ProPublica

by Sebastian Rotella

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For years, Chinese American dissidents in New York have suspected that China’s powerful and ubiquitous intelligence services had infiltrated their ranks and were tracking their every move.

“We operate under the assumption that no secret can be kept from the Chinese Communist Party, except maybe very sensitive ones,” said Chuangchuang Chen, a law student at St. John’s University and leading pro-democracy activist in Queens.

On Wednesday, Chen and other dissidents got new evidence of just how deep and aggressive China’s pursuit has become. U.S. prosecutors announced charges in three major cases that they say depict the alarming reach of Chinese intelligence in the United States. In one case, FBI agents arrested a 73-year-old dissident leader who is accused of spying on his fellow activists for 17 years. In the other cases, prosecutors said, Chinese spies recruited U.S. operatives, armed them with generous budgets, elaborate cover stories and high-tech gear, and sent them across the country to target Chinese Americans, including a congressional candidate on Long Island and a sculptor in Southern California.

The high-profile U.S. prosecutions are part of a stepped-up counteroffensive against an increasingly brazen adversary. Wednesday’s announcement at the Justice Department in Washington, D.C., came after months of public concern — including extensive reports by ProPublica — about the Chinese regime’s global campaign to harass, threaten, kidnap or imprison its critics and their families. ProPublica detailed one case in which a Chinese police officer slipped into the U.S. and deployed a team of Chinese and U.S. operatives, including a former New York City police detective, to spy on a New Jersey couple and force them to return to China.

During the press conference, Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen, head of the DOJ’s national security division, described “an alarming rise in transnational repression” and warned that China and other “authoritarian states around the world feel emboldened to reach beyond their borders to intimidate or exact reprisals against individuals who dare to speak out against oppression and corruption.”

All three cases unveiled Wednesday grew out of FBI counterintelligence investigations in the Eastern District of New York, where neighborhoods in Queens and Brooklyn have long been home to many Chinese Americans. Immigrants in such areas often fear that reporting acts of repression will result in retaliation against relatives in their former country. The FBI has been urging victims to come forward, creating a website with information and instructions in 28 languages.

“We have dozens of transnational repression cases,” said FBI Assistant Director Alan E. Kohler Jr., who leads the counterintelligence division, at the press conference. “However, we believe we should have hundreds.”

Reacting to the charges at a daily press briefing Thursday, a spokesperson for the Chinese foreign ministry said he did not know the specifics but denied that his government engages in such activity.

“We have never asked and will never ask Chinese citizens to do things in violation of local laws and regulations,” said the spokesperson, Zhao Lijan, in comments posted on the website of the embassy of China. “The accusation of ‘transnational repression schemes’ is totally made out of thin air. The US attempt to hype up ‘China threat’ and tarnish China’s reputation is doomed to fail.”

The clandestine tactics and methods described in the New York cases resemble those at the heart of a groundbreaking federal indictment of police officials and prosecutors from the city of Wuhan in 2020. ProPublica later determined that the lead officer in that case had slipped in and out of the U.S. pursuing other targets for several years, eluding detection by law enforcement. The defendants in the Wuhan case were part of Operation Fox Hunt, President Xi Jinping’s worldwide campaign to forcibly repatriate thousands of Chinese nationals accused, justifiably or not, of corruption.

The new prosecutions allege that, as in many Fox Hunt cases in North America, Chinese spies recruited teams of local operatives, often private detectives who conducted surveillance and gathered intelligence on targets. The New York-based detective hired in the Wuhan case has pleaded innocent, claiming he was duped by Chinese operatives claiming to represent a company hunting for an embezzler.

But some revelations in the new cases are unusual. Prosecutors took direct aim at the Ministry of State Security, China’s secret political police, charging an MSS officer named Qiming Lin with interference in the U.S. electoral process. Olsen said he was not aware of a previous case in which charges were filed against Chinese state officials for trying to sabotage a U.S. electoral candidacy.

Lin had discussed resorting to violence, such as a beating or a staged accident, to prevent a Chinese American candidate from winning an election in a congressional district on Long Island, authorities say.

“In the end, violence would be fine too,” Lin told a U.S. private investigator, according to a voice message transcript in a criminal complaint. “Huh? Beat him [chuckles], beat him until he cannot run for election. Heh, that’s the-the last resort. You-you think about it. Car accident, [he] will be completely wrecked [chuckles], right? Don’t know, eh, whatever ways from all different angles. Or, on the day of the election, he cannot make it there himself, right?”

The allegations stand out because, in general, Chinese intelligence officers have been less likely to engage in violence in the West than their counterparts from Russia and other authoritarian nations.

Lin also instructed the investigator to look for compromising information about the candidate’s personal life and suggested trying to orchestrate a scandal involving a prostitute, according to the complaint. He said his spy agency had set its sights on destroying other politicians as well.

“Right now we will have a lot more-more of this in the future. ... Including right now [a] New York State legislator,” Lin said, according to the transcript. “[T]here are, uh, some-some, uh who speak negatively about China. ... The people who always speak up, you need to pay attention to them. If possible-possible to get some information, then this side will hold you in very high regards in the future.”

Authorities did not identify the intended victim, but their description resembles that of veteran dissident Xiong Yan, who participated in the 1989 protests in Tiananmen Square, became a U.S. citizen and served in the U.S. Army in Iraq. Yan is running for Congress in New York’s 1st District on Long Island. Media reports Wednesday quoted him as saying he had first heard about the case from journalists.

Prosecutors charged Lin with interstate harassment and the illegal use of identity information. Lin had come to New York to meet with the private investigator, who was not identified, in the past, but he is now believed to be in China, prosecutors said.

Olsen said the FBI arrested two Long Island men at the heart of a second case Tuesday: Fan “Frank” Liu, a wealthy U.S. citizen who runs a media company in New York, and Matthew Ziburis, a former Florida corrections officer turned professional bodyguard. The pair’s alleged exploits show the kind of resources that Beijing is accused of pouring into cross-border repression. Ziburis earned more than $100,000 for stalking dissidents in California, Indiana and Thailand last year while Liu, who hired and directed him, received more than $3 million from accounts based in Hong Kong, according to a criminal complaint.

The two men were hired by an intermediary for the Chinese government to discredit prominent dissidents, prosecutors said. The targets included the sculptor of a statue titled “CCP Virus,” which depicted the coronavirus with the face of Xi, the complaint alleges. The suspects instructed a private investigator to bribe an Internal Revenue Service official to provide them with the artist’s tax records in hopes of finding damaging information, authorities said. In reality, the private investigator was cooperating with the FBI and there was no IRS official, authorities said.

To gain access to the targets, the conspirators devised elaborate cover stories, with Ziburis presenting himself variously as an art broker and a journalist, according to the complaint. Their equipment allegedly included a GPS tracker, secret microphones and a surveillance camera that provided a live feed monitored in China. Prosecutors charged Qiang Sun, a China-based employee of an international technology company, with serving as an intermediary between the Chinese government and the U.S. suspects. He remains at large.

The charges in the case include acting as illegal foreign agents, attempted bribery of a federal official and interstate stalking.

The final case detailed Wednesday highlights another trademark of Chinese spymasters: the long game.

The investigation centers on Shujun Wang, 73, a military historian and former college professor who has been prominent in dissident circles for almost two decades. Wang first came to the United States as a visiting scholar in 1993 and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2003, authorities said. Three years later, he was among a group of leading Chinese dissidents who founded the Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang Memorial Foundation in the Chinatown area of Flushing, Queens. Wang served as secretary general of the foundation named for two reformist figures of the Chinese Communist Party.

But by then, authorities say, Wang was already a highly placed mole who had infiltrated the movement in New York.

“Emails, chat communications, WANG’s own admissions and other evidence show that, beginning at least in or about 2005, while acting under the direction and control of [People’s Republic of China] and MSS officials, WANG reported to the MSS information about Chinese dissidents and members of the Chinese democracy movement in the United States and elsewhere,” the complaint says.

Wang operated under the direction of four senior MSS officers whom he has identified in questioning by FBI agents, the complaint says. He allegedly filed meticulous reports in face-to-face meetings during visits to China, via a messaging app, and in “diaries” that he wrote in draft emails accessed by his handlers. It is not clear when the FBI first began investigating him, but the complaint details alleged crimes beginning in 2016.

Wang’s communications, according to the complaint, show he focused on the top targets of the authoritarian regime: those involved in the causes of Tibet, Taiwan, the Uyghurs, Hong Kong and the pro-democracy movement. He allegedly kept the MSS informed about conversations, meetings, protests and other activities in granular detail.

“In a March 2019 diary entry, WANG listed possible speakers and attendees at a Tiananmen Square massacre memorial protest in New York,” the complaint says. “According to WANG, one speaker identified by name was to deliver an ‘hour long’ speech and describe his feelings ‘without any reservations.’ WANG further stated that he had not heard from a well-known Taiwan democracy organization; that nothing dramatic occurred at a 50th birthday party in Flushing which 80 people attended; that a known anti-Chinese Communist Party protestor would likely attempt to block Xi Jinping’s car when Xi visited President Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Florida; and that people in New York were not enthusiastic about ‘the democratic movement’ because the Tiananmen Square protesters were too old now.”

Wang also helped shadow a well-known leader of the Hong Kong democracy movement, reporting to the MSS about meetings and telephone calls with him, the complaint says. Hong Kong authorities arrested the activist last year.

FBI agents arrested Wang Wednesday on charges of acting as an illegal foreign agent, misusing identity information and making false statements. Although the unmasking of a seasoned leader might seem devastating, many of Wang’s associates had had suspicions for years, said Chen, the Queens dissident.

“People told me to be careful around him,” Chen said. “He was seen as an active spy. It was a public secret. In our circle, we have known he was being monitored by the FBI for some time.”

Dissidents had suspected Wang because of his ability to travel frequently to China without being arrested or bothered by the authorities there, Chen said. They believed he had frequent contact with officials at the Chinese consulate in New York as well, Chen said. They reported him to the FBI, kept their distance and waited, knowing that U.S. counterintelligence agencies can also play the long game.

If the FBI keeps looking, it will find similar Chinese repression operations going on around the country, Chen predicted. He named the likely hotbeds: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston, Atlanta.

The newly announced cases are “the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “But it’s a good step. Very good step. I applaud it.”

In an initial court appearance Wednesday, Liu denied the allegations through an interpreter. He, Ziburis and Wang were released on bond. Their lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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by Lylla Younes and Al Shaw

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

Today ProPublica is releasing the data behind our investigative series “Sacrifice Zones,” which revealed more than 1,000 hot spots of cancer-causing industrial air pollution around the country. Researchers can now download the principal data files behind our investigation from our Data Store.

The data that we used for the analysis is based on the Environmental Protection Agency’s Risk Screening Environmental Indicators model, a tool that estimates concentrations of toxic chemicals in the air around industrial facilities. ProPublica mapped and published this information for the first time, giving readers a neighborhood-level view of their estimated cancer risks from industrial air pollution.

We are releasing three geographic files: one for the perimeters of each of the toxic hot spots identified in ProPublica’s analysis (hot spots are defined as contiguous grid squares with estimated excess cancer risk above 1 in 100,000); one containing the grid squares within each of those hot spots; and one containing the point locations for facilities included in our analysis. Users are encouraged to read our methodology and watch our guide for investigating hot spots before working with these files to better understand the strengths and limitations of RSEI data.

We are also updating our interactive map in two important ways.

First, we have updated the data files and map with corrections for errors in EPA’s data. The RSEI model relies on data from the Toxic Releases Inventory, a federal database containing emissions information submitted annually by companies operating large industrial facilities in the U.S. As we revealed in our series, the EPA does a poor job of verifying the accuracy of the industry-reported data in the TRI. Before we published the map, we independently fact-checked data from and contacted 200 facilities in our analysis to ensure that they had submitted correct emissions data for the five-year period of our analysis. While many companies responded to our inquiries, a number did not get back to us by our deadline. After we published, we heard from additional companies that wished to correct the TRI data reflected in our map. We also corrected the locations for a small number of facilities.

Second, we added Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands to the map. In doing so, we identified three new hot spots, which are included in our data update.

Do You Live Near an Industrial Facility? Help Us Investigate.

by Carol Marbin Miller and Daniel Chang, Miami Herald

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

In a legislative session highlighted by culture war battles and redistricting, Florida lawmakers gave a measure of mercy to a group of parents whose children died of catastrophic birth-related brain injuries.

Following up on action taken last year, the Legislature voted to give $150,000 stipends to parents whose children were once enrolled in a state program called the Birth-Related Neurological Injury Compensation Association, or NICA, but had been dropped from the rolls when the children died.

Families of surviving NICA children received identical stipends last year as part of a comprehensive slate of reforms, but the families of children who died were left out, even though some had spent themselves into poverty trying to keep their children alive.

The reforms were implemented after a series of stories by the Miami Herald and ProPublica documented how parents in NICA had to beg for help from the program, which was supposed to provide “medically necessary” care to certain children left severely disabled by oxygen deprivation or spinal injury at birth. Parents complained that they had to plead, often in vain, for medication, specially equipped vans, in-home nursing care and home modifications, to which they were entitled under the NICA statute.

In addition to the $150,000 supplement, last year’s reform package provided a $40,000 increase in the program’s death benefit, a $10,000 annual stipend for family mental health care, an increase in the lifetime subsidy for home modifications from $30,000 to $100,000, and money for wheelchair-accessible vans, among other things.

Advocates claimed the reforms didn’t go far enough, and Sen. Lauren Book, a Democrat who leads her party in the upper chamber, filed a bill this year with several provisions designed to rectify that.

The bill, however, failed to secure a single sponsor in the House of Representatives, and Senate leaders declined to present it to any of the three committees to which it was assigned.

Supporters of the bill, including NICA’s current director, Melissa Jaacks, persuaded lawmakers to include a few provisions in a separate, sprawling bill that modified the statute governing the state Department of Health. The most significant measure was the one-time $150,000 payment to the families whose children had died.

The Health Department legislation that passed, which still must be signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, also bolsters NICA’s ability to collect dues from doctors who are required to help financially sustain the program.

An August 2021 report by the Florida Auditor General, an independent watchdog who reports to the Legislature, said that, since 2016, administrators failed to collect more than $14.4 million in delinquent assessments from doctors. NICA staff told auditors that it didn’t make financial sense for the agency to collect from doctors individually but that it would file batches of lawsuits against them. No lawsuits had been filed since January 2018, the audit said.

Lawmakers created NICA in 1988 in response to demands from doctors who claimed high medical malpractice premiums were driving them from practicing medicine in Florida. The law immunized obstetricians from the consequences of a bad outcome by precluding families from filing malpractice suits. In exchange, parents were steered into NICA.

Obstetricians who participate in the program must pay $5,000 annually in order to be granted immunity from lawsuits. Other doctors licensed in the state are required to pay $250 each year to support the program, and hospitals pay $50 for every live birth. The assessments are invested, helping the fund grow.

The Herald-ProPublica series documented how NICA had amassed nearly $1.7 billion in assets while denying or delaying care to children who suffered profound brain damage at birth — often as the result of negligence.

To parents like Ruth Jacques of Orlando, who was prevented from holding anyone responsible for the 2018 death of her son, Reggie, this year’s legislation is a long-overdue acknowledgment of her pain.

“I am sad about my son,” she said. “I am strengthened to know that the voices of a few can be so loud.”

After her story was told by the Herald, Jacques attended NICA board meetings and spoke with state insurance regulators seeking to include the parents of deceased children in the ongoing NICA reform.

“It gives me hope for tomorrow,” said Jacques, who has given birth to two sons since Reggie died. “It is this strength and perseverance that I wish to leave as my kids’ greatest legacy.”

Providing the $150,000 supplement to parents like Jacques had been the “number one legislative priority” for NICA administrators after Book’s reform bill failed to gain any traction, Jaacks said. Still, the director added, there is much unfinished business, and “we will absolutely pursue additional legislation next year.”

Jaacks was hired in October​ when the program’s then-director, Kenney Shipley, resigned amid pressure. (Shipley has declined comment.) Jaacks and the new NICA board, brought in after the Herald-ProPublica investigation, are considering whether to extend to the parents of deceased children another benefit from last year: allowing them to have their mental health care covered.

“What these families have been through should never have happened,” Jaacks said of the 209 families who lost a child as a consequence of a birth injury.

Leanne Lewis, 28, of Keystone Heights, about 25 miles from Gainesville, lost her son, BradyJ Lee Yarbrough, on April 20, 2019. Brady had been born with severe brain damage and had suffered unrelenting seizures as a consequence.

Like Jacques, Lewis attended several meetings with NICA’s new director and worked for months to convince lawmakers that her suffering was no less real than that of parents whose living children still are clients.

“We begged them to view us as parents and to stop viewing our children as just another case,” Lewis said. “We wanted them to see us as human beings, not as a dollar sign. We cried to them.”

The supplement, she said, can never compensate her for her loss. But it will help her get on with her life.​

“There are 209 families that are going to be reminded that their children have not been forgotten,” Lewis said. “When your child dies, the only thing you want from other people is to remember them.”

by Lulu Ramadan, The Seattle Times

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

Washington state lawmakers are set to dedicate $1.5 million to removing toxic fluorescent lights from schools and another $125,000 to studying environmental hazards and creating new standards to protect students from exposure to harmful substances.

In requesting the funding, lawmakers cited an investigation by The Seattle Times and ProPublica into a Seattle-area campus where children and staff were exposed to a combination of harmful conditions, including elevated levels of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, a banned chemical that the Environmental Protection Agency has linked to cancer and other illnesses.

More than 200 students, parents and teachers at the Sky Valley Education Center in Monroe filed lawsuits claiming they developed cancer, brain damage, hormonal problems and other illnesses after exposure to PCBs on campus. Two of the lawsuits have resulted in extraordinary jury awards against Monsanto, the manufacturer of the chemicals, totaling nearly $250 million to 11 people. At least 15 lawsuits are pending.

The school district knew as early as 2014 that PCBs were leaking into classrooms from aging fluorescent lights but were slow to respond to the unfolding crisis, The Times and ProPublica reported.

The Legislature’s proposed budget, agreed upon by the state House and Senate on Wednesday but awaiting the governor’s approval, allocated $125,000 to the University of Washington’s Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences to review policies on environmental conditions in schools. The research will cover several contaminants, including PCBs, lead, asbestos and mold. The study is due in December.

“These are first steps,” said Democratic state Rep. Gerry Pollet, one of a handful of lawmakers who pushed for the funding. “If we have a report to the Legislature in December, we will have a first look at what standards need to be adopted to protect children’s health in schools, how to remediate, and from there we will learn how much we need to fund.”

Another $1.5 million is earmarked for the state departments of education and ecology to remove fluorescent lights known to contain PCBs; the substance was banned by the EPA in 1979 but is suspected to linger in building materials and light fixtures in aging campuses across the country.

Those same lights leaked oily PCB liquids into classrooms at Sky Valley, releasing the chemical into the air and onto surfaces. At that campus alone, it cost more than $1.6 million to remove PCB-laden material, including carpets, furniture and air filters.

The goal is to replace the fluorescent lights with energy-efficient alternatives, which will save school districts money in the long run, said state Rep. Alex Ramel, a Democrat who also pushed for the funding after reading the Times’ reporting. Replacing the lights is “the lowest-hanging fruit there is,” he said. “It would make sense even if they weren’t leaking toxins into schools.”

Pollet acknowledged that the proposed budget’s $1.5 million won’t cover the full cost of removing the toxic materials from schools. But he called the funding an “urgent, easy Band-Aid” and the first of many steps.

In addition to the funding, lawmakers proposed giving the Washington State Board of Health power to take action on classroom contamination.

The proposal would have reversed a rule that bars the board of health from creating and enforcing rules relating to conditions in school buildings — an exclusion that is unique to schools. That language was withdrawn in the late stages of negotiations and did not make it into the latest budget.

“What’s crazy is the board of health can adopt a rule protecting people from exposure to contaminants in state government buildings, for example, but not in schools,” Pollet said.

Though the board of health is responsible for maintaining safe conditions on campuses, the agency can’t take action without the Legislature’s approval.

This gap and others allow contaminants to fester in schools across the state.

At Sky Valley, health inspections repeatedly flagged hazards on campus as early as 2014 and made recommendations to fix the problems. But over the years, the levels of PCBs climbed, even after multiple cleanup attempts, state and federal environmental documents revealed.

Under Washington state law, however, health districts aren’t required to enforce any recommendations they make after inspecting schools. Likewise, school districts aren’t required to act when inspections find certain toxic chemicals, a gap reported in the Times’ and ProPublica’s investigation and later cited in the state budget requests.

Though the budget language doesn’t address these specific shortcomings, the proposal describes the study as a precursor to changing “policies and standards in Washington schools.”

In the Sky Valley lawsuits, juries awarded 11 parents, teachers and students a collective $247 million in verdicts against Monsanto. Other Sky Valley families are bringing similar cases, one of which is currently at trial.

Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in 2018, denied the allegations both in the lawsuits and in a statement to The Times. The company is appealing the jury verdicts.

The Monroe School District, which serves about 6,000 students, agreed to a $34 million settlement with parents and students exposed to PCBs, court documents filed last month revealed. The extraordinary settlement was filed under a court seal and is the maximum allowed under the school district’s insurance policy. The settlement amounts to about a third of the district’s entire operating budget.

In court documents, the Monroe School District defended its actions at Sky Valley, saying it communicated problems to parents and addressed PCBs appropriately. The filing notes that Washington law only broadly mandates that schools maintain safe conditions, but “none of these requirements are specific to PCBs in building materials.”

In a statement to The Times, the district said it supports legislative interest in strengthening testing and remediation standards in schools, adding that those efforts are “more effective when the legislature also provides funding.”

The school district continues to clear Sky Valley of PCBs under the guidance of the EPA, which hasn’t yet given the school a clean bill of health after eight years of remediation efforts. School district records show, however, that the latest testing on campus, conducted by a district contractor in August, found only minor levels of the chemical.

by Alec MacGillis

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

This story was co-published with The New Yorker and is exempt from our Creative Commons license until Sept. 11, 2022.

Last October, I sat in the office of Klaus Emmerich, the chief union representative at the Garzweiler brown-coal mine in western Germany, as he shared his misgivings about the country’s celebrated plan to stop burning coal. Germany’s build-up of renewable energy was lagging and, given that coal accounts for more than a quarter of its total electricity supply, that meant it would have to rely on another energy source for the time being: natural gas, which came mostly from Russia. “We’re giving ourselves over to the Russians,” Emmerich told me. “I have a bad feeling about it.”

Five months later, Emmerich’s premonitions have borne out, powerfully. President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has unleashed civilian and military carnage, ravaged cities and sent some two million people fleeing the country. As its effects have rippled across Europe and the world, one consequence has gone underexamined: The invasion has upended the political and economic policies of Germany, where the government has reconsidered its long-planned energy transition; undone a congenial political stance toward Russia that lasted for half a century; and reversed a policy of military minimalism that dates to the end of the Second World War. In many ways, Germany has rethought its place in the world — all in two weeks.

At the heart of the shift is Germany’s dependence on Russian fossil fuels, which until recently was not seen as problematic by German leaders. Quite the opposite: It was part of a deliberate, decadeslong effort by Germany to maintain comity with the huge, nuclear-armed neighbor with whom it fought in two bloody 20th century wars. Germany chose its dependence on Russia because it saw the economic links created by fuel imports — physical links, in the form of pipelines through Eastern Europe and under the Baltic Sea — as integral to keeping peace and integrating Russia into the rest of Europe.

On Feb. 22, Germany’s new chancellor, Olaf Scholz, announced a curtailment to that dependence on Russian energy. The country was halting Nord Stream 2, a new gas pipeline from Russia that would be capable of providing Europe with 55 billion cubic meters of gas per year at a time when the rest of the Continent’s gas production is declining. Not only would this leave Germany without a crucial source for its energy supply, it was an admission that the strategy of “Ostpolitik” — accommodation with Russia — that Scholz’s center-left Social Democratic Party had embraced, at least in spirit, for more than 50 years, was a failure.

On Feb. 27, Scholz made an even more stunning declaration. After having already decided to send heavy weaponry to Ukraine, Germany would vastly increase its defense spending — making it, by one estimate, the third-largest military spender in the world, after the U.S. and China — and shift its entire posture toward military engagement. “President Putin created a new reality with his invasion of Ukraine,” Scholz said. “This new reality requires a clear response. We have given it.”

The following day, Finance Minister Christian Lindner told the broadcaster ARD that Germany would now “get one of the most capable, most powerful armies in Europe, one of the best-equipped armies in Europe in the course of this decade.” More than 75 years after the Nazis were vanquished, Germany would allow itself to think and act as a regional power again, complete with pride in its military capability. Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, a senior member of the historically pacifist-inclined Green Party, said, “If our world is different, then our politics must also be different.” It is hard to overstate the magnitude of this shift, which has left many Germans in shock. “I don’t think I’ve seen anything like it in my political life,” Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff, the vice president of the Berlin office of the German Marshall Fund think tank and a former senior government adviser, told me. “It’s staggering.”

Ostpolitik, or “eastern policy,” dates back to Willy Brandt, who led the Social Democrats (known by their German acronym, the SPD) into power in West Germany in 1969. His embrace of detente and diplomatic outreach to East Germany and the Soviet Union was born of a combination of pragmatism in the face of a nuclear-armed threat, guilt over the Nazis’ unfathomable destruction on the Eastern Front and a desire to show at least some independence from the country’s chief ally and protector, the United States.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the unraveling of the Soviet Union, the policy was widely judged a rousing success, credited by many Germans with having helped bring about the end of the Cold War. “Germans thought that because the Wall came down peacefully, that Ostpolitik was right,” Kristine Berzina, also with the German Marshall Fund, told me. “Their lived experience was that those relations led to the right outcome, and that meant that making sure that the gas keeps flowing was paramount not only for the German economy but that it was the right strategic decision.” To Berzina and others, though, this was an inaccurate and fateful misremembering of Ostpolitik and an overstatement of its role in the fall of the Iron Curtain.

The policy depended both on diplomacy and military strength, according to Jan Behrends, a loyal SPD member who has served on the party’s historical commission. In Behrends’s view, Brandt was no “hippie peacenik”; he was a Cold Warrior who had, in the late 1940s, lived through the Soviet blockade of Berlin. In 1970, when Brandt paid his first state visit to Moscow, West Germany was spending more than 3% of its GDP on the military and had half a million people under arms. “They took him seriously because Brezhnev looked at him and saw that he was head of the most important fighting force in Western Europe,” Behrends, a historian at the European University Viadrina, in eastern Germany, said.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Germany kept up with Ostpolitik, and the country’s military spending slipped below 1.5% of GDP, even as signs mounted that Russia was on an alarming trajectory under Putin, who, in the 1990s, levelled Grozny, in Chechnya, and presided over a regime that saw disturbing numbers of dissidents persecuted and journalists murdered. Germany further expanded its energy ties with Russia. Angela Merkel, whose center-right Christian Democrats won the 2005 election and led a coalition government with the SPD, agreed to carry on with the construction of the first Nord Stream. The SPD chancellor she unseated, Gerhard Schröder, became chairman of the subsidiary overseeing construction of the pipeline, in which Russia’s Gazprom held a 51% stake.

As chancellor, Merkel defended the country’s investment in Russian energy even as more ominous signs emerged: Putin’s speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference decrying the expansion of NATO, Russia’s bombardment of Georgia in 2008, its annexation of Crimea and fueling of the conflict in Ukraine’s Donbas region in 2014, the murder of the opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in Moscow. (One disturbing episode even occurred inside Germany. In 2019, a Georgian citizen was killed by a bike-riding assassin, alleged to be a former colonel in the Russian intelligence service, in broad daylight in a park in Berlin.)

Yet Germany’s dependence on Russian fossil fuels only increased. After the Fukushima disaster in 2011, Merkel committed to closing all of Germany’s nuclear plants in a little more than a decade. At the time, nuclear energy was providing nearly a quarter of the country’s electricity. “When we closed down nuclear, they must have drunk champagne in the Kremlin,” Behrends said. “That’s when we gave up our energy sovereignty.”

Behrends doesn’t just blame Merkel. In 2014 and 2015, the U.S. essentially deputized the German chancellor to handle its Russia policy during negotiations in Minsk to end the fighting in the Donbas region. (Merkel grew up in East Germany, where Putin worked for the KGB, and speaks Russian. Among journalists, she was known as the “Putin whisperer.”) “Why did they outsource their Russia policy to Merkel and trust her so much?” Behrends asked. “If the U.S. had sat at the table, they would have carried much more weight, but they weren’t there.”

In hindsight, Germany’s complacency toward Putin’s abuses and consolidation of power looks feckless. But there was little public appetite in Germany for confrontation. Behrends described Merkel’s soft stance as a form of “silent populism.” She sensed that the Germans, basking in peace and prosperity, would not support upending the status quo. “She was popular with Germans because she didn’t disturb their need for Bequemlichkeit, their comfort zone,” he told me.

Looming above all, of course, was the boundless shame of the Third Reich, which left many Germans intent on moral repentance. Within the country, there has long been a divide over what this repentance should entail, roughly aligned in two camps: those who believe Germany should never permit itself to return to totalitarianism (“never again dictatorship” or “never again Auschwitz”), and those who believe Germany should never engage in any war, full stop. With a few exceptions, such as Germany’s limited participation in NATO’s operations in Kosovo and Afghanistan, the “never again war” camp has held sway.

Germany was further restrained by a regional political dynamic that came into play post-reunification. Former East Germans, who had endured the Red Army’s depredations at the end of the Second World War in ways that the rest of the country had not, were deeply wary of antagonizing Russia. Some also felt betrayed by western Germany for having abandoned its promises of vast economic aid in the east following reunification, which created some sympathy for Putin’s claims to having been cheated by the West.

Olaf Scholz is an unlikely figure to lead Germany’s abrupt break with its postwar maxim, “Es gibt keine militärische Lösung” — “there is no military solution.” This past summer, when I saw him speak at a campaign rally in Berlin, he struck me as a politician in the mold of an old-fashioned Midwestern Democrat, like Ohio’s Sen. Sherrod Brown: progressive but measured, comfortable in his own skin, self-effacing, motivated above all by domestic concerns. (Like Brown, Scholz spoke often of restoring “respect” to the non-college-educated workers who had been drifting away from his party.) There was barely any mention of Russia, or foreign policy in general, during the campaign’s televised debates.

Scholz assumed the chancellorship in December, and his allies sent more weapons to Ukraine. Germany was ridiculed for promising only helmets. As the U.S. prepared sanctions against Russia, Germany equivocated on the fate of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz during their talks in the Kremlin on Feb. 15 (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

On Feb. 15, Scholz visited Putin at the Kremlin. The experience of listening “to Putin unplugged,” for hours likely helped transform Scholz, Kleine-Brockhoff said. “He got a good education from Vladimir the Great.” A week later, Putin recognized the two separatist regions in Ukraine, and Russian forces invaded. Behrends’ SPD sources have told him that Scholz discussed the substance of his landmark speech on military spending with few beyond his closest advisers, which made for good theater in the Bundestag: Members who might have decried such a major shift were caught unaware and were carried along from applauding Scholz’s generalities about supporting Ukraine to applauding rhetoric whose import registered too late.

After the speech, applause poured in from Germany’s allies, too. A little more than three decades after Margaret Thatcher and François Mitterrand warned against German reunification, the leaders of the Western alliance were a generation removed from living through the Second World War and German military aggression. Their countries, the U.S. and others were desperate for Western Europe’s largest country to step up. “It represents the moment when Germany became comfortable — and found it inevitable — to become a military power, and when others around Germany became comfortable with that decision,” Kleine-Brockhoff said. “That was the momentous thing. You could hear the cheers from Paris and Warsaw. You could see the smiles from London and Washington.”

Scholz’s military shift calls for an immediate expenditure of a hundred billion euros on the armed forces and, in years ahead, a return to spending more than 2% of GDP on defense. Reaching the 2% threshold would meet Germany’s commitment to NATO. (Putin’s actions might achieve what former President Donald Trump’s browbeating never did.)

Notably unresolved, though, is how Germany plans to survive with much less of the Russian fossil fuels it has sought all these years. According to Bloomberg, the country now relies on Russia for two-thirds of its natural gas, half its coal and nearly a third of its oil. Extending reliance on nuclear energy won’t be an easy stopgap. Last fall, energy experts told me that prolonging the life of Germany’s three remaining nuclear plants wasn’t feasible; once the process of closing starts, it’s difficult to reverse. On Tuesday, Economy Minister Robert Habeck, a member of the Green Party, ruled out a nuclear extension.

The country could delay its exit from coal, but that would imperil its goals for sharply reducing carbon emissions. And electricity production is far from the only concern: Natural gas is used to make fertilizer and, crucially, for home heating in the winter. So assured had Germany been in its Russian pipelines that it is only now building two terminals on the North Sea to receive liquefied natural gas from other countries. The terminals will take at least two years to complete, and the gas itself will likely be far costlier. (The European Union, as a whole, announced plans this week to reduce annual imports of Russian natural gas by two-thirds.)

Berzina, of the German Marshall Fund, told me that the most immediate concern will be buying enough natural gas this summer to put in storage for next winter, at what will likely be painfully high prices. Beyond that, the country will need to invest heavily in switching as many households as possible from gas boilers to electric heating sources, which she said could cost thousands of dollars per home. To provide the energy for that additional electricity, she added, the country should reconsider its opposition to nuclear power, an aversion stemming from a combination of deeply rooted naturalist conceptions of the inviolability of German soil and Cold War-era fears about being caught in the middle of a nuclear war. “The moral imperative of Ukraine now outweighs this,” she told me.

That would represent a dramatic turnabout, but at the pace of current transformation in Germany, one shouldn’t rule out anything. During a recent forum, Kleine-Brockhoff was challenged by a participant who wanted to know how Germany could swing, in a matter of days, “from appeasement to brinkmanship.” “My answer is that it’s because it was so long in coming,” Kleine-Brockhoff told me. “Because the domestic debate lingered for years and got nowhere. Until the breaking point, and the breaking was the invasion.” He went on: “In the end, a democracy will defend itself and stand for democratic values. That I never doubted. The question is, would it come too late?”

by Craig Silverman and Jeff Kao

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

Just before 11 a.m. Moscow Standard Time on March 1, after a night of Russian strikes on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, a set of Russian-language Twitter accounts spread a lie that Ukraine was fabricating civilian casualties.

One account created last year, @Ne_nu_Che, shared a video of a man standing in front of rows of dark gray body bags that appeared to be filled with corpses. As he spoke to the camera, one of the encased bodies behind him lifted its arms to stop the top of the bag from blowing away. The video was taken from an Austrian TV report about a climate change demonstration held in Vienna in February. But @Ne_nu_Che claimed it was from Ukraine.

Four Russian-language Twitter accounts posted a video that they claimed showed Ukrainian media had faked reports of civilian casualties. It is actually an unrelated clip from an Austrian TV report in February. The accounts were later removed by Twitter for violating its platform manipulation and spam policy. (Screenshots captured by ProPublica)

“Propaganda makes mistakes too, one of the corpses came back to life right as they were counting the deaths of Ukraine’s civilians,” the tweet said.

Eight minutes later, another account, @Enot_Kremle_Bot, tweeted the same video. “I’M SCREAMING! One of the ‘corpses’ came back to life during a segment about civilian deaths in the Ukraine. Information war is reaching a new level,” they said.

Two other accounts created last fall within a few days of @Enot_Kremle_Bot soon shared the same video and accusations of fake civilian casualties. “Ukrainian propaganda does not sleep,” said one.

The Twitter profiles are part of a pro-Putin network of dozens of accounts spread across Twitter, TikTok and Instagram whose behavior, content and coordination are consistent with Russian troll factory the Internet Research Agency, according to Darren Linvill, a Clemson University professor who, along with another professor, Patrick Warren, has spent years studying IRA accounts.

The IRA burst into the American consciousness after its paid trolls used thousands of English-language accounts across social media platforms to influence American voters during the 2016 presidential election. The IRA was at the center of a 2018 Department of Justice criminal indictment for its alleged effort to “interfere with elections and political processes.”

“These accounts express every indicator that we have to suggest they originate with the Internet Research Agency,” Linvill said. “And if they aren’t the IRA, that’s worse, because I don’t know who’s doing it.”

An analysis of the accounts’ activity by the Clemson Media Forensics Hub and ProPublica found they posted at defined times consistent with the IRA workday, were created in the same time frame and posted similar or identical text, photos and videos across accounts and platforms. Posts from Twitter accounts in the network dropped off on weekends and Russian holidays, suggesting the posters had regular work schedules.

Many of the accounts also shared content from facktoria.com, a satirical Russian website that began publishing in February. Its domain registration records are private, and it’s unclear who operates it. Twitter removed its account after being contacted by ProPublica.

Russian Twitter Accounts That Disseminated Propaganda Posted Mostly During Working Days

While Twitter sees relatively constant use throughout the week, these accounts posted mostly during Russian working days.

Note: Data includes posts on Twitter from 28 accounts identified in the Clemson Media Forensics Hub and ProPublica analysis as exhibiting coordinated or bot-like behavior. The accounts were removed by Twitter. Source: Twitter. (Jeff Kao/ProPublica)

The pro-Putin network included roughly 60 Twitter accounts, over 100 on TikTok, and at least seven on Instagram, according to the analysis and removals by the platforms. Linvill and Warren said the Twitter accounts share strong connections with a set of hundreds of accounts they identified a year ago as likely being run by the IRA. Twitter removed nearly all of those accounts. It did not attribute them to the IRA.

The most successful accounts were on TikTok, where a set of roughly a dozen analyzed by Clemson researchers and ProPublica racked up more than 250 million views and over 8 million likes with posts that promoted Russian government statements, mocked President Joe Biden and shared fake Russian fact-checking videos that were revealed by ProPublica and Clemson researchers earlier this week. On Twitter, they attacked jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and blamed the West for preventing Russian athletes from competing under the Russian flag in the Olympics.

Late last month, the network of accounts shifted to focus almost exclusively on Ukraine, echoing similar narratives and content across accounts and platforms. A popular post by the account @QR_Kod accused the Ukrainian military of using civilians as human shields. Another post by @QR_Kod portrayed Ukraine as provoking Russia at the behest of its NATO masters. Both tweets received hundreds of likes and retweets and were posted on the same day as the body bag video. At least two Twitter accounts in the network also shared fake fact-checking videos.

Twitter accounts such as @QR_Kod shared memes that echo propaganda spread domestically by Russian state media. @QR_Kod was later removed by Twitter for violating its platform manipulation and spam policy. (Screenshots captured by ProPublica)

The findings indicate that professionalized trolling remains a force in domestic Russian propaganda efforts and continues to adapt across platforms, according to Linvill.

“I can’t stress enough the importance of understanding the way that this is a tool for Putin to control narratives among his own people, a way for him to lie to his own people and control the conversation,” Linvill said. “To suggest that the West is blanketly winning this information war is true only in some places. Putin doesn’t have to win the information war, he just has to hold his ground. And these accounts are helping him do that.”

After inquiries from ProPublica, all of the active accounts were removed from TikTok, and nearly all were suspended by Twitter. Meta said it removed one Instagram account for violating its spam policy and that the others did not violate its rules. None of the platforms attribute the accounts to the IRA. Twitter and TikTok said the accounts engaged in coordinated behavior or other activity that violated platform policies.

A TikTok spokesperson said the initial eight accounts shared with it violated its policy against “harmful misinformation.” TikTok removed an additional 98 accounts it determined were part of the same pro-Putin network.

“We continue to respond to the war in Ukraine with increased safety and security resources to detect emerging threats and remove harmful misinformation,” said a statement provided by the company. “We also partner with independent fact-checking organizations to support our efforts to help TikTok remain a safe and authentic place.”

A Twitter spokesperson called the roughly 60 accounts it removed “malicious” and said they violated its platform manipulation and spam policy, but declined to be more specific. They said the company had determined that the active accounts shared by ProPublica had violated its policies prior to being asked about them. Twitter decided to leave the set of 37 accounts online “to make it harder for bad actors to understand our detections,” according to the spokesperson.

The accounts were removed by Twitter within 48 hours of ProPublica contacting the company about them. The week before, Twitter removed 27 accounts that the Clemson researchers also identified as likely IRA accounts.

“Our investigation into these accounts remains ongoing, and we will take further action when necessary,” said a statement from a Twitter spokesperson. “As is standard, when we identify information operation campaigns that we can reliably attribute to state-linked activity, we will disclose this to the public.”

Twitter declined to offer more details on why it left roughly 30 accounts that it identified as violative online to continue spreading propaganda. It also declined to comment on connections between the roughly 60 accounts in this recent network and the hundreds of accounts flagged by Linvill and Warren last spring as possible IRA profiles. Linvill said he identified the recent accounts largely based on their commonality with the previous set of 200.

“I connect these current accounts to the ongoing activity over the course of the past year by carefully tracking accounts’ tactics, techniques and procedures,” he said.

Platforms may be hesitant to attribute activity to the IRA in part because the agency has adapted and made its efforts harder to expose, according to Linvill. But he said social platforms should disclose more information about the networks it removes, even if it can’t say with certainty who is running them.

“In every other area of cybersecurity, dangerous activity from bad actors is disclosed routinely without full confidence in the source of the activity. We name and disclose computer viruses or hacker groups, for instance, because that is in the public interest,” he said. “The platforms should do the same. The Russian people should know that some sophisticated and well-organized group is covertly using social media to encourage support for Putin and the war in Ukraine.”

The Internet Research Agency is a private company owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian entrepreneur known as “Putin’s Chef.” Prigozhin is linked to a sprawling empire ranging from catering services to the military mercenary company Wagner Group, which was reportedly tasked with assassinating President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The IRA launched in St. Petersburg in 2013 by hiring young internet-savvy people to post on blogs, discussion forums and social media to promote Putin’s agenda to a domestic audience. After being exposed for its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. election, the IRA attempted to outsource some of its English-language operations to Ghana ahead of 2020. Efforts to reach Prigozhin were unsuccessful.

But it never stopped its core work of influencing Russian-speaking audiences. The IRA is part of a sprawling domestic state propaganda operation whose current impact can be seen by the number of Russians who refuse to believe that an invasion has happened, while asserting that Ukrainians are being held hostage by a Nazi coup.

Prior to the invasion, accounts in the network identified by the Clemson Media Forensics Hub and ProPublica celebrated Russian achievements at the Olympics.

“They were deep in the Olympics, tweeting about Russian victories and the Olympics and how the Russians were being robbed by the West and not allowed to compete under their own flag,” Linvill said.

After the invasion began, they moved to unify people behind Putin’s war.

“It was a slow shift,” he said. “And this is something I’ve seen from the IRA before: When a significant world event happens, they don’t always know immediately how to respond to it.”

By late February, the network had found its voice in part by echoing messages from Russian officialdom. The accounts justified the invasion, blamed NATO and the West and seeded doubts about civilian death tolls and Russian military setbacks. When sanctions kicked in and Western companies began pulling out of Russia, they said it was good news because Russian products are better. (Two Twitter accounts in the network shared the same video of a man smashing an old iPad with a hammer.)

Accounts in the network responded to sanctions by posting videos disparaging Western products. (Screenshot captured by ProPublica)

“These accounts were sophisticated, they knew their audience, and they got engagement far surpassing the number of followers that they had,” Linvill said.

Paul Stronski, a senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, reviewed content shared by more than two dozen of the Twitter accounts prior to their suspension. “A lot of this is the type of stuff I would expect from Russian trolls,” said Stronski, who reads and speaks Russian.

He said many of the accounts adopt an approachable and humorous tone to generate engagement and appear relatable to younger audiences present on social media.

“They’re very critical of prominent Russians who have criticized this war, questioning their patriotism,” Stronski said. “They’re saying in effect that during wartime you shouldn’t be criticizing your own. You should be lining up behind the state.”

When President Biden flubbed the pronunciation of “Ukrainians” during his recent State of the Union address, several of the accounts on Twitter, TikTok and Instagram shared the clip and mocked him. While that clip spread widely outside of the suspected IRA network as well, the accounts often spread more obscure content in coordination. Multiple Twitter accounts, for example, shared a screenshot of a Russian actor’s tweet that he cared more about being able to use Apple Pay than the war in Ukraine. The accounts criticized him, with one warning that “the internet remembers everything.”

Before the account takedowns, the Russian government had begun closing off the country from global social media and information sources. It restricted access to Twitter and blocked Facebook. The Russian legislature passed a law that allows for a 15-year sentence for people who contradict the official government position on the war. As a result, TikTok announced it would pause uploads of new videos in Russia.

Some of the accounts in the network saw the writing on the wall and prepared their audience to move to Telegram, a Russian messaging service.

“Friends! With happiness I'd like to tell you that I decided to make the t.me/enot_kremlebot channel, in which you will see analytics to the fullest extent. Twitter could block us any minute!” tweeted @Enot_Kremle_Bot on March 5. “I really don’t want to lose my treasured and close-to-my-heart audience! Go to this link and subscribe.”

Correction

March 11, 2022: This story originally misstated what TikTok communicated about its actions. The company said that after receiving ProPublica’s questions, it removed any active accounts it had been asked about, along with 98 others that the social media company linked to a pro-Russia network identified by ProPublica; TikTok did not decline to say how many accounts were removed.

by Annie Waldman, ProPublica; Beth Schwartzapfel, The Marshall Project; and Erin Einhorn, NBC News

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This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the U.S. criminal justice system and NBC News. Sign up for The Marshall Project's newsletters, and follow them on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

Join the reporters for a live virtual event on March 24 for a behind-the-scenes look at how they got the story and discussion of the juvenile justice system more broadly.

ST. MARTINVILLE, La. — Lawyers and a judge gathered in an East Baton Rouge juvenile courtroom last October for an update on a teenager detained after joyriding in a stolen car. The teen appeared on a screen, alongside a caseworker who stunned everyone by describing conditions in the lockup where he was held.

The 15-year-old was being kept in round-the-clock solitary confinement. He was getting no education, in violation of state and federal law, nor was he getting court-ordered substance abuse counseling, according to two defense attorneys present. And no one in the room that day — not the judge, not the prosecutor, not the defense lawyers — appeared to have heard of the facility where Louisiana’s Office of Juvenile Justice was holding him, the Acadiana Center for Youth at St. Martinville.

“It was as if a secret prison had been opened up,” one of the attorneys, Jack Harrison, said. “I could see on the judge’s face both shock and real anger — visceral anger.”

They had no idea how bad it was.

Scrambling to respond to a wave of violence and escapes from other juvenile facilities, state officials quietly opened the high-security lockup last summer to regain control of the most troubled teens in their care. Instead, they created a powder keg, according to dozens of interviews, photo and video footage and hundreds of pages of incident reports, emergency response logs, emails and education records.

Though Louisiana policy considers solitary confinement for youths a rare last resort and many other states have placed strict limits on it because of the psychological harm it causes, teens in this facility, some with serious mental illness, were locked alone in their cells for at least 23 hours a day for weeks on end. They were shackled with handcuffs and leg irons when let out to shower, and they were given little more than meals slid through slots in their doors. Some teens took those brief moments of human contact to fling their feces and urine at the guards.

At least two of the teens in the facility harmed themselves so badly that they required medical attention. Some destroyed beds and shattered light fixtures, using the metal shards to hack holes in the cinder block walls large enough for them to escape.

Photos taken at the Acadiana Center for Youth at St. Martinville, Louisiana, by a staff member at the time show holes dug into cell walls. Youths detained there broke off ceiling light fixtures and used them to tunnel through the walls, according to the staffer and internal documents. (Obtained by The Marshall Project, NBC News and ProPublica) A teen broke through the concrete wall of his cell and escaped, according to an incident report logged by staff on Jan. 20. (Louisiana Office of Juvenile Justice)

“I got frustrated with the whole situation and refused to go back in the pod because of being scared,” one guard wrote in an October incident report after a night spent listening to banging on the walls. Her supervisor, she wrote, advised her “to keep all doors closed secure in case they get out because it was only two female workers,” noting that he did not check the cells because he “did not have enough manpower to do it.”

On several occasions, guards responded to transgressions with violence, according to incident reports obtained through a public records request. Three slammed door hatches on teens’ hands. One struck a boy with his knee and fired pepper spray into a teen’s cell, leaving him coughing and vomiting.

“This is child abuse,” said Mark Soler, executive director at the Center for Children’s Law and Policy, a public interest group based in Washington; he previously served on a Louisiana task force reviewing care at the state’s juvenile facilities. “It’s outrageous that children should be held under conditions where they are locked in their room for most of the day and held in shackles when they exit. It is cruel to the children, and it is far outside accepted professional standards.”

Carmen Daugherty, the policy director at Youth First Initiative, an advocacy organization that seeks to end the incarceration of youth, called the conditions at St. Martinville “egregious.”

“It’s like you put all of the things that we talk about that are so wrong with our youth justice system and you put it in one facility,” she said.

The last two decades have brought enormous change to the U.S. juvenile justice system: Almost every state slashed the number of incarcerated young people by half or more, favoring probation, therapy and community programs for all but those who commit the most severe crimes. But as states lock up fewer children, many are struggling to care for the ones left behind, the most troubled among an already marginalized group that is disproportionately Black and facing complex psychological and social issues.

Some states have addressed these youths by “wrapping them pretty tight” with therapy, education and family involvement, said Candice Jones, former director of juvenile justice in Illinois. “The programs and services we’re providing them need to be the best.” But many states have fallen short. In recent years, the U.S. Department of Justice has investigated abuses in juvenile facilities in Texas, South Carolina and other places, including the overuse of solitary confinement and restraints, and insufficient rehabilitation and education.

“Story after story emerging from juvenile systems reveal that agencies around the country don’t have a good handle on how to manage their most challenging youth,” said Michele Deitch, a juvenile justice expert at the University of Texas at Austin. “They’re just throwing up their hands and saying: ‘We’ve exhausted our options. We just don’t know what to do.’”

Louisiana holds about 350 youths, more than 80% of whom are Black, in secure facilities; it has promised for decades to move its lockups toward a more therapeutic model. But like many states, it has failed to fully fund or commit to the new approach. That, combined with a debilitating staff turnover caused by low pay and dangerous conditions, has meant staff haven’t been properly trained to prevent the violence and chaos that has erupted.

Watch video ➜

St. Martinville was designed to be a “transitional treatment unit” for “youth who demonstrated an inability or unwillingness to discontinue violent and aggressive acts,” said Office of Juvenile Justice spokeswoman Beth Touchet-Morgan.

Of the 31 teens who have been transferred to St. Martinville for behavioral reasons since it opened, 21 have “successfully” been returned to other facilities, she said. (Louisiana also sent more than 50 teens to St. Martinville for COVID-19 quarantine.) The spokeswoman said that while the staff works to minimize situations requiring physical interventions, they may be necessary to ensure safety. She did not comment on specific altercations, but she said the department reviews incidents and holds staff members accountable if they violate policy, subjecting them to disciplinary action and sometimes requiring additional training. The agency rejected reporters’ requests to tour the facility, and several staff members said they’d been instructed not to talk to the media.

Perry Stagg, the Office of Juvenile Justice’s assistant secretary, confirmed that St. Martinville did not initially provide education but denied the accounts from teens and their lawyers that those detained had been confined all day and shackled when they left their cells. The agency’s policy, he said, is to keep youths unrestrained when they are out of their cells, unless they are acting violently or disruptively. Stagg said St. Martinville has been providing substance abuse counseling and recreation, and he suggested that the teens who said that they were denied those services were either lying or had opted out.

“It’s up to the child to participate,” he said. “We can’t force them to participate, but it’s absolutely available.”

While conditions have improved in recent months, with some — but not all — teens now allowed out of their cells during the day, and math and English instruction now being offered, the facility is still providing less education than the law requires and youths are still being shackled when they leave the common area in front of their cells, according to state records, teens and their families and attorneys.

The young people locked up in St. Martinville have committed serious crimes. The eight whose stories were shared with ProPublica, The Marshall Project and NBC News include boys who had stolen cars and guns and escaped from multiple lockups. One teen broke a guard’s arm in a fight at a previous facility.

But unlike at adult prisons, the goal of the juvenile justice system is not to punish youths for violating the law but to help them go on to lead productive lives. This is especially significant, experts and advocates say, given that Black youths are already overrepresented at every step of the criminal justice process.

“These are still kids,” said Amy Borror, an analyst at the Gault Center, a juvenile justice nonprofit. “They’re scared, they’re mad, they’re confused, they’re away from their homes. And if anybody knows how to deal with them it should be a department of juvenile justice. That’s why they exist. That’s their job.”

Known as the lockup capital of the world, Louisiana has relied heavily on solitary confinement for both adults and teens. Officials have long understood that the state needs to move away from discredited methods of punitive juvenile detention; in the late 1990s, the U.S. Justice Department sued the state, noting concerns that ranged from physical abuse to excessive use of handcuffs and solitary confinement.

The federal government dismissed the suit in 2006 after a series of reforms and the promise of others. But the rollout was hampered by aggressive budget cuts, and the Office of Juvenile Justice is still having a hard time recruiting correctional workers, who start at less than $27,000 a year. Hiring has been so difficult that staffers don’t get the necessary training to work with deeply troubled youths and soon leave, experts and local officials said. The result is that, although the state has come a long way since detained teens were showing up at hospitals with broken fingers and jaws, its detention centers have logged hundreds of fights each year. Pandemic-related lockdowns and isolation further strained resources and frayed nerves.

Louisiana officials once again came under scrutiny last year following the 2019 suicides of two teens held in solitary confinement at a youth facility in Ware. A legislative committee in May asked its auditor to investigate the use of solitary in state facilities; that investigation has not yet been completed.

Current state policy caps the use of solitary confinement at 12 hours at a time in most cases, and seven days for “highly disruptive” behavior. The American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the United Nations have all condemned the practice of isolating young people as deeply harmful, leading to depression, anxiety and psychosis. Studies show the majority of kids who die by suicide in lockups are, or recently were, in isolation.

At least 24 states and the federal government have placed strict limits on the use of solitary confinement for young people. The U.S. Department of Justice has intervened in at least a dozen cases involving state and local juvenile justice agencies in the last decade to make clear that overuse of solitary confinement for juveniles is unconstitutional.

And yet, when Louisiana’s Office of Juvenile Justice faced a crisis last year, it fell back on isolation.

In audio from inside St. Martinville provided by the former staff member, teens scream and bang on their cells. The photo shows the facility’s exterior. (Bryan Tarnowski for NBC News, The Marshall Project and ProPublica)

In May, youths at the Swanson Center for Youth overtook guards and gained control of the facility. The next month, teens barricaded themselves at Swanson, all but destroying it. Officials needed a place to put the state’s most challenging teens — and fast, so Bill Sommers, the agency’s deputy secretary, said he approached Gov. John Bel Edwards about opening a new facility. While home-like dormitory settings are considered best practice for juvenile detention, the agency leased a 24-cell jail from the St. Martin Parish sheriff where teens could be held in individual cells, according to internal emails.

“We have some youth in our care that are not therapy ready and are not wanting to go down the same path as others, and we don’t have the facilities nor the manpower to hold them in those dormitory settings,” Sommers told a juvenile justice commission last year. “St. Martinville was born out of necessity.”

The state signed a contract with the sheriff on July 26 and began moving in teens shortly after. While the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services inspects and licenses juvenile group homes and detention facilities where youths are held when they’re first accused of crimes, only the Office of Juvenile Justice has authority over secure care facilities like St. Martinville where teens are placed after they’ve been sentenced. A legislative task force described this “glaring gap in oversight” in 2019, recommending that an outside agency inspect the facilities. But nothing has changed.

Stagg said the facility was intended as a temporary fix until a new, more secure area at Swanson is completed next year. “If we can get them to a more isolated setting, it allows us to separate these kids, offer individual services, work with them one-on-one, provide mentoring, build relationships and try to work with them to get them to a place where we can put them back in a general population setting where they can participate and not be disruptive,” he said.

There was no relationship-building in those first few months, according to youths at the facility, their lawyers, family members and a former staff member. “You’re in your cell all day,” said Rashad, who was 15 when he arrived at St. Martinville last summer after trying to escape from another lockup, where he’d been sent after joyriding in a stolen car. He had only the thin sheet on his bed and the clothes he’d been issued, which did not include socks, he said. He had no books, no paper, no pencils.

“You have to have a strong mind,” said Rashad, who is being identified by his middle name to protect his privacy. “You can’t think about it. If you think about it, it will make you sad.”

Experts say that treating kids like hardened criminals is inhumane and, in some cases, unconstitutional. It’s also counterproductive, often leading to more bad behavior. As teens at St. Martinville began to destroy light fixtures and beds, officials cleared out the cells, a former staffer said in an interview, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear of repercussions for future jobs.

“These kids were in their cells with no beds on a concrete floor with a state-issued green mattress — flame retardant — a blanket and a sheet and nothing else. No light. No nothing,” the former staffer said. “Feces were being thrown every single day, multiple times a day. Not a surface in those pods has not had feces on it.”

In October, word of the conditions began to seep beyond St. Martinville’s walls.

In the East Baton Rouge court hearing, which was held to check on Rashad’s progress, his lawyers and Judge Gail Grover were told he was being held in solitary confinement and wasn’t receiving court-ordered services including education, substance abuse counseling and prescribed medication. “My jaw dropped,” said Peter Dudley, Rashad’s lawyer. “You’ve got a child that we’re supposed to be trying to rehabilitate. He’s basically being housed like a death row inmate.”

Grover declined to discuss specifics of the case because of laws requiring privacy in juvenile proceedings, but she did say it was the first time she’d held the juvenile justice agency in contempt of court for its treatment of a teen. She ordered Rashad’s immediate release from state custody and told the agency to start providing education. “I give orders because I believe the young people need the services that I’m ordering,” Grover said. “It should be complied with unless there’s a reason.”

Around the same time, the Louisiana Center for Children’s Rights filed a complaint with the state Education Department about the lack of instruction in the facility three months after it opened. “It’s a clear violation of the law,” said Rachel Gassert, the organization’s policy director. “To open a facility without making sure you have everything set up that you need to provide for kids is very concerning.”

The state Department of Education, which oversees instruction in juvenile facilities, and the Louisiana Special School District, which provides services to children with disabilities in state facilities, said they didn’t learn about the new facility until the fall, months after it opened. The Special School District said it didn’t begin providing services, as required by state and federal law, until Dec. 17.

“We were basically in emergency mode,” Stagg said about the lack of education originally offered. “That wasn’t something we were just being negligent on. It took time to put together.” When asked about the other issues raised in the contempt hearing, Stagg said he didn’t recall specific details but said teens have been provided with all required services.

Rebecca McDonald in her son’s bedroom in Glenmora, Louisiana. The 16-year-old boy is being held at St. Martinville, where he told his mother, “I’m not getting any kind of mental stimulation. ... I’m going crazy.” (Bryan Tarnowski for NBC News, The Marshall Project and ProPublica)

Even now, however, education still falls short of state law, which requires six hours of daily instruction. Attorneys and advocates who represent two teens who were held in St. Martinville this winter said one met his teacher just once and the other had 45 minutes of online instruction per day. One waited two weeks before he saw a counselor. The other saw a counselor for half an hour a week.

Officials trying to bring education to St. Martinville have run up against staffing challenges in a tight labor market, Stagg said. His agency settled the education complaint in January, agreeing to hire an independent monitor to keep tabs on instruction and provide advocates with biweekly updates on their compliance with state and federal education law.

A mid-January update showed that a teacher had been providing two hours of in-person instruction a day in math and two hours in English language arts. But that ended when the teacher, an 84-year-old retired educator, went on medical leave at the end of January; he has since died, and while the agency says it has made efforts to hire a new teacher, he had not been replaced as of last week. Recent education updates also noted that instruction has been limited by teens refusing to participate, staff shortages and technical glitches.

The incident reports suggest that the use of solitary confinement eased toward the end of the year, but shackling and some isolation continued amid assaults and fights. A December incident sent a guard to the hospital bleeding from the head. Two teens escaped in January and two more in February. One managed to smuggle a gun into the facility. By late fall, teens were starting to attend classes, go outside for recreation and watch movies, according to incident reports and other internal documents.

Family photographs of McDonald’s son when he was younger. As of late February, the teen had been held in solitary confinement for at least a month, his mother said. (Bryan Tarnowski for NBC News, The Marshall Project and ProPublica)

But without meaningful treatment and engagement, the teens remained idle and frustrated, according to lawyers and parents. Rebecca McDonald’s 16-year-old son is in state custody after being caught stealing a car. He bounced between juvenile lockups and residential facilities for the better part of a year and wound up in St. Martinville, where she said he told her: “I’m not getting any kind of mental stimulation. I can’t even talk to you. I’m going crazy.”

Over the winter, he was involved in an escape at St. Martinville that resulted in him facing new charges. After that, officials stopped letting him out of his cell, he said. As of late February, he had been held in solitary confinement for at least a month, according to his mother.

“He needs somewhere that can help him mentally, that can set him up with some schooling, that he can accomplish something. Not fend for yourself,” McDonald said. “He’s 16 years old, he’s been in a lot of trouble. He needs someone to set him on the right path. ... If they don’t teach them anything else, they won’t learn anything else.”

When asked about the conditions at St. Martinville, the governor’s spokesperson, Christina Stephens, said that state agencies face the same staffing struggles that other employers do, “and it becomes even more challenging in this case because of the difficulty of the task at hand.” The governor is “concerned about the safety and treatment of the youth who are there and the staff that run the facility,” she said.

State Rep. Royce Duplessis, a New Orleans Democrat who chairs the juvenile justice oversight commission, said: “Clearly these facilities are underresourced. They’re undermanned.”

He added, “We need to make sure the guards are paid and these are not facilities that kids want to tear up and jump on the guards and just be destructive.”

An old baseball jersey belonging to McDonald’s son hangs in his empty bedroom. (Bryan Tarnowski for NBC News, The Marshall Project and ProPublica)

Duplessis filed a bill last week that would restrict the use of solitary confinement in juvenile facilities to four hours at a time, require authorities to promptly notify the youth’s parents and attorney and require the juvenile justice agency to track its use.

There’s no place for facilities like St. Martinville, argues Dayshawn, a mother from New Orleans whose teenage son spent weeks there last year. Diagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated in a psychiatric facility as a child, he was arrested at 13 for stealing a car. He spent years in juvenile lockups and was moved to St. Martinville after an escape attempt. “He needs therapy. He needs treatment,” said Dayshawn, who is being identified by her middle name to protect her son’s privacy. “You all are not giving him that. You’re just locking him up.”

She worries that Louisiana is setting her son up to commit more crimes.

“He is going to come back in the world and do the same thing.”

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Zinhle Essamuah of NBC News contributed reporting.

by Eli Hager

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Across the Southwest, states are reconsidering how they approach welfare, with several legislatures enacting or considering new laws to ensure that more assistance is made available to low-income families struggling to afford rent, child care, groceries and diapers. The moves follow months of ProPublica reporting on punitive and outdated welfare policies in this part of the country and come amid a yearslong surge in the region’s cost of living.

In New Mexico, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Wednesday signed into law a budget that will allow an estimated $6.96 million in child support to go directly to children instead of to the government. Until now, the state had intercepted these dollars as reimbursement for the custodial parent previously having received welfare, as ProPublica reported in September.

All of that money will now go to kids in poverty.

In Arizona, lawmakers introduced a bill in February that would, among other provisions, increase the amount of cash assistance available to poor parents and keep adjusting it for inflation going forward. The legislation would also extend the limit — currently the shortest in the nation — on the number of months that these families can receive aid.

Advocates said the potential reforms were directly informed by ProPublica’s reporting on a mom in Phoenix named Arianna Bermudez who was cut off from welfare assistance that she desperately needed to be able to afford child care — only to have welfare funding instead be used to help pay for an investigation of her parenting. (Her son was removed from her care for more than six months, even though she was not accused of of child abuse or neglect.)

And in Colorado, a bill was introduced late last month that would make several similar changes, including removing restrictive barriers to accessing cash aid and increasing monthly payments, in part to reflect how rents and prices have been increasing in that state, as they have been around the Southwest.

The New Mexico policy shift is the most dramatic one, and it has been in the works since last year. Making sure that the child support is actually going to children is an administration initiative, according to Nora Meyers Sackett, the governor’s press secretary.

ProPublica’s investigation of this issue found that single mothers applying for public assistance in New Mexico, which has one of the highest child-poverty rates in the U.S., first have to reveal under penalty of perjury who fathered their kids and the exact date when they got pregnant, among other deeply personal details. The state then uses that information to pursue child support from the dads — and pockets much of the money it collects, sharing a large portion with the federal government.

The 1996 welfare reform law signed by then-President Bill Clinton encouraged states to recoup money spent on public assistance in this way, and most states still do it.

It may take several months for the change to take effect, likely until July, according to Jodi McGinnis Porter, a spokesperson for the New Mexico Human Services Department. The fixes that still need to be made, she said, include updates to the state child support computer system and informing the federal government that the new policy is in place.

Arizona, for its part, has been a national outlier in its punitive approach to applicants for public assistance. Only 6% of families in poverty in the state are able to access cash aid, and if they do get help, the amount — $278 a month for a family of three — is one of the lowest in the country.

That’s partly because, during the Great Recession over a decade ago, Arizona started redirecting the majority of its welfare funding to its Department of Child Safety, which investigates parents and in many cases removes their children. Often those under investigation are poor and could have better supported their kids if provided cash assistance.

But the new legislation, which would aim to increase benefits back to pre-Recession levels, is unlikely to pass the Republican-led, fiscally conservative state Legislature. No lawmakers have explicitly come out against the bill yet, but in the past, efforts to expand government programs for the poor have routinely failed in Arizona.

Meanwhile, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox was asked at a December news conference about the restrictive welfare policies that ProPublica investigated in his state. Our reporting found that the Utah Department of Workforce Services has an agreement with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to count a percentage of the church’s charitable work as the state’s own welfare spending, as a way of spending less state money on public assistance.

The department does not appear to have proposed any changes to that policy and did not respond to a request for comment.

by Brooke Stephenson

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This story was originally published in our data newsletter, which you can sign up for here.

Imagine you’re a journalist and you receive a collection of tens of millions of posts from more than 100,000 Facebook groups. You think there’s got to be a story — maybe several — in that cache. But how do you find it?

A team of reporters from ProPublica and the Washington Post was faced with just such a problem in June, when the newsrooms obtained a unique dataset on Facebook groups compiled by CounterAction, a firm that studies online disinformation.

Computational journalist Jeff Kao and reporter Craig Silverman from ProPublica, along with Jeremy B. Merrill and Craig Timberg from The Washington Post, found that between Election Day 2020 and the Jan. 6 siege of the Capitol, Facebook groups exploded with at least 650,000 posts attacking the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory.

The four journalists’ reporting provides some of the clearest evidence yet that Facebook was an important source of misinformation that led to the Jan. 6 attack. Here’s a look at how they did it.

Reporters started with a collection of data on public Facebook groups CounterAction had been monitoring because members had posted links to websites with a strong connection to U.S. politics, or because the groups had members in common with other groups CounterAction was already monitoring. (The dataset did not include private Facebook groups, which are closed to everyone except their members.) This included up to 18 months’ worth of posts from each group. The dataset was so massive, a personal computer simply couldn’t process it; the reporting team had to run its analyses on the cloud.

Reporters initially just wanted to know what the data could tell them about how Facebook was treating political groups on its platform. They consulted with experts and sources, then analyzed the dataset in various ways, looking for patterns. As the summer of 2021 came to a close, Jeff and Craig found something promising.

They saw a spike in the rate at which Facebook removed groups from the platform right before the election, a dramatic drop-off after the election and then another spike again around Jan. 6. The first spike in group removals seemed to show Facebook was capable of efficiently removing misinformation when it was determined to.

For example, reporters identified more than 300 QAnon groups in the CounterAction dataset. All had been removed by October 2020, when Facebook announced a total ban of QAnon.

Note: QAnon-related Facebook groups were identified from a sample of roughly 100,000 public Facebook groups. Only groups with 10 or more posts are shown. Source: A ProPublica-Washington Post analysis of public Facebook group data collected by CounterAction. (Chris Alcantara and Kate Rabinowitz/The Washington Post)

But the speedy removals can be largely credited to a group task force within Facebook’s Civic Integrity Unit, which, according to former members, was disbanded soon after the election.

Facebook banned Stop the Steal groups on Nov. 5, 2020, but the rate of group removals appeared to drag after the election.

As rioters stormed the Capitol, Facebook was again taking down groups at a rate not seen since before the election.

With this in mind, the reporters narrowed their focus to the period between Election Day and Jan. 6, and made a point to look at Stop the Steal groups specifically, since they had a clear connection to the Jan. 6 attack.

Slowly but surely, the investigation was beginning to take shape.

Note: Removal dates for each group are estimates based on when groups became inactive. Political Facebook groups were identified from a sample of roughly 100,000 public Facebook groups. Only groups with 10 or more posts are shown. Source: A ProPublica-Washington Post analysis of public Facebook group data collected by CounterAction. (Chris Alcantara and Kate Rabinowitz/The Washington Post) Why Facebook Groups?

Misinformation on Facebook isn’t limited to groups. But the reporters had reason to believe they were a promising starting point.

For one thing, groups have been important to Facebook’s growth for a long time. The company has heavily promoted groups ever since Mark Zuckerberg made them his strategic priority in 2017. Jeff even remembers seeing ads for them on the New York City subway.

But they’re also one of the platform’s most toxic products.

Because of Facebook’s quest for engagement, Jeff explained, “many of the most popular groups are either clickbait content groups or political groups. And what’s politically engaging? It’s borderline bannable behavior.” In a March internal Facebook report, first published by Politico, Facebook identified “harmful” and “violating” narratives — content worth banning — as the “Worst of the Worst Hate,” “Violence & Incitement,” and “Vaccine Misinformation.”

“Facebook itself did a study saying when you set limits on what users should be allowed to see on the platform, the dynamics of the platform are such that people will walk right up to that line and try not to cross it,” Jeff said. The closer people can walk that line of prohibited content, like stoking political anger with misinformation, the farther their posts travel.

Source Image: Facebook’s Blueprint for Content Governance and Enforcement

Many of the 650,000 group posts reporters identified as challenging the legitimacy of Biden’s election fell into this category. Facebook’s own report warned that these harmful narratives may have had “substantial negative impacts including contributing materially to the capital riot and potentially reducing collective civic engagement and social cohesion in the years to come.”

Drew Pusateri, a spokesperson for Meta, Facebook’s newly renamed parent company, declined to comment on specific posts for our January story, but said the company does not have a policy forbidding posts or comments that attack the legitimacy of the election. He said Meta has a dedicated groups integrity team and an ongoing initiative to protect people who use groups from harm.

Whittling It Down

To zoom in on the political groups with harmful content, reporters had to get a more accurate number of groups within the CounterAction dataset that were actually political. Floating around amid, for example, QAnon and Biden voter groups, were groups of knitters or runners or other groups unrelated to politics that might have ended up being monitored by CounterAction because one member shared a political link during election season.

Tools like keyword searches, which freed reporters from reviewing each group by hand, still cast too wide a net. For example, a search for all the groups that included posts with the word “Trump” would still catch a lot of online chatter in groups that aren’t political. They needed a way to calculate the scale of the problem that didn’t require them to read through all 100,000 groups.

Enter machine learning.

Jeff said when he is trying to figure out if a problem is suited for machine learning, he uses something he calls the “intern test.” “If a reasonably competent intern that you hired off the street who had no prior knowledge could be trained to do it fairly quickly — you show them a few examples like: this is inciting violence, this is not — then the machine learning algorithms could probably do it to a specific accuracy,” Jeff explained, as part of my ex-intern soul died a little out of sheer irrelevance.

Sorting groups into political and non-political buckets passed the intern test.

But in order to teach the underpaid 19-year-old machine how to do it, the team first had to do their own grunt work to provide the examples.

Many of the groups in the dataset disappeared from public view during this project. Based on the groups’ content and the time they disappeared, reporters believed many were taken down by Facebook. More than 5,000 groups that contained meaningful activity (meaning more than 10 of their posts had been flagged by CounterAction) that the reporters analyzed were no longer online as of August 30, 2021. They hand-labeled the political ones: If a group’s name and description showed that it had been created to represent or discuss U.S. politics, or a social movement with strong ties to politics, it went in the “political” bucket. Ultimately, the reporters found about 2,500 of these groups, including those for the QAnon conspiracy theory, militia groups and the Stop the Steal movement.

These groups essentially became the machine’s study guide.

The machine (a text classification model in this case) combed through the remaining groups and compared their posts to those from the 2,500 political groups Jeff had already shown it. Then it predicted how likely each new group was to be political. If the model said there was more than a 50% chance a group was political, the group went into the “political group” bucket. The model identified over 27,000 likely political groups from posts between Election Day and Jan. 6.

Then, like any good teacher, the reporters checked the machine’s work.

They went through a sample of the groups themselves, and determined the model had a precision rate of about 79%, meaning a little over 1 in 5 of the groups that the machine identified turned out to be false positives.

A C+: Under different circumstances, that wouldn’t be anything to display on the refrigerator door.

But the reporters were perfectly happy with it. They didn’t need A+ work, just an estimate accurate enough to cut down the size of the dataset they were working with.

Finding Insurrection Posts in a Haystack

The reporters then enlisted some more help, this time a text-analysis technique called TF-IDF.

Basically, if you give it a bunch of text, TF-IDF will pull out all the words that are used the most often, with more weight given to the most unusual ones.

“Words like ‘the,’ or ‘a’ or ‘and — they don’t really tell you anything about the content of a post, so those would get massively downweighted,” Jeff said.

Reporters sorted for all the Facebook groups with “Stop the Steal” in their names, since these were groups they could be sure sought to delegitimize Biden’s victory.

Then they fed this collection of Stop the Steal groups into TF-IDF, at which point it scratched its head and asked, “Which words make a group a Stop the Steal group?”

It pulled a list of important identifying words or phrases, like “mail-in ballot fraud,” “stop the steal,” “every legal vote” and “treason.” Reporters picked through everything TF-IDF brought up and pulled out the terms that were meaningfully linked to election delegitimization theories; they found about 60.

They also found 86 terms that were linked to delegitimization theories, but only when they appeared alongside other terms. For example, “absentee ballots” on its own doesn’t suggest a post is toxic, but “absentee ballots” plus “fraud” does.

From there, the team did a keyword search based on the terms TF-IDF had identified, and came back with around 1.03 million posts that likely referenced delegitimization.

They again checked the program’s work by hand, going through a sample of the posts the keyword tool had surfaced and checking if they were actually related to election misinformation. The model had a precision rate of about 64%. (False positives included mainstream news articles about extremism, debunkings of fraud claims and references to other countries’ elections.)

To determine a rough number of delegitimizing posts, reporters multiplied the number of “likely” harmful posts (1.03 million) by the estimated proportion of actually toxic posts (64%).

Which brought them to their final estimate: more than 650,000 posts attacking the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

That number is almost certainly an undercount. As mentioned, this analysis only examined posts in a portion of all public groups, and did not include comments, posts in private groups or posts on individuals’ profiles.

Only Facebook has access to all the data to calculate the true total — and it hasn’t done so publicly.

by Craig Silverman and Jeff Kao

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On March 3, Daniil Bezsonov, an official with the pro-Russian separatist region of Ukraine that styles itself as the Donetsk People’s Republic, tweeted a video that he said revealed “How Ukrainian fakes are made.”

The clip showed two juxtaposed videos of a huge explosion in an urban area. Russian-language captions claimed that one video had been circulated by Ukrainian propagandists who said it showed a Russian missile strike in Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city.

But, as captions in the second video explained, the footage actually showed a deadly arms depot explosion in the same area back in 2017. The message was clear: Don’t trust footage of supposed Russian missile strikes. Ukrainians are spreading lies about what’s really going on, and pro-Russian groups are debunking them. (Bezsonov did not respond to questions from ProPublica.)

Stills from a Russian-language video that falsely claims to fact-check Ukrainian disinformation. There’s no evidence the video was created by Ukrainian media or circulated anywhere, but the label at the top says the video is a “New Fake from Ukrainian media.” The central caption inaccurately labels the footage as “Kharkiv is again under attack by the occupants!” falsely attributing the claim to Ukrainian media. The lower caption correctly identifies the event as “Fire at the ammunition depot, the city of Balakliya, 2017.” (Screenshot taken by ProPublica)

It seemed like yet another example of useful wartime fact-checking, except for one problem: There’s little to no evidence that the video claiming the explosion was a missile strike ever circulated. Instead, the debunking video itself appears to be part of a novel and disturbing campaign that spreads disinformation by disguising it as fact-checking.

Researchers at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub and ProPublica identified more than a dozen videos that purport to debunk apparently nonexistent Ukrainian fakes. The videos have racked up more than 1 million views across pro-Russian channels on the messaging app Telegram, and have garnered thousands of likes and retweets on Twitter. A screenshot from one of the fake debunking videos was broadcast on Russian state TV, while another was spread by an official Russian government Twitter account.

The goal of the videos is to inject a sense of doubt among Russian-language audiences as they encounter real images of wrecked Russian military vehicles and the destruction caused by missile and artillery strikes in Ukraine, according to Patrick Warren, an associate professor at Clemson who co-leads the Media Forensics Hub.

“The reason that it’s so effective is because you don’t actually have to convince someone that it’s true. It’s sufficient to make people uncertain as to what they should trust,” said Warren, who has conducted extensive research into Russian internet trolling and disinformation campaigns. “In a sense they are convincing the viewer that it would be possible for a Ukrainian propaganda bureau to do this sort of thing.”

Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine unleashed a torrent of false and misleading information from both sides of the conflict. Viral social media posts claiming to show video of a Ukrainian fighter pilot who shot down six Russian planes — the so-called “Ghost of Kyiv” — were actually drawn from a video game. Ukrainian government officials said 13 border patrol officers guarding an island in the Black Sea were killed by Russian forces after unleashing a defiant obscenity, only to acknowledge a few days later that the soldiers were alive and had been captured by Russian forces.

For its part, the Russian government is loath to admit such mistakes, and it launched a propaganda campaign before the conflict even began. It refuses to use the word “invasion” to describe its use of more than 100,000 troops to enter and occupy territory in a neighboring country, and it is helping spread a baseless conspiracy theory about bioweapons in Ukraine. Russian officials executed a media crackdown culminating in a new law that forbids outlets in the country from publishing anything that deviates from the official stance on the war, while blocking Russians’ access to Facebook and the BBC, among other outlets and platforms.

Media outlets around the world have responded to the onslaught of lies and misinformation by fact-checking and debunking content and claims. The fake fact-check videos capitalize on these efforts to give Russian-speaking viewers the idea that Ukrainians are widely and deliberately circulating false claims about Russian airstrikes and military losses. Transforming debunking into disinformation is a relatively new tactic, one that has not been previously documented during the current conflict.

“It’s the first time I’ve ever seen what I might call a disinformation false-flag operation,” Warren said. “It’s like Russians actually pretending to be Ukrainians spreading disinformation.”

Stills from a Russian-language video that falsely claims to fact-check Ukrainian disinformation. There’s no evidence the video was created by Ukrainian media or circulated anywhere, but the label at the top says the video is “Fake Ukrainian media.” The captions on the left inaccurately label the footage as “A shopping center in Kyiv caught on fire after being hit by a Russian rocket,” falsely attributing the claim to Ukrainian media. The caption on the right correctly identifies the event as “Fire in Pervomais’k from 2021.” (Screenshot taken by ProPublica)

The videos combine with propaganda on Russian state TV to convince Russians that the “special operation” in Ukraine is proceeding well, and that claims of setbacks or air strikes on civilian areas are a Ukrainian disinformation campaign to undermine Russian confidence.

It’s unclear who is creating the videos, or if they come from a single source or many. They have circulated for roughly two weeks, first appearing a few days after Russia invaded. The first video Warren spotted claimed that a Ukrainian flag was removed from old footage of a military vehicle and replaced with a Z, a now-iconic insignia painted on Russian vehicles participating in the invasion. But when he went looking for examples of people sharing the misleading footage with the Z logo, he came up empty.

“I’ve been following [images and videos of the war] pretty carefully in the Telegram feeds, and I had never seen the video they were claiming was a propaganda video, anywhere,” he said. “And so I started digging a little more.”

Warren unearthed other fake fact-checking videos. One purported to debunk false footage of explosions in Kyiv, while others claimed to reveal that Ukrainians were circulating old videos of unrelated explosions and mislabeling them as recent. Some of the videos claim to debunk efforts by Ukrainians to falsely label military vehicles as belonging to the Russian military.

“It’s very clear that this is targeted at Russian-speaking audiences. They’re trying to make people think that when you see destroyed Russian military hardware, you should be suspicious of that,” Warren said.

There’s no question that older footage of military vehicles and explosions have circulated with false or misleading claims that connect them to Ukraine. But in the videos identified by Warren, the allegedly Ukrainian-created disinformation does not appear to have circulated prior to Russian-language debunkings.

Searches for examples of the misleading videos came up empty across social media and elsewhere. Tellingly, none of the supposed debunking videos cite a single example of the Ukrainian fakes being shared on social media or elsewhere. Examination of the metadata of two videos found on Telegram appears to provide an explanation for that absence: Whoever created these videos simply duplicated the original footage to create the alleged Ukrainian fake.

A digital video file contains embedded data, called metadata, that indicates when it was created, what editing software was used and the names of clips used to create a final video, among other information. Two Russian-language debunking videos contain metadata that shows they were created using the same video file twice — once to show the original footage, and once to falsely claim it circulated as Ukrainian disinformation. Whoever created the video added different captions or visual elements to fabricate the Ukrainian version.

“If these videos were what they purport to be, they would be a combination of two separate video files, a ‘Ukrainian fake’ and the original footage,” said Darren Linvill, an associate professor at Clemson who co-leads the Media Forensics Hub with Warren. “The metadata we located for some videos clearly shows that they were created by duplicating a single video file and then editing it. Whoever crafted the debunking video created the fake and debunked it at the same time.”

The Media Forensics Hub and ProPublica ran tests to confirm that a video created using two copies of the same footage will cause the file name to appear twice in the video’s metadata.

Joan Donovan, the research director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, called the videos “low-grade information warfare.” She said they don’t need to spread widely on social media to be effective, since their existence can be cited by major Russian media sources as evidence of Ukraine’s online disinformation campaign.

“It works in conjunction with state TV in the sense that you can put something like this online and then rerun it on TV as if it’s an example of what’s happening online,” she said.

That’s exactly what happened on March 1, when state-controlled Channel One aired a screenshot taken from one of the videos identified by Warren. The image was shown during a morning news program as a warning to “inexperienced viewers” who might be fooled by false images of Ukrainian forces destroying Russian military vehicles, according to a BBC News report.

“Footage continues to be circulated on the internet which cannot be described as anything but fake,” the BBC quoted a Channel One presenter telling the audience.

At least one Russian government account has promoted an apparent fake debunking video. On March 4, the Russian Embassy in Geneva tweeted a video with a voiceover that said “Western and Ukrainian media are creating thousands of fake news on Russia every day.” The first example showed a video where the letter “Z” was supposedly superimposed onto a destroyed military vehicle.

Stills from a Russian-language video that falsely claims to fact-check Ukrainian disinformation. There’s no evidence the video was created by Ukrainian media or circulated anywhere, but the label at the top says the video is a “Ukrainian edit.” The top caption inaccurately labels the footage as “Ukrainians captured Russian equipment.” The lower caption correctly identifies the event as “Video of Ukrainian equipment 2019.” (Screenshot taken by ProPublica)

Another video that circulated on Russian nationalist Telegram channels such as @rlz_the_kraken, which has more than 200,000 subscribers, claimed to show that fake explosions were added to footage of buildings in Kyiv. The explosions and smoke were clearly fabricated, and the video claims they were added by Ukraininans.

Stills from a Russian-language video that falsely claims to fact-check Ukrainian disinformation. There’s no evidence the video was created by Ukrainian media or circulated anywhere, but the label in the middle of the images says “New Fake from Ukraine.” The caption at the top says “Urgent!” and inaccurately labels the footage as “Kyiv was attacked by the Russian army!” while falsely attributing the claim to Ukrainian media. The lower caption correctly identifies the image as “Kyiv 2017.” (Screenshot taken by ProPublica)

But as with the other fake debunking videos, reverse image searches didn’t turn up any examples of the supposedly manipulated video being shared online. The metadata associated with the video file indicates that it may have been manipulated to add sound and other effects using ​​Microsoft Game DVR, a piece of software that records clips from video games.

The fake debunking videos have predominantly spread on Russian-language Telegram channels with names like @FAKEcemetary. In recent days they made the leap to other languages and platforms. One video is the subject of a Reddit thread where people debated the veracity of the footage. On Twitter, they are being spread by people who support Russia, and who present the videos as examples of Ukrainian disinformation.

Francesca Totolo, an Italian writer and supporter of the neo-fascist CasaPound party, recently tweeted the video claiming that a Ukrainian flag had been removed from a military vehicle and replaced with a Russian Z.

“Now wars are also fought in the media and on social networks,” she said.

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by Megan O’Matz

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At a wedding hall in rural northwest Wisconsin, an evangelist hollered a question to an eager crowd of conferencegoers: “Who thinks Wisconsin can be saved?”

He was answered with enthusiastic whistles and cheers. The truth, he said, would be revealed. “We need transparency!”

The subject: the nation’s election systems. The preacher was among a group of conservative speakers, including politicians, data gurus and former military officers, who theorized on the mechanics of voter fraud in general — and specifically distrust in the voter rolls, the official lists of eligible voters.

“Voter rolls are very, very important to the process,” Florida software and database engineer Jeff O’Donnell told the gathering of 300 in late January in Chippewa Falls, deeming the rolls “the ground zero” of what he called Democratic plots to steal elections. The only way former President Donald Trump could have lost his reelection campaign in 2020, O’Donnell said in an interview, was if voter rolls had been inflated with people who shouldn’t have been able to cast ballots.

Ever since Trump failed to convince the world that he lost the 2020 election because of fraud, like-minded people across the country have been taking up the same rallying cry, revisiting that vote with an eye toward what will happen in 2022.

Now, a new group is stepping into a more conspicuous role in that world by providing easily accessible tools for people in Wisconsin, other Midwest battleground states and, eventually, the entire country to forge ahead with a quest to prove election irregularities.

Calling its work unprecedented, the Voter Reference Foundation is analyzing state voter rolls in search of discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and the number of voters credited by the rolls as having participated in the Nov. 3, 2020 election.

The foundation, led by a former Trump campaign official and founded less than a year ago, has dismissed objections from election officials that its methodology is flawed and its actions may be illegal, ProPublica found. But with its inquiries and insinuations, VoteRef, as it is known, has added to the volume in the echo chamber.

Its instrument is the voter rolls, released line by line, for all to see.

In early August, the foundation published on its website the names, birthdates, addresses and voting histories for 2 million Nevada voters, information that is normally public but only available on request, for a fee. It claimed to have found a significant discrepancy between the number of voters and the number of ballots cast, despite being warned by state election officials that its findings were “fundamentally incorrect.”

In the months since, VoteRef has reported similar discrepancies in rolls posted for 18 other states, including the 2020 election battlegrounds of Michigan, Georgia, Ohio and Wisconsin. Most recently, it added Texas. It intends to post the rolls of all 50 states by year’s end.

“Voter File Transparency site adds Michigan; large discrepancy found,” read a headline on a Dec. 6 press release put out by the organization, which is led by Gina Swoboda, a high-ranking officer in the Republican Party of Arizona.

The project is still in its early stages, and the people at the Chippewa Falls conference did not mention VoteRef specifically.

Still, the VoteRef initiative is an important indication of how some influential and well-funded Republicans across the country plan to encourage crowdsourcing of voter rolls to find what they consider errors and anomalies, then dispute voter registrations of specific individuals. Visitors to the VoteRef site are able to scroll through data on more than 106 million people in a free, easy-to-use format. The VoteRef data includes personal identifying information of every voter and the years they voted, but not how they voted.

People line up at a polling place in Franklin, Wisconsin, on Nov. 3, 2020. VoteRef has posted that state's voter rolls. (Chang W. Lee/The New York Times via Redux)

VoteRef’s methods have already led to pushback from state officials. The New Mexico Secretary of State believes posting data about individual voters online is not a permissible use under state law and has referred the matter to the state attorney general for criminal investigation.

And an attorney for the Pennsylvania Department of State notified VoteRef in January that state law prohibits publishing the voter rolls on the internet and asked that the data be removed. VoteRef complied.

ProPublica contacted election officials in a dozen of the states where VoteRef has examined voter rolls, and in every case the officials said that the methodology used to identify the discrepancies was flawed, the data incomplete or the math wrong. The officials, a mix of Democrats and Republicans, were in Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.

“The accuracy and integrity of Michigan’s election has been confirmed by hundreds of audits, numerous courts and a GOP-led Oversight Committee analysis,” said Tracy Wimmer, director of media relations for Michigan’s secretary of state.

“This is simply another meritless example of election misinformation being disseminated to undermine well-founded faith in Michigan’s election system, and from an organization led by at least one former member of the Trump campaign,” Wimmer said.

VoteRef, records show, is an initiative of the conservative nonprofit group Restoration Action and its related political action committee, both led by Doug Truax, an Illinois insurance broker and podcaster who ran unsuccessfully in the state’s GOP primary for the U.S. Senate in 2014.

A ProPublica review found that VoteRef’s origins and funders are closely linked to a super PAC predominantly funded by billionaire Richard Uihlein, founder of the mammoth Wisconsin-based packaging supply company Uline. A descendant of one of the founders of the Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company, Uihlein is a major Trump supporter and a key player in Wisconsin and Illinois politics. Among his political donations: $800,000 in September 2020 to the Tea Party Patriots political action committee, a group that helped organize the Jan. 6 rally that led to the Capitol insurrection.

Uihlein and his wife, Elizabeth Uihlein, have contributed in excess of $30 million combined over two decades to mainly Republican candidates on the state and local level, particularly in Illinois and Wisconsin, according to OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan organization that tracks campaign donor information. The total includes money given to groups that advocate on behalf of candidates as well as direct contributions.

Doug Truax during his unsuccessful 2014 campaign in Illinois for the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate. VoteRef is an initiative of Truax’s nonprofit group Restoration Action and its political action committee. (Joe Lewnard/Daily Herald via AP Photo)

Voter rolls are public information, typically used by campaigns to identify potential supporters, target messages or persuade people to go to the polls. Journalists and some businesses also at times use the rolls for newsgathering or commercial purposes.

VoteRef has said its aim is to increase transparency in the elections process, echoing the language used to justify door-to-door address checks, painstaking ballot audits and other efforts that Trump supporters are continuing to employ to parse the 2020 election. To publicize the results of its analysis of ballot inconsistencies, it crafted press releases that then were parroted on sites that purport to be legitimate news outlets and were connected to a media network that received large sums of money from VoteRef.

“VoteRef is the beginning of a new era of American election transparency,” Swoboda, VoteRef’s executive director, said in its Nevada press release. “We have an absolute right to see everything behind the curtain.” 

Until a few months before the 2020 election, Swoboda, a resident of Scottsdale, a Phoenix suburb, was a professional in Arizona’s election system, working as the campaign finance and lobbying supervisor in the Arizona Secretary of State’s Office.

Swoboda then served as Election Day operations director for the Trump campaign in Arizona, according to a sworn court affidavit she gave in Arizona in November 2020 as part of Trump’s legal challenge to election results there. She described how she took complaints from people who thought poll workers allowed defective ballots to be submitted, in what later became known as “SharpieGate.” (Votes made with a Sharpie do count, the state said.)

She and others associated with VoteRef declined to be interviewed for this story. But Swoboda did respond via email.

“In each of the states we’ve researched to date, the election data math simply doesn’t add up,” she wrote. “That requires reform. We seek to spur this reform through the sustained spotlighting of inaccuracies or wrongdoing.”

Flawed Methodology

As of late February, VoteRef showed 431,173 more ballots cast overall than people credited by voter rolls with having participated in the 2020 election.

To those unschooled in the mechanics of elections, VoteRef’s approach could seem reasonable: Compare the total number of ballots cast in the Nov. 3, 2020 election with the number of current voters on the rolls who have recorded histories of having participated in the vote.

For example, the VoteRef table for Nevada shows 8,952 more ballots cast than individuals credited with voting, based on histories obtained in February 2021.

“Theoretically, these numbers should match,” VoteRef claimed in an August press release.

But there are valid reasons the numbers do not match. 

Nevada election officials explained it this way in a press release: “If ‘John Doe’ votes and has his ballot counted in Lander County, then moves to Mineral County, once he is registered in Mineral County, he will show no vote history because he has no vote history in Mineral County. The farther away from the election the data is acquired, the more it will have changed.”

In Connecticut, there were 1,839,714 ballots cast in 2020, according to VoteRef, but the group’s examination of voter histories in October, 2021, showed 1,802,458 people voting. VoteRef’s conclusion is that there was a discrepancy of 37,256 ballots.

But state election officials said that the registration database is “live,” and voting histories of those who moved out of state or died in the months after the election would have been removed from the rolls, accounting for the discrepancy.   

“The list is not a static list,” said Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill. “It changes all the time.”

In Michigan, where VoteRef found a difference of more than 74,000 votes, an elections official said that state’s qualified voter file also constantly changes as it's updated, making the data the foundation relied on in late May 2021 — more than six months after the election — out of date.

In a recent email to ProPublica, Swoboda conceded as much.

“It's up to election officials who run election offices to reconcile their data, not the Voter Reference Foundation, which merely publishes their information in a consumer-friendly format,” she said. “Of course, our election experts are well aware of the time lag between certification and data pulls — we posted the documents online for all to see!”

Federal law requires that election supervisors make reasonable efforts to update voter lists, but provides leeway in how states carry out the task. The law prohibits administrators from removing people for simply not voting in repeated elections, unless notices go unanswered and officials wait for two federal election cycles before putting the voters on an inactive list.

Counties haven’t always done a good job, however, in maintaining the voter rolls, leading some people to distrust the system. One of VoteRef’s key aims is to task ordinary people with the chore of finding anomalies.

Scrutinizing Voter Rolls and Neighbors

In announcing the launch of its website, the Voter Reference Foundation touted it as a “first of its kind” searchable tool for all 50 states “that will finally give American citizens a way to examine crucial voting records.”

“Citizens will be able to check their voting status, voting history, and those of their neighbors, friends and others. They will be able to ‘crowd-source’ any errors,” the press release stated.

The group’s backers have encouraged scrutiny outside of one’s own household.

“With VoteRef.com you can find out who voted and who didn’t. Did your aunt who died 10 years ago ‘vote’ after she died? Did your ‘neighbor’ who moved to another state vote? Did 55 votes emerge from a five-unit apartment complex?” Jeffrey Carter, a partner in a venture capital group who earlier had appeared on Truax’s podcast, wrote on the newsletter site Substack in December. 

Matt Batzel, whose organization American Majority recently highlighted VoteRef’s efforts in Wisconsin, said in an interview with ProPublica that VoteRef’s vision is for citizens to detect and then report potential problems with the voter rolls, such as people who are registered to vote at vacant lots or unusually high numbers of votes coming from nursing homes.

Election experts say the type of work being done by VoteRef risks leading to further misinformation or being weaponized by people trying to undermine the legitimacy of the past election or give the sense that voter fraud is a more encompassing problem than it’s proven to be. Or it could be used to harass or intimidate valid voters under the guise of challenging their legitimacy. 

A woman votes in Columbus, Ohio, on Nov. 3, 2020. The Voter Reference Foundation has posted that state’s voter roll. (Maddie McGarvey/The New York Times via Redux)

Even without any clear evidence of fraud during the 2020 election, the vast, decentralized election system still is drawing scrutiny from those who believe that the system can be easily manipulated. At the daylong voter integrity conference in Chippewa Falls, speakers invoked war imagery, spoke of coverups, and urged people to “expose the tactics” of the political left. The group — saluted via video by Trump acolyte and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell — is seeking to put like-minded individuals in vote-certifying secretary of state offices nationwide.

The voter rolls have been targeted, too, by others in Wisconsin, including special counsel Michael J. Gableman, a former state Supreme Court justice and Trump supporter who the state’s Republican Assembly speaker appointed in June to conduct a review of Wisconsin’s administration of the 2020 election. On March 1, Gableman released a report blasting what he called “opaque, confusing, and often botched election processes.”

Gableman urged the Legislature to consider legal methods to enable citizens or civil rights groups to help maintain election databases.

“As it stands, there is no clear method for individuals with facial evidence of inaccurate voter rolls to enter state court and seek to fix that problem,” he wrote. He envisioned a system that “could even provide nominal rewards for successful voter roll challenges.”

While information about voters is available in most states, it comes at a cost and with limits on how it can be distributed to avoid having some private information be easily accessible. 

In January, an official with the Pennsylvania Department of State wrote to Truax warning that it appeared that the Voter Reference Foundation had “unlawfully posted Pennsylvania-voter information on its website” and demanding that the organization “take immediate action” to remove the information.

Soon, Pennsylvania data disappeared from the website. Swoboda declined to answer questions about the matter. Attempts to reach Truax were unsuccessful.

In New Mexico, Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver also said the undertaking is not an allowable use of voter data. By state law, she said, the rolls can only be used for governmental or campaign purposes.

“Having voter registration data ‘blasted out across the internet’ violates state law limiting use of the voter rolls solely for campaign or government activities,” she said. In December, Toulouse Oliver’s office referred the matter to the state attorney general for investigation and possible prosecution.

Associates of the Voter Reference Foundation dismiss these privacy concerns.

"You are joking, right?” said Bill Wilson, chairman of the conservative-leaning Market Research Foundation of Fairfax, Virginia, which paid more than $11,000 to the state of Virginia in March 2021 for the voter roll data and shared it with the Voter Reference Foundation.

“Big tech, both political parties and big media have no interest or concern for privacy and have mountains of data on individuals that is shared and sold on an hourly basis. You called me at my home, after all.’’

Support in GOP Circles

Restoration Action/PAC describes itself on its website as an “effective dynamo against those trying to destroy our country.” It produces ads on behalf of state and national candidates, castigates Planned Parenthood, “biased liberal media” and “Big Tech” and advocates for fair elections.

Truax, the group’s head, frequently assumes the role of news anchor to host the First Right video podcast, interviewing far-right conservatives. In early June last year, he introduced his audience to VoteRef, telling them: “We helped create the organization, and we’ll have much more to say about it in the coming weeks.”

Gina Swoboda, left, who leads VoteRef, appears with Truax on his video podcast. (Screenshot via RestorationPAC, YouTube)

Richard Uihlein’s quiet role was essential. He’s been the primary funder of Restoration PAC since its inception in 2015, contributing at least $44 million, according to the data from OpenSecrets. In May 2021, Federal Election Commission records show, Uihlein donated $1.5 million to Restoration PAC. That same month, the Voter Reference Foundation was incorporated in Ohio.

Two weeks after the Uihlein donation, money started flowing from Restoration PAC to a media network that did some data procurement and analysis for VoteRef, with payments totalling more than $955,000 as of the end of 2021, the FEC records show.

The network, which includes Pipeline Media, is operated by Bradley Cameron, a Texas business strategist, state corporation records show. Brian Timpone is listed as a manager at Pipeline Media. He made headlines a decade ago after his firm, then called Journatic, came under fire for outsourcing hyperlocal news offshore using phony bylines.

In recent months, VoteRef has released press releases about its activities that have been turned into stories on sites owned by Metric Media, which Cameron leads, according to his online profile. The sites mimic legitimate news outlets but print press releases, shun bylines, do little to no original reporting and rely on automated data. “New website to publish which Arlington residents voted, did not vote in gubernatorial election,” read an Oct. 28 headline in the Central Nova News of Virginia, a Metric Media site.

Uihlein did not respond to calls or emails from ProPublica seeking comment. Cameron and Timpone also did not reply to messages seeking an interview.

Political figures with ties to Trump have been touting the efforts of VoteRef.

Among them: former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, an immigration hard-liner appointed by Trump to serve as acting head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Cuccinelli now heads the Election Transparency Initiative, a Virginia organization opposed to expanding early voting or easing registration requirements. The initiative, a project of the conservative group Susan B. Anthony List, says it partners with The Heritage Foundation’s political arm.

Cuccinelli spoke in September to about 100 party loyalists at a gathering at a suburban Milwaukee hotel about how they could use the VoteRef tools and become involved in securing the elections process. 

Similarly, J. Hogan Gidley, former national press secretary for the 2020 Trump campaign, promoted the work of VoteRef on Philadelphia conservative talk radio before Christmas. 

“We’re doing some work with them, too. We know the folks over there really well,” said Gidley, who is now with the America First Policy Institute, a nonprofit packed with Trump administration alums.

Truax, meanwhile, brought in Swoboda for his podcast last summer. They talked about the Arizona ballot audit and briefly referenced her work with the Voter Reference Foundation.

“It always feels like to me that the states, in general, have gotten a little sloppy in different areas and just you know nobody’s really paying a lot of attention to it,” Truax said.

He added: “Now I think as conservatives we’re in a place we really got to pay a lot more attention. There’s a lot of energy now on this.”

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Alexandra Berzon contributed reporting.

Update, March 7, 2022: This story was updated to reflect Texas's voter rolls, which the Voter Reference Foundation posted the day this story was published.

by Perla Trevizo and Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Mike Hixenbaugh, NBC News

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

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

It was also produced in partnership with NBC News.

The Houston Fire Department reprimanded a firefighter for misconduct after an investigation into a delayed 911 response to a case in which a mother and daughter died of carbon monoxide poisoning.

The department opened the investigation in July, following reporting from ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and NBC News, which revealed that first responders initially decided not to enter a Houston family’s home during the massive winter storm that hit Texas in February 2021, a decision that resulted in a couple and their two children being exposed to the lethal gas for an additional three hours.

The fire department has not disclosed details of the investigation. In a letter to the Texas attorney general fighting the release of records to the news organizations, Houston officials wrote that state law prevents the public disclosure of records dealing with misconduct of a firefighter or police officer. But the letter states that the “allegations of misconduct in this investigation were sustained and disciplinary action was taken against the firefighter.”

In an email to the news organizations, Houston Fire Chief Samuel Peña confirmed that the investigation found evidence of misconduct but declined to elaborate because of a potential appeal from the disciplined firefighter. Peña told the news organizations in August that he was awaiting the results of the investigation but that it appeared a fire captain in the dispatch center “failed to provide the necessary information for the people on scene to make the appropriate decision.”

The department’s decision to discipline a firefighter is one in a series of actions taken by governmental bodies after a yearlong investigation by the news organizations, which found failures at every level of government to protect residents of Texas and other states from carbon monoxide poisoning. Safety gaps and a lack of consistent policies have left residents vulnerable to the invisible gas. These policy failures contributed to the worst carbon monoxide poisoning catastrophe in recent history as power outages swept Texas during the winter storm, the news organizations found. The state has confirmed at least 19 deaths from carbon monoxide after residents tried to stay warm by using barbecue grills, running their cars or starting up portable generators in enclosed spaces.

Following reporting on the dangers of portable generators and the lack of federal regulations, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission last week announced that it intends to recommend new mandatory rules to make the generators safer, saying manufacturers have not voluntarily done enough to prevent carbon monoxide poisoning deaths caused by their products.

And in Texas, the Harris County fire marshal is drafting a proposal that would require carbon monoxide detectors in more apartments and town houses, at the request of county commissioners. Harris County leaders also said they would lobby the Legislature during its next session in 2023 for the ability to require carbon monoxide alarms in single-family homes.

The decisions came after the news organizations found that Texas was one of only six states with no statewide requirement for carbon monoxide detectors in homes, resulting in uneven protections for residents. The Texas Legislature later passed a measure that requires carbon monoxide alarms in homes built or renovated starting this year. The legislation does not apply to nearly 10 million existing homes and apartments.

Harris County, which includes Houston, was hit particularly hard by the 2021 storm. At least five people died from carbon monoxide poisoning, and more than 590 residents sought care in emergency rooms after exposure to the gas.

Shalemu Bekele, his wife, Etenesh Mersha, and their two children were among those poisoned on Feb. 15, 2021, after she turned on their car that morning in the family’s attached garage to keep warm and charge her phone. Relatives called 911 in the evening after they were contacted by a friend who had been on the phone with Mersha when she and the family stopped responding.

Firefighters were dispatched to the home but left after no one answered the door. A 911 dispatcher told Michael Negussie, Bekele’s cousin, that he would relay concerns that the family might have been poisoned by carbon monoxide to the emergency responders on the scene, but never did, according to 911 recordings and records obtained by the news organizations, as well as interviews with fire department officials.

A fire crew returned nearly three hours later after a series of increasingly worried 911 calls from Negussie, who repeatedly told dispatchers that he believed his relatives had been poisoned. The emergency responders entered through an unlocked door and found Mersha and the couple’s 7-year-old daughter, Rakaeb, dead. Bekele and their 8-year-old son, Beimnet, were rushed to the hospital, where they recovered.

Neither Negussie nor Bekele responded to requests for comment this week.

Because of a lack of uniform policies, first responders in Texas and across the country have discretion when deciding whether to enter a home. Houston fire officials have pointed to a department memo that says firefighters should ensure that they are in the right location, look for signs someone is inside, check with neighbors and contact dispatch to ask for additional information from the caller. If emergency crews decide to forcefully enter the home, they should call the police for support, according to the memo.

Officials with the city’s fire department did not respond to questions about whether they had made any policy changes following the investigation into the circumstances of Mersha and Rakaeb’s deaths.

Bill Toon, a retired EMS provider and consultant with decades of experience, said the department should assess whether additional policies are needed to prevent future incidents.

“To me, this isn’t about an individual — it’s about a systemwide practice,” Toon said. “If you’ve discovered this incident, and it probably isn’t the only one that they have, what are you going to do to prevent it from happening in the future?”

by Joaquin Sapien and Joshua Kaplan

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

The U.S. House of Representatives select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol issued a subpoena on Thursday to Kimberly Guilfoyle, a top fundraiser for former President Donald Trump and the fiancee of his son, Donald Trump Jr.

The subpoena cites a text message Guilfoyle sent to former Trump campaign adviser Katrina Pierson, in which Guilfoyle claims to have raised millions of dollars for the rally that preceded the Capitol riot. The text exchange was first reported in November by ProPublica.

In the text, Guilfoyle wrote that she “raised so much money for this. Literally one of my donors Julie at 3 million.” She was referring to Julie Jenkins Fancelli, a Publix supermarket heir and the biggest known funder for the Jan. 6 rally. Fancelli previously did not respond to ProPublica requests for comment on the matter.

The subpoena, which seeks to force Guilfoyle to hand over documents and appear for a deposition, also stated that she “communicated with others” about the speaking lineup for the Jan. 6 rally and met with Trump and members of his family in the Oval Office that morning.

Guilfoyle is the first member of the Trump family circle to be subpoenaed by the select committee. Guilfoyle and Trump Jr. announced their engagement in January. She was appointed national chair of the Trump Victory finance committee in January 2020 and was put at the helm of the former president’s super PAC last fall.

The subpoena is another indication that the committee is becoming increasingly aggressive in its investigation into the Capitol attack. In documents filed in a civil case in a California district court on Wednesday, the committee said for the first time that it had evidence that could potentially lead to criminal charges against the former president for his actions leading up to the Jan. 6 attack, including obstructing an official proceeding of Congress and conspiracy to defraud the United States. The committee would refer any potential criminal charge to the Justice Department to decide whether to prosecute. Trump has denied any wrongdoing.

The step comes almost a week after Guilfoyle walked out of a meeting with the committee after initially agreeing to answer questions about the events of Jan. 6. According to a statement from her lawyer last week, Guilfoyle left the meeting because she was concerned members of the committee would leak information from the interview to the press.

In September, citing ProPublica reporting, the committee sent subpoenas to Pierson and Caroline Wren, a Republican fundraiser who served as Guilfoyle’s deputy during the 2020 campaign. The committee subsequently issued subpoenas to three close advisers to Trump Jr. and Guilfoyle.

In a statement, Joe Tacopina, Guilfoyle’s attorney, said the subpoena was a politically motivated abuse of power and that Guilfoyle will answer questions truthfully. “She has done nothing wrong,” he said. In November, Tacopina said the texts to Pierson were not about the Jan. 6 rally and threatened to “aggressively pursue all legal remedies available” against ProPublica. At the time, Pierson declined to comment and Trump Jr. did not respond to emailed questions.

ProPublica previously reported that Wren told another rally organizer that she raised $3 million for the Jan. 6 rally and “parked” the funds in several dark money organizations.

Wren previously sent a statement to ProPublica from her attorney that did not address how much money was raised for the rally or how it was spent, but stated that to her “knowledge, Kimberly Guilfoyle had no involvement in raising funds for any events on January 6th.”

Guilfoyle developed a professional relationship with Fancelli during the 2020 campaign, according to documents obtained by ProPublica, and Fancelli donated $250,000 to Trump Victory shortly after receiving a call from Guilfoyle.

by Caroline Chen

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As the United States relaxes pandemic restrictions, advising some 70% of Americans they no longer need to wear a mask, many parents of young children are desperate to know when they can expect a vaccine to be authorized for kids under 5.

But opaque communication from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and drugmakers, on top of whiplash over the shifting timeline and unexpected delays, has led to confusion and angst. Some parents are obsessively tracking every press release, investor report and social media announcement to glean information, and a few have even lied about their kids’ ages to get their children vaccinated. Many feel they are on their own.

“I just feel like we are being left on Pandemic Island,” said Jen Wendeln, mother to a 3-year-old boy in Cincinnati. “They’ve sent rescue boats several times and then told us: ‘Never mind, none for your children. Don’t worry, we’ll come back, just keep waiting.’”

Parents have been told that vaccines for little ones are coming “soon” over and over. In September, Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla said that two-shot data for 2- to 4-year-olds would be available “before the end of the year,” with submission to the FDA soon after. That data turned out to contain mixed news, and timelines got pushed out as Pfizer added a third shot. Parents grew hopeful when Dr. Anthony Fauci suggested authorization could happen sometime in February, and momentum seemed to be gathering as the FDA scheduled a meeting of outside experts to review Pfizer’s data on Feb. 15 to consider authorizing two doses first while waiting for data on the third. In the latest twist, however, the FDA then delayed that meeting, saying that new information had led it to decide it was better to wait for more data.

All of this happened as first the delta variant, then omicron, sent an increasing number of children to the hospital, filling up pediatric wards. Some parents, hearing experts urge the public to get vaccinated as soon as possible to prevent catching the highly infectious variant, were frustrated not to have that option for their children. “I put my kids in car seats. I laid them on their back when they were babies so they wouldn’t suffocate,” said Dr. Amy Cho, an emergency room physician in Minnetonka, Minnesota. Knowing that vaccines are preventing deaths in kids over 5, it pains her that one isn’t available yet for her 3-year-old. “I couldn’t live with myself knowing I didn’t do everything I could to prevent that outcome,” she said.

Thousands of parents have turned to Facebook groups to share information and seek answers to their questions: Why the delay? When would the data become public? What is going on with the trials? Conspiracy theories have blossomed and rumors are rampant.

To bring some clarity to the conversation, I dug into FDA policy and asked officials at the agency, Moderna and Pfizer as well as pediatric vaccine experts the questions parents most want answered. What I learned dispels a widespread myth, adds context to the factors officials are deliberating and provides an update on timing.

Why Do Parents Want a Vaccine?

While children under 5 are much less vulnerable to the coronavirus than adults, they are not invulnerable to serious consequences. In the United States, more than 460 children under 5 have died of COVID-19, according to the CDC. They’ve been hospitalized and have died at a higher rate than kids ages 5 to 11, according to the agency. “It’s very frustrating for us, writing off kids who have died — what’s the acceptable number of child deaths for people?” asked Dr. Scott Krugman, vice chair of pediatrics at the Herman & Walter Samuelson Children's Hospital at Sinai. “If it’s preventable, it should be zero.”

A source of anxiety for many parents is that it’s hard to predict which kids may have bad outcomes. While children with asthma or other lung conditions are more likely to suffer from pneumonia if they are infected, researchers still don’t know what puts a child at higher risk of suffering from multisystem inflammatory syndrome, or MIS-C. The condition, in which many different organs including the heart, lungs, kidneys and brains become inflamed, can be serious and even deadly. Children with no preexisting conditions are often the ones who experience MIS-C, Krugman said: “They’re perfectly healthy 4- or 5 year-olds who randomly show up with cardiac enzymes through the roof and who need close monitoring and support.” Some other children also experience symptoms that last for months.

Experts have been telling parents that they can keep their little ones safe by surrounding them with people who are vaccinated, boosted and masked. But many parents point out that restrictions are easing and people are becoming more active, so the risk is actually increasing for their children. As schools drop mask mandates as well, some parents are also worried that their vaccinated older kids could bring the virus home to their unvaccinated younger siblings.

“Things are getting less safe for those of us who cannot vaccinate our family members — knowing there are even fewer people wearing masks makes everything that much more dangerous for us,” said Chris Nammour, father of a 2-year-old in Puyallup, Washington. So far, he’s chosen not to send his daughter to day care. “Our world is very small.”

What Exactly Does the FDA Consider Before Approving the Vaccine?

Many parents who want a vaccine say they don’t expect perfection: They don’t expect it to prevent infection, but want to lower the risk of the worst outcomes for their children, like hospitalizations or Long COVID. Emily Whittington is one of them. Her 4-year-old son, Jeremy, was born with a rare gene mutation that causes brain malformations and is particularly at risk of experiencing a seizure if he gets sick. Whittington lives in rural West Virginia and said that the low vaccination rate in her area has made her have to keep Jeremy out of pre-K to avoid exposure. “Can any of those doctors or advisory boards look me in the eye and say, ‘Your son is better off getting COVID without the vaccine than with some protection?’”

But the agency isn’t considering Whittington’s situation in isolation; it has a far more complicated calculus to make. “In addition to those people who are really excited about getting their kids vaccinated, there are also a lot of people out there that are like ... I really want to know that, if the FDA tells me I’m going to have to give this to my kid or I should give this to my kid, I want to know that it really works,” an FDA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told me. Only 1 in 4 children ages 5 to11 was fully vaccinated as of March 1, and polling has shown that about a third of parents want to “wait and see,” while another third do not plan to get their child the shot.

“The challenge we have is, if we take something forward where there’s tremendous controversy because the data are not really clear, there can be a lot of confusion in the public, and ultimately, it can be counterproductive for getting the population vaccinated,” the official said.

The FDA also considers what’s going on in real time. When cases of omicron were surging and more and more kids were being hospitalized, the agency made an unprecedented move by saying it would consider authorizing two shots of the Pfizer vaccine for kids under 5 while waiting for the rest of the efficacy data on a third shot. The thinking was that those kids could get a head start on the vaccine series before the third shot was authorized. But the plan also hung on the presumption that the third dose would do the trick. What if Pfizer’s three doses still weren’t enough? Some experts worried that it was a risky move for the agency to take.

“If it didn’t work out, the price they could pay could be a lack of confidence not just in the COVID-19 vaccinations but a spillover into other childhood vaccinations,” said Dr. Peter Hotez, a pediatrician and dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. And what if a fourth or a fifth dose was ultimately needed? asked Dr. C. Buddy Creech, professor of pediatrics and director of the Vanderbilt Vaccine Research Program. “Do side-effect profiles go up when we do that? Does it change over time if you keep hammering the immune system with the same antigen over and over again?”

Pfizer, which was gathering data in real time, reportedly found that its shots were less effective against the omicron variant. With this new information in hand, the FDA decided to delay and wait for data from all three shots to come in before considering authorization. One factor in the decision was that risk for children overall has dropped as omicron cases have fallen. “In the midst of a huge surge, the benefit/risk [calculation] could be different than when you’re now coming towards the tail of a surge,” the FDA official said. “It doesn't change our essential considerations, which are that the vaccine has to show the safety that we need ... but it is true that the efficacy that we would expect, that could be a little bit different depending on the amount of disease that was circulating at a given time, the amount of hospitalizations, etc.”

The agency has a challenging job of balancing the need for thoroughness with speed, said Dr. Paul Spearman, director of the division of infectious diseases at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Children are not just little adults — their immune systems are different — so you can’t just scale down the existing vaccine proportionally and presume it’ll be both safe and effective. It’s not unusual for children’s vaccine trials to take longer than adults’ because of additional steps needed to find the correct dosage for different age groups, Spearman said. “There’s more care taken about safety and finding a precise dose, and more scrutiny, because it's a vulnerable population.”

Ian Stone, parent of a 4-year-old in San Diego, said he’s willing to wait for a vaccine. “I want it to be safe. I want it to be effective. I don’t want it to be pushed forward because we have to have something,” he said. But Stone, who works in public relations, said he thinks the unexpected delay “may cause more harm than good. It’ll make people question and scrutinize it that much more. If it wasn’t ready, I wish they hadn’t gotten hopes up because you’ve drawn unwanted attention.”

Is “Age De-escalation” a Real FDA Vaccine Policy?

Misinformation has further confused parents, causing unnecessary concern that vaccines will be further delayed.

In December, Pfizer said that two shots were found to be safe for all kids under 5, but while children under 2 generated antibody levels similar to what has been seen in 16- to 25-year-olds, the 2- to 4-year-olds did not hit the same bar for effectiveness. In response to the results, the drugmaker said it would start testing a three-shot regimen to see if that could increase the level of protection.

For parents of children under 2, the obvious question was: Why not authorize the shot for the babies first?

It was surprisingly hard to get a clear answer to this question. A myth sprung up and circulated around the internet, printed in traditional media and repeated by doctors, that the FDA had a policy that prohibited it from authorizing vaccines for age groups out of order. It was referred to as an “age de-escalation policy.”

Age de-escalation describes how some clinical trials are run, including the COVID-19 vaccine trials. Adults are enrolled first, and once the vaccines are proven safe and effective, then the trial extends to younger and younger age groups. This is important for a number of reasons including safety — adults and teens are better able to articulate side effects they may be experiencing, so if a side effect is identified as related to the vaccine, researchers can look out for that symptom in younger kids who may not be as articulate; a fussing baby, as every parent knows, can be difficult to interpret.

But when it comes to authorizing vaccines, that doesn’t apply. “There’s no such policy, and we would have been happy to skip an age group,” the FDA official told me.

I also asked Pfizer why, then, it hadn’t sought authorization for kids under 2 first. The oblique answer I got from a spokeswoman was: “We’re continuing to study a third dose in this population.” I asked for more information and was told, “If successful, we will pursue a three-dose series based on the ongoing late stage study.”

So Pfizer is pursuing a three-dose series for all kids under 5. But why do that, if two doses had worked for the younger age group?

The FDA is tightly limited by regulation and cannot publicly discuss trial data before approval outside of specific circumstances, such as an advisory committee. That has accounted for much of the agency’s reticence. The official could only tell me, enigmatically, that “eventually it will become clear that there was not a way to skip an age group here.” Perhaps something in Pfizer’s data in infants made the drugmaker or FDA determine it wasn’t sufficient for authorization, but until data becomes public, it is impossible to know.

As for Moderna, authorization of its vaccine for 12- to 17-year-olds has been held up in the U.S. because of concerns that it could cause myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscle. Moderna is now testing a smaller dose for adolescents and 6- to 11-year-olds, but in the meantime, the company has said that it expects data from its trial of kids under 5 in March.

Parents, again confused by the supposed age de-escalation policy, have speculated that Moderna could not ask the FDA for authorization for the youngest kids before the teens had access to the vaccine.

Not so, a Moderna spokesperson told me: “Once the data are available in this age group, Moderna will review the data and decide whether to file for Emergency Use Authorization independent of whether other EUA submissions currently under review have already been approved.”

What’s Next for Vaccines for Small Children?

Here’s the good news: Two companies could have data on vaccines in kids under 5 in a matter of weeks. Pfizer has said it’ll have data on three doses “in spring” and Moderna has said it’ll have data by the end of March. If the data looks good, there’s nothing to stop the FDA from authorizing a vaccine for kids of a certain age group, even if an older cohort misses the mark or hasn’t yet gotten the green light. Creech, who is also a principal investigator for Moderna’s pediatric vaccine trials, and Spearman both told me they expect authorization by April or, in a worst-case scenario, May.

The bad news is that this far into the pandemic, communication is still floundering in the face of a public that is increasingly distrustful of scientists and federal health agencies.

It’s true that the FDA is legally limited in discussing data particulars and manufacturers are traditionally secretive about ongoing trials. But nobody has acknowledged that the legal and conventional restrictions mean that answers to basic questions like, “Why was this review delayed?” tend to result in impenetrable answers like, “We realize now in data that came in very rapidly because of the large number of cases of omicron that at this time it makes sense for us to wait until we have the data from the evaluation of a third dose.” None of this helps the public understand the scientific process.

What is apparent is that while many parents would like to see more data, what they want even more is to be reassured that their kids’ health is a priority.

“They’ve never spoken to parents of underage kids to say: ‘We’re sorry this is so hard. It grieves us too that it’s been so complicated,’” said Jennifer Martin, a parent of three in Seattle. “There’s a lack of urgency,” said Samirah Swaleh, parent to a 9-month-old boy in the Los Angeles area. “They just don’t seem to care about babies and toddlers?!” wrote Wendeln, the mother in Cincinnati. Cho, the emergency room physician, longs for a clearer timeline. “If you’re running a marathon and you know there’s an end, people can do amazing things. But it’s really, really hard when you don’t know if there’s an end in sight.”

I brought these sentiments to the FDA official I spoke to. The response hit many of the notes the parents said they wanted. I wish it could have come earlier, more often and been on the record, but I hope it provides some parents a bit of reassurance that they’ve been heard.

“We are going to work as expeditiously as possible,” the official said. “What does that mean? In general — though I can’t promise anything — you’ve seen that after an EUA [application] in this area, we generally are trying to take action in two to four weeks.”

The official emphasized: “We’re not going to be sitting on anything here.”

“I would want parents to know that we understand their concerns. We’re parents too,” the official added. “We are going to move as fast as we can once we have the data in our hands.”

by Rob Perez, Honolulu Star-Advertiser

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

When Steven Moniz Jr. and his wife, Sheri, got the keys to their new home in 2013, their kids were so happy that they made “snow angels” on the carpet. It was the first time the couple had ever owned property, and they too were overjoyed.

For years, they had rented an apartment in a low-income housing project on Oahu, unable to afford a house amid the island’s booming real estate market. But then, because Steven is Native Hawaiian, they were able to purchase a new residence at roughly half the going rate through a unique homesteading program created a century ago to return Hawaii’s Indigenous people to their ancestral lands.

With the help of a federal grant, the Moniz family bought a three-bedroom house for $281,000 in a West Oahu subdivision built specifically for the program. The couple cried at their good fortune, knowing that thousands of other Hawaiians are still waiting for such an opportunity. “For us, it was like tears of joy,” Sheri said.

The elation didn’t last long.

Within months of moving in, she said, the wall near a window frame in the master bedroom started to swell and mold began growing as water seeped through the frame. Their central air conditioning stopped working. And, when a family member climbed into the attic to inspect the AC system, he discovered that one of the main wood beams supporting the roof was cracked in half.

“How could they have missed that?” Moniz asked.

Dozens of other Native Hawaiian homeowners have found themselves asking similar questions, alleging problems with their new homes, according to a Honolulu Star-Advertiser-ProPublica survey of nearly 80 residents.

The state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, which administers the homesteading program, has the right to inspect new construction under its contracts with builders. But DHHL never inspected the Monizes’ new home or the hundreds like it that cropped up over roughly the past decade in their subdivision and another one nearby. Instead, the agency relied on the developer it hired to inspect the properties and vouch for the quality of the work.

Sheri and Steven Moniz Jr. stand in the cul-de-sac in front of their home. (Cindy Ellen Russell/Honolulu Star-Advertiser)

DHHL is a unique entity: It exists to manage a trust that returns people who are at least 50% Native Hawaiian to their ancestral land, recompense for the government’s history of taking property. And the agency says that inspections conducted by the builder and the city are sufficient to protect the buyers’ interests.

But legal scholars and former DHHL officials disagree with the state agency’s view. They say that as a trustee, DHHL has a heightened legal duty to act in the best interests of Steven Moniz and the thousands of other beneficiaries eligible for homesteads. And by forgoing inspections, they say, the agency is shirking that responsibility, leaving no one who represents only the buyers, some of whom waited decades for homesteads.

“Inviting beneficiaries to put their life savings into homes that the department has never bothered to inspect is not a close question,” said attorney Carl Varady, who along with a colleague has successfully sued the state and DHHL for breach of trust in a separate matter. DHHL “can’t delegate that.”

Moreover, the department has no system in place for tracking complaints once beneficiaries move into their new residences. Instead, DHHL directs homeowners to the private developers who built the homes.

Given questions about the department’s responsibilities to Hawaiians and its approach to construction oversight, the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica undertook to find out how satisfied beneficiary homeowners were. The news organizations canvassed the two most recent homesteading subdivisions in Kapolei, a region of former sugar cane land where much of Oahu’s single-family housing has been built the past several decades. Gentry Kapolei Development began building in one subdivision in 2009, the other in 2018.

Through our survey, we found dozens of homeowners claiming multiple problems with their residences, including some that started within days or months of moving in. Many residents criticized DHHL’s lack of oversight, and some sought help from the agency but were turned away. And while the builder, Gentry, ultimately fixed many of the problems, some homeowners said they ended up spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on repairs not covered by warranties.

“I’ve been running across problem after problem since we’ve been in this house,” said Peter Kamealoha, who described a range of issues in his 2010 Kanehili home, including a cracked air-conditioning duct and cracks in the ceiling. “A brand-new home shouldn’t have problems like this.”

Gentry, which has built more than 14,000 homes in Hawaii over half a century, says it takes pride in delivering quality homes to Native Hawaiians and would not jeopardize its reputation for the sake of small, short-term gains. “It’s an honor to build these homes,” said Gentry President Quentin Machida. A spokesperson also said the company is responsive to homeowner complaints and has performed many “courtesy” repairs beyond the warranty periods, including for Moniz and Kamealoha.

The homeowner experiences are adding to many beneficiaries’ frustration with DHHL’s management of the program. As the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica previously reported, the historically underfunded agency has consistently failed to meet its main mission of getting Hawaiians onto trust-held land on a timely basis. Now, the news organizations have found that the agency, in the eyes of many beneficiaries, is failing even some who get housing.

“They’re telling beneficiaries F you,” said Mike Kahikina, a trust beneficiary and former member of the Hawaiian Homes Commission that oversees DHHL. “We’re treated as fourth-class citizens.”

The Monizes said they found one of the main wood beams in their attic had cracked in half. After the homeowner complained, Gentry said it attached splints on either side to reinforce the beam. (Cindy Ellen Russell/Honolulu Star-Advertiser)

The newsrooms’ investigation comes as the Legislature considers whether to appropriate a record $600 million to help DHHL address the needs of the thousands of Hawaiians waiting for homesteads, particularly those who cannot afford to purchase their own homes. The proposal was sparked in part by the news organizations’ coverage, including the revelation that at least 2,000 beneficiaries have died while waiting.

“The Beneficiaries Deserve More”

Under the homesteading program, Hawaiian beneficiaries apply for a 99-year land lease from DHHL. Upon award, they then take one of two primary routes to housing: hiring a contractor to construct a home on the parcel, or buying a completed home from a developer hired by the department. The latter is by far the most common option.

Home inspections emerged as a major issue in the mid-1990s after a number of legal settlements with beneficiaries who sued DHHL over allegations of shoddy construction.

In one case, the agency paid out $1.5 million to settle claims involving a 50-home development in Panaewa, located on the Big Island’s eastern shoreline. Homeowners alleged they were given substandard septic tanks, defective concrete foundations and keys that opened multiple houses.

Following the settlements, DHHL said in 1996 it would step up oversight, beginning twice-weekly inspections of construction projects. Then-Director Kali Watson told reporters that the measure was designed to prevent another Panaewa. Today, Watson, who heads a nonprofit developer of affordable housing, still believes DHHL should handle inspections. “They do need people with a lot more expertise to actually monitor construction and make sure it’s done well,” he said in an interview.

In the intervening decades, the agency spent more than $200 million on Kapolei projects, including an unprecedented effort to develop four subdivisions totaling more than 1,000 homes.

Sometimes DHHL served directly as the developer for new units, and in those cases it did continue the inspection system. But other times, like in the two most recently built subdivisions, Kanehili and Kauluokahai, it hired a private developer who was also responsible for the inspections.

Still, the development contracts DHHL signed with Gentry in 2008 and 2018 included a provision giving the agency the right to inspect the homes during construction. The provision was standard in DHHL’s development agreements.

But given the layer of inspections already in place, including those done by the builder and city, DHHL decided not to exercise that right. Doing so “would take additional resources, depriving or reducing service to the other class of beneficiaries, those on the waitlist,” said William J. Aila Jr., the department’s director and chair of the commission that oversees it. DHHL could not say how much it saved by forgoing inspections. Aila also said Gentry had done excellent work in the two subdivisions.

Attorneys versed in trust law, however, say DHHL is obligated to do inspections as part of its legal duty as trustee.

The Kauluokahai subdivision where Gentry has built more than 125 homes (Cindy Ellen Russell/Honolulu Star-Advertiser)

“With respect to the duty of loyalty owed to the beneficiaries, the beneficiaries deserve more,” said Susan Gary, a retired University of Oregon law professor with expertise in trust law. “And I think that’s where the problem is. That’s not something you can delegate.”

David Kauila Kopper, litigation director of the Native Hawaiian Legal Corp., said courts have required the state to protect beneficiary interests in other matters related to trust duties. In 2000, for example, the Hawaii Supreme Court ruled that the state could not delegate to a developer the state’s trust responsibility to determine whether a planned Big Island project protected the customary and traditional rights of Native Hawaiians to access the property for cultural practices. And in 2019, the high court determined that the state breached its trust duty to care for public lands by failing to conduct regular inspections of Hawaii Island property that the military was leasing for live-fire training exercises. In nearly 50 years, the state had only inspected the land a few times. “It all stems from the same trustee obligation,” Kopper said.

When it comes to DHHL and homestead construction, “an argument could be made that by relying on Gentry or the city and putting your hands up and saying, ‘Well, that’s good enough,’ you’re delegating the duty to further the best interests of your beneficiaries to entities that perhaps don’t have that in mind — and that’s not their job,” Kopper added.

DHHL counters that it only has a constitutional obligation to provide beneficiaries with a buildable vacant lot, not a home. Therefore, officials say, the department has no duty to check the houses themselves. Beneficiaries, the agency noted, purchase homes directly from the builder, who must comply with government code under its development agreement with DHHL.

For the two Kapolei subdivisions, Gentry used in-house and third-party inspectors. The company said the level of monitoring, including daily checks by Gentry superintendents, was thorough and matched what is done at its private developments. Additionally, the buyer is able to walk through the home after it’s completed to do a final check.

John Merriman, vice president of Mid Pac Engineering, one of the outside companies used by Gentry, said, “There are multiple people out there who want the quality to be high enough that those homeowners don’t have issues.”

Regarding the Moniz case, Gentry said that if the support beam had been cracked before the home was sold, the problem would have been caught during the inspection process. The company told the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica that it reinforced the beam after the homeowner complained.

“They Did Do a Bum Job”

DHHL says it has no jurisdiction over homeowners’ construction-defect claims because the transaction is between the buyer and the builder, so the department typically doesn’t investigate or track such complaints. Gentry, however, conducts regular surveys of its customers and said the overall feedback from their DHHL projects has been positive.

For our own survey, the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica reached out to the occupants of the roughly 500 developer-built homes in the two newest homestead communities in Kapolei. Over the course of several months, the news organizations sent mailers and emails, made phone calls, knocked on over 100 doors, advertised on social media, spoke at a homeowner meeting and published a questionnaire on the websites for both media outlets. Seventy-eight people responded, including 53 who reported two or more problems or concerns with their residences. The majority of those raising multiple issues were from Kanehili, the older of the two subdivisions. The issues ranged from simply cosmetic — hairline cracks in the ceiling, for instance — to more serious, such as mold growing inside the home or flooring damaged by sewage backups.

Gentry provides a warranty that covers the cost of parts and labor for all repairs during the first year, as well as similar coverage for electrical and plumbing issues for another year. And some manufacturer warranties for specific items extend beyond that, though the length of the guarantees vary and they typically cover parts only.

In an interview, Aila, the head of DHHL, stressed that homeowners have the responsibility to properly maintain their residences. If they don’t do so and the warranties expire, “three or four years later, they can’t come back and make accusations that there’s poor quality because the faucet is leaking and now the cabinet is rotten,” he said.

Dozens of respondents, however, told the news organizations that their problems emerged within about a year of moving in. And many said they were surprised when they had to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on repairs not covered by warranties in the first few years. DHHL declined to comment on the cases, except to say the house is the responsibility of the homeowner.

One respondent who reported issues was Marlena Brown-Clemente, who said her AC unit stopped working just over a year after moving in. When she called DHHL to complain, she said the agency directed her to Gentry. The company told her the problem was her responsibility, she said, so she ultimately paid about $1,000 to fix it. Still, problems persisted. That was not what Brown-Clemente expected when, in 2016, she inherited her late father’s rights to pick a lot in Kauluokahai, which at the time had no homes. Two years later, she and her husband purchased a four-bedroom, three-bath house there for about $360,000. As luck would have it, the home model was called The Lena, the nickname Brown-Clemente’s father used for her. “I looked at my husband and cried,” she said in an interview. “I said, ‘Whatever you do, you have to get me that house.’”

Marlena Brown-Clemente holds a portrait of her father, Arthur Brown Sr., who died in 2016. (Cindy Ellen Russell/Honolulu Star-Advertiser)

Gentry said it had no records of calls about air conditioning from Brown-Clemente, and that the system performs well if regular maintenance is done. Brown-Clemente, 49, a full-time volunteer for her church, said the couple hires a company to service the system every six months, like Gentry recommends. “I came into this thinking I’m just lucky to have it, so I didn’t complain too much,” she told the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica. “But now I’m looking back: Yeah, they did do a bum job on my house.”

Air conditioning, which is all but essential in Kapolei during the humid summers, was the most commonly cited problem in the Star-Advertiser/ProPublica survey, mentioned by nearly 40 respondents.

Plumbing was another top concern, flagged by more than two dozen.

Kealii Cabrera, a construction supervisor who bought his new $390,000 Kanehili home in 2020, said his problems started almost immediately. A week after moving in, he said, sewage started backing up through a downstairs shower drain, flooding part of the first floor. Cabrera said he had to relocate his family to a hotel for a month while repairs were made to the flooring and walls.

He said he complained to DHHL multiple times. At first, the department referred him to Gentry, which initially refused to take responsibility for the damage. When conversations with the builder stalled, Cabrera said he went back to DHHL, which told him the department couldn’t get involved. He said he asked the department whether it had a quality control system, and it responded no. “That’s the root of the problem,” Cabrera said.

In response to written questions from the news organizations, a Gentry spokesperson said the company ultimately paid Cabrera over $50,000 to cover cleanup, temporary housing and other costs, after reviewing his request and the circumstances around the incident. The spokesperson described the temporary housing payment as “a very rare occurrence.”

In the Moniz case, Gentry said it performed many “courtesy” repairs beyond the warranty periods, including paying for refrigerator and AC fixes in 2017 and 2018, in addition to reinforcing the beam.

Some respondents to the news organizations’ survey lauded Gentry for its customer service and quality of work. About 18 reported no or only minor problems, including nearly a dozen who said they were very happy with their homes. “It’s like the promised land for us,” John Gora said of the Kauluokahai house he and his wife, Melissa-Ann Gora, purchased last summer after she spent nearly 40 years on the waitlist.

No Forum for Help

If homeowners are unable to resolve disputes over alleged defects with the builder, they usually can’t expect help from DHHL. The agency provides no forum for owners to pursue such claims — even when DHHL served as the developer and oversaw inspections.

Timothy McBrayer and Iwalani Laybon-McBrayer learned that firsthand.

For more than a decade, the couple has unsuccessfully sought DHHL’s help to resolve alleged construction defects that they say have been present almost from the time they moved into their new home in 2007. Shioi Construction, which built the home, disputed their claims and noted that the city and a DHHL special inspector had checked the dwelling.

The couple live in Kaupea, a Kapolei subdivision that was constructed just before Kanehili and for which DHHL served as the developer. The department hired Shioi to build homes and a project manager to monitor the work.

The carpet in one of Iwalani Laybon-McBrayer’s bedrooms was removed after a water leak caused mold to grow, she said. (Cindy Ellen Russell/Honolulu Star-Advertiser) Laybon-McBrayer said one of the home’s outdoor outlets caught fire in 2018. (Cindy Ellen Russell/Honolulu Star-Advertiser)

In the first year or two, the McBrayers said they experienced plumbing, mold and electrical problems that they reported to Shioi and DHHL. The problems largely continue to this day. The couple can no longer get homeowner’s insurance.

The McBrayers kept a log showing they sought assistance from 25 different DHHL representatives since 2007, and they said they received multiple assurances that the agency would deal with the situation.

Eric Seitz, their attorney, told DHHL in August that the couple relied on those promises. And DHHL, which supervised the builder, owed the McBrayers a fiduciary duty that went well beyond a normal home transaction, Seitz said. “The department is there to provide a service to Hawaiians, to help them, not merely to sell them a house and say, ‘You’re on your own,’” he said in an interview. “When complaints are brought to them, they have a much deeper and overriding responsibility to help.”

But when the McBrayers tried to take their case to the commission, their request was denied because DHHL lacked jurisdiction, a position the agency took repeatedly with the couple, its records show.

One of Laybon-McBrayer’s upstairs bathrooms. She says the tub and shower cannot be used because of plumbing leaks. (Cindy Ellen Russell/Honolulu Star-Advertiser)

Still, some commissioners have raised concerns. At a February 2019 meeting, one questioned why the McBrayer problems have taken so long to resolve. Another, Zachary Helm, cited the case to highlight the need for greater oversight of construction. As contractors build more homes, “we can do a little better job in monitoring the work these people do,” said Helm, who recently declined additional comment.

DHHL also declined to comment.

“The Wild, Wild West”

Some beneficiary families remain skeptical of DHHL’s ability to remedy their concerns. Kepa Maly, one of the original homeowners in the Panaewa development plagued by problems, recently sold the house he and his wife shared for 30 years. “Our children didn’t want anything to do with it,” Maly wrote in an email. “And given the choice, I doubt we would ever live in a DHHL-developed project again. They’ve demonstrated incompetence and a lack of common decency throughout their history.”

Former Gov. John Waihee, the only Native Hawaiian to serve as the state’s top executive, said the solution is simple: DHHL should hire an inspector or two. The costs, he said, would be negligible.

But Robin Danner, who heads the largest beneficiary organization in Hawaii, says that after decades of state mismanagement, something more is needed: greater federal oversight. That could come in two forms. One, the U.S. government could sue the state for breach of trust, a step it has never taken. Or two, it could further specify how DHHL implements the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, the federal law that created the program a century ago. As written now, the law is vague about a range of issues, including quality control.

In fact, the homesteading program, which was taken over by the state as a condition of statehood, ran for more than 90 years without a single federal regulation in place.

A 2013 White House discussion where Robin Danner, far right, who leads a group for homestead beneficiaries, said she asked if the Obama administration could start developing federal regulations for the homesteading program. (Courtesy of the White House)

At the request of Danner’s group, the Sovereign Council of Hawaiian Homestead Associations, the Obama administration in 2016 adopted the first two federal regulations in the program’s history. But neither dealt with housing; one established procedures for land exchanges and the other a process for amending the 1921 law. No more have been adopted since, continuing to leave large sections of the law open to interpretation. And that has enabled DHHL to undermine its fiduciary obligation to beneficiaries, according to Danner, who says the federal government should adopt a rule requiring DHHL to perform inspections.

“When federal regulations are silent, that’s when you get the wild, Wild west,” Danner said.

She and other Native Hawaiians are now looking to President Joe Biden, who has vowed to fulfill “Federal trust and treaty responsibilities” to Indigenous people and appointed Deb Haaland to lead the Interior Department, which oversees the Native Hawaiian land trust. As the first Native American to lead the department, Haaland has pledged to champion Indigenous issues.

But it’s unclear what, if any, action will come from Washington.

Haaland’s office has not made her available for an interview, despite several requests since June. But an Interior spokesperson issued a statement in response to questions from the Star-Advertiser and ProPublica. “Both the state and the federal government have roles in administering the laws governing the Hawaiian Home Lands trust,” he said. “However, the day-to-day administration of the trust and the governance of home inspections are the responsibility of the state.”

The news organizations also reached out to Hawaii’s four members of Congress, but three of them declined comment or did not respond. Sen. Mazie Hirono issued a statement. “DHHL has an important obligation to provide access to affordable, safe housing for Hawaii’s Native Hawaiian community,” she said. “I remain committed to supporting the Native Hawaiian community and working to ensure that both the state of Hawaii and the federal government meet their obligations under the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act.”

Hirono did not address the question of greater federal oversight.

Laybon-McBrayer, who is president of the Kaupea Homestead Association, said the situation leaves families like hers to go it alone. “I just say, ‘Lord, keep us safe,’” she said. “I gotta trust in a higher power rather than a broken system.”

Beena Raghavendran and Agnel Philip of ProPublica contributed reporting. Kacie Yamamoto of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser contributed research.

by Isaac Arnsdorf

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Former President Donald Trump has officially endorsed a plan, created by a man who has self-identified with the Oath Keeper militia, that aims to have Trump supporters consolidate control of the Republican Party.

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The plan, known as the “precinct strategy,” has been repeatedly promoted on Steve Bannon’s popular podcast. As ProPublica detailed last year, it has already inspired thousands of people to fill positions at the lowest rung of the party ladder. Though these positions are low-profile and often vacant, they hold critical powers: They help elect higher-ranking party officers, influence which candidates appear on the ballot, turn out voters on Election Day and even staff the polling precincts where people vote and the election boards that certify the results.

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“Just heard about an incredible effort underway that will strengthen the Republican Party,” Trump said Sunday in a statement emailed to his supporters. “If members of our Great movement start getting involved (that means YOU becoming a precinct committeeman for your voting precinct), we can take back our great Country from the ground up.”

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Trump’s email named Dan Schultz, an Arizona lawyer and local party official who first developed the precinct strategy more than a decade ago. Schultz spent years trying to promote his plan and recruit precinct officers. In 2014, he posted a callout to an internal forum for the Oath Keepers militia group, according to hacked records obtained by ProPublica.

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“Why don’t you all join me and the other Oath Keepers who are ‘inside’ the Party already,” Schultz wrote under a screen name. “If we conservatives were to do that, we’d OWN the Party.”

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Federal prosecutors in January charged the leader of the Oath Keepers and 10 of its other members with seditious conspiracy in last year’s attack on the U.S. Capitol. One of them pleaded guilty, as have several members of the group in related cases who are cooperating with the investigation. The group’s leader, Stewart Rhodes, pleaded not guilty.

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There is no indication that Schultz had any involvement in the Capitol riot.

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Schultz told ProPublica he never became a formal member of the Oath Keepers organization. “I have taken oaths to support and defend the Constitution as a West Point cadet, as a commissioned U.S. Army officer and as a practicing attorney,” Schultz said in a text message. “Those oaths do not have expiration dates, by my way of thinking, and I have kept my oaths. In that sense, I am an ‘oath keeper.’”

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According to experts on extremist groups, the Oath Keepers recruit military and law enforcement veterans using the idea that their oath to defend the Constitution never expired. The group then urges people to resist what they say are impending orders to take away Americans’ guns or create concentration camps.

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“I don’t ever want to be pulling the trigger on an AR-15 in my neighborhood,” Schultz said in a 2015 conference call with fellow organizers, referring to the semi-automatic rifle. “Oath Keepers, I love them for instilling the oath. But what they need to do also, I think, is spread the message that hey, we can do stuff politically so we never get to the cartridge box.”

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In more recent interviews on right-wing podcasts and internet talk shows, Schultz has repeatedly described his precinct strategy as a last alternative to violence.

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“It’s not going to be peaceful the next go-round, perhaps,” Schultz said in a June interview with the pro-Trump personality David Clements. “But it ought to be, and the way to ensure that it will be is we’ve got to get enough of these good decent Americans to take over one of the two major political parties.”

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It was not clear whether Trump or his aides were aware that Schultz has self-identified with the Oath Keepers. Trump’s spokesperson, Liz Harrington, did not respond to requests for comment.

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Schultz has spent months trying to get his idea in front of Trump. Steve Stern, a fellow movement organizer, told ProPublica that he met a former Trump administration official for lunch at Mar-a-Lago, the ex-president’s private club in Palm Beach, in December. While there, Stern said, he got a chance to briefly mention the project to Trump.

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Then, last month, Schultz and Stern landed an interview on a talk show hosted by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO who promotes conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. Lindell said he would discuss the plan with Trump personally. Schultz and Stern followed up with a conference call with Harrington and Bannon, according to Stern. Harrington previously worked at Bannon’s “War Room” website.

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“I know the president’s very jacked up about it,” Bannon said on his podcast, speaking with Schultz after Trump released the endorsement. “Help MAGA, help the America First movement, right? Help the deplorables, help President Trump, help yourself, your country, community, your kids, grandkids, all of it. Put your shoulder to the wheel.”

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Bannon, who led Trump’s 2016 campaign, originally lifted the precinct strategy to prominence in a podcast interview with Schultz last year. After the episode aired, thousands of people answered Bannon’s call to become precinct officers in pivotal swing states, according to data compiled by ProPublica from county records and interviews with local party officials.

As of last August, GOP leaders in 41 counties reported an unusual increase in sign-ups since Bannon’s first interview with Schultz, adding a total of more than 8,500 new precinct officers. The trend appears to have continued since then. New precinct officers started using their powers to remove or censure Republican leaders who contradicted Trump’s election lies and to recruit people who believe the election was stolen into positions as poll watchers and poll workers.

Bannon received a last-minute pardon from Trump after the former adviser was charged with financial fraud. He has pleaded not guilty to contempt of Congress for defying a subpoena from the committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. Bannon’s spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.

In addition to Bannon and Lindell, the precinct strategy has won support from pro-Trump figures such as former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who urged Trump to impose martial law, and lawyers Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, who led some of the lawsuits seeking to overturn the election results. Right-wing groups such as Turning Point Action, which organized buses to transport rallygoers on Jan. 6, also joined the effort to recruit precinct officers.

While Stern said he’s thrilled about Trump’s written statement endorsing the precinct strategy, he said he hopes to hear it from Trump’s own lips at an upcoming rally. Stern said he plans to be there with tables to sign more people up.

Jeff Kao and Mollie Simon contributed reporting.

by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News

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

More than a year after the acting Alaska attorney general suddenly resigned, the criminal investigation into his alleged sexual contact with a teenager decades ago is not complete, and two special prosecutors hired to look into the case have billed for less than two weeks’ time.

Nikki Dougherty White told the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica in January 2021 that Ed Sniffen began an illegal sexual relationship with her in 1991 when she was a 17-year-old high school student and Sniffen was the coach of her school’s mock trial team. Sniffen was 27 years old at the time.

Under Alaska law, it is a felony for an adult to have sex with a 16- or 17-year-old if the adult is the minor’s coach. (In most other cases, the age of consent in Alaska is 16.)

Former acting Alaska Attorney General Ed Sniffen. (National Association of Attorneys General)

Sniffen resigned as the Daily News and ProPublica were preparing an article about the allegations.

Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy, who appointed Sniffen to the role, has said through a spokesperson that he was unaware of the allegations against Sniffen until the newsrooms began investigating White’s story. The governor then directed incoming Alaska Attorney General Treg Taylor to “appoint a special outside counsel, independent of the Department of Law, to investigate possible criminal misconduct by Mr. Sniffen.”

Billing records obtained by the Daily News and ProPublica show two special prosecutors hired to look into the case have spent a combined total of 70.5 hours investigating the matter. As of Feb. 11, the state of Alaska had spent about $19,500 of a budgeted $50,000 on the investigation.

White, who has cooperated with the investigation, says she’s tired of waiting for answers.

“I feel like the state’s letting me down,” she said. “There doesn’t seem to be a high level of interest from the government in getting this right.”

A spokesperson for the state Department of Law referred questions to the independent prosecutor and said the department “is not involved in this investigation in any way and has no input or influence over the timing or status.” The special prosecutor, Gregg Olson, said this month that he cannot proceed until he receives a final report from the Anchorage Police Department.

“I anticipate that the investigation is near its conclusion,” said Olson, a retired state prosecutor who worked in the office of special prosecutions and as the district attorney in Bethel and Fairbanks. “But I don’t make any conclusions, form any opinions about a case until the investigation is complete.”

The Anchorage Police Department declined to answer questions about the investigation, which according to Olson is being handled by a detective within the Crimes Against Children Unit.

Sniffen has turned down repeated interview requests and, through his attorney, Jeffrey Robinson, would not say if he has cooperated in the investigation. Neither Olson nor the Department of Law spokesperson would say whether Sniffen has cooperated.

“Mr. Sniffen disputes any allegation of wrongdoing, and out of respect for the process undertaken by Mr. Olson, declines to comment any further,” Robinson wrote in an email.

One Resignation Followed Another

Dunleavy appointed Sniffen to the attorney general position on Jan. 18, 2021, pending confirmation by the state Legislature. Sniffen was a longtime attorney for the Department of Law’s consumer protection unit but was unfamiliar to many Alaskans until he was named as the replacement for Attorney General Kevin Clarkson.

Clarkson had resigned in August 2020 after the Daily News and ProPublica revealed that he had sent hundreds of personal text messages to a junior state employee. (In his resignation letter, Clarkson acknowledged errors in judgment but characterized his texts to the woman as “‘G’ rated.”)

When Sniffen resigned, a spokesperson for the Alaska Department of Law said the new attorney general had determined that it would have been a potential conflict of interest for one of the state attorneys who had been working for Sniffen to investigate the case, and the state would “contract with special counsel to ensure an independent and unbiased investigation into any possible wrongdoing.”

That was 397 days ago.

The Department of Law originally selected former sex-crimes prosecutor Rachel Gernat to oversee the case. Gernat said at the time that she did not know Sniffen personally and was not a current or recent state employee.

Potential witnesses told the Daily News and ProPublica they were contacted for interviews in the first six months of 2021, and White said the investigation seemed to be moving swiftly.

White and her attorney, Caitlin Shortell, said they held multiple Zoom meetings with Gernat, providing additional details and the names of other potential witnesses.

“One thing that we heard from Rachael Gernat was that this case is astonishingly well corroborated despite the fact that it happened so long ago,” Shortell said. “That it is more well corroborated than cases that happened last month.”

Shortell said she doesn’t know what remains to be done in the investigation and that as far as she knows, “almost all of the witnesses were able to be contacted.”

But on June 8, 2021, while still under contract with the Department of Law, Gernat applied for a job within the agency.

“Based on that inquiry, I was replaced as the special prosecutor,” she wrote in an email to the Daily News and ProPublica. “This replacement was to avoid any appearance of bias and to ensure the confidence in the neutrality of the special prosecutor.”

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Olson replaced Gernat as special prosecutor a month later, on July 12, 2021. Gernat had worked 49 hours on the case.

The next day, Gernat emailed White’s attorney to inform her of the change, noting that the “investigation itself is coming to a conclusion.”

To White and her attorney, there has appeared to be little movement in the case since Gernat’s departure.

“It’s been months and months of nothing but radio silence,” White said. “It’s difficult to have gone through first the article, and then to go through the three intense interviews with the Anchorage Police Department, and then to have multiple calls with the previous prosecutor.”

“And I feel like now it’s just kind of gone into this void of nothing,” she said.

Olson said that after his initial request for the police to take additional steps in the investigation, he has been waiting too.

“Honestly I personally would have hoped that I was going to get this case, get the report, make a decision and move on,” he said. “I’m still waiting for that. Hopefully, it will happen soon.”

Compelled to Speak Out

In 1991, when, according to White, she and Sniffen began a sexual relationship on a high school trip to New Orleans, the Alaska Legislature had recently changed state law to ensure that educators and other authority figures could not legally have sex with teenagers under their care or influence. The legislation was seen as closing a loophole that had been revealed two years before when an Anchorage teacher and newspaper columnist was charged with having a sexual relationship with one of his 17-year-old students. A judge at the time found there was no law against the relationship.

The Legislature amended the sexual abuse of a minor law in 1990 to make it a crime for a teacher, coach, youth leader or someone in a “substantially similar position” to engage in sexual activity with someone who they are teaching or coaching and who is under the age of 18.

That law took effect on Sept. 19, 1990, according to state law library records. A substantially similar version remains on the books today.

State prosecutors have used the law to file criminal charges against 12 people over the past five years, according to sex crimes data provided by the Alaska Court System.

One of the most recent cases, filed June 8, 2021, involves a village public safety officer accused of having sex with a high school student who had asked for a ride home from a party. The officer was 27 years old at the time; the alleged victim was 17.

Alaska State Troopers learned of the alleged crime when the VPSO confessed to another law enforcement officer and that officer reported the case as required by state law, according to charges filed in state court. The former officer has pleaded not guilty.

Another two cases resulted in convictions, two were dismissed and seven are awaiting trial.

Under current Alaska law, there is no statute of limitations on felony sexual abuse of a minor, although Gernat said at the time of her appointment that it can depend on the severity and timing of the offense. In one 2016 case, an Anchorage jury found a man guilty of sexually abusing a 16-year-old while acting as an authority figure, for abuse that occurred in 2005.

Asked if he had concluded whether any statute of limitations might apply to allegations against Sniffen, Olson said only, “I have not made any final legal determinations in the case.”

White said she does not regret going public with her story despite the delays. She is Athabascan and Alaska is her home state, she said, and when she heard Sniffen had been named as the state’s top law enforcement officer, she felt compelled to speak out.

“This means a lot to my family and I wouldn’t have been able to sit by and say, ‘Oh I just need to let this go,’” she said. “If Clarkson was drummed out for text messages to an adult woman, I felt that Sniffen had absolutely zero business sitting behind the desk of the attorney general.”

by Ilya Marritz

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Though Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is just days old, Russia has been working for years to influence and undermine the independence of its smaller neighbor. As it happens, some Americans have played a role in that effort.

One was former President Donald Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Another was Trump’s then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

It’s all detailed in a wide array of public documents, particularly a bipartisan 2020 Senate report on Trump and Russia. I was one of the journalists who dug into all the connections, as part of the Trump, Inc. podcast with ProPublica and WNYC. (I was in Kyiv, retracing Manafort’s steps, when Trump’s infamous call with Ukraine’s president was revealed in September 2019.)

Given recent events, I thought it’d be helpful to put all the tidbits together, showing what happened step by step.

Americans Making Money Abroad. What’s the Problem?

Paul Manafort was a longtime Republican consultant and lobbyist who’d developed a speciality working with unsavory, undemocratic clients. In 2004, he was hired by oligarchs supporting a pro-Russian party in Ukraine. It was a tough assignment: The Party of Regions needed an image makeover. A recent election had been marred by allegations that fraud had been committed in favor of the party’s candidate, prompting a popular revolt that became known as the Orange Revolution.

In a memo for Ukraine’s reportedly richest man, Rinat Akhmetov, Manafort summed up the polling: Many respondents said they associated the Party of Regions with corruption and considered it the “party of oligarchs.”

Manafort set to work rebranding the party with poll-tested messaging and improved stagecraft. Before long, the Party of Regions was in power in Kyiv. One of his key aides in Ukraine was, allegedly, a Russian spy. The Senate Intelligence Committee report on Trump and Russia said Konstantin Kilimnik was both “a Russian intelligence officer” and “an integral part of Manafort’s operations in Ukraine and Russia.”

Kilimnik has denied he is a Russian spy. He was indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller for obstruction of justice for allegedly trying to get witnesses to lie in testimony to prosecutors in the Manafort case. Kilimnik, who reportedly lives in Moscow, has not been arrested. In an email to The Washington Post, Kilimnik distanced himself from Manafort’s legal woes and wrote, “I am still confused as to why I was pulled into this mess.”

Manafort did quite well during his time in Ukraine. He was paid tens of millions of dollars by pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych and other clients, stashing much of the money in undeclared bank accounts in Cyprus and the Caribbean. He used the hidden income to enjoy some of the finer things in life, such as a $15,000 ostrich jacket. Manafort was convicted in 2018 of wide-ranging financial crimes.

“We Are Going to Have So Much Fun, and Change the World in the Process”

In 2014, Manafort’s plum assignment in Ukraine came to an abrupt end. In February of that year, Yanukovych was deposed in Ukraine’s second uprising in a decade, known as the Maidan Revolution, in which more than a hundred protesters were killed in Kyiv. He fled to Russia, leaving behind a vast, opulent estate (now a museum) with gold-plated bathroom fixtures, a galleon on a lake and a 100-car garage.

With big bills and no more big checks coming in, Manafort soon found himself deep in debt, including to a Russian oligarch. He eventually pitched himself for a new gig in American politics as a convention manager, wrangling delegates for an iconoclastic reality-TV star and real estate developer.

“I am not looking for a paid job,” he wrote to the Trump campaign in early 2016. Manafort was hired that spring, working for free.

According to the Senate report, in mid-May 2016 he emailed top Trump fundraiser Tom Barrack, “We are going to have so much fun, and change the world in the process.” (Barrack was charged last year with failing to register as a foreign agent, involving his work for the United Arab Emirates. He has pleaded not guilty. The case has not yet gone to trial.)

A few months later, the Trump campaign put the kibosh on proposed language in the Republican Party platform that expressed support for arming Ukraine with defensive weapons.

One Trump campaign aide told Mueller that Trump’s view was that “the Europeans should take primary responsibility for any assistance to Ukraine, that there should be improved U.S.-Russia relations, and that he did not want to start World War III over that region.”

According to the Senate report, Manafort met Kilimnik twice in person while working on the Trump campaign, messaged with him electronically and shared “sensitive campaign polling data” with him.

Senate investigators wrote in their report that they suspected Kilimnik served as “a channel for coordination” on the Russian military intelligence operation to hack into Democratic emails and leak them.

The Senate intel report notes that in about a dozen interviews with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Manafort “lied consistently” about “one issue in particular: his interactions with Kilimnik.”

Manafort’s attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Manafort didn’t make it to Election Day on the Trump campaign. In August 2016, The New York Times revealed that handwritten ledgers recovered from Yanukovych’s estate showed nearly $13 million in previously undisclosed payments to Manafort from Yanukovych and his pro-Russian party. Manafort was pushed out of his job as Trump’s campaign chairman less than a week later.

After Trump won the election, the Senate report says, Manafort and Kilimnik worked together on a proposed “plan” for Ukraine that would create an Autonomous Republic of Donbas in separatist-run southeast Ukraine, on the Russian border. Manafort went so far as to work with a pollster on a survey on public attitudes to Yanukovych, the deposed president. The plan only would need a “wink” from the new U.S. president, Kilimnik wrote to Manafort in an email.

Manafort continued to work on the “plan” even after he had been indicted on charges of bank fraud and conspiracy, according to the Senate report. It’s not clear what became of the effort, if anything.

“Do Us a Favor”

With Manafort’s conviction in 2018, Rudy Giuliani came to the fore as the most Ukraine-connected person close to President Trump. Giuliani had long jetted around Eastern Europe. He’d hung out in Kyiv, supporting former professional boxer Vitali Klitschko’s run for mayor. One of Giuliani’s clients for his law firm happened to be Russia’s state oil producer, Rosneft.

By 2018, Giuliani had joined Trump’s legal team, leading the public effort to discredit Robert Mueller’s investigation. Giuliani saw that Ukraine could be a key to that effort.

Giuliani ended up working with a pair of émigré business partners, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, to make contacts in Ukraine with corrupt and questionable prosecutors, in an effort to turn up “dirt” on Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, who had served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. Giuliani also worked to sow doubt about the ledger that had revealed the secret payments to Manafort, meeting with his buddies in a literally smoke-filled room.

Parnas and Fruman told the president at a donor dinner in 2018 that the U.S. ambassador in Kyiv was a liability to his administration.

((<a href="https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-parnas-yovanovitch-recording-transcript-trump-discusses-firing-yovanovitch-at-donor-dinner">Transcript</a> courtesy of rev.com))

Trump recalled Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, who had been a vocal opponent of corruption in Ukraine, from Kyiv in May 2019.

Two months later, Trump had his infamous call with Ukraine’s new President, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Zelenskyy asked Trump for anti-tank Javelin missiles. You know what happened next. Trump said he needed Zelenskyy to first “do us a favor” and initiate investigations that would be damaging to Joe Biden. He also pressed Zelenskyy to meet with Giuliani, according to the official readout of the call:

These events became publicly known in September 2019, when a whistleblower complaint was leaked.

“In the course of my official duties, I have received information from multiple U.S. Government officials that the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” the whistleblower wrote.

In December 2019, as an impeachment inquiry was at full tilt, Giuliani flew to Ukraine and met with a member of Ukraine’s parliament, Andrii Derkach, in an apparent effort to discredit the investigation of Trump’s actions. Derkach, a former member of the Party of Regions, went on to release a trove of dubious audio “recordings” that seemed to be aimed at showing Biden’s actions in Ukraine, when he was vice president, in a negative light.

Within months, the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Derkach, describing him as “an active Russian agent for over a decade” who tried to undermine U.S. elections. Derkach has called that idea “nonsense.”

In a statement, Giuliani said, “there is nothing I saw that said he was a Russian agent. There is nothing he gave me that seemed to come from Russia at all.” Giuliani has consistently maintained that his actions in Ukraine were proper and lawful. His lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Where They Are Now...

Many of Trump’s allies have been charged or investigated for their work in and around Ukraine:

Paul Manafort: convicted of financial fraud — then pardoned by Trump

Rick Gates: a Manafort aide who pleaded guilty to conspiracy and lying to the FBI

Sam Patten: another Manafort associate convicted for acting as a straw donor to the Trump inaugural committee on behalf of a Ukrainian oligarch

Rudy Giuliani: reportedly under criminal investigation over his dealings in Ukraine; his lawyer called an FBI search of his home and seizure of electronic devices “legal thuggery”

Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman: convicted for funneling foreign money into U.S. elections; Parnas’ attorney said he would appeal

Key Documents

• US Senate Intelligence Committee Russia Investigation Volume 5: Counterintelligence Threats and Vulnerabilities
• Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Report
• Many of the exhibits from Paul Manafort’s 2018 trial are available for free with a CourtListener account

by Samantha Hogan, The Maine Monitor

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

This article was produced in partnership with The Maine Monitor, a former member of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network.

Civil rights lawyers sued Maine officials on behalf of impoverished criminal defendants on Tuesday, alleging the state failed to create an effective public defense system in violation of defendants’ constitutional rights.

Maine doesn’t supervise the attorneys it contracts with to represent adults who are charged with crimes and cannot afford their own lawyer, said Zach Heiden, chief counsel for the Maine branch of the ACLU. For more than a decade, Maine has not implemented rules to evaluate attorneys, trained lawyers or compensated attorneys properly, he said. That has denied defendants of their Sixth Amendment right to counsel or creates an “unreasonable risk” of doing so, Heiden added.

“The state has the power to fix this problem and we’ve only brought this lawsuit really as a last resort because the state was — for whatever reason — unwilling to make the necessary changes,” Heiden said.

Maine is the only state that employs no public defenders and instead relies exclusively on private attorneys to defend the state’s poor against criminal charges and other legal matters. The Maine Commission on Indigent Legal Services, or MCILS, was formed in 2010 to meet the state’s obligation to provide lawyers to adults and juveniles charged with crimes who cannot afford to hire their own attorney.

The Maine Monitor and ProPublica reported in 2020 how MCILS hired attorneys with criminal convictions and histories of professional misconduct to represent the state’s poor in court. An analysis by the news organizations found that 26% of lawyers who were seriously disciplined — reprimanded, suspended or disbarred — between 2010 and 2020 by the state’s attorney licensing agency were later contracted by MCILS.

MCILS also repeatedly failed to enforce its own rules and allowed lawyers who were not eligible and sometimes underqualified to defend people facing serious criminal charges, including sexual assault and violent felonies, the news organizations reported last year.

“There are some excellent lawyers who are participating in the criminal defense system and there are also some lawyers who are in need of substantial training — are underperforming — the issue in our case is the state makes no efforts to identify which category those lawyers fall into and to get underperforming lawyers the remedial help they need,” Heiden said.

The agency’s executive director, Justin Andrus, and eight commissioners appointed to oversee MCILS are named in the lawsuit that was filed in Kennebec County Superior Court on Tuesday. The class action was filed on behalf of five plaintiffs who are adults currently charged with crimes, incarcerated and receiving legal assistance from attorneys paid by MCILS.

“I’ve been seeking from the beginning of my tenure the funding and authority necessary to fully comply with the requirements of a constitutionally adequate indigent defense system and this lawsuit, as far as I understand it, does nothing more than seek the same things that I’ve been seeking publicly,” said Andrus, who was appointed as executive director of MCILS in January 2021.

As recently as Friday, Andrus released an outline of proposed changes to improve the supervision and training of court-appointed counsel. Multiple defense attorneys said they opposed the proposed rules, which would require them to check-in weekly or monthly with supervisors.

An email seeking comment from the office of Maine Gov. Janet Mills, a Democrat, was not returned Tuesday morning.

For a decade, MCILS relied on a quick review of invoices that were submitted at the conclusion of a criminal case to assess attorneys’ performances. Eleanor Maciag, the agency’s deputy director since 2012, estimated she and the former director spent one to two minutes reviewing each invoice before approving the payment in 2019, she told The Maine Monitor at the time.

Maine lawmakers added $18.5 million to the state’s budget for MCILS in 2021 to hire more employees and increase the hourly pay for lawyers from $60 to $80 an hour. State lawmakers also unanimously supported legislation to open the state’s first trial-level public defender office, but it remains unfunded.

“You look at the amount of money that was increased and it looks like a lot, but most of that is just changing the assigned counsel rates and that’s just buying the same system for a greater price,” said David Carroll, the director of the Sixth Amendment Center, a nonprofit that evaluates criminal defense systems, which was hired by the state Legislature to review Maine’s defense system.

The changes improved oversight of MCILS’ finances but not of the quality of the representation that attorneys provide indigent clients, Carroll said. The Sixth Amendment Center conducted a review of Maine’s public defense system in 2018, which determined the state’s criminal docket was advancing at the expense of defendants’ constitutional rights.

The center made seven recommendations to improve how legal services are provided to defendants. State lawmakers implemented some, but not all, of the recommendations. The report was not meant to be an a-la-carte menu of reforms, Carroll said. Among the recommendations: that Maine shift to a hybrid system of public defenders and private assigned counsel.

The ACLU sued the state of New York in 2007 for not meeting its responsibility to fund and manage its public defense systems in five counties.

The case was litigated for seven years when on the day before trial, in October 2014, the NYCLU and its litigation partner, Schulte Roth & Zabel, announced a settlement mandating that New York provide lawyers to defendants during their first appearance before a judge, set caseload standards and strengthen oversight by the state-level office among other changes. The state was ordered to pay $5.5 million in lawyer fees.

The ACLU has also filed lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of criminal defense systems in Connecticut, Mississippi, Michigan, Idaho and Nevada.

MCILS is currently run by seven employees. It does not have the staff necessary to assess or remediate the representation that contracted attorneys provide to clients, Andrus recently told lawmakers.

Maine is also not meeting most of the American Bar Association’s “Ten Principles of a Public Defense Delivery System,” Andrus said. MCILS does not have resources equal to prosecutors, and lawyers are not immediately assigned because of delays with the courts and screenings for financial eligibility.

“What we are unable to do yet is move forward in the direction of a public defense system that really meets the strictures of the Sixth Amendment,” Andrus recently told lawmakers.

by Brooke Stephenson

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

If you watch TV, you’ve likely been inundated with ads about tax prep services that promise to meet your every need or let you file for free.

It’s the time of year when people open search engines and ask: “Is TurboTax free?”

A screenshot from Google’s Keyword Planner, showing a large jump in searches for the phrases: “Is TurboTax free” and “Is H&R Block free” over the last three months. (Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Source images: jcphoto/Getty Images. Screenshot by ProPublica.)

ProPublica has been asking similar questions since 2013, when we first reported on how Intuit, TurboTax’s parent company, fought to keep the government from setting up a free, simple tax filing process. In the intervening years, our reporters have stayed on the story, uncovering the company’s sweeping history of lobbying and “dark pattern” customer tricks, which have helped it fend off a free government tax-filing option and create a multibillion-dollar software franchise.

Last year, we wrote a guide presenting several ways people could file their taxes for free. But this year a few things have changed: For one, TurboTax is no longer participating in the IRS Free File program, a public-private partnership that it helped construct. Under Free File, tax prep companies agreed to provide free online filing to tens of millions of lower-income taxpayers, and in exchange the government agreed not to offer its own free filing tools. In 2019 and earlier years, TurboTax and H&R Block together accounted for around two-thirds of all filings through the program, according to ProPublica’s analysis. But H&R Block left the program in 2020, and now, Intuit wrote in a blog post, it too is leaving “to focus on further innovating in ways not allowable under the current Free File guidelines.”

A spokesperson for Intuit said the company was “at all times clear and fair with its customers” and has upheld its obligations to the IRS under the Free File program.

Despite the departure of the two major players, the IRS Free File program will still let you file your federal taxes for free if you make less than $73,000 a year. You can browse the list of the remaining providers yourself, or you can answer a couple questions and have the lookup tool connect you with the providers you are eligible to use.

(Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Source images: Sezeryadigar/Getty Images. Screenshot by ProPublica.)

Wait, in case you missed that: If you get nothing else from this story, please remember that you can file your federal taxes FOR FREE.

Still, TurboTax’s departure made me wonder: What are these amazing innovations it’s offering that aren’t “allowable” under IRS guidelines? Are they worth the cost of dealing with TurboTax?

A TurboTax spokesperson said, “The Free File Program rules did not allow Intuit to provide all of the benefits we can deliver to help consumers with their complete financial health, not just in tax, but beyond.” Leaving the program would, for example, allow TurboTax to offer customers access to tax experts and other financial services, he said.

I decided to run a little test. Even though it has dropped out of the IRS Free File program, the company still offers its own “free” version and pours millions into marketing it. To see how TurboTax’s “free” version measured up, I went through the steps to file my taxes through TurboTax’s service as well as through an IRS Free File provider.

(Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Source images: AlpamayoPhoto/Getty Images. Screenshot by ProPublica.)

I’ve actually used both before — TurboTax on my first few years of income, and IRS providers starting in 2019, after I read reporting by ProPublica and commentary by the comedian Hasan Minhaj.

The IRS claims that 70% of Americans can file their taxes for free through Free File, but in reality, only about 1% of those who are eligible actually use the service. And we reported in 2019 that in recent years, the IRS had spent no money at all to advertise the program. On top of that, participating companies often set up roadblocks to genuinely free filing for the folks who do find the service.

(Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Source images: Feifei Cui-Paoluzzo/Getty Images. Screenshot by ProPublica.)

Free File only requires that the partner companies offer free federal returns, so it may be difficult or impossible to file your state taxes for free, depending on your income bracket. And while the state return is the most common source of a tacked-on charge, providers can also pitch loans, “audit defense” scans or even products that have nothing to do with taxes to Free File users.

Some companies are advertised as free on the IRS website, but then require taxpayers with certain tax documents, like 1099s, to pay for a much more expensive service.

The people who get 1099s often aren’t wealthy — recipients include the approximately 1 million people who drive for Uber, and women with care-taking responsibilities who take low-paid contract work to accommodate child or elder care schedules.

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Finding providers that are both genuinely free and user-friendly adds another layer of difficulty. Several of the IRS providers allow you to upload photos of your tax forms to make the process easier, but some had state restrictions and others charged you to file a 1099, which I needed to do.

In fact, I had quite a few forms to file.

In 2021, I was:

• A contract worker for a Southern California nonprofit.

• A full-time fellow for ProPublica in New York City.

• A part-time crew member at Trader Joe’s (Store 20 forever).

• A freelance writer for a local investigative paper.

• And a very sporadic email newsletter writer for my hometown running store in Virginia.

That adds up to three W2s and two 1099s across three states, and less than $50,000 in income, which is just the kind of low-paying tax mess that TurboTax’s innovative services should be able to help with,right?

Let’s dive in.

The TurboTax Saga

Below is the screen TurboTax shows you while trying to figure out if its free version is “right for you.”

(Screenshot by ProPublica)

These are the buttons that steer you away from the free version of TurboTax:

• “I want to maximize deductions and credits.”
• “I donated over $300 to charity.”
• “I’m self-employed/freelancer.”
• “I sold stock, crypto, or own rental properties.”
• “I own a small business.”
• “I own a home.”

Intuit’s spokesperson told me that “Pressing buttons has no effect on whether or not a user qualifies or disqualifies from using TurboTax Free Edition. Pressing buttons generates a recommendation to use a particular TurboTax product, but the consumer is free to use whatever product they wish.”

The cheapest program I can file under as an ex-freelancer was TurboTax Deluxe, for $39.

So I start there and wait to see if TurboTax’s excellent features will make me that money back in refunds.

(Spoiler: They don’t.)

The bummer is, I love using TurboTax. Not because it saves me money, but because clicking the big, eye-catching buttons gives me a false sense of control and a hit of dopamine.

(Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Source images: Jennifer A Smith/Getty Images. Screenshot by ProPublica.)

Check! I’m achieving!

And I think Intuit knows what appeals to me about its software, because back when it offered a genuinely free service through the IRS, that website was confusing, slow and ugly. There were no pretty buttons. And almost no one could find it, because Intuit hid it from Google and other search engines. (It stopped hiding the page from search engines after ProPublica reported on the practice.)

Anway, back to my tax filing.

After a soothing video in which I am assured that TurboTax can handle the complexities of my tax situation, the site asks for permission to access my tax returns “for purposes other than the preparation and filing” of my tax return. If I wasn’t really paying attention (which would be understandable; taxes are mind-numbing), it would be easy to assume these permissions were necessary to file my taxes and not a ploy to give TurboTax additional access to my information. I decline.

An Intuit spokesperson told us, “The consent you referenced allows us to surface offers for other Intuit products or services, or those of third parties that would be relevant for our customers,” but “Intuit does not use or share tax information anywhere outside of the tax prep process — even with other Intuit products — unless a customer gives express consent.”

Next it tries to upsell me TurboTax MAX: Defend and Restore, which offers insurance against identity theft for another $49. I skip that too.

I’m five minutes into this process, and I’ve spent half my time rejecting TurboTax’s attempts to collect additional money or information.

(Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Source image: tirc83/Getty Images.)

I know that reading about me doing my taxes might seem even more boring than doing your own, but bear with me as I describe a few notable events from my TurboTax journey because I think they’ll help us understand more about how the tax prep industry works.

Here are some features that initially appealed to me:

• Free live online chats with tax specialists.

(Screenshot by ProPublica)

• The ability to link to my eTrade account just by logging in, saving me the trouble of entering information about stocks and dividends manually.
• Expandable explainers that answer questions like, “Why am I taking the standard deduction?” and, “How do I know if I got my 2021 stimulus check?”
• The ability to automatically pull my 2021 W2s for the employers that I worked for in previous years I filed with TurboTax.
• The option to upload a photo of my W2 from the places where I started work during 2021, like ProPublica, instead of manually entering details from each individual box. There were occasional clarifying questions (“Box 20 seems to be blank — can you confirm this?”), but they were easy to deal with.

And all the while, TurboTax is doing the software equivalent of gently patting my head.

After I submit each W2, I’m shown an encouraging screen that tells me I’m on track for my biggest refund yet! I feel inches from those promised dollars.

(Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Screenshot by ProPublica.)

Once all my W2 information has been submitted, little animated papers file themselves under the heading “Sit back while we fill in your New York return.” It gives me the impression TurboTax is working hard for me.

(Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Source Images: Veronique Beranger/Getty Images. Screenshot by ProPublica.)

In reality, this is the digital equivalent of TurboTax twiddling its thumbs.

Former staffers told reporter Justin Elliott that Intuit’s designers added these animated delays between screens to both reinforce and ease consumers’ “fear, uncertainty and doubt.” TurboTax encourages this subconscious sense I’ve had the whole time that taxes are a scary dark maze that I can only navigate if I let the software lead me by the hand.

In a statement, an Intuit spokesperson said, “The process of completing a tax return often has at least some level of stress and anxiety associated with it. … To offset these feelings, we use a variety of design elements — content, animation, movement, etc. — to ensure our customers’ peace of mind.”

The cute face of this software creates a feeling of trust that I can’t totally shake, even though I’m going through all this for a ProPublica piece, which is about the least trusting way you can undertake any activity.

This feeling fades slightly when I move on to inputting my freelance (1099) income.

Because taxes weren’t withheld from that income when I was paid, all taxes are instead calculated and owed when I file, a fact I always forget and never enjoy remembering.

TurboTax tells me I can reduce my self-employment tax by entering self-employment expenses, like cellphone service or gas mileage.

On the next screen, TurboTax offers me a list of possible applicable expenses I could deduct, and I feel a rush of affection for the site. This could be the moment TurboTax finally starts paying for itself.

Ah, but wait.

It’s another upsell — this time for TurboTax Self-Employed.

(Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Screenshot by ProPublica.)

The site tells me that if I have at least $630 in expenses to report, TurboTax Self-Employed will pay for itself. At first this seems like helpful information. Then it strikes me that if my qualifying expenses fail to clear that threshold, or just barely clear it, then by taking the offer I would have happily paid TurboTax $70 to “save” $70, and essentially walked away empty-handed.

I check: “I don’t have expenses,” even though I do. I just don’t have enough that I can afford to pay for the pleasure of reporting them.

I go through the same song and dance for a second 1099, and then we hit upsell number three.

Remember that offer of “NO COST” chats with tax specialists that endeared me to this service?

Well, the tax experts are back!

(Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Screenshot by ProPublica.)

And ol’ Intuit is once again trying to sell me something it claims to offer for free, this time in the form of TurboTax Live Deluxe. Intuit said that while product experts are available to connect with tax filers to answer questions about the filings themselves, Live connects customers with tax experts that specialize in specific filing statuses (such as someone who knows a lot about freelancers).

Shortly after declining the live services, I get a question about how my experience has been so far.

Me:

(Screenshot by ProPublica)

When we get to the state tax section, I learn that TurboTax will charge me an additional fee for each state I need to file in.

(Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Source Images: Kypros/Getty Images.)

That adds up to a $156 bill: $39 for each of the states I need to file in — California, New York and Virginia — plus $39 for TurboTax Deluxe.

According to TurboTax’s website, “Actual prices for paid versions are determined based on the version you use and the time of print or e-file and are subject to change without notice.” You can find this information if you click to expand a box called “*Important offer details and disclosures” at the very bottom of the page.

And before I can pay, it tries to sell me TurboTax MAX one last time.

(Screenshot by ProPublica)

Overall, a “not so good” experience.

Free File Through the IRS

After looking through four or five providers, I ultimately decide to use FreeTaxUSA to test the process of filing through an IRS Free File provider. I’ve used it in the past, and while the service requires users to input their W2 and 1099 information by hand, it claims to offer free state tax filing and doesn’t charge for 1099s.

The questions don’t come with as many cool graphics, but they’re still clear and easy to answer.

(Screenshot by ProPublica)

Like TurboTax, I’m upsold right out of the gate, but unlike TurboTax, the upsell is not mandatory just because I did freelance work, and the upgrade they’re offering is relatively inexpensive — FreeTaxUSA Deluxe is $6.99. The offer also only appears once, rather than four times, during the process.

(Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Screenshot by ProPublica.)

FreeTaxUSA also allowed me to deduct my freelance expenses for no extra cost, which helped reduce my tax bill.

(Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Source Image: DreamPictures/Getty Images.)

In the end, FreeTaxUSA asked me for $15 for each of the states I filed in — my federal return was, as advertised, free — for a total of $45. When I reached out to FreeTaxUSA support to ask why I didn’t receive the free state tax filing I was promised, they told me that in order to file for free I needed to create an account through their Free File link.

I had entered the FreeTaxUSA website via the IRS’ Free File link, but I struggled to log in to my old account that way. After cycling through this twice, I tried to see if I would have better luck restarting from the site’s homepage.

I did, but in doing so, I apparently lost that golden /freefile2021/ in my url.

(Screenshot by ProPublica)

At that point, I had been doing taxes for about two days straight. I got fed up and just paid, which is about the most everyman American taxpayer experience I could have had.

As a taxpayer and consumer, you have the right to know your options, particularly when you could be spending less money. But the big takeaway is not necessarily that one tax filing software is better or more honest than another. It’s not even that you should contact customer support before you pay (though I really should have).

The takeaway, at least for me, is that filing your taxes for “free” online is confusing and soul-sucking by design.

So take a deep breath, release a guttural scream, and don’t let some fun buttons lure you into paying more than you need to.

To paraphrase TurboTax:

(Photo illustration by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica. Screenshot and annotation by ProPublica.)

Screenshots have been edited by ProPublica.