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by Doug Bock Clark

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On a Saturday in late March, the woman who runs elections in the rural hills of Surry County, North Carolina, was pulling another weekend shift preparing for the upcoming primary, when she began to hear on the other side of her wall the thunder of impassioned speeches. She was dismayed that the voices were questioning the election she’d overseen in 2020 and implying that corrupted voting machines had helped steal it. She also believed it was no coincidence that the Surry County GOP convention — the highlight of which was a lecture from a nationally prominent proponent of the stolen-election myth — was taking place in a public meeting room right next to her office.

The elections director, 47-year-old Michella Huff, who’d lived in the county since high school and knew many voters by name, considered it ludicrous that anyone could think the election had been rigged in Surry County. Donald Trump had received upward of 70% of the roughly 36,000 votes cast. Huff, a registered Republican for most of her adult life, had personally certified the vote.

Yet people had begun approaching Huff in church recently, saying things like, “I know you didn’t do anything, but that election was stolen.” In February, a longtime acquaintance of Huff’s cornered her in a bluegrass music store and berated her with complaints rooted in conspiracy theories. Huff started limiting her trips to town, even doing her grocery order online. “I didn’t want to have to deal with that,” she said of the election backlash. But it was hard to live in partial hiding. “I’m not that kind of person. I’m a people person.”

Unbeknownst to Huff, a national network of election deniers had been making inroads in Surry County, on the fringe of Appalachia. In early 2022, several members of the Surry County GOP had attended a training, put on by North Carolina Audit Force, which describes itself as a group that forms grassroots coalitions to “reveal election irregularities.” There, they were taught to “canvass” for election fraud by door-knocking to check for inaccuracies in public records, such as if a different person lived at an address than was listed on voter rolls. Discrepancies, canvassers claim, can indicate fraud — though experts say that canvassers often misinterpret normal imperfections in difficult-to-maintain voter lists, such as someone failing to update their address when moving. By early March, canvassers were crisscrossing Surry County, following “walk books” put together by data analysts associated with North Carolina Audit Force, who mapped routes for efficiency.

The featured lecturer at the Surry County GOP convention, Douglas Frank, is the face of the nationwide canvassing movement and claims to have established campaigns with the help of “supermoms” in at least 40 states. Frank and other speakers spent hours at the convention blaming corrupted voting machines and collusion among Democrats, Big Tech and nefarious forces for stealing the election. The assembly ultimately passed resolutions to create an election integrity task force and push for an audit, tactics espoused by Trump supporters.

The following Monday morning, Frank showed up at the service window of Huff’s office with William Keith Senter, the new chair of the Surry County GOP, and a woman who signed the guestbook as “NC Audit Force.” Huff believed that the group wanted to get inside her office — where voting equipment was kept — so she stepped into the cramped lobby with them, letting the door to her office automatically lock behind her.

The bowtie-wearing Frank began complaining to Huff about “phantom voters” discovered through canvassing and declaring that if he could just take an electromagnetic field meter tool to her DS200 ballot tabulators, he could reveal a minuscule modem that had helped switch votes from Trump to Joe Biden. It wasn’t the first time that Frank had encouraged an election official to let outsiders access election equipment. About 11 months before, he’d offered to help bring in a “team” to “audit” machines for Colorado officials, according to an affidavit for an arrest warrant of an official charged in the incident and to Frank himself. In September, Frank posted on Telegram that his phone had been seized by FBI agents investigating the incident, according to The Washington Post. Frank has not been charged.

“My objective is to help the clerk understand how they’re being hacked and what they need to do to fix it,” Frank said when asked about Colorado, using another term for election officials. In reference to Huff, he said: “I was there trying to offer a service to the clerk. I always assume clerks want to have clean elections, which is why I offered to help her find out if her machines were online or not.” Frank claimed to have convinced “dozens” of other election and county-level officials of the need to probe voting machines, “and that’s why counties all across the country are taking the machines out of the election process.”

It was not Frank who most concerned Huff, however, but Senter — a high school auto shop teacher and cattle farmer with a mechanic’s callused hands and baseball hat declaring “Pray for America” atop his silvering hair. The new GOP chair — who, according to three members of the Surry County GOP, replaced a predecessor who hadn’t sufficiently backed claims of election fraud — would remain in Huff’s orbit long after the barnstorming Frank left town. Indeed, Senter was only at the beginning of a campaign that would include efforts to drastically cut Huff’s pay and call into question even the most mundane functions of her office.

Huff told ProPublica that, as the men pressured her for more than an hour, Senter threatened that she should comply with their demands or the county commission would fire her. (She initially described this incident in an article by Reuters.) She feared that her reddening face and neck gave away her fear. (The commission has no authority to fire Huff; she is appointed by and answers to the county and state boards of elections. Senter denied threatening Huff’s job and wrote to ProPublica that “I speak loudly because I do not hear well. I drove a loud race car for years and have shot high powered rifles all of my life, so I have high frequency hearing loss.” Frank said that descriptions of Senter as threatening were “overblown,” and that “he might have been emphatic, but never, like, threatening.”)

But Huff refused to give in.

Huff is hardly the only election official struggling to stand up to those who believe the voting system is rigged; such confrontations have dramatically unfolded across the country, from Hood County, Texas, to Floyd County, Georgia, to Nye County, Nevada. Her circumstances illustrate how the efforts to target her are part of a larger playbook, with tactics that are replicated throughout the country.

“Election officials in small rural offices are absolutely more vulnerable,” said Paul Manson, who studies the demography of election officials and serves as the research director for the Elections & Voting Information Center at Reed College. Because such offices have fewer resources, Manson said, they have a harder time adapting to the increasingly controversial nature of election administration in the United States. These types of offices also represent the vast majority of the nation’s roughly 10,000 election jurisdictions, according to Manson’s research, with 48% of offices staffed by only one or two people and an additional 40% having between two and five. (Huff’s office has four full-time staff members, including her.)

As she juggled budget challenges and harassment, Huff has sought help from the North Carolina State Board of Elections, but that agency has faced struggles of its own. The GOP-dominant legislature has deprived the board of federal funding it had intended to use to hire and retain staff, instead sending it directly to counties. Moreover, groups claiming election fraud have organized campaigns against the agency, leaving it straining to support the 100 far-flung county boards of elections it oversees, officials say.

Laws and regulations were not written for the hostile environment of today, said Richard L. Hasen, a professor and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at the University of California, Los Angeles. Many of the individuals challenging election officials are even using the law itself, such as overwhelming those offices with public records requests, a practice that Senter would soon take up in Surry County and that “election integrity” groups would employ against the North Carolina State Board of Elections.

Hasen warned: “The country’s election infrastructure isn’t designed to stand up to one of its two major parties turning against it.”

When Michella Huff accepted the job as Surry County’s elections director in 2019, she thought she knew what she was getting into. On her first day, in October, she parked at a strip mall neighbored by corn fields, a hunting supply store and a chicken processing plant, and walked into a former grocery store, which had closed as the region bled jobs and had been renovated to house the county’s tax, agricultural and elections divisions. After more than two decades as the head of groundskeeping for Mount Airy, population roughly 10,500 and the largest town in the county, located about 100 miles north of Charlotte, she was giving her aching back a rest and working in an air-conditioned office.

Each fall, for most of her adult life, she’d taken a few weeks off from mowing and planting to be a poll worker during early voting and then run a polling site as a chief precinct judge on Election Day. Though the days could be long and the pay little, she loved how some people kept their “I Voted” stickers pristine to add to lifetime collections and how others brought in homemade grape jelly for poll workers. Most of all, she was motivated by the certainty that she was making American democracy function.

After the 2020 presidential election went off smoothly, Huff was aware of the “Stop the Steal” movement promoted by Trump, but, given her knowledge of how election security worked, she knew that its claims of Venezuelan software flipping votes from Trump to Biden were baseless. In the aftermath of Jan. 6, she assured herself that that kind of chaos would never come to sleepy Surry County.

Mount Airy, population roughly 10,500, is the largest town in Surry County. (Cornell Watson for ProPublica)

But instead of the conspiracy theories dying down, they intensified. Soon after taking the job, she had switched her party status to independent “to reflect the way that this office must be portrayed in a nonpartisan manner.” It wasn’t until Biden took office that people in the community began to ask her about this. Huff recalls that one afternoon in early March 2021, she was surprised by a visitor at her office: Kevin Shinault, her former elementary school teacher and a GOP precinct chair, who she said accused her of participating in a debunked conspiracy theory known as “Zuckerbucks.”

In 2020, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had provided grants to election officials through the Center for Tech and Civic Life to help with unexpected pandemic expenses, and critics held that this had been part of a plot to throw the election to Joe Biden. Huff happily explained that the $48,584 she’d received from the group had been used for straightforward expenses, like hiring a Spanish-language interpreter. Nearly every election office in North Carolina had accepted such grants. Shinault, however, argued that hiring a Spanish-language interpreter had nefariously boosted Hispanic participation to the Democrats’ advantage. Huff assured him that helping Spanish-speaking voters wasn’t partisan. (Shinault did not respond to requests for comment.)

That night, Huff attended the biweekly county commissioners meeting, at which the chair of the county Elections Board asked the five county commissioners to split $20,000 left over from the previous year’s federal grants between Huff and her staff as belated hazard pay for their efforts during the pandemic. Huff figured it was a routine request. Numerous other counties had used the money this way; Surry’s bipartisan Elections Board had already signed off on it; and records show that about two months earlier, commissioners had reviewed the grants without comment.

The county commissioners, however, sharply questioned the chair of the Elections Board for nearly an hour, implying that unless more county employees got such pay, it wasn’t fair. Eddie Harris, a commissioner who works at a luxury saddle-making company his family owns, declared, “I will never take one penny from Mark Zuckerberg or any of his ilk,” calling the Meta CEO “a left-wing radical extremist bigot.” (Senter wrote to ProPublica, “As a party, we approached the commissioners and ask [sic] them to send the Zuckerbucks back, and they agreed.” Harris did not respond to requests for comment.)

Huff realized that her decadeslong relationships with people wouldn’t prevent them from envisioning her as part of some dark conspiracy. The next month, the commissioners unanimously voted to return nearly $100,000 in pandemic grant money, including the Center for Tech and Civic Life grant and around $60,000 from the USC Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy, named for the former Republican governor of California. They also returned the $20,000 in federal funding, rather than divvying it up among the elections staff.

Huff felt that returning the money was “very unfair,” but she resolved not to let it affect her performance. The best way to rebut conspiracy theories was to run her elections perfectly. She hoped the election conspiracy theories “would be a dead issue after the money was sent back.”

But once Senter and Frank confronted her in March 2022, she realized the target on her back was permanent.

After that heated visit, Senter kept showing up at the elections office. With the service window between them, Huff helped him file public records requests, which he insisted on scrawling by hand. (He explained to ProPublica that the handwritten requests were necessary, “so they could not be doctored by anyone else.”) Huff politely did her duty, but whenever she saw him, “My gut flipped. It makes me angry that he has that power — I can’t help how my body reacts.” When Huff and her staff finished work late in the evening, police escorted them to their cars, past campaign-style signs that Senter had put up reading “The People’s Trust is SHATTERED” and “We DEMAND a Full FORENSIC Audit.” Huff repeatedly took them down, until the sheriff decided the signs should stay up, as they were legal political expression on public property.

In March and April, Senter sent numerous emails and texts to the county commissioners, which ProPublica obtained through public records requests. On March 31, he emailed the commissioners asking them to “please consider our recommendations that are in the attachment,” which included a suggestion to reduce her pay and stated that “there is NO requirement to fund any additional election support staff.” Though Huff answers to the county and state elections boards, the county commissioners set her budget and salary.

Later that day, Senter texted the commissioners, “Y’all might better get Michella in check,” complaining about her charging 5 cents per copy for public records. “It’s gonna get ugly if she don’t jump on board. Cut her salary to 12 bucks an hour like the law says you can do.” (Senter told ProPublica: “The ugly part is in reference to the phone calls, text, threats and pressure I was receiving due to her lies and deceit that she reported to the media”; but his message to the commissioners made no reference to those things, and Huff said she had not spoken to the media about Senter as of the end of March.)

North Carolina law does specify that elections directors can be paid a minimum of $12 an hour (less than $25,000 annually), but two lawyers specializing in elections told ProPublica that any attempt to drastically reduce Huff’s salary, which was $71,000 as of March, would almost certainly be struck down, as courts have found that elections director salaries must be in line with those of their peers; a ProPublica review of elections director salaries in North Carolina found that the average is about $61,000.

Commissioners responded only occasionally to Senter’s messages about Huff, according to the documents ProPublica received from public records requests, such as the commission chair texting Senter instructions for how to avoid paying for public information requests to Huff’s office. (Only one of the county commissioners responded to a request for comment. Mark Marion said, “We have signified that we are behind our elections department.” When pressed for specific instances, he pointed to “our day-to-day conversations and visits” with elections staff.)

At an April 18 commissioners meeting, Senter asked the panel during the public comment period to consider not using the county’s voting machines in the upcoming May primary because of his and others’ suspicions that they had been corrupted. He was backed by a parade of speakers, among them Shinault.

At a commissioners meeting the following month, the room was filled, with the overflow watching on a livestream. Essentially, the whole meeting was given over to election deniers, some of whom traveled from elsewhere in North Carolina and the nation and presented slideshows on the vulnerabilities of voting machines and the so-called evidence from canvassing efforts.

Near the end of the meeting, a commissioner read prewritten remarks explaining that the requests to discard the voting machines were outside their power.

Afterward, the crowd assembled on the courthouse lawn, alongside a memorial to Confederate soldiers. People chanted, “Hell no, the machines gotta go!” A succession of speakers promised to fight on, with one declaiming so vehemently that he tore his lips on the microphone mesh, spotting it with blood.

In late August, Senter traveled to Missouri for a weekendlong gathering of hundreds of election deniers put on by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO who claims to have spent at least $35 million of his fortune on efforts to prove the 2020 election was fraudulent. At Lindell’s event, activists from all 50 states touted their campaigns, which often involved pressuring county and state election officials. “We’ve had a few victories,” Senter told the crowd when he presented as the representative for North Carolina. “We feel like if you’ve got a committed group of patriots, and some county commissioners that are not afraid to face the establishment and do their job, and local law enforcement that will hear the evidence that you produce to them, we can actually get something done in your county. So if you’d like that strategy, hit us up in North Carolina, and we’ll help you out with it.”

After returning home, Senter submitted to Huff’s office a time-consuming public records request similar to one that Lindell had promoted, which required one of Huff’s three full-time staff members to spend 60 hours at a scanner uploading 2020 “poll tapes,” the physical receipts from tabulators. Across North Carolina and nationwide, short-staffed offices reported being overwhelmed with often identical requests. Senter’s requests to Huff came atop dozens of others from different sources, including a sweeping request from a lawyer for the Republican National Committee. Before 2020, Surry County’s elections office had received an estimated half-dozen public records requests a year; in the first 10 months of 2022, it received 81.

An ally of Senter’s filed requests for court-ordered mediation and a lawsuit against Huff, seeking the same records that Lindell’s campaign has recommended asking for. While none of the legal actions have so far been successful, shortly before Surry County’s 2020 elections-related paper records were to be routinely discarded, the county Board of Elections agreed to preserve them for three more years. Huff said that each legal action resulted in her and her staff having to spend significant time with lawyers and on paperwork, rather than on actual elections administration.

Most laws and regulations that govern public records requests and elections do little to ease the disruptions that Huff and others were enduring — and offer few means to hold anyone accountable. “I don’t think there’s a silver bullet solution, unfortunately,” said Lawrence Norden, the senior director of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit law and public policy institute. He noted that public records laws are necessary tools to ensure government transparency. “In a lot of cases, if election officials had more resources available to them, it would be easier to push back on some of these things.” He said that officials in smaller jurisdictions often need to turn to professional associations, nonprofits or their state election agencies for help.

The organization most responsible for supporting Huff is the North Carolina State Board of Elections, which is responsible for statewide election infrastructure, such as its voter registration database, and which provides oversight and help for county offices. It had dispatched staff to back up Huff when election deniers were holding rallies in the county and offered legal advice and support over the phone.

But the state board, too, was being overwhelmed by public information requests. Before 2020, only several dozen requests would come in per year, said Patrick Gannon, its public information director. In 2021, there were 380, with some coming from the same people who submitted requests to Huff. Meanwhile, the number of people on the communications team had dwindled from four to two, in large part due to reductions in federal funding and the GOP-led legislature not meeting budgeting requests, according to board officials. By late October, the officials said, five employees had accepted buyout offers. To make payroll, the agency also let two people go and did not fill 17 positions — reducing its staff by more than 20% during its busiest time and limiting the services it could provide counties.

Huff helps election workers test voting machines to ensure each is functioning properly. (Cornell Watson for ProPublica)

Huff’s experiences with so-called election integrity activists were more intense than what other North Carolina election workers were facing, though many of them were also enduring their own challenges. After the May primary, at least 14 counties reported complaints to the state board about aggressive poll observers, according to an internal survey obtained through a public records request. The complaints and additional documentation from one of the counties described two instances in which observers tailed election workers in their cars, among other examples of observers “intimidating poll workers.” This led the agency to pass rules to ensure that observers — the individuals assigned by political parties to monitor election officials — didn’t do things like stand so close to voting equipment that they could see confidential information. However, these rules were nullified when they were sent for approval to a board appointed by the GOP-controlled state legislature.

Even states considered to be on the forefront of election administration — such as Colorado, where legislators have passed laws addressing rising security risks, and Kentucky, where the Republican secretary of state has pushed back against conspiracy theories — have experienced significant disruptions as a result of the organized campaigns by 2020 election deniers. “It’s the new normal, until we have our political leaders in both parties pushing back strongly against it,” Norden said.

One of the individuals helping Senter in his Surry County campaign is Carol Snow, the North Carolina Audit Force leader who accompanied Senter and Frank to the elections office during their March confrontation with Huff. In a May email from Snow to Senter with the subject line “Surry Co Dirt,” which ProPublica obtained through public records requests, she provides him with a PowerPoint presentation. Its 61 slides outline supposed errors in North Carolina’s voter registration database. In an August email Snow sent to the county commissioners, copying Senter, she presented them with supposed evidence of voter-registration fraud in Surry County assembled through canvassing. She also suggested that law enforcement could subpoena information inaccessible through public records requests, which she claimed might reveal “individual voter fraud” or systemwide “election fraud.” She concluded, “We will get to the bottom of this or die (or be imprisoned for) trying.” The commissioners did not respond to the email.

(Snow declined to comment on the emails; in response to earlier questions about North Carolina Audit Force’s efforts in Surry County, Snow wrote: “Americans have every right to oversee our election process. That’s what should happen in a free society.”)

Until recently, Snow was also a leader in the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, a statewide affiliate of the nationwide Election Integrity Network, which has trained thousands of activists in the battleground states to scrutinize election officials. The network’s goal is to make sure there are “local election integrity task forces organized at every local election office in America,” according to its training manual, and it lays out how to aggressively scrutinize officials in ways that are similar to what Huff has experienced, such as through filing public records requests and investigating voting machines and voter lists. “The goal is for the task force members to be ever-present at the election office and board meetings,” it reads.

Jim Womack, the head of the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, told ProPublica that the group had nothing to do with the events in Surry County and that Snow’s actions there were “her business.” He and Snow said she had recently left the organization.

Womack estimated that as of August, the North Carolina Election Integrity Team had trained more than 1,000 volunteers, who would be present in most major North Carolina counties in November, including Surry. “As long as” election officials are “doing things in accordance with the law and the books, they shouldn’t have anything to worry about,” Womack said. “And if that causes stress, I'm sorry.”

In the months before the November 2022 midterm election, Huff decided to go on the offensive against misinformation, giving speeches to various civic groups about how elections actually work, like the local real estate agents association.

One afternoon toward the end of the summer, she showed up at a country club for what she had believed was a concerned citizens meeting — and found waiting for her eight local conservative leaders, including county commissioner Harris, who had fiercely criticized the Center for Tech and Civic Life money. For two and a half hours, Huff answered the Republicans’ questions, largely about election security, explaining the safeguards that kept voting tabulators from being hacked. The discussion was tense but civil, and while Huff kept her hands clasped atop a table, her feet compulsively kicked an orange golf tee beneath it. As Huff headed for the door, she reminded her hosts, “The people who work in the elections office, we’re real people who love our community too.”

Afterward, a ProPublica reporter asked an attendee, Earl Blackburn, a Republican candidate for a local school board, if Huff’s presentation had made him feel better about election security. Though Huff had taken more than 15 minutes to explain directly to Blackburn how the voting machines couldn’t be hacked, he said, “I don’t know that she has satisfactorily answered my question.” To explain how the machines could be hacked anyway, Blackburn referenced a badly reviewed Sean Connery heist movie that hinges on thieves dodging a laser beam alarm system to break into a global bank.

Huff speaks during a September training for election workers at the Surry County Board of Elections. (Cornell Watson for ProPublica)

On Sept. 19, Huff hosted a watch party in the public meeting room next to the elections office for a livestream of speeches in which experts and North Carolina State Board of Elections members explained election security, hoping that some of the Surry County GOP might attend — or at the very least some skeptical citizens. But the only people who came were longtime poll workers who already understood how elections worked.

As September turned to October, she and her staff hosted another event at which they publicly tested the dozens of voting machines that would be used in November to prove their accuracy. She hoped some of the election deniers might assuage their fears at the event, but none showed up.

No matter how many questions she answered or how many times she proved the soundness of the voting machines, it wasn’t clear that she was convincing anyone.

When Huff had taken the job in 2019, she had told the Board of Elections that she expected to stay 20 years. But recently there had been many nights she had wondered how she could continue. She said, “If this is what every day and every night looks like, how could anyone keep this up for 17 more years?” She wasn’t just thinking of herself but also about how the stress she brought home and the controversies surrounding her would affect her children, who are in high school and college, and her husband.

Coming home late from work each night, Huff parked beside a plot that was normally filled with heirloom tomatoes, cucumbers, herbs and peppers, but which was now just dirt. Instead of tending her garden, she was trapped all day in the halogen-lit office. Still, in her most hopeful moods, she could imagine that instead of cultivating the land she was cultivating democracy. “It’s a seed. You plant it. It grows. It flowers. It fruits,” she said. “It takes careful tending to make sure that it survives and becomes something beautiful.”

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Six days before a local runoff election last year in Frisco, a prosperous and growing suburb of Dallas, Brandon Burden paced the stage of KingdomLife Church. The pastor told congregants that demonic spirits were operating through members of the City Council.

Grasping his Bible with both hands, Burden said God was working through his North Texas congregation to take the country back to its Christian roots. He lamented that he lacked jurisdiction over the state Capitol, where he had gone during the 2021 Texas legislative session to lobby for conservative priorities like expanded gun rights and a ban on abortion.

“But you know what I got jurisdiction over this morning is an election coming up on Saturday,” Burden told parishioners. “I got a candidate that God wants to win. I got a mayor that God wants to unseat. God wants to undo. God wants to shift the balance of power in our city. And I have jurisdiction over that this morning.”

What Burden said that day in May 2021 was a violation of a long-standing federal law barring churches and nonprofits from directly or indirectly participating in political campaigns, tax law experts told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. Although the provision was mostly uncontroversial for decades after it passed in 1954, it has become a target for both evangelical churches and former President Donald Trump, who vowed to eliminate it.

Burden’s sermon is among those at 18 churches identified by the news organizations over the past two years that appeared to violate the Johnson Amendment, a measure named after its author, former President Lyndon B. Johnson. Some pastors have gone so far as to paint candidates they oppose as demonic.

At one point, churches fretted over losing their tax-exempt status for even unintentional missteps. But the IRS has largely abdicated its enforcement responsibilities as churches have become more brazen. In fact, the number of apparent violations found by ProPublica and the Tribune, and confirmed by three nonprofit tax law experts, are greater than the total number of churches the federal agency has investigated for intervening in political campaigns over the past decade, according to records obtained by the news organizations.

In response to questions, an IRS spokesperson said that the agency “cannot comment on, neither confirm nor deny, investigations in progress, completed in the past nor contemplated.” Asked about enforcement efforts over the past decade, the IRS pointed the news organizations to annual reports that do not contain such information.

Neither Burden nor KingdomLife responded to multiple interview requests or to emailed questions.

(Video editing by Todd Wiseman/Texas Tribune and Justin Dehn/Texas Tribune. Source videos: Shelby Tauber for ProPublica/Texas Tribune, KingdomLife Church.)

Trump’s opposition to the law banning political activity by nonprofits “has given some politically-minded evangelical leaders a sense that the Johnson Amendment just isn’t really an issue anymore, and that they can go ahead and campaign for or against candidates or positions from the pulpit,” said David Brockman, a scholar in religion and public policy at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.

Among the violations the newsrooms identified: In January, an Alaska pastor told his congregation that he was voting for a GOP candidate who is aiming to unseat Republican U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, saying the challenger was the “only candidate for Senate that can flat-out preach.” During a May 15 sermon, a pastor in Rocklin, California, asked voters to get behind “a Christian conservative candidate” challenging Gov. Gavin Newsom. And in July, a New Mexico pastor called Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham “beyond evil” and “demonic” for supporting abortion access. He urged congregants to “vote her behind right out of office” and challenged the media to call him out for violating the Johnson Amendment.

Andrew Whitehead, a sociologist at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, who studies Christian nationalism, said the ramping up of political activity by churches could further polarize the country. “It creates hurdles for a healthy, functioning, pluralistic democratic society,” he said. “It’s really hard to overcome.”

The Johnson Amendment does not prohibit churches from inviting political speakers or discussing positions that may seem partisan nor does it restrict voters from making faith-based decisions on who should represent them. But because donations to churches are tax-deductible and because churches don’t have to file financial disclosures with the IRS, without such a rule donors seeking to influence elections could go undetected, said Andrew Seidel, vice president of strategic communications for the advocacy group Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

“If you pair the ability to wade into partisan politics with a total absence of financial oversight and transparency, you’re essentially creating super PACs that are black holes,” Seidel said.

Churches have long balanced the tightrope of political involvement, and blatant violations have previously been rare. In the 1960s, the IRS investigated complaints that some churches abused their tax-exempt status by distributing literature that was hostile to the election of John F. Kennedy, the country’s first Catholic president. And in 2004, the federal agency audited All Saints Episcopal Church in California after a pastor gave an anti-war speech that imagined Jesus talking to presidential candidates George W. Bush and John Kerry. The pastor did not endorse a candidate but criticized the Iraq war.

Some conservative groups have argued that Black churches are more politically active than their white evangelical counterparts but are not as heavily scrutinized. During the 1984 presidential campaign, Democratic candidate Rev. Jesse L. Jackson was accused of turning Sunday sermons into campaign rallies and using Black churches to raise funds. In response to allegations of illegal campaigning, Jackson said at the time that strict guidelines were followed and denied violating the law.

While some Black churches have crossed the line into political endorsements, the long legacy of political activism in these churches stands in sharp contrast to white evangelical churches, where some pastors argue devout Christians must take control of government positions, said Robert Wuthnow, the former director of the Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion.

Wuthnow said long-standing voter outreach efforts inside Black churches, such as Souls to the Polls, which encourages voting on Sundays after church services, largely stay within the boundaries of the law.

“The Black church has been so keenly aware of its marginalized position,” Wuthnow said. “The Black church, historically, was the one place where Black people could mobilize, could organize, could feel that they had some power at the local level. The white evangelical church has power. It’s in office. It’s always had power.”

At the end of his two-hour sermon that May, Burden asserted that his church had a God-given power to choose lawmakers, and he asked others to join him onstage to “secure the gate over the city.”

Burden and a handful of church members crouched down and held on to a rod, at times speaking in tongues. The pastor said intruders such as the mayor, who was not up for reelection last year but who supported one of the candidates in the race for City Council, would be denied access to the gates of the city.

“Now this is bold, but I’m going to say it because I felt it from the Lord. I felt the Lord say, ‘Revoke the mayor’s keys to this gate,’” Burden said. “No more do you have the key to the city. We revoke your key this morning, Mr. Mayor.

“We shut you out of the place of power,” Burden added. “The place of authority and influence.”

Johnson Amendment’s Cold War Roots

Questions about the political involvement of tax-exempt organizations were swirling when Congress ordered an investigation in April 1952 to determine if some foundations were using their money “for un-American and subversive activities.”

Leading the probe was Rep. Gene Cox, a Georgia Democrat who had accused the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, among others, of helping alleged Communists or Communist fronts. Cox died during the investigation, and the final report cleared the foundations of wrongdoing.

But a Republican member of the committee argued for additional scrutiny, and in July 1953, Congress established the House Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations. The committee focused heavily on liberal organizations, but it also investigated nonprofits such as the Facts Forum foundation, which was headed by Texas oilman H.L. Hunt, an ardent supporter of then-Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, a Republican who was best known for holding hearings to investigate suspected Communists.

In July 1954, Johnson, who was then a senator, proposed an amendment to the U.S. tax code that would strip nonprofits of their tax-exempt status for “intervening” in political campaigns. The amendment sailed through Congress with bipartisan support and was signed into law by Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Johnson never explained his intent. Opponents of the amendment, as well as some academics, say Johnson was motivated by a desire to undercut conservative foundations such as the National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government, founded by newspaper magnate Frank Gannett, which painted the Democrat as soft on communism and supported his opponent in the primary election. Others have hypothesized that Johnson was hoping to head off a wider crackdown on nonprofit foundations.

Over the next 40 years, the IRS stripped a handful of religious nonprofits of their tax-exempt status. None were churches.

Then, just four days before the 1992 presidential election, Branch Ministries in New York ran two full-page ads in USA Today and The Washington Times urging voters to reject then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, a Democrat, in his challenge to Republican President George H.W. Bush.

The ads proclaimed: “Christian Beware. Do not put the economy ahead of the Ten Commandments.” They asserted that Clinton violated scripture by supporting “abortion on demand,” homosexuality and the distribution of condoms to teenagers in public schools. Clinton, the ads said, was “openly promoting policies that are in rebellion to God’s laws.”

The IRS revoked the church’s tax-exempt status, leading to a long legal battle that ended with a U.S. appeals court siding with the federal agency.

The case remains the only publicly known example of the IRS revoking the tax-exempt status of a church because of its political activity in nearly 70 years. The Congressional Research Service said in 2012 that a second church had lost its tax-exempt status, but that its identity “is not clear.”

Citing an increase in allegations of church political activity leading up to the 2004 presidential election between incumbent Bush and Kerry, IRS officials created the Political Activities Compliance Initiative to fast-track investigations.

Over the next four years, the committee investigated scores of churches, including 80 for endorsing candidates from the pulpit, according to IRS reports. But it did not revoke the tax-exempt status of any. Instead, the IRS mostly sent warning letters that agency officials said were effective in dissuading churches from continuing their political activity, asserting that there were no repeat offenders in that period.

In some cases, the IRS initiated audits of churches that could have led to financial penalties. It’s unclear how many did.

In January 2009, a federal court dismissed an audit into alleged financial improprieties at a Minnesota church whose pastor had supported the congressional campaign of former U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, a Republican from Minnesota.

The court found that the IRS had not been following its own rules for a decade because it was tasked with notifying churches of their legal rights before any pending audits and was required to have an appropriately high-level official sign off on them. But a 1998 agency reorganization had eliminated the position, leaving lower IRS employees to initiate church investigations.

Following the ruling, the IRS suspended its investigations into church political activity for five years, according to a 2015 Government Accountability Office report.

During the hiatus, a conservative Christian initiative called Pulpit Freedom Sunday flourished. Pastors recorded themselves endorsing candidates or giving political sermons that they believed violated the Johnson Amendment and sent them to the IRS. The goal, according to participants, was to trigger a lawsuit that would lead to the prohibition being ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The IRS never challenged participating churches, and the effort wound down without achieving its aim.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request from ProPublica and the Tribune last year, the IRS produced a severely redacted spreadsheet indicating the agency had launched inquiries into 16 churches since 2011. IRS officials shielded the results of the probes, and they have declined to answer specific questions.

Despite the agency’s limited enforcement, Trump promised shortly after he took office that he would “totally destroy the Johnson Amendment and allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution.”

As president, Trump tried unsuccessfully to remove the restrictions on church politicking through a 2017 executive order. The move was largely symbolic because it simply ordered the government not to punish churches differently than it would any other nonprofit, according to a legal filing by the Justice Department.

Eliminating the Johnson Amendment would require congressional or judicial action.

Although the IRS has not discussed its plans, it has taken procedural steps that would enable it to ramp up audits again if it chooses to.

In 2019, more than two decades after eliminating the high-level position needed to sign off on action against churches, the IRS designated the commissioner of the agency’s tax-exempt and government entities division as the “appropriate high-level Treasury official” with the power to initiate a church audit.

But Philip Hackney, a former IRS attorney and University of Pittsburgh tax law professor, said he doesn’t read too much into that. “I don’t see any reason to believe that the operation of the IRS has changed significantly.”

The Pulpit and Politics

There is no uniform way to monitor church sermons across the country. But with the COVID-19 pandemic, many churches now post their services online, and ProPublica and the Tribune reviewed dozens of them. Many readers shared sermons with us. (You can do so here.)

Texas’ large evangelical population and history of activism in Black churches makes the state a focal point for debates over political activity, said Matthew Wilson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

“Combine all of that with the increasing competitiveness of Texas elections, and it’s no surprise that more and more Texas churches are taking on a political role,” he said. “Texas is a perfect arena for widespread, religiously motivated political activism.”

The state also has a long history of politically minded pastors, Wuthnow said. Texas evangelical church leaders joined the fight in support of alcohol prohibition a century ago and spearheaded efforts to defeat Democrat Al Smith, the first Catholic to be nominated for president by a major party, in 1928. In the 1940s, evangelical fundamentalism began to grow in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Today, North Texas remains home to influential pastors such as Robert Jeffress, who leads the First Baptist megachurch in Dallas. Jeffress was one of Trump’s most fervent supporters, appearing at campaign events, defending him on television news shows and stating that he “absolutely” did not regret supporting the former president after the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.

Burden went a step further, urging followers to stock up on food and keep their guns loaded ahead of President Joe Biden’s inauguration. He told parishioners that “prophetic voices” had told him in 2016 that Trump would have eight consecutive years in office.

The Frisco Conservative Coalition board voted to suspend Burden as chair for 30 days after criticism about his remarks.

Burden called his comments “inartful” but claimed he was unfairly targeted for his views. “The establishment media is coming after me,” he said at the time. “But it is not just about me. People of faith are under attack in this country.”

Since then, Burden has repeatedly preached that the church has been designated by the Lord to decide who should serve in public office and “take dominion” over Frisco.

As the runoff for the Frisco City Council approached last year, Burden supported Jennifer White, a local veterinarian. White had positioned herself as the conservative candidate in the nonpartisan race against Angelia Pelham, a Black human resources executive who had the backing of the Frisco mayor.

White said she wasn’t in attendance during the May 2021 sermon in which Burden called her the “candidate that God wants to win.” She said she does not believe pastors should endorse candidates from the pulpit, but she welcomed churches becoming more politically active.

“I think that the churches over the years have been a big pretty big disappointment to the candidates in that they won't take a political stance,” White said in an interview. “So I would love it if churches would go ahead and come out and actually discuss things like morality. Not a specific party, but at least make sure people know where the candidates stand on those issues. And how to vote based on that.”

Pelham’s husband, local pastor Dono Pelham, also made a statement that violated the Johnson Amendment by “indirectly intervening” in the campaign, said Ellen Aprill, an emerita tax law professor at Loyola Marymount Law School in Los Angeles

In May 2021, Pelham told his church that the race for a seat on the City Council had resulted in a runoff. He acknowledged that his church’s tax-exempt status prevented him from supporting candidates from the pulpit. Then, he added, “but you’ll get the message.”

“It’s been declared for the two candidates who received the most votes, one of which is my wife,” Pelham said. “That’s just facts. That’s just facts. That’s just facts. And so a runoff is coming and every vote counts. Be sure to vote.”

Pelham then asked the congregation: “How did I do? I did all right, didn’t I? You know I wanted to go a little further, but I didn’t do it.”

Angelia Pelham, who co-founded Life-Changing Faith Christian Fellowship in 2008 with her husband, said the couple tried to avoid violating the Johnson Amendment. Both disagreed that her husband’s mention of her candidacy was a violation.

“I think church and state should remain separate,” Angelia Pelham said in an interview, adding: “But I think there’s a lot of folks in the religious setting that just completely didn’t even consider the line. They erased it completely and lost sight of the Johnson Amendment.”

She declined to discuss Burden’s endorsement of her opponent.

In his sermon the morning after Pelham defeated his chosen candidate, Burden told parishioners that the church’s political involvement would continue.

“So you’re like, but you lost last night? No, we set the stage for the future,” he said, adding “God is uncovering the demonic structure that is in this region.”

“Demonic” Candidate

Most Americans don’t want pastors making endorsements from the pulpit, according to a 2017 survey by the Program for Public Consultation, which is part of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.

Of the nearly 2,500 registered voters who were surveyed, 79% opposed getting rid of the Johnson Amendment. Only among Republican evangelical voters did a slight majority — 52% — favor loosening restrictions on church political activity.

But such endorsements are taking place across the country, with some pastors calling for a debate about the Johnson Amendment.

After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, New Mexico became an island of abortion access for women in Texas and other neighboring states.

The issue raised the stakes in the upcoming Nov. 8 New Mexico governor’s race between incumbent Lujan Grisham, a supporter of abortion rights, and Republican challenger Mark Ronchetti, who advocates limiting access.

“We’re going to fast become the No. 1 abortion place in all of America,” a pastor, Steve Smothermon, said during a July 10 sermon at Legacy Church in Albuquerque, which has an average weekly attendance of more than 10,000 people. Smotherman said the governor was “wicked and evil” and called her “a narcissist.”

“And people think, ‘Why do you say that?’ Because I truly believe it. In fact, she’s beyond evil. It’s demonic,” Smothermon said.

He later added: “Folks, when are we going to get appalled? When are we going to say, ‘Enough is enough’? When are we going to stop saying, ‘Well, you know, it’s a woman’s right to choose’? That’s such a lie.”

Church attendees had a stark choice in the upcoming election, Smothermon said. “We have the Wicked Witch of the North. Or you have Mark Ronchetti.”

The governor’s campaign declined to comment. Neither Legacy Church, Smothermon nor Ronchetti responded to requests for comment.

(Video Editing by Todd Wiseman/Texas Tribune and Justin Dehn/Texas Tribune. Source videos: Adria Malcolm for ProPublica/Texas Tribune, Legacy Church.)

The sermon was a “clear violation” of the Johnson Amendment, said Sam Brunson, a Loyola University Chicago law professor. But Smothermon showed no fear of IRS enforcement.

Those who thought he crossed the line were “so stupid,” Smothermon said during the sermon. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

In another example, pastors at a Fort Worth church named Mercy Culture have repeatedly endorsed candidates for local and statewide offices since its founding in 2019.

“Now, obviously, churches don’t endorse candidates, but my name is Landon and I’m a person before I’m a pastor. And as an individual, I endorse Nate Schatzline,” the lead pastor, Landon Schott, said in a February sermon about a church member who was running to fill an open state representative seat.

Johnson Amendment rules allow pastors to endorse in their individual capacity, as long as they are not at an official church function, which Schott was.

In other services, Schott challenged critics to complain to the IRS about the church’s support of political candidates and said he wasn’t worried about losing the church’s tax-exempt status.

“If you want it that bad, come and take it. And if you think that we will stop preaching the gospel, speaking truth over taxes, you got another thing coming for you,” Schott said in May.

Schatzline, a member of Mercy Culture, received 65% of the vote in a May 24 runoff against the former mayor of the Dallas suburb of Southlake. He works for a separate nonprofit founded by Heather Schott, a pastor at Mercy Culture and the wife of Landon Schott.

Schatzline said in an interview with ProPublica and the Tribune that Landon Schott, not the church, endorsed him. He added that the church sought legal advice on how to ensure that it was complying with the Johnson Amendment.

“I think prayers can manifest into anything that God wants them to, but I would say that the community rallying behind me as individuals definitely manifested into votes,” Schatzline said.

Mercy Culture also supported Tim O’Hare, a Republican running for Tarrant County judge, this year after he came out against the shutdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. His opponent in the primary had ordered churches and businesses to temporarily close when she was mayor of Fort Worth.

O’Hare came to prominence as the mayor of suburban Farmers Branch, where he championed a city ordinance to prohibit landlords from renting to immigrants without legal status. A federal court declared the ordinance unconstitutional in 2010 after a legal battle that cost the city $6.6 million.

O’Hare has pledged to hire an election integrity officer to oversee voting and “uncover election fraud.”

“The Lord spoke to me and said, ‘Begin to pray for righteous judges in our city,’” Heather Schott said during a Feb. 13 service. “I am believing that Mr. Tim O’Hare is an answered prayer of what we have been petitioning heaven for for the last year and a half.”

Neither Mercy Culture, Landon Schott nor Heather Schott responded to requests for comment. O’Hare also did not respond to a phone call and email seeking comment.

Schott’s comments were a prohibited endorsement, said Aprill, the emerita tax law professor at Loyola Marymount Law School in Los Angeles.

“It doesn’t say ‘vote for him’ but is still an endorsement,” she said. “There’s no other way to understand the statement that O’Hare has answered prayers for righteous judges.”

Two weeks later, O’Hare won his primary. He faces Deborah Peoples, a Democrat, on Nov. 8.

A New Tactic

On April 18, 2021, a day before early voting began for city council and school board elections across Texas, pastors at churches just miles apart flashed the names of candidates on overhead screens. They told their congregations that local church leaders had gathered to discuss upcoming city and school elections and realized that their members were among those seeking office.

“We’re not endorsing a candidate. We’re not doing that. But we just thought because they’re a member of the family of God, that you might want to know if someone in the family and this family of churches is running,” said Robert Morris, who leads the Gateway megachurch in Southlake and served as a member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board.

On the same day, Doug Page gave a similar message less than 5 miles away at First Baptist Grapevine.

“And so what we decided to do is look within our church families and say, ‘Who do we know that’s running for office?’ Now, let me clarify with you. This is not an endorsement by us. We are not endorsing anyone. However, if you’re part of a family, you’d like to know if Uncle Bill is running for office, right? And so that’s all we’re going to do is simply inform you.”

Saying that you are not endorsing a candidate “isn’t like a magic silver bullet that makes it so that you’re not endorsing them,” Brunson said.

(Video editing by Todd Wiseman/Texas Tribune and Justin Dehn/Texas Tribune. Source videos: Shelby Tauber for ProPublica/Texas Tribune, Gateway Church, First Baptist Grapevine.)

The churches’ coordination on messaging across the area is notable, according to University of Notre Dame tax law professor Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, who said he hadn’t before seen churches organizing to share lists of candidates.

“I do think this strategy is new,” said Mayer, who has studied the Johnson Amendment for more than a decade. “I hadn’t heard of that before. It’s quite a sophisticated tactic.”

Eight of the nine candidates mentioned by the pastors won their races.

Mindy McClure, who ran for reelection to the Grapevine-Colleyville school board, said she thought church involvement contributed to her defeat in a June 5, 2021, runoff by about 4 percentage points. Her opponent campaigned on removing critical race theory from district curriculum, while McClure said students “weren’t being indoctrinated in any way, shape or form.” Critical race theory is a college-level academic theory that racism is embedded in legal systems.

McClure said pastors endorsing from the pulpit creates “divisiveness” in the community.

“Just because you attend a different church doesn’t mean that you’re more connected with God,” she said.

Lawrence Swicegood, executive director of Gateway Media, said this month that the church doesn’t endorse candidates but “inform(s) our church family of other church family members who are seeking office to serve our community.” Page told ProPublica and the Tribune that “these candidates were named for information only.”

Eleven days after responding to ProPublica and the Tribune in October, Morris once again told his church that he was not endorsing any candidates during the last Sunday sermon before early voting. Then, he again displayed the names of specific candidates on a screen and told parishioners to take screenshots with their cellphones.

“We must vote,” he said. “I think we have figured that out in America, that the Christians sat on the sidelines for too long. And then all of a sudden they started teaching our children some pretty mixed up things in the schools. And we had no one to blame but ourselves. So let’s not let that happen. Especially at midterms.”

Help Us Report: How Do Religious Institutions in Your Area Involve Themselves in Elections?

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune want to understand how the Johnson Amendment is enforced — or isn’t. Please send us examples of any political activity you see at churches or other religious institutions, and we’ll look into whether or not it breaks the rules. We want to hear about examples across the political spectrum.

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Oct. 31, 2022: This story originally misstated the name of the university where Andrew Whitehead, a sociologist, works. It is Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, not University of Indiana-Purdue.

by Jessica Priest and Jeremy Schwartz

Under federal law, churches and other nonprofit organizations are prohibited from electioneering.

The Johnson Amendment, a 1954 congressional measure, bans tax-exempt organizations from interfering directly or indirectly in a political campaign on behalf of or in opposition to a candidate. Violators risk having their tax-exempt status revoked by the IRS.

ProPublica and the Texas Tribune want to understand how the amendment is enforced — or isn’t. That’s where you come in: We can’t be everywhere, so we need your help identifying violations and understanding the government’s response to them.

What does a Johnson Amendment violation look like? The IRS says pastors endorsing candidates from the pulpit is “clearly prohibited,” but other situations are less clear. Please send us examples of any political activity you see at churches or other religious organizations, and we’ll look into whether it breaks the rules. These could include, but are not limited to:

• Criticizing or praising candidates, politicians or political parties during a religious sermon or function.
• Helping a candidate raise funds.
• Sharing campaign literature or posting signs.
• Publishing a voter guide.
• Hosting candidates.

We know that some people think religious institutions should be more involved in politics. No matter what you believe, we want to hear about examples across the political spectrum.

You don’t have to belong to a congregation to participate. If you’re a ProPublica or Texas Tribune reader, we’d love your help.

A note about our commitment to your privacy: We appreciate you sharing your story, and we take your privacy seriously. We are gathering this information for the purposes of our reporting, and we will not publish your name or information without your consent.

by Craig Silverman, Ruth Talbot, Jeff Kao and Anna Klühspies

Google is funneling revenue to some of the web’s most prolific purveyors of false information in Europe, Latin America and Africa, a ProPublica investigation has found.

The company has publicly committed to fighting disinformation around the world, but a ProPublica analysis, the first ever conducted at this scale, documented how Google’s sprawling automated digital ad operation placed ads from major brands on global websites that spread false claims on such topics as vaccines, COVID-19, climate change and elections.

In one instance, Google continued to place ads on a publication in Bosnia and Herzegovina for months after the U.S. government officially imposed sanctions on the site. Google stopped doing business with the site, which the U.S. Treasury Department described as the “personal media station” of a prominent Bosnian Serb separatist politician, only after being contacted by ProPublica.

Google ads are a major source of revenue for sites that spread election disinformation in Brazil, notably false claims about the integrity of the voting system that have been advanced by the incumbent president, Jair Bolsonaro. Voters in Brazil are going to the polls on Sunday with the outcome in doubt after Bolsonaro’s unexpectedly strong showing in the first round of voting.

The investigation also revealed that Google routinely places ads on sites pushing falsehoods about COVID-19 and climate change in French-, German- and Spanish-speaking countries.

The resulting ad revenue is potentially worth millions of dollars to the people and groups running these and other unreliable sites — while also making money for Google.

Platforms such as Facebook have faced stark criticism for failures to crack down on disinformation spread by people and governments on their platforms around the world. But Google hasn’t faced the same scrutiny for how its roughly $200 billion in annual ad sales provides essential funding for non-English-language websites that misinform and harm the public.

Google’s publicly announced policies bar the placement of ads on content that makes unreliable or harmful claims on a range of issues, including health, climate, elections and democracy. Yet the investigation found Google regularly places ads, including those from major brands, on articles that appear to violate its own policy.

ProPublica’s examination showed that ads from Google are more likely to appear on misleading articles and websites that are in languages other than English, and that Google profits from advertising that appears next to false stories on subjects not explicitly addressed in its policy, including crime, politics, and such conspiracy theories as chemtrails.

A former Google leader who worked on trust and safety issues acknowledged that the company focuses heavily on English-language enforcement and is weaker across other languages and smaller markets. They told ProPublica it’s because Google invests in oversight based on three key concerns.

“The number one is bad PR — they are very sensitive to that. The second one is trying to avoid regulatory scrutiny or potentially regulatory action that could impact their business. And number three is revenue,” said the former leader, who agreed to speak on the condition that their name not be used in order not to hurt their business and career prospects. “For all these three, English-speaking markets primarily have the biggest impact. And that’s why most of the efforts are going into those.”

ProPublica used data provided by fact-checking newsrooms, researchers and website monitoring organizations to scan more than 13,000 active article pages from thousands of websites in more than half a dozen languages to determine whether they were currently earning ad revenue with Google. (To read a detailed breakdown of how ProPublica obtained and analyzed the data, see this accompanying article.)

The analysis found that Google placed ads on 41% of roughly 800 active online articles rated by members of the Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network as publishing false claims about COVID-19. The company also served ads on 20% of articles about climate change that Science Feedback, an IFCN-accredited fact-checking organization, has rated false.

A number of Google ads viewed by ProPublica appeared on articles published months or years ago, suggesting that the company’s failure to block ads on content that appears to violate its rules is a long-standing and ongoing problem.

In one example, Google recently placed ads for clothing brand St. John on a two-year-old Serbian article falsely claiming that cat owners don’t catch COVID-19. Google placed an ad for the American Red Cross on a May 2021 article from a far-right German site that claimed COVID-19 is comparable in danger to the flu. An ad for luxury retailer Coach was recently attached to an April article in Serbian that repeated the false claim that the COVID-19 vaccines change people’s DNA.

Last August, the Greek edition of the Epoch Times, a far-right U.S. publication connected to the Falun Gong spiritual movement, published an article that falsely claimed the sun, and not increased levels of carbon dioxide, could be responsible for global warming. That story had multiple Google ads when ProPublica viewed it, even though it appears to clearly violate Google’s policy against climate disinformation.

A spokesperson for the Red Cross said its ad appeared on the far-right German site due to an automated placement it did not directly control.

“Please note that based upon our Fundamental Principles of impartiality and neutrality, the Red Cross does not take sides in issues of a political, racial, religious or ideological nature, so we would purposefully not advertise on a story or site such as the one you shared with us,” said a statement from the organization.

Coach and St. John did not respond to requests for comment.

Google’s policy is to remove ads from individual articles that violate its rules, and to take sitewide action if violations reach a specific undisclosed threshold. Google removed ads from at least 14 websites identified in the investigation after being contacted by ProPublica.

Google spokesperson Michael Aciman said the company has put more money into non-English-language enforcement and oversight, which has led to an increase in the number of ads blocked on pages that violate its rules. He declined to provide figures or to say how many people Google has working on non-English-language content and ad review.

“We’ve developed extensive measures to tackle misinformation on our platform, including policies that cover elections, COVID-19 and climate change, and work to enforce our policies in over 50 languages,” Aciman said. “In 2021, we removed ads from more than 1.7 billion publisher pages and 63,000 sites globally. We know that our work is not done, and we will continue to invest in our enforcement systems to better detect unreliable claims and protect users around the world.”

Google continues to review the sites and pages ProPublica shared with it and is "taking appropriate action on any content that violates our policies," Aciman said.

The data about ad removals comes from Google's most recent Ads Safety report, which emphasized the removal of ads from more than half a million pages that violated policies against harmful claims about COVID-19 and false claims that could undermine elections. But Google does not release a list of pages or publishers it took action against, the countries and languages they operate in or other data related to its Ads Safety report.

Google has been vocal about its $300 million commitment, announced in 2018, to fight misinformation, support fact-checkers and “help journalism thrive in the digital age.” But the investigation shows that as one arm of Google helps support fact-checkers, its core ad business provides critical revenue that ensures the publication of falsehoods remains profitable.

Laura Zommer, the general director of the Argentina-based Chequeado, founded in 2010 as the first fact-checking organization in Latin America, said Google’s failure to invest in oversight of sites in languages other than English causes serious harm in emerging democracies.

“The problem is that disinformation that takes hold in less developed democracies can cause even more damage than the disinformation circulating in countries with more developed democracies,” said Zommer, who is also the co-founder of Factchequeado, an initiative to counter Spanish-language disinformation in the U.S.

In Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia, three Balkan countries where democracy is fragile, 26 of the 30 most prolific publishers of false and misleading claims in the region earn money from Google, according to data from local fact-checkers.

“If the world’s largest online advertising platform doesn’t care that it has made false information, hate speech and toxic propaganda profitable in societies like ours, and has no intention to do anything to change because it wouldn’t financially pay off, that is devastating,” said Tijana Cvjetićanin, a member of the editorial board of Bosnian fact-checking site Raskrinkavanje, which shared data with ProPublica.

A comparison with English-language outlets suggests Google is more rigorous in choosing its publisher partners in that language. ProPublica found Google placed ads on 13% of English-language websites that NewsGuard deemed unreliable for having repeatedly published false content or deceptive headlines and failing to meet transparency standards. In contrast, ProPublica’s analysis found anywhere from 30% to 90% of the sites most often flagged for false claims by fact-checkers in the non-English languages examined were monetizing with Google.

Along with unequal enforcement across languages, ProPublica found disparity across and within regions.

Africa Check shared a list of 68 active English-language URLs that had been fact- checked as false by teams in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya since 2019, as well as 45 French-language articles that had been debunked by its French-language checkers. ProPublica’s analysis found that 57% of debunked English-language articles in Africa had ads from Google, while the percentage was higher, 66%, for French-language articles.

Alexandre Alaphilippe, executive director of the EU Disinfo Lab, a non-profit organization that researches disinformation, said Google should be required to equally enforce its policies across languages and regions and to be transparent about its oversight decisions.

“These companies have decided to go global in their services, and that was their own decision for growth and to make revenue,” he said. “It’s not possible to make this choice and not face the accountability needed to be in all of these countries at the same time.”

Google’s Global Ad Dominance

Google is the world’s biggest digital advertising business. Last year it generated a record $257 billion in revenue. Most of that money comes from companies paying to place ads on Google products such as search and YouTube. But in 2021 Google earned $31 billion by placing its customers’ ads on more than 2 million websites around the world. They’re part of what the company calls the Google Display Network.

These publishing partners range from major news outlets such as The New York Times to small sites run by individuals. In order to join the Google Display Network, a publisher must meet requirements that include publishing original content and adhering to policies against unreliable and harmful claims and sexually explicit content, among others. Once accepted, Google says, publishers in the network receive 68% of the money spent on each ad placed on their site.

Google’s ad systems are also used to place ads on websites that are not necessarily members of its Display Network. These publishers work with ad technology companies that have partnered with Google, and which use its technology to buy and sell ads. As with ads placed on sites in the Display Network, Google and the publisher both earn money.

Google places ads on publisher sites using an automated auction system called programmatic advertising. The process starts when a person visits a webpage or opens an app. As the page loads, the site or app owner collects information about the ad space available along with data about the user, which can include location, age range, browsing history and interests.

The data is sent to an ad exchange like the one operated by Google, where ad buyers — ranging from major brands like Spotify to smaller local businesses — can place a bid to show an ad to the specific user visiting the website or app. Bids are placed, or not, based on the user and publisher data shared with potential advertisers and the price an advertiser is willing to pay to reach that person.

In the blink of an eye, the top bidder wins the auction and the ad loads on the page. Money flows from the ad buyer to the ad exchange (and any other intermediaries involved in the transaction), eventually making its way to the website or app publisher.

In 2019, the Global Disinformation Index, a nonprofit that analyzes websites for false and misleading content, estimated that disinformation websites earned $250 million per year in revenue, of which Google was responsible for 40% and the rest came from other ad tech companies. NewsGuard, which employs human reviewers to evaluate and rate websites based on a set of criteria including accuracy, estimated in 2021 the annual ad revenue earned by sites spreading false or misleading claims is $2.6 billion. The report did not say how much of that Google might be responsible for.

How much of Google’s revenue comes from monetizing false and misleading content is difficult to estimate. Each of the billions of digital display ads placed every day by Google has a different price point that fluctuates based on the combination of advertiser, target website and the users the ad will be shown to. It’s all part of a complex, opaque and largely automated digital ad buying and selling process dominated by Google. This means advertisers have to rely in part on the mix of automation and human review Google uses to ensure its publisher partners don’t violate its rules.

The findings of fact-checkers could be used by Google to enforce its policy against placing ads next to content that makes unreliable and harmful claims. There are more than 350 fact-checking projects around the world that employ journalists, and in some cases scientists, to identify and investigate claims spreading on the web, on social media and in traditional media. Their articles and associated ratings are used by platforms including Meta to help enforce policies around false and harmful content. Google already highlights fact-checks in search and Google News results to direct people to trustworthy information. But the company does not use fact-checks to keep ads off of pages with unreliable or harmful claims. And unlike Meta and TikTok, it does not pay fact-checkers for the results of their research.

“When it comes to ads, they obviously monetize disinformation. Whether it’s without knowing or knowing, it doesn’t matter,” said Baybars Örsek, director of the International Fact-Checking Network. “There has never been a public announcement from Google’s side that has acknowledged fact-checking as a signal for their ads monetization business.”

Google’s Aciman declined to comment on Google’s relationship with fact-checkers.

Failed Enforcement in Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia

On Sept. 20, as he prepared to mobilize part of the country’s population to fight in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Milorad Dodik, a member of Bosnia’s three-person presidency and Bosnian Serb separatist leader who has expressed strong support for the invasion.

The Putin meeting was a propaganda coup for Dodik. Even better for him, Google helped ensure it was lucrative.

After the meeting, the homepage of the Serbian media site ATV featured articles praising the meeting and quoting Dodik about plans for greater economic cooperation with Russia, while sowing doubt about genocide committed during the Bosnian war, a frequent Dodik talking point. A ProPublica reporter viewing those stories was served ads for Saks Fifth Avenue department store, New Balance shoes and eBay that were placed via Google’s ad systems. ProPublica also documented ads from brands such as Guess on false ATV articles claiming that Serbia had found a cure for COVID-19 and NATO was planning to deploy troops to Ukraine.

A Saks spokesperson said its ads were not supposed to have appeared on ATV, and that the company would block the site from future campaigns.

“It was not our intention to advertise on this site as it violates the brand safety guidelines we have in place with our ad partner,” said a statement from the company.

An eBay spokesperson also said its ad was not placed “intentionally” on ATV. Guess and New Balance did not respond to requests for comment.

Ads for Guess appeared recently on an ATV article from 2020 that falsely claimed Serbia had a cure for COVID-19. (ProPublica screenshot)

Google is helping the site earn money by placing ads on false and divisive content in spite of the ATV website and its related TV station being sanctioned in January by the U.S. Treasury Department due to Dodik’s “corrupt activities and continued threats to the stability and territorial integrity” of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Dodik “exerts personal control over ATV,” approves content and corruptly funnels government contracts to the outlet, according to the Treasury Department’s sanctions announcement.

Google removed ads from the ATV website after being contacted by ProPublica, but declined to comment on its relationship with the site. “Google is committed to complying with all applicable sanctions,” Aciman said. ATV and representatives from Dodik’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

ATV is one of the 30 most frequent sources of false and misleading content published in the Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian language, according to data provided to ProPublica by Raskrinkavanje. Of the 30 sites most flagged by Raskrinkavanje for false claims, 26 made money with Google. The list included popular sites in the region, such as the websites of tabloid newspapers, as well as smaller operations that in some cases don’t disclose their owners or are run by fringe figures.

ProPublica also scanned close to 10,000 active articles that fact checkers in the three Balkan countries flagged for false claims since 2019. Just over 60% were earning money with Google. The articles included a range of falsehoods about national politics, the pandemic, vaccines, the war in Ukraine and other topics.

“It might just be a financial matter for Google, but for us it’s a corrosive influence on our already very fragile democracies,” Cvjetićanin said.

Ads for Amazon Prime Video, Spotify, BetMGM and a women’s clothing site were placed via Google’s systems on a Srbin.info article falsely claiming COVID-19 vaccines can change people’s DNA. (ProPublica screenshot)

Dejan Petar Zlatanovic operates Srbin.info, a Serbian website that publishes pro-Kremlin propaganda copied from Russian state media, election conspiracies about the U.S. and anti-LGBTQ content. Its homepage features a prominent hyperlink directly to the official Kremlin website. Google ads abound there and on article pages.

Zlatanovic said in an email that Srbin.info earns between $5,000 and $7,000 per month, with Google ads providing a key portion of the revenue.

"The editorial policy of Srbin.info from the beginning was to offer relevant alternative news, not to brainwash people or to determine how they should live,” Zlatanovic wrote in Serbian. “All our lives we have lived in a communist and post-communist society based on single-mindedness and we got sick of single-mindedness.”

In April, Srbin.info published an article claiming that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines could change the genetic makeup of people and alter “human genetics forever.” The story cited debunked claims by an American doctor who falsely claimed children’s DNA could be altered by the vaccines.

Ads from Amazon Prime, BetMGM, Spotify, and StyleWe were shown to a ProPublica reporter who viewed the story. The companies did not respond to requests for comment. Google declined to comment on the Balkan sites and articles identified by ProPublica in the analysis.

Zlatanovic told ProPublica in an email that the vaccines article contained information he felt was “relevant for the public” because it came from a medical professional.

Google also placed ads on an article making a similar false claim when it spread across a set of sites in the region in late 2020, according to local fact-checkers. The false claim that mRNA vaccines can change “the genetic structure of a person” was reported by B92, which is among the 30 sites in the region most often flagged by fact-checkers. It eventually corrected its story, but has a history of publishing false claims and potentially harmful health content.

B92 has published articles claiming that baking soda can save your life; that watermelon can cure cancer but could be poisonous if the fruit is cracked (it later corrected this story); and that there’s a juice that can kill cancer cells in 42 days, to name some of the stories local fact-checkers have had to debunk. All had ads from Google when viewed by ProPublica, except for the cancer cure story, which was deleted by the site at some point after publication.

B92 did not respond to a request for comment.

The rampant anti-vaccine and COVID-19 disinformation appears to have contributed to low vaccination rates in the region. Just 25% of people are fully vaccinated in Bosnia, while 47% are vaccinated in Serbia and 55% in Croatia, among the lowest rates in Europe. A survey of unvaccinated Bosnians published in April by Raskrinkavanje’s parent company suggests conspiracy theories have taken hold among the population. Almost half of respondents agreed with the false claim that vaccines contain “dangerous nanoparticles,” and 38% believe the mRNA vaccines “alter DNA.”

Brazil’s Disinfo Boom

For at least four years, Brazilian president Bolsonaro has sowed doubt and spread disinformation about the country’s electoral process and the reliability of the country’s electronic voting system, leading to a 2021 Supreme Court investigation that documented his false claims.

Aiding his efforts are pro-Bolsonaro websites with big audiences — and a slew of ads courtesy of Google.

One of the largest is Terra Brasil Notícias, a two-year-old site run by a couple based in one of Brazil’s northeastern provinces. This summer, it published a story containing a clip from “Last Week Tonight” where host John Oliver explained the risks of electronic voting machines. The site used this to undermine confidence in Brazil's electronic voting system. Brazil’s electronic voting machines do not use paper audits, but have repeatedly been proven secure, and there is no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud in the country.

On Oct. 2, the day Brazilians voted in the first round of the presidential elections, Terra Brasil Notícias was one of several pro-Bolsonaro websites threatened with a fine by the head of the country’s Superior Electoral Court for publishing a falsehood about Bolsonaro’s opponent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Terra Brasil Notícias and other sites spread the false claim that the leader of a criminal organization had said he’d vote for Lula.

Marie Santini, director of the Netlab at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, said the number of junk news and disinformation sites like Terra Brasil Notícias, as well as their audience, exploded in Brazil in part because Google ads make it easy for people to earn money from this type of content. She likened it to people who might drive for Uber to earn extra cash.

“You don’t need to make quality content or really work with journalists. You can copy things, you can use bots, you can recycle news, and you do it from your house and you receive some money,” she said. “It’s a way to make money for people that are without opportunity. But who is making money on a large scale? Of course, it’s the platform, Google.”

In response to the court’s finding, Terra Brasil Notícias took down the story that repeated the false claim about Lula. It also deleted its article about U.S. voting machines after Brazilian fact-checking organization Aos Fatos contacted the site last month. In an email, Aos Fatos listed eight recent articles from the site that it rated as false, and asked Terra Brasil Notícias to comment on its relationship with Google. In response, the site published the email from Aos Fatos and defended the articles. It later deleted all of them. As of this writing, it still earns money with Google.

Terra Brasil Notícias did not respond to requests for comment. Google declined to comment.

Santini’s Netlab team monitors thousands of right-wing and left-wing messaging groups and websites. They shared a list of 262 active Portuguese-language websites in Brazil that circulated in messaging groups and were labeled by researchers as publishing false or misleading information. ProPublica found that 46% of the more than 250 sites flagged for disinformation earn money with Google. When that list was compressed to the 30 most shared sites in WhatsApp and Telegram groups, ProPublica found that 80% of them earn money with ads placed via Google.

“This ecosystem of sites is very important for politics in Brazil,” said Santini. “They are very powerful because people consume this thinking that it’s journalism, but it’s only propaganda. And it’s paid by Google ads.”

Ads are also funding COVID-19 disinformation in Brazil. Google placed ads on a false October 2021 story from Stylo Urbano that claimed people could develop AIDS as the result of COVID-19 vaccinations; a false December 2020 story on the same site claiming that COVID-19 PCR tests have a 97% false positive rate; and a false February 2021 article on the site that said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “deliberately violated several federal laws” by inflating the number of deaths due to COVID-19.

After being contacted by ProPublica, Google removed its ads from the site. Stylo Urbano did not respond to a request for comment.

Brazil is one of several countries in Latin America where false claims are funded by Google ads. A coalition of fact-checking organizations in Latin America provided ProPublica with a list of websites they said are frequent sources of false and misleading claims. Of the 49 active sites on the list, 19 (or 39%) currently earn money with Google.

The coalition was led by Chequeado, the Argentinian nonprofit fact-checking organization. Zommer, its founder, said Chequeado has received support from Google over the years in the form of grants and training. But it and other platforms’ ongoing failure to enforce their policies in Spanish and other languages outside of English make their work more difficult, according to her.

"The fight against disinformation is unequal, as is the world,” Zommer said.

An Anonymous Network in Spain

Google’s enforcement failures in Spanish, a language spoken by roughly 550 million people, extend beyond Latin America.

On Sept. 22, the site Euskal News, based in the autonomous Basque region of Spain, published an article that suggested excess deaths in the Netherlands and other countries were the result of COVID-19 vaccines. The article, which was reprinted from another site, said the vaccines are possibly “causing deaths in a figure well above the average. The failure could not be more resounding.”

There is no evidence to support claims that COVID-19 vaccines are causing excess mortality. But the story is standard fare for Euskal News, a Google publishing partner that mixes anti-immigrant content and vaccine disinformation with warnings of an impending globalist and EU takeover.

A EuskalNews story with Google ads that falsely linked excess death figures in the Netherlands to vaccines. (ProPublica screenshot)

Google placed ads on a May 6 article that falsely linked the presence of microplastic fibers in people’s lungs to mask wearing, even though the study in question was conducted pre-pandemic. Google also placed ads on a page on the site that falsely says Pfizer’s vaccine resulted in thousands of adverse effects. That claim, and the internal Pfizer documents it’s based on, has repeatedly been debunked by fact-checkers. Though it placed ads on that article, Google blocked them from another on the same site that falsely claims the Pfizer vaccine had 160,000 adverse effects.

ProPublica documented additional pages on Euskal News with vaccine disinformation where Google appears to have blocked ads. Google declined to say how many pages it blocks before examining its overall relationship with a site, but it did remove ads from the site after being contacted by ProPublica.

Euskal News, launched in the spring of 2019, does not list an owner, and its articles do not have bylines. However, research by a Spanish digital security and investigations firm identified connections between the site and a far-right Basque politician named David Pasarin-Gegunde. In a 2020 interview, he declined to say who runs Euskal News but said it’s a person from his “ideological environment.” The site lists its webmaster as Eneko Eastresana, but he and Pasarin-Gegunde did not respond to requests for comment.

Euskal News was one of 32 active Spanish sites flagged by the Brussels-based EU DisinfoLab as frequent sources of false and misleading claims. ProPublica found that 14 of the sites, or 44%, earn money with Google.

Alaphilippe, who runs the DisinfoLab, said the sites on the list “regularly publish misleading, deceptive or incorrect information and often lack credible or transparent sources.”

Google declined to comment on the Spanish sites and articles identified in ProPublica’s analysis.

Media Capture and False Content in Turkey

Over the past two decades, Turkey’s media environment has transformed dramatically.

National newspapers and TV stations have been taken over by people aligned with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, leading Reporters Without Borders to assess that 90% of Turkey’s national media is under government control. The outlets adhere to “a tight chain of command of government-approved headlines, front pages and topics of TV debate,” according to a recent Reuters investigation.

One byproduct of Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian information environment — RSF says there are currently nine journalists in jail in the country — is that once-reliable publications publish false articles about politics, the pandemic and a range of clickbait meant to attract and earn money from traffic coming via Google search, according to Emre Kızılkaya, chair of the International Press Institute’s National Committee in Turkey. He cited a study he produced for IPI revealing how Google search rewards pro-government outlets and the at times false information they publish.

“President Tayyip Erdoğan and his cronies used multiple tactics for media capture in the past two decades, enabling them to control most of the largest news outlets today. These outlets owe most of their digital traffic — and revenue — to Google Search,” Kızılkaya, who also edits a nonprofit news site that reports on Turkish media, told ProPublica.

ProPublica analyzed over 1,000 articles rated false by Turkish fact-checking operation Teyit since 2019, and found that 73% are earning money from Google ads. Of the 50 outlets contained in that data that were most frequently flagged by fact-checkers, 45 earn money with Google. That’s the highest of any country analyzed in the investigation.

“In Turkey, disinformation pays and propaganda works. Google is still a part of this problem, despite its promises to help solve it,” Kızılkaya said. “The ProPublica data confirm the findings in our recent studies that demonstrated Google's algorithmic bias towards Turkey's pro-government media outlets at the expense of endangering fragile communities here.”

Google declined to comment on its search and ad efforts in Turkey.

Monetizing the German Far Right

In Germany, the right-wing, anti-immigration website Freie Welt is run by the husband of Beatrix von Storch, the former deputy leader of Germany’s major far-right AfD party.

One of the website’s articles, which had Google ads on it, falsely argues that the shortage of wheat in Ukraine was a result of U.S. companies buying one-third of Ukrainian land suitable for cultivation. Another article with ads claimed that 44% of pregnant women in Pfizer’s vaccine trial miscarried, a lie that has been debunked by fact-checkers.

Freie Welt is one of 30 German-language sites the EU DisinfoLab identified as consistent sources of false and misleading content. A third of them earn money with Google.

An ad for the American Red Cross was placed on a Journalistenwatch article that claimed COVID-19 was like the flu. Image has been blurred by ProPublica to conceal other ads on the page. (ProPublica screenshot)

The list includes Journalistenwatch, a leading platform of the “Neue Rechte,” a far-right political movement in Germany. Google placed an ad from the American Red Cross on an article falsely claiming that COVID-19 is like the flu. Another article falsely linking the decline in the birth rate in Germany to COVID-19 vaccines also earned money from Google.

Journalistenwatch and Freie Welt did not respond to requests for comment.

Google placed ads on a Report24 article that falsely claimed the World Health Organization warned against kids getting the COVID-19 vaccines. (ProPublica screenshot)

Some of the German-language sites identified by the EU DisinfoLab are based in neighboring Austria and Switzerland. One is Report24, an Austrian website that regularly spreads false information about COVID-19 measures and vaccination, according to fact-checkers. A ProPublica reporter was shown an ad for Hydeline, an American furniture retailer, on an article from June 2021 that falsely claims that the World Health Organization advises against children and teenagers getting COVID-19 vaccines.

Hydeline did not respond to a request for comment.

In response to questions from ProPublica, a spokesperson from Report24 who did not provide their name said the above articles were “carefully researched and contain all necessary sources — as every article on our website does.” They said ProPublica’s questions and findings are similar to “the biased, fake news producing, pharma industry funded fact-checkers.”

The site claimed that no Google ads appeared on the articles in question, and there hadn’t been any “for a long time.” The site did not respond after being sent screenshots showing Google ads on the article pages.

After being contacted by ProPublica, Google removed ads from Report24. The company declined to comment about the German sites and articles identified in the analysis.

Money for Falsehoods in French

Last October, just ahead of the United Nations global climate summit, Google announced it would no longer place ads on content that “contradicts authoritative scientific consensus” on climate change.

“Advertisers simply don’t want their ads to appear next to this content,” read a notice attributed to the Google Ads team.

But as with its policy about COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation, Google often fails to enforce its climate policy across languages. Science Feedback, a French nonprofit fact-checking organization that employs journalists and scientists, provided ProPublica with 427 active URLs of articles about climate change in French and other languages it has rated false since 2021. A fifth of them were earning money with Google, according to the analysis.

A story with false claims about climate change had ads for eyewear company Caddis and furniture maker Rove and a health PSA from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Medical Association and the Ad Council, an ad industry association. (ProPublica screenshot)

In just one example, the French site 1 Scandal published an article in January falsely stating that global warming is “statistically insignificant” and “the climate emergency is imaginary.” Google had placed multiple ads on the page when ProPublica reporters visited it, including for Caddis eyewear and Rove furniture, as well as a public service announcement about diabetes supported by the CDC, the American Medical Association and the Ad Council, an ad industry body.

Kathy Kayse, chief media strategy and partnerships officer for the Ad Council, said in a statement that the organization relies on donated media space to place ads for its public service campaigns. This means the organization did not pay to place its ad on 1 Scandal.

“Because of this model, we cannot always predict or control where our content will be placed,” Kayse said, noting that they were responding on behalf of the Ad Council and the American Media Association.

Caddis, Rove, the CDC and 1 Scandal did not respond to requests for comment. Google appears to have removed ads from the site in response to questions from ProPublica.

ProPublica also analyzed two sets of French-language articles rated false by IFCN-accredited fact-checkers in France and Senegal.

Among the recent fact-checked French links earning money with Google is a May article from InfoDuJour that falsely claimed people vaccinated against COVID-19 were experiencing an “increase in adverse effects.” The story cited other false claims, which have been the subject of multiple fact-checks, that warned people against receiving doses of the “harmful” vaccines.

The same site also recently published an article that claims athletes are dying in greater numbers and that the cause “most likely lies in the introduction of an experimental injection that was supposed to protect against Covid-19 disease, but which, on the contrary, caused untold damage to the immune system and cardiovascular problems.”

On Aug. 1, InfoDuJour published an article headlined “Anti-Covid vaccines finally recognized as dangerous!” The page currently brings up a notice from the site that says Google found the article violated its policy about harmful COVID-19 misinformation. “To meet the digital giant’s conditions and avoid penalty, we have decided to delete the article,” the page says.

Marcel Gay runs InfoDuJour from Nancy, a city in the northeast of France. He told ProPublica that his site’s coverage of the pandemic and vaccines provided it with unprecedented traffic.

“Our media has gained a lot of visibility,” he said in an online message sent via the site’s customer support tool. “Last July we recorded 3.2 million unique visitors. And the advertising earnings from Google, about €3,000!” — roughly $2,979 at current exchange rates.

Gay defended his site’s pandemic content, saying it is “taking care to balance the information and to give divergent opinions.” He complained that traffic has since fallen since Google and Twitter took action against his site, noting that it was removed from Google News and Google Discover, the latter of which highlights news stories in the Google app. He said he deleted some anti-vaccine articles in order to keep earning money with Google.

“This planetary censorship is unique in the history of humanity,” Gay said. “It is reminiscent of the Inquisition that prevailed in the Middle Ages.”

Google declined to comment on InfoDuJour and 1 Scandal.

Another French-language site earning money with Google, this time in Africa, is 24Jours.com. Two years ago, it was the subject of separate investigations by the EU DisinfoLab and fact-checkers at Les Observateurs that revealed it was part of a network of more than 10 sites publishing false information, reprinting Russian propaganda and stealing content from other outlets.

In the ensuing years the site continued to earn money from Google on articles with false claims that cunnilingus can help prevent cancer, a man killed over 20 pizza delivery men, and a woman named her children Corona and Virus. Ads from Google also appear on content that 24Jours.com copies word-for-word from other sites — even articles stolen from fact-checkers such as Les Observateurs.

The operator of 24Jours.com, who on WhatsApp identified himself as Kennedy and said he was in Cameroon, told ProPublica that he stopped posting “fake news” in 2019, and that many sites copy content from sources such as Reuters. After being informed that sites pay to license content from Reuters and other sources, Kennedy said he would remove the infringing content.

“Less than 10% of the content on my website are copied from other websites,” he said.

Kennedy estimated Google is currently blocking ads from 26 articles on his site. When told that ProPublica was reaching out to Google to ask about his site, he said he would disable Google ads.

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

Update, Oct. 31, 2022: This story was updated with Google’s comment that it continues to review sites and pages shared with it by ProPublica.

Correction

Oct. 29, 2022: An animation with this story originally misattributed the location of an article on climate change. It is from France, not Africa.

by Ruth Talbot, Jeff Kao, Craig Silverman and Anna Klühspies

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

Our story “How Google’s Ad Business Funds Disinformation Around the World” found that, despite Google’s public commitments to fight disinformation, it continues to allow websites to use Google’s ad systems to profit from false and misleading content. Our reporting identified websites that were allowed to continue to collect revenue from Google ads, even on stories that appeared to be in violation of the company’s policies against unreliable and harmful claims related to COVID-19, health, elections and climate change. We also found that websites containing misinformation in languages other than English and smaller markets were more likely to be allowed to continue to profit from Google ads than similar English-language websites.

We analyzed datasets of articles and websites containing false claims to determine what proportion of them made money using Google’s ad platforms. We obtained these datasets from organizations that track online disinformation around the world and wrote software to determine whether a web address was currently earning money from Google ads. Between Aug. 23 and Sept. 13, 2022, we ran the datasets through this software system to calculate the proportion of web addresses monetizing with Google ads for each dataset. We include our detailed findings in Appendix A.

Data Sources

We analyzed 17 article and website datasets, totaling more than 13,000 active articles and over 8,000 domains, obtained from nine fact-checking and news quality monitoring organizations. Some of the datasets cover articles and websites from a particular country or region, while others cover subject matter, such as COVID-19 misinformation or climate change misinformation. In Appendix B we include a description of each dataset and the organizations that provided them.

Data Cleaning

The datasets varied in size, types of content and level of curation. We filtered all URL datasets to include only articles published after 2019 to keep the datasets recent and roughly within the same time frame. If the dataset provided information on the type of fact-checked content, we limited it to the most serious forms of disinformation or disinformation purveyors. For example, Brazil’s Netlab provided a column distinguishing between suspected and confirmed purveyors of disinformation, allowing us to select confirmed purveyors.

Some datasets included links to social media platforms, such as Facebook or Twitter. We excluded these links from our analysis. Some datasets also had links to images or pdfs, which we similarly excluded. See Appendix C for a full list of exclusions.

The datasets from the International Fact-Checking Network and Raskrinkavanje included articles that had been archived using a webpage archiving service such as archive.today. In these cases, we wrote programs to extract the original web addresses of the false or misleading articles. For the IFCN dataset, we extracted by hand any addresses that we could not extract by code. For Raskrinkavanje, we excluded from our final analysis any remaining links that could not be extracted. Links that could not be extracted accounted for less than 1% of the total webpages from the datasets. We do not have reason to believe these excluded links biased our results. See Appendix C for more detailed information.

Analyzing a Web Address

Our system to determine whether a web address was currently earning money with Google’s ad systems consists of two components: a web scraper and a data analysis script.

Web Scraper

A web scraper is software that can systematically extract and save data from a visited web page. ProPublica’s scraper uses a library called Playwright, which can mimic human behavior when visiting a site and is often used for automated website testing.

When our web scraper visits any web address, URL or base domain, it collects and saves the following information:

1. All network requests initiated by the webpage. Network requests are used to retrieve web content such as images, text and ads or to provide information such as user actions or profile information back to the web servers.
2. The response for each network request, if those requests went out to Google servers (a handful of servers we identified as serving or related to Google’s ad content). When successful, these responses contain ad content that the website loads onto the page.
3. The webpage content. Once the webpage loads, the scraper captures its HTML, the code that defines what a visitor to that page would see.

When our web scraper visits a base domain, the location at which an entire site resides, it also saves the following information:

4. The ads.txt file: The ads.txt file lists all of a website’s advertising partners. Not all websites make this file available to visitors, but it is highly recommended by Google and the IAB Tech Lab as a web advertising transparency best practice.
5. A random subpage: When visiting a website, the scraper will select an arbitrary subpage link found on the base domain (e.g. for test.com, test.com/morecontent) and also scrape the same information for that page. This is done to capture cases where the homepage for a website does not run ads, but sections of the website do.

Analysis Script

Our analysis tool processes the above data from each URL to determine whether the address is valid, and if so whether it is monetizing with Google’s ad systems.

We manually identified 10 separate network request and response pairs that indicate a webpage is making a request to a Google server for one or multiple ads. If the response did not contain advertising content, then we did not count the website as monetizing with Google. (This may occur, for example, if the webpage makes an ad request, but Google has demonetized the specific page or website.) We then wrote software that would look for these request-response pairs in the data collected by our web scraper.

We also identified scenarios where a scraper visit did not result in valid webpage content. These invalid visits can mean the scraper was redirected to a different page from the original page, the content at the web address is no longer available, or the server is no longer reachable.

Thus, for a single web address, there are three possible outcomes of the analysis:

1. The web address is valid, and it is monetizing with Google’s ad systems.
2. The web address is valid, but it is not monetizing with Google’s ad systems.
3. The web address is not valid or the content has been removed.

We scraped and analyzed each web address in our 17 datasets to determine which of the three categories it fell under. We then compiled the results in a spreadsheet. Appendix A provides the detailed results of this analysis.

Verifying the Results

We hand-checked the results of all of the smaller domain datasets by visiting each page and determining the validity of its web address and whether the webpage was monetizing via Google’s ad systems. For the larger datasets containing individual webpages, we extracted and checked a random sample of web addresses by hand, using a 90% confidence level and 10% margin of error.

The scraper and analysis tools were designed to make false positives (where we falsely flag a web address as monetizing with Google) very rare. In fact, we never identified a false positive during our audit. There were some instances where ads were displayed at the time of the scrape but not when we manually visited the page later on (or vice versa). In these cases, we manually examined the scraped data to confirm ad content was served at the time of the scrape. There were a few rare instances where content returned from the ad server was never loaded on the page, possibly because of coding errors on the webpage. We still counted these cases as positives, since they are indications of an active monetization relationship with Google.

False negatives (where the scraper did not find ads on the page but ads were present) were more common due to several scenarios: For example, the scraper was sometimes blocked from accessing a page or failed to bypass page pop-ups such as consent forms. In our audits we saw false negative rates of between 0% and 13%.

Because we found false negatives more often than false positives, the true proportion of these web addresses monetizing with Google’s ad systems is likely slightly higher than what we reported.

Dataset name

Data source

Languages covered

Regions covered

Domains or Web Pages

Number of valid web addresses analyzed

Number of valid web addresses monetizing Google ads

% of valid web addresses monetizing Google  ads

Africa Check

Misinformation

Web Pages

Africa Check

English

Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya

Web pages

66

38

57.6

Africa Check

Misinformation

Web Pages

Senegal

Africa Check

French

Senegal, Guinea, Mali, Côte d'Ivoire, and Cameroon

Web pages

44

29

65.9

Balkans

MisinformationWeb Pages

Raskrinkavanje

Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian

Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Web pages

9,973

6,216

62.3

Balkans Publishers

​​Raskrinkavanje

Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian

Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Domains

30

26

86.7

Brazil Publishers

Netlab

Portuguese

Brazil

Domains

30

24

80

Latin American Publishers

Chequeado

Spanish, Portuguese

Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Venezuela, Peru and Mexico

Domains

49

19

38.8

Covid Disinformation Pages

International Fact-Checking Network

Various

Global

Web pages

814

338

41.5

NewsGuard Publisher list

NewsGuard

Various

Global

Domains

7,739

4,186

54.1

Turkey Disinformation Pages

Teyit

Turkish

Turkey

Web pages

1,035

756

73

Turkey Publishers

Teyit

Turkish

Turkey

Domains

50

45

90

Spanish Language Publishers

EU DisinfoLab

Spanish

Spain

Domains

32

14

43.8

German Language Publishers

EU DisinfoLab

German

Germany, Austria and Switzerland

Domains

30

10

33.3

EU

Disinformation Pages

EU DisinfoLab

Various

EU

Web pages

235

57

24.3

Climate

Disinformation Pages

Science Feedback

Various

Global

Web pages

427

86

20.1

Appendix B: Organization and Dataset details

All datasets were filtered to remove duplicates, archived URLs that could not be successfully unarchived, data before 2019 and URLs from social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Weibo, Pinterest, Telegram and WhatsApp (see full list in Appendix C).

Africa Check

Website: https://africacheck.org/

Description: Africa Check is an African nonprofit fact-checking organization founded in South Africa in 2012.

Datasets analyzed:

• Articles in French from Senegal, Guinea, Mali, Côte d’Ivoire and Cameroon between 2019 and 2022 fact-checked and determined to be misinformation.
• Articles in English from Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya between 2019 and 2022 fact-checked and determined to be misinformation.Raskrinkavanje

Website: https://raskrinkavanje.ba/

Description: Raskrinkavanje is a fact-checking program for media organizations in the Balkans. It was founded in 2017 by Zašto ne, a civil society organization based in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Datasets analyzed:

• Articles from the region between 2019 and July 2022 that were fact-checked by Raskrinkavanje and determined to be misinformation.
• Thirty websites that were most frequently identified as publishing misinformation by Raskrinkavanje in the region from 2019 to July 2022.Netlab

Website: http://www.netlab.eco.ufrj.br/

Description: Netlab is a research laboratory of the School of Communication of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) that uses network analysis to study online misinformation.

Datasets analyzed:

• A list of websites shared within Brazilian right wing and left wing WhatsApp and Telegram groups and channels in August 2022 and flagged by researchers as a source of disinformation in Portuguese.Chequeado

Website: https://chequeado.com/

Description: Chequeado is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news monitoring and fact-checking organization founded in Argentina in 2010.

Datasets analyzed:

• Websites determined by LatamChequea, Chequado’s fact-checking partners in Latin America, to be spreading false information.International Fact-Checking Network

Website: https://www.poynter.org/ifcn/

Description: The International Fact-Checking Network is a network of 100 fact-checking organizations around the world. It was launched in 2015 by the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism institute based in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Datasets analyzed:

• COVID: links to social media and news content spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic.NewsGuard

Website: https://www.newsguardtech.com/

Description: NewsGuard is a company that provides trust ratings for the most visited websites in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Germany, France and Italy.

Datasets analyzed:

• Domains for news websites around the world rated by NewGuard. Reliability ratings range from 0 to 100 (0 being completely untrustworthy).Teyit

Website: https://teyit.org/

Description: Teyit is a Turkish nonprofit fact-checking and media literacy social enterprise founded in 2016.

Datasets analyzed:

• Articles that were published in 2019 or later that contained claims categorized as “incorrect association,” “manipulation,” or “distortion” and which the fact-checkers had not seen subsequently corrected. (Fact-checkers provided access to a database containing a wide range of thousands of fact-checks which ProPublica filtered based on the previous criteria.)EU DisinfoLab

Website: https://www.disinfo.eu/

Description: EU DisinfoLab is a Brussels-based nonprofit organization that studies misinformation in the EU.

Datasets analyzed:

• Articles from the region between 2019 and present that were fact-checked by EU DisinfoLab and determined to be misinformation.
• Websites from Spain and German-speaking countries that were identified as sources of false and misleading claims in the regions.Science Feedback

Website: https://sciencefeedback.co/

Description: Science Feedback is a nonprofit based in France that produces scientist-expert fact-checks for health and climate news articles.

Datasets analyzed:

• Articles related to climate and climate change published in 2019 or later that Science Feedback rated their lowest rating, “False.”

Appendix C: Dataset Cleaning Criteria

All datasets were cleaned with the intention of removing invalid links, social media traffic, archived content and images/PDFs.

Any links originating from the below social media or content hosting sites were removed from the final analysis.

• Google Drive
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Pinterest
• Telegram
• TikTok
• Twitter
• Vimeo
• Weibo
• WhatsApp
• YouTube

Any links ending in any of the below were automatically excluded from the final analysis:

• .png
• .jpg
• .jpeg
• .pdf
• ?type=image

Any of the archiving sites below were visited and an attempt was made to extract the archived URL. If the extraction failed or the extracted link was of a type that should be excluded from the final analysis anyway, the URL was discarded.

• Web.archive.org
• Webcache.googleusercontent.com
• Archive.today
• google.com/url?
• perma.cc

by Katherine Eban, Vanity Fair, and Jeff Kao, ProPublica

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

This article was produced in partnership with Vanity Fair.

“A Secret Language of Chinese Officialdom”

Toy Reid has always had a gift for languages — one that would carry him far from what he calls his “very blue-collar” roots in Greenville, South Carolina. In high school, Spanish came easily. At nearby Furman University, where he became the first person in his family to attend college, he studied Japanese. Then, “clueless but curious,” as he puts it, he channeled his fascination with the Dalai Lama into a master’s degree in East Asian philosophy and religion at Harvard. Along the way, he picked up Khmer, the national language of Cambodia, and achieved fluency in Chinese.

But it was his career as a China specialist for the Rand Corporation and as a political officer in East Asia for the U.S. State Department that taught him how to interpret a notoriously opaque language: the “party speak” practiced by Chinese Communist officials.

Party speak is “its own lexicon,” explains Reid, now 44 years old. Even a native Mandarin speaker “can’t really follow it,” he says. “It’s not meant to be easily understood. It’s almost like a secret language of Chinese officialdom. When they’re talking about anything potentially embarrassing, they speak of it in innuendo and hushed tones, and there’s a certain acceptable way to allude to something.”

For 15 months, Reid loaned this unusual skill to a nine-person team dedicated to investigating the mystery of COVID-19’s origins. Commissioned by Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., the team examined voluminous evidence, most of it open source but some classified, and weighed the major credible theories for how the novel coronavirus first made the leap to humans. An interim report, released on Thursday by the minority oversight staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP), concludes that the COVID-19 pandemic was “more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident.”

As part of his investigation, Reid took an approach that was artful in its simplicity. Working out of the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington and a family home in Florida, he used a virtual private network, or VPN, to access dispatches archived on the website of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). These dispatches remain on the internet, but their meaning can’t be unlocked by just anyone. Using his hard-earned expertise, Reid believes he unearthed secrets that were hiding in plain sight.

On Nov. 12, 2019, a dispatch by party branch members at the BSL-4 laboratory appeared to reference a biosecurity breach: "These viruses come without a shadow and leave without a trace."

Ever since the Chinese city of Wuhan was identified as ground zero for the COVID-19 pandemic, a contingent of scientists have suspected that the virus could have leaked from one of the WIV’s complex of laboratories. The WIV is, after all, the venue for some of China’s riskiest coronavirus research. Scientists there have mixed components of different coronaviruses and created new strains, in an effort to predict the risks of human infection and to develop vaccines and treatments. Critics argue that creating viruses that don’t exist in nature runs the risk of unleashing them.

The WIV has two campuses and performed coronavirus research on both. Its older Xiaohongshan campus is just 8 miles from the crowded seafood market where COVID-19 first burst into public view. Its newer Zhengdian campus, about 18 miles to the south, is home to the institute’s most prestigious laboratory, a biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) facility, designed to enable safe research on the world’s most lethal pathogens. The WIV triumphantly announced its completion in February 2015, and it was cleared to begin full research by early 2018.

Like many scientific institutes in China, the WIV is state-run and funded. The research carried out there must advance the goals of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As one way to ensure compliance, the CCP operates 16 party branches inside of the WIV, where members including scientists meet regularly and demonstrate their loyalty.

Week after week, scientists from those branches chronicled their party-building exploits in reports uploaded to the WIV’s website. These dispatches, intended for watchful higher-ups, generally consist of upbeat recitations of recruitment efforts and meeting summaries that emphasize the fulfillment of Beijing’s political goals. “The headlines and initial paragraphs seem completely innocuous,” Reid says. “If you didn’t take a close look, you’d probably think there’s nothing in here.”

But much like imperfect propaganda, the dispatches hold glimmers of real life: tension among colleagues, abuse from bosses, reprimands from party superiors. The grievances are often couched in a narrative of heroism — a focus on problems overcome and challenges met, against daunting odds.

As Reid burrowed into the party branch dispatches, he became riveted by the unfolding picture. They described intense pressure to produce scientific breakthroughs that would elevate China’s standing on the world stage, despite a dire lack of essential resources. Even at the BSL-4 lab, they repeatedly lamented the problem of “the three ‘nos’: no equipment and technology standards, no design and construction teams, and no experience operating or maintaining [a lab of this caliber].”

And then, in the fall of 2019, the dispatches took a darker turn. They referenced inhumane working conditions and “hidden safety dangers.” On Nov. 12 of that year, a dispatch by party branch members at the BSL-4 laboratory appeared to reference a biosecurity breach.

once you have opened the stored test tubes, it is just as if having opened Pandora’s Box. These viruses come without a shadow and leave without a trace. Although [we have] various preventive and protective measures, it is nevertheless necessary for lab personnel to operate very cautiously to avoid operational errors that give rise to dangers. Every time this has happened, the members of the Zhengdian Lab [BSL4] Party Branch have always run to the frontline, and they have taken real action to mobilize and motivate other research personnel.

Reid studied the words intently. Was this a reference to past accidents? An admission of an ongoing crisis? A general recognition of hazardous practices? Or all of the above? Reading between the lines, Reid concluded, “They are almost saying they know Beijing is about to come down and scream at them.”

And that, in fact, is exactly what happened next, according to a meeting summary uploaded nine days later.

The dozens of pages of WIV dispatches that Reid unearthed, particularly those from November 2019, helped shape the conclusion of the interim report. Working out of a small, windowless room in the Hart building that they nicknamed “the Bat Cave,” the researchers cross-referenced Reid’s analysis with myriad clues, from procurement notices and patent filings to records of ongoing scientific experiments at the WIV. As their investigation grew, so did a timeline that unfolded across the walls like a giant checkerboard.

A sign on the door of the Senate team’s office, nicknamed “the Bat Cave.” (Mark Peterson/Redux for Vanity Fair)

Given advance access to hundreds of pages of the Senate researchers’ findings and analysis, Vanity Fair, in partnership with ProPublica, spent five months investigating their underlying evidence. We analyzed WIV documents, consulted with experts in CCP communications, asked biocontainment experts to help analyze documents and reviewed with independent scientists the possible evidence that certain vaccine research may have begun far earlier than acknowledged.

We also traced the hazards that arose as the WIV built a lab to research the world’s most dangerous pathogens. Taken together, our reporting provides critical context that is not included in the pared-down 35-page interim report. It offers the most detailed picture to date of the months leading up to the COVID-19 outbreak, including new details on the intense pressure the lab faced to produce breakthrough research, its struggles to grapple with mounting safety issues and a previously unreported series of references to a mysterious incident shortly before the virus began infecting its first victims.

The Senate HELP minority committee did not release a detailed 236-page analysis that Reid drafted as a companion report. Nor did the interim report provide context for the documents he unearthed. These omissions came as hundreds of pages were whittled down to 35 in the days before the report was released. Though some members of the Senate team reviewed a small number of classified documents, the interim report relied only on publicly available material. A spokesperson for the Senate HELP minority committee told Vanity Fair and ProPublica: “What has been included in the interim report are the facts the Committee has determined are ready for, and worthy of, publication at this time. The Committee’s bipartisan oversight investigation is still ongoing, and what is worthy of inclusion will find its way into the final report.”

Vanity Fair and ProPublica downloaded more than 500 documents from the WIV website, including party branch dispatches from 2017 to the present. To assess Reid’s interpretation, we sent key documents to experts on CCP communications. They told us that the WIV dispatches did indeed signal that the institute faced an acute safety emergency in November 2019; that officials at the highest levels of the Chinese government weighed in; and that urgent action was taken in an effort to address ongoing safety issues. The documents do not make clear who was responsible for the crisis, which laboratory it affected specifically or what the exact nature of the biosafety emergency was.

The interim report also raises questions about how quickly vaccines were developed in China by some teams, including one led by a military virologist named Zhou Yusen. The report called it “unusual” that two military COVID-19 vaccine development teams were able to reach early milestones even faster than the major drug companies who were part of the U.S. government’s Operation Warp Speed program.

Vanity Fair and ProPublica spoke to experts who said that the timeline of Zhou’s vaccine development seemed unrealistic, if not impossible. Two of the three experts said it strongly suggested that his team must have had access to the genomic sequence of the virus no later than in November 2019, weeks before China’s official recognition that the virus was circulating.

The authors of the interim report do not claim to have definitively solved the mystery of COVID-19’s origin. “The lack of transparency from government and public health officials in the [People’s Republic of China] with respect to the origins of SARS-CoV-2 prevents reaching a more definitive conclusion,” the report says, adding that its conclusion could change if more independently verifiable information becomes available.

Throughout the pandemic, the WIV has largely remained a black box, owing to the Chinese government’s refusal to cooperate with international probes. By mining the WIV’s own records, Toy Reid and Senate researchers unearthed new clues that support the interim report’s assessment that a lab accident was “most likely” responsible for the pandemic.

In response to detailed questions, a Chinese Embassy spokesperson, Liu Pengyu, dismissed allegations of a lab leak and said that an international team convened by the World Health Organization concluded that “the allegation of lab leaking is extremely unlikely. The conclusion should be respected. … From the very beginning, China has taken a scientific, professional, serious and responsible attitude in origins tracing.” Some American politicians and journalists “distort facts and truth,” he said, adding that the U.S. should “stop using the epidemic for political manipulation and blame games.”

“Open the Aperture of Your Mind”

More than two years after the COVID-19 pandemic’s onset, the question of its origin has remained a scientific whodunit for the ages. Did the virus come from a caged infected animal, languishing in the warren of stalls at a Wuhan wholesale market? Or did it come from the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology, where China’s top coronavirus researchers, some partly funded by the U.S. government, were splicing together coronavirus strains to gauge how they might become most infectious to humans?

A bitter battle has ensued between a group of virologists who assert their research points to a market origin and an alternate group of academics and online sleuths who argue there’s been an attempted cover-up of a more likely lab origin. Four months ago, the World Health Organization’s Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens revised an earlier conclusion and said that both scenarios remain on the table, due to insufficient evidence, and require further investigation.

In June 2021, with efforts to learn the truth at a virtual standstill, Burr drafted Dr. Robert Kadlec, the former Health and Human Services assistant secretary for preparedness and response under President Donald Trump, to assemble a team to examine the leading hypotheses. Burr, the ranking member of the Senate HELP committee, is retiring at year’s end. A spokesperson for Burr declined to make him available for an interview.

In the foreword of the interim report, Burr wrote, “My ultimate goal with this report is to provide a clearer picture of what we know, so far, about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 so that we can continue to work together to be better prepared to respond to future public health threats.”

Burr has served in the U.S. Congress for 28 years, first as a congressman and then, since 2005, as a senator. By today’s standards, he is a moderate Republican, having voted to convict Trump in the Jan. 6 impeachment. Long known for his work on biodefense issues, he helped lead passage of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act in 2006 and also worked to speed up the FDA’s approval of drugs for rare diseases.

The pandemic also immersed him in scandal, as ProPublica has previously reported. In February 2020, after receiving Senate intelligence committee briefings on the health threat of COVID-19, he sold up to $1.7 million in stock holdings before the market tanked, sparking a Justice Department investigation into insider trading. Burr said he relied on public news reports to guide his decision to sell stocks. He stepped aside as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee after the FBI seized his cellphone. In January 2021, the DOJ closed its investigation without charging him.

Dr. Robert Kadlec examines evidence assembled by the Senate researchers. (Mark Peterson/Redux for Vanity Fair)

The Senate HELP committee paid the salaries of seven researchers, but little more, so Kadlec cobbled together the best team he could. From the State Department, he borrowed a veterinary epidemiologist as well as Reid, whom he’d met just weeks earlier through a mutual friend who was a Dalai Lama aficionado. At the time, Reid was detailed to the office of Sen. Marco Rubio to work on China policy issues. Kadlec also leaned on scientific advisers with expertise in virology, epidemiology and biodefense.

Kadlec, a former Air Force officer who worked with Burr years earlier on bioterrorism issues, has served under both Republican and Democratic presidents. In 2003, he deployed to Iraq for the Department of Defense and played a critical role in debunking the false claims that trailers there doubled as mobile bioweapons labs. That experience, he says, equipped him to navigate the murky world of“dual-use research,” where civilian scientific work sometimes has a clandestine military purpose.

In February 2020, in his role at HHS, Kadlec allowed sick Americans on a cruise ship to return to the U.S. Angry that the move added to the domestic COVID-19 case count, Trump threatened to fire him. And when Rick Bright, a senior HHS official turned whistleblower, accused the Trump administration of politicizing the pandemic response, he also alleged that Kadlec demoted him in retaliation and used federal funds to bestow contracts on favored drugmakers. The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis investigated. While it did not issue formal findings against Kadlec, it noted in a press release that an HHS division under Kadlec’s control awarded a lucrative contract to a drugmaker, despite regulators’ warnings about its troubled manufacturing plants. Calling the experience “very hurtful,” Kadlec says, “I got slimed in the press.” He adds, “I still carry that with me today.”

Kadlec says the investigation of the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster, in which seven astronauts died, inspired his approach to the inquiry. It showed that “in complex disasters and events, there is always a political side, an engineering side, a human error side,” he says. “These things happen for a variety of reasons, so you have to open the aperture of your mind.”

In recruiting Reid, Kadlec found an analyst who would look for clues in places a typical scientist wouldn’t. “The things that I’ve been researching and translating are not really science,” Reid says. “It’s the party speaking to the world of science and trying to manage it.”

“Complex and Grave Situation”

Even the authors of the relentlessly cheerful party branch dispatches and meeting summaries in the WIV archive found it hard to sugarcoat the events of Nov. 19, 2019, Toy Reid discovered as he delved into the WIV’s archives.

Seven days after the Zhengdian party branch members wrote their memo about rushing to the front line to defend against viral dangers, fallout arrived in the form of an official visitor from Beijing. That visitor, Dr. Ji Changzheng, is the technology safety and security director for the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the sprawling state agency that oversees more than 100 research institutions in China, including the WIV. His visit was billed as a senior safety-training seminar for a small high-level audience, including the WIV’s research department heads and top biosafety officials.

But the meeting, chronicled in a one and a half page summary uploaded to the WIV website on Nov. 21, was no pro forma seminar. According to Reid, it appears to have been “out of the ordinary and event driven,” and distinct from the annual safety training, which had been held in April.

For Reid, the import of Ji’s opening remarks practically leapt off the page. Ji told the assembled group that he had come bearing “important oral remarks and written instructions” from General Secretary Xi Jinping and China’s premier, Li Keqiang, to address a “complex and grave situation.”

Though the summary’s language is characteristically vague, Ji described:

many large-scale cases of domestic and foreign safety incidents in recent years, and from the perspective of shouldering responsibility, standardizing operations, emergency planning, and inspecting hidden dangers one-by-one, [he] laid out a deep analysis, with many layers and taken from many angles, which vividly revealed the complex and grave situation currently facing [bio]security work.

The WIV’s deputy director of safety and security spoke next, summarizing “several general problems that were found over the course of the last year during safety and security investigations, and [he] pointed to the severe consequences that could result from hidden safety dangers.”

But what drew Reid’s full attention was the word Ji used to describe the important “written instructions” he was relaying from Beijing: “pishi.” When China’s senior leaders receive written reports on a worrying or important issue, they will write instructions in the margins, known as pishi, to be carried out swiftly by lower-level officials. As Reid interpreted it, the pishi that Ji arrived with that day appeared to have come directly from Xi, arguably China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong. To Reid, it suggested that Xi himself had been briefed on an ongoing crisis at the WIV.

Is it possible that Ji meant to invoke the authority of China’s supreme leader in a general way? As Reid acknowledges, “When Chinese officials want to be taken seriously by whoever their audience is, they invoke more senior officials.” To assess whether Ji had simply been dropping Xi’s name, as a way to underscore the importance of his message, Reid researched nine of Ji’s visits to different facilities prior to the pandemic. All were characterized as annual or routine. None mentioned a pishi. “There wasn’t this bandying about of Xi,” Reid says.

Further, when Chinese officials are invoking a higher authority in general terms, they will typically cite an important speech, says Reid. For example, Ji could have referenced the one Xi gave at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ plenary session in May 2018. As Reid puts it, “If he just wanted to invoke the authority of Xi, the natural way to do that is to say, ‘Remember when he came to speak to all of us?’” Invoking the pishi, Reid believes, was “taking it to another level.”

Ji did not respond to questions and a request for comment sent to the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The director general at the WIV and the head of the WIV party committee did not respond to emails seeking comment.

Vanity Fair and ProPublica examined research from Chinese academics on pishi and separately got three experts on CCP communications to review the WIV meeting summary. All agreed that it appeared to be urgent, nonroutine and related to some sort of biosafety emergency. Two also agreed that it appeared Xi himself had issued a pishi.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official said that, while the pishi in the dispatch is not necessarily a smoking gun, he reads it as saying that “there is some issue related to lab security, which doesn’t come up very often, that needed to be seen by Xi Jinping.” He added, “Something signed off on by the General Secretary (Xi) and Premier (Li) is high priority.”

Another longtime CCP analyst said it was not possible to conclude from the document that Xi and Li had actually issued a pishi related to a specific incident, or even that they had been informed of one. Ji, in her view, might well have been invoking their names without their knowledge to underscore the importance of his message. However, she said that, given the party’s preference for positive communications, the acknowledgment of a “‘complex and grave situation’ means ‘We are facing something really bad.’” She also said that the language of the summary implied that the situation in question was happening at that time.

Reading between the lines is essential to understanding what the WIV dispatches really mean. As Geremie Barmé, an emeritus professor of Chinese history at the Australian National University, who analyzed key documents at our request, said of CCP communications, “The style of self-protection, of rounding things out, of avoiding the truth, is a highly developed, bureaucratic art form.”

Without more evidence, it is impossible to know the details of what the assembled group knew and discussed that day. But at least one news report supports the notion that the virus may have been circulating at that time. In March 2020, a veteran journalist with the South China Morning Post reported that she reviewed internal Chinese government data on early cases of COVID-19 that included a 55-year-old in Hubei province, where Wuhan is located, who contracted COVID-19 on Nov. 17, 2019.

That was just two days before Ji arrived at the WIV, bearing urgent instructions from the highest levels of China’s government.

“Black Swans and Gray Rhinos”

A virologist and former Army officer, James LeDuc spent half a century studying how infectious diseases impact public health and national security. Over the course of his career, he witnessed China’s rise from a “not well-developed country” to a biotechnology superpower, he told Vanity Fair and ProPublica.

In December 1985, LeDuc, then a supervisor at the U.S. Army medical research center, Fort Detrick, arrived at the Wuhan Institute of Virology to help work on a trial of drug efficacy for the hantavirus, a life-threatening disease transmitted by rodents. “China was emerging from the Cultural Revolution. Everyone was on bicycles,” he recalls. “I can remember giving a talk — the screen was a sheet one of us had to hold. The windows were broken out.”

China "didn’t have the background of how to run [advanced laboratories] safely," says James LeDuc. "They were trying to do their best."

Two and a half decades later, with help from French scientists and engineers, the WIV laid the cornerstone for China’s first BSL-4 laboratory. That facility, the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, would become synonymous with the country’s lofty biotech ambitions. “China has said repeatedly and forcefully — and they’re backing up their words with actions — that they intend to own the bio-revolution,” the biodefense expert Dr. Tara J. O’Toole testified in November 2019 before a U.S. Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities. O’Toole served as one of Kadlec’s scientific advisers for the report.

Today, China operates three BSL-4 laboratories and plans to build at least five more. (Biolabs are rated 1-4, from least to most secure, according to standards set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and international public health agencies.)

China’s progress has been fast — arguably too fast for its infrastructure to keep pace. It remains dependent on other countries for critical technology and supplies, leading to chronic procurement hurdles that party branch members refer to as the “stranglehold problem.” It has a thin bench of experts to run the most advanced laboratories. China “didn’t have the background of how to run [advanced laboratories] safely,” says LeDuc. “They were trying to do their best.”

From 2010 until his retirement in 2021, LeDuc served as director of the Galveston National Laboratory, one of eight BSL-4 facilities in the U.S. During that time, he went out of his way to help improve standards at the WIV. He brought several of the WIV’s scientists to Galveston for training and invited its officials to attend an international conference he hosted.

In 2016, LeDuc returned to the WIV for a scientific meeting in which he shared a new set of recommendations. The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity had urged the U.S. government to more intensively screen proposals for what it called “gain-of-function research of concern” in which scientists manipulate dangerous pathogens to gauge their likelihood of sparking a pandemic.

LeDuc says his presentation was “not necessarily well received. Most of the folks were scientists and could care less about policy.” But he felt he had a responsibility to warn them all the same. “It’s enlightened self-interest that we are doing everything to ensure [China’s] success,” he says. “We want to make sure they have the best practices. If someone screws up, we all suffer.”

Poring through publicly available documents, Kadlec’s researchers saw that China’s top scientists had been sounding the alarm too. “The biosafety laboratory is a double-edged sword; it can be used for the benefit of humanity but can also lead to a ‘disaster,’” warned a March 2019 article co-written by Yuan Zhiming, director of the WIV’s BSL-4 laboratory. “With increasing numbers of high-level biosafety laboratories constructed in China, it is urgent to establish and implement standardized management measures.”

That same month, the director of China’s CDC cautioned that bioengineering technologies would “also be available to the ambitious, careless, inept and outright malcontents, who may misuse them in ways that endanger our safety.” Writing in the journal Biosafety and Health, the director at the time, George Fu Gao, also urged that “modifying the genomes of animals (including humans), plants, and microbes (including pathogens) must be highly regulated.”

Meanwhile, reports of sloppy practices, hazardous conditions and inadequate oversight reverberated across China’s laboratories, according to documents unearthed by Reid and reviewed by Vanity Fair and ProPublica. A 2018 study by a municipal agency in Zhangjiajie, which canvassed 37 laboratories in the area, came to a scorching conclusion. “Our findings allow for no optimism about biosafety conditions,” the study said. “There are many hidden safety dangers, including occupational exposure, hospital acquired infections, environmental hazard, lack of training, those without credentials taking posts, management systems that do not operate effectively, leadership that does not place enough importance [on lab safety], deficient supervision and management by relevant health departments, etc.”

On Nov. 7, 2018, an official with the Municipal Health Inspection Bureau of Guangzhou, China’s largest manufacturing hub, identified a litany of hazards found during laboratory biosafety inspections: improper use of disinfectants, substandard management of samples, personnel with inadequate training and protective gear, and laboratory wastewater released directly into sewage systems.

The WIV was by no means exempt from such problems, according to reports in its own archives. In 2011 and 2018, inspections of WIV laboratories turned up lapses including improper storage of viral samples and management failings.

Then, on Dec. 24, 2018, an incident that was impossible to conceal helped catapult lab safety to the top of China’s policy agenda. Three students at Beijing Jiaotong University burned to death after improperly stored chemicals exploded inside the school’s laboratory.

On Jan. 21, 2019, Xi Jinping gave a speech to the CCP’s Central Party School, where budding young cadres receive their higher education. Conveying a sense of “anxious urgency,” according to The New York Times, he stressed the need to prepare for two kinds of risks: “black swans and gray rhinos.” He was referring to two concepts popularized in bestselling books: A black swan is a rare and unpredictable event, while a gray rhino is an obvious risk that is ignored until it poses an immediate threat. Xi proceeded to describe potential security problems in China’s state laboratories, leaving no doubt that he was concerned about the issue.

With Xi himself calling for action, a biosecurity bill that had been on the back burner became a top priority and later passed. In October 2019, Gao Hucheng, chairman of a National People’s Congress committee responsible for environmental protection, argued for its importance before the Congress’ standing committee.

In the fall of that year, according to declassified intelligence in a U.S. State Department fact sheet, several researchers inside the WIV became sick “with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.” The fact sheet did not say who the researchers were or how the US government learned of their illnesses.

As the Chinese government raced to overhaul biosafety regulations, scientists at the WIV faced a conflicting imperative: Beijing’s demand for scientific breakthroughs, which created pressure to perform cutting-edge experiments that could be published in prestigious journals. A party branch dispatch noted that Tong Xiao, a member of the WIV’s CCP committee, often told scientists there: “Don’t look at your work duties as pressure. Every task is an opportunity and a ladder for continuous self-improvement. Our team’s belief is that suffering losses is good fortune.”

“They’ve got this really aggressive regime breathing down their neck,” says Reid. “These guys are in a political pressure cooker.”

“A Doom Loop of Pressure”

In 2002, an outbreak of the SARS coronavirus that originated in China spread around the world, killing 774 people and infecting more than 8,000. At first, China tried to conceal the problem. When that became impossible, it played down the severity, falsely claiming the epidemic was under control. Meanwhile, in two separate incidents in 2004, SARS accidentally leaked from a top laboratory in Beijing and led to mini outbreaks.

In the wake of the debacle, China committed to a long-term project to not only repair its public-health reputation but also achieve the cutting-edge scientific prowess worthy of a true global superpower.

In 2004, French president Jacques Chirac flew to Beijing to sign a scientific cooperation agreement that would help catapult China into the big leagues. Welcomed with lavish ceremony, amid Champagne and strutting soldiers, Chirac pledged that France would sell China four mobile BSL-3 laboratories, help build a world-class BSL-4 lab and partner on essential research.

Eleven years and $44 million later, construction of the BSL-4 lab was complete. Set high above a flood plain, the four-story concrete laboratory was designed to withstand a magnitude 7 earthquake. By early 2018, it had been accredited to research the world’s most dangerous pathogens, including Ebola, Marburg and Nipah viruses. Xi Jinping himself hailed it as “of vital importance to Chinese public health.”

"My gut feeling is that the WIV was not ready to go hot when they turned everything on [at the BSL-4] and started doing experiments in early 2018," says Larry Kerr.

From the outside, the WIV appeared to be a transparent hub for top-caliber international collaborations. That ethos was best embodied by a fearless scientist named Shi Zhengli. She had risen through the ranks at the WIV to become director of its Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases and deputy director of its BSL-4 lab. Fluent in French, she had trained at the BSL-4 Jean Mérieux-Inserm Laboratory in Lyon and was well known in China as “bat woman” for her intrepid exploration of their caves to collect samples. “Shi Zhengli was totally aware of how to handle viruses,” Gabriel Gras, a French biosafety and biocontainment technology expert who helped train the WIV’s BSL-4 staff, told Vanity Fair and ProPublica. “She has handled these all her life.”

As the BSL-4 lab there became one of the nation’s most exalted scientific showpieces, Shi’s research grew in importance and scope. In a 2015 research paper, Shi and a University of North Carolina virologist named Ralph Baric proved that the spike protein of a novel coronavirus could be used to infect human cells. Using mice as subjects, they spliced the spike of a novel SARS-like virus from a bat into a version of the 2003 SARS virus, creating a new infectious pathogen. The virus manipulation was completed at Baric’s BSL-3 lab in North Carolina. This gain-of-function experiment was so fraught that the authors essentially put a warning label on it, writing, “scientific review panels may deem similar studies … too risky to pursue.”

In March 2018, Shi partnered with Baric and a longtime collaborator, Peter Daszak, on a $14 million grant proposal to genetically manipulate bat coronaviruses to see how they might cause pandemics. The proposal called for possibly enhancing the viruses with something called a furin cleavage site to boost their entry into human cells. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) rejected the grant proposal for not adequately assessing the risks posed by a supercharged virus.

It is not clear whether WIV scientists continued the research on their own. Shi and Baric did not offer comment. In his response to our request for comment, Daszak did not address the DARPA grant. He said that he had not reviewed the Senate report and instead pointed to another report, which he recently co-authored in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that “strongly indicates” a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2.

Though Shi was most often pictured in the Chinese press in her white, pressurized oxygen suit, required for BSL-4 research, published papers show that she and the researchers she supervised did much of their work in BSL-3 and even BSL-2 facilities, which the WIV allowed prior to the pandemic. The interim report enumerates several types of risky research conducted at the WIV at BSL-3 and BSL-2 levels. Animal experiments to test the efficacy of vaccines generated highly infectious aerosols that are “difficult to detect,” the interim report says, adding that “there were concerns about conducting this type of research in a BSL2 laboratory.”

In early 2017, the collaboration with the French fizzled and Gras, the last French expert there, departed. The French had served as designers and contractors but never became partners. “I think the French did not really have a strong interest in working with Wuhan,” in part due to diverging research interests, Gras said. He added that Yuan Zhiming, the BSL-4 director, “was not an easy person. He can put pressure on people.” Yuan did not respond to emails seeking comment.

Long before the lab began its riskiest work, there were alarming signs of trouble ahead. In 2016, during severe flooding, the waters rose so high that nearby streets were impassable, and researchers had to hike through a forested area to reach the laboratory and ensure its safety, Zhengdian lab party branch members recounted in a WIV dispatch that Toy Reid unearthed.

The decision to build the walls out of stainless steel caused a considerable challenge. Stainless steel is “very vulnerable to corrosion” from disinfectants, Bob Hawley, the former chief of safety and radiation protection at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease, told Vanity Fair and ProPublica. Hawley is an expert adviser to the interim report.

Even in 2016, Chinese technicians were already struggling with how to properly disinfect laboratory surfaces and other items, according to emails obtained in a FOIA lawsuit. That July, Yuan emailed an NIH staffer he’d met the previous year under the subject line “ask for help.” He wrote that he was seeking “some suggestion for the choice of disinfectants” used in the BSL-4 laboratory. “I am sorry to disturb you and I really hope you could give us some suggestion,” he wrote.

As LeDuc observed, “They were looking for expertise wherever they could find it.”

Yuan himself identified the shortage of expertise as one of many problems that imperiled safe operations in China’s laboratories. In the September 2019 issue of the Journal of Biosafety and Security, he described a threadbare system where maintenance costs were “generally neglected” and “several high-level BSLs have insufficient operational funds for routine yet vital processes. Due to the limited resources, some BSL-3 laboratories run on extremely minimal operational costs or in some cases none at all.”

Gerald Parker, associate dean for Global One Health at Texas A&M University’s School of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and an expert adviser to the interim report, told Vanity Fair and ProPublica that he found Yuan’s revelations “jaw-dropping.” The combination of biosafety problems and limited maintenance funds is “a recipe for disaster,” he said. “You further couple that with an authoritarian regime where you could be penalized for reporting safety issues. You are in a doom loop of pressure to produce, and if something goes wrong you may not be incentivized to report.”

As the Zhengdian lab party branch members noted in their dispatch of Nov. 12, 2019, which the interim report includes: “In the laboratory, they often need to work for four consecutive hours, even extending to six hours. During this time, they cannot eat, drink or relieve themselves. This is an extreme test of a person’s will and physical endurance.”

A four- to six-hour shift in a positive pressure suit would be “unusually lengthy,” said Hawley, given the stress of dehydration, lack of mobility and noise from oxygen that is so loud it requires hearing protection. “Usually, it’s only a couple of hours at the maximum.”

Larry Kerr, a virologist who recently retired as HHS’s director of the Office of Pandemics and Emerging Threats and served as an expert adviser to the Senate report, told Vanity Fair and ProPublica, “My gut feeling is that the WIV was not ready to go hot when they turned everything on [at the BSL-4] and started doing experiments in early 2018.” He added: “Even the WIV’s people are saying, ‘We don’t have the resources and capabilities to keep this up and running.’ It’s like, holy crap, if you are working in a lab like that, I don’t understand why people don’t shut it down.”

But the showpiece laboratory remained as busy as ever. As Reid said of the WIV dispatches he analyzed, “The feel you get from all these documents is: It’s just produce, produce, produce, like an actor preparing to take the stage before they’re ready.”

Newspaper clippings on a cork board in the Bat Cave. (Mark Peterson/Redux for Vanity Fair) “The CCP’s Version of ‘Cover Your Ass’”

By the fall of 2019, trouble was brewing at the WIV, according to documents turned up by Toy Reid.

On Sept. 11, 2019, the CCP’s No. 15 Inspection Patrol Group arrived at the Beijing headquarters of the WIV’s parent organization, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), to conduct a two-month political inspection. The inspection was part of a larger routine sweep of 37 state organizations. According to the inspection team’s leader, its purpose was to sniff out any “violations of political discipline, party organizational discipline, [financial] ethics discipline, discipline with regard to the masses, work discipline, and discipline in one’s personal life.” They were also on the lookout for instances of insufficient loyalty to the CCP’s mission.

The Beijing inspectors identified more than a dozen “principal problems” at CAS, among them a “‘persistent gap’ between Xi Jinping’s important instructions on pursuing ‘leap frog development in science and technology’ and CAS’s implementation of Xi’s instructions.” In short: not enough progress, despite all the pressure.

A week earlier, on Sept. 3, more than 50 managers and staffers at the WIV had met to discuss a looming internal audit that would evaluate political discipline, according to a party branch dispatch. The scientists and their overseers were facing scrutiny at every level.

A trail of evidence from that fall appears to show the WIV trying to address a crisis. “That’s when you start to see emergency response activity,” says Larry Kerr, the former director of the HHS pandemic office.

It began within 24 hours of the start of the CAS inspection. On Sept. 12 between 2 and 3 a.m., the interim report says, the WIV took down its Wildlife-Borne Viral Pathogen Database, which contained more than 15,000 samples from bats. The database had been a resource for researchers globally. A password-protected section only accessible to WIV personnel contained unpublished sequences of bat beta-coronaviruses — the family of coronaviruses to which SARS-CoV-2 belongs. Public access to the database has not yet been restored.

On Dec. 11, a team of WIV researchers submitted a patent application for a device to filter and contain hazardous gases inside a biological chamber, like the ones it used to transport infected animals.

The Senate researchers analyzed a trail of procurements and patent applications, which, the interim report notes, suggest that “the WIV struggled to maintain key biosafety capabilities at its high-containment BSL3 and BSL4 laboratories.” On Dec. 11, a team of WIV researchers submitted a patent application in China for a device to filter and contain hazardous gases inside a biological chamber, like the ones it used to transport infected animals. The application, which Vanity Fair and ProPublica reviewed, noted that defective air hoses on animal carriers can lead to “multi-stage” risks when airborne pathogens are involved, and warned that a “stable high-efficiency filtering device” and corrosion-resistant frame were “urgently needed.” The following year, in November 2020, the WIV applied for a patent for a new disinfectant compound that it argued would reduce “the corrosion effect to metal, especially stainless steel material,” the interim report says.

The patent application, which listed seven inventors, including Yuan Zhiming, vividly describes concerns related to its prior disinfectant:

Long-term use will lead to corrosion of metal components such as stainless steel, thereby reducing the protection of … facilities and equipment. It can not only shorten its service life and cause economic losses, but also lead to the escape of highly pathogenic microorganisms into the external environment of the laboratory, resulting in loss of life and property and serious social problems.

In the words of one China analyst who serves as an adviser to Western companies, when Chinese officials “describe the solution to a problem, that’s how you find out what went wrong.”

Vanity Fair and ProPublica analyzed the WIV website and found that there may have been an after-the-fact attempt to reframe the events of November 2019. On Nov. 11, the WIV appeared to republish the entire section of its website containing institutional and party branch news. Every dispatch from prior dates, even those from several years earlier, contains underlying data that indicates that it was changed on that day.

While this could have resulted from routine site maintenance, it raises another possibility: that WIV officials removed or revised documents in an effort to insulate themselves from blame ahead of the Nov. 19 visit from Ji Changzheng, the CAS biosecurity official.

The first dispatch to be posted after Nov. 11 was the one from the Zhengdian lab party branch enumerating how its members had rushed to the front lines every time there had been a biocontainment lapse. The dispatch was dated Nov. 12, but the underlying data suggested the file was actually uploaded on Nov. 19, the day of Ji’s urgent visit.

Matthew Pottinger, who researches China-related issues at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and was President Trump’s former deputy national security adviser, told Vanity Fair and ProPublica, “This is the CCP’s version of ‘cover your ass.’”

“Scientifically, Technically Not Possible”

As Senate researchers explored the question of when the outbreak began, they and their scientific advisers examined the surprisingly fast vaccine development by several Chinese research teams.

The work of one military vaccinologist caught their attention: Zhou Yusen, director of the State Key Laboratory of Pathogen and Biosecurity at the Academy of Military Medical Sciences Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, in Beijing. Zhou had spent years working to develop vaccines for pathogens including SARS and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), a novel coronavirus first identified in Saudi Arabia in 2012. A 2016 report by the WIV featured Zhou as a key partner on its MERS vaccine research. And in November 2019, he collaborated on a paper with a team of WIV scientists that included Shi Zhengli.

On Feb. 24, 2020, Zhou became the first researcher in the world to apply for a patent for a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. His proposed vaccine worked by reproducing a part of the virus’s spike protein known as the receptor binding domain. In order to start vaccine development, researchers would have needed the entire SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequence, the interim report says.

Shi Zhengli has said that her lab was the first to sequence the virus and completed that work on the morning of Jan. 2, 2020. That sequence is the one Zhou said he worked with in his Chinese patent application, which Vanity Fair and ProPublica reviewed.

According to the interim report, there are limits to how fast a vaccine can be developed. In particular, it said that “animal studies are designed to last a specific length of time and cannot be curtailed without compromising the resulting data.”

In his patent application and in subsequently published papers, Zhou documented a robust research and development process that included both adapting the virus to wild-type mice and infecting genetically modified ones with humanized lungs.

Vanity Fair and ProPublica consulted two independent experts and one expert adviser to the interim report to get their assessment of when Zhou’s research was likely to have begun. Two of the three said that he had to have started no later than November 2019, in order to complete the mouse research spelled out in his patent and subsequent papers.

Larry Kerr, who advised on the interim report, called the timeline laid out in Zhou’s patent and research papers “scientifically, technically not possible.” He added, “I don’t think any molecular biology lab in the world, no matter how sophisticated, could pull that off.”

Rick Bright, the former HHS official who helped oversee vaccine development for the U.S. government, told Vanity Fair and ProPublica that even a four-month timetable would be “aggressive,” especially when the virus in question is new. “Things aren’t usually that perfect,” he said.

Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, told us the timetable was very fast but “feasible for a group with substantial existing expertise and ongoing work” on developing similar SARS-related coronavirus vaccines, but only if “everything went right.”

Zhou and his colleagues described their COVID-19 vaccine research in a preprint posted on May 2, 2020. When it was published in a peer-reviewed journal three months later, Reid found, Zhou was listed as “deceased.” The circumstances of his death have not been disclosed.

A chart tabulating early cases of COVID-19 in Wuhan. (Mark Peterson/Redux for Vanity Fair) Battle Lines

In the early hours of Jan. 1, 2020, Wuhan officials closed the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market after identifying it as the site of the world’s first cluster of SARS-CoV-2 infections. Animals for sale were carted away, stalls were sanitized and an epidemiology team spent days collecting environmental samples.

How did the virus arrive in Wuhan, a metropolis of 11 million people hundreds of miles north of China’s teeming bat caves? It was such an unlikely place for a coronavirus outbreak that WIV scientists had in the past used Wuhan residents as a control group when screening people in the countryside of Yunnan Province for exposure to bat-borne viruses. The assumption was that urbanites in Wuhan would have little contact with bats.

To many scientists, the answer was clear: The wildlife trade in China had brought live animals, an obvious source of disease, into dangerously close proximity with people. Years earlier, something similar had happened with SARS, which spilled over into multiple different markets that sold live animals across Guangdong Province over the course of months.

But the interim report also highlights questions that soon arose regarding the market theory. If the wildlife trade was the culprit, where was the trail of infected animals? And where was the animal host?

The question of where COVID-19 came from has never been a purely scientific one. From the start, in both China and the U.S., it has been politicized almost beyond recognition.

In April 2020, Trump declared at a press conference that COVID-19 — or “kung flu,” as he soon began calling it — had come from a lab in China. When pressed on the evidence for this claim, he declared: “I can’t tell you that. I’m not allowed to tell you that.”

As a conspiratorial rabble trained its sights on the WIV generally, and Shi Zhengli specifically, Western scientists rushed to their defense. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” read a statement signed by 27 scientists and published by the Lancet medical journal on Feb. 19, 2020. It would later emerge that one of the scientists who’d signed that statement had sought to conceal his own role in orchestrating it and creating the impression of a consensus, as Vanity Fair has reported previously. That scientist didn’t address this issue when he replied to our request for comment for this article.

By then, however, the battle lines had been drawn. If you backed the lab-leak theory, you were with Trump. If you believed in science, you supported the natural-origin theory generally and the market-spillover theory in particular.

On Feb. 25, 2022, a team of researchers from China’s CDC published a preprint revealing that of the 457 swabs taken from 18 species of animals in the market, none contained any evidence of the virus. Rather, the virus was found in 73 swabs taken from around the market’s environment, all linked to human infections. And although some seafood and vegetable vendors in the market tested positive, no vendors from animal stalls did.

The next day, a team of scientists including Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, published a preprint identifying the Huanan market as the “unambiguous epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic.” Using mapping software, they analyzed the locations of 155 of the earliest known cases reported by the Chinese authorities to the World Health Organization and found them to be centered on the market. A companion analysis led by Jonathan Pekar, a bioinformatics graduate student at the University of California San Diego, said there had been not one but “at least two” spillover events at the market.

The Worobey paper described its findings as “dispositive evidence” for a market origin. The New York Times catapulted the preprints to international attention. When the peer-reviewed version was published in Science in July, the “dispositive evidence” language was gone. In a detailed response to our request for comment, Worobey said that the removal of those words was the authors’ editorial choice and that the language in Science was “no less definitive” than the preprint: “It was replaced with similar language: ‘our analyses indicate that the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 occurred through the live wildlife trade in China.’”

By contrast, the interim Senate report concludes that “the hypothesis of a natural zoonotic origin no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt, or the presumption of accuracy.” The available evidence doesn’t fit the patterns of previous outbreaks, it states, including outbreaks of SARS in 2003 and avian influenza in 2013. Those outbreaks saw many independent spillover events in multiple locations, and those viruses “exhibited much greater genetic diversity than early SARS-CoV-2 strains.” And within six months of the first known case of SARS, the report says, Chinese health officials found evidence of the virus in palm civets and raccoon dogs.

The interim report also points out that, “almost three years after the COVID-19 pandemic began, there is still no evidence of an animal infected with SARS-CoV-2, or a closely related virus, before the first publicly reported human COVID-19 cases in Wuhan in December 2019.”

Worobey said, “Our two recent papers establish that a natural zoonotic origin is the only plausible scenario for the origin of the pandemic.” Before this story ran, Worobey posted his comments to us, as well as additional ones, on Twitter, so they would not be “ignored or filtered,” and stated he had not been given sufficient time to respond.

While the China CDC found no evidence of the virus in animals in the market, Pekar told Vanity Fair and ProPublica that the removal of animals from the market by the start of 2020 made it difficult to “actually sample the correct animals for SARS-CoV-2.”

The Senate’s interim report is no likelier than the Worobey and Pekar studies to close the book on the origins debate, nor does it attempt to. If anything, it seems destined to escalate the battle just as Republicans in Congress hope to retake the majority in the midterm elections. They aim to haul Dr. Anthony Fauci, the outgoing director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, into Benghazi-style hearings.

The dispute over COVID-19’s origins, fought in the halls of Congress and on the web pages of scientific preprints, has become more toxic and divisive as time has passed. On Twitter, what should be scientific debate has devolved into a mosh pit of poop emojis and middle school insults. It is unclear what is driving the animus, but political advantage, egos, scientific reputations and research dollars all hang in the balance.

“Under the Thumb of the Party State”

In early February 2020, as COVID-19 was spreading beyond China, James LeDuc of the Galveston National Laboratory began fielding calls from journalists asking if SARS-CoV-2 could have originated from a lab.

He didn’t think so. Nonetheless, on Feb. 9, he emailed his longtime colleague and mentee at the WIV, Yuan Zhiming. LeDuc encouraged him to “conduct a thorough review of the laboratory activities associated with research on coronaviruses so that you are fully prepared to answer questions dealing with the origin of the virus.” He included a three-page list of “some areas where you may wish to investigate.”

Included in LeDuc’s proposed review were the following questions: “Is there any evidence to suggest a mechanical failure in biocontainment during the time in question? -were biological safety cabinets used and appropriately certified? -Exhaust air filtration systems working correctly?”

The questions were apt. Two and a half months earlier, according to the interim report, procurement officials at the WIV posted a call for bids on a government website seeking a costly air incinerator. The post was dated Nov. 19, 2019, the very day that the visiting CAS safety official arrived to address a “complex and grave” situation there.

"The WIV is under the thumb of the party state," says Toy Reid. "American scientists have been slow to realize that."

Prior to the wider adoption of HEPA filters in the 1950s, air incinerators were used to “superheat air coming from one place and going to another, in order to render them free of any microbial agent,” said Bob Hawley, the former safety chief at the Army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease. “If somehow the HEPA filter system failed, because there was a tear or breach … then your quick fix would be to bring in an air incinerator.”

LeDuc says he never heard back from Yuan.

Toy Reid, who is now in Jakarta, Indonesia, resuming his work for the State Department, says that WIV scientists are not “free agents” who can candidly share what occurred in their laboratories. “The WIV is under the thumb of the party state,” he says. “Just because you can’t see the political pressures they’re under doesn’t mean they’re not under them. American scientists have been slow to realize that.”

Without the cooperation of China’s government, we can’t know exactly what did or didn’t happen at the WIV, or what precise set of circumstances unleashed SARS-CoV-2. But the dispatches that Reid unearthed, when overlaid with additional evidence the Senate team compiled, point to a catastrophe in the making: political pressure to excel, inadequate resources to safeguard risky work and an effort to skirt blame once a crisis hit.

As Reid sees it, the international community must continue to demand answers. “If you just throw your hands in the air and say, ‘We’ll never know because it’s China,’ and just move on — if you take that defeatist approach to things — you can’t prepare yourself to prevent something like this from happening in the future.”

We Want to Talk to People Working, Living and Grieving on the Front Lines of the Coronavirus. Help Us Report.

Clarification, Oct. 28, 2022: This story has been updated to clarify that Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, said two recent papers by him and his colleagues established that “a natural zoonotic origin is the only plausible scenario for the origin of the pandemic.”

by Sophia Kovatch

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Nationwide, rent was up by 9% in September compared to the previous year. That’s the first time in 2022 that rent increases were in the single digits, down from an 18% increase in March, according to an analysis by the real estate company Redfin.

While supply and demand, high mortgage interest rates and other economic factors are certainly at play in rising rents, an investigation by ProPublica found another key factor: a rental pricing software owned by real estate tech firm RealPage. Here’s what we learned.

How RealPage’s Rent-Setting Algorithm Works

The software collects tons of data from its clients, many of whom price tens of thousands of units. All together, RealPage says its rent-setting algorithm holds lease transaction data for more than 13 million units across the country.

Each day, the software recommends a new price for every available unit. To determine the new rate, it draws from competitor data on the actual rent tenants paid, as opposed to the publicly advertised rent.

The use of private competitor data — though it is aggregated and anonymized — to set prices is one of the concerns experts raised. The practice could allow RealPage to stifle rental competition, they said, driving up rents across the country and, potentially, even violating antitrust laws. Experts said that RealPage also sponsors meetings that gather competitors together to talk about pricing, which could also be a warning sign of collusion.

What You Need to Know About RealPage

1. Landlords use RealPage to make more money. RealPage boasts that it helps landlords outperform the market by up to 7% — that is, its software users can expect better-than-market-average revenues, even in weak markets. Greystar, the largest property manager in the U.S., outperformed its markets by 4.8% in one downturn, according to RealPage materials.

RealPage promises streamlined apartment pricing and flexible options for renters, but the true benefit for landlords is just how far the software will push rents up — far beyond what most property managers are willing to do manually.

2. RealPage believes it is driving rents higher across the country. A now-deleted video showed a RealPage executive saying in 2021 that the company’s software was a driver of double-digit rent increases across the country. Another executive said most property managers would be hesitant to raise rents by double digits without the assistance of the software.

Take this example from Seattle: In a RealPage-priced building in a downtown Seattle ZIP code, rent rose by 33% in one year for a couple living in a one-bedroom apartment. In a non-algorithm-priced building in the same ZIP code, rent for another tenant’s studio rose by just 3.9% over a similar period.

Property managers don’t have to accept the software’s recommendations — they are free to reject the algorithm’s price if they feel it’s too high or low. But overall, about 90% of recommendations are implemented, former employees said.

3. RealPage discourages landlords from bargaining with tenants over rents. One of the developers of RealPage’s price-setting software said leasing agents have “too much empathy” with renters, which can lead them to hesitate to seek the highest rents. The software automates rent-setting calculations, leading to more revenue for landlords and property management companies.

This may be why RealPage discourages bargaining with tenants about rent. When you take the human element out of the equation, profits seem to soar.

4. Critics say RealPage may encourage pricing collusion among landlords. When RealPage acquired LRO, its main pricing competitor, in 2017, the Department of Justice’s antitrust division investigated the deal. The merger ultimately proceeded, doubling the number of units RealPage priced — and expanding its cache of data.

Legal experts have raised concerns that RealPage’s software could be facilitating collusion among clients in places where many of them use it to set rents. In particular, the company’s User Group — a forum for clients to work together and suggest software improvements — could be an “antitrust red flag,” they said. The group has more than 1,000 members and two subcommittees on pricing, which meet in private at annual conferences.

Days after ProPublica released its investigation into RealPage, a group of renters filed a lawsuit alleging that nine of the largest property management firms in the U.S. are working together to artificially inflate rents, violating federal law.

5. RealPage says it uses data in a “legally compliant” way. The company told ProPublica that it “uses aggregated market data from a variety of sources in a legally compliant manner.”

RealPage noted that landlords who use employees to manually set prices “typically” conduct phone surveys to check competitors’ rents, which the company says could result in anti-competitive behavior.

“RealPage’s revenue management solutions prioritize a property’s own internal supply/demand dynamics over external factors such as competitors’ rents,” a company statement said, “and therefore help eliminate the risk of collusion that could occur with manual pricing.”

The statement said RealPage’s software also helps prevent rents from reaching unaffordable levels because it detects drops in demand, like those that happen seasonally, and can respond to them by lowering rents.

Other Reasons Rent Is So High

Although RealPage’s software is affecting rental prices in markets across the country, it’s far from the only factor in increasing rents. Here are some other things that help explain why rent is so high.

1. Private equity-owned rentals: Since 2011, there’s been a steady increase in the number of rental units owned by private equity-backed firms, according to reporting by ProPublica. These property management firms aim to increase short-term profits by increasing rents, cutting costs, or both. By 2021, more than half of the top 35 apartment building owners were backed by private equity, likely contributing to higher rents around the country.

2. High cost of homebuying: Property values in many markets escalated steeply in the years after the Great Recession. More recently, average interest rates on 30-year fixed-rate mortgages in the U.S. have soared, now surpassing 7% — nearly double what they were this time last year. Both trends have slowed homebuying, pushing rental demand and prices higher.

3. Slow, expensive construction: Supply chain issues have slowed housing construction, reducing the rental supply as demand increases. As inflation affects every sector of the economy, the costs of labor and materials go up, making it hard to build housing people can afford. The nation has lagged in constructing the new housing units needed in most years since the Great Recession.

4. Supply and demand: With more people forced to rent, there simply aren’t enough rental units to go around — especially in some markets that saw an influx of new renters during the pandemic. Higher competition for rentals drives prices up.

Heather Vogell contributed reporting.

by Anjeanette Damon

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A politically connected COVID-19-testing company with a stunningly high error rate in Nevada has become a key issue in the state’s closely fought governor’s race.

In May, a ProPublica investigation detailed how Gov. Steve Sisolak’s administration fast-tracked the license for Northshore Clinical Labs, a company with ties to a family that has donated nearly $50,000 to his political campaigns since 2011, including $40,000 to his gubernatorial races. The investigation also revealed that the company missed 96% of COVID-19 cases in a sample of 51 PCR tests from the University of Nevada Reno campus, used questionable billing practices and had widespread problems with the testing it provided to five government agencies. The article also noted how the lab was allowed to continue operating in the state despite repeated warnings from public health scientists.

Now, as Sisolak, a Democrat, seeks a second term, he is fending off relentless Republican attacks labeling him “corrupt” and pointing out that he failed to notify the public of the problematic tests. His opponent, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo, as well as the Republican Governors Association and an independent political action committee, have spent millions of dollars on mailers and television, radio and digital ads hyping the issue. Lombardo’s Republican allies in the Legislature have unsuccessfully asked for audits and investigations into Northshore’s dealings. And the two candidates for governor spent nearly 10 minutes arguing the issue this month in their only debate.

“Gov. Sisolak covered up a public health crisis for five months,” Lombardo’s spokesperson, Elizabeth Ray, said. “Sisolak knew about this crisis back in January, and he failed to alert the public. His inaction in this ‘pay-to-plague’ scandal could have cost Nevadans their lives.”

In response, Sisolak’s campaign has accused Republicans of exaggerating the nature of the testing problems and the governor’s role in it.

“Joe Lombardo and national Republicans have spent tens of millions of dollars spreading lies, misconstruing the truth and misleading Nevadans,” Molly Forgey, Sisolak’s campaign spokesperson, said. “Plain and simple: Republicans are desperate. Lombardo doesn’t have any real plans or vision so instead, he’s scraping the bottom of the barrel in an attempt to shift the narrative away from his pattern of corruption and his out-of-touch stances.”

Shortly after ProPublica published its investigation, a government spokesperson for the Sisolak administration said his office was exploring legal avenues to hold the company accountable for botched testing services that put its customers’ health at risk. This week, however, the spokesperson confirmed the administration has yet to take action beyond assisting federal investigators looking into Northshore’s practices.

“I don’t have many updates for you,” spokesperson Meghin Delaney said.

Northshore and its representatives have consistently declined to comment on ProPublica’s reporting.

As the debate has raged, both sides have bent the facts in making their cases to the voters. According to ProPublica’s extensive reporting on the issue, which included a review of more than 3,000 pages of internal emails, here is what both sides have gotten wrong.

Misleading: “Steve Sisolak’s administration fast-tracked a contract for a shady company tied to a campaign donor.” — A Republican Governors Association ad

Among Republicans’ most repeated errors is the claim that Sisolak handed a state contract to the testing company. In some cases, Republicans have accused Sisolak of giving Northshore a $165 million contract.

In reality, the state did not sign a contract with Northshore, nor did it pay the company $165 million. That figure is the total amount of money the company, which says it operated in more than 20 states at the height of the pandemic, billed the federal government for COVID-19 tests it said it provided to people with no health insurance.

The Sisolak administration, however, did let Northshore jump ahead of other companies waiting for inspections so it could more quickly obtain its state laboratory license.

Northshore had contracted with brothers Gregory and Angelo Palivos to build clientele and manage its operations in Nevada. Their parents, Peter and Vicky Palivos, have donated heavily to Sisolak’s campaign and are personal friends of the governor’s. The Palivos brothers worked with an influential lobbyist who used his ties to the administration to help Northshore with its state laboratory license.

After the lobbyist emailed Sisolak’s chief of staff, the head of the licensing bureau urged the health inspectors to move up Northshore’s inspection.

“I want to let you know how frustrating it is to have my staff schedule their inspections only to have labs use previous directors to influence or pressure us into having businesses that they represent, jump ahead of others that are patiently waiting for their inspections,” the state’s lead inspector wrote to his boss in an email obtained by ProPublica.

In a written statement earlier this year, a spokesperson for the Palivos brothers said they were unaware of Northshore’s problems when they were hired to manage its Nevada operations. The spokesperson said they were driven by their desire to help Nevada in the middle of a testing crisis and that they relied on Northshore “for standard operating procedures, licensing, compliance, test supplies, molecular lab work, reporting of test results, and billing.” She also said the Palivos brothers pushed the company to fix the problems with its tests before the state became involved.

Sisolak has repeatedly said he had no conversations about Northshore with Palivos family members. The Palivos brothers also said they never spoke with the governor about their testing business.

“This guy — on my life, on my mother, my children, my wife’s life — never asked me about this testing company,” Sisolak said during the Oct. 2 gubernatorial debate, referring to Peter Palivos. “Never talked to me. Never sent me an email. Never made a phone call. Never sent me a text. Never did anything. They followed the procedures. That’s what happened.”

The Palivos family’s political donations didn’t stop amid the Northshore debacle. On Jan. 17, three days after the state scheduled its investigation into complaints about Northshore’s operations, a limited liability company operated by Peter and Vicky Palivos donated $10,000 to Sisolak’s campaign.

Incorrect: “Now, Sisolak is under federal investigation.” — Better Nevada PAC ad

Both the Lombardo campaign and the Better Nevada PAC, which said it has spent more than $1 million on ads about Northshore, have claimed Sisolak is being investigated by the federal government.

ProPublica confirmed that the Inspector General’s Office of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services expanded its investigation into Northshore to Nevada after the initial story ran in May. An email from the OIG investigator did not indicate that Sisolak or his administration were under investigation.

“Myself and other law enforcement agencies have had a case opened regarding Northshore Clinical Lab for quite some time,” wrote Special Agent Peter Theiler, who is based in Chicago. “After reading the ProPublica article on Northshore Clinical Lab regarding Nevada patients, we are interested in obtaining records related to testing for COVID-19 for Northshore Clinical Lab rapid test results and PCR test results for Nevada.”

Spokespeople for both Lombardo’s campaign and the Better Nevada PAC point to the Sisolak administration’s comments about the OIG investigation as evidence Sisolak himself is under investigation.

But that’s not supported by public records. The OIG has declined to comment on the investigation.

Incorrect: “As soon as we found out, their license was revoked.” — Sisolak during his Oct. 2 debate with Lombardo

The state never revoked Northshore’s license. Instead, it tried working with the company to bring it into compliance before ultimately closing the license at the company’s request.

Delaney declined to address this inaccuracy when ProPublica asked about it. His campaign spokesperson also did not explain the inaccuracy.

That’s not to say Sisolak’s administration ignored the problem. The Nevada Bureau of Health Care Quality and Compliance immediately began investigating after the Washoe County Health District filed a complaint detailing errors with the company’s PCR tests.

Northshore had been conducting both rapid and PCR tests. In “several hundred”cases, the rapid test came back positive, but the PCR test came back negative, according to a Jan. 10 email from Washoe County Health District’s epidemiology manager. At state and local health officials’ urging, Northshore voluntarily stopped using PCR tests. However, state officials allowed the company to continue conducting rapid tests across the state despite it not having the proper licensing to do that.

In their investigation, state inspectors noted deficiencies with Northshore’s operations and were working with the company to correct them. During that process, Northshore abruptly announced it was pulling out of the state and asked for its license to be closed.

State officials closed the license but also reported their findings to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the State Board of Nursing and the company itself.

Incorrect: “We were cooperating in a federal investigation.” — Sisolak during the debate

During the debate, moderator Jon Ralston asked Sisolak why he never alerted the public to the problems with Northshore’s tests when he became aware of them in January 2022.

“We were cooperating in a federal investigation into the company, which we’re still cooperating with,” Sisolak answered.

According to documents obtained by ProPublica, however, the federal investigation into Northshore didn’t include its Nevada operations until May, after the ProPublica story ran.

The governor may have misspoken. (Delaney and Forgey also refused to address this inaccuracy.) At the time, Nevada health officials had launched a state investigation into the reported testing inaccuracies and told local media they could not comment on the ongoing investigation.

Sisolak’s answer drew an attack from Lombardo, who said the governor had owed the public a warning for their personal safety.

“You should have, front-facing as the leader of this state, said, ‘Hey, if you took this test, come in and get another test because we have determined they are all false, or the percentage of them, the majority of them were false,’” Lombardo said during the debate.

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by Allan Sloan and Carson Kessler

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In recent months, federal antitrust regulators have notched some notable achievements, blocking four hospital mergers. Those actions follow the announcement of a major change in antitrust philosophy, embodied by President Joe Biden’s executive order last year aimed at promoting competition. That order criticized hospital consolidation for the ways in which it has left “many areas, particularly rural communities, with inadequate or more expensive healthcare options.”

Suddenly, antitrust regulators seem to have swagger. News articles have described the Federal Trade Commission, whose job is to stop anti-competitive behavior, as being “unleashed” under its aggressive new chief, Lina Khan. Republicans have responded with complaints of “radical” policies. An FTC official told Kaiser Health News, “We are feeling invigorated and looking to fulfill the executive order’s call to be aggressive on antitrust enforcement.”

What can be gleaned about hospital consolidation 15 months after Biden’s executive order? An examination of the cases the FTC has taken on — and those it hasn’t — suggests that so far the rhetoric has been more muscular than the reality. The agency initiated three challenges of hospital mergers during this period (the fourth example noted above was initiated during the Trump administration) and allowed 54 to proceed without taking public action. By contrast, the FTC challenged a total of three hospital mergers over the four years of the Trump administration, while permitting 375 to go through unchallenged.

One reason the numbers haven’t risen further is an impediment that is rarely mentioned outside of antitrust circles: The FTC’s guidelines focus exclusively on challenging mergers of hospitals within a single geographic region, not when a major player in one region buys up a hospital in a different one. And those so-called cross-market deals make up an increasing portion of hospital mergers.

Not only does the FTC face that obstacle, it’s short on the money and staffing it would take to duke it out over big-time cross-market mergers. “Our resource constraints overhang every enforcement decision,” Holly Vedova, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, told us in a statement. “It’s not possible to quantify the number of additional mergers that we could challenge, but there’s little doubt that being able to invest more resources in our investigations would bolster our enforcement.”

Let’s start with a quick review of the quarter century of hospital consolidation that brought us to today. There were 1,887 hospital mergers announced from 1998 through the end of last year, according to the American Hospital Association and health care consultants Kaufman Hall. Absent those mergers, we’d have about 8,000 hospitals in the U.S. rather than the 6,093 that the AHA says we had at the end of last year.

Over the years, the FTC has generally attempted to block about 1% of those mergers, which made it a very small sandbag in the path of a fast-moving flood of deals. (Those sympathetic to the FTC point out that, due to its limited resources, the agency attempts to select winnable cases whose prominence or importance will send a message to the hospital industry and discourage similar transactions.) The agency isn’t notified about all hospital mergers, only those with a value of more than $101 million, a number that gets adjusted every year for the size of the economy. These days the number of mergers is slowing down, Kaufman Hall said, but the size of deals is increasing.

Fewer hospitals means less competition for patients. And as they teach you in Market Economics 101, fewer competitors generally results in higher prices. Lots and lots of studies have been conducted of mergers and pricing, which aren’t published until years after mergers are completed because it takes so long to do the analyses. They show that, in general, having fewer hospitals competing for business makes prices higher than they would otherwise be.

Health care consolidation is the “No. 1 driver of health care spending inflation,” according to professor David Dranove of Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, co-author of “Big Med: Megaproviders and the High Cost of Health Care in America.”

Unlike things like higher gasoline prices or rising food costs, the cost of hospital consolidations isn’t obvious, and usually isn’t paid by people directly. Rather, employers who pick up some or most of the cost of their workers’ medical insurance, either directly or through payments they make to health insurance companies, pass on those costs indirectly by giving workers less in salary and benefits than they might otherwise get. (Similarly, when it comes to government health insurance plans such as Medicare, Medicaid and various state and local programs, the cost of hospital mergers is paid indirectly, through higher taxes or bigger government deficits.)

“The more money that is going into benefits, the less money is going to employees,” said Bill Kramer, senior adviser for health policy at Purchaser Business Group on Health, which represents some 40 private employers and public entities that collectively purchase health care for more than 15 million Americans.

Employees’ health care costs are also rising rapidly, a trend expected to continue in 2023. “Workers’ contribution to family health insurance premiums grew 259 percent from 1998 to 2018, while nominal average hourly earnings for production and nonsupervisory workers grew by only 68 percent,” according to a 2020 paper by economist Martin Gaynor, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and a founder of the Health Care Cost Institute.

This brings us to today’s FTC. Over the past year or so, the agency blocked two mergers involving the two biggest hospital companies in New Jersey, both of which had been vacuuming up hospitals in the state since they were created by mergers in 2016. One involved a deal for Hackensack Meridian Health to buy Englewood Health, which was announced in 2019 and prompted an FTC suit in late 2020, in the waning days of the Trump administration. The FTC prevailed in both U.S. District Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals, leading the hospitals to officially raise the white flag in June.

The second deal was for the state’s other Big Two hospital chain, RWJBarnabas Health, to acquire St. Peter’s University Hospital of New Brunswick. In that case, the filing of an administrative complaint by the FTC in June was enough to get the hospitals to drop their merger plans.

The FTC prevailed in the Hackensack Meridian case by proving to the courts’ satisfaction that a merger with Englewood would raise costs for patients in New Jersey’s Bergen County. However, some key numbers — such as projections by an outside expert hired by the FTC — were blacked out in the publicly available documents, and remain so even after the proposed merger was dropped, because they’re still considered proprietary. (The FTC’s other prominent victories in 2022 include blocking the merger of the two largest hospital systems in Rhode Island and getting HCA Healthcare to abandon its plans to take over Utah’s Steward Health Care System after the FTC went to court.)

The FTC’s successes in the Hackensack Meridian and Barnabas cases are examples of a strategic change in the FTC’s approach to hospital deals. After losing every anti-hospital merger case that it brought in the 1990s, the FTC improved the quality of its market analysis and has since run up an excellent record — six wins against just one loss since 2020 — in the relative handful of cases that it brings. The analysis concentrates on competition within what are defined as geographic markets, such as Bergen County (where Englewood is located and where Hackensack Meridian has significant market share) and Middlesex County (where St. Peter’s is based and Barnabas is a big player).

While the FTC appears to have gotten better at winning local antitrust cases like those two in New Jersey, its reach is severely limited when it comes to so-called cross-market mergers, marriages between entities that do not directly compete in the same geographic or product market.

The number of cross-market mergers has been increasing. Over the past decade, more than half of all hospital mergers have occurred across geographic markets, according to University of California Hastings College of the Law professor Jaime King, who specializes in health care and competition issues. None have been challenged in federal court.

Despite the rise in cross-market mergers and emerging data that suggests that they contribute to rising prices, the FTC’s formal guidelines on hospital mergers haven’t been updated since 2010. The FTC guidelines include 34 detailed pages on how to evaluate and challenge an intramarket merger and zero pages on how to evaluate or challenge a cross-market merger. That’s largely because courts tend to support the FTC if it can demonstrate that one local competitor is merging with another local competitor, reducing the number of hospital options and increasing the chances that the acquirer can raise prices.

Consider one merger this year that the FTC allowed to proceed without a word of public objection. In February, two Michigan systems, Beaumont Health and Spectrum Health, combined to create the largest health system and private employer in the state, with 22 hospitals and more than 300 outpatient locations.

“I believe the FTC decided to not intervene in this case because both the Beaumont system and Spectrum system are geographically dispersed from each other,” said Bret Jackson, president of the nonprofit Economic Alliance for Michigan, who said he spoke to the FTC regarding the deal. Jackson sees elevated prices as an inevitable result. “It is still too soon to see the price effects of the merger on health care costs, since both systems are under existing contracts with insurers,” he said. “But never in the history of hospital mergers in the country has a hospital come down in pricing after a merger.” (A spokesperson for Corewell Health, the newly merged entity, said, “We remain focused on quality, affordable care for the communities we serve.”)

Experts like King argue that courts and the FTC should recognize that if one chain buys multiple hospitals in different markets, that chain can also wield significant power to raise prices.

The FTC and its fellow antitrust enforcer, the Department of Justice, have taken some preliminary steps toward retooling their approach. In January, the two agencies began soliciting public input on ways to modernize merger guidelines, specifically for markets that “may fall outside the frameworks under the current approach.” More than 1,900 comments have been submitted to the agencies.

King applauds the FTC for that step and for its recent aggressiveness. But she thinks the agency still has a ways to go before it can effectively combat hospital consolidation. “There’s a need to reevaluate old assumptions about how health care markets are working,” King said. “It’s almost like they’re two decades behind.”

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by Mark Olalde

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The price of oil produced in California this year reached its highest level in a decade. President Joe Biden is releasing millions of barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to keep prices in check. And fossil fuel companies’ earnings are so high that Gov. Gavin Newsom has called for a windfall tax on their profits.

It might seem like a lucrative time to drill for oil in the Golden State. Yet, some of the world’s largest oil companies, several of which have done business in the state for more than a century, are selling assets and beginning to pull out of California.

Even with strong cash flow in the short term, producers have more to gain from offloading wells and the associated liability — chiefly expensive environmental cleanup — than from pumping more oil and gas, experts say.

“This is the kind of deal you see when an industry is in its twilight,” said Andrew Logan, senior director for oil and gas at Ceres, a nonprofit focused on sustainability in companies and markets.

Some industry experts, lawmakers and environmentalists are concerned about the recent deals, noting that the sales shift environmental liability from corporate powerhouses to less-capitalized firms, increasing the risk that aging wells will be left orphaned, unplugged and leaking oil, brine and climate-warming methane. They see a threat that the state’s oil industry could repeat a pattern seen in other extractive industries like coal mining and lead to taxpayers bearing cleanup costs.

California Assemblymember Steve Bennett, a Democrat who has long worked on oil policy, has seen oil companies in his Ventura district walk away from environmental liability. “It gets passed on to a smaller company and to a smaller company until someone declares bankruptcy and the public is stuck with the cleanup bill,” he said.

IKAV Enters the Fray

Supermajors Shell and ExxonMobil recently agreed to sell more than 23,000 wells in California, which they owned through a joint venture called Aera Energy, to German asset management group IKAV for an estimated $4 billion. Aera accounts for about a quarter of California’s oil and gas production, largely from pumping in Kern and Ventura counties.

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Shell and ExxonMobil say the deal will strengthen their businesses.

But Greg Rogers, an attorney and accountant who researches the oil and gas industry, said the deal allows the sellers to shed decommissioning costs. “You got bad assets with big liabilities, and you can get rid of both at the same time. That’s a win for Exxon and Shell,” he said.

IKAV will inherit a portfolio littered with wells past their prime. Nearly 9,000 Aera wells were idle as of early October, meaning about 38% of the company’s unplugged inventory isn’t producing oil or gas, according to state data.

“With oil being over $100 a barrel, any well that would’ve come back has likely come back,” Logan said, adding that long-idled wells are simply “orphan wells in waiting.”

In an email, Aera spokesperson Kimberly Ellis-Thompson said the company is capable of managing its large portfolio of idle wells. “Since 2019, when new idle well management program regulations were published, we have met or exceeded the requirements for retiring idle wells,” she said. The company has decommissioned and plugged nearly 1,000 wells on average every year since then, she said.

IKAV, Aera’s soon-to-be new owner, manages about $2.5 billion in energy-focused assets. News releases on the Aera sale quoted Constantin von Wasserschleben, IKAV’s chairman, saying, “We advocate a co-existence between renewable and conventional energy for decades to come.”

As the world increasingly shifts to cheaper renewable energy to address climate change, IKAV has been snapping up oil and gas wells from supermajors exiting the market. The firm, which once focused exclusively on renewable energy, began expanding into oil and gas in 2020 when it purchased BP’s gas assets in the San Juan Basin, spanning New Mexico and Colorado. The deal was part of BP’s push to divest $10 billion in assets, including aging American gas fields.

BP declined to comment.

An Aera facility and a pump in Ventura. Aera accounts for about a quarter of California’s oil and gas production. (Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)

If it’s not profitable to return wells to production, they need to be plugged. But if a company doesn’t plug its wells before walking away, wells are orphaned and the cleanup costs ultimately fall to taxpayers and current operators through fees.

This has happened with thousands of wells in California and hundreds of thousands, or more, across the country.

For example, the Greka group of companies left more than 750 wells for California to plug when its wealthy owner began pushing his businesses into bankruptcy in 2016 and retired to his Santa Maria winery. And a subsidiary of one of the country’s largest mining companies, Freeport-McMoRan, left dozens of likely orphaned wells, state records show, even though the company brought in nearly $23 billion in revenue last year.

Greka’s CEO didn’t respond to a request for comment, and a Freeport spokesperson said the company is working with the state to verify details about its orphaned wells.

To minimize the government’s exposure if wells are orphaned, producers must put up a bond, typically held as cash or a surety policy. The bonds act like a security deposit: The company gets its bond back if it cleans up its mess, but the government keeps the money if the company orphans its wells.

Newsom has called for an end to all oil extraction in the state by 2045, but his administration has yet to use another tool to hold producers responsible for cleanup.

California has the authority to ask for an additional $30 million in financial security from a single operator but only requires Aera to hold a $3 million bond. As a result, Aera’s bonds cover less than half a percent of the $1.1 billion that ProPublica estimates it would cost the state to plug the wells based on the average cost to California for past well plugging. (That estimate does not include the additional cost of full surface remediation.)

California Oil and Gas Supervisor Uduak-Joe Ntuk said in a statement that his agency reviews bonds for all oil companies in the state but did not say whether the amount of Aera’s financial security would be increased through the sale.

Aera, Shell and ExxonMobil did not respond to a question about the gap between their bonds and the estimated cost to plug their wells. IKAV did not respond to requests for comment. In an email, ExxonMobil spokesperson Meghan Macdonald said that “when we make divestments, we always try to work with partners like Aera and IKAV who are also committed to a lower-emissions future.”

Costs vary widely, but states have paid $100,000 or more to plug wells — and the same to clean up surface pollution — meaning there’s a significant gap between what’s needed and what California has available in bonds.

“If they don’t have the financial resources when it comes time to plug those wells, there’s a possibility that the public will be left holding the bag and paying those costs even though it’s the company that made the profit from selling the oil,” said Hollin Kretzmann, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity.

Who Will Be Liable?

More than 240,000 wells have pierced the state since the late 1800s, when Southern California’s first producing well spouted oil near where Dodger Stadium now stands. Of those, more than 5,300 are “orphan, deserted, and potentially deserted wells,” according to data the California Geologic Energy Management Division published in September.

Many on that list belong to individuals who died long ago or companies that dissolved in the shuffling of corporate paperwork. However, some responsible parties are still around but no longer legally liable after offloading their wells through sales and bankruptcies.

So who will be responsible for cleanup?

California is unique because state law allows regulators to call on former operators such as Shell and ExxonMobil to help pay for plugging onshore oil wells if they are later orphaned, even by a different owner. But companies have escaped responsibility under this stronger legal standard by exploiting loopholes such as a porous bankruptcy code.

Some experts question whether Shell and ExxonMobil would be required to pay if the wells they are selling to IKAV are ultimately orphaned, saying their ownership of the wells through a separate company, Aera, might shield them from liability.

“Exxon and Shell do not directly operate those wells. There’s corporate structuring going on in between,” Rogers said. And IKAV now adds another layer of corporate paperwork, holding the wells it acquired in New Mexico, Colorado and California through companies that were registered in Delaware shortly before the sales.

Aging wells that are left orphaned and unplugged can leak oil, brine and climate-warming methane. (Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)

Alongside Aera, two other companies — California Resources Corp. and Chevron — account for the vast majority of California’s oil and gas production, and they too are shrinking their positions in the state. California Resources, which has been in and out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy in recent years, sold most of its Ventura Basin operations in November 2021. Chevron recently sold its California headquarters and plans to consolidate some of its unused Bakersfield office space as it shifts employees to Texas. Reuters reported in early October that Berry Corp., another large oil company that for many years has operated in California and Utah, was considering selling.

Berry did not respond to a request for comment.

Shell acknowledged its California wells were overvalued, suggesting the wells are even nearer to the end of their economic life than previously predicted. The company is wiping as much as $400 million off its books through the sale via an impairment charge.

Shell has been shedding assets in part to hand off associated greenhouse gas emissions. A 2021 Dutch court ruling ordered it to significantly reduce emissions, although the company has appealed the ruling. Zoe Yujnovich, the company’s upstream director, said in a news release about the sale of Aera that Shell will instead be “focusing on positions with high growth potential.”

For its part, ExxonMobil plans to focus on oil and natural gas that costs less to extract, Liam Mallon, president of ExxonMobil Upstream Co., said in a news release announcing the sale to IKAV.

Large public companies are handing off oil and gas assets around the country. Between 2017 and 2021, more than a quarter of oil and gas mergers and acquisitions took public companies private, with private equity often involved, according to a study conducted by the Environmental Defense Fund. The report voiced concern that private companies are less transparent and have less incentive to protect the environment.

California Is Just the Beginning

With more than 2 million unplugged oil wells believed to be scattered across the U.S., California is the tip of the iceberg.

A massive boom in American oil and gas production over the past 15 years spurred by technological advances in hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling unlocked previously inaccessible geologic formations. But the shale revolution and current market highs buoyed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine won’t last forever.

Longtime petroleum reservoir engineer Dwayne Purvis laid out the reality at a recent conference. This shale revolution revitalized only some oil fields, and more than 90% of the country’s unplugged wells are either idle or minimally producing and unlikely to make a major comeback, according to his research.

“The bulk of the wells are producing from plays where there is no hope of another deus ex machina,” Purvis said, referencing nearly depleted oil fields.

The oil industry also faces an impending decline in demand from the shift to renewable energy and the trend toward banning the sale of new internal-combustion engine cars, as well as plans to phase out drilling in metro areas.

“The overall industry is being assaulted right now through policy changes at the state and federal level. That’s the story writ large,” Rogers said. “The industry is dying.”

by Neil Bedi and Kathleen McGrory

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Days after ProPublica detailed dangerous working conditions at a chlorine plant that used asbestos until it closed last year, public health advocates and two U.S. lawmakers are renewing calls for Congress to ban the carcinogen.

“American workers are dying from asbestos. It is way past time to end its use,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat from Oregon. “This ProPublica report confirms our worst fears: workers dealing with asbestos are often left vulnerable to this deadly, dangerous substance.”

Merkley and Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, D-Ore., are sponsoring the Alan Reinstein Ban Asbestos Now Act, which would permanently ban the importing and use of asbestos. The proposed legislation is named after Alan Reinstein, who died in 2006 from mesothelioma, a cancer caused by asbestos. Alan’s wife, Linda, co-founded the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, one of the leading nonprofits that has advocated for protecting the public from the dangers of asbestos.

The lack of a ban “puts workers, their families, and the surrounding communities at risk for deadly disease and death from asbestos exposure, which as ProPublica detailed, is sickeningly frequent and widespread and without consequences for the companies that allow it to continue,” said Linda Reinstein in a statement.

Reinstein has helped build a coalition of doctors, public health experts, trade unions and advocates to push Congress to pass the asbestos ban. This week, Reinstein’s organization sent letters to members of Congress calling for their support and highlighting the findings of the ProPublica investigation.

Linda Reinstein on Capitol Hill at a June hearing about banning asbestos (Shuran Huang for ProPublica)

“This powerful article explodes the decades-long claim of the chlor-alkali industry that its use of asbestos is safe for workers,” said Bob Sussman, a former deputy administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency during the Clinton administration who now works as counsel for the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization. “There can no longer be any doubt that, as EPA has found, asbestos-using plants present a serious risk to the worker health and this risk must be eliminated.”

The lawmakers filed the bill in May and it had one Senate committee hearing in June. Since the ProPublica report was published in collaboration with NPR last Thursday, three House members have signed on to co-sponsor the bill.

Unlike dozens of other countries, the United States has never fully banned asbestos. The EPA made an attempt to do so in 1989, but it was overturned in federal court in 1991, and efforts by lawmakers to outlaw the carcinogen have repeatedly fallen short. Meanwhile, the chemical industry has continued to import hundreds of tons of asbestos — more than 200,000 pounds — every year for use in chlorine production plants.

The industry has long fought against a ban by saying its workers were well protected by strict safety measures and strong workplace safety regulations. Public health organizations and lawmakers had suspected that those safety claims were exaggerated, but for years were unable to assess the conditions inside these plants.

The ProPublica investigation found that safety standards were routinely disregarded at what was once America’s longest-standing chlorine plant. Workers at the OxyChem Niagara Falls plant said asbestos would splatter on the ceilings and walls, roll across the floor like tumbleweeds and stick to workers’ clothes. Windows and doors were left open, allowing asbestos dust to escape. The company’s own industrial hygiene monitoring showed their workers were repeatedly exposed to unsafe levels. Federal workplace regulators had also stopped conducting regular unannounced inspections at the plant; the Occupational Safety and Health Administration included the Niagara Falls site and others like it in a special program for “exemplary” workplaces.

In response to ProPublica’s reporting, OxyChem said the health and safety of its workers is its top priority. The company said the workers’ accounts from Niagara Falls were inaccurate, but wouldn’t provide specifics on what was incorrect. The plant closed last year for unrelated reasons. Eight other plants in the U.S. still use asbestos.

“It’s devastating to see at every step of the way where worker safety wasn’t protected: by the companies, and by the EPA and OSHA during past administrations,” said Merkley.

Asbestos is a toxic mineral that can cause serious illnesses like scarring of the lungs, called asbestosis, and mesothelioma, a vicious cancer that kills most victims within a few years. The government’s inability to ban asbestos has been cited as one of the greatest failures of the U.S. chemical regulatory system. “The system was so complex, it was so burdensome that our country hasn’t even been able to uphold a ban on asbestos — a known carcinogen that kills as many as 10,000 Americans every year,” President Barack Obama said in 2016 on the day he signed legislation meant to fix these problems.

Later that year, the EPA began the formal process of re-evaluating the risks associated with asbestos. It took five years, and in 2020, the agency determined chlorine workers were at “unreasonable risk” from their exposure to asbestos.

In April, the EPA proposed a new asbestos ban. The rule needs to be finalized before it goes into effect, and the EPA has said that it is planning to be done with that process by November 2023. In that time, EPA will consider industry arguments against a ban, including claims that workers face little risk of exposure. The chemical companies have also argued the ban could disrupt the country’s supply of chlorine used to clean drinking water, even though public health advocates say only a small portion of chlorine from asbestos-reliant plants is used for that purpose. Twelve Republican attorneys general have backed the companies and said an asbestos ban would place a “heavy and unreasonable burden” on the industry.

Two key trade associations, the American Chemistry Council and The Chlorine Institute, said in statements this week that they continue to believe asbestos is used safely in the chlorine industry.

Michal Freedoff, the official in charge of chemical regulation at EPA, told ProPublica she could not comment on the final rule-making process but said the agency would not be backing down on the science.

The agency has already extended the original deadlines for evaluating and regulating asbestos. The evaluation was supposed to be complete three years after it started in 2016, and the regulations should have been finalized within two years after that. Lawmakers and public health advocates worry, given the chemical industry’s influence, that there will be even further delays or a new ban will be held up in court. (In response, the EPA pointed out that despite an increased workload, its budget for chemical regulation has remained flat for six years. It also said the Trump administration missed deadlines for nine out of the first 10 chemicals, including asbestos, that were to be regulated under the new 2016 law.)

Organizations like the Environmental Defense Fund are calling for the EPA to expedite its ban, especially given the findings in the ProPublica investigation. The “reporting underscores the need to take action to ban chrysotile asbestos, particularly to protect workers,” said Maria Doa, senior director of chemicals policy at the Environmental Defense Fund. “Given the strong, well-established science on the unreasonable risks posed by chrysotile asbestos, we reiterate our call for EPA to expedite its final decision to ban chrysotile asbestos and to require rapid implementation of the ban.”

Merkley and Bonamici, along with the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization, are instead pushing Congress to write a ban into law, which would accelerate the process and make it harder for the industry to overturn it in court. The bill would ban all six known types of asbestos, whereas the EPA rule would only ban the one type primarily used in the U.S.

ProPublica reached out to Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., and Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., the chairs of the committees where the bill was filed. Carper said he remains “committed to working with our colleagues on both sides of the aisle, as well as advocates and industry stakeholders” on the proposal. Pallone, however, said he believed the EPA will act on asbestos. “I’m confident the Biden Administration takes this public health threat as seriously as I do, and look forward to continuing to work with them to get asbestos banned once and for all,” he said in a statement. The minority leaders of the committees, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., and Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., did not respond to questions or provide comment on the conditions at the Niagara Falls plant.

Do You Work With These Hazardous Chemicals? Tell Us About It.

by Justin Elliott, Megan O’Matz and Doris Burke

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Much of the cardboard and paper goods strewn about our homes — the mail-order boxes and grocery store bags — are sold by a single private company, with its name, Uline, stamped on the bottom. Few Americans know that a multibillion-dollar fortune made on those ubiquitous products is now fueling election deniers and other far-right candidates across the country.

Dick and Liz Uihlein of Illinois are the largest contributors to Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, who attended the Jan. 6 rally and was linked to a prominent antisemite, and have given to Jim Marchant, the Nevada Secretary of State nominee who says he opposed the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory in 2020. They are major funders to groups spreading election falsehoods, including Restoration of America, which, according to an internal document obtained by ProPublica, aims to “get on God’s side of the issues and stay there” and “punish leftists.”

Flush with profits from their shipping supply company, the Uihleins have emerged as the No. 1 federal campaign donors for Republicans ahead of the November elections, and the No. 2 donors overall behind liberal financier George Soros. The couple has spent at least $121 million on state and federal politics in the last two years alone, fighting taxes, unions, abortion rights and marijuana legalization.

From Minor to Major Donors

Modest donors a decade ago, the Uihleins have emerged as the top donor to federal Republican causes this cycle.

(Source: OpenSecrets)

Uline’s core business — selling boxes — is so boring there’s an entire Simpsons bit devoted to its dullness. But tax records obtained by ProPublica show the company, which is privately held and does not publicly disclose financial results, has experienced an astonishing boom.

The Uihleins, who make the vast majority of their money from the company, reported around $18 million in income in 2002, according to the records. That rocketed fortyfold, to $712 million, in 2018. Thanks to the pandemic-induced online shopping surge, Uline has grown even more since.

Uline Up (Source: Data obtained by ProPublica)

While the Uihleins rarely speak to the press — they didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story — they have become well known in political circles. But the explosion of the Uihleins’ wealth as well as the roots of their politics have not been well understood.

The German-American clan made their original fortune in the 19th century as owners of the Milwaukee brewery Schlitz. Family members were staples of the Chicago Tribune society pages. In 1917, Dick’s grandfather was identified as a millionaire in a Chicago Tribune humor item about how the wealthy man had fired an unqualified chauffeur.

When Dick and Liz Uihlein donated millions in recent years to the pro-Trump super PAC America First Action, they were following in a family tradition. Edgar J. Uihlein of Chicago was among the handful of largest donors to the original America First Committee, the aviator Charles Lindbergh’s group that opposed the United States’ entry into World War II. (It’s unclear whether that was Edgar Sr., Dick’s grandfather, or Edgar Jr., his father, who had just graduated from college.) While America First drew supporters from across the political spectrum, it was most associated with rightists. Uihlein’s donation was disclosed in 1941. Later that year, Lindbergh gave an openly antisemitic speech assailing Jewish influence.

When Edgar Uihlein Sr. died in 1956, his estate was valued at $4.8 million — more than $50 million in today’s dollars — and the money was left in a trust for his heirs, newspapers reported at the time.

Dick’s father, Edgar Uihlein Jr., who had started a plastics company after serving in the Navy during World War II, established himself as an important funder of far-right political groups in the 1960s.

A document from 1963 identifies Edgar Uihlein Jr. as on the National Finance Committee of the John Birch Society. Founded a few years earlier, the group quickly became a significant force to the right of the Republican Party, known for its obsessively anti-communist politics. The Birchers combined hostility to New Deal social programs with lurid conspiracies, famously campaigning against “the horrors of fluoridation,” a supposed Red plot.

Edgar J. Uihlein was listed as a member of the John Birch Society’s National Finance Committee in a July 1963 bulletin.

The group fiercely opposed civil rights. An entry in one 1963 Birch newsletter railed against the upcoming March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King would give his “I Have a Dream” speech: “the only good Americans who should have anything to do with this Communist-instigated mob in any way, or pay any attention to it in Washington, are the police required to maintain law and order.”

An excerpt from an August 1963 bulletin of the John Birch Society

Edgar Uihlein Jr. supported politicians who embraced segregation. In early 1962, he sponsored a speech that brought to Chicago a former U.S. Army general named Edwin Walker. Walker toured the country attacking supposed communist conspiracies and civil rights, while celebrating the Southern defeat of Reconstruction, which he labeled “the tyranny within our own white race.”

The Anti-Defamation League, which tracked far-right figures in the period, has archives showing Edgar Uihlein Jr.’s involvement with several other groups and campaigns, including a $1,000 contribution to the presidential campaign of segregationist George Wallace in 1968. It’s not clear when, if ever, Uihlein’s association with the John Birch Society ended. As late as 1977, the founder of the group wrote a long letter to him asking for money.

Edgar Uihlein Jr.’s second child, Dick, born in 1945, grew up in the wealthy Chicago suburb of Lake Bluff and got the same sort of blue-blood education (Phillips Andover, Stanford) as his father (Hotchkiss, Princeton). Amid the social upheavals of the ’60s, Dick Uihlein didn’t waver: He married Liz before graduating from college in 1967, joined the family business and immersed himself in conservative politics. He worked on the 1969 Illinois congressional campaign of Phil Crane, who won a crowded Republican primary in an upset on a hardline anti-tax and anti-communist platform.

In one of the only interviews he’s ever given, Dick Uihlein told National Review in 2018 that he got his politics from his father, who often went by Ed. At the family breakfast table growing up, Uihlein recalled, “My father would talk about the importance of capitalism and the evils of socialism.” Dick said that same year that “my father shared many of the same values that I have, conservative values.”

Dick Uihlein said he shared his father’s values in court testimony in 2018.

Dick and Liz Uihlein continue to revere Edgar Jr., who died in 2005. Dick Uihlein named the family foundation after his father, and it now sends tens of millions of dollars to right-wing institutions. Among the recipients of the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation’s grants are the Federalist Society and think tanks that have pushed misleading claims about the 2020 election, such as the Conservative Partnership Institute and the Foundation for Government Accountability, as the Daily Beast reported.

Tucked in toward the back of the Uline catalog released this summer, sent out to millions of homes and businesses, was a long tribute to the “wise” Edgar Uihlein Jr.

“Father Uihlein, the head of the family, had a towering presence, and we respected his values,” wrote Liz Uihlein under a picture of her husband and father-in-law, recalling “frequent dinners at his house, where business, issues of the day, fishing muskies and, always, politics were discussed.”

She ended on a note of nostalgia tinged with bitterness: “Living your life and raising your kids were easier in an easier time. There was no legalized marijuana, defund the police or social media. We, like so many families, were raised with a sharp moral compass. The rules were the rules, but it was OK.”

Liz Uihlein wrote a tribute to Edgar Uihlein Jr. in a recent edition of the Uline catalog. Dick Uihlein is sitting on the far right next to his father.

The Uihleins’ political giving reflects these longings for a bygone era. Dick Uihlein is a major funder of the American Principles Project, which runs ads attacking what it calls “transgender ideology,” abortion and the teaching of “critical race theory.”

Last year, Uihlein weighed in on recalling four school board members in a small town north of Milwaukee because of their support for COVID-19 safety protocols and “equity” training for teachers. More recently, in his home state of Illinois, Uihlein has spent more than $50 million to back the Republican gubernatorial candidate Darren Bailey, who has drawn criticism for saying the Holocaust “doesn’t even compare” to the toll of abortions and for accusing Democrats of “putting perversion into our schools” for adopting a sex ed bill that includes information about gender identity and same-sex couples.

The Uihleins were huge beneficiaries of a tax provision promoted by Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., that was included in the Trump tax overhaul and are continuing to support the Wisconsin senator and fund attack ads against his opponent.

For all the Uihleins’ dismay at the disorder they see consuming the country, there is one domain where they can exert near total control. Former employees of Uline told ProPublica the couple’s traditionalist politics govern the smallest details of how the company is run.

For new staffers, it begins with the dress code in the employee handbook: Women are not permitted to wear pants except as part of a pantsuit or on Fridays; hose or stockings must be worn except during the warmer months; dresses “that are too short” and corduroy of any kind are strictly prohibited.

“DRESS CODE VIOLATIONS ARE TAKEN SERIOUSLY AND MAY RESULT IN DISCIPLINARY ACTION UP TO AND INCLUDING TERMINATION,” the handbook warns.

(Excerpts from Uline’s employee handbook)

The handbook defines “tardy” as one minute past an employee’s scheduled start time. Just four personal items are allowed on employees’ desks, with maximum dimensions of 5 inches by 7 inches. One former staffer at Uline’s headquarters recalled a coworker who was forced to remove several drawings done by his young child. “Liz would walk up and down the aisles, and if your desk looked off, you’d be written up,” he recalled.

The Uihleins have enlisted company employees to manage their vast personal real estate holdings and maintain their exacting standards, records obtained by ProPublica show. While the Uihleins’ primary home is in Lake Forest, Illinois, they also have several waterfront properties in Florida. In one case, a Uline staffer emailed an official in Everglades City to complain after surveillance footage showed a local man “peeing off Dick’s dock.”

The family’s management style has worked well for the company. Founded in 1980 when Dick and Liz Uihlein saw a gap in the market and borrowed money from Dick’s father to launch a shipping supply distributor, Uline has grown to a network of 12 vast warehouses around the country as well as in Canada and Mexico. Uline’s signature marketing product, its Sears-style catalog, now runs over 800 pages, offering endless varieties of paper bags, packing tape, foaming hand soap, metal racks and more.

Liz Uihlein runs day-to-day operations from the company’s Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin headquarters, right over the Illinois border. Her obsessive focus on next-day shipping and customer service — “We answer the phones faster than 911,” a company saying goes — have powered Uline’s expansion.

Growth accelerated with the online shopping boom that relies on Uline’s specialty, cardboard boxes, which it carries in more than 1,700 sizes. “It’s weird to develop a love of corrugated boxes and shipping supplies, but I really enjoy” it, Liz Uihlein told a Milwaukee business newspaper.

Uline is now so dominant that its customers range from high-end firms like Tesla and Gucci to countless small merchants on Etsy to huge municipal governments. The New York City Department of Education and other agencies, for example, collectively spend more than half a million dollars per year with Uline.

Unlike at other corporate workplaces where discussing politics is tacitly discouraged, the Uihleins lean in to theirs. Employees gathered at the major Uline distribution center in Allentown, Pennsylvania, for a company party in 2019 were bemused when the entertainment hired by the company emerged on stage: a Donald Trump impersonator, wearing a red MAGA hat. The company regularly hosts “Lunch & Learn” sessions at its headquarters with figures such as former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, as the Guardian reported.

An excerpt from a 2020 email sent to Uline employees for a talk on “Why Freedom Is Better Than Socialism”

In 2018, when the New York Times published a profile labeling the Uihleins “The Most Powerful Conservative Couple You’ve Never Heard Of,” the company began to get calls from angry liberal customers canceling their accounts, a former sales staffer recalled. A website, Refuse Uline, was launched that lists alternatives to the company. But as the company’s only shareholders, the Uihleins only have to answer to themselves.

When COVID-19 hit, as Liz Uihlein campaigned against shutdowns and required workers to return to the office before vaccines were available, demand for Uline’s shipping and cleaning supplies surged. In 2020, as other businesses shuttered, sales at Uline shot up 14% to $6.5 billion, according to an internal report obtained by ProPublica. Stung by a worker shortage, Uihlein emailed Wisconsin’s Democratic governor in July 2021 urging him to “get government out of the way” by immediately cutting people off of expanded federal unemployment benefits that had helped people weather the pandemic. Uline needed to fill 500 jobs, she noted in the email, which ProPublica obtained via a public records request. The governor did not oblige.

It’s not clear when the Uihleins, who are both 77, will retire. But the next generation is in place. The couple’s adult children are executives at the company, and they have begun to give money to federal candidates — all conservatives. Dick and Liz Uihlein, meanwhile, have been taking steps to preserve their multibillion-dollar empire for their descendants by shielding it from the hated estate tax.

Over the years, they have gradually transferred the shares of Uline into a so-called “dynasty trust,” which now appears to hold a majority of the company, according to the tax records and business documents filed in Florida. Bob Lord, a lawyer at tax reform group Patriotic Millionaires, said dynasty trusts are typically designed to avoid estate and other transfer taxes for ultrarich families.

“The goal is for the company to remain in the family for possibly hundreds of years,” he said. “And the wealth generated by the company will accumulate untouched by estate tax.”

Help ProPublica Investigate Threats to U.S. Democracy

Do you have information about Uline or Dick and Liz Uihlein that we should know? Reporter Justin Elliott can be reached via email at justin@propublica.org or via Signal at (774) 826-6240.

Andy Kroll contributed reporting.

by Perla Trevizo and Marilyn W. Thompson

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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.

Days after being elected Texas governor in 2014, Greg Abbott called a staff meeting to discuss his vision for leading the state.

“Our number-one priority as public servants is to follow the law,” Abbott, who served as Texas attorney general before he was elected, told staffers, according to his autobiography. Adhering to the law was “a way to ignore the pressure of politics, polls, money and lobbying.”

The Republican governor-elect said he rejected the path of Democratic President Barack Obama, whom he had sued 34 times as attorney general. Abbott claimed that Obama had usurped Congress’ power by using executive orders, including one to protect from deportation young people born in other countries and brought to the United States as children.

Now, nearly eight years into his governorship, Abbott’s actions belie his words. He has consolidated power like no Texas governor in recent history, at times circumventing the GOP-controlled state Legislature and overriding local officials.

The governor used the pandemic to block judges from ordering the release of some prisoners who couldn’t post cash bail and unilaterally defunded the legislative branch because lawmakers had failed to approve some of his top priorities. He also used his disaster authority to push Texas further than any other state on immigration and was the first to send thousands of immigrants by bus to Democratic strongholds.

Abbott’s executive measures have solidified his conservative base and dramatically raised his national profile. He is leading Democrat Beto O’Rourke in polls ahead of the Nov. 8 election and is mentioned as a potential 2024 GOP presidential contender. But his moves have also brought fierce criticism from some civil liberties groups, legal experts and even members of his own party, who have said his actions overstep the clearly defined limits of his office.

“Abbott would make the argument that Obama had a power grab, that he was trying to create an imperial presidency by consolidating power. That’s exactly what Abbott is doing at the state level,” said Jon Taylor, chair of the political science and geography department at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

At least 34 lawsuits have been filed in the past two years challenging Abbott’s executive actions, which became bolder since the start of the pandemic. Abbott used his expanded power at first to require safety measures against COVID-19, similar to what other governors did. But after pushback from his conservative base, he later forbade local governments and businesses from imposing mask and vaccine mandates. He also forced through Republican priorities, including an order that indirectly took aim at abortions by postponing surgeries and procedures that were not medically necessary.

Lower courts have occasionally ruled against Abbott, but Texas’ all-Republican highest court has sided with the governor, dismissing many of the cases on procedural grounds. Other challenges to Abbott’s use of executive power are still pending. In no case have the governor’s actions been permanently halted.

Abbott’s office did not respond to multiple requests for an interview or to questions from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. In responding to the lawsuits, his legal team has defended his actions as allowed under the Texas Disaster Act of 1975, which gives the governor expansive powers.

Several of Abbott’s allies also declined to comment or didn’t return phone calls. Carlos Cascos, a former secretary of state under Abbott, said that in the end, it is up to the courts to decide whether the governor’s actions are unconstitutional.

“Until there’s some final judgment, the governor can do it,” Cascos, also a Republican, said. “If people want to change the rules or laws, that’s fine, but you change them by going through a process.”

Legal experts concede that Abbott has been successful so far, but they insist his moves exceed his constitutional authority.

“I’m not sure any other governor in recent Texas history has so blatantly violated the law with full awareness by the Supreme Court, and he’s been successful at every turn when he had no power to exercise it. It’s amazing,” said Ron Beal, a former Baylor University law professor who has written widely on administrative law and filed legal briefs challenging Abbott’s power. Although Texas Supreme Court justices are elected, Abbott has appointed five of the nine members of the state’s highest court when there have been vacancies.

Some Republicans also fault the governor’s actions. Nowhere was that more pronounced than when Abbott vetoed the Legislature’s budget last year after Democrats fled the state Capitol to thwart passage of one of the strictest voting bills in the country. The governor contended that “funding should not be provided for those who quit their job early.”

The move, which spurred a lawsuit from Democratic lawmakers, would have halted pay for about 2,100 state employees who were caught in the crosshairs.

Former state lawmakers, including two previous House speakers — Joe Straus, a Republican, and Pete Laney, a Democrat — as well as former Republican Lt. Gov. Bill Ratliff, weighed in on the dispute, filing a brief with the state’s Supreme Court calling the governor’s action unconstitutional and “an attempt to intimidate members of the Legislature and circumvent democracy.”

In response to the lawsuit, state Attorney General Ken Paxton argued that Abbott used his constitutional authority to veto the Legislature’s budget and that the courts didn’t have a role to play in disputes between political branches.

The Supreme Court agreed, saying it was not a matter for the judicial branch to decide. In the end, lawmakers passed a bill that restored the funding that Abbott had vetoed. Staffers didn’t lose a paycheck.

“It was a terrible thing to do, to threaten those people who do all that work, and threaten not to pay them while the governor and the members of Legislature were still going to get paid. How cynical is that?” said Kel Seliger, an outgoing Republican state senator from Amarillo who has split with his party’s leadership on various issues as it has shifted further right.

Weak Governor?

Abbott has taken advantage of emergency orders and disaster declarations like no other Texas governor in recent history. (Miguel Gutierrez/Pool via The Texas Tribune)

Research groups consistently rank Texas as a “weak governor” state because its constitution limits what the governor can do without legislative authorization. Executive officers such as the lieutenant governor and the attorney general are also independently elected, not appointed by the governor, further diluting the power of the office.

“The way the constitution is designed, unless it’s specified in the constitution, you don’t have that power. Period. And that’s why I think you can look at a whole variety of his actions as violating the constitution. He just doesn’t have it. He asserts it, and he gets away with it,” said James Harrington, a former constitutional law professor at the University of Texas at Austin who founded the Texas Civil Rights Project. Harrington initially filed a brief defending Abbott’s early use of pandemic-related executive orders limiting crowd sizes and the types of businesses allowed to remain open, but he said the governor’s later orders fell outside of the bounds of the law.

The weak-governor structure was created by the framers in 1876 who believed that Edmund Jackson Davis, a former Union general who led Texas following the Civil War, abused his powers as governor. A Republican who supported the rights of freed people, Davis disbanded the Texas Rangers and created a state police force that he used, at times, to enforce martial law to protect the civil rights of African Americans. He also expanded the size of government, appointing more than 9,000 state, county and local officials, which left a very small number of elected positions.

Currently, the governor’s office accrues power largely through vetoes and appointments. While the Legislature can override a veto, governors often issue them after the legislative session ends. The governor is the only one who can call lawmakers back.

During a typical four-year term, a governor makes about 1,500 appointments to the courts and hundreds of agencies and boards covering everything from economic development to criminal justice. The longer governors serve, the more loyalty they can build through appointments.

Abbott’s predecessor, Republican former Gov. Rick Perry, set the stage for building power through appointments. Over 14 years, Perry, a former state representative who became Texas’ longest-serving governor, positioned former employees, donors and supporters in every state agency.

Perry could not be reached for comment through a representative.

In contrast to his predecessor, Abbott, a jurist with no legislative experience, found other avenues to interpret and stretch the law. Abbott has benefited from appointments and vetoes, but he has also taken advantage of emergency orders and disaster declarations like no other governor in recent state history.

Disaster declarations are generally used for natural calamities such as hurricanes and droughts and are useful legally for governors who could face legislative gridlock or state agency inaction if going through normal channels. Abbott’s use of such tools has grown even as his party holds a majority in the state Legislature.

In his eight years as governor, Abbott has issued at least 42 executive orders. Perry signed 80 orders during his 14-year tenure, though they rarely brought controversy. He once required human papillomavirus vaccines for girls but backtracked after pushback from the Legislature.

“Rick Perry experimented with and developed a number of tools that former governors had,” said Cal Jillson, professor of political science at Southern Methodist University. “That he sharpened appointments would be one of those, executive orders would be another of those, the use of the bully pulpit would be a third. And Abbott went to school on that.”

Aiding Abbott in his push to strengthen executive power have been what is essentially a Republican-controlled state with no term limits for officeholders, a Legislature that meets every two years and innate fundraising skills that have helped him draw about $282 million (adjusted for inflation) in campaign contributions in the decade since he first ran for governor. He has used some of that haul to oppose candidates for office, including those in his own party, who have crossed him.

“It’s surprising that even the legislative leadership in the Republican Party has acquiesced to the degree they have because the powers that Abbott has accrued have to come from somewhere else, and it’s coming from them,” said Glenn Smith, an Austin-based Democratic strategist.

Last year, state lawmakers filed 13 bills aiming to curb the governor’s powers under the state’s disaster act, including Republican proposals that would require the Legislature’s permission to extend executive orders, which the governor now does every 30 days.

For instance, in 2019 Abbott issued an executive order to extend the state’s plumbing board after it was on track to shut down because of legislative inaction. He was able to do so by using his power under a disaster declaration that he first issued when Hurricane Harvey pummeled the state in 2017. He continued to renew the disaster declaration for nearly four years.

Abbott similarly continues to renew his 2020 COVID-19 disaster declaration even as he downplays the severity of the pandemic.

During the last legislative session, the only measure that passed — and was signed by Abbott — is a bill that removed the governor’s authority to restrict the sale, dispensing or transportation of firearms during a declared disaster.

“He governs like a judge, and that’s where the autocratic side comes out,” said state Rep. Lyle Larson, a Republican lawmaker whom Abbott tried to oust in 2018 after he pushed a measure that would make the governor wait a year before appointing to boards anyone who donated more than $2,500 to his campaign. The San Antonio lawmaker, who defeated Abbott’s preferred candidate at the time, has decided not to seek reelection.

Methodically Creating a Powerhouse

Over the years, Abbott continued to insert himself in decision-making that had previously not been in the purview of the governor’s office. (Laura Skelding for The Texas Tribune)

Abbott’s tenacity at building the power of the office can be traced back to his recovery after an oak tree fell on him while he was jogging at age 26, paralyzing him from the waist down, said Austin-based Republican consultant and lobbyist Bill Miller.

“He’s had setbacks in life that he’s overcome with tremendous success, and you don’t achieve that unless you’re persevering and a tough individual, and he’s both in the extreme,” Miller said.

At 32, Abbott was elected as a Harris County district judge, then was plucked from the bench by former Gov. George W. Bush, who elevated him to fill a vacancy on the Texas Supreme Court, a recommendation of Bush’s political adviser Karl Rove. Abbott ran for state attorney general and served 12 years before his election as governor in 2014.

He began testing the limits of his executive power quickly after his election.

In June 2015, six months into his first term, Abbott analyzed the state budget and vetoed more than $200 million in legislative directives that provided specific instructions to agencies on how certain funds should be used.

The move eliminated funding for various projects, including water conservation education grants and a planned museum in Corpus Christi. Abbott called some of the projects “unnecessary state debt and spending.”

The head of the Legislative Budget Board at the time argued that the governor had overstepped his authority because while he could veto line-item appropriations, he could not override the Legislature’s instructions to state agencies.

“We were just kind of flabbergasted. In all of your 150-plus years of precedent in state government, this had never been seen before,” said a longtime capitol attorney who asked to not be identified for fear of retribution. “It was kind of shocking to me that he was an attorney, was the attorney general, was on the (Texas) Supreme Court and, in my opinion, has such little value for the Texas Constitution and disrespect for the separation of powers. Such disrespect for a coequal branch of government.”

Over the years, Abbott continued to insert himself in decision-making that had previously not been in the purview of the governor’s office. His actions drew little public scrutiny because they involved procedural matters.

For instance, state agencies must typically seek public comment before publishing final regulations in areas such as the environment and education. But Abbott wanted to review proposed regulations before their public release. In 2018, his office directed agencies to first run them past the governor.

Citing a 1981 executive order by Ronald Reagan, Abbott’s chief of staff wrote that presidential review of proposed regulations helped to “coordinate policy among agencies, eliminate redundancies and inefficiencies, and provide a dispassionate ‘second opinion’ on the costs and benefits of proposed agency actions.”

But insisting on a review of agency proposals could give his office influence over matters that should not be left to the executive branch, critics said. For example, Abbott’s office could suggest softening regulations for emissions, which could be favorable to the oil and gas industry. While agency leaders do not have to comply, the boards and commissions overseeing them are often appointed by the governor.

Byron Cook, a Republican former state lawmaker from Corsicana, criticized Abbott’s request at the time and continues to believe that the governor overstepped his authority. “I think it’s a dangerous precedent, and I don’t think it’s in the best interest of the people in the state because it circumvents the legislative process,” Cook said in a recent interview.

At the time, Abbott’s office defended his line-item veto and his request to review agency rules as measures that were within his constitutional authority.

It’s unclear how much influence Abbott has wielded over that process in the past six years because the governor’s office is fighting the release of records to ProPublica and the Tribune that would show its interactions with state agencies.

While some lawmakers like Cook openly resisted Abbott’s push to grow the powers of the executive branch, Perry and Abbott have faced limited pushback because few have wanted to cross them, several former and current lawmakers told ProPublica and the Tribune.

“Somebody’s got to push back, but pushing back very often brings retribution, and so people are very careful,” said Seliger, who filed a bill in one of last year’s special legislative sessions aimed at removing the governor’s line-item veto power.

The measure was mostly symbolic because only Abbott has the power to decide what topics will be addressed in a special session — and Seliger’s bill was not among them.

Pushing an Agenda

Abbott declared a public emergency in March 2020 and issued executive orders to deal with pandemic safety. Legal challenges continued to mount as he asserted his disaster authority to control local government responses to the crisis and to impose his policy priorities. (Miguel Gutierrez Jr. for The Texas Tribune)

As the pandemic hit Texas, Abbott reacted like most other governors struggling with an unprecedented public health crisis. He declared a public emergency on March 13, 2020, and issued a string of executive orders to deal with pandemic safety.

Abbott initially faced at least 10 lawsuits from business owners and conservative activists insisting his restrictions on businesses and crowd control violated the constitution. Charles “Rocky” Rhodes, a professor of state and federal constitutional law at South Texas College of Law Houston, said many of Abbott’s early actions were allowed under the disaster act’s sweeping provisions.

Legal challenges mounted as Abbott, in response to criticism from conservative groups and lawmakers, shifted course and asserted his disaster authority to control local government responses to the crisis and to impose his policy priorities. Rhodes pointed to an order forbidding employers from imposing vaccine mandates on employees. He said Abbott pushed “beyond the scope of his authority” and against federal vaccine mandates.

A string of legal actions filed by local governments and school districts in state and federal courts alleged that Abbott has tried to usurp the power of local entities, including the courts, by issuing orders that prohibited them from taking their own measures to deal with rising infection rates. Abbott’s legal team has defended the orders as within the scope of his expansive powers under the disaster act.

Two Texas parents who signed on as intervenors in a lawsuit against Abbott brought by La Joya and other independent school districts — Shanetra Miles-Fowler, a mother of three in Manor, and Elias Ponvert, a father of four in Pflugerville — told ProPublica and the Tribune that they saw Abbott’s order as political.

A lower-court order delayed implementation of Abbott’s prohibition against local governments imposing mask and vaccination mandates. The timing allowed parents to get through “the most dangerous months of the COVID pandemic,” said attorney Mike Siegel, who represented parents in the La Joya lawsuit. “Our fight likely saved the lives of students and staff who were facing a terrible choice of missing school or risking infection.” The masking cases are still pending at the Texas Supreme Court.

Abbott also used his disaster emergency powers to block judges from releasing prisoners who had not posted pretrial bail, prompting a lawsuit from 16 county judges and legal groups who argued that he had exceeded his constitutional powers. Abbott’s order also restricted the release of some charged with misdemeanors on time served with good behavior. His order said the disaster act gave him broad authority to control entrance and exit into facilities and the “occupancy of premises.”

In a court filing, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers argued that Abbott’s executive order “violates the separation of powers, interferes with judicial independence, violates equal protection and due process of law, and constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.”

Abbott had been trying unsuccessfully since 2017 to make it harder for those accused of violent crimes, or any prior offenses involving threats of violence, to get out of jail without posting cash bonds. When COVID-19 struck, some counties began releasing prisoners to try to reduce jail populations. In Harris County, where Abbott had once served as a judge, the jail was overflowing, and a federal judge in Houston had ordered the county to begin releasing about 250 prisoners per day.

Elizabeth Rossi, an attorney with the Civil Rights Corps, a nonprofit group that has represented plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Harris County challenging its felony bail practices, said Abbott’s “heartless and cruel” order impacted tens of thousands of prisoners held in Texas jails. “The human effects were really visceral,” she said.

One inmate, Preston Chaney, 64, died of COVID-19 while awaiting trial in the Harris County jail for three months, unable to post a small bond on charges that he stole lawn equipment and frozen meat.

Maurice Wilson, a 38-year-old with diabetes who served time in Harris County on drug possession charges, said he was terrified by the spread of COVID-19 as he sat in jail on a $10,000 bond. He was one of the many prohibited from release under Abbott’s order because of a prior misdemeanor assault conviction.

The Texas Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the Harris County judges and other plaintiffs lacked standing because they had not suffered injury and overturned a temporary restraining order that had halted enforcement of Abbott’s order. Abbott finally got a bail-reform package through the Legislature and signed it into law in September 2021. It formalized some aspects of his executive order.

What Abbott has tried to do is “make himself the chief prosecutor, the chief lawmaker and, with bail, the chief judge,” said Jessica Brand, a lawyer who represented a law enforcement group in the case. “We do not live in a kingdom, however, and such behavior is totally inconsistent with the framework of government this state has adopted.”

Power Concentration

Abbott, flanked by top Republicans at a press conference in June 2021, detailed a plan for Texas to build its own border wall. (Sophie Park for The Texas Tribune)

Abbott’s power consolidation came to a head last year as his administration embarked on the state’s most ambitious and costly border initiative to date.

On May 31, 2021, about four months into President Joe Biden’s term, Abbott became the first governor in recent history to issue a border disaster declaration, which he said was needed because the federal government’s inaction was causing a “dramatic increase” in the number of people crossing into the state. The disaster declaration gave the governor more flexibility to shift funds, increase penalties for some state trespassing charges against immigrants and suspend rules, including those governing state contracts.

Abbott had already succeeded in securing more than $1 billion for border security during the Legislative session for the deployment of Department of Public Safety troopers and National Guard members under Operation Lone Star.

The governor launched the initiative in March of that year, contending it was necessary to stem the smuggling of drugs and people into the country through Texas. Under the disaster declaration that Abbott used to bolster his authority over the operation, immigrants charged with criminal trespassing for crossing the border through private property could be punished by up to a year in jail. He could also use state funds to build barriers.

In August, Abbott used his power to reconvene lawmakers for a special session where they again increased funding for border security by an additional $2 billion. Over the next few months, the governor continued to deploy National Guard members to the border with no end date for their mission.

As costs ballooned, Abbott chose not to bring lawmakers back for another special session. Instead, with help from a handful of Republican lawmakers and some state agency leaders, Abbott dipped at least twice into other agencies’ coffers to shift another nearly $1 billion to support an operation that has been plagued with problems since it began.

An investigation by ProPublica, the Tribune and The Marshall Project found that the state’s reported success included arrests unrelated to the border or immigration and counted drug seizures from across Texas, including those made by troopers who were not directly assigned to Operation Lone Star. Reporting by the Tribune and Army Times also exposed poor working conditions, pay delays and suicides among National Guard members deployed as part of the operation. And the Department of Justice is investigating potential civil rights violations related to Abbott’s directive to prosecute immigrants for trespassing. A spokesperson for the DOJ said she didn’t have any information to provide on the investigation.

Abbott’s office has previously said the arrests and prosecutions “are fully constitutional.”

Still, Abbott continues to expand the scope of the operation with no end in sight.

In April, the governor used the powers he had tested and amassed to announce his latest step under the umbrella of Operation Lone Star: Texas would transport migrants arriving at the border to Washington, D.C., later expanding the initiative to New York and Chicago. Once again, he used the powers of the disaster declaration and tasked the state’s emergency agency with carrying out the measure.

Since then, more than 12,500 people have been bused at a cost of about $14 million, according to state records. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, also Republicans, followed Abbott’s lead with their own initiatives. A Texas county sheriff is conducting a criminal investigation into the treatment of immigrants, and the D.C. attorney general is examining immigrant busing into Washington by Texas and Arizona. All of the governors have defended their actions as legal.

“I can’t remember that the governor has ever used state powers for this type of militarized border enforcement,” said Barbara Hines, founder and former director of the University of Texas Law School Immigration Clinic.

“What he’s doing under the guise of emergencies, disasters, invasions, whatever misnomer Abbott wants to give it to enforce federal immigration law,” she added, “I think that’s illegal.”

Lexi Churchill contributed research.

by Kathleen McGrory and Neil Bedi

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Theresa Opalinski was warming up her border collies for their agility training one day in 2011 when she couldn’t catch her breath. Her husband, Michael, suggested they go to urgent care, and a few days later, a specialist drained more than a liter of fluid from her left lung. After ping-ponging between local hospitals, she underwent an exploratory surgery, which confirmed she had mesothelioma.

The diagnosis puzzled them. Asbestos exposure is the only known cause of the vicious cancer, which kills most people who get it within a few years. Because cases often involve occupational exposure in industries like shipbuilding and construction — and because it can take decades for the cancer to develop — mesothelioma is sometimes thought of as an old man’s disease. Theresa was just 53 and held a master’s in public administration. She had been a congressional aide, she’d managed a nonprofit, she’d worked in marketing. Never with asbestos.

Far from her mind was the fact that she and Michael had grown up a mile away from a plant in North Tonawanda, New York, that used a type of asbestos that is blue in color to make industrial plastics. The plant’s owner, OxyChem, closed and demolished the facility in the 1990s. But the company has since faced at least 10 lawsuits alleging that the plant released so much asbestos into the environment that residents of the surrounding neighborhood developed mesothelioma and other ailments associated with the toxic substance.

The blue dust settled onto windowsills and on a Little League field and atop fresh snow, lawsuits allege and residents recall. It got stuck in workers’ hair and on their clothes and wound up on the seats of their cars and inside their homes. One woman, married to a plant employee, died after years of washing her husband’s asbestos-soiled uniform, her family said.

OxyChem declined to comment on the lawsuits involving its plastics plant. Most of the cases have been settled out of court, records show. Two are pending. In some of the cases, OxyChem said it was not responsible for the plaintiff’s injuries. In at least one, the company said the lawsuit had not been filed by the legally required deadline.

The latest suits, filed earlier this year, come as the company is forced to reckon with its other uses of asbestos — and contemplate a future without it. Unlike some 60 other countries, the United States hasn’t banned asbestos. OxyChem is one of two chemical companies that import and use the potent carcinogen to make chlorine. For decades, it has maintained that the workers in its chlorine plants face no threat of exposure; in recent months, it has used that argument to fight a proposed federal ban on the substance.

But last week, ProPublica reported that asbestos accumulated in a number of areas inside and around OxyChem’s chlorine plant in Niagara Falls, New York, and that employees worked amid the dust until the plant closed late last year. They often went without protective suits or masks in the building where asbestos was removed from equipment, they said. “We were constantly swimming in this stuff,” one former employee said.

Though the two OxyChem plants that have come under scrutiny used different types of asbestos for different industrial processes, there are striking similarities between the facilities, which are 10 miles apart. Experts say both situations speak to OxyChem’s poor track record of containing asbestos in its plants, and they both illustrate the carcinogen’s long tail and broad impact.

Asbestos is a naturally occurring mineral known for its strength, durability and ability to resist heat. It was once used widely in industrial operations and construction. But its tiny fibers can also do serious damage. Once inhaled, they can settle into the lungs, abdomen and other parts of the body, where they can cause cancer and other deadly conditions.

The North Tonawanda plant was built in the 1920s, state Department of Environmental Conservation records show. It was acquired by Hooker Chemical in the 1950s, then by Occidental Petroleum, OxyChem’s parent company, in the 1960s.

The asbestos used at the plant sickened workers, some of whom went on to sue the asbestos companies that sold the material, court records and news clips show. The asbestos use also had a profound effect on the surrounding community, the lawsuits against OxyChem allege. When the plant got too dusty, the workers used air hoses to remove fibers from the facility, according to the lawsuits.

One of the plaintiffs, James Urban, played baseball on a Little League field that was regularly contaminated by dust from the plant in the late 1960s, according to his lawsuit. Nearly 30 years later, doctors found fluid between the layers of tissue lining his lungs, a condition known as a pleural effusion that can be caused by asbestos exposure. Urban declined to comment when reached at home by ProPublica.

Michael Opalinski used to clean a fine blue dust off the windowsills of his home when he was growing up in North Tonawanda in the 1960s and ’70s, he told ProPublica. He sometimes saw tiny blue feathers atop a fresh snowfall. He recalled at least two explosions at the plant that expelled clouds of dust into the air.

Paul Richards worked at the plant from 1962 to 1980, he said. One of his jobs was to empty 100-pound bags of asbestos and stomp the material through a grate in the floor. After a shift, asbestos would cover his face, he said. It would slip underneath his collar and inside his pockets.

Jean Richards (Courtesy of Amy Shuler)

At home, Paul’s wife, Jean, would take his dirty uniforms into the basement, shake them out and launder them. Then one day, more than a decade after Paul had left the plant, Jean was diagnosed with lung cancer. “That’s how she got sick,” he said recently. “Just from washing my clothes.” Jean battled the cancer for years, her daughter, Amy Shuler, said, undergoing chemotherapy and other treatments, often feeling too sick to eat or drink.

When Jean died in 2005 at age 62, Paul lost his high school sweetheart and longtime hunting and fishing partner. Amy lost the mother who doted on her and took her shopping and then out to lunch each Saturday. “I lost my best friend, all because my dad had worked with asbestos and mom would breathe in the dust when she would shake his clothing out before putting it in the wash,” Amy said. “No one told us of the dangers.”

For Theresa Opalinski, treatment was grueling: a surgery to remove part of the lining of her lungs, four rounds of chemotherapy. She lost weight, grew weak. The disease, Michael said, was like “putting on a cement overcoat.” “It forms a hard shell [around the lungs], to the point where you can’t breathe.” Later, Theresa participated in phase 1 trials of experimental therapies at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. She pushed through them not because she expected to beat the cancer herself, but so that one day, someone else might, her husband said. She died in 2016 at age 58.

Michael Opalinksi (Rich-Joseph Facun, special to ProPublica)

Michael, who had seen a local law firm’s billboard seeking North Tonawanda residents diagnosed with mesothelioma, didn’t call until after Theresa died, he said. He told ProPublica he couldn’t say much about the lawsuit he filed against OxyChem in 2017. Records show it was settled out of court.

The Opalinskis had plans to retire early, travel the world, take the dogs to national agility competitions. Everything is different now. In 2020, he left the city where he and Theresa grew up and moved to the countryside. His new house has a big yard for the dogs. He wishes Theresa had lived to see it. He thinks about her when he’s on the back porch, listening to the wind blow through the leaves. She loved being outside, especially in the summer. “It’s tough that you can’t share it with her,” he said.

He still struggles to make sense of it: the diagnosis, her loss, how it could have happened in the first place. Even in the 1960s when Theresa was likely exposed, asbestos was a known carcinogen. “If what you are producing is very harmful and you’ve known it since the 1950s,” he asked, “why would you do it?”

Do You Work With These Hazardous Chemicals? Tell Us About It.

by Jake Pearson

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In the spring of 2020, George Floyd’s caught-on-camera murder by a Minneapolis police officer prompted massive social justice protests across the country. Millions of people marched for law enforcement reform — even Sen. Mitt Romney, the Utah Republican and onetime GOP presidential nominee. Activists pressed policymakers to “defund the police.”

Amid the pressure, elected officials pledged sweeping changes to how officers operate and how they’re overseen.

But two and a half years later, with violent crime increasing across the country, that momentum has seemingly stalled. In Washington, support for the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which would have created a national police misconduct registry among other measures, withered while lawmakers passed bipartisan legislation to invest in the police. A recent House bill would award local police departments $60 million annually for five years, with few of the kinds of accountability measures for cops that progressives had advocated.

Meanwhile, in New York City, home to the nation’s largest police force, Mayor Eric Adams pledged to recruit officers with the right temperament for the job, weeding out overly aggressive cops while taking on violent criminals. He has since staked his mayoralty on combating crime, empowering the police to pursue a range of functions, from sweeping homeless encampments to relaunching a controversial plainclothes anti-crime unit, which had only recently been disbanded over criticisms that it disproportionately targeted Black and Latino New Yorkers and was involved in many police killings.

To make sense of these shifts, I called Elizabeth Glazer, one of New York’s leading experts on criminal justice. For more than two decades, she’s been working in law enforcement and policymaking circles, first as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, where she leveraged federal racketeering laws to put shooters and their enablers behind bars, then as a government official, including the deputy secretary for public safety under New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Most recently, she served as the director of the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice during the Bill de Blasio administration.

This year, Glazer founded Vital City, a nonprofit dedicated to offering practical solutions to public safety problems. The endeavor is something of a call for a rebirth of civic mindedness, drawing on research that shows how communities can both be safer and feel safer if the whole of city government — not just the police — acts, including cleaning up vacant lots, turning on street lights and employing young people during the summer.

We discussed police reform post-Floyd, the role of the cops and the shifting narrative around public safety amid rising levels of crime. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

From your perch, what does the legislative inaction around the police reform agenda say about the ground-level movement that was spurred by Floyd’s murder? What happened?

Two things happened: One, there’s a kind of built-in conservatism about the importance of maintaining the police. As a country, we are afraid to change policing because we are so firmly attached to the view that it is only the police that can keep us safe.

The second thing is, the movement coincided with rocketing rates of increase in shootings. Suddenly, scary violence really erupted in ways we hadn’t seen in many years. And our reflex when crime happens is, “Call the police,” not, “Make sure you have enough summer youth employment.” That bolstered the reluctance to make changes.

But I think the other thing is that “defund the police” was really a lost opportunity. It sort of had this toxic messaging. So it was viewed as an existential threat to police departments. But in fact, it might’ve been an enormous opportunity if police departments didn’t view it that way. It could have been a chance for them to begin to reshape their roles in a way that focused on their core strengths and to begin to give back to other professionals the responsibility to deal with the homeless, those with mental illness and all these other areas where their authority had kind of expanded into.

I’ve always thought that some of the reformers and even the police union would have some common ground, especially when it comes to defining what the job of the cop is.

In fact, cops have often said: “We don’t want to be social workers. That’s not our job.” So it does seem like there’s an opportunity. But we don’t start from that point because I think there’s a sense from the profession that they are under attack and underappreciated. And if you say, ‘Do less,’ it feels like yet a further attack, as opposed to, ‘How can we support you to do what you do best?’ What’s happened is that the police department, as it accretes more and more functions, occupies a very prominent role among the city agencies. But actually we’re a civilian government, we have civilian heads whose job, really, is to ensure the police are part of an integrated civic approach, ensuring that communities thrive.

You’ve been making this argument for years. Why should policymakers listen today?

The police are great at solving crimes. And that is something that only they can do, and, really, that is what they should do.

But the line between who is police and who is government more broadly has become more and more blurred, so what you see is police really taking over all kinds of civic services. In New York City, the Police Department is funded to the tune of millions of dollars to construct community centers and do community programming. They have an employment program. They do graffiti removal. They do mentoring. They have a beekeeper. All of these are civic services. Why are the police doing it?

We seem to have gotten into this strange Rube Goldberg situation, in which the police, as a stated matter, are saying, “We’re doing it in order to build trust with the community.” But it’s really a backward way of doing it and ultimately, I think, ineffective because it is hard to make friends when it is an unequal relationship. It is hard to say: “Play basketball with me. By the way, I have a gun.” Or, “By the way, on another day I may be arresting you and your friends.” It’s just the way things are constructed. But the police can build respect by solving cases. And I think neighborhoods rely upon them, and have respect for them, when they do that job they can do so excellently.

In 1999, you wrote a piece for National Affairs that argued law enforcement needed to take a broader approach to crime reduction instead of focusing on arrests and one-off prosecutions. Today, 23 years later, do you feel as though the more things have changed, the more they are the same?

I think the frustration I was expressing then was that there didn’t seem to be a connection between going back in and arresting people over and over again and saying, “OK, well now a bunch of people who have been killing other people in the neighborhood have been arrested. Before another group steps in to fill the void, is there something else that can be done?” Who has that panoramic view?

A civilian needs to be the one who has that panoramic view, that civilian being the mayor, who oversees all the different services that are produced for the benefit of a city’s citizens and weaves them together toward one goal, which is supporting the well-being of New Yorkers. The police are an important part of that, but they are not the most important part, and they are not the point of the spear. They are a civic service that needs to be coordinated and synchronized with all these other efforts, focused on neighborhoods in need and working alongside their colleagues in housing, parks, employment and all the other things that keep us safe.

At the same time, when you think about this service of last resort, meaning the criminal justice system, it’s much more than just the city. Somebody also needs to coordinate that, and it needs to be someone who has enough gravitas and connections to have players who do not report to them be willing to think together and act together for a common goal.

Is there any recognition in the Adams administration that maybe the police don’t need to be as omnipresent in every aspect of city life? Or is that point lost on them?

I mean, certainly the mayor’s campaign rhetoric was very much about dealing with upstream issues. He famously quoted Bishop [Desmond] Tutu about making sure people don’t “fall into the river.” And he’s been a big proponent on summer youth employment. The difficulty is, it’s unclear what the plan is and how it all fits together. And then, even to the extent that one thing or another is announced, how are those things doing? And do they connect to anything else that’s being done?

How do you advise policymakers who are navigating the new terrain here when politicians weaponize crime stats for political ends? Yes, crime is up, but in truth there are some neighborhoods that are feeling it disproportionately.

Crime is now and always has been highly, highly concentrated, particularly violent crime. If you look at the neighborhoods that suffered the most number of shootings today and 30 years ago, they’re almost identical. Many fewer shootings now, but still, they lead the city. And right across the board, every social distress is borne in these neighborhoods, including poor health outcomes and high unemployment. So we’re seeing the durability of place.

There are community groups who have the slogan, “Nothing stops a bullet like a job.” And in fact they’re exactly right. Our problem is it doesn’t feel like immediate action. One of the great attractions, I think, for elected officials and for residents of sending in the police is it feels like something is being done. We’ve seen over and over again; that can’t be the only answer. And we have such incredibly good evidence about what else stops crime right now, not in 20 years, but right now. Turning on the lights reduces crime. Summer youth employment reduces crime.

by Karim Doumar and Cynthia Gordy Giwa

Sign up for ProPublica’s User’s Guide to Democracy, a series of personalized emails that help you understand the upcoming election, from who’s on your ballot to how to cast your vote.

Election coverage often focuses on competition between rival candidates while downplaying policies and platforms. But knowing how to decipher these “horse race” stories can help you understand what’s at stake for you and can inform your political participation.

Think about it this way: The campaigns themselves are constantly watching certain signals — polls, fundraising totals, public opinion — to understand what’s going on in their races. They adjust their tactics accordingly. You have the power to adjust your actions, too. Here are a few questions to ask.

How Competitive Is Your Congressional District?

Today, we’re going to focus on your district’s candidates for the House of Representatives using a tool called the Cook Political Report.

The Cook Political Report is a nonpartisan newsletter that analyzes federal campaigns and elections to weigh the likelihood that your current representative will be able to hang onto their seat compared to the chances of a challenger defeating them. Its authors watch polls, track fundraising and outside spending, and talk to the campaigns and candidates. Then they assign a rating to the competitiveness of each race:

• Solid (Republican or Democrat): These races are not considered competitive and are not likely to become so.
• Likely (Republican or Democrat): These races are not considered competitive at this point, but they could tighten up.
• Lean (Republican or Democrat): These are considered competitive races, but one party has an advantage.
• Toss-Up: These are the most competitive; either party has a good chance of winning.

These ratings update often, though, based on what’s happening on the campaign trail. Want to know if the outlook in your district changes? You can check the Cook Political Report site.

Where Does the Campaign Money Come From?

Political organizations and nonprofit committees have spent hundreds of millions of dollars influencing elections, so candidates’ campaign finances are another illuminating metric. Where did they get all that money, and how are they spending it?

One number that can help you determine the strength of a campaign is the percentage of funds raised from PACs, or political action committees. A PAC is a collection of individuals who have pooled their money to donate to candidates. The best-funded PACs are corporations and interest groups — the NRA, Planned Parenthood and labor unions all have PACs — but they can also be funded by civically engaged folks who aren’t political operators.

A reliance on PACs, versus individual donors, can tell you something about how much the candidate is benefitting from institutional support versus grassroots support. A higher percentage of funds from PACs means a candidate’s donor money comes mostly in fairly large checks, as opposed to donations from individuals. A higher percentage of individual donations, on the other hand, is a sign of grassroots enthusiasm about the campaign.

Federal candidates have to file data about their fundraising and spending with the Federal Election Commission, the agency that enforces campaign finance law, on a regular schedule. This makes it easier to peek inside this universe.

Most campaigns file quarterly reports on April 15, July 15, Oct. 15 and Jan. 15. So the numbers here will give you a snapshot of money raised and spent within a three-month window. To start, we’ll look specifically at campaign fundraising.

Campaigns need money to get their messages out; it’s expensive to buy advertising and organize rallies, town halls and other campaign activities. Most political fundraising amounts sound like a LOT of money to me — and probably to you, too. For example, according to OpenSecrets, hundreds of millions of dollars have been poured into Pennsylvania’s senate race so far. So how do you know what those numbers mean?

That’s where the rankings come in handy: More competitive races typically attract more money. You can also look at the money gap between two candidates. If a candidate is at the lower end of the fundraising scale, particularly against a well-funded competitor, that usually indicates their chances are not great. But there are exceptions. In 2018, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beat 10-term incumbent Rep. Joe Crowley in her primary despite a huge gap in fundraising. In 2020, Rep. Cori Bush defeated the 20-year (and highly funded) incumbent congressman William Lacy Clay in a major upset. So if your candidate of choice is outspent, don’t count them out.

Check on Your Local Races

There’s only so much that ProPublica can track with our data on federal candidates, but the League of Women Voters has a trove of information about candidates all the way down your ballot. The league is nonpartisan and works to arm citizens with the information they need to confidently vote.

For its VOTE411.org project, the league reached out to every candidate running for local and state office and asked each one a set of identical questions, like:

• What experiences qualify you to represent the citizens living in your district?
• What would be your top three priorities if elected?
• How will you work to increase job opportunities for your constituents?

Usually, the majority of candidates actually answer these questions in their own words because the league is such a well-known and respected resource for voters. This year, though, more and more Republican candidates are refusing to participate in league activities because they claim it is biased against Republicans, as our reporter Megan O’Matz reported early this election season. That said, the Vote411 voter guides can still help you learn about candidates and their positions, as well as any ballot measures in your area.

Another resource, Ballotpedia, also has a tool to help you understand what you’re voting for, especially on the local level. Put in your address and get information on every candidate and ballot initiative you’ll have a say on at the polls.

by Alison Burdo, The Press of Atlantic City

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

A New Jersey judge this week threw out an eviction complaint filed against an Atlantic City woman who told journalists that her landlord had failed to address unsafe conditions in the home. The property owner, Michael Scanlon Sr., began eviction proceedings against the woman shortly after a reporter for The Press of Atlantic City and ProPublica visited the property in August.

The news organizations were looking at Scanlon’s properties as part of an investigation into a New Jersey agency that paid him more than $1.1 million for three Atlantic City rooming houses, forcing out the residents who lived in them.

Tenants said they had just six weeks’ notice to vacate the rooming houses, including 108 Albion Place. With few affordable options, two residents at that address took the landlord up on an offer to relocate to another of his rental properties, a Westside rowhome, in June 2021.

But the women, Nada Gilbert and Nikki Knight, said conditions in their new home were bad: A persistent leak caused Knight’s bedroom ceiling to bulge overhead and damaged her mattress, and a sagging porch roof was being held up by makeshift pillars. The women, in response, began withholding rent earlier this year, leading the landlord to try to remove them.

Atlantic City Superior Court Judge James P. McGee on Wednesday dismissed the case against Gilbert, citing the landlord’s failure to appear at the hearing that morning.

The women had ended up living there after being forced to move from Albion Place as part of the Vacant Rooming House Conversion Project, which the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority launched in winter 2020. Officials said the initiative would “protect Atlantic City residents by providing improved housing conditions and revitalize numerous properties.” Its leaders variously said the project, which involved CRDA acquiring empty rooming houses, would reduce blight, improve the city’s housing stock and expand affordable housing.

But the news organizations’ investigation found CRDA has fallen well short of those goals while displacing dozens of low-income residents in the process, including Gilbert and Knight.

Scanlon Sr. did not respond to requests for comment about his legal conflict with the two women, but his son Michael Scanlon Jr. said a “miscommunication” preceded the eviction filing. “It was more my fault,” Scanlon Jr. said. He had previously told the news organizations that the tenants had had more than six weeks’ notice to move but did not provide documentation to support that.

He blames the leak on the neighboring vacant home but said he and his father have come to an agreement with the tenants. The women’s outstanding rent balance will be forgiven, and the remaining repairs and additional cosmetic updates will be made, according to Scanlon Jr., who also said he expects to take full ownership of the rental property in the next few weeks. Gilbert confirmed the details but said she has not yet signed any documents outlining the terms.

Meanwhile, the three properties that Scanlon Sr. sold to CRDA are boarded up with no signs of construction. After owning the three properties, which were all within about a block of the beach, for roughly a year, CRDA last month sold them for $150,000 to a hotel developer, who now has until September 2023 to start building.

Asked whether CRDA discussed relocation efforts with landlords in the program, agency leaders said no. “That was solely on the owners to deal with that,” said Lance Landgraf, CRDA director of planning and development, in an interview last month. “Our direction to them was: ‘We will not buy this with anybody in it.’ That’s as far as I went with it.”

CRDA was set up almost 40 years ago to use casino tax revenue to address “the pressing social and economic needs” of Atlantic City residents. But Landgraf said the agency has limited funds to service a variety of goals, which, under the law, also include redevelopment. And he stood by the rooming house project as a critical component of economic development. “We needed to get those properties cleaned up and changed into a better, more viable use in the community that would promote development, not restrict it,” Landgraf said.

However, critics say the state agency had other options besides closing the rooming house down and question how CRDA is using its power. In response to the investigation’s findings, one of the authors of the original legislation establishing CRDA, David Sciarra, said the rooming house outcomes “should be a wake-up call to legislators in Trenton.”

“They need to do some serious oversight to make sure that CRDA is operating in the best interests of all residents of Atlantic City and not just an investment arm of the casino industry,” he said.

by Megan O’Matz, photography by David Kasnic for ProPublica

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Note: In September, ProPublica’s Megan O’Matz joined up with photographer David Kasnic for three days, attending two Republican events and an activist’s court hearing to report for a story on how Wisconsin’s political environment is being transformed. Kasnic has been photographing Wisconsin’s political scene for years while O’Matz moved to the state in 2021.

Our excursion together began at a Constitution Day celebration at a community park in New Berlin, Wisconsin. The next day we were in Waukesha for a “meat-and-greet” event of food and politics at the county’s Republican Party headquarters.

Kasnic then went to Racine for a court hearing on a criminal case involving Harry Wait, a conservative activist. Wait has admitted publicly to having absentee ballots in the names of two elected officials sent to his home; he said the move was intended to demonstrate the vulnerability of a state government website. He was in court for a preliminary hearing on fraud charges. Wait, defending his actions, has said the state was operating a “rogue system.” A judge has entered a not guilty plea on Wait’s behalf, court records show.

I talked to Kasnic about how we approached this assignment; our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Day One: Constitution Day Celebration, New Berlin Linda Balistreri, a member of We the People Waukesha, greets attendees at the group’s Constitution Day event. Kasnic: What was the inspiration behind the story?

O’Matz: In Wisconsin, it seems that Election Day 2020 never ended. Even though Donald Trump lost the state, his supporters haven’t given up and are revising the rules governing how elections are run. We wanted to try to connect with voters, to hear their thoughts and meet them wherever they are — in parks and courthouses and even dive bars. The folks who believe the election was not fair, despite having no evidence of widespread fraud, have had some success in the courts. They’ve won rulings that tighten controls on absentee balloting and increase the likelihood that more of those ballots will be thrown out because of technicalities. Reading about the minutiae of election law, though, can be ponderous, and we needed a photographer to help us show the people and the passion behind all this activity. That’s where you came in, David.

The event included speeches and a buffet table. O’Matz: Folks on the right of the political spectrum can be hostile to traditional media outlets. How were you first received at the Constitution Day celebration, which commemorates the Sept. 17, 1787, signing of the U.S. Constitution, and which was hosted by a conservative group, We the People? How did you make people feel comfortable with us being at the event?

Kasnic: A lot of this stuff comes down to when you shake people’s hands, or you look people in the eye, and you’re sincere with them — a lot of the guard drops down and you simultaneously realize that we’re human beings and we’re just connecting. I think they can assume that I probably share some different beliefs than they do. But I don’t think that means that we can’t interact and be curious human beings with each other and be interested in one another’s thoughts and ideas. I grew up in a rural community, somewhat rural, in the Pacific Northwest, not really near any big town. My dad always says, “blue state, red towns” and it’s pretty accurate.

Attendees stand for the national anthem. Wisconsin attorney Dan Kelly, who is running for a 2023 seat on the state Supreme Court, speaks at the Constitution Day gathering. O’Matz: Do you approach your work differently than a breaking news photographer does? You told me you think of yourself as photographing slices of history. Can you explain what you meant?

Kasnic: That’s ideally what I’m doing. What I’m really trying to do is just point my camera toward the outside world. A lot of what I’m interested in can be tied into contemporary news topics. I don’t have a traditional photojournalist approach to many of these political events, even though I do have training in photojournalism. I go to these situations and I think about how the pictures can exist five, 10, 20 years from now, 30 years from now.

Craig Dedo (first image) attended in a MAGA hat and Maxine Learned, of We the People Waukesha, hosted a Constitution and Bill of Rights trivia game while dressed as a Founding Father. O’Matz: In New Berlin, I talked to a petite lady who gave her name as Mad Max and was dressed as a Founding Father: all in green with a jacket and a jabot and USA earrings. She joked that people were asking her if she was from “The Wizard of Oz.” What interesting conversations did you have?

Kasnic: The guy who was running the DJ booth. I just had a really good conversation with him and his wife. It’s kind of like talking to a really good friend’s mom and dad. I talked to him again this past Saturday at another event and he’s wearing a We the People of Waukesha shirt and underneath it says, “are pissed off.” So it’s “We the People of Waukesha are pissed off,” and “pissed off” is in a different font. I don’t really feel that type of energy from him. He’s just a real sweet guy, but obviously he might have some political beliefs that many folks in this country do find problematic. And I just think that nuance and that dynamic fascinates me.

Matt acts as DJ for We the People, playing music in between speakers and running sound for speeches. (Krasnic didn’t ask Matt for his last name; many people at the event were reluctant to provide that information.)

Day Two: “Meat-and-Greet” at the Republican Party of Waukesha County Headquarters A volunteer and a dog outside the meat-and-greet, where some attendees were screened by dogs. O’Matz: What was the scene where you shot the photo of the woman with the dog in Waukesha at the “meat-and-greet”? What about it caught your eye?

Kasnic: The dog’s name is Justice. It’s a “bomb-sniffing” dog, but it’s terrified of how many people are coming in and out. And then on the right end of the picture frame is a Trump-Pence sign. And so there’s these really interesting things happening, like America. There’s something nuanced about it.

Inside the county GOP headquarters O’Matz: You felt this event was not as valuable visually as the Constitution Day celebration. Why? It’s so colorful, and I love the sign on the table that reads, “Believe In: ‘In God We Trust,’ The Bill of Rights” etc.

Kasnic: If you’re being sent there for an assignment, you want to photograph the people who are speaking and you want to photograph a lot of people in the crowd and you want to kind of get the people in the back standing on the stairs because there’s nowhere else to sit. I looked at it like, “Maybe I don’t need to do that here.” There’s so many different walks of life, there’s so many different kinds of individuals that all kind of share the same beliefs. So they’re similar, but they look kind of different. There’s a guy with headphones. And then there’s a poster board of Trump in the background that gives a “Where’s Waldo?” effect to the photograph.

Scenes from the meat-and-greet

Day Three: Activist Harry Wait’s Hearing, Racine Harry Wait’s supporters gather outside the Racine County Courthouse on one of his hearing dates. Some are carrying signs for Wait’s group, H.O.T. Government, which stands for “honest, open, transparent.” Wait and his supporters walk into the courthouse for the hearing. O’Matz: You seem really chill about having difficult conversations in these kinds of settings, where minds don’t get changed and where you still need access to do your work.

Kasnic: I’m a white guy and I’m cisgender. So I understand how my ability to go inside some of these spaces is a bit easier than it would be for other folks. Let’s say I was a Black or Latinx photographer: I’d probably have a different encounter with these people because some of the things that they’re saying about the world would impact me drastically differently.

First image: Wait’s attorney at the time, Michael Gableman, is an election denier who led a taxpayer-funded review of the 2020 vote in Wisconsin that was called a “charade” by a Republican state senator. Gableman, who remained steadfast in his views on election fraud, has not responded previously to requests for comment from ProPublica. Wait’s supporters protest a gag order — a rule issued by a judge forbidding people involved in a case from talking about it publicly. O’Matz: I notice in the picture below, you were focused not so much on Wait but on the crowd of media, why?

Kasnic: It’s interesting, the media scrum — to kind of step back and observe from a little bit of a distance. You look at a guy like Harry Wait and if you don’t live in Wisconsin, it’s likely you haven’t heard of him before. So I felt it important to step back and show that this person is under a microscope of sorts. It’s important to move your feet and see where your feet can take you for a different perspective.

Wait outside the Racine County Courthouse after the hearing Kasnic: What photo do you think was most evocative of what we observed during our time together?

O’Matz: Probably the photo from the Constitution Day picnic, where people are standing with their hands or hats over their hearts. At times you really get this sense of fellowship, of connecting with others who share your beliefs. After all, they took time during a beautiful Saturday afternoon to talk about the Constitution, rather than, say, watch college football.

by Heather Vogell

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Renters filed a lawsuit this week alleging that a company that makes price-setting software for apartments and nine of the nation’s biggest property managers formed a cartel to artificially inflate rents in violation of federal law.

The lawsuit was filed days after ProPublica published an investigation raising concerns that the software, sold by Texas-based RealPage, is potentially pushing rent prices above competitive levels, facilitating price fixing or both.

The proposed class-action lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in San Diego.

In an email, a RealPage representative said that the company “strongly denies the allegations and will vigorously defend against the lawsuit.” She declined to comment further, saying the company does not comment on pending litigation.

The nine property managers named in the lawsuit did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

They included some of the nation’s largest landlords, such as Greystar, Lincoln Property Company, Equity Residential, Mid-America Apartment Communities and FPI Management — which together manage hundreds of thousands of apartments.

Four of the five renters named in the suit were Greystar tenants. A fifth rented from Security Properties. Their apartments were located in San Diego, San Francisco and two Washington state cities, Redmond and Everett.

The lawsuit accused the property managers and RealPage of forming “a cartel to artificially inflate the price of and artificially decrease the supply and output of multifamily residential real estate leases from competitive levels.”

RealPage’s software uses an algorithm to churn through a trove of data each night to suggest daily prices for available rental units. The software uses not only information about the apartment being priced and the property where it is located, but also private data on what nearby competitors are charging in rents. The software considers actual rents paid to those rivals — not just what they are advertising, the company told ProPublica.

ProPublica’s investigation found that the software’s design and reach have raised questions among experts about whether it is helping the country’s biggest landlords indirectly coordinate pricing — potentially in violation of federal law. In one neighborhood in downtown Seattle, ProPublica found, 70% of more than 9,000 apartments were controlled by just 10 property managers, who all used RealPage pricing software in at least some of their buildings.

RealPage told ProPublica that the company “uses aggregated market data from a variety of sources in a legally compliant manner.”

The company also said that landlords who use employees to manually set prices “typically” conduct phone surveys to check competitors’ rents, which the company says could result in anti-competitive behavior.

“RealPage’s revenue management solutions prioritize a property’s own internal supply/demand dynamics over external factors such as competitors’ rents,” a company statement said, “and therefore help eliminate the risk of collusion that could occur with manual pricing.”

The lawsuit said that RealPage’s software helps stagger lease renewals to artificially smooth out natural imbalances in supply and demand, which discourages landlords from undercutting pricing achieved by the cartel. Property managers “thus held vacant rental units unoccupied for periods of time (rejecting the historical adage to keep the ‘heads in the beds’) to ensure that, collectively, there is not one period in which the market faces an oversupply of residential real estate properties for lease, keeping prices higher,” it said. Such staggering helped the group avoid “a race to the bottom” on rents, the lawsuit said.

RealPage brags that clients — who agree to provide RealPage real-time access to sensitive and nonpublic data — experience “rental rate improvements, year over year, between 5% and 12% in every market,” the lawsuit said.

RealPage encourages property companies to have daily calls with a RealPage pricing adviser and discourages deviating from the rent price suggested by the software, the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit was filed by four law firms and a nonprofit, Justice Catalyst Law, dedicated to developing cases and legal strategies that advance economic and social justice. Gary Smith Jr., one of the lawyers involved, said the investigation into the case had been going on for more than a year.

“Today’s lawsuit plausibly alleges that Lessors of rental units have coordinated to drive rents up to unprecedented levels, exacerbating the nation’s affordable housing crisis,” Smith said in a media release.

RealPage counts some of the largest property managers in the country among its clients. Many favor cities where rent has been rising rapidly, according to a ProPublica analysis of five of the country’s top 10 property managers as of 2020. All five use RealPage pricing software in at least some buildings, and together they control thousands of apartments in metro areas such as Denver; Nashville, Tennessee; Atlanta and Seattle, where rents for a typical two-bedroom apartment rose 30% or more between 2014 and 2019.

Greystar and FPI Management each control hundreds of buildings in metro areas where rents have risen steeply in recent years. And Equity Residential, Lincoln Property Company and Mid-America Apartment Communities each manage dozens of buildings in high-growth markets.

RealPage’s clients may gravitate toward high rent-growth markets for several reasons. For instance, tenants in those areas will bear more rent hikes and so offer an opportunity to landlords to make more money.

But, RealPage says its software, formerly known as YieldStar, steers pricing that beats the market in areas where it operates.

“Find out how YieldStar can help you outperform the market 3% to 7%,” RealPage urges potential clients on its website.

Haru Coryne and Ryan Little contributed data analysis.

by Karim Doumar and Cynthia Gordy Giwa

Sign up for ProPublica’s User’s Guide to Democracy, a series of personalized emails that help you understand the upcoming election, from who’s on your ballot to how to cast your vote.

It’s time to talk about misinformation. You already know it’s all around us, but understanding how to spot it and defend against it is one of the most important parts of being an informed and active voter.

What Is the Difference Between Disinformation and Misinformation?

• Disinformation is false information that is deliberately created and shared by people to knowingly cause harm — like, say, Russian actors trying to meddle in a U.S. election.

• Misinformation is also false information, but the people sharing it don’t realize it’s fraudulent — like, say, your uncle sharing a questionable meme on Facebook. Systematic disinformation campaigns can become misinformation when users go on to accept and share false messages without knowing it.

Top Trends in Misinformation and Disinformation in the 2022 Midterm Elections

As the COVID-19 pandemic first swept across the country in 2020, state and national election administrators scrambled to change rules to make voting as safe and accessible as possible. Voting by mail exploded. Early voting took off. In the fast-paced environment, misinformation flourished.

After the vote, lies about a stolen election spread like wildfire. When rules change quickly, it can be genuinely difficult to keep up with what is and isn’t allowed — and people who spread lies count on that.

The misinformation and disinformation leading up to the midterms falls into two broad categories, lies about elections themselves and lies about candidates’ and party’s platforms:

• Lies about voter fraud and election integrity continue to spread, even though voter fraud is extremely rare. Conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines, fraudulent votes, stuffed ballot boxes and more have led to confused voters inundating election officials with misinformed questions, according to a New York Times review of 2022 misinformation trends and consequences. These lies are thriving on platforms like TikTok, and the Brookings Institution reports that increasingly sophisticated misinformation and disinformation campaigns on social media platforms can suppress voting rights. A House Committee on Oversight and Reform report this year said that election officials are working hard to address misinformation and disinformation but need more resources and funding to do so effectively.

• Distortions about actual policy positions of candidates and parties spread, too. This is a tale as old as time. As long as there have been elections, folks have lied to voters and misled them about their opponents in order to get elected. Experts especially fear that Spanish-language misinformation and disinformation could sway Latino voters in the 2022 midterms.

How Can I Tell If Something Is Fake News?

Here are some tips and tools that can help you assess content online.

Do some research. There are a number of reliable places for you to fact-check things you see on- and offline. Some are standalone projects, like:

• Snopes
• FactCheck.org
• PolitiFact

While others are directly associated with trustworthy news sources, like:

• AP Fact Check
• Fact Checker from The Washington Post

ProPublica also runs the Politwoops database, which lets you look up U.S. politicians’ deleted tweets.

Consider the publication. If you see an inflammatory political article from a news site you’ve never heard of before, these are some of the things you can look for to tell whether or not the site is legit:

• Does it have an about us page?
• Does it have a mailing address at the bottom?
• Does it have a Wikipedia page?

Run a reverse image search. If you see a photo online of a ballot box in the back of a random van or an image claiming to be proof of voter fraud, go to images.google.com, click the camera icon and paste in the image link or upload the photo. This should give you information on where else the image has been posted.

Practice emotional skepticism. You are more likely to believe a false story that confirms your beliefs about the world than a false story that doesn’t. This may sound obvious to you, but many folks are susceptible to fabricated content because of our biases, and false content usually tries to play to our emotions.

Misinformation especially flourishes during elections. In past elections, ProPublica and its partners found:

• Numerous Facebook accounts sharing “outright lies” about voting by mail.

• An image circulating on Twitter appearing to show an immigration officer arresting someone in line to vote, which was determined to be a hoax.

• A YouTube video compilation claiming to show Democrats stuffing ballot boxes — videos that were all actually filmed in Russia.

• Tweets that promote wrong information about the voting process, such as nonexistent voter ID requirements.

The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions has created a checklist for identifying fake news. Keep it handy as the election nears and wild claims start to flow freely.

The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions misinformation checklist. (International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions) Misinformation and Disinformation Thrive During Confusion, Like When States Change Voting Laws

According to a report by First Draft and the Brennan Center for Justice, more than half of all U.S. states passed laws to restrict or expand voting access since the beginning of 2021, including “laws that limit mail voting access, shrink drop box numbers, create harsher voter ID requirements and eliminate same-day voting registration.” The risks here, according to the report, are that voters could mistakenly believe the laws respond to voter fraud risks that don’t actually exist and that new rules and unfamiliar conditions create a window for bad actors to sow confusion.

On an individual level, the best defense against this is to educate yourself about your state’s voting rules. The news outlet FiveThirtyEight has compiled an excellent resource to help you understand how election law has changed in your state and specifically if voting is becoming harder there.

What Are the Different Types of Misinformation and Disinformation?

In 2018, First Draft News, an organization of social newsgathering and verification specialists, classified seven distinct types of misinformation and disinformation swirling around our information ecosystem, from satire or parody to fabricated or manipulated content:

First Draft’s 2018 graphic guide defines different types of misinformation. (Claire Wardle)