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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.

On Jan. 10, the U.S. Department of Justice released a 123-page report on the 1921 racial massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which claimed several hundred lives and left the thriving Black neighborhood of Greenwood in smoldering ruins. The department’s investigation determined that the attack was “so systematic and coordinated that it transcended mere mob violence.” While it conceded that “no avenue of prosecution now exists for these crimes,” the department hailed the findings as the “federal government’s first thorough reckoning with this devastating event,” which “officially acknowledges, illuminates, and preserves for history the horrible ordeals of the massacre’s victims.”

“Until this day, the Justice Department has not spoken publicly about the race massacre or officially accounted for the horrific events that transpired in Tulsa,” said Kristen Clarke, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, in announcing the report. “This report breaks that silence through a rigorous examination and a full accounting of one of the darkest episodes of our nation’s past. This report reflects our commitment to the pursuit of justice and truth, even in the face of insurmountable obstacles.”

Only two weeks later, the department took a strikingly different action regarding the historical record of a violent riot: It removed from its website the searchable database of all cases stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol that were prosecuted by the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.

These jarringly discordant actions were, of course, separated by a transfer of power: the inauguration of President Donald Trump, who swiftly moved to issue pardons, commute prison sentences and request case dismissals for all of the 1,500-plus people charged with crimes on Jan. 6, including seditious conspiracy and assaulting police officers. That sweeping clemency order — “Fuck it, release ’em all,” Trump said, according to Axios — prompted a wave of outrage, and criticism even from some Republicans. “I’ve always said that when you pardon people who attack police officers, you’re sending the wrong signal to the public at large,” said South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham.

The removal of the database happened more quietly, but it is worthy of notice in its own right. It signals the Trump administration’s intention to not only spare the president’s supporters any further consequences for their role in the riot, but to erase the event from the record — to cast it into the fog of confusion and forgetting in which the Greenwood massacre had existed for so long.

As some have noted, this push to whitewash recent history carries a disconcerting echo of countless autocratic regimes, from the Chinese Communist Party’s memory-holing of the Tiananmen Square massacre to the Argentine military junta’s “disappearing” of dissidents in the 1970s. It comes at the same time as the administration is also seeking to whitewash the teaching of American history, more generally: Trump issued an executive order on Jan. 29 titled “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling” that threatens to withhold federal funds from schools that teach that the country is “fundamentally racist, sexist or otherwise discriminatory” and instructs the government to “prioritize federal resources, consistent with applicable law, to promote patriotic education.” One wonders: Would teaching the Tulsa massacre be allowed?

But the removal of the database is troubling for another reason, too: It undermines our ability to consider the events of Jan. 6 in all their complexity and particularity.

I was made aware of that complexity when I spent several days after the riot immersing myself in the more than 500 smartphone videos that participants had shared on the Parler social-media app, for an essay accompanying ProPublica’s compilation of the video trove. What struck me perhaps more than anything else about the videos was the sheer diversity of the motivations, profiles and actions that they put on display. Yes, seen from afar, the mob seemed to assume the unity of purpose of a single, organized mass bent on destruction.

But seen in the close-up of the videos, heterogeneity emerged. There were young women with puffy jackets and pompom hats, middle-aged women who could have been coming straight from a business lunch, young men furtively removing their black tactical gear under the cover of a tree to pull on red MAGA sweatshirts to pass as mere Trump supporters. There were people viciously attacking police officers and denigrating them (“You should be ashamed, fucking pansies”), others pleading with them not to (“Do not throw shit at the police!” “Do not hurt the cops!”) and still others thanking the cops who were arriving on the scene (“Back the blue! We love you!”). There were people smashing in windows and others decrying them for doing so (“Oh, God no. Stop! Stop!” “What the fuck is wrong with him?” “He’s Antifa!”) There were people who, in a matter of moments, swung from being pitchfork-carrying marauders to wide-eyed tourists, as they deferentially asked a Capitol police officer for directions or swung their cameras up to capture the inside of the dome. (“This is the state Capitol,” an awestruck man says to his young female companion.)

This was the great, necessary undertaking of the four-year effort by the Department of Justice: to draw distinctions for the sake of allocating individual accountability. By poring over countless such videos and other evidence, investigators zeroed in on the hundreds of people who could be identified as engaging in and instigating the most violence. There was Daniel Rodriguez, who could be seen on camera driving a stun gun into the neck of Officer Michael Fanone; he was sentenced to more than 12 years. There was Thomas Webster, a former New York City police officer and member of the Marine Corps who swung a metal flagpole at an officer; he got 10 years. There was Peter Schwartz, a Pennsylvania welder who attacked the police with a chair and chemical spray; he got 14 years.

Thomas Webster at the Jan. 6 Rally

Watch video ➜

Inevitably, some of the outcomes were ripe for second-guessing. Kerstin Kohlenberg, the former U.S. correspondent for Germany’s Die Zeit newspaper, reported recently on the case of Stephen Randolph, a 34-year-old Kentucky man who received an eight-year sentence for his role in pushing over one of the metal security barriers on the Capitol grounds, injuring a police officer in the process; others in the same group received much milder sentences. Trump and his allies could have chosen to comb through cases and pardon only the defendants who they could argue had been painted with too broad a brush.

But that’s not what Trump did. Instead, he himself took up the broadest brush possible and wiped it all clear. In doing so, he let the defendants off the hook. But in another sense, with the mass pardon and deletion of the database, he deprived all of the Jan. 6 participants of individual agency, of individuality, period. In a sense, he rendered them just what the most ardent castigation on the other side had cast them as from the outset: a mindless mob.

As chance has it, at the end of Trump’s first week in office, I was in Tulsa. I went to the Greenwood Rising museum, which tells the story of the rise of the neighborhood and its sudden destruction. It is a powerful presentation despite the dearth of documentation of the violence: snatches of oral history from survivors play over a video simulation of gunfire and arson; before and after photos capture the near-total obliteration of the neighborhood’s prospering commercial core by first the attack and later urban renewal.

One of the museum’s central preoccupations is the attempt by Tulsa authorities and leading white denizens to downplay the massacre, by framing it as a “Negro uprising”; only a couple decades afterward, the museum notes, many in Tulsa were barely aware it happened at all. This cover-up came with lasting consequences for Greenwood survivors, who were denied insurance claims for their destroyed homes, not to mention any form of civic restitution.

Even now, many Black residents of Tulsa are left wondering why the reckoning represented by the Department of Justice investigation is not joined by substantive reparations of any sort. The last two living survivors of the massacre, Lessie Benningfield Randle and Viola Fletcher, said in a statement responding to the report, “The DOJ confirms the government’s role in the slaughter of our Greenwood neighbors but refuses to hold the institutions accountable under federal law.” Still, they said, “We are relieved to see one of the biggest cover-ups in American history come crashing down.”

And now, back in Washington, the federal government has embarked on an entirely new cover-up of another day of enormous violence. The erasure will not be nearly as successful this time around. There are, after all, all those videos, which live on ProPublica’s website, among other places, while much of the deleted database can be found on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. (And ProPublica is one of 10 media organizations that have jointly sued the federal government, seeking to obtain 14,000 hours of Jan. 6 surveillance footage.)

But for the time being, at least, those seeking to preserve the record of one of the darkest days in recent U.S. history will be doing so, like the survivors of Greenwood and other outbursts of violence around the world, in direct opposition to their own government.

Alex Mierjeski and Agnel Philip contributed research.

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by Sharon Lerner and Pratheek Rebala

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

In the face of the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to reshape the Environmental Protection Agency and drive out its workers, more than 300 career employees have left their jobs since the election, according to a ProPublica analysis of personnel data.

The numbers account for a relatively small share of the overall workforce at the EPA, but those who have departed include specialist civil servants crucial to its mission: toxicologists, lawyers, engineers, biologists, toxic waste specialists, emergency workers, and water and air quality experts.

Gary Jonesi made the decision to leave on election night. An attorney who helped enforce environmental laws for almost 40 years, he had loved working for the agency under both Democratic and Republican presidents. But he feared what the incoming administration might do.

In the past weeks, as the Trump administration has signaled radical changes at the agency and attempted to entice workers into leaving, he feels he made the right choice. “I didn’t know it was going to be this bad,” said Jonesi, who worked on litigation related to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico as well as cases that involved both water and air pollution. “I feel for my old colleagues. And I feel for the American public, who are being put in danger.”

Other career employees expressed a mixture of fear, resignation and quiet defiance as they faced a painful decision: quit or work for an administration that has openly proclaimed its intention to radically transform the agency in addition to rolling back environmental protections.

In his first weeks in office, President Donald Trump announced plans to reverse efforts to address climate change, abandon the EPA’s decadeslong focus on protecting the most vulnerable communities from pollution and step away from other key initiatives at the heart of the agency’s work.

At the same time, Trump has embarked on an unprecedented government-wide campaign to drive workers from their jobs. Employees throughout the federal government received offers to resign but get paid through September — a move experts say is legally questionable and unions have challenged in court. Some recently hired workers who are still on probation have been told their agencies have the right to immediately let them go.

EPA workers face additional threats. Trump’s team has discussed relocating the agency’s headquarters outside of Washington, D.C., a move that would likely force many of the roughly 7,000 employees who work there to quit. And he issued an executive order on “radical and wasteful government DEI programs,” which included a directive to terminate, “to the maximum extent allowed by law,” all environmental justice offices and positions. The order could result in the firing of hundreds of staff members who work on pollution in disproportionately burdened areas, which often have lower incomes, higher percentages of residents of color or both.

At a sometimes tearful meeting held at EPA headquarters and online on Wednesday, leaders of the agency’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights told staff members that the EPA was beginning to implement that directive. “We’re all preparing for the worst,” said one environmental protection specialist who attended the meeting, where workers were instructed to prepare for the possibility of being placed on administrative leave and download their human resources files. “We’re preparing to be laid off.”

Employees in other parts of the agency are similarly distraught.

“We feel terrorized,” said one of the more than 20 current EPA employees who communicated with ProPublica about their experience of working at the agency under the second Trump administration. None said they planned to take up the offer to resign, a proposal that the agency said in numerous emails is open to staff until Thursday.

While there is an obvious appeal of quitting a job when your employer is aggressively trying to oust you, the EPA staffer, whose work involves measuring pollution levels in air, water and soil at contaminated sites, said he felt a moral obligation to stay.

“If I leave, my experience would go with me and there would be no replacement,” he said. (Along with the other EPA employees quoted in this story, the scientist spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of retribution by the Trump administration.)

Others found the financial enticements to leave insulting. “I don’t work here for the fucking money,” said one longtime agency employee who works on air pollution. “I work here because I believe in it, and I want to serve the public.”

An emergency worker who responds to chemical fires, oil spills and national disasters echoed that sentiment, saying he has no intention of walking away from the work he’s done for more than 20 years, which he described as “the most challenging and amazing job there is.”

Other EPA employees are already bracing themselves for the possible end of their stints at the agency. One young scientist was winding down a day spent reviewing reports on drinking water last week when she received the email informing her that she had been identified as likely being on a probationary period and laying out the process for terminating her.

Until that point, she had been thinking of her first months in what she described as a “dream job” at the EPA as the beginning of a long career in civil service. “All that came crashing down when I got that email,” said the scientist, who recently finished graduate school and is now steeling herself for the likelihood that she will have to move back in with her parents.

If she goes, the scientist will join the more than 300 career staffers who have left since the election. That group is part of a brain drain of more than 500 EPA workers ProPublica identified as having departed since Nov. 22; the full group includes political appointees and short-term staff. Changes in administrations typically trigger turnovers at federal agencies, but ProPublica found the number leaving the EPA appears to have already eclipsed by more than 60 the number that left after President Joe Biden was elected in 2020. It is unclear exactly what motivated staffers to leave in recent weeks and how many more might be forced out or quit on their own terms in the coming days.

The shakeup is unprecedented, according to some veteran employees. “When you take a job at a federal agency, you know there are elections every four years. You know there are going to be changes in administration priorities,” said a scientist who has weathered many of these transitions during her more than 20 years working in the federal government. “This is something else.”

The EPA did not respond to questions for this story, including how many employees had taken the agency up on its offers to resign.

Taking the Side of Polluters

The EPA’s mission to protect human health and the environment requires it to do the often difficult work of regulating powerful companies. Under any administration, the agency faces intense lobbying from these entities as they seek to avoid expense and the burdens of compliance. Corporate pressure on the EPA was considerable under Biden as his administration attempted to tackle climate pollution.

But Trump appears eager to both scale back the agency, which has more than 15,000 employees, and align what remains of it with the companies it regulates. During the campaign, he asked oil executives for $1 billion while promising to cut environmental regulations, according to The Washington Post.

On Friday, two days after the Senate confirmed Lee Zeldin as EPA administrator, the agency put out a press release supporting Zeldin’s ability to “Unleash American Greatness.” Among those quoted were representatives of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the National Mining Association, the American Petroleum Institute and the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, all of which have recently challenged the agency in court.

In a brief welcome address, Zeldin discussed making the nation “energy dominant” and “turning the U.S. into the AI capital of the world.” (AI is widely recognized as a climate threat because it consumes vast amounts of energy.) Other Trump appointees have worked for fossil fuel and chemical companies and have previously opposed stricter environmental regulation. David Fotouhi, whom Trump nominated to be second-in-command of the agency, recently tried to overturn its ban on asbestos.

The administration is planning to remove civil service protections from certain federal workers, which would allow some positions now held by highly skilled personnel to be reclassified so they could be filled based on loyalty to the administration rather than expertise. The move could have tremendous implications for the EPA, whose workforce includes thousands of highly trained experts.

“If he replaces EPA scientists and lawyers with people who just want to say yes to him, it will be the death knell for the EPA,” said Kyla Bennett, director of science policy at Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.

The Human Costs

The redirection of the agency and the loss of experienced professionals who respond to emergencies, monitor pollution, clean up highly contaminated areas and enforce environmental laws will have profound effects across the country.

“Nastier stuff than usual will come out of factories. More people will get cancer. More people will get heart disease. People will die sooner and they’ll be sicker,” said one Ph.D. scientist who works at the agency.

Because he spends part of his time focusing on health in particularly polluted areas, the scientist may find himself in the crosshairs of Trump’s order to eliminate all environmental justice work and positions. The order could directly affect as many as 250 EPA employees, according to Matthew Tejada, who served as the EPA deputy assistant administrator for environmental justice during the Biden administration.

The environmental justice office was established in 1992, after research done in the 1980s showed that communities with hazardous waste sites had higher percentages of Black and low-income residents. Two years later, President Bill Clinton signed an executive order requiring all federal agencies to make environmental justice part of their mission. As of publication, a page about the 1994 executive order had been removed from the EPA website. The agency also disabled EJScreen, an online mapping tool that was used to identify pollution levels in communities around the country, along with other information about environmental justice and climate change.

The Ph.D. scientist described the mood within his office as “a combination of exhaustion and exasperation with what’s very clearly a calculated campaign of harassment.” Still, he is hoping he will escape the apparently imminent purge of EPA staff working on environmental justice.

For some staff, the rapid changes are a bridge too far. One chemist who has worked at the agency for more than a decade described himself as seriously thinking about leaving — though on his terms, not in response to the administration’s resignation offer. “My motivation to work at EPA was because I want to protect human health and the environment and the lure of a stable job,” he told ProPublica. “But now all that’s gone.”

Others say the administration’s aggressive efforts to drive them out of the EPA have left them only more determined to stay. “Personally, it makes me want to hang on until I have the chance to do (or not do) something worth getting fired for,” one lawyer said.

Another scientist, who oversees the cleanup of highly contaminated sites, agreed. He saw the departures from EPA norms and repeated offers to resign as designed to scare him and others out of the agency — and vowed that the tactics would not work on him.

“It won’t make me quit,” the scientist said. “Nothing is going to make me quit.”

Instead, the scientist recently bought a new Black history month T-shirt that he plans to wear when he is required to return to the office full time in late February. “I’m going to dare somebody to say something to me,” he said. He acknowledged that the move, which would broadcast his derision for the Trump administration’s retreat from environmental justice, could get him fired. But he said he didn’t care.

“I’m going to stand up to them,” the scientist said. “I may lose the battle, but principally I will have won the war.”

Do you have any information about the EPA that we should know? Sharon Lerner can be reached by Signal at 718-877-5236.

If you have other information you can share about the federal government, you can reach ProPublica’s tip line on Signal at 917-512-0201.

Kirsten Berg, Mollie Simon and Mariam Elba contributed research. Agnel Philip contributed data analysis.

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Ballinger, Gregory Joseph - St. Louis, MO

September 14, 1939 - February 2, 2025

(nee Dunsworth) of St. Louis, MO fortified with the sacraments of the Holy Mother Church on February 1, 2025, at the age of 93. Loving wife of Paul for 70 years, mother of 10, grandmother of 36 and great-grandmother of…

Tues., Jan 28, 2025. Visitation at St. Monica Church, 12136 Olive Blvd., Creve Coeur, Fri., Feb. 7, from 9-10 a.m. Mass at 10 a.m. Ortmann Stipanovich Funeral Home www.osfuneralhomes.com