said in an interview, “when The Empowerment Alliance decided to use its vast financial resources” to shape the debate in Knox County and in the Mount Vernon News.

The News published two stories on the hearing but did not mention the public admission of Knox Smart Development’s ties to Rastin, the Ariel Corporation and The Empowerment Alliance.

The board’s decision is likely to take months.

In the meantime, construction has started at the old Mount Vernon News building, which is being turned into an academic hub for a local university. The building will be named after Rastin’s stepson, a former president of Ariel Corporation.

by Jacob Orledge, North Dakota Monitor

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the North Dakota Monitor. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

When Republican Kelly Armstrong filed his federal financial disclosure after being elected to Congress in 2018, he revealed his extensive ties to the oil and gas industry in his home state of North Dakota. It detailed his income from hundreds of oil wells and his financial relationship with two of the state’s largest oil producers.

Those ties will matter a great deal if, as is likely, he’s elected as North Dakota’s governor next month. Under North Dakota’s system, he will automatically chair two state bodies that regulate the energy industry, meaning Armstrong would be expected to preside over decisions that directly impact companies in which he has financial or familial ties.

As head of both the North Dakota Industrial Commission and the Land Board, Armstrong would have a nearly unmatched level of control and oversight compared with leaders in other states. The former state senator would help set policy at a time when North Dakota — the No. 3 oil producer in the nation — is entering a new phase of energy development. The Industrial Commission has faced criticism in recent years from landowners and legislators, including for being too supportive of corporate interests.

Armstrong wrote in an email, in response to questions from the North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica, that he earns nearly all of his personal income from the oil and gas industry. In 2022, Armstrong received up to $50,000 in royalty income from Hess Corp. — a company that has been the subject of 14 votes by one of those bodies in recent years and is likely to be discussed by the boards in the years to come. Similarly, an oil and gas company run by Armstrong’s father had been part of a yearslong, multicompany dispute with the Land Board, which oversees state-owned lands and minerals. Most entities, including his father’s company, have reached negotiated settlements.

The man Armstrong seeks to succeed, Gov. Doug Burgum, has voted about 20 times on issues related to companies with which he has a financial relationship, according to a review of minutes from the Industrial Commission, which is responsible for energy regulation and oversight of state-owned businesses. That includes Continental Resources, one of the region’s largest producers.

The mechanics of how we’ve done things in North Dakota don’t really make sense from an ethics standpoint.

—Scott Skokos, executive director of Dakota Resource Council

These votes were made under North Dakota’s ethics rules, which are significantly weaker than those in other states. Board members have discretion to decide whether they have a conflict of interest, and the boards are effectively self-policing on this front. The state’s Ethics Commission has created conflict-of-interest rules, but it can only take action if a complaint is filed; it also has not implemented consequences for violating those rules.

Most ethics experts contacted for this article said that royalty owners voting on matters involving companies they receive income from is problematic.

“That’s not just an apparent conflict of interest, that’s a real conflict of interest,” said Dennis Cooley, director of the Northern Plains Ethics Institute at North Dakota State University. “Anything that touches on ‘I’m giving you money for this,’ even with the best intentions, and that’s what I’m assuming these folks have, these representatives have, it’s really hard to separate yourself from folks who pay you.”

Scott Skokos, executive director of the environmental conservation group Dakota Resource Council, agreed. “The mechanics of how we’ve done things in North Dakota don’t really make sense from an ethics standpoint,” said Skokos, whose group has opposed some Industrial Commission decisions. Government, he said, is “supposed to work for the people, and what’s happening is the government is working for corporate interests.”

Armstrong, a lawyer whose father has been involved in the oil industry since 1979, sat for an interview this summer at the GOP’s state headquarters to discuss his connections to one of the state’s largest industries. He said he doesn’t believe his financial ties to oil and gas companies will pose a conflict of interest when he’s asked to vote on matters involving those companies. “I would talk to somebody,” he said in the interview, “but I don’t think so.”

Armstrong said he will not divest his oil and gas interests, nor will he place his holdings in a blind trust. And he said his experience dealing with the industry will be an asset in the governor’s role as “promoter-in-chief” for North Dakota’s energy industry.

“It’s the No. 1 driver of our economy in North Dakota, and I have an incredible knowledge base about what it’s like to grow up in western North Dakota in the oil and gas business,” Armstrong said. “I don’t think that’s a conflict. I think that is a benefit.”

Few Guardrails

Since he was elected governor in 2016, Burgum has cast about 20 votes on the Industrial Commission involving oil and gas companies that lease minerals from a family venture the governor co-owns and at least one vote that benefited a company in which his wife owns stock.

Those votes covered a range of issues including experimental production technology, disputes between companies and research grants.

North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, center, leads a meeting of the state Industrial Commission on July 2 in Bismarck with state Agriculture Commissioner Doug Goehring, left, and state Attorney General Drew Wrigley. (Michael Achterling/North Dakota Monitor)

But because of North Dakota’s thin financial disclosure requirements, the public wasn’t informed that Burgum and his family held a financial interest in the companies until he ran for president last year.

That’s when Burgum became subject to more stringent federal requirements; his disclosure report revealed that he receives up to $51,000 annually in mineral royalties combined from Continental Resources and Hess, two of the Bakken oil field’s largest oil producers. The income comes from mineral leases signed through the Burgum Farm Partnership, a family venture co-owned by Burgum and five relatives.

A spokesperson for the governor, Mike Nowatzki, said those leases began long before Burgum took office and have not been the subject of any business that has come before the boards.

Those federal disclosures also revealed that his wife, Kathryn Burgum, held stocks in nine energy companies, more than half of which do business in the state.

One of those, Otter Tail Corp., had business before the Industrial Commision and was the recipient of a $4.4 million grant for grid resiliency approved in a 3-0 vote last December. Burgum voted in favor of the grant.

Burgum’s wife held stock valued between $1,001 and $15,000 in Otter Tail. Multiple emails sent to Nowatzki sought the actual value, as well as comment from Burgum’s wife. The spokesman did not provide either.

Burgum’s 2023 federal financial disclosure showed that his wife held stock in nine energy companies, valued between $70,000 and $241,000, including between $1,001 and $15,000 in Otter Tail stock. The company had business before the Industrial Commission and was the recipient of a $4.4 million grant. (Document obtained by North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica. Screenshot highlighted by ProPublica.)

The exact amount of those holdings matters because the Industrial Commission’s ethics policy prohibits board members from participating in, voting on or attempting to influence any decision on a company they or their spouse owns $5,000 or more equity in if there is a “reasonably foreseeable benefit” to the business from the “matter under consideration.”

Nowatzki asserted that the board’s ethics policy only applies if the governor himself benefited, not the company, and that it’s “absurd” to suggest the grant to Otter Tail “would provide a ‘reasonably foreseeable benefit’ to the governor on a 32-year-old investment valued at under $15,000.”

“The governor has no involvement in management of that account, and it has not factored into any decisions in his official capacity as governor,” Nowatzki wrote in an email.

Richard Briffault, a Columbia University law professor and expert in government ethics, says the stock ownership should have been disclosed prior to any votes. “If a regulator’s spouse has financial interests in one of the entities subject to regulation, that’s as if the regulator himself has a financial interest,” he said.

Had Burgum’s holdings been known, he still might not have been prevented from participating in those votes. The three-member Industrial Commission, which also includes the state attorney general and agriculture commissioner, is one of many entities in North Dakota that uses a version of the “neutral reviewer” process: If a board member discloses a conflict of interest in a matter under consideration, the remaining members vote on whether their conflicted colleague is disqualified. Industrial Commission Executive Director Karen Tyler said the board, which holds open meetings, often does not take a formal vote but has a “discussion and then a consensus whether or not the conflict rises to the level of a disqualifying conflict of interest.”

Three ethics experts told the North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica that they’ve rarely, if ever, seen this process used by government boards elsewhere. It is best practice, they said, for officials with a conflict to automatically recuse themselves.

“I find that to be a bizarre system,” said Cooley, who said he had never seen it used until he moved to North Dakota.

Richard Painter, a University of Minnesota law professor who studies government ethics, called the system “flawed.” “There’s going to be a lot of pressure on the other board members to say, ‘No, it’s OK for you to go ahead and vote; I don’t think you’ve got a conflict,’” said Painter, who served as President George W. Bush’s chief ethics attorney.

In fact, the neutral reviewer system was used when another member of the Industrial Commission, Doug Goehring, joined a 3-0 vote in favor of a carbon storage permit for Red Trail Energy, a western North Dakota ethanol plant in which he said in an interview that he had invested $60,000.

At the time, in 2021, Goehring verbally disclosed that he was an investor; the minutes of the meeting show that “the Commission did not have any concerns” with his participation in the vote. In a recent interview, he described the commission’s evaluation of conflicts of interest as “housekeeping stuff.”

Goehring, who is also the state’s longtime agriculture commissioner, in 2018 verbally disclosed a conflict and abstained from a vote giving Red Trail Energy a $500,000 grant; he did that, he said in an interview, because the action was an appropriation of taxpayer dollars. By contrast, he said he voted for the permit in 2021 because “anybody is eligible for a permit” if the “geology is appropriate.”

“To think that that’s not a conflict of interest is to hallucinate, in my opinion,” Skokos said. “For him to vote on it, having a financial stake in that company, is alarming.”

Goehring also never disclosed his stake in Red Trail Energy on state financial disclosure reports filed between 2010 and 2022 and reviewed by the North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica. Asked about this, he called the omission an “oversight.”

Red Trail Energy is in the process of being sold for $210 million. Initial investors such as Goehring will see a sizable profit from that sale, according to Jodi Johnson, Red Trail Energy’s CEO.

Armstrong’s Holdings

The state’s guardrails against conflicts of interest will be tested if Armstrong is elected governor. His oil and gas holdings outstrip — and compose a far greater share of his overall wealth than — those of the current governor.

I have an incredible knowledge base about what it’s like to grow up in western North Dakota in the oil and gas business. I don’t think that’s a conflict. I think that is a benefit.

—Kelly Armstrong, gubernatorial candidate and congressman

“Nearly 100% of my non-salary income is from oil and gas,” Armstrong wrote in an email.

As the GOP nominee, Armstrong is the favorite to be North Dakota’s next governor. Democrats last won statewide office in 2012, and the party has been absent from the governor’s mansion since 1992. Democrat Merrill Piepkorn, a state senator from Fargo, and independent candidate Michael Coachman also are running for governor.

Armstrong, the son of oilman Michael Armstrong of Dickinson, owns widespread mineral interests throughout the Bakken. His 2022 income from oil and gas, according to financial disclosures filed by the congressman, was between $426,674 and $2,460,900. He received up to $100,000 from Conoco and up to $50,000 from Hess, two of the largest oil producers in North Dakota. He also owns 11% of The Armstrong Corp., the family’s business that his campaign described as engaging in oil and gas exploration, among other efforts.

Armstrong’s 2023 federal financial disclosure showed that he received up to $50,000 from Hess and up to $100,000 from Conoco. (Document obtained by North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica. Screenshot highlighted by ProPublica.)

Armstrong’s industry interests have grown during his time in Congress. His financial disclosures indicate that the number of wells he earns royalty income from has increased to 475 in 2022, up from 301 in 2018.

He stepped down as vice president of The Armstrong Corp. after being elected to Congress in 2018. He said in an interview he has not made any oil and gas business decisions while serving in Congress.

Armstrong pointed out that states, and not the federal government, have “most of the control over the regulation” of oil and gas production. And he acknowledged the influence he would have if elected in a state where the governor has more sway. By contrast, Texas, the country’s top oil producer, elects members to the body that regulates the industry.

“North Dakota does things very uniquely,” Armstrong said, though he could see benefits to Texas’ approach and would entertain the idea of adjusting his state’s system.

“Ask me after I’ve done it for two years. That’s my answer, we’ll wait and see.”

“Clearly Inadequate Disclosure”

The public only got insight into Burgum’s and Armstrong’s financial positions because of a quirk of political circumstances: In recent years, both had to file federal disclosures.

North Dakota’s disclosure requirements for elected officials call for a fraction of what the federal government or most other states do. The state only requires public officials to file financial disclosure reports when they’re running for elected office, which is every four years for most positions. (Most states require the reports annually.) Officials also are not required to report stock ownership nor the value of their assets. The records are not published online, unlike in most states, and there are no penalties enforced for submitting incomplete or inaccurate statements.

There also is no state authority empowered to monitor such disclosures or offer guidance. The statements of interest are submitted to the North Dakota secretary of state’s office, but Sandy McMerty, deputy secretary of state, said, “There is no requirement for us to check” on the accuracy of those filings.

“That’s clearly inadequate disclosure,” said Painter, the former White House ethics attorney.

Still, Armstrong and Burgum failed to meet North Dakota’s requirements. Armstrong did not list his ownership stake in several family companies in his 2016 disclosure as a state lawmaker. He did include those companies in his 2018 disclosure while running for Congress. Asked why the reports differed, Armstrong said: “I have no idea.”

Oil and gas infrastructure in Williams County, North Dakota (Kyle Martin for North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica)

Burgum, meanwhile, failed to disclose on his 2020 state financial report both his ownership stake in the Burgum Farm Partnership, which owns the mineral leases his family has, and his wife’s brokerage account. He disclosed the family partnership, but not the leases, in his 2016 report. He is not running for reelection.

In response to inquiries by the North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica, Burgum filed an amended version of the 2020 report with the secretary of state’s office in September. It now includes the family partnership and the brokerage account, but it does not mention his family’s mineral leases or individual stocks owned by his wife.

Nowatzki said the stocks are managed by Merrill Lynch and the investment account was “inadvertently omitted from previous statements of interest.”

Nowatzki pushed back, however, on any assertion the oil and gas leases should have been disclosed, arguing that that isn’t required of North Dakotans generally. “Tens of thousands of families and mineral owners have similar arrangements,” he said.

Painter said that the leases they held “absolutely” should have been disclosed.

The state’s Ethics Commission was supposed to help mitigate potential conflicts of interest. Created in 2019 as the result of a voter-initiated ballot measure to amend the constitution, three years later the commission instituted conflict-of-interest rules for the legislative and executive branches of government. The rules — which define a conflict of interest and spell out how potential conflicts should be disclosed and evaluated — have proven largely ineffective in part because conflicts are often not disclosed and there are no consequences in the rules for violations.

Rebecca Binstock, executive director of the Ethics Commission, said that body is planning to create new financial disclosure rules and will rectify the lack of what she called “meaningful enforcement.” The commission said last month it’s working with the secretary of state to draft proposed legislation to create a process for enforcing compliance with the state’s financial disclosure requirements.

In 2017, proposed legislation would have required that statements of interest be published online and available to the public for free. (The North Dakota Monitor paid $170 to obtain statements of interest for all candidates on the November ballot.) Ultimately, that effort failed, and the legislature voted only to commission a study of the issue. Armstrong voted against it. He told the North Dakota Monitor that the study was unnecessary because he thought the secretary of state’s office had agreed to publish the disclosures online without a legislative directive. That has not happened.

Armstrong, meanwhile, has campaigned on a promise to “promote and demand transparency.” Still, he said in an interview that he is opposed to increasing the transparency requirements for state legislators.

“Outside the pain in the ass of filing my financial disclosure, I don’t have a problem with doing it at the federal level, but you can’t force that on people here,” Armstrong said. “State legislators would never get it done that way.”

As we report on the energy industry in North Dakota, we want to hear from more of the people who know it best. Do you work for an oil or gas company? Are you a landowner who receives royalty payments? Do you have a personal story to share about deductions from royalty checks? All perspectives matter to us. Please get in touch with reporter Jacob Orledge at jorledge@northdakotamonitor.com.

by Doug Bock Clark and Heather Vogell

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.

An examination of a new election rule in Georgia passed by the state’s Republican-controlled election board suggests that local officials in just a handful of rural counties could exclude enough votes to affect the outcome of the presidential race.

The rule was backed by national groups allied with former President Donald Trump. It gives county boards the power to investigate irregularities and exclude entire precincts from the vote totals they certify. Supporters of the rule, most of whom are Republicans, say it’s necessary to root out fraud. Critics, most of whom are Democrats, say it can be used as a tool to disenfranchise select buckets of voters.

An analysis by ProPublica shows that counties wouldn’t have to toss out many precincts to tip the election if it’s as close as it was in 2020, when Trump lost Georgia by less than 12,000 votes. Based on tallies from that year, an advantage of about 8,000 Democratic votes could be at risk in just 12 precincts in three counties under the new rule, the analysis found. There are 159 counties in Georgia.

A judge is expected to decide soon whether the rule will stand.

The three counties — Spalding, Troup and Ware — voted for Trump in 2020. But each has small yet significant concentrations of Democratic votes clustered in specific precincts. All three also have local election boards that have become stacked in recent years with partisans who’ve voiced support for the false claim that Trump won the 2020 election or have cast doubt on the integrity of the election process.

In Spalding, about 40 miles south of Atlanta, a man who is now county election board chair had previously alerted Trump’s attorneys to what police later determined was false evidence of voter fraud. More recently, he has tweeted that President Joe Biden is a “pedophile,” made sexually degrading comments about Vice President Kamala Harris and, this August, accused a top state elections official of “gaslighting” for saying there was no evidence of fraud in 2020.

In Ware County, in the southeast corner of the state, the election board chair is tied to far-right groups and has called democracy “mob rule.” In Troup County, which borders Alabama, the election board chair maintains that debunked “statistical anomalies” in the 2020 vote still haven’t been explained.

The legality of the rule was debated on Oct. 1 during back-to-back bench trials for two lawsuits. One was brought by the Democratic National Committee and others against the State Election Board, seeking to invalidate the rule. The other was brought by a Republican local board member against her county, the Democratic National Committee and others, seeking a judgment that she had the discretion not to certify election results.

During the trial, Judge Robert McBurney said to the lawyer representing the Republican board member, “You have very successfully pulled me down an intriguing rabbit hole about, well, maybe you could certify some of the votes, but not all of the votes.”

The boards’ new power is the culmination of ground-level efforts in Georgia that began the day Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election. After Trump lost — and after Georgia’s Republican secretary of state rebuffed his demand to “find” him the 11,780 votes he would have needed to win — GOP state legislators launched an effort to reshape county election boards, paving the way for removing Democrats and stacking them with Trump backers. Boards are supposed to administer elections in a nonpartisan manner, and some of these changes broke with the norm of having equal numbers of Republican and Democratic members, plus an independent chair to break ties.

The legislature also removed the secretary of state as head of the State Election Board and replaced members of the board — stacking it, too, with Trump partisans. At an August rally in Atlanta, Trump praised three of them by name, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory.” The three board members did not respond to requests for comment.

With the addition of its newest member, the state board was able to do in August what the previous iteration of it wouldn’t: Pass rules giving the county boards unprecedented power.

What’s more, the rule allowing county boards to exclude specific votes was secretly pushed by Julie Adams, a leader of a group central to challenging the legitimacy of the American election system. That group’s founder joined Trump on the call in 2020 during which he pressured the secretary of state to hand him victory.

Adams, a Fulton County election board member, was the plaintiff in one of the two lawsuits. She did not respond to requests for comment or a list of detailed questions.

The State Election Board and attorneys representing parties in both lawsuits did not comment.

A lawyer representing the Democratic National Committee referred ProPublica to the Harris-Walz campaign. “For months, MAGA Republicans in Georgia and across the country have been trying to lay the groundwork to challenge the election results when they lose again in November,” deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks said in a statement. “A few unelected extremists can’t just decide not to count your vote.”

During one of the bench trials, Richard Lawson, a lawyer for Adams and the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank aligned with Trump, argued that county board members should have the authority to exclude entire precincts’ votes if they find something suspicious.

A lawyer for the Democratic National Committee, Daniel Volchok, warned that board members making “individual determinations about if a ballot is fraudulent or otherwise should not be counted” is “a recipe for chaos.”

“It is also a recipe for denying Georgians their right to vote.”

Spalding County has for years played a prominent role in Trump supporters’ efforts to challenge election results.

In 2020, Trump’s allies trying to overturn the election quickly realized that the weakest points in America’s election system are its thousands of counties, where the day-to-day work of running elections is done. Previously unreported emails and messages show that one of the first places they targeted was Spalding County.

In the days after the election, Ben Johnson, the owner of a tech company who in 2021 would become chair of the Spalding County election board, began tweeting repeatedly at a team of lawyers challenging the election results on behalf of Trump, including Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, a ProPublica review of his deleted but archived tweets found. Johnson also advocated on social media for overturning the election. The Daily Beast reported in 2022 on other Johnson tweets, including one suggesting that Wood investigate claims of election fraud in Spalding County.

About two weeks after the election, a hacker emailed Wood and others to say that that he and another operative were “on ground & ready for orders” near Spalding County, outlining in a series of attachments how they were seeking to acquire voting machine data to prove the election was stolen in Spalding and another Georgia county. (Wood previously told ProPublica, “I do not recall any such email” and that he did not give the hacker any orders, though he did say he recalled the hacker “leaving one night to travel to Georgia.” The hacker did not previously respond to requests for comment.)

Messages obtained by ProPublica show that about an hour later, the operative messaged the hacker: “Woot! We have a county committing to having us image” voting machine data.

The hacker and operative were able to help their allies access voter machine data elsewhere, which became a central pillar in a long-running conspiracy theory that voting machines were hacked. That theory was key to justifying attempts to overturn the 2020 election. In Spalding County, however, their plan fell apart after the secretary of state made clear in a memo that accessing such data would be illegal. “Our contact wants to give us access, but with that memo it makes it impossible,” the operative wrote, without “her getting in a lot of trouble.”

After Trump’s loss, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed a massive bill “to comprehensively revise elections” in response to “many electors concerned about allegations of rampant voter fraud.” And Republican state legislators began writing bills to revamp local election boards, one county at a time. Since 2021, the reorganizations of 15 boards have brought a wave of partisan Republicans, ProPublica found.

As a result of the 2021 reorganization in Spalding, the election board lost three Black Democrats. Three new white Republicans became the majority — including Johnson, who became chair.

In 2022, after news outlets reported that Johnson had supported the QAnon conspiracy theory on social media, he tweeted an open letter emphasizing that he “took an oath to serve in the interests of ALL eligible voters of Spalding County” and “There’s no room for politics in the conducting of Elections.”

Since then, Johnson has continued to share social media content questioning the integrity of Georgia’s elections.

Reached by phone, Johnson said, “I don’t want to talk to any liberal media” and “You’re going to spread lies.” He did not respond to a detailed list of questions subsequently sent to him.

The new rule says that if there are discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and the number of people recorded as having voted in a given precinct, “The Board shall investigate the discrepancy and no votes shall be counted from that precinct until the results of the investigation are presented to the Board.” If “any error” or “fraud is discovered, the Board shall determine a method to compute the votes justly.”

Minor discrepancies between the number of voters and ballots are not uncommon. For instance, ballots can become stuck in scanners, voters can begin filling out a ballot and then stop before submitting it, or election systems can be slow to update that a provisional ballot has been corrected.

In counties like Spalding, Ware and Troup — with Republican-leaning boards and at least a few Democratic-heavy precincts — the conservative majority has the power to determine how to “compute the votes justly.” At the trial and in court documents, Democratic lawyers argued this could mean not certifying Democratic votes, with one arguing in a brief that county board members “will attempt to delay, block, or manipulate certification according to their own political preferences” by invoking the rule “to challenge only certain types of ballots or returns from certain precincts as fraudulent.”

Democratic voters in many conservative rural counties are packed into a small number of precincts. In 2020, Spalding had five precincts with Democratic majorities, which provided about 3,300 more votes for Biden than Trump. Troup had five such precincts totaling about 3,000 such votes, and Ware had two such precincts totaling roughly another 1,600 votes.

Troup County removed two Black women and two men — all Democrats, one said — from its elections board when it restructured in 2021, shrinking the board from seven to five members.

“They definitely wanted us off the board,” said former member Lonnie Hollis, who is worried the new board will behave partisanly this election. She said Republican officials in Troup have connections to the state party.

The board’s new chair, William Stump, a local banker, said that he believes Troup got its vote totals right last presidential election but that “there were some fairly significant statistical anomalies” elsewhere in Georgia.

“It didn’t pass the smell test,” he said. Stump recently appeared at a GOP luncheon in LaGrange with State Election Board member Janelle King, whose ascension to the board cemented its MAGA majority and enabled the passage of the rules.

Stump said he was at the luncheon, where the GOP handed out Trump gear, to answer questions about the election process. “We don’t have, I don’t think, outwardly partisan folks on the board,” he said. “Everybody’s concern is to get the numbers right and get them out on time.”

When Ware County reconstituted its election board in 2023, it removed two Black members who were Democrats and installed Republican Danny Bartlett as chair. Bartlett, a retired teacher, served as executive director of the Okefenokee chapter of Citizens Defending Freedom, a Christian nationalist group the Southern Poverty Law Center calls “anti government” and “part of the antidemocratic hard-right movement.”

Bartlett also started a Facebook group in 2022 called Southeast Georgia Conservatives in Action that asks potential members. “Are you ready to take action against the assault upon our country?” Bartlett sought to raise money for the group through a raffle that offered as a grand prize a “Home Defense Package” that included $2,000 worth of guns, gear and a “Patriot Pantry 1-week Food Supply Ammo Can.”

Bartlett did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Carlos Nelson, Ware’s elections supervisor, said he opposed the board’s restructuring but said that Bartlett hasn’t gone along when conservative activists have demanded measures such as hand-counting ballots. “He has been a really good chair,” said Nelson, who is a Democrat. He said he didn’t know about Bartlett’s outside political affiliations but that they were “totally different from his participation on the board.”

Shawn Taylor, one of the Black board members who was removed, said she’s concerned that the new election leaders are too partisan and may try to sway the election results.

“These MAGA Republicans are putting things in place to try to steal the election,” she said, adding she did not think all Republicans supported those attempts. “I believe that it’s going to cause major conflict within a lot of these counties.”

The Ware County commission in July removed a new conservative election board member, Michael Hargrove, who had complained about the “Biden/Harris Crime Syndicate” on social media, after he entered a polling site’s restricted area during spring elections and got into a confrontation with a poll worker. Hargrove said in an email that he “had, as an Elections Board member, EVERY right to be in that location at that time. Any other issue related to that event is juvenile nonsense.”

His replacement, Vernon Chambless, is a local lawyer who told ProPublica that he believes Trump should have been declared the winner in 2020. “We’re going to make sure that everything’s kosher before we certify,” he said.

Alex Mierjeski, Amy Yurkanin, Mollie Simon, Mariam Elba, Kirsten Berg and Doris Burke contributed research.

by Brett Murphy

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

In late January, as the death toll in Gaza climbed to 25,000 and droves of Palestinians fled their razed cities in search of safety, Israel’s military asked for 3,000 more bombs from the American government. U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew, along with other top diplomats in the Jerusalem embassy, sent a cable to Washington urging State Department leaders to approve the sale, saying there was no potential the Israel Defense Forces would misuse the weapons.

The cable did not mention the Biden administration’s public concerns over the growing civilian casualties, nor did it address well-documented reports that Israel had dropped 2,000-pound bombs on crowded areas of Gaza weeks earlier, collapsing apartment buildings and killing hundreds of Palestinians, many of whom were children. Lew was aware of the issues. Officials say his own staff had repeatedly highlighted attacks where large numbers of civilians died. Homes of the embassy’s own Palestinian employees had been targeted by Israeli airstrikes.

Still, Lew and his senior leadership argued that Israel could be trusted with this new shipment of bombs, known as GBU-39s, which are smaller and more precise. Israel’s air force, they asserted, had a “decades-long proven track record” of avoiding killing civilians when using the American-made bomb and had “demonstrated an ability and willingness to employ it in [a] manner that minimizes collateral damage.”

While that request was pending, the Israelis proved those assertions wrong. In the months that followed, the Israeli military repeatedly dropped GBU-39s it already possessed on shelters and refugee camps that it said were being occupied by Hamas soldiers, killing scores of Palestinians. Then, in early August, the IDF bombed a school and mosque where civilians were sheltering. At least 93 died. Children’s bodies were so mutilated their parents had trouble identifying them.

Weapons analysts identified shrapnel from GBU-39 bombs among the rubble.

In the months before and since, an array of State Department officials urged that Israel be completely or partially cut off from weapons sales under laws that prohibit arming countries with a pattern or clear risk of violations. Top State Department political appointees repeatedly rejected those appeals. Government experts have for years unsuccessfully tried to withhold or place conditions on arms sales to Israel because of credible allegations that the country had violated Palestinians’ human rights using American-made weapons.

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Do you have information about how the U.S. arms foreign countries? Contact Brett Murphy on Signal at 508-523-5195 or by email at brett.murphy@propublica.org.

On Jan. 31, the day after the embassy delivered its assessment, Secretary of State Antony Blinken hosted an agency-wide town hall at an auditorium at the State Department headquarters where he fielded pointed questions from his subordinates about Gaza. He said the suffering of civilians was “absolutely gut wrenching and heartbreaking,” according to a transcript of the meeting.

“But it is a question of making judgments,” Blinken said of his agency’s efforts to minimize harm. “We started with the premise on October 7 that Israel had the right to defend itself, and more than the right to defend itself, the right to try to ensure that October 7 would never happen again.”

The embassy’s endorsement and Blinken’s statements reflect what many at the State Department have understood to be their mission for nearly a year. As one former official who served at the embassy put it, the unwritten policy was to “protect Israel from scrutiny” and facilitate the arms flow no matter how many human rights abuses are reported. “We can’t admit that’s a problem,” this former official said.

The embassy has even historically resisted accepting funds from the State Department’s Middle East bureau earmarked for investigating human rights issues throughout Israel because embassy leaders didn’t want to insinuate that Israel might have such problems, according to Mike Casey, a former U.S. diplomat in Jerusalem. “In most places our goal is to address human rights violations,” Casey added. “We don’t have that in Jerusalem.”

Last week, ProPublica detailed how the government’s two foremost authorities on humanitarian assistance — the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department’s refugees bureau — concluded in the spring that Israel had deliberately blocked deliveries of food and medicine into Gaza and that weapons sales should be halted. But Blinken rejected those findings as well and, weeks later, told Congress that the State Department had concluded that Israel was not blocking aid.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken (Evelyn Hockstein/Pool/AFP)

The episodes uncovered by ProPublica, which have not been previously detailed, offer an inside look at how and why the highest ranking policymakers in the U.S. government have continued to approve sales of American weapons to Israel in the face of a mounting civilian death toll and evidence of almost daily human rights abuses. This article draws from a trove of internal cables, email threads, memos, meeting minutes and other State Department records, as well as interviews with current and former officials throughout the agency, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The records and interviews also show that the pressure to keep the arms pipeline moving also comes from the U.S. military contractors who make the weapons. Lobbyists for those companies have routinely pressed lawmakers and State Department officials behind the scenes to approve shipments both to Israel and other controversial allies in the region, including Saudi Arabia. When one company executive pushed his former subordinate at the department for a valuable sale, the government official reminded him that strategizing over the deal might violate federal lobbying laws, emails show.

The Biden administration’s repeated willingness to give the IDF a pass has only emboldened the Israelis, experts told ProPublica. Today, as Israel and Iran trade blows, the risk of a regional war is as great as it has been in decades and the cost of that American failure has become more apparent, critics charge.

“The reaffirmation of impunity has come swiftly and unequivocally,” said Daniel Levy, who served in the Israeli military before holding various prominent positions as a government official and adviser throughout the ’90s. He later became one of the founders of the advocacy group J Street and president of the U.S./Middle East Project.

Levy said there is virtually no threat of accountability for Israel’s conduct in Gaza, only “a certainty of carte blanche.” Or, as another State Department official said, “If there’s never any consequences for doing it, then why stop doing it?”

The war in Gaza has waged for nearly a year without signs of abating. There are at least 41,000 Palestinians dead, by local estimates. Israel says its actions have been legal and legitimate, unlike those of Hamas, which killed more than 1,100 Israelis, mostly civilians, on Oct. 7 and continues to hold dozens of hostages.

The U.S. has been a stalwart ally of Israel for decades, with presidents of both parties praising the country as a beacon of democracy in a dangerous region filled with threats to American interests.

In response to detailed questions from ProPublica, a State Department spokesperson sent a statement saying that arms transfers to any country, including Israel, “are done so in a deliberative manner with appropriate input” from other agencies, State Department bureaus and embassies. “We expect any country that is a recipient of U.S. security articles,” he added, “use them in full compliance with international humanitarian law, and we have several ongoing processes to examine that compliance.”

The spokesperson also said Lew has been at the forefront of ensuring “that every possible measure is taken to minimize impacts on civilians” while working on a cease-fire deal to secure “the release of hostages, alleviate the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, and bring an end to the conflict.”

Israeli military leaders broadly defend their aerial campaign in Gaza as a “military necessity” to eradicate terrorists hiding among civilians. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also publicly pressured the Biden administration to hasten arms transfers. “Give us the tools and we’ll finish the job a lot faster,” he said in June.

ProPublica sent detailed questions to representatives of the Israeli government as well. A spokesperson said in a statement: “The article is biased and seeks to portray legitimate and routine contacts between Israel and the Embassy in Washington with State Department officials as improper. Its goal appears to be casting doubt on the security cooperation between two friendly nations and close allies.”

Weapons sales are a pillar of American foreign policy in the Middle East. Historically, the U.S. gives more money to Israel for weapons than it does to any other country. Israel spends most of those American tax dollars to buy weapons and equipment made by U.S. arms manufacturers.

While Israel has its own arms industry, the country relies heavily on American jets, bombs and other weapons in Gaza. Since October 2023, the U.S. has shipped more than 50,000 tons of weaponry, which the Israeli military says has been “crucial for sustaining the IDF’s operational capabilities during the ongoing war.” The air defenses that defend Israeli towns and cities — known as the Iron Dome — also depend largely on U.S. support.

There is little sign that either party is prepared to curtail U.S. weapons shipments. Vice President Kamala Harris has called for a cease-fire, lamented the death toll in Gaza and said she supported Palestinians’ right to self-determination as well as President Joe Biden’s decision to pause a shipment of 2,000 bombs in June. She has also echoed a refrain from previous administrations, pledging to “ensure Israel has the ability to defend itself.” Harris also said she had no intention of breaking with Biden’s Israel policy.

Republican nominee for president Donald Trump, who has described himself as the “best friend that Israel has ever had,” reportedly told donors that he supports Israel’s “war on terror” and promised to crush pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses. Trump was also recently a featured speaker at the Israeli-American Council’s summit, where he cast himself as the most pro-Israel choice in the coming election. “You have a big protector in me,” he told the crowd. “You don’t have a protector on the other side.”

People transport the body of a family member for burial following an Israeli strike on a school sheltering displaced Palestinians in Gaza City on Aug. 10 that killed more than 90 people. Shrapnel from GBU-39 bombs was identified among the rubble. (Omar al-Qattaa/AFP via Getty Images)

The United States first began selling significant amounts of weapons to Israel in the early 1970s. Until then, Israel had relied on an array of home-grown and international purchases, notably from France, while the Soviet Union armed Israel’s adversaries. Over the past half-century, no country in the world has received more American military assistance than Israel.

The U.S. gives the Israeli government about $3.8 billion every year and much more during wartime to help maintain its military edge in the region. Congress and the executive branch have imposed legal guardrails on how Israel and other countries can use the weapons they buy with U.S. money. The State Department must review and approve most of those large foreign military sales and is required to cut off a country if there is a pattern or clear risk of breaking international humanitarian law, like targeting civilians or blocking shipments of food to refugees. The department is also supposed to withhold U.S.-funded equipment and weapons from individual military units credibly accused of committing flagrant human rights violations, like torture.

Initially, a country makes a request and the local embassy, which is under the State Department’s jurisdiction, writes a cable called a “country team assessment” to judge the fitness of the nation asking for the weapons. This is just the beginning of a complex process, but it’s a crucial step because of the embassies’ local expertise.

Then, the bulk of that review is conducted by the State Department’s arms transfers section, known as the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, with input from other bureaus. For Israel and NATO allies, if the sale is worth at least $100 million for weapons or $25 million for equipment, Congress also gets final approval. If lawmakers try to block a sale, which is rare, the president can sidestep with a veto.

For years, Josh Paul, a career official in the State Department’s arms transfers bureau, reviewed arms sales to Israel and other countries in the Middle East. Over time, he became one of the agency’s most well-versed experts in arms sales.

Even before Israel’s retaliation for Oct. 7, he had been concerned with Israel’s conduct. On multiple occasions, he said, he believed the law required the government to withhold weapons transfers. In May 2021, he refused to approve a sale of fighter jets to the Israeli Air Force. “At a time the IAF are blowing up civilian apartment blocks in Gaza,” Paul wrote in an email, “I cannot clear on this case.” The following February, he wouldn’t sign off on another sale after Amnesty International published a report accusing Israeli authorities of apartheid.

In both cases, Paul later told ProPublica, his immediate superiors signed off on the sales over his objections.

“I have no expectation whatsoever of making any policy gains on this topic during this Administration,” he wrote at the time to a deputy assistant secretary.

During that same time period, Paul circulated a memo to some of the agency’s senior diplomats with recommendations to strengthen the arms sales review process, such as including input from human rights groups. Paul warned that the Biden administration’s new arms transfer policy — which prohibits weapons sales if it’s “more likely than not” the recipient will use them to intentionally attack civilian structures or commit other violations — would be “watered down” in practice.

“There is an inarguable significant risk of civilian harm in the sale of precision-guided munitions to Israel and Saudi Arabia,” the December 2021 memo said. The U.S. government has been historically unable to hold itself to its own standards, he wrote, “in the face of pressure from partners, industry, and perceived policy imperatives emerging from within the government itself.”

It does not appear that recommendations in the memo were implemented either. Paul resigned in protest over arms shipments to Israel last October, less than two weeks after the Hamas attack. It was the Biden administration’s first major public departure since the start of the war. By then, local authorities said Israeli military operations had killed at least 3,300 Palestinians in Gaza.

Internally, other experts began to worry the Israelis were violating human rights almost from the onset of the war as well. Middle East officials delivered at least six dissent memos to senior leaders criticizing the administration’s decision to continue arming Israel, according to those who had a role in drafting some of them. The content of several memos leaked to the media earlier this year. The agency says it welcomes input from the dissent channel and incorporates it into policymaking decisions.

In one previously unreported memo from November, a group of experts across multiple bureaus said they had not been consulted before several policy decisions about arms transfers immediately after Oct. 7 and that there was no effective vetting process in place to evaluate the repercussions of those sales.

That memo, too, seemed to have little impact. In the early stages of the war, State Department staff worked overtime, often after hours and through weekends, to process Israeli requests for more arms. Some in the agency have thought the efforts showed an inappropriate amount of attention on Israel.

The Israelis, however, felt different. In late December, just before Christmas, staff in the arms transfers bureau walked into their Washington, D.C., office and found something unusual waiting for them: cases of wine from a winery in the Negev Desert, along with personalized letters on each bottle.

The gifts were courtesy of the Israeli embassy.

Israeli wine sent to officials in the State Department’s arms transfers bureau in December (Obtained by ProPublica)

The State Department spokesperson said employees are allowed to accept gifts from foreign governments that fall below a certain dollar threshold. “To allege that any of their allegiances to the United States should be questioned is insulting,” he added. “The accusation that the Department of State is placing a disproportionate attention on Israel is inconsistent with the facts.”

The spokesperson for the Israeli government told ProPublica, “The embassy routinely sends individual bottles of wine (not cases) to many of its contacts to cordially mark the end of the year holidays.”

One month later, Lew delivered his endorsement of Israel’s request for the 3,000 precision GBU-39 bombs, which would be paid for with both U.S. and Israeli funds. Lew is a major figure in Democratic circles, having served in various administrations. He was President Barack Obama’s chief of staff and then became his treasury secretary. He has also been a top executive at Citigroup and a major private equity firm.

The U.S. defense attaché to Israel, Rear Adm. Frank Schlereth, signed off on the January cable as well. In addition to its assurances about the IDF, the memo cited the Israeli military’s close ties with the American military: Israeli air crews attend U.S. training schools to learn about collateral damage and use American-made computer systems to plan missions and “predict what effects their munitions will have on intended targets,” the officials wrote.

Portions of the January cable U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew sent to Washington urging the approval of an arms transfer (Obtained by ProPublica)

In the early stages of the war, Israel used American-made unguided “dumb” bombs, some likely weighing as much as 2,000 pounds, which many experts criticized as indiscriminate. But at the time of the embassy’s assessment, Amnesty International had documented evidence that the Israelis had also been dropping the GBU-39s, manufactured by Boeing to have a smaller blast radius, on civilians. Months before Oct. 7, a May 2023 attack left 10 civilians dead. Then, in a strike in early January this year, 18 civilians, including 10 children, were killed. Amnesty International investigators found GBU-39 fragments at both sites. (Boeing declined to comment and referred ProPublica to the government.)

At the time, State Department experts were also cataloging the effect the war has had on American credibility throughout the region. Hala Rharrit, a career diplomat based in the Middle East, was required to send daily reports analyzing Arab media coverage to the agency’s senior leaders. Her emails described the collateral damage from airstrikes in Gaza, often including graphic images of dead and wounded Palestinians alongside U.S. bomb fragments in the rubble.

“Arab media continues to share countless images and videos documenting mass killings and hunger, while affirming that Israel is committing war crimes and genocide and needs to be held accountable,” she reported in one early January email alongside a photograph of a dead toddler. “These images and videos of carnage, particularly of children getting repeatedly injured and killed, are traumatizing and angering the Arab world in unprecedented ways.”

Portions of two email snapshots that senior leaders received early in the war (Obtained, highlighted and pixelated by ProPublica)

Rharrit, who later resigned in protest, told ProPublica those images alone should have prompted U.S. government investigations and factored into arms requests from the Israelis. She said the State Department has “willfully violated the laws” by failing to act on the information she and others had documented. “They can’t say they didn’t know,” Rharrit added.

Rharrit said her superiors eventually told her to stop sending the daily reports. (The State Department spokesperson said the agency is still incorporating perspectives from Arab media in regular internal analyses.)

Lew’s January cable makes no mention of the death toll in Gaza or the incidents of the Israelis dropping GBU-39s on civilians. Eight current and former State Department officials with expertise in human rights, the Middle East or arms transfers said the embassy’s assessment was an inadequate but not a surprising distillation of the administration’s position. “It’s an exercise in checking the boxes,” said Charles Blaha, a former human rights director at the agency.

The State Department declined to comment on the status of that request other than to say the U.S. has provided large amounts of GBU-39s to Israel multiple times in past years.

While the U.S. hoped that the smaller bombs would prevent unnecessary deaths, experts in the laws of war say the size of the bomb doesn't matter if it kills more civilians than the military target justifies. Lt. Col. Rachel E. VanLandingham, a retired officer with the Air Force’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps, said the IDF is legally responsible for doing all it can to know the risk to civilians ahead of any given strike and to avoid indiscriminately bombing densely populated areas like refugee camps and shelters. “It seems extremely plausible that they just disregarded the risk,” VanLandingham added. “It raises serious concerns and indicators of violating the law of war.”

Officials at the embassy in Jerusalem and in Washington said that similar concerns have been repeatedly brought to Lew, but his instincts were to defend Israel. In a separate cable obtained by ProPublica, he told Blinken and other leaders in Washington that “Israel is a trustworthy defense articles recipient” and his country team assessments ahead of past weapons sales have found that Israel’s “human rights record justifies the sale.”

Lew went even further and said the IDF’s system for choosing targets is so “sophisticated and comprehensive” that, by defense attaché Schlereth’s estimation, it “meets and often exceeds our own standard,” according to the cable. Two State Department officials told ProPublica that Lew and Schlereth have made similar statements during internal meetings. (The Navy did not make Schlereth available for an interview or respond to a list of questions.)

Early in the war, diplomats at the embassy also reported that Israel had dropped bombs on the homes of some of the embassy’s own staff, in addition to numerous other incidents involving civilians.

As to why Lew’s cables failed to reflect that kind of information, one official said, “My most charitable explanation is that they may not have had the time or inclination to critically assess the Israelis’ answers.”

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew (Ahmad Gharabli/AFP via Getty Images)

In Israel’s New York consulate, weapons procurement officers occupy two floors, processing hundreds of sales each year. One former Israeli officer who worked there said he tried to purchase as many weapons as possible while his American counterparts tried just as hard to sell them. "It’s a business,” he said.

Behind the scenes, if government officials take too long to process a sale, lobbyists for powerful corporations have stepped in to apply pressure and move the deal along, ProPublica found.

Some of those lobbyists formerly held powerful positions as regulators in the State Department. In recent years, at least six high-ranking officials in the agency’s arms transfers bureau left their posts and joined lobbying firms and military contractors. Jessica Lewis, the assistant secretary of the bureau, resigned in July and took a job at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck. The company is the largest lobbying firm in Washington, by lobbying revenue, and has represented the defense industry and countries including Saudi Arabia. (Lewis and the firm did not respond to requests for comment.)

Paul Kelly, who was the top congressional affairs official at the State Department between 2001 and 2005, during the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, said he regularly “got leaned on” by the private sector to push sales to lawmakers for final approval. “They wouldn’t bribe or threaten me, but they would say … ‘When are you going to sign off on it and get it up to the Hill?’” he told ProPublica.

Three other State Department officials who currently or recently worked on military assistance said little has changed since then and companies that profit from the wars in Gaza and Ukraine frequently call or email. (The agency spokesperson told ProPublica that arms transfers are “not influenced by a particular company.”) The pressure also reaches lawmakers’ offices once they are notified of impending sales. Those measures include frequent phone calls and regular daytime meetings, according to an official familiar with the communications.

In some cases, the efforts appear to have drifted into questionable legal territory. In 2017, the Trump administration signed a $350 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia, an extension of Obama’s former policy before he suspended some sales because of humanitarian concerns. For years, the Saudis and their allies used American-made jets and bombs to attack Houthi militant targets in Yemen, killing thousands of civilians in the process.

The following February, the State Department was weighing whether to approve a sale of precision-guided missiles produced by Raytheon to Saudi Arabia. A vice president at the company named Tom Kelly — the former principal deputy assistant secretary of the State Department’s arms transfers bureau — emailed a former subordinate, Josh Paul. Kelly asked to set up a meeting with Paul and a colleague at the company to “talk through strategy” on pushing the sale through, according to an email of the exchange.

Paul wrote back that such a meeting could be illegal. “As you’ll recall from your time here, we’re restricted by the Anti-Lobbying Act from coordinating legislative strategies with outside groups,” he said. “However, I think the potential bumps in the road are relatively obvious.” Those bumps were a reference to recent media articles about mass civilian casualty incidents in Yemen.

“No worries,” Kelly responded. “I’m sure I’ll see you around.”

Kelly and Raytheon did not reply to requests for comment.

The State Department ultimately signed off on the sale.

Mariam Elba contributed research.

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

This story was produced in partnership with The Oregonian/OregonLive. 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.

Nike, the world’s largest athletic apparel brand, has moved to hinder public scrutiny of its corporate jets after ProPublica and The Oregonian/OregonLive highlighted executives’ travel destinations. In doing so, it became the latest participant in a cat-and-mouse game of jet owners seeking to cloak their movements around the globe.

A month after the story’s publication, Nike’s two Gulfstream G650ER jets were no longer visible on the flight tracking website FlightAware. Both were added to the Federal Aviation Administration’s Limiting Aircraft Data Displayed list, consisting of planes that sites like FlightAware are not allowed to show. Placement on the list makes it harder — but not impossible — to see where the planes are going.

We reported that Nike’s private jets last year emitted almost 20% more carbon dioxide than they did in 2015, which the company uses as a baseline for its climate goals. The planes are one small reason Nike and its supply chain produced roughly as much carbon dioxide in 2023 as in 2015, despite the company’s voluntary commitment to sharply reduce emissions.

The website LADDlist.com first detected the block on one of the jets on Aug. 27, just two weeks after the article was published and days after flight records show the aircraft returning from a 10-day trip to Cape Cod, Massachusetts, where company executive chairperson Mark Parker owns a home. It’s unclear from LADDlist when the other jet was blocked, but it was visible on FlightAware as of Aug. 13.

A spokesperson for the FAA would not confirm the timing for either jet’s placement on the list, and Nike did not respond to questions. The jets are still trackable via a different data source that ProPublica and The Oregonian/OregonLive used in their reporting.

Plane travel has been considered public information because taxpayers help fund the air traffic control system governing the common space, said Chuck Collins of the progressive Institute for Policy Studies.

Collins, who has studied the FAA’s secrecy programs, called Nike’s move an effort to avoid accountability. He said it amounts to Nike saying: “‘We don’t want ProPublica to bother us. We don’t want to show up in the newspaper.’”

A precursor to the LADD list, which contained the names of 1,100 jet owners who wanted their travel hidden, was private until ProPublica fought in court to obtain it from the FAA. After the news organization reported on the program’s participants in 2010, the FAA said it would require plane owners to demonstrate a valid safety concern to block tracking. But, under pressure from Congress and from lobbying groups for pilots and plane owners, the FAA soon dropped the requirement.

The list of blocked tail numbers has since exploded. It now encompasses 52,000 planes, or 24% of all registered aircraft in the nation, according to FAA records obtained in January by the Institute for Policy Studies.

The National Business Aviation Association, which represents corporate jet owners, cited privacy as a key reason for the program’s existence. “People shouldn’t be required to surrender their right to privacy, safety and security from corporate espionage just because they board an aircraft,” association spokesperson Dan Hubbard said.

Passenger manifests are not public.

A variety of celebrities have protested the disclosure of their jet travel by people and groups bringing attention to their carbon emissions. After a college student posted the whereabouts of Elon Musk’s jets on X, the social media platform Musk owns, Musk tried to buy the account, then suspended the student temporarily.

Nike executives’ travel remains visible through other means, thanks to a transponder technology known as automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast, or ADS-B, which was implemented as part of an FAA move to a more precise, next-generation air traffic control system. ProPublica and The Oregonian/OregonLive used transponder records from a site called ADS-B Exchange to track flights by Nike’s jets.

Some of the news organizations’ reporting focused on the travels of CEO John Donahoe, a former Silicon Valley tech executive who maintained a home in the Bay Area after starting at Nike. Airports near his home became a magnet for Nike’s jets during his tenure.

The morning after former Nike executive Elliott Hill was named as Donahoe’s replacement on Sept. 19, a Nike jet’s transponder reported the plane departing from the Portland area, records show.

With a moving van posted outside Donahoe’s downtown Portland condominium building, the jet climbed to a cruising altitude of 41,000 feet, landing in San Jose, California, less than 24 hours after Donahoe’s exit was announced.

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.

Former President Donald Trump’s media company has forced out executives in recent days after internal allegations that its CEO, former Rep. Devin Nunes, is mismanaging the company, according to interviews and records of communications among former employees.

Several people involved with Trump Media believe the ousters are retaliation following what they describe as an anonymous “whistleblower” complaint regarding Nunes that went to the company’s board of directors.

The chief operating officer and chief product officer have left the company, along with at least two lower-level staffers, according to interviews, social media posts and communications between former staffers reviewed by ProPublica. The company, which runs the social media platform Truth Social, disclosed the departure of the chief operating officer in a securities filing Thursday afternoon.

ProPublica has not seen the whistleblower complaint. But several people with knowledge of the company said the concerns revolve around alleged mismanagement by Nunes. One person said they include allegations of misuse of funds, hiring of foreign contractors and interfering with product development.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Trump Media did not answer specific questions but said that ProPublica’s inquiry to the company “utterly fabricates implications of improper and even illegal conduct that have no basis in reality.”

“This story is the fifth consecutive piece in an increasingly absurd campaign by ProPublica, likely at the behest of political interest groups, to damage TMTG based on false and defamatory allegations and vague innuendo,” the statement said, adding that “TMTG strictly adheres to all laws and applicable regulations.”

Trump Media’s board comprises a set of powerful figures in Trump’s world, including his son Donald Trump Jr., former U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and the businesswoman Linda McMahon, a major donor and current co-chair of Trump’s transition planning committee.

Nunes was named CEO of the company in 2021, with Trump hailing him as “a fighter and a leader” who “will make an excellent CEO.” As a member of Congress, Nunes was known as one of Trump’s staunchest loyalists.

After the internal allegations about Nunes were made at Trump Media, the company enlisted a lawyer to investigate and interview staffers, according to a person with knowledge of the company.

Then, last week, some employees who were interviewed by the lawyer were notified they were being pushed out, the person said. The employees being pushed out include a human relations director and a product designer, along with Chief Operating Officer Andrew Northwall and Chief Product Officer Sandro De Moraes. The person with knowledge of the company said Trump Media asked the employees to sign an agreement pledging not to make public claims of wrongdoing against the company in exchange for severance.

On Thursday afternoon, Northwall posted on Truth Social announcing he had “decided to resign from my role at Trump Media,” adding that he was “incredibly grateful” to Trump and Nunes “for this opportunity.”

“As I step back, I look forward to focusing more on my family and returning to my entrepreneurial journey,” the statement said.

De Moraes now identifies himself on his Truth Social bio as the “Former Chief Product Officer” of the company.

Some word of the departures became public earlier this week when former Trump Media employee Alex Gleason said in a social media post that “Truth Social in shambles. Many more people fired.”

Trump personally owns nearly 60% of the company. That stake, even after a recent decline in the company’s stock price, is worth nearly $2 billion on paper, a significant chunk of Trump’s fortune. He said last month he was not planning to sell his shares. What role Trump plays, if any, in the day-to-day operations of the company is not clear.

Since it launched in 2021, the company has become a speculation-fueled meme stock, but its actual business has generated virtually no revenue and Truth Social has not emerged as a serious competitor to the major social media platforms.

Among Nunes’ moves as CEO, as ProPublica has reported, was inking a large streaming TV deal with several obscure firms, including one controlled by a major political donor. He also traveled to the Balkans over the summer and met with the prime minister of North Macedonia, a trip whose purpose was never publicly explained by the company.

Trump Media has a formal whistleblower policy, adopted when the company went public in March, that encourages employees to report illegal activity and other “business conduct that damages the Company’s good name” and business interests.

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 Alexandra Zayas

More than a dozen ProPublica journalists are working across the country to cover reproductive health in the wake of abortion bans. We hope to hear from medical providers, families and policymakers. We asked Deputy Managing Editor Alexandra Zayas to explain our reporting process and the ethics that guide it.

It’s clear by now that state abortion bans are having a seismic impact on health care. They are, as intended, preventing doctors from terminating pregnancies. But they are also introducing a dangerous new dynamic for anyone who happens to conceive.

If you have a story to share or expertise to volunteer, you can get in touch with the whole team, including editors, by:

• Email
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• Signal

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Doctors have told us they’ve seen their colleagues hesitate to treat deadly conditions like preeclampsia and cancer, worried their attempts to protect their pregnant patients could be interpreted as a crime against the fetus, punishable by prison time.

Defenders of abortion bans insist that those doctors are being misled or confused, and that so-called “life-of-the-mother” exceptions are clear. But even a Republican lawmaker who voted for his state’s ban, a doctor himself, told ProPublica he thinks the language is too vague.

Indeed, the death of Amber Thurman raises critical questions about the role abortion bans are playing in the decisions of doctors in emergency situations. Suffering from a grave infection, the 28-year-old medical assistant and single mother needed a procedure that had been criminalized in Georgia, with few exceptions. As her condition deteriorated in a suburban Atlanta hospital, doctors discussed performing it, but they did not do so until 20 hours after she had arrived; by then, it was too late. A state committee of maternal health experts, including 10 doctors, deemed her death preventable and blamed a delay in care.

The more cases like these we examine, the more we can do to expose the cracks through which women are falling.

ProPublica has a long, successful track record of exploring the causes of maternal harm. Seven years ago, we dedicated a significant portion of our staff to investigating why so many women in the United States were dying from causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. We dug past academic research and hospital data to explore individual, preventable deaths. What specific, fixable flaws in the system had cost us Lauren Bloomstein, and Shalon Irving, and Dacheca Fleurimond? What had left their babies motherless?

Each loss was a tragedy. But when the people closest to those mothers shared what they knew, they also unearthed lessons for how to save the next life, illuminating the causes and consequences of maternal mortality in a way nothing else had. ProPublica’s reporting on the “Lost Mothers” had a tremendous impact, including a landmark new law funding the study of maternal deaths and how to prevent them.

Our reporting so far suggests state abortion bans are having unintended, lethal consequences. If there are more cases out there, only the people closest to the families know the most critical details. This is why we’ve again devoted a significant portion of our newsroom to examining preventable maternal deaths — and it’s why we need your help to unearth them, so that those with the power to change systems can learn from them.

If you happen to be aware of a case in which you suspect abortion-related laws played a role, we understand why you may be hesitant to tell us about it. This is why we want to tell you more about our reporting process and the ethics that guide it.

We are nonpartisan.

We are a nonprofit, independent newsroom and have no partisan agenda in exposing these deaths. While we are bringing necessary scrutiny to the Republican state governments that passed these bans, we are also questioning what more the Biden administration can do to assess and mitigate their consequences.

Ahead of a heated election in which abortion is on the ballot in 10 states — and on the lips of presidential candidates — we want voters to know everything they can about the impact state bans are having on the safety of anyone who can conceive.

We rely on and protect anonymous sources.

Only because of the courage of ProPublica’s anonymous sources does the public know the extent of the horror of child separation at the U.S.-Mexico border, and the intertwined interests of billionaire donors and Supreme Court justices, and the preventable nature of the abortion-related deaths we exposed in Georgia.

We have secure ways to speak to us and send us documents. We honor agreements to not name sources in our stories. We do not rely on any single source for reporting; we independently and carefully confirm and corroborate evidence.

We help families find answers.

We can help families get medical records and then consult with experts about them. We take our findings and go to hospitals, clinics and doctors and press them for answers. We work hard to check every fact and to keep families updated on our progress.

We want to know not just about the last moments of a person’s life, but the entirety of it, to help the public understand the magnitude of the loss and how to avoid another. We can travel and meet with families face-to-face, at the time, place and pace that feels most comfortable to them. We recognize the loss of control families already feel and work hard to not add to that.

When reporter Kavitha Surana first began talking with Thurman’s family members, their grief was raw and intense, and they did not feel ready to grapple with their loss. It took a year before they were finally ready to discuss her death.

“Hopefully her death won’t be in vain,” her sister Cjuana Williams told ProPublica.

We value expertise.

Recognizing that every one of these cases involves a unique set of very complex factors, we seek out independent experts to help us interpret and convey all of the details. We never rely on one source, and we subject our final stories to a rigorous editing process by journalists with decades of experience reporting on health care systems.

If you have a story to share or expertise to volunteer, you can get in touch with the whole team, including editors, at reproductivehealth@propublica.org. You can also leave us a voicemail at 917-512-0242.

If your tip is sensitive, consider sending us a secure message on Signal at 917-512-0242.

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by Richard A. Webster, Verite News

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Verite News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

In February, a prosecutor from a rural area outside Baton Rouge asked members of Louisiana’s Senate judiciary committee to imagine a frightening scene: You are home with your wife at 4 a.m. when suddenly a 17-year-old with a gun appears. The teenager won’t hesitate, District Attorney Tony Clayton said. “He will kill you and your wife.”

According to Clayton, teenagers were terrorizing the state without fear of consequences. The only way to stop them was to prosecute all 17-year-olds in adult court, regardless of the offense, and lock them up in prison. Law enforcement officials from around the state made similar arguments. Legislators quickly passed a bill that lowered the age at which the justice system must treat defendants as adults from 18 to 17.

But according to a review of arrests in the five months since the law took effect, most of the 17-year-olds booked in three of the state’s largest parishes have not been accused of violent crimes. Verite News and ProPublica identified 203 17-year-olds who were arrested in Orleans, Jefferson and East Baton Rouge parishes between April and September. A total of 141, or 69%, were arrested for offenses that are not listed as violent crimes in Louisiana law, according to our analysis of jail rosters, court records and district attorney data.

Just 13% of the defendants — a little over two dozen — have been accused of the sort of violent crimes that lawmakers cited when arguing for the legislation, such as rape, armed robbery and murder. Prosecutors were able to move such cases to adult court even before the law was changed.

The larger group of lesser offenses includes damaging property, trespassing, theft under $1,000, disturbing the peace, marijuana possession, illegal carrying of weapons and burglary. They also include offenses that involve the use of force, such as simple battery, but those are not listed in state law as violent crimes either, and they can be prosecuted as misdemeanors depending on the circumstances.

In one case in New Orleans, a boy took a car belonging to his mother’s boyfriend without permission so he could check out flooding during Hurricane Francine last month, according to a police report. When the teen returned the car, the front bumper was damaged. The boyfriend called police and the teen was arrested for unauthorized use of a vehicle. In another case, a boy was charged with battery after he got into a fight with his brother about missing a school bus.

In July, a 17-year-old girl was charged with resisting arrest and interfering with a law enforcement investigation. She had shoved a police officer as he was taking her older sister into custody for a minor charge resulting from a fight with another girl. None of those defendants have had an opportunity to enter a plea so far; convictions could result in jail or prison time of up to two years.

In juvenile court, teenagers facing charges such as these could be sentenced to a detention facility, but the juvenile system is mandated to focus on rehabilitation and sentences are generally shorter than in adult court, juvenile justice advocates said. And in the juvenile system, only arrests for violent crimes and repeat offenses are public record. But because these 17-year-olds are in the adult system, they all have public arrest records that can prevent them from getting jobs or housing.

Rachel Gassert, the former policy director for the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights, said there was one word to describe what she felt when Verite News and ProPublica shared their findings: “Despair.”

Eight years ago, Gassert and other criminal justice advocates convinced lawmakers to raise the age for adult prosecution from 17 to 18 years old, pointing to research that shows that the human brain does not fully develop until early adulthood and that youth are more likely to reoffend when they are prosecuted as adults. The law enacted this spring was the culmination of a two-year effort to reverse that.

“The whole push to repeal Raise the Age was entirely political and all about throwing children under the bus,” Gassert said. “And now we are seeing the tire treads on their backs.”

Gov. Jeff Landry’s office, Clayton and state Sen. Heather Cloud, R-Turkey Creek, who sponsored the bill to roll back Raise the Age, did not respond to requests for comment. The Louisiana District Attorneys Association, which supported the bill, declined to comment.

The whole push to repeal Raise the Age was entirely political and all about throwing children under the bus. And now we are seeing the tire treads on their backs.

—Rachel Gassert, former policy director at the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights

Louisiana is the only state to have passed and then fully reversed Raise the Age legislation. It’s one of four states, along with Georgia, Texas and Wisconsin, that automatically prosecute all 17-year-olds as adults. In other states, 17-year-olds can be prosecuted as adults only in special circumstances, such as when they are charged with a serious, violent crime like murder.

Landry and his Republican allies argued that Raise the Age and other liberal policies were responsible for a pandemic-era uptick in violent offenses committed by juveniles in Louisiana. They said juvenile courts, where a sentence can’t extend past a defendant’s 21st birthday, are too lenient.

Juvenile justice advocates argued that the law would cause teenagers to be prosecuted as adults for behaviors that are typical for immature adolescents. These 17-year-olds would face long-lasting consequences, including arrest records and prison time. And the harm would fall largely on Black children. Nearly 9 out of every 10 of the 17-year-olds arrested in Orleans and East Baton Rouge parishes are Black, Verite News and ProPublica found. (A similar figure couldn’t be calculated for Jefferson Parish because some court records weren’t available.)

Opponents of the law also pointed out that the data didn’t show a link between enacting the Raise the Age legislation and a surge in violent crime. In 2022, when then-Attorney General Landry and others first tried to repeal the law, crime data analyst Jeff Asher said in a legislative hearing that Louisiana’s increase in homicides during the pandemic was part of a national trend that began before Raise the Age was passed.

“It happened in red states. It happened in blue states. It happened in big cities, small towns, suburbs, metro parishes,” Asher told lawmakers. Starting in 2023, data has shown a significant drop in homicides in Louisiana and nationwide.

Conservative lawmakers dismissed Asher’s numbers and instead cited horrific crimes committed by teenagers, such as the brutal killing of 73-year-old Linda Frickey amid a surge in carjackings in New Orleans in 2022. In that incident, four teenagers between 15 and 17 years old stole Frickey’s SUV in broad daylight. One of them kicked, punched and pepper-sprayed her as he pulled her out of the vehicle, according to court testimony. Frickey, who had become tangled in her seat belt, was dragged alongside the vehicle. Landry argued that teenagers who commit such heinous crimes must be punished as adults.

Opponents said the Frickey case instead showed why the law wasn’t needed: District attorneys in Louisiana have long had the discretion to move cases involving the most serious crimes out of juvenile court, which is what Orleans Parish District Attorney Jason Williams did. Three girls who took part in the carjacking pleaded guilty to manslaughter and were each sentenced to 20 years in prison; the 17-year-old who attacked Frickey and drove her car was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.

After the attempt to repeal the Raise the Age law failed in 2022, lawmakers passed a bill in 2023. It was vetoed by Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards. “Housing seventeen year olds with adults is dangerous and reckless,” Edwards said in a written statement at the time. “They often come out as seasoned criminals after being victimized.”

This year, with Landry in lockstep with the Republican supermajority in the Legislature, the law sailed through. For Landry, who was elected on an anti-crime platform, the law’s passage fulfilled a campaign pledge. When the law took effect, he declared, “No more will 17-year-olds who commit home invasions, carjack, and rob the great people of our State be treated as children in court.”

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry speaks before lawmakers in Baton Rouge. (Michael Johnson/The Advocate via AP)

Now these teenagers are treated as adults from arrest to sentencing. In New Orleans, that means that when a 17-year-old is arrested, police no longer alert their parents, a step that department policy requires for juveniles, according to a department spokesperson. It’s not clear if law enforcement agencies elsewhere in the state have made a similar change.

All 17-year-olds arrested in New Orleans are now booked into the Orleans Parish jail, where those charged with crimes not classified as violent have spent up to 15 days before being released pending trial. Though the jail separates teens from adults, it has been under a court-ordered reform plan since 2013 after the Department of Justice found routine use of excessive force by guards and rampant inmate-on-inmate violence. Federal monitors said in May that violence remains a significant problem, although they acknowledged conditions have improved somewhat. The sheriff has agreed with this assessment, blaming understaffing.

Most of the cases involving 17-year-olds in Orleans, Jefferson and East Baton Rouge parishes are pending, according to court records and officials in those offices. Several defendants have pleaded guilty. Prosecutors have declined to file charges in a handful of cases. Many defendants are first-time offenders who should be eligible for diversion programs in which charges will eventually be dropped if they abide by conditions set by the court, according to officials with the Orleans and Jefferson Parish district attorneys.

None of the DAs in Orleans, Jefferson or East Baton Rouge parishes took a position on the law, according to officials in those offices and news reports. Williams, the Orleans Parish DA, responded to Verite News and ProPublica’s findings by saying his office is holding “violent offenders accountable” while providing alternatives to prison for those teenagers “willing to heed discipline and make a real course correction.”

Margaret Hay, first assistant district attorney with Jefferson Parish, declined to comment on Verite and ProPublica’s findings except to say, “We’re constitutionally mandated to uphold and enforce the laws of the state of Louisiana.” East Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore declined to comment.

Having a felony arrest or conviction on your record is like wearing a heavy yoke around your neck.

—Aaron Clark-Rizzio, legal director at the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights

Even those who avoid prison face the long-term consequences of going through the adult court system. Background checks can reveal arrests and convictions, which could prevent them from obtaining a job, housing, professional licenses, loans, government assistance such as student aid or food stamps, or custody of their children.

“Having a felony arrest or conviction on your record,” said Aaron Clark-Rizzio, legal director for the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights, “is like wearing a heavy yoke around your neck.”

Marsha Levick, chief legal officer with the Juvenile Law Center, a nonprofit law firm based in Philadelphia, said that what’s happening in Louisiana reminds her of the late 1990s, when states toughened punishments for juveniles after a noted criminologist warned of a generation of “super predators.” That theory was eventually debunked — but not before tens of thousands of children had been locked up and saddled with criminal records.

Mariam Elba contributed reporting and Jeff Frankl contributed research.

Do you have a story to share regarding a 17-year-old facing criminal charges in Louisiana? Contact Richard Webster at Rwebster@veritenews.org.

by Ziva Branstetter

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

Women in Georgia can once again legally obtain abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, following a judge’s strongly worded order this week tossing the state’s ban. While Gov. Brian Kemp spoke out against the decision and Georgia’s attorney general quickly appealed it, providers told ProPublica they have immediately resumed offering such care.

Planned Parenthood’s four clinics in Georgia are fielding an influx of calls from within the state and those around it where most abortions remain banned, said Jaylen Black, vice president of marketing and communications for the organization’s Southeast region. Workers are also calling patients they have previously had to turn away. “We’ve been able to get them rescheduled,” Black said.

The new, if temporary, access is the latest in a wave of developments in the two weeks since ProPublica told the stories of Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, Georgia women who died after they couldn’t access legal abortions and timely medical care in their state. A committee of maternal health experts, including 10 doctors, deemed their deaths “preventable,” shifting the discussion about such outcomes from hypothetical to a new American reality.

“This isn’t something that the state will easily be able to sweep under the rug,” said Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit challenging the ban. “It is now a national issue.”

Watch video ➜

The women’s stories reverberated through the U.S. Senate, the vice presidential debate and a demonstration outside the Georgia Capitol. Vice President Kamala Harris spoke to one of their families alongside Oprah Winfrey, then traveled to Atlanta to give a speech about them. “Now we know that at least two women — and those are only the stories we know — here in the state of Georgia died — died because of a Trump abortion ban,” she told the crowd. Before launching into the details of the first, she led the crowd in a chant to “speak her name: Amber Nicole Thurman, Amber Nicole Thurman, Amber Nicole Thurman.”

Thurman died on Aug. 19, 2022, one month after Georgia’s law went into effect banning abortion before many women know they’re even pregnant. Thurman had traveled to North Carolina, where she obtained abortion medication, and had not fully expelled the fetal tissue.

She sought care for the rare complication at a suburban Atlanta hospital, where she was diagnosed with sepsis, a life-threatening infection. As her condition deteriorated, doctors discussed a procedure to empty the uterus called a dilation and curettage, or D&C; the state had recently attached criminal penalties to performing it, with few exceptions. It took 20 hours after Thurman’s arrival for doctors to do so, according to records reviewed by ProPublica. It came too late.

Miller, who died Nov. 12, 2022, had lupus, diabetes and hypertension, and doctors warned another pregnancy could kill her. She ordered abortion pills online, but she also did not expel all the fetal tissue and needed a D&C. Her family later told a coroner she hadn’t visited a doctor “due to the current legislation on pregnancies and abortions.” Her children watched her suffer in bed for days, moaning in pain. She ultimately took a lethal combination of painkillers.

Georgia’s maternal mortality review committee, tasked with studying deaths of pregnant women and new mothers to recommend improvements in care, directly blamed the state’s abortion ban for Miller’s death, according to members who spoke to ProPublica on the condition of anonymity. The committee found that the hospital’s delay in performing the critical procedure on Thurman had a “large” impact on her “preventable” outcome. The hospital and doctors involved in her care have not explained the delay or commented on her case; an attorney hired by Thurman’s family said the hospital was within its legal rights to perform the procedure.

First image: Thurman and her son in a photo she posted on social media the year before her death. Second image: Miller with her husband, Alex Cardenas; son Christian; and daughter Turiya, whom she named after her sister. (Courtesy of Turiya Tomlin-Randall)

While defenders of the ban have said it includes an exception to save the life of the mother, doctors have told ProPublica that the language doesn’t account for the fast-moving realities of emergency medicine or the complexities of maternal health.

Though Miller’s underlying conditions would have made her pregnancy riskier as it progressed, that alone did not qualify her for an abortion. And once she and Thurman needed a D&C to clear the fetal tissue, neither of their cases appeared to clearly fit the language of the ban’s exception allowing doctors to perform it.

It allows doctors to remove “a dead unborn child” that resulted from a “spontaneous abortion” defined as “naturally occurring” from a miscarriage or a stillbirth. Thurman had told doctors her miscarriage was not spontaneous but the result of abortion pills. Most bans including Georgia’s also allow abortions “necessary in order to prevent the death of the pregnant woman or the substantial and irreversible physical impairment of a major bodily function.” There is no standard protocol for how providers should interpret such language, doctors have told ProPublica — or how far gone a patient needs to be to qualify.

Forty-one senators introduced a resolution inspired by ProPublica’s reporting that calls on hospitals in all states to provide emergency abortion care when their patients need it. Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregan Democrat who chairs the powerful Senate Finance Committee, has a pending request for information from the hospital that treated Thurman to determine whether doctors violated a federal law that requires them to provide emergency care. (The hospital has not responded to ProPublica’s requests seeking comment on those questions about its adherence to the law.)

And in Georgia on Monday, Fulton County Superior Judge Robert C. I. McBurney struck down key parts of the state’s ban criminalizing nearly all abortions after about six weeks.

“It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb,” McBurney’s ruling states.

“The Court finds that, until the pregnancy is viable, a woman’s right to make decisions about her body and her health remains private and protected, i.e., remains her business and her business alone. When someone other than the pregnant woman is able to sustain the fetus, then — and only then — should those other voices have a say in the discussion about the decisions the pregnant woman makes concerning her body and what is growing within it.”

In reversing the six-week ban, McBurney reverted to the state’s previous standard, which allowed abortion up until a fetus was deemed viable, at about the 22nd week of pregnancy.

Kemp, a Republican who said he was “overjoyed” when the ban first went into effect, said this week through a spokesperson: “Once again, the will of Georgians and their representatives has been overruled by the personal beliefs of one judge.”

Brittany Smith, program director for SisterSong, one of the plaintiffs in the case against the ban, attended Saturday’s vigil for Thurman and Miller. “I think a lot of people are not making the connection that abortion care is health care,” she said. “Abortion quite literally saves lives. All pregnancies are not safe, and all pregnancies should not be carried all the way to term.” (Nydia Blas for ProPublica)

The ruling marks the second time McBurney has blocked the state abortion ban.

In 2022, he issued a ruling that the law was unconstitutional when the state legislature passed it in 2019, frozen in the books until after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the federal constitutional right to abortion three years later. The state appealed, and its Supreme Court reinstated the ban until it could review McBurney’s ruling.

About a year later, with the ban still in place, the state Supreme Court rejected the argument, sending the case back to McBurney to consider the lawsuit’s underlying question: Whether the Georgia Constitution protects the right to privacy and, if so, if that right includes abortion. McBurney’s ruling Monday emphatically says it does.

While McBurney allowed abortions to resume in Georgia, the Supreme Court could, once again, stay the judge’s ruling until it takes up the case.

The last time it did so, the window of abortion access in Georgia lasted eight days.

The urgency and impermanence of this moment in Georgia was palpable in conversations with providers. “I think this type of moment definitely feels like a demand to provide a lot of care to as many people as possible,” said Kristen Baker, public affairs manager and lobbyist for the Feminist Women’s Health Center, which operates a clinic in Georgia.

Black said that Planned Parenthood staff is doing all it can — “for the time being” — to meet the demand and “getting people in our doors as soon as possible.”

Kavitha Surana contributed reporting. Mariam Elba and Cassandra Jaramillo contributed research.

by Caroline Chen

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

In 2018, Darryl Young was hoping for a new lease on life when he received a heart transplant at a New Jersey hospital after years of congestive heart failure. But he suffered brain damage during the procedure and never woke up.

The following year, a ProPublica investigation revealed that Young’s case was part of a pattern of heart transplants that had gone awry at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center in 2018. The spate of bad outcomes had pushed the center’s percentage of patients still alive one year after surgery — a key benchmark — below the national average. Medical staff were under pressure to boost that metric. ProPublica published audio recordings from meetings in which staff discussed the need to keep Young alive for a year, because they feared another hit to the program’s survival rate would attract scrutiny from regulators. On the recordings, the transplant program’s director, Dr. Mark Zucker, cautioned his team against offering Young’s family the option of switching from aggressive care to comfort care, in which no lifesaving efforts would be made. He acknowledged these actions were “very unethical.”

ProPublica’s revelations horrified Young’s sister Andrea Young, who said she was never given the full picture of her brother’s condition, as did the findings of a subsequent federal regulator’s probe that determined that the hospital was putting patients in “immediate jeopardy.” Last month, she filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against the hospital and members of her brother’s medical team.

The lawsuit alleges that Newark Beth Israel staff were “negligent and deviated from accepted standards of practice,” leading to Young’s tragic medical outcome.

Defendants in the lawsuit haven’t yet filed responses to the complaint in court documents. But spokesperson Linda Kamateh said in an email that “Newark Beth Israel Medical Center is one of the top heart transplant programs in the nation and we are committed to serving our patients with the highest quality of care. As this case is in active litigation, we are unable to provide further detail.” Zucker, who is no longer on staff at Newark Beth Israel, didn’t respond to requests for comment. His attorney also didn’t respond to calls and emails requesting comment.

Zucker also didn’t respond to requests for comment from ProPublica in 2018; Newark Beth Israel at the time said in a statement, made on behalf of Zucker and other staff, that “disclosures of select portions of lengthy and highly complex medical discussions, when taken out of context, may distort the intent of conversations.”

The lawsuit alleges that Young suffered brain damage as a result of severely low blood pressure during the transplant surgery. In 2019, when the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services scrutinized the heart transplant program following ProPublica’s investigation, the regulators found that the hospital had failed to implement corrective measures even after patients suffered, leading to further harm. For example, one patient’s kidneys failed after a transplant procedure in August 2018, and medical staff made recommendations internally to increase the frequency of blood pressure measurement during the procedure, according to the lawsuit. The lawsuit alleges that the hospital didn’t implement its own recommendations and that one month later, “these failures were repeated” in Young’s surgery, leading to brain damage.

The lawsuit also alleges that Young wasn’t asked whether he had an advance directive, such as a preference for a do-not-resuscitate order, despite a hospital policy stating that patients should be asked at the time of admission. The lawsuit also noted that CMS’ investigation found that Andrea Young was not informed of her brother’s condition.

Andrea Young said she understands that mistakes can happen during medical procedures, “however, it’s their duty and their responsibility to be honest and let the family know exactly what went wrong.” Young said she had to fight to find out what was going on with her brother, at one point going to the library and trying to study medical books so she could ask the right questions. “I remember as clear as if it were yesterday, being so desperate for answers,” she said.

Andrea Young said that she was motivated to file the lawsuit because she wants accountability. “Especially with the doctors never, from the outset, being forthcoming and truthful about the circumstances of my brother’s condition, not only is that wrong and unethical, but it took a lot away from our entire family,” she said. “The most important thing to me is that those responsible be held accountable.”

ProPublica’s revelation of “a facility putting its existence over that of a patient is a scary concept,” said attorney Jonathan Lomurro, who’s representing Andrea Young in this case with co-counsel Christian LoPiano. Besides seeking damages for Darryl Young’s children, “we want to call attention to this so it doesn’t happen again,” Lomurro said.

The lawsuit further alleges that medical staff at Newark Beth Israel invaded Young’s privacy and violated the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, more commonly known as HIPAA, by sharing details of his case with the media without his permission. “We want people to be whistleblowers and want information out,” but that information should be told to patients and their family members directly, Lomurro said.

Andrea Young, Darryl’s sister, is now suing the hospital for medical malpractice in her brother’s death. (Demetrius Freeman for ProPublica)

The 2019 CMS investigation determined that Newark Beth Israel’s program placed patients in “immediate jeopardy,” the most serious level of violation, and required the hospital to implement corrective plans. Newark Beth Israel did not agree with all of the regulator’s findings and in a statement at the time said that the CMS team lacked the “evidence, expertise and experience” to assess and diagnose patient outcomes.

The hospital did carry out the corrective plans and continues to operate a heart transplant program today. The most recent federal data, based on procedures from January 2021 through June 2023, shows that the one year probability of survival for a patient at Newark Beth is lower than the national average. It also shows that the number of graft failures, including deaths, in that time period was higher than the expected number of deaths for the program.

Andrea Young said she’s struggled with a feeling of emptiness in the years after her brother’s surgery. They were close and called each other daily. “There’s nothing in the world that can bring my brother back, so the only solace I will have is for the ones responsible to be held accountable,” she said. Darryl Young died on Sept 12, 2022, having never woken up after the transplant surgery.

A separate medical malpractice lawsuit filed in 2020 by the wife of another Newark Beth Israel heart transplant patient who died after receiving an organ infected with a parasitic disease is ongoing. The hospital has denied the allegations in court filing. The state of New Jersey, employer of the pathologists named in the case, settled for $1.7 million this month, according to the plaintiff’s attorney Christian LoPiano. The rest of the case is ongoing.

by Abrahm Lustgarten

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When Hurricane Helene, the 420-mile-wide, slow-spinning conveyor belt of wind and water, drowned part of Florida’s coastline and then barged its path northward through North Carolina last week, it destroyed more than homes and bridges. It shook people’s faith in the safety of living in the South, where the tolls of extreme heat, storms and sea level rise are quickly adding up.

Helene was just the latest in a new generation of storms that are intensifying faster, and dumping more rainfall, as the climate warms. It is also precisely the kind of event that is expected to drive more Americans to relocate as climate change gets worse and the costs of disaster recovery increase.

Researchers now estimate tens of millions of Americans may ultimately move away from extreme heat and drought, storms and wildfires. While many Americans are still moving into areas considered high risk, lured by air conditioning and sunny weather, the economic and physical vulnerabilities they face are becoming more apparent.

One study by the First Street Foundation, a research firm that studies climate threats to housing, found that roughly 3.2 million Americans have already migrated, many over short distances, out of flood zones, such as low-lying parts of Staten Island, Miami and Galveston, Texas. Over the next 30 years, 7.5 million more are projected to leave those perennially flooded zones, according to the study.

All of this suggests a possible boom for inland and Northern cities. But it also will leave behind large swaths of coastal and other vulnerable land where seniors and the poor are very likely to disproportionately remain.

The Southern United States stands to be especially transformed. Extreme heat, storms and coastal flooding will weigh heavily on the bottom third of this country, making the environment less comfortable and life within it more expensive and less prosperous.

The young, mobile and middle class will be more likely to leave to chase opportunity and physical and economic safety. That means government — from local to federal — must now recognize its responsibility to support the communities in climate migration’s wake. Even as an aging population left behind will require greater services, medical attention and physical accommodation, the residents who remain will reside in states that may also face diminished representation in Congress — because their communities are shrinking. Local governments could be left to fend alone, but with an evaporating tax base to work with.

In December, the First Street Foundation created one of the first clear pictures of how this demographic change is unfolding. It looked at flood risk and migration patterns down to the census tract, across the country, and identified hundreds of thousands of so-called abandonment zones where the out-migration of residents in response to rising risk had already passed a tipping point, and people were making small, local moves to higher ground.

The research contains plenty of nuance ⎯ cities like Miami may continue to grow overall even as their low-lying sections hollow out. And the abandonment areas it identified were scattered widely, including across large parts of the inland Northeast and the upper Midwest. But many of them also fall in some of the very places most susceptible to storm surges from weather events like Helene: Parts of low-lying coastal Florida and Texas are already seeing population declines, for instance.

In all, the First Street report identified 818,000 U.S. census blocks as having passed tipping points for abandonment ⎯ areas with a combined population of more than 16 million people. A related peer-reviewed component of the organization’s research forecasts that soon, whole counties across Florida and Central Texas could begin to see their total populations decline, suggesting a sharp reversal of the persistent growth that Florida has maintained as climate pressures rise, by the middle of this century.

Such projections could turn out to be wrong ⎯ the more geographically specific such modeling gets, the greater its margin of error. But the mere fact that climate research firms are now identifying American communities that people might have to retreat from is significant. Retreat has not until recently been a part of this country’s climate change vernacular.

Other research is putting a finer point on which Americans will be most affected. Early this year Mathew Hauer, a demographer at Florida State University who has estimated that 13 million Americans will be displaced by rising sea levels, was among the authors of a study that broke out what this climate-driven migration could mean for the demographics of the United States, examining what it might look like by age.

Hauer and his fellow researchers found that as some people migrate away from vulnerable regions, the population that remains grows significantly older. In coastal Florida and along other parts of the Gulf Coast, for example, the median age could increase by 10 years this century — far faster than it would without climate migration.

This aging means that older adults — particularly women, who tend to live longer — are very likely to face the greatest physical danger. In fact, there is notable overlap between the places that Hauer’s research suggests will age and the places that the First Street Foundation has identified as the zones people are abandoning.

The exodus of the young means these towns could enter a population death spiral. Older residents are also more likely to be retired, which means they will contribute less to their local tax base, which will erode funding for schools and infrastructure, and leave less money available to meet the costs of environmental change even as those costs rise. All of that is very likely to perpetuate further out-migration.

The older these communities get, the more new challenges emerge. In many coastal areas, for example, one solution under consideration for rising seas is to raise the height of coastal homes. But, as Hauer told me, “adding steps might not be the best adaptation in places with an elderly population.” In other places older residents will be less able and independent, relying ever more on emergency services. This week many of Helene’s victims have simply been cut off, revealing the dangerous gaps left by broken infrastructure, and a mistaken belief that many people can take care of themselves.

In the future authorities will have to adapt the ways they keep their services online, and the vehicles and boats they use, in order to keep flooded and dangerous places connected. Such implications are worrisome. But so is the larger warning inherent in Hauer’s findings: Many of the effects of climate change on American life will be subtle and unexpected. The future demographics of this country might look entirely unfamiliar. It’s past time to give real thought to who might get left behind.

by Ava Kofman

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Last December, Sid Miller, the Texas commissioner of agriculture, posted a photo of himself brandishing a double-barrel shotgun on X and invited his followers to join him on a “RINO hunt.” Miller had taken to stumping in the March primary election against incumbents he deemed to be Republicans in Name Only. Not long after that, he received a text message from one of his targets, a state representative named Glenn Rogers. “You are a bought and paid for, pathetic narcissist,” it began. “If you had any honor, you would challenge me, or any of my Republican colleagues to a duel.”

Rogers, a 68-year-old rancher and grandfather of five, represents a rural district west of Fort Worth. He was proud to serve in a Legislature that, as he told me recently, “couldn’t be more conservative if it tried.” Since entering office in 2021, he co-authored legislation that allowed Texans to carry handguns without a permit, supported the Heartbeat Act that grants citizens the right to sue abortion providers and voted to give the police the power to arrest suspected undocumented migrants in schools and hospitals. In a statehouse packed with debate-me agitators, he was comparatively soft-spoken — a former professor of veterinary medicine with an aversion to grandstanding. He was not in the habit of firing off salvos, as he had to Miller, that ended with “Kiss My Ass!”

But the viciousness of the primary season had been getting to him. Nearly a year before the March elections, ads began to appear in Rogers’ district castigating him not simply as a RINO but as a closet liberal who supported gun control and Shariah law. (Rogers was especially peeved by an ad that photoshopped his signature white cowboy hat onto a headshot of Joe Biden.) Some of the attacks originated from his challenger’s campaign, while others were sponsored by organizations with grassroots-sounding names, like Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, Texas Gun Rights and Texas Family Project. By the time voters headed to the polls, they could have been forgiven for thinking that Rogers had disappointed a suite of conservative groups.

In reality, Rogers had disappointed two men: Tim Dunn and Farris Wilks, billionaires who have made their fortunes in the oil industry. Over the past decade, the pair have built the most powerful political machine in Texas — a network of think tanks, media organizations, political action committees and nonprofits that work in lock step to purge the Legislature of Republicans whose votes they can’t rely on. Cycle after cycle, their relentless maneuvering has pushed the statehouse so far to the right that consultants like to joke that Karl Rove couldn’t win a local race these days. Brandon Darby, the editor of Breitbart Texas, is one of several conservatives who has compared Dunn and Wilks to Russian oligarchs. “They go into other communities and unseat people unwilling to do their bidding,” he says. “You kiss the ring or you’re out.”

Like the Koch brothers, the Mercer family and other conservative billionaires, Dunn and Wilks want to slash regulations and taxes. Their endgame, however, is more radical: not just to limit the government but also to steer it toward Christian rule. “It’s hard to think of other megafunders in the country as big on the theocratic end of the spectrum,” says Peter Montgomery, who oversees the Right Wing Watch project at People for the American Way, a progressive advocacy group.

Texas, which has few limits on campaign spending, is home to a formidable army of donors. Lately Dunn has outspent them all. Since 2000, he and his wife have given more than $29 million to candidates and PACs in Texas. Wilks and his wife, who have donated to many of the same PACs as Dunn, have given $16 million. Last year, Dunn and his associated entities provided two-thirds of the donations to the state Republican Party.

The duo’s ambitions extend beyond Texas. They’ve poured millions into “dark money” groups, which do not have to disclose contributors; conservative-media juggernauts (Wilks provided $4.7 million in seed capital to The Daily Wire, which hosts “The Ben Shapiro Show”); and federal races. Dunn’s $5 million gift to the Make America Great Again super PAC in December made him one of Donald Trump’s top supporters this election season, and he has quietly begun to invest in efforts to influence a possible second Trump administration, including several linked to Project 2025.

Rogers believes he provoked the ire of the Dunn and Wilks machine for two reasons. He refused to support a school voucher bill that would funnel taxpayer dollars to private schools, and he voted to impeach Attorney General Ken Paxton, one of the machine’s most powerful allies. (Paxton, who did not respond to requests for comment, was impeached in part for misusing his office to help a friend under federal investigation.)

Since neither of these issues particularly excited voters, many attacks focused on distorting Rogers’ record on immigration instead. When his wife joined a text group for the spouses of incumbents under siege (they called themselves the Badass Babes), she saw that her husband was not the only opponent of vouchers who had supposedly given Democrats “control of the Texas border.” The mailers sent across the state were identical, with only the names and faces swapped out.

Flyers attacking Texas state Rep. Glenn Rogers (Jake Dockins, special to ProPublica)

The onslaught worked. Rogers lost his seat by 27 percentage points, and more than two dozen statehouse candidates backed by the two billionaires prevailed this spring. These challengers received considerable support from Dunn-and-Wilks-backed allies like Miller, the agricultural commissioner, as well as from GOP heavyweights like Gov. Greg Abbott. “You cannot overstate the absolute earthquake that was the March 5 primary,” says Matt Mackowiak, a political consultant and chair of the Travis County GOP.

The morning after his routing at the polls, Rogers published an editorial in The Weatherford Democrat. Commendably short on self-pity, it argued that the real loser in his race was representative democracy. “History will prove,” he wrote, “that our current state government is the most corrupt ever and is ‘bought’ by a few radical dominionist billionaires seeking to destroy public education, privatize our public schools and create a theocracy.”

Dunn and Wilks are often described as Christian nationalists, supporters of a political movement that seeks to erode, if not eliminate, the distinction between church and state. Dunn and Wilks, however, do not describe themselves as such. (Dunn, for his part, has rejected the term as a “made-up label that conflicts with biblical teaching.”) Instead, like most Christian nationalists, the two men speak about protecting Judeo-Christian values and promoting a biblical worldview. These vague expressions often serve as a shorthand for the movement’s central mythology: that America, founded as a Christian nation, has lost touch with its religious heritage, which must now be reclaimed.

Exactly what this reclamation would look like is up for debate. Some Christian nationalists advocate for more religious iconography in public life, while others harbor grander visions of Christianizing America’s political institutions. Those on the extreme end of this spectrum are sometimes called Dominionists, after the passage in Genesis in which man is given “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.”

Tim Dunn in 2022 (Guerin Blask/The Forbes Collection via Contour RA by Getty Images)

David Brockman, a nonresident scholar at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, has extensively reviewed the speeches and donations of Dunn and Wilks and believes the two men to be thoroughgoing Dominionists. Zachary Maxwell, a Republican activist who knows the Wilks family personally and used to work for Texas Scorecard, a media group associated with Dunn and Wilks, agrees. “They want to get Christians in office to change the ordinances, laws, rules and regulations to fit the Bible,” he told me. According to Texas Monthly, Dunn once told Joe Straus, the first Jewish speaker of the Texas House since statehood, that only Christians should hold leadership positions. (Dunn has denied the remark.)

Wilks did not respond to detailed lists of questions. In an email, Dunn directed me to his previous public statements. In one of them, he explained that every Christian should avoid the label “Christian Nationalist” because “it makes ‘Christian’ an adjective — in other words, subjugated to something else.” A self-proclaimed proponent of limited government, he has also rejected the way in which the label, a “smear,” suggests that Christians would replace “God as King with earthly kings who claimed God’s authority.”

Unlike most billionaires, Dunn and Wilks are also pastors. Friends and critics alike described the pair as conspicuously down-home and devout. “They love God, they serve God,” said Jerry Maston, an evangelical pastor and Wilks’ brother-in-law. Dunn, who is 68, has served on the “pulpit team” of a nondenominational church in Midland. Wilks, who is four years older, practices a form of Christianity that hews closely to the Old Testament at the Assembly of Yahweh, a church his family founded outside of Cisco, a town in Central Texas. When I saw him preach there earlier this year, he warned his followers that “absorption in bounty makes us forgetful of the giver.” The two men may differ on certain points of doctrine — Wilks doesn’t celebrate Christmas, considering it a pagan holiday — but they share the same vision of a radically transformed America.

Farris Wilks in 2015 (Ronald W. Erdrich/Abilene Reporter-News/AP Images)

Many of their ideas have been shaped by David Barton, a former teacher in Aledo, Texas, and the closest the Christian nationalist movement has to an in-house intellectual. Barton has been advancing the same revisionist thesis for decades: The founders intended for the barrier between church and state to protect Christianity from the government, not vice versa. “‘Separation of church and state’ currently means almost exactly the opposite of what it originally meant,” explains the website for WallBuilders, Barton’s advocacy group, to which Wilks has donated more than $3 million.

This view, dismissed by historians but increasingly common among white evangelicals, has been encouraged by recent Supreme Court decisions reinterpreting the establishment clause and embraced by prominent Republicans, most notably the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson. Johnson lauded Barton at a 2021 WallBuilders event, citing his “profound influence on me and my work and my life and everything I do.” The day after Johnson was elected speaker, Barton said on a podcast, “We have some tools at our disposal now we haven’t had in a long time.”

With its high concentration of movement leaders, conservative pastors and far-right megadonors, Texas has become the country’s foremost laboratory for Christian nationalist policy, and many of its experiments have been bankrolled by Dunn and Wilks. Several of the lawmakers they’ve funded have introduced bills linked to Project Blitz, a coalition of religious groups, including Barton’s WallBuilders, that drafted model legislation to advance Christianity’s role in civic life. One bill directs educators to hang posters of the Ten Commandments “in a size and typeface that is legible to a person with average vision from anywhere in the classroom.” Another, now law, requires schools to display “In God We Trust” placards.

“You can look here to see what’s coming to other states soon,” said Amanda Tyler, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, a nonprofit legal advocacy group. After Texas passed a law allowing the work of licensed mental health counselors in public schools to be done by unlicensed chaplains — representatives of “God in government,” one of the bill’s sponsors called them — a dozen other states introduced similar bills. That includes Louisiana, which became the first state to sign a bill into law this June requiring schools to post the Ten Commandments in classrooms. (Trump celebrated on Truth Social: “I LOVE THE TEN COMMANDMENTS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS, PRIVATE SCHOOLS, AND MANY OTHER PLACES, FOR THAT MATTER.”)

It is no accident that Dunn and Wilks have concentrated their energies on infusing Christianity into education. Many far-right Christians trace the country’s moral decline to Supreme Court rulings in the 1960s and early 1970s that ended mandated prayer and Bible reading in public schools. Texas recently proposed an overhauled reading curriculum that strongly emphasizes the Bible “in ways that verge on proselytizing,” according to Brockman, the scholar at the Baker Institute; The 74, a nonprofit newsroom, reported that the state’s educational consultants contracted with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, whose board Dunn has served on since 1998. Wilks and his brother, Dan, have given around $3 million to PragerU, a video platform co-founded by Dennis Prager, the conservative radio host. It is not an accredited university; instead it provides “a free alternative to the dominant left-wing ideology in culture, media and education.” Public school leaders in Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and South Carolina have recently approved PragerU’s teaching materials. One lesson shows an animated Frederick Douglass explaining that slavery was a compromise the founding fathers made to “achieve something great.”

Predictably, these attempts to control what happens in the classroom trigger local culture wars, which, in turn, lead Christian nationalists to contend that religious values are under siege. “They’re going to be things that people yell at, but they will help move the ball down the court,” Barton said in a 2016 conference call with state legislators that was later made public. The ultimate aim of these skirmishes is to end up with a religious liberty case before an increasingly conservative Supreme Court.

Last year, researchers at the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution found that more than half of Republicans support Christian nationalist beliefs, including that “being a Christian is an important part of being truly American,” that the government should declare the United States a Christian nation and that “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.” They have also found that Christian nationalists were roughly twice as likely as other Americans to believe that political violence may be justified. Those who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 with wooden crosses and Christian flags did not see themselves as insurrectionists overturning democracy but as patriots defending the will of God. They had been spurred on by years of rhetoric that recast political debates as spiritual battles with apocalyptic stakes.

In 2016, Trump received a higher share of the white evangelical vote than any presidential candidate since 2004, but the sociologists Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry have found that Christian nationalist beliefs were an even better predictor of support for his candidacy than religious affiliation. The slogan Make America Great Again can be interpreted, not unreasonably, as a dog-whistle to make it Christian Again, too. During the same speech in which he boasted that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue without losing voters, Trump warned that Christianity was “under tremendous siege” and pledged that when he was president, “Christianity will have power.” This June, he promised a Christian coalition “a comeback like just about no other group,” and in July, he encouraged Christians to vote “just this time” because in four years “you won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.”

Dunn has placed himself in a favorable position to guide a second Trump administration — and transform the nature of the federal government. He helps fund America First Legal, a conservative law firm headed by the former Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller that represents itself as the MAGA movement’s answer to the ACLU, as well as the Center for Renewing America, a far-right policy group led by the former Trump budget director Russell Vought. According to documents obtained by Politico, the Center for Renewing America has explicitly listed “Christian Nationalism” as one of its top priorities. Both groups have played a role in shaping Project 2025, an extreme policy agenda, published by the Heritage Foundation, that proposes consolidating executive power and remaking the federal bureaucracy, agency by agency.

“Eighty percent of my time is working on the plans of what’s necessary to take control of these bureaucracies,” Vought said in a video captured in August by undercover reporters from the Centre for Climate Reporting. “I want to make sure that we can say we are a Christian nation.” Vought has publicly defended the Christian nationalist label as “a rather benign and useful description for those who believe in both preserving our country’s Judeo-Christian heritage and making public policy decisions that are best for this country.”

Since 2021, Dunn has also been a founding board member of the America First Policy Institute, yet another group assembled by Trump loyalists to prepare for his possible return to the White House. One of its papers, “Ten Pillars for Restoring a Nation Under God,” discusses how America was “founded as a self-governing nation on biblical principles” — a favored Dunn talking point. Brooke Rollins, a former domestic policy adviser in the Trump administration who worked with Dunn at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, recruited him to the institute. “We wanted to create a national organization similar to what we built in Texas,” she told The Wall Street Journal. “This is a 100-year play.”

“I am by nature a tightwad,” Dunn writes in “Yellow Balloons,” a book he self-published in 2018. His mother once told him that as a child, he needed to be turned upside down to shake a nickel out of his pocket for the church collection basket. The youngest of four boys, Dunn grew up modestly in Big Spring, Texas. In the 1980s, he settled with his wife and six children in Midland, the seat of the Permian Basin, to become the chief financial officer at an oil company before founding his own in 1996. When the British writer Peter Stothard traveled to Midland for The Times of London during the 2004 presidential election, he spoke to Dunn, a “thin-faced, blue-jeaned Bush-backer” who was “convinced that his oil has existed for only 4,000 years, the time decreed by Genesis, not 200 million years as his geologists know.”

CrownQuest Operating, as Dunn’s company is called today, keeps most of its operations within Texas to limit interactions with the federal government. It ranks among the top 10 biggest oil producers in the state and has made Dunn one of the wealthiest people in Texas. But for many years, when it came time to pick up the check at lunch with colleagues, Dunn writes, he found himself with “alligator arms.” It wasn’t until he came to better understand the parable of the unjust steward, a cryptic story from the Gospel of Luke, that he discovered his charitable side. Its moral, according to Dunn, is that when we get to heaven, “part of our reward will be being invited into people’s homes to reciprocate for things we did for them in this life, and we’re supposed to make that part of our investment calculation.”

In the meantime, many of Dunn’s investments have brought him treasures here on Earth. In 2007, he started his own PAC, Empower Texans, to fight a tax on oil wells financed through investors. Dunn has donated a majority of its funds, lending it the air of a special interest group of one. Around a decade later, when one of Dunn’s political advisers connected him to Farris Wilks, Empower Texans became an interest group of two.

Wilks was raised in a goat shed on a homestead just south of Cisco, a town of 3,900 people and more than a dozen churches. He went to work at his father’s masonry business, and on weekends, he helped his family build their own church, the Assembly of Yahweh. In the 1990s, Wilks and his younger brother, Dan, decided to use their knowledge of stone to prospect for oil in their own backyard. In 2000, the brothers founded Frac Tech, a fracking services provider, and a decade later they sold their stake for $3.5 billion. Not long before the deal closed, the brothers established charitable foundations to fund conservative groups, including Focus on the Family and the Heritage Foundation. In 2015, they made their first significant campaign gift — $15 million to a Ted Cruz super PAC connected to David Barton — and the San Antonio Express-News said they were gaining a reputation as the “Koch brothers of the Christian Right.”

Scenes from Cisco, Texas (Jake Dockins, special to ProPublica)

Wary of the media spotlight, Dan Wilks made fewer headline-grabbing campaign donations after that. Farris, however, was only getting started. Though he does not regularly socialize with Dunn, he relies on the same fleet of consultants and synchronizes his donations to many of the same campaigns. By 2018, he’d become the largest donor to Empower Texans, after Dunn.

At first glance, what’s most striking about Dunn and Wilks’ political giving, apart from its unprecedented scale, is its low rate of return. For more than a decade, their PACs and the lawmakers they supported won a handful of proxy wars — obstructing legislation, forcing retirements, generating scandals — but they were snubbed by the establishment Republicans who controlled the statehouse. In 2022, according to The Texas Tribune, 18 out of the 19 candidates backed by the group lost their races.

Political strategists have attributed this poor showing to the group’s uncompromising approach. Luke Macias, a longtime consultant to Dunn-and-Wilks-backed campaigns, has refused to work with candidates who support exceptions for abortion bans. (Macias did not respond to a request for comment.) “My job is to communicate a candidate’s beliefs to a broader audience,” a consultant who worked with Macias on an Empower Texans-funded campaign told me. “His job is to find people who believe exactly what they believe and try to get them elected. From a financial perspective, Luke is the worst possible investment you can make, because he doesn’t seem to make decisions based on the facts, polls or strength of the opposition, but that right there tells you something about the strength of Tim Dunn’s ideology: Loyalty and fidelity are more important to him than short-term outcomes like winning.”

Dunn and Wilks, however, are focused on the long term. Gerrymandering has meant that most Republicans in Texas only fear for their seat if they’re challenged in a primary election — the Texas equivalent of term limits, Dunn has said. The tactical brilliance of Empower Texans has been to transform the political climate of Austin into a perpetual primary season. A dark money subsidiary, Texans for Fiscal Responsibility, warns legislators about how upcoming votes will affect their conservative rankings on its index, while a separate media arm, Texas Scorecard, publishes editorials, podcasts and documentaries to hound incumbents it disapproves of out of office. “The irony is that most of the incumbents they attack agree with them on 95% of the issues,” Jon Taylor, a political scientist at the University of Texas at San Antonio, said of Dunn and Wilks. “I’m not sure how to explain the purity test they demand, except that it comes down to wanting people they can completely control.”

Some donors might hesitate to back a losing candidate, but Dunn and Wilks’ PACs often resurrect their challengers as though they are fighters in an arcade game. “They find candidates with an exceptionally high pain tolerance,” said a Texas House staff member who has worked for an incumbent opposed by Empower Texans. “They might not beat you on the first go, but they slowly chip away at your support and keep you under a microscope by hammering you with the same guy 52 weeks a year.” Shelley Luther, a beautician who was jailed for refusing to close her hair salon in Dallas during the pandemic, won the primary for a House seat this March after two failed campaigns supported by Dunn and Wilks. For Bryan Slaton, a former youth pastor and Empower Texans-backed candidate, the third time was the charm, though he was later unanimously expelled from the House after an internal investigation found that he got a 19-year-old aide drunk and had sex with her.

The political muscle of Christian nationalism is driving a growing share of attacks on Republicans across the country. Since 2010, a historically high number of Republicans have been defeated by primary challengers in the most evangelical House districts, according to an analysis posted on Substack by Michael Podhorzer, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. The former Texas Gov. Rick Perry recently expressed his concerns about the internecine warfare consuming the state party. “If we continue down this path pointing our guns inside the tent,” he told The Texas Tribune earlier this year, “that is the definition of suicide.”

David Pepper, the author of “Laboratories of Autocracy: A Wake-Up Call From Behind the Lines” and the former chair of the Ohio Democratic Party, calls this trend the Texas Lesson. “It’s a tragic case study in how statehouses have flipped from serving the public interest to serving the far-right interests of private donors,” he told me. “These billionaires have been relentless and systematic about punishing moderates — ” Pepper paused and corrected himself. “Actually, I wouldn’t even call these lawmakers ‘moderate.’ These are simply officials who maybe, on one occasion, will stand up for the best interest of their district.”

Rogers (Jake Dockins, special to ProPublica)

Not long after he arrived in Austin at the start of his first term, Glenn Rogers began to sort his colleagues into categories. There was a close-knit contingent of unabashed loyalists, who took most of their money from Empower Texans and its spinoffs. There were legislators who may or may not have taken some money from Dunn and Wilks, but who followed most of their agenda out of fear of facing a primary challenger. And there were representatives who reliably voted for the interests of their district, though this last category, Rogers conceded, was “largely aspirational.” When Dunn and Wilks win, they win, Rogers told me, “and when they lose, they still win, because the people left in office are afraid to disagree with them. You can’t be in politics long without being influenced by them in one way or another.”

That influence, Rogers soon realized, extended well beyond the House. In the 2022 gubernatorial primary, Dunn and Wilks backed Don Huffines, a real estate investor and former state senator who ran to the right of Abbott, through a new PAC they dubbed Defend Texas Liberty. Huffines called for sending troops to the border, abolishing property taxes and passing a school voucher program. Abbott handily won the primary, but he also started to sound a lot more like Huffines, particularly when it came to private school vouchers.

Abbott’s newfound ardor for vouchers was striking. He asked faith leaders to “go to the pulpit” for the measure and called four special sessions of the Legislature in an attempt to rally the House into passing it. That vouchers undermine church-state separation while also draining resources from public schools has made them appealing to both free-market fundamentalists and far-right Christians. Yet vouchers are unpopular in rural districts across Texas, where Friday night football games are sacrosanct and private schools are scarce. When Abbott failed to corral the votes he needed, he began to vigorously campaign against the holdouts, including Rogers.

“How did someone who pitched himself as a governor committed to public education end up leading the charge to destroy public schools?” asks James Talarico, a Democratic member of the House and a former public school teacher. “Follow the money.” Abbott’s motivations have remained a subject of speculation in Austin, but Talarico suggested that the governor started to push for vouchers in earnest because he was shut out by Dunn and Wilks. Last December, Abbott intensified his push after receiving $6 million from Jeff Yass, a pro-voucher billionaire in Pennsylvania, to spend in this year’s primaries.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott after an event that promoted a statewide school voucher program (Jordan Vonderhaar/The Texas Tribune)

In an opinion essay in the Midland Reporter-Telegram, Dunn wrote that he is “basically uninvolved” with the voucher movement, but candidates he and Wilks backed have repeatedly testified in support of vouchers; Texans for Fiscal Responsibility has given high marks to those who support the measure; and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, where Dunn has long served on the board, joined Abbott on a tour of private Christian schools across the state.

As the voucher fight escalated, the House decided to bring impeachment charges against Attorney General Paxton, claiming, among other charges, that he had abused public trust and committed bribery. Paxton, one of the biggest recipients of Dunn and Wilks largess, had refused to defend the Texas Ethics Commission against lawsuits filed by Empower Texans in an effort to strip the campaign-finance watchdog agency of its powers. The Dunn-Wilks political machine seemed to view the impeachment as an existential threat. In May 2023, Jonathan Stickland, a political adviser to Dunn and Wilks and the president of their new PAC, Defend Texas Liberty, wrote on X that a vote to impeach Paxton was “a decision to have a primary.” In June, Defend Texas Liberty paid for a billboard in Rogers’ district attacking him for joining “61 Democrats to impeach Ken Paxton,” without mentioning that in doing so Rogers had also joined the majority of Republicans.

One of the billboards paid for by Defend Texas Liberty PAC (Tony Pilkington/Breckenridge Texan)

That same month, Defend Texas Liberty contributed $3 million to Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor and a former conservative talk show host, shortly before he was set to preside over the impeachment trial in the Senate. (Patrick did not respond to a request for comment, but he has denied that the donation influenced his impartiality at the trial, during which Paxton was acquitted on all 16 articles.) Texas Monthly calculated that the well-timed gift from Defend Texas Liberty was 30 times more than what the group gave Patrick when he ran for reelection in 2022. Hours after the donation was made public in a campaign-finance report, Stickland, the political adviser, wrote on X: “This is just the beginning, wait till you see the next report. We will never stop. Ever.”

He spoke too soon. Last October, The Texas Tribune reported that Stickland met for hours with Nick Fuentes, one of the country’s most prominent white supremacists, at an office park near Fort Worth owned by Wilks Development, the family’s real estate company. A Holocaust denier and antisemite, Fuentes has popularized the idea of an imminent “white genocide,” a fear that has been used as a justification by several mass shooters, including the one who killed 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso in 2019. (Defend Texas Liberty replaced Stickland and released a terse statement opposing Fuentes’ “incendiary views.” Stickland did not respond to requests for comment.)

After the Tribune’s reporting prompted a rare bipartisan outcry, Dunn and Wilks phased out Defend Texas Liberty and poured $6.8 million into a new vehicle, Texans United for a Conservative Majority. The rebranded PAC has not been shy about communicating its vision. Its new logo replaces the Goddess of Liberty statue that crowns the top of Austin’s Capitol building with a cross.

“We have a three-party system in Texas, and they all loathe each other,” Vinny Minchillo, a Republican-aligned consultant in Plano, said. “You have the Democrats, the more traditional moderate Republicans and the official state GOP, a dysfunctional organization which has been pretty much completely overtaken by the Dunn and Wilks side of things.” Once ridiculed as unserious fanatics by the conservative establishment, Dunn and Wilks are now its kingmakers.

Nowhere was this more evident than at the Texas Republican Convention in San Antonio in May. In the exhibit hall, there was plenty of generic Republican fare — gold-standard absolutists, Patriot Mobile vendors, merch stores hawking sweatshirts printed with “Jesus was accused of Insurrection too” — but many booths were linked to the Dunn-Wilks universe. Wilks Development co-sponsored the weekend, and the Dunn family hosted a “grassroots” breakfast, closed to the press. A WallBuilders booth was selling “The American Story,” a two-volume revisionist history that Barton co-wrote with his son. State Sen. Angela Paxton, the attorney general’s wife, spoke on a panel dedicated to “Upholding Our Judeo Christian Heritage & Values.”

On a prominent stage erected by Texas Scorecard, lawmakers talked up the Contract With Texas, an open letter that began to circulate in the weeks before the convention. It asked for “all GOP legislative priorities” to receive a floor vote before any Democratic bill and for the removal of all Democratic committee chairs. No one knew for sure who was behind the letter, which would significantly curb the influence of a party that holds 42% of seats in the House, but at least 21 of its 23 signatories had taken money from Wilks and Dunn’s entities.

One morning, I ran into Mark McCaig, the publisher of The Texas Voice, a conservative political blog, in the main lobby, where children wearing bright yellow sandwich boards printed with the phrase “Abolish Abortion” had been serving as an unofficial welcome party. McCaig has a close-cropped beard and a wonkish demeanor. The previous day, the general counsel of the Texas Republican Party posted a photo of McCaig chatting with a Texas Tribune journalist on Facebook; her caption denounced McCaig as a “plague” and the Tribune journalist as a “pagan reporter.”

McCaig told me he didn’t mind “committing the sacrilege” of talking to other reporters, though he confessed that he often had trouble articulating Dunn and Wilks’ goals when asked. “They say they want to make things even more conservative,” he observed, “but I don’t know what else is left to accomplish socially.” Buoyed by the MAGA wave, the Legislature has passed bills — permitless-carry laws, abortion bans, LGBTQ+ restrictions, border militarization — that would have seemed far-fetched just a few years earlier. “A lot of pro-life leaders in the state don’t want to give women the death penalty,” McCaig continued. “You start to wonder what their true agenda is, and I think it’s power.”

The most far-reaching of these efforts to consolidate power may be the Convention of States Project. A highly controversial effort, partly funded by Dunn, it represents one of the best hopes for Christian nationalists, among other interested parties, who want to transform the laws of the land in one fell swoop. “When we started the Convention of States — and I was there at the beginning — I knew we had to have a spiritual revival, a Great Awakening and a political restoration for our country to come back to its roots,” Dunn said at a 2019 summit for the group, where he spoke alongside Barton. “What I did not expect is that the Convention of States would be an organization that would trigger that Great Awakening.”

The Convention of States Project takes its cues from Article V of the Constitution, which proposes two paths for constitutional amendments. The familiar path — a two-thirds vote in each chamber of Congress to be ratified by three-fourths of states — has been deployed successfully 27 times. The other path, which involves two-thirds of states passing resolutions to call for a constitutional convention, is rarely discussed and has never been used.

One afternoon in San Antonio, Mark Meckler, the president of the Convention of States and one of Dunn’s close friends, pitched a packed room of delegates on this second path. Wearing a blue trucker cap printed with a COS logo, he mocked the group’s critics, which included “every other baby-killing America-hating Marxist organization in the country” as well as the John Birch Society. “Thank God, those people were not at the Alamo,” Meckler said. “Because we wouldn’t remember the Alamo, because there would have been no Alamo, because all those people would have just run away.”

Meckler, who lives in a home that Dunn transferred to him near Austin, is a deft salesman. He said he regularly hears from people who find the prospect of a convention frightening. During his lecture, he sought to assuage those fears, casting the prospect of a constitutional convention as a humdrum exercise that would bore even its own attendees. “What’s going to happen at a convention?” Meckler asked, pausing for dramatic effect. “People are going to make suggestions.” Some of the delegates laughed. “Are you guys scared? I’ve never been to a meeting where I was afraid of people making suggestions.” Yet nothing in Article V limits the scope of the laws that might be changed.

“It’s a gamble, but if it pays off, it would be the biggest opportunity ever for billionaires to transform the government,” Montgomery, the researcher of the religious right, said. The Mercer family and Koch-funded groups have also backed the effort. The Convention of States says that 19 states have passed its resolutions. To win over the remaining 15, the group has started to back primary challengers to Republicans who oppose them in states across the country. During a 2018 appearance on Fox, Meckler admitted that critics of the movement were getting at “something truthful” when they complained that the convention was “intended to reverse 115 years of progressivism. And we say, ‘Yes, it is.’”

This spring, Rogers took me on a tour of his ranch, a 3,000-acre property that abuts the Brazos River. “Our forefathers intended for ranchers and farmers to be able to serve in the Capitol,” he told me as we cut through the tall grass.

Rogers insisted to me that he was better off working his land, because it allowed him to spend more time with his grandchildren. But as the afternoon turned to evening and he began to play the consolatory voicemail messages he had received from constituents and colleagues, it was evident the loss still rankled. “I’ve been coming up with a short list of people interested in running for office,” he said, “but I’ve yet to find anyone who’s willing to go through what I did without billionaire support.”

Dunn’s wealth is only growing. Last December, he signed an agreement to sell his oil company to Occidental Petroleum in a deal valued at $12.4 billion. Seventeen days later, he made the $5 million contribution to a Trump PAC. Brad Parscale, Trump’s 2016 digital campaign manager, recently bought a modern farm-style house around the corner from Dunn’s compound in Midland. Dunn has poured millions into a new effort led by Parscale to use AI to target voters.

Before I left, Rogers brought out a little-known book, first published in 1998, called “Confrontational Politics.” Its author, H.L. Richardson, was a Republican state senator in California who was known for ruthlessly campaigning against other Republicans in the 1970s and 1980s.

The text had been recommended to Rogers by someone who knew that Dunn encouraged his associates to study it, and the tactics deployed against Rogers appeared to be lifted directly from its pages. Richardson advised conservatives to cultivate single-issue groups, to “joyfully punish the adversaries” and to keep in mind a vital principle: The route to political domination starts at the local level. “Control the bottom,” he wrote, “and one day you control the top. One day the man you elected to city council becomes the state senator and then moves to Congress and talks to the president on your behalf. If you really become effective, one day the phone rings and you are asked to come to Washington to advise the president. Somebody is leveraging the president at this very moment. Why not you?”

Doris Burke contributed research.

by Sharon Lerner and Andy Kroll

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

Three investigators for the Heritage Foundation have deluged federal agencies with thousands of Freedom of Information Act requests over the past year, requesting a wide range of information on government employees, including communications that could be seen as a political liability by conservatives. Among the documents they’ve sought are lists of agency personnel and messages sent by individual government workers that mention, among other things, “climate equity,” “voting” or “SOGIE,” an acronym for sexual orientation, gender identity and expression.

The Heritage team filed these requests even as the think tank’s Project 2025 was promoting a controversial plan to remove job protections for tens of thousands of career civil servants so they could be identified and fired if Donald Trump wins the presidential election.

All three men who filed the requests — Mike Howell, Colin Aamot and Roman Jankowski — did so on behalf of the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, an arm of the conservative group that uses FOIA, lawsuits and undercover videos to investigate government activities. In recent months, the group has used information gleaned from the requests to call attention to efforts by the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency to teach staff about gender diversity, which Fox News characterized as the “Biden administration’s ‘woke’ policies within the Department of Defense.” Heritage also used material gathered from a FOIA search to claim that a listening session the Justice Department held with voting rights activists constituted an attempt to “rig” the presidential election because no Republicans were present.

An analysis of more than 2,000 public-records requests submitted by Aamot, Howell and Jankowski to more than two dozen federal offices and agencies, including the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Trade Commission, shows an intense focus on hot-button phrases used by individual government workers.

Those 2,000 requests are just the tip of the iceberg, Howell told ProPublica in an interview. Howell, the executive director of the Oversight Project, estimated that his group had submitted more than 50,000 information requests over the past two years. He described the project as “the most prestigious international investigative operation in the world.”

Among 744 requests that Aamot, Jankowski and Howell submitted to the Department of the Interior over the past year are 161 that seek civil servants’ emails and texts as well as Slack and Microsoft Teams messages that contained terms including “climate change”; “DEI,” or diversity, equity and inclusion; and “GOTV,” an acronym for get out the vote. Many of these FOIAs request the messages of individual employees by name.

Trump has made clear his intentions to overhaul the Department of the Interior, which protects the nation’s natural resources, including hundreds of millions of acres of land. Under President Joe Biden, the department has made tackling climate change a priority.

Hundreds of the requests asked for government employees’ communications with civil rights and voting rights groups, including the ACLU; the Native American Rights Fund; Rock the Vote; and Fair Count, an organization founded by Democratic politician and voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams. Still other FOIAs sought communications that mention “Trump” and “Reduction in Force,” a term that refers to layoffs.

Several requests, including some sent to the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, focus on personnel. Some ask for “all employees who entered into a position at the agency as a Political Appointee since January 20, 2021,” the first day of the Biden administration. Others target career employees. Still other FOIAs seek agencies’ “hierarchy charts.”

“It does ring some alarm bells as to whether this is part of an effort to either intimidate government employees or, ultimately, to fire them and replace them with people who are going to be loyal to a leader that they may prefer,” Noah Bookbinder, president and CEO of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, said of the FOIAs.

Asked whether the project gathered the records to facilitate the firing of government workers, Howell said, “Our work is meant to just figure out who the decision-makers are.” He added that his group isn’t focused on simply identifying particular career employees. “It’s more about what the bureaucrats are doing, not who the bureaucrats are,” he said.

Howell said he was speaking on behalf of himself and the Oversight Project. Aamot requested questions in writing, but did not respond further. Jankowski did not reply to a request for comment.

Bookbinder also pointed out that inundating agencies with requests can interfere with the government’s ability to function. “It’s OK to make FOIA requests,” said Bookbinder, who acknowledged that CREW has also submitted its share of requests. “But if you purposely overwhelm the system, you can both cause slower response to FOIAs … and you can gum up other government functions.”

Indeed, a government worker who processes FOIAs for a federal agency told ProPublica that the volume of requests from Heritage interfered with their ability to do their job. “Sometimes they come in at a rate of one a second,” said the worker, who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak to the press. The worker said they now spend a third of their work time processing requests from Heritage, including some that seek communications that mention the terms “Biden” and “mental” or “Alzheimer’s” or “dementia” or “defecate” or “poop.”

“They’re taking time away from FOIA requesters that have legitimate requests,” said the worker. “We have to search people’s accounts for poop. This isn’t a thing. I can’t imagine a real reporter putting in a request like that.”

Asked about the comment, Howell said: “I’m paying them, so they should do their damn job and turn over the documents. Their job is not to decide what they think is worth, you know, releasing or not.” He added that “we’re better journalists by any standard than The New York Times.”

Project 2025, which is led by Heritage, became politically toxic — with Trump disavowing the endeavor and Kamala Harris seeking to tie her opponent to the plan — in part for proposing to identify and fire as many as 50,000 career government employees who are deemed “nonperforming” by a future Trump administration. Trump attempted to do this at the end of his first term, issuing an executive order known as “Schedule F” that would have allowed his administration to reclassify thousands of civil servants, making them easier to fire and replace. Biden then repealed it.

Project 2025’s 887-page policy blueprint proposes that the next conservative president reissue that “Schedule F” executive order. That would mean a future Trump administration would have the ability to replace tens of thousands of career government employees with new staffers of their choosing.

To fill those vacancies, as ProPublica has reported, Project 2025 has also recruited, vetted and trained future government employees for a Republican administration. In one training video obtained by ProPublica, a former Trump White House official named Dan Huff says that future government staffers should prepare to enact drastic policy changes if they join the administration.

“If you’re not on board with helping implement a dramatic course correction because you’re afraid it’ll damage your future employment prospects, it’ll harm you socially — look, I get it,” Huff says. “That’s a real danger. It’s a real thing. But please: Do us all a favor and sit this one out.”

Howell, the head of the Oversight Project and one of the FOIA filers, is a featured speaker in one of Project 2025’s training videos, in which he and two other veteran government investigators discuss different forms of government oversight, such as FOIA requests, inspector general investigations and congressional probes. Another speaker in the video, Tom Jones of the American Accountability Foundation, offers advice to prospective government employees in a conservative administration about how to avoid having sensitive or embarrassing emails obtained under the FOIA law — the very strategy that the Oversight Project is now using with the Biden administration.

“If you need to resolve something, if you can do it, it’s probably better to walk down the hall, buttonhole a guy and say, ‘Hey, what are we going to do here?’ Talk through the decision,” Jones says.

“You’re probably better off,” Jones says, “going down to the canteen, getting a cup of coffee, talking it through and making the decision, as opposed to sending him an email and creating a thread that Accountable.US or one of those other groups is going to come back and seek.”

The records requests are far reaching, seeking “full calendar exports” for hundreds of government employees. One FOIA submitted by Aamot sought the complete browser history for Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, “whether exported from Chrome, Safari, Windows Explorer, Mozilla.” The most frequent of the three requesters, Aamot, whose online bio describes him as a former psychological operations planner with the Army’s Special Operations Command, submitted some FOIAs on behalf of the Heritage Foundation and others for the Daily Signal. The publication spun off from the Heritage Foundation in June, according to an announcement on the think tank’s website, but another page on the site still seeks donations for both the foundation and the Daily Signal.

ProPublica obtained the Department of Interior requests as well as tallies of FOIAs from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Health Resources and Services Administration through its own public records requests.

Several of the Heritage Foundation’s requests focus on gender, asking for materials federal agencies presented to employees or contractors “mentioning ‘DEI’, ‘Transgender’, ‘Equity’, or ‘Pronouns.’” Aamot sent similar requests to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Office of Management and Budget, Americorps and the Chemical Safety Board, among other agencies. Howell said he believes that the group has uncovered evidence that “unpopular and just frankly sexually creepy and sexually disordered ideas are now being translated into government jargon, speak, policies, procedures and guidance documents.”

Heritage’s FOIA blitz has even sought information about what government employees are saying about Heritage and its employees, including the three men filing the thousands of FOIAs. One request sent to the Interior Department asks for any documents to and from the agency’s chief FOIA officer that mention Heritage’s president, Kevin Roberts, as well as the names of Aamot, Howell and Jankowski.

Irena Hwang contributed data analysis. Kirsten Berg contributed research.

by Asia Fields, ProPublica, with Becca Savransky, Idaho Statesman

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Idaho Statesman. Learn more about how to apply for upcoming opportunities.

When the Idaho Statesman and ProPublica teamed up to report on crumbling school buildings last year, we recognized that it would be a challenge to capture the attention of readers and officials.

Idaho residents already knew that their own school buildings were in bad shape and that state law made it hard for districts to raise the money to fix them. We were unsure whether additional reporting would change anything.

To have a chance at impact, we set out to do the most comprehensive possible version of the story to show that the problems were statewide. We needed to take readers into schools so they could see what was broken and the effect on students and staff in a way that wouldn’t be easy to ignore. And because we couldn’t visit every school ourselves, we needed to get people in every part of the state to help us document what was happening locally.

Through ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, we spent about nine months reporting and heard from 106 of the state’s 115 superintendents and 233 students, parents, teachers and others.

While Idaho has one of the highest thresholds for school bonds to pass, we know school facilities funding is an issue across the country. Local journalists have already done important coverage of this issue and related equity concerns. We want to share our tips and the lessons we learned doing this work so you can scale up your efforts to reach many different kinds of stakeholders in your community.

If you would like to talk about adapting some of these strategies for your reporting, email us at asia.fields@propublica.org and bsavransky@idahostatesman.com.

Step 1 Determine the reporting gaps.

If you’re new to the beat or topic, you’ll first want to figure out exactly how school funding works in your state. Some questions you might ask include: What data and public records are out there? Can we get them? And what’s missing from what already exists?

When it comes to school maintenance, you can find information through the Education Writers Association, National Council on School Facilities and your state Department of Education, as well as by talking to your local school administrators. The Education Commission of the States has a 50-state breakdown of school construction funding in different states.

In Idaho, through a records request, reporter Becca Savransky was able to get the results of every school bond election for decades from the state Department of Education. But there was a lot she couldn’t get through official channels. There hadn’t been a statewide assessment of school facilities in nearly three decades.

Schools had received inspections, but they were mostly surface level and sparse in detail, primarily focused on clear worker safety issues rather than an exhaustive facilities review. For example, Becca visited a Boundary County school where she saw buckets taped to pipes to catch leaks and heard that the maintenance director had to blow snow off the roof to prevent it from collapsing again. In comparison, the inspection report’s only reference to the roof was linking to a federal alert about preventing injury during snow removal. It also didn’t show the impact on students and staff.

The maintenance director at Valley View Elementary School in Bonners Ferry, Idaho, spends hours after snowstorms blowing snow off the roof to prevent a collapse. (Sarah A. Miller, Idaho Statesman)

The state said it would cost thousands of dollars to find and release the inspections for every school in the state, anyway, and a separate state agency denied Becca’s request for school safety reports because they could reveal security vulnerabilities.

As you figure out what’s missing from the official record, that will help you focus your large crowdsourcing efforts to help target those gaps.

Step 2 Who has the information you need? Take their temperature.

Once you’ve identified a gap, it’s time to think about who has information that can fill it. The key for a successful crowdsourcing project is finding people who care about the topic and are willing to talk. Make a list of possible stakeholders and start thinking about the concerns and opportunities that might come up as you talk with each group.

For the Idaho project, we talked with a variety of sources early on, listening for:

• Buy-in. Becca had already spoken with a number of superintendents who told her this issue needed more attention. Other sources said this was an important issue and that they were eager to share their experiences.
• Clear examples. Sources were able to provide concrete examples of problems with their school buildings. Superintendents also had information about budgets and costs and were willing to give us access to schools. Students and teachers were able to explain how these issues got in the way of learning.
• Potential barriers. We asked what might prevent someone from participating in our reporting. While we heard a variety of concerns, the good news was that our sources felt we could address them — and they were willing to help us spread the word.

Step 3 Come up with a reporting plan.

The next step is to figure out the specific materials to seek and questions to ask. We asked ourselves: If we had this information, what might we be able to say in the story? What would make it stronger? Who was best situated to give us what we were seeking? And if we received a ton of responses, how could we keep them organized and incorporate as many as possible into a story?

In Idaho, we decided we needed three things: a way to show how prevalent school disrepair was across districts; visual evidence; and material that would clearly illustrate how school conditions were affecting students, parents and staff.

We planned how we’d approach different stakeholders and tracked our outreach and what came from it. (We used Airtable, but you can use a spreadsheet or another system that works for you.)

Superintendents

We decided to create a survey to send public school district superintendents, with the goal of hearing from as close to all 115 of them as possible. We knew getting busy superintendents to respond might be hard, so we did some testing before reaching out to the whole group. We asked four superintendents in a diverse range of districts to provide feedback on the survey. We asked whether anything was missing, what might keep someone from filling it out and about the best ways to share it.

Reporters Asia Fields and Becca Savranksy speak with Jan Bayer, the Boundary County School District superintendent, over Zoom. Bayer was one of four superintendents we asked for feedback on our survey before sending it out to the larger group. (Asia Fields/ProPublica)

We were able to get all but nine to respond by having a group of superintendents share the survey and by doing multiple rounds of reminder calls and emails. We found it effective to share the percentage of their peers we had heard from.

Principals, teachers and other school staff

In order to reach school staff and students, both newsrooms published a callout asking people to tell us about their schools. We set up calls with groups such as the state teacher’s association to introduce our project and ask for their help to spread the word through emails, social media posts, flyers or any methods they thought might work.

We reached out to teachers when we thought the issue might be front of mind, such as when there was a heat wave, as many schools don’t have air conditioning.

We also reached out to online groups, asking moderators or administrators if we could join and post or if they would be willing to post for us.

Students

To reach students, we found that posting on Instagram and TikTok alone didn’t work. A recent graduate suggested we reach out directly to students, and we had the most success by visiting students at schools. (Read more about that below.)

Parents, community members and facilities experts

To reach others with knowledge about school buildings, we identified social media groups from those focused on a region in Idaho to those specifically for parents. We made sure to connect with groups for parents whose children had disabilities, as we knew school accessibility was a concern.

Some recommendations for reaching out over social media:

• Use a professional account (especially on Instagram) that identifies you as a journalist and shows examples of your past work.
• If you’re creating a new account, ask your audience team to give you a follow from the newsroom account to help establish your credibility.
• Make your requests clear and concise. Do you want them to fill out a callout, help you spread the word or something else?

We also reached out to associations for engineers and architects in the state.

Highlights From This Series Previous Arrow Right Next Arrow Right April 13, 2023

We documented how restrictive policies in Idaho made it difficult for school districts to raise funds for construction and repairs, leaving students to learn in freezing classrooms and overcrowded schools.

Sept. 6, 2023

We showed how a state fund to fix unsafe schools had gone largely unused. One district had received only a fraction of what it needed after six bond elections in seven years failed.

Dec. 14, 2023

We revealed how prominent lawmakers were discussing a proposal to make it easier for school districts to repair and replace their aging buildings by lowering the required threshold for bond votes to pass.

Dec. 15, 2023

Hundreds of students, parents, educators and others — including 91% of the state’s superintendents — told us what it’s like to have schools with flooded classrooms, leaky ceilings, failing plumbing and discolored drinking water.

Jan. 8, 2024

In his State of the State address, Gov. Brad Little called for $2 billion in state funding to help schools repair or replace their buildings, declaring it “priority No. 1.”

March 21, 2024

The Legislature approved $1.5 billion in new funding and redirected an additional $500 million, which the governor said was the largest investment in school facilities in state history.

April 9, 2024

We reported on how the Idaho Freedom Foundation used a state election law to make it harder for school districts to pass bonds and levies to fix their buildings.

May 21, 2024

For the first time in two decades, voters in the Salmon School District in remote Central Idaho approved a bond to build a new school.

Step 4 Look at what’s missing and adjust as you go.

Once you’ve heard from many people, it can be helpful to take a step back and evaluate what you’re getting against your initial goals. What are you missing? Who haven’t you heard from? You can and should adjust as you get more feedback.

Sometimes, you may even find that what you’ve heard from the community significantly shifts the focus of your story or your understanding of a problem. That’s a success!

When we noticed we weren’t getting many photos and videos, we emphasized it in our callout and outreach. When we heard from some teachers who said their schools were in good condition, we updated the callout to clarify that we were interested in hearing about that, too. We also heard some criticism in response to our posts on social media. We responded directly to those posts to clarify our process and invite further feedback.

Step 5 On-the-ground reporting.

Some of our best reporting happened when we went to where our sources were — in schools.

If you have limited ability to travel, you’ll want to choose your destinations carefully to help you fill gaps and capture geographic diversity. We focused on rural districts we hadn’t heard from and those where it seemed there were extreme facilities issues. We picked routes that allowed us to visit multiple schools. We visited 39 in total.

Some superintendents were eager to help us meet groups of students. Others were more wary but let us meet with a few students they selected. (You can read more about the activities we did with students in our methodology post.)

We also brought a camera that produces instant prints because we wanted to make sure we left the school visits with evidence of the problems in hand. With teacher permission, students photographed the issues they saw in their schools. We found that the photos were sometimes hard to make out. We would recommend making sure the students use flash and also having them use their cellphones to take photos, as long as teachers and administrators are OK with it. Just be sure the students share the photos with you before you leave.

Idaho Statesman and ProPublica reporters brought a camera that makes instant prints to school visits so students could show the problems in their schools. Students documented a deteriorating locker at Kamiah High School, leaky ceilings at Moscow High School and bathroom drains bulging up from the floor at Canyon Springs High School, among numerous other problems. (Courtesy of Kamiah, Moscow and Canyon Springs students) Step 6 Keep sources updated.

Be sure to report back to your sources! You might not be able to use everything they shared, but hopefully the relationships you build will help fuel other stories going forward. When the governor called for making school maintenance “priority No. 1,” we reached out to sources for their response to what the Legislature was considering.

It’s an example of the way ProPublica’s engagement team thinks about how reporting and source relationships can build off each other.

ProPublica’s engagement reporting team created this diagram to show that community-fueled journalism doesn’t stop after one story. Staying in touch can lead to great tips and more meaningful impact.

If you try any of these engagement approaches in your reporting or have questions, we’d love to hear from you. You can reach us at asia.fields@propublica.org and bsavransky@idahostatesman.com.

ProPublica plans to partner with newsrooms in every state in the next five years through its Local Reporting Network. If you have an accountability project you’d like to partner on, you can learn more about the program and sign up for office hours to discuss your idea with an editor.

Peter DiCampo contributed reporting.

by Sharon Lerner

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

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is planning to withdraw and reconsider its approval for Chevron to produce 18 plastic-based fuels, including some that an internal agency assessment found are highly likely to cause cancer.

In a recent court filing, the federal agency said it “has substantial concerns” that the approval order “may have been made in error.” The EPA gave a Chevron refinery in Mississippi the green light to make the chemicals in 2022 under a “climate-friendly” initiative intended to boost alternatives to petroleum, as ProPublica and The Guardian reported last year.

An investigation by ProPublica and The Guardian revealed that the EPA had calculated that one of the chemicals intended to serve as jet fuel was expected to cause cancer in 1 in 4 people exposed over their lifetime.

The risk from another of the plastic-based chemicals, an additive to marine fuel, was more than 1 million times higher than the agency usually considers acceptable — so high that everyone exposed continually over a lifetime would be expected to develop cancer, according to a document obtained through a public records request. The EPA had failed to note the sky-high cancer risk from the marine fuel additive in the agency’s document approving the chemical’s production. When ProPublica asked why, the EPA said it had “inadvertently” omitted it.

Although the law requires the agency to address unreasonable risks to health if it identifies them, the EPA’s approval document, known as a consent order, did not include instructions on how the company should mitigate the cancer risks or multiple other health threats posed by the chemicals other than requiring workers to wear gloves.

After ProPublica and The Guardian reported on Chevron’s plan to make the chemicals out of discarded plastic, a community group near the refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi, sued the EPA in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The group, Cherokee Concerned Citizens, asked the court to invalidate the agency’s approval of the chemicals.

Over several months when ProPublica and The Guardian were asking questions about the plastic-based chemicals, the EPA defended its decision to permit Chevron to make them. But in the motion filed on Sept. 20, the agency said it would reconsider its previous position. In a declaration attached to the motion, Shari Barash, director of the EPA’s New Chemicals Division, explained the decision as based on “potential infirmities with the order.”

Barash also wrote that the agency had used conservative methods when assessing the chemicals that resulted in an overestimate of the risk they pose. The EPA’s motion said the agency wants to reconsider its decision and “give further consideration to the limitations” of the risk assessment as well as the “alleged infirmities” identified by environmental groups.

Asked last week for an accurate estimate of the true risk posed by the chemicals, the EPA declined to respond, citing pending litigation. The EPA also did not respond when asked why it did not acknowledge that its approval may have been made in error during the months that ProPublica was asking about it.

Chevron, which has not begun making the chemicals, did not respond to a question about their potential health effects. The company emailed a statement saying that “Chevron understands EPA told the court that the agency had over-estimated the hazards under these permits.”

As ProPublica and The Guardian noted last year, making fuel from plastic is in some ways worse for the climate than simply creating it directly from coal, oil or gas. That’s because nearly all plastic is derived from fossil fuels, and additional fossil fuels are used to generate the heat that turns discarded plastic into fuels.

Katherine O’Brien, a senior attorney at Earthjustice who is representing Cherokee Concerned Citizens in its suit, said she was concerned that, after withdrawing its approval to produce the chemicals, the EPA might again grant permission to make them, which could leave her clients at risk.

“I would say it’s a victory with vigilance required,” O’Brien said of the EPA’s plan to withdraw its approval. “We are certainly keeping an eye out for a new decision that would reapprove any of these chemicals.”

by Lizzie Presser

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Maylia Sotelo arrived in a black Cadillac. It pulled down an alley by the Fox River, which cuts through the city of Green Bay, Wisconsin. On that Tuesday evening in November 2022, she stepped out of a rear door and into another car. Maylia was 15 years old and slight, with a soft, girlish face and large, upturned eyes. For $50, she sold a man five “blues,” round pills stamped with “M30” that passed for Percocet. Narcotics investigators from the Brown County Drug Task Force were listening over a wire and, within minutes, their informant turned over his buy. Like every fake Percocet the task force seized that year, the pills were actually fentanyl. The officers, though, decided to let Maylia leave.

Maylia was comfortable around the business of drugs. Her childhood home had been a hangout for users and dealers; hollowed-out pens littered the floors, and strange men let themselves in at all hours. She had grown up with three older sisters, who had all been kicked out or left because of their mother’s violence. It fell to Maylia to protect Maliasyn, two years younger, from their mom’s unpredictable delusions. She would lose herself in uppers and opioids, start yelling out of nowhere or cry uncontrollably. Sometimes, she locked the girls in the house for days.

Before Maylia sold blues, she sold weed. She had been smoking since fifth grade. The first time she tried weed, she found herself laughing at nothing. “Why would I sit here being sad and sober when I can be high and happy?” she thought. She hated staying home, so after class, she took Maliasyn to a trap house where teens smoked blunts on the first floor and adults met in the bedrooms upstairs. The guys there, a couple of years older, were dropping out of school to sell weed. When Maylia was 13, she started dealing, too, because everyone was doing it.

By the start of her sophomore year at West High School, blues had overtaken bud in popularity. Across the city, boys blared songs about popping percs (“Yeah, just popped a 30, yeah, a 30 / It could change your life or it could ruin it, that’s the dirty”), and blue circle emojis with an “M” dominated Snapchat and Facebook. Maylia didn’t use percs. Like everyone at West, she knew they were fake, but nobody talked about what that meant. Instead of the oxycodone in Percocet, the pills contained filler and fentanyl, an opioid 50 times stronger than heroin.

Two days after the drug task force confirmed that Maylia was selling fentanyl, she arranged through a friend to buy a bulk order of blues from a man she’d never met. The city was facing a dry spell, so instead of her typical hundred-pill order from her usual source, she asked the man for a thousand. When her friend delivered the percs, she poured them onto a tray in her lap and pushed each chalky pill with a key, counting them one by one. She texted her customers: “Back in motion.” The next day, she caught a ride to an apartment complex and sold a pill to a teenager named Jack McDonough.

Early the following week, Maylia told Maliasyn that she’d be home soon, put on her “Sesame Street” slides and settled into the passenger seat of a friend’s Audi Q5. He drove her to Culver’s for a strawberry milkshake and then to Taco Bell for a sale. When they parked, lights flashed in the rearview mirror. Drug task force agents in unmarked cars rushed in and Maylia was handcuffed. “I don’t think you can do that,” she said quietly, as an officer went to pat her down. “I’m a minor.”

Agents took Maylia to a juvenile detention center in Fond du Lac, an hour south of Green Bay, and booked her on drug charges. Since she had no criminal history, the prosecutor and a county caseworker began negotiating with Maylia’s attorney. They presented a consent decree, the juvenile justice equivalent of a deferred prosecution agreement, which proposed that Maylia could be released to her father, whom she barely knew, placed on an ankle monitor, and required to satisfy certain conditions, like attending therapy or substance abuse counseling. If Maylia complied for six months, her charges could be dropped. After Christmas, while her dad was preparing his home, the county moved her into the less restrictive setting of shelter care, a coed house for kids.

In early January, a month after the arrest, a police officer arrived looking for Maylia. She was in the shower, getting ready for a hearing where she expected to be let out. Instead of taking her to court, the officer drove her to jail. There, he told her that she was under arrest for first-degree reckless homicide. Jack McDonough had died of an overdose.

Maylia would be the first juvenile in Wisconsin charged with homicide for providing the fentanyl that led to a death. In a country flooded with the drug, at a time when teens were dying from opioids at record rates, far outpacing plans to help them, she would be treated as an adult by a justice system that has no clear guidelines for how to handle the kids who are selling.

Jack McDonough first tried blues a year earlier, at the age of 17. With his girlfriend, he learned to crush the pill on a swatch of tinfoil, run a lighter underneath it and inhale the smoke through a straw. Calm blanketed them, muting their anxiety. Sometimes, it triggered a surge of confidence, a feeling that anything was doable. More often, it let them drift into nothingness, a fuzzy space between wakefulness and sleep. “We thought we were doing Percocets,” his girlfriend told me. “I didn’t even really know what a perc was.” At first, they smoked the pills a few times each week, sitting in Jack’s car between classes at Southwest High. Within a couple months, they needed one a day or they’d be sick — vomiting, legs shaking, unable to sleep. “I told Jack that I’m pretty sure it’s not even real percs, I’m pretty sure it’s fentanyl, and he was like, ‘What? No. I’m not doing fentanyl.’”

Until recently, opioids almost exclusively claimed the lives of adults. Since COVID-19 began, though, the rate of overdose deaths among teenagers has rocketed, more than doubling in three years. It’s not that more teens are using drugs, but that fentanyl has made the supply deadlier than ever. Many know or discover that the pills on the street are tainted but don’t want to stop — until they can’t. In a matter of weeks or a couple of months, they’ve become addicted. Today, over 300,000 kids under 18 are estimated to have an opioid-use disorder.

As fentanyl has rapidly entered the world of adolescents, the major institutions that touch teens’ lives have been unprepared to manage the fallout. Few doctors are offering the recommended medication, most schools are ill-equipped to help, and the justice system is treating children as criminals. Parents don’t know what to look for: the straws, the ash marks, the weight loss, the nausea of withdrawals. Teens are on their own. With nowhere to turn, each week, 22 high-school-aged kids — a classroom’s worth — are dying from overdose.

Jack’s parents had separated when he was an infant, and he’d grown up with his mom, Carrie, who owned a small house in De Pere, a suburb of Green Bay, and worked in sales at a truck maintenance supply company. He saw his father on weekends and holidays and in the summer. Carrie is warm and effusive, a self-labeled “helicopter parent,” with a deadpan sense of humor. Jack preferred body comedy, jump-scaring anyone he could. If he wanted to learn karate, Carrie booked him classes; if he wanted to swim with friends, she drove them to the water park. Together, the two worked out, volunteered to walk rescue dogs, went shopping, talked through plays he could run on his basketball team. After Carrie remarried when Jack was 11, he continued to confide in her about his insecurities and offered updates on his various crushes.

By high school, Jack was a gangly 6 foot 3, and he preferred duck hunting to sitting in class. At Southwest, 4 miles from Maylia’s school, he kept falling behind. He had trouble believing in himself: He told his mom he thought he was too slow. She would stay up late helping him with homework or she’d do it for him when he gave up. With his friend Mason, he liked to break down old cars just to fix them back up. The two clicked “like Buzz and Woody,” Mason told me. They would wrestle in public, but “behind closed doors, he was like a teddy bear.”

Left photo: Jack and Carrie, when he was 13. Right photo: Jack celebrates Christmas in 2017. (Collage by Han Cao for ProPublica. Source images: Courtesy of Carrie Harrison.)

The winter he started smoking percs, Jack cut out most of his friends. In early 2022, he began buying from a young dealer who went by Speakers, and soon he was introduced to other teens who were selling. Within a couple months, he dropped 15 pounds. Carrie worried he was bulimic. She would press her ear against the bathroom door, listening for hints of purging. He’d always been sweet and respectful, but that semester, he started disobeying her, becoming hostile out of nowhere. On weekends, he racked up speeding tickets and broke curfew; Carrie and her husband, Ryan, clamped a wheel lock on his car. On weekdays, he retreated to his room after school and went to bed at sundown. Carrie had no idea, but he often video-chatted with his girlfriend so the two could smoke percs at the same time.

Carrie booked him a therapy appointment, but the first slot she could get was a few months out. She told his school counselor that she thought he was using drugs but says she was brushed off. Carrie couldn’t prove anything — the drug tests she randomly gave Jack kept coming back negative. Others, though, knew what was going on. A classmate texted saying that he had lost two friends and didn’t want to see Jack die, too. “1 perk can’t kill you lmao, you’d have to smoke like 10 perks to even think abt overdosing,” Jack replied. “It just gets you high, for like an hour.” Mason also worried, and he sometimes probed Jack, who swung from denial to regret. “He knew he was addicted,” Mason said. “He knew it was hurting the people around him. He also knew he couldn’t stop on his own.”

In April of 2022, Carrie got a call from Tracy Liska, a police officer assigned to Southwest. Jack had been caught going door to door, pretending to fundraise for St. John’s Homeless Shelter — a place Maylia’s mom sometimes stayed. Liska had heard rumors that kids at school were using fake Percocet, which she knew was probably fentanyl, but she couldn’t search them unless she had reason to believe they had pills on them. Jack was “attached at the hip” to his girlfriend, “so in love,” Liska told me, and kids said she was using. When Carrie arrived at her office, stammering that something wasn’t right with Jack, Liska told her that a classmate was calling him a “perkhead.” Back home, Carrie took Jack’s phone and started scrolling. She found streams of texts setting up deals to buy “erks” and photos and videos of Jack smoking them.

Carrie didn’t know that the gold-standard treatment for teens addicted to opioids is buprenorphine, a long-acting opioid that strips away withdrawal symptoms and cravings and protects against overdose. Each year, on average, only 372 kids between the ages of 12 and 17 are getting the drug, according to the best national data. Most pediatricians aren’t trained in addiction and don’t feel comfortable prescribing the medication, and many clinics are afraid of the liability that comes with treating minors. A recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that only 39 rehabs in the country offer buprenorphine to those under 18. Carrie called the most comprehensive national resource hotline in the country, run by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration; it pointed her to Libertas, one of the only centers for adolescents in Green Bay. But when she reached Libertas, which doesn’t offer buprenorphine to kids, it had closed its inpatient program for teens.

After five days of calls to every rehab she could find, Carrie heard back from a residential facility in Minnesota, a Hazelden Betty Ford clinic. For the first time, it seemed like she’d found a solution. Before Jack left home, he wrote to his girlfriend’s mom to say that her daughter needed help. “We chose the wrong road to walk, and it is worse than I thought,” he texted. “I need you to make sure you keep her away from these kinds of drugs no matter what the case is. I can’t lose her to addiction, she is going to tell you that she hates you and tell you things to make you feel terrible about yourself and your job as a parent. But what I feel for her is real love and I wouldn’t be saying this if I didn’t care.” To his mom, he scribbled, “I’m trying to do better to be a better son. I hope you can forgive me for everything.”

Jack wrote his mom a note before he went to rehab. (Courtesy of Carrie Harrison)

The same spring that Jack entered rehab, Maylia was introduced to blues by her older sister Marianna. Since leaving home at the age of 13, Marianna had been bouncing between relatives and a boyfriend, between a local shelter and the back seat of a car. She’d sold weed to support herself, and then she’d leveled up to percs. She’d climbed so high that some considered her Green Bay’s biggest dealer.

Maylia was captivated by her sister — she was “self-made and self-paid.” Marianna could buy at $3 a pill and sell at $20. At 18, she owned a midnight blue Mercedes Benz and an apartment on Imperial Lane, the main stretch in one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods. She had decorated it with silver-studded couches and filled it with a collection of Nike sneakers and Louis Vuitton purses. With their mom caught up in her own addiction, Marianna took the girls in. Often, when she crisscrossed the city selling, Maylia sat shotgun, looking out for cops. She took photos of her sister, draped in long, neon-orange wigs, smirking next to 4-foot stacks of cash. Sometimes, they flashed fans of bills together.

In August of 2022, Marianna was arrested for dealing fentanyl and held in Brown County Jail. Maylia and Maliasyn went to stay with their grandmother, a manager at Family Dollar, who they said rarely stocked the kitchen. Soon, Maylia’s phone would not stop ringing. Marianna’s clients were asking if she had any idea where they could buy blues. “Money kept calling,” Maylia said. “It was calling me.”

Through Marianna’s contacts, Maylia bought a hundred pills for $500. She could double her money in a day. In the mornings before school, she tucked a handful of pills in her panties and another handful in her purse. Customers came to her. The 19-year-olds told the 18-year-olds, who told the 17-year-olds, and then the kids she had known as infants. Maylia was a good student with a quiet, observant demeanor. She didn’t like to sell on campus. Sometimes, classmates begged. The stink, like burnt popcorn, hung in the girls’ bathroom. Kids walked the hallways scratching their faces.

The only experience Maylia enjoyed more than smoking weed was surprising Maliasyn with a gift and seeing the look on her face. “Sometimes, I just wished that everything, everybody around us, would disappear, and it could just be me and my sister,” she said. Maylia hid packets of ramen and goldfish and hot Cheetos around their bedroom; she bought Maliasyn pink low-top Nike Dunks and brought home a PlayStation a customer had traded for blues. She promised she’d stop selling once she’d saved $3,000 for a car, which she couldn’t yet buy because she wasn’t old enough to drive. Maliaysn reminded her to be smooth and slow down. Instead, she kept going. “Her name was ringing in the streets,” a competing dealer told me. Maylia loved being one of the only girls in the game. For as long as she could remember, people had called her Princess. Now they called her Hollywood, for her big curly wigs, thick feline lashes and how little interest she showed in the kids at school.

Left photo: Maliaysn, left, and Maylia. Right photo: Marianna, left, and Maylia. (Collage by Han Cao for ProPublica. Source images: Courtesy of Maylia’s sisters.)

Maylia knew that people were overdosing, but she didn’t realize that a tiny amount of fentanyl could kill: 2 milligrams, which, if poured on a penny, would only cover Abraham Lincoln’s ear. On Dec. 1, 2022, just after the informant bought from Maylia, a customer told her that his girlfriend died from pills and he didn’t want to use anymore. Maylia sent her condolences, adding: “im glad you thinkin smarter.” Two days later, she saw Jack’s girlfriend’s Facebook story announcing that Jack had died. She’d hung out with his girlfriend once and messaged right away. “I’m so sorry for your loss mami keep your head up 💔,” she wrote. “Can I asked what happened?”

Jack had returned to Green Bay that fall. He’d spent 24 days at Hazelden, where he told staff that he didn’t have a problem. This wasn’t unusual. Jack’s counselor attributed his resistance to “significant shame and fear” and predicted that Jack would open up. He never did. The counselor noted in his file that Jack had a moderate Percocet disorder but made no mention of fentanyl. Nor did a doctor prescribe buprenorphine or explain the importance of the medication to Carrie. (Though Hazelden was given a medical release form, a spokesperson said it would not comment on Jack’s care for confidentiality reasons.)

In May, Jack was discharged to his dad, who had moved to Arizona. Carrie begged him to stay there and start over, but once Jack turned 18, he came back, moving in with his grandparents. Mason saw Jack once, in late November, and he could tell that he was still using. He told Jack he wouldn’t speak to him until he stopped.

On Dec. 2, Jack went to his girlfriend’s house and logged into her Facebook. He ordered a pill from Maylia. It was the first time he had bought from her. At 9 p.m., he took an Uber home, changed into his pajamas and kissed his grandmother goodnight. “Mmm you should smoke wimme mamita ❤️,” he texted his girlfriend hours later. The next morning, when his grandparents couldn’t open his bedroom door, they called the police. Officers found him sitting cross-legged in bed, unresponsive.

It wasn’t until Carrie arrived at her parents’ house that morning that she realized Jack was using fentanyl. She had always thought he was smoking real Percocet, which was terrifying enough. But as she tried to keep breathing, she noticed that the officers weren’t touching Jack’s belongings, as if any contact could kill. She had no idea that all the fake Percocet in town now contained fentanyl. Tracy Liska, the police officer at Southwest, hadn’t told her. (Liska says she must have mentioned fentanyl, though she didn’t note this in her reports.) The Drug Enforcement Administration was claiming that 60% of all fentanyl-laced pills it analyzed were potentially lethal, but the person on the federal government hotline hadn’t warned her, either. Hazelden hadn’t tested Jack’s urine for fentanyl or told Carrie that Percocet bought on the street was often contaminated with the drug. “You think you’ve talked to the police, doctors, teachers,” she said. “I didn’t fathom that it would be fentanyl.”

Aaron Hanson, the De Pere detective assigned to investigate Jack’s death, was the first person in a position of authority who seemed to care about Jack and want to do something for him. He checked in often, keeping Carrie apprised of what he was uncovering. After Jack’s autopsy confirmed that the cause of death was fentanyl intoxication, Hanson told her that the state would be pursuing a homicide charge. The term “homicide” didn’t seem to fit — she pictured a person shooting a gun or wielding a knife — but she was relieved to hear that a dealer would be taken off the streets. In early January of 2023, Hanson let her know that the seller was a 15-year-old girl. She would be charged as an adult. Carrie had imagined an older man with clout, maybe a warehouse full of drugs. “How could this happen? Any of it?” she wondered. She also thought, “Put her away.”

Over the past 15 years, as the number of opioid overdoses has risen sharply, leaders in law enforcement have promoted homicide charges as a key component of the nation’s response. The goal, they say, is to send a message that dealing drugs comes with great risk. Prosecutions have soared in the 30 states with the statutes on the books. Wisconsin is one of the most aggressive. Its counties filed nearly 400 cases between 2019 and 2023. The charges often attach to friends or relatives or partners who use with the person who overdosed rather than people who deal in any significant quantity. Even when the charges fall on habitual drug sellers, they rarely reach high-level operators. With each step up the distribution ladder, causation is tougher to prove, so the typical investigation ends with the person who delivered the drugs. These sellers, like Maylia, tend to have no control over whether the pills are cut with fentanyl or, if they are, whether it’s a fatal dose.

When the person who provides the drug is a teen and the charge is homicide, most states allow or require the accused to be treated as an adult. These laws are a legacy of the 1990s tough-on-crime era, when criminologists and politicians warned of “super-predators” and an imminent “bloodbath” from teen violence. The prediction never materialized, but almost every state passed laws that made it easier to transfer minors into the adult system. In at least 31 states, a child charged with certain serious crimes, like rape or homicide, must be tried in adult criminal court, according to recent research by Juvenile Law Center. Eight additional states allow prosecutors to choose whether to file in juvenile or criminal court. (In some, like Wisconsin, defendants can request to be tried in the juvenile system.) In 2019, the last year for which there is data, an estimated 53,000 juveniles were charged in adult criminal courts because judges, prosecutors or state law transferred them there.

Once the homicide charge was filed against Maylia, under the law, she morphed from dealer to killer, then from juvenile to adult. In Wisconsin, anyone older than 9 charged with homicide — whether it’s violent or drug-induced — is automatically sent to adult criminal court. When the officer picked up Maylia at shelter care with a warrant for her arrest, he drove her to Brown County Jail.

“This is big-boy jail,” Maylia thought as she walked into the booking room, where adults sat on benches. It’s where Marianna was. Brown County Jail had no designated area for girls, so Maylia was led down a dark hallway into an adult section, where men in orange jumpsuits were housed. There, she was held in a separate cell with another girl. Instead of the board game marathons, arts and crafts afternoons and school days she’d grown used to in juvenile detention, Maylia got a deck of cards, permission to walk laps, and an hour or two of classes.

In February of 2023, Trisha Fritz, the attorney assigned to Maylia by the public defenders’ office, asked the judge to move the homicide case to juvenile court. She knew chances were slim, but in criminal court, Maylia would be subject to the same sentencing guidelines as adults, which are focused on retribution and deterrence; she could face up to 40 years in prison. The goal of most juvenile courts, by contrast, is to balance public safety with rehabilitation and the best interests of the child. In a juvenile correctional facility, teens get clinical counseling, skills classes, education and, through their participation, the chance to earn their return to the community.

The juvenile system is notoriously erratic, but there’s little question that a judge there would take into account the circumstances of Maylia’s childhood and whether child protective services had intervened. Before Maylia turned 1, CPS documented that her mother overdosed on cocaine and Adderall with seven children in her home. When she was 5, a caller told the agency that Maylia’s mom was “high as a kite” and her boyfriend was violent. The next year, a mandated reporter alerted CPS that there was “absolutely no food in the home” and that the kids witnessed their mother using heroin. When she was 7, there was a substantiated finding that a man “opened his pants, pulled out his penis and masturbated” in front of one of Maylia’s sisters. That same year, a woman overdosed on crack in the house; a social worker wrote that Maylia’s mom “would not call rescue or the police because [she] did not want her children removed.” An elementary school employee reported that Maylia missed half the school year. After Maylia turned 8, CPS noted that her mom allegedly started hitting her.

When social workers came to the front door, Maylia’s mom ignored them. She told the girls to lay down and be quiet. When the agency called, she let the phone ring to voicemail. (Maylia’s mom could not be reached for comment.) During Maylia’s childhood, 20 referrals were made to CPS. The agency’s policy directed staff to note when they tried to make contact with a parent, but there was no requirement to do anything more. CPS could only identify a “maltreater” if staff interviewed that person or found other evidence, like a police report. Workers kept noting that Maylia’s mom had “referrals in all areas of child protection; sexual abuse to her children allegations, neglect, homelessness, drinking, drug history, relationship issues,” but she refused to meet with them. Going no further, staff closed case after case.

Top photo: Maylia’s mom holds her in the hospital with her three older sisters. Bottom photo: Maylia as a baby. (Collage by Han Cao for ProPublica. Source images: Courtesy of Mariah Zimmer.)

When Maylia was 14, child protection workers saw that her mother was hallucinating, revealing a “detachment from reality,” and they decided that the girls should no longer be under her care. The agency, though, offered no assistance with counseling or school. Maylia and Maliasyn began shuttling between the homes of their older sisters and their grandmother. Imani Hollie, a former Brown County public defender who represented Maylia when CPS finally got involved, told me that she’d seen the agency fail to protect kids in all sorts of extreme situations, but Maylia’s case stood out. Social workers had ignored her needs since she was an infant, and when the state did act, it sent her directly to criminal court. “Everyone,” Hollie said, “wanted to back away and treat her as an adult, rather than, ‘This is a child who is in the system, who has lived through horrendous allegations, and who went 14 years without any intervention.’”

As Fritz was preparing for a hearing on moving Maylia’s homicide case to juvenile court, she was struck by two pages in the narcotics investigation report. The Brown County Drug Task Force had learned that Maylia was selling fentanyl three days before she sold to Jack, but they didn’t arrest her. They could have requested a search warrant for her phone. They could have continued surveilling her or notified child protective services. They could have brought her in for dealing. Why, instead, did they let a minor continue handling a potentially lethal substance?

The drug task force, like most law enforcement agencies, has no internal guidelines governing interactions with suspects under the age of 18. In a series of cases referred to as the Miller trilogy, named after the 2012 Miller v. Alabama decision, the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized that children are different in the eyes of the law. Relying on brain science and psychological research, it found that children “have limited ‘control over their own environment’ and lack the ability to extricate themselves from horrific, crime-producing settings.” They are more impulsive, more easily pressured, less capable of assessing consequences and more capable of change than adults. These rulings have led the country through major reforms in the juvenile justice system, particularly when it comes to sentencing. But they have not led to much change in law enforcement.

Nicholas Ronsman, who was 27 and a first-year narcotics investigator on the drug task force, had no issue treating a 15-year-old as he would an adult. He learned about Maylia when he asked an informant for a list of dealers along with their prices for blues; whoever charged the least, he reasoned, had the largest supply. The informant knew the girl by her Facebook name, and she was offering the best prices. Ronsman passed her profile page to an intel analyst, who found that it belonged to Maylia. “At first I was like, ‘She’s 15, she can’t be that big of a player,’” Ronsman told me. “But then I look at her family, her sister Marianna.”

Ronsman had worked Marianna’s case. His team had confiscated $11,329 and about 8,400 fake Percocet pills at her grandmother’s place while Maylia and Maliasyn were there. (Soon after, they seized $27,200 more from another apartment.) The drug task force has a protocol to report to CPS whenever they encounter minors who are living in a house with narcotics, but the officers never did. (“We were not aware of any kids in the house,” Matthew Ronk, the director of the task force, told me. Probation agents found the drugs, so when they called for task force assistance, he said, his officers saw no need to do their own room-to-room search.) By the time Maylia’s name came to Ronsman, she was no longer just a child deserving of safety but a suspect. “We figured, ‘Hey, she probably learned from her sister, she’s got to learn from somewhere.’ So that was my mindset: She’s 15, but she’s got connections, she probably might be a legitimate, larger target.”

Once the informant completed the buy, Ronsman believed that if he arrested Maylia, a juvenile intake worker would likely release her and she’d go back to selling. “The goal of juvenile justice isn’t to put juveniles in prison, which it shouldn’t be. It’s obviously to get them help,” he told me. “So, from my experience with selling a controlled substance, they would have let her out.” As a narcotics investigator, he is a mandatory reporter, but he didn’t think connecting her with social workers was the answer, either. “If I called CPS and they go talk to her, and she says, ‘No, I’m not selling fentanyl, blah blah blah,’ would that do anything? Who knows? Also, it would have interfered with any investigation.”

In the summer of 2023, six months after Maylia’s arrest, she was shuttled from jail to Brown County Circuit Court for her transfer hearing. Carrie sat in the gallery with Ryan and her parents. Ronsman took the stand. He testified that in a shoebox in Maylia’s bedroom, his team had found 775 pills and $3,976. He said he had gone through Maylia’s text messages and found that the average age of the customers he could identify was 18. When Wendy Lemkuil, the prosecutor, asked if Maylia was the largest known fentanyl dealer in Brown County schools, he said that she was.

Fritz cross-examined him. Ronsman had documented two instances in which Maylia had sold at West High School. “Yeah,” he said. She wanted to know how he would explain his decision to do nothing when he first discovered that Maylia was selling.

“So, fentanyl is dangerous?” she asked Ronsman in court.

“Correct,” he said.

“And the drug task force had information that Ms. Sotelo sold five fentanyl pills to somebody Nov. 29 of 2022, correct?”

“That’s correct.”

“And did not arrest her?”

“That’s correct.”

“Why?”

“It’s our common policy and procedure in the Brown County Drug Task Force to build a case, to show that there is a habit of selling drugs and that they just didn’t sell drugs one time.”

At first, Carrie thought she must have misheard. She noticed her body shaking, and Ronsman’s low-pitched voice — “build a case” — repeated in her head. She couldn’t comprehend that the officers knew Maylia was selling fentanyl days before Jack died and did not arrest her. The police department had been the first institution that appeared to believe that Jack’s life mattered. Jack’s school counselor had dismissed Carrie’s concerns, the local clinics were no help, the staff at Hazelden hadn’t provided guidance. The police had made it seem like this investigation was for Jack. Now she realized that he didn’t mean anything to the officers: He wasn’t a person to them but a piece of evidence to be used against Maylia.

After each hearing, Maylia turned on the news and watched herself in handcuffs. The anchors parroted the prosecutor’s language, calling her “the largest dealer of fentanyl in Brown County schools.” She wasn’t the largest — she knew bigger — and she hated any insinuation that she was malicious or uncaring. Still, she started to grasp how she came across to others. Maylia had never paid attention to the news before, and now she kept seeing segments on fentanyl, hearing there was an epidemic. She had assumed that only a mixture of many drugs could kill, but kids were dying from a single fake Percocet. “Before, it was like, ‘I’m doing drugs, they’re doing drugs, everybody does drugs,’” she told me.

Often, Maylia spoke about herself as if she were split in two. There was a former Maylia, who was rash and inattentive, and a present Maylia, who had insight. The first Maylia, as she saw it, had been so self-deluded or naive that she let herself believe that she wasn’t causing harm: Her buyers would find percs even if she wasn’t the one selling. She started off thinking she was helping Maliasyn and was soon seduced by the money. “I thought for a long time that the way out of this labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small self-sufficient world in a back corner,” she wrote in her journal. That version of Maylia hadn’t even considered the consequences for Marianna. “I don’t know why it didn’t click for me that she’d just got indicted,” she told me.

When the former Maylia got to jail, she blamed everyone around her. Her mother, who left her to fend for herself. The customer who snitched. Even Jack, who came back to Green Bay and decided to use. She couldn’t understand why he kept smoking percs after he’d had the chance to get sober. Maylia couldn’t blame Marianna — they carried the same unspoken memories, like veterans from the same squad. Each day on her way to class, Maylia passed Marianna, who was waiting in her cell. Behind glass, she curled her fingers into a heart and mouthed, “I miss you.” Maylia marveled at how pretty she looked.

The other Maylia, the one in the present, blamed herself and felt disgusted. When the judge quickly rejected her request to move the homicide case to juvenile court, she accepted that she would be going to prison, but she no longer saw herself as a victim. After Marianna was sentenced to eight years in federal prison, Maylia wasn’t outraged, either. It was a long time, she thought, but it could have been worse. She rarely brought up the violence in her home, and when she talked about it at all, she downplayed it. Her mom didn’t “strangle” Marianna, she just “grabbed her by the neck.” Her sisters always said that their mother was an addict, and while she didn’t think that was wrong, she hated when they said it. “She was just — she didn’t know how to be a mother.” Maylia wrote in her journal that while her upbringing had affected her decision-making, she could determine her own future. “I contributed to creating my current experience,” she wrote. “I can now make conscious choices which will bring the changes I want!”

Part of this shift came from reading; for the first time in her life, she could count on three meals a day, which allowed her to relax. She was attending Bible study and devouring books — Joyce Meyer’s “Battlefield of the Mind,” Oprah Winfrey’s “What Happened to You?” At night, she took notes on trauma’s effects on the brain and how to break a “generational curse.”

It was the stories of fellow inmates that transformed her perspective on addiction. She had always tried to keep distance from her customers, but in jail, many were incarcerated with her. She watched one teenager beg her mother to allow her back into her home — the pitch of her voice rising, banging the phone around, yelling she’d stop using — and get nowhere. She’d hear adults say that the first thing they planned to do when they got out was get high. She had previously thought that using was a choice; now she understood that the opioids were in control. She watched a 17-year-old girl try to sleep through withdrawals, too weak to stand to shower, peeing herself. Another had been found facedown in a snowbank, near dead. Often, she thought about Jack and how she wished she could tell him what she’d seen and what she’d learned. She hated that she had fed her customers’ darkest impulses. Many had childhoods similar to hers: parents with addiction, abuse in the home, the shame of abandonment. “They just took a different way out.”

In the 15 years before Maylia’s case, only one juvenile in Wisconsin had been charged in criminal court with drug-induced homicide — in that instance, the drug was heroin. Once the district attorney in Brown County charged Maylia, though, prosecutors across the state began to do the same. In Fond du Lac, after an 18-year-old overdosed on fentanyl, the district attorney brought homicide charges against three boys under 18, all in the adult system. (Two pleaded no contest, and the third is trying to raise money for a lawyer to represent him at trial.) In Rock County, south of Madison, a 15-year-old was charged in criminal court. He admitted to a detective that he delivered two percs to a boy who later died from fentanyl intoxication. The detective showed up at his house after a school police officer noticed him crying. “It’s all my fucking — it’s all my fault,” he told the officer. “I wish I would have never done that.” He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 19 months in prison.

It’s impossible to know how many teens in the country are being charged with drug-induced homicide. There is no national database, many states do not aggregate cases, and when prosecutors file in juvenile court, the records are sealed. As a result, there’s been almost no scrutiny of how these laws are used against kids, said Katie McCreedy, a Northeastern University doctoral researcher who studies these charges. “How can young people in media stories be simultaneously assumed to know nothing about how deadly the drugs are and also held accountable for homicide?”

Both drug-induced homicide charges and transfer laws have been presented as tools to deter crime, but there’s no clear evidence that either work. In fact, many scholars argue that drug-induced homicide prosecutions may lead to more overdose deaths, as they can reduce the chances that a witness will call 911. Most criminologists agree that charging and sentencing juveniles as adults has not been shown to reduce recidivism. A series of large-scale studies found that minors prosecuted in criminal court are more likely to be rearrested than similar offenders in the juvenile system; also, Black kids are disproportionately charged in criminal court. As adolescents continue to sell fentanyl, police and prosecutors are faced with the choice of whether to consider minors as the Supreme Court has cast them — kids who can’t compute consequences the way adults can — or as killers, subject to adult sentences.

States and counties play a major role in this calculation. In recent years, as pharmaceutical money from opioid settlements has been distributed, they have been charged with investing in evidence-based solutions. According to public records, Wisconsin has earmarked only a tiny percentage of funding for treating minors. Brown County has funneled most of its spending to the sheriff’s office. In addition to paying for fentanyl test strips and Narcan, a nasal spray that delivers an overdose-reversal drug, the county decided to hire two “overdose investigators” for the drug task force. Their mandate is to pursue all fatal overdoses as homicides.

In May of 2024, Maylia pled no contest to first-degree reckless homicide. She was convinced she’d lose her appeal to send the case to the juvenile system, and she was ready to stop fighting. She was also impatient to get to a facility where she could spend time outside. It had been more than a year.

Two months later, Maylia was driven to the courtroom for sentencing. Carrie had been unable to sleep for days. Her best guess was that she was panicked that the case was ending. At least there was purpose in showing up to each hearing. It was a way of keeping Jack alive.

In court, Lemkuil, the prosecutor, kept returning to what Maylia ought to have known. “Maylia had a crystal ball of what could happen to her if she delivered drugs just like her sister did,” she said. She asked the judge for 10 years of initial confinement, followed by 10 years of extended supervision. Fritz referred to Miller v. Alabama. The judge, seemingly unaware of the case, asked her to repeat the name. She explained how the court’s language reminded her of Maylia, who had an underdeveloped sense of responsibility and received almost no parenting. Fritz asked the judge for extended probation or a maximum sentence of five years of confinement.

For the first time in the 19-month-long case, Maylia spoke in court. In jail, her friends had coached her to appear remorseful but not to cry, because no one likes self-pity. Within seconds, she couldn’t stop herself. Sitting with her hands shackled in her lap, she choked on her words. Fritz held Maylia’s written testimony close to her face so she could read. She wasn’t asking for sympathy, she said, “because I know I’m not the one who deserves it. I am speaking today to assure you that I will do everything and anything to change.” She added, “I understand the seriousness of what I have done, and I understand that there will be consequences for my actions, and I will accept those.”

At the start of the investigation, Carrie wanted retribution, and she thought she knew what justice meant. She wasn’t so sure anymore. When she addressed the court, she talked about Jack, how loyal and opinionated he was, how she had dedicated her life to him, and how that life was now meaningless, devoid of a future. She called out the drug task force for continuing to allow Maylia to deal when investigators knew she was selling fentanyl. Ronsman, who was watching from the gallery, raised his eyebrows. He understood the impulse to play Monday morning quarterback but, he thought, he wouldn’t have done anything differently given what he knew at the time. Carrie continued: “I do believe that you, Maylia, are responsible for Jack’s death.” At the front of the courtroom, she forced herself to look at Maylia. “However, I also believe that you are deserving of forgiveness. I do forgive you, Maylia.”

The judge said that considering how much Maylia was selling, she was bound to kill at some point. He was disturbed by the photos of money on her phone. “In one of them, it’s almost like someone is bathing in the cash,” he said. Yes, she was young, but he needed to keep in mind “the substantial negative impact of drug trafficking on the community.” Young users in particular, he added, “don’t really have any idea what they’re doing or what they’re getting into when they start using.” He sentenced Maylia to 10 years in prison and 10 years of extended supervision.

That evening, Carrie leaned into the corner of her living room couch next to Ryan, facing the door to Jack’s bedroom, which remained almost exactly as he had left it. She had been hoping for some epiphany, for a grand finale, but there was none. She was struck by Maylia’s voice — she sounded like a little kid, not like the girl in the flashy photos she’d posted on social media. During the hearing, Carrie had watched Maylia’s mom on the opposite side of the gallery. She kept tossing her headband in the air, spitting loudly into napkins and walking up and down the aisle in a blue suit, fur-lined snow boots and a hard hat on an 83-degree day.

“I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Carrie said to Ryan, holding her face in her hand.

“A homicide case?”

“Well, that, of course, but I’ve never been exposed to that, I guess, that lifestyle. A child who grew up in a drug-trafficking home.”

Ryan didn’t see a reason to wish for a shorter sentence. Maylia would just be released back into the same circumstances. “This is where the problem was in the first place,” he said.

“But it’s what she knows, you know?” Carrie replied. All kids want to come home. “Look at Jack.”

She could trace the progression of her grief through the hearings in the case. How the anger had overwhelmed her at first, how she’d blamed herself for not doing more, how she had stopped wanting to live, how she had lost her trust in the police. Now she noticed a new sensation. She felt strangely protective of Maylia, and she couldn’t quite figure out why. How could CPS ignore what was happening in that home? She kept picturing Maylia’s limp face in the brief moment when they had looked at each other during the hearing.

“Maybe this is part of it,” she said. “I lost my son, my only child. And here is Maylia, who didn’t have a mother. So, it’s like, I’m childless, she’s motherless, and we’re in this situation together, but against each other.”

Carrie a year and a half after Jack’s death (Photo by Akilah Townsend for ProPublica. Photo illustration by ProPublica and Han Cao.) How We Reported This Story

Lizzie Presser interviewed scores of pediatricians, addiction specialists, counselors, teachers, lawyers, law enforcement officers, parents of kids with addiction, and teenagers in recovery. She reported from Baltimore, Denver, Monterey, California, and Green Bay, Wisconsin. She spent a week shadowing health care providers and meeting their patients. To reconstruct Maylia Sotelo’s path into the criminal justice system, she drew from hundreds of pages of child protective services and police records, court transcripts and statements, Maylia’s text messages, journals and letters, and interviews with Maylia, her sisters, people she met in jail, and those who had seen conditions in her home. (Her grandmother did not provide a comment.) To reconstruct Jack McDonough’s life, Presser drew from extensive medical records, school reports and emails, text messages, and interviews with his mother, other relatives, friends and girlfriend. Through public records requests, Presser established the timeline of the investigation into Jack’s death and the scope of drug-induced homicide charges brought against teens in Wisconsin.

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.

In a landmark lawsuit filed this week, the California attorney general accused ExxonMobil of “deceptively” promoting chemical recycling as a solution for the plastics crisis, citing ProPublica’s recent reporting and expanding on our findings.

In June, we examined the oil giant’s claim that it had transformed discarded plastic into new fruit cups through an “advanced” chemical recycling technology called pyrolysis. We broke down the math to show just how little recycled content winds up in products made this way and how companies inflate that percentage in their marketing.

The lawsuit cited the fruit cup example alongside the attorney general’s own discoveries, which reveal an even more extreme gap between what ExxonMobil advertises and how much recycled plastic its products actually contain.

ProPublica reported that plastic made via pyrolysis can’t contain more than 10% recycled content. Because the technology is shrouded in secrecy, we could not determine the specific amount in ExxonMobil’s products.

Citing internal company documents, the lawsuit said ExxonMobil’s process yields less than 0.1% recycled plastic content.

Yet it marketed the cups as containing “30% ISCC PLUS certified-circular content” — shorthand for 30% recycled — through a controversial accounting method called mass balance, which allows recyclers to pump up the advertised recycledness of one product by reducing the advertised recycledness of other, less lucrative products.

The lawsuit cited ProPublica’s reporting on the first federal action against mass balance, taken last month when the Environmental Protection Agency prohibited its use in a voluntary program for sustainable products. The California lawsuit said mass balance is “widely criticized, including by some members of the plastics industry, precisely because it is deceptive to the public.”

ExxonMobil has a “massive financial interest” in ensuring that mass balance methods are “accepted broadly and even enshrined in law,” the lawsuit stated. “Indeed, continuing the public deception is ExxonMobil’s business model.”

During a press conference on Monday, California Attorney General Rob Bonta blasted the oil giant for “falsely touting ‘advanced recycling’” as a solution to the plastic crisis, calling it ExxonMobil’s “biggest greenwashing campaign.”

In a statement, an ExxonMobil spokesperson insisted that advanced recycling works. “To date, we’ve processed more than 60 million pounds of plastic waste into usable raw materials, keeping it out of landfills.” California officials have known for decades that the state’s recycling system isn’t effective, the statement said. “Instead of suing us, they could have worked with us to fix the problem.”

The California lawsuit does not focus solely on chemical recycling. It accused ExxonMobil of misleading the public for decades about the sustainability of plastic, first by promoting traditional recycling despite knowing that plastic is functionally not recyclable, and more recently by marketing advanced recycling as a cure-all. Unlike traditional recycling, advanced recycling uses heat or chemicals to break plastic down to its molecular building blocks. But it’s done little to improve America’s 5% plastic recycling rate and can’t solve the environmental damage or health problems caused by microplastics and toxic chemicals.

Plastic recycling is “a farce, a lie, a deceit,” Bonta said during the press conference. “One thing ExxonMobil actually does is recycle its lies.”

Judith Enck, founder of the advocacy group Beyond Plastics, called California’s action “the most consequential lawsuit in the country” in terms of holding the plastics industry accountable and told ProPublica it reminded her of the tobacco lawsuits from the 1990s, which eventually led to billions of dollars in settlements for deceptive advertising on the risks of smoking.

The lawsuit seeks an abatement fund to mitigate the harm caused by the company’s actions. Bonta told reporters that the fund — which he hopes will be “to the tune of billions of dollars” — will pay for efforts such as educating the public about the truth of plastic recycling. Enck said she wants the money to expand the refill-and-reuse infrastructure in California. That could include installing dishwashing equipment in schools and hospitals to reduce single-use plastic, or adding water bottle refill stations, which appear in airports but are rare in other public spaces.

Bonta’s lawsuit was filed on the same day as a separate lawsuit from four environmental groups, including the Sierra Club. The suit similarly accuses ExxonMobil of misleading the public about the recyclability of plastic. Bonta and the groups’ leaders spoke at the same press conference.

Enck said ProPublica’s reporting and other news outlets “created breadcrumbs for litigators.” The California lawsuit comes two years after Bonta’s office sent subpoenas to ExxonMobil and industry trade groups to investigate their “historic and ongoing efforts to deceive the public.”

The lawsuit also cited the company’s collaboration with trade groups like the American Chemistry Council. From 2020-2023, for instance, the company gave the council $19.4 million for an ad campaign and national policy work on advanced recycling. One video, which got more than 8 million YouTube views, declared: “Imagine a future where plastic is not wasted but instead remade over and over into the things that keep our food fresher, our families safer and our planet cleaner.”

This ad campaign, “with ExxonMobil at the helm, deceptively seeks to convince consumers that recycling, especially ‘advanced recycling,’ will save the day in order to continue saturating the public and the planet with single-use plastic,” the lawsuit said.

“It is disappointing that legal action has diverted time and resources away from our industry’s efforts to scale up a circular economy for plastics,” the American Chemistry Council said in a statement. “Regardless, we remain steadfast in our mission to advocate for effective policy, collaborate with communities, and invest in new technologies that help to increase plastics recycling and recycled plastic use in products, contributing to a more sustainable future.”

ExxonMobil’s ads are misleading because the company knows its advanced recycling process is not economically viable and can only handle small amounts of consumer waste, the lawsuit noted. In fact, only about 8% of the waste plastic fed into its advanced recycling system becomes new plastic; the rest gets burned up as fuel or becomes other nonplastic products. Even if ExxonMobil operated a potential future project that’s more efficient, it would only be able to turn 13% of the waste plastic into new plastic.

“The truth is ExxonMobil’s ‘advanced recycling’ program is less like a recycling program,” the lawsuit said, “and more like a waste disposal or destruction program akin to the incineration solutions advocated by ExxonMobil in the past.”

by B. “Toastie” Oaster, High Country News

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with High Country News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

I’m standing at an Indigenous sacred site, looking at something I’m not supposed to see. Signs of ceremony are all around: little animal skulls, ribbons, a stump of freshly burnt sage stems in ashes, tied together with red yarn. It looks like a ceremony happened in the last week.

I’m here with a source who wants their story told — who wants to expose the harm that the public and private sectors are inflicting on tribal cultures in pursuit of renewable energy development. But the source also wants to protect these cultural sites from public exposure. So I don’t take any photos. I don’t record it in my notes. I walk away and do not publish what I see.

Another month, in another part of the Pacific Northwest, I’m at a tribal community event, not reporting, exactly, but relationship building — an important component of establishing trust in Indigenous journalism. I overhear an elder talking about a ceremonial rite of passage that takes place at a location where I have been reporting, a location sited for renewable energy development. The public isn’t supposed to know about this ceremony, which means I’m not supposed to know either. So I pretend I didn’t hear.

I’m engaged in a yearlong investigation, a partnership between two newsrooms, documenting how proposed developments are threatening sacred lands and Indigenous cultural resources. I usually write for an Indigenous editor, but none of my editors are Native right now on this story. I return to the virtual newsroom, and they’re eager to hear about what makes these sites sacred; we need to be able to communicate this to readers, they say, particularly when we dig into the legal and political mechanisms threatening the sites.

I want the public to understand the importance of these places, and part of me wants to tell my editors everything. But if I do, and the information escapes, it will be on me. I’m Native, too, and I have to handle this information responsibly, without selling out my kin. In the Native world, we tend to view each other — and all living things — as relatives. At the same time, my tribe is not from here, and I’m still learning about the cultures I’m reporting on. Language that would bring the location vibrantly to life is right there in my mind, but I don’t feel right about using it. The most I seem to be able to tell my editors — speaking accurately and honestly while respecting cultural concerns — is that tribal leaders won’t share that information with me.

I mention some rock features. My editors ask what the features are used for. A variety of purposes, I say, thinking carefully — hunting, storage, cooking. I’m leaving information out, but everything I say is true. Even mentioning the archaeological features could endanger them, putting them in the crosshairs of looters and vandals. Write one too-specific article, and tribal historic preservation officers might find themselves fighting off new age gatherings of non-Natives appropriating Indigenous worship. Or worse: Western scientists destroying ancestral remains for anthropological “research.”

During our discussion, my editors seem to believe that sharing as much information as possible is a public good. It’s a value assumption of investigative journalism — a very American value, and one I sometimes share. Transparency is what empowers the watchdog press. And of course we aren’t withholding information that’s critical to the investigation. But tribal cultures don’t necessarily put such a premium on transparency. In many Indigenous cultures, information is carefully guarded by storytellers, shared orally and only with select people or at certain times, if at all.

I sit down at my laptop to write, thinking again about words. How do I write about plants and sites and ceremonies I can’t write about?

During my reporting, a tribal government sends me, at my request, a set of guidelines about cultural information it doesn’t want published, like the names or pictures of the first foods that grow where I’m reporting. On the one hand, I don’t work for tribal governments, so I don’t have to do what they say. And I’ve worked with neighboring tribes who publicly identify some of the very same plants, which are threatened by renewable energy development. Yet I know I’d be responsible to the community if that information got out.

My own tribal citizenship impacts the reporting process, too. “Toastie, where are you from originally?” began a conversation I recently had with a Chickasaw legal expert. “You’re Choctaw. We're kind of cousins.” I’m still taken aback sometimes when I hear a question like this from another professional. Normally, I wouldn’t feel obligated to talk about my family history at work. But this part of our conversation is how we recognize each other and orient ourselves in relational space. My conduct as a reporter will reflect on my community. So we talk like Natives a bit before settling into our official roles.

I sit down at my laptop to write, thinking again about words. How do I write about plants and sites and ceremonies I can’t write about? And then one of my editors forwards me a note from another, paraphrasing a third editor: “Readers may say: They are only roots. How do we get them to think beyond that?”

I leave my desk, play some guitar, go for a walk, trying to shake off frustration. I know my editors are speaking for a readership we can’t assume is educated about Native issues like food sovereignty — the ability of a people to govern its own food sourcing. But I have to walk a narrow line between educating and oversharing. I find myself wishing everyone in America, myself included, had learned more about Native issues in school. Then we could avoid situations like this.

The problem haunts me over the dinner stove. “Root gathering,” a phrase I’ve heard Natives use, might be the simplest language to choose. But it sounds primitive, like something hunter-gatherers do; “civilized” people “harvest vegetables.” I pace around my apartment, searching for wording that might clarify what’s at stake. Indignation flashes through my mind as I reflect on how terms like “heirloom” are applied almost exclusively to European foods — Italian tomatoes, say, even though tomatoes were originally engineered by Indigenous scientists in South America.

I find myself wishing everyone in America, myself included, had learned more about Native issues in school. Then we could avoid situations like this.

What would these Indigenous roots be called if they were in rustic-looking display crates at Whole Foods? Finally, I think I’ve found a solution: I write “endemic, heirloom, organic root vegetable harvests.” True, it’s a word salad, but the plants themselves remain anonymous, and non-Native readers could better understand why they’re valuable.

I Slack the phrase to one of my editors. She laughs, understanding the jab at bourgeois vernacular. Few of those modifiers will make it past top edits; what remains in the final draft is simply a “root vegetable harvest.” Not as obvious, but at least we avoided “root gathering.”

It’s difficult to write for Natives and non-Natives at the same time. If a non-Native editor puts the term “first foods” in quotes, that could alienate Native readers. But a non-Native reader may never have encountered the term, and the quotes might help explain that it’s a common phrase.

It’s even more difficult when terms mean different things to different audiences, like the word “sacred.” Natives use it a lot, but I’ve seen it spark scorn in some non-Natives. (“Sacred land? It’s 2024!” reads a social media comment on one of our most recent stories.) Others seem to use it with a shallow understanding.

Handling information amid these tensions, created by different value systems, is the challenge and responsibility of a journalist. Of course, we can’t get into all this in the draft itself. So the challenge remains: How do you write about a sacred site without saying why it’s sacred, in a way that will help non-Natives care? There’s no clear dividing line between too much information and not enough. It’s the liminal space in which a lot of Indigenous affairs reporting takes place.