They had been summoned by Attorney General William Barr.

Over the preceding weeks, Donald Trump’s claims that the presidential election had been stolen from him had reached a crescendo. He’d become obsessed with a conspiracy theory that voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan, had switched votes from him to Joe Biden. 

With each day, Trump ratcheted up the pressure to unleash the might of the federal government to undo his defeat. 

Barr interrogated experts from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, crammed in beside top FBI officials around a cheap table. He needed the group of around 10 to answer a crucial question: Was it really possible the 2020 presidential vote had been hacked?

ProPublica’s description of the previously unreported meeting comes from several people who were in the room or were briefed on the gathering. Everyone understood that the meeting represented an important moment for the nation, they said. Barr, who did not respond to requests for comment, had walked a delicate line with Trump, instructing the FBI to investigate allegations of election irregularities while declaring publicly there had been no evidence “to date” of widespread fraud.

The nonpartisan specialists from CISA, backed by their FBI counterparts, explained they’d unravelled what had happened in Antrim County. A clerk had made a mistake when updating ballot styles on machines, leading to a software problem that initially transferred votes from Republicans to Democrats, they said. There was no fraud, just human error — which would soon be publicly confirmed through a hand count of the county’s ballots.

Listening intently, Barr seemed to understand both the truth and that telling it to the president would almost certainly cost him his job. 

At the end of the meeting, Barr turned to his top deputy, made hand motions as if he was tying on a bandana and said he was going to “kamikaze” into the White House. 

What happened next is well known. When Barr met with Trump in the Oval Office on Dec. 14, the president launched into a monologue about how the events in Antrim County were “absolute proof” that the election had been stolen. Barr waited to get a word in edgewise before telling his boss what the experts from CISA had told him.

Then Barr offered his resignation letter, which Trump accepted. Barr left believing he’d done his part to preserve democratic norms. 

“I was saddened,” Barr wrote of Trump in his memoir. “If he actually believed this stuff he had become significantly detached from reality.”

Barr was one of many federal officials — most of them Trump appointees — who refused to bend to the president’s demands, which only intensified after Barr was gone. Although rioters inspired by Trump managed to delay the certification of his defeat by storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, ultimately the institutional guardrails of American democracy held — barely.

But if faced with the same tests today, the guardrails and people that held the line would largely be missing, an examination by ProPublica found. 

ProPublica scrutinized what happened the last time Trump lost a national election. Some of that happened in plain sight: After a cascade of defeats in court, Trump began pressuring state and local officials to overturn the results. But more happened behind the scenes, like the meeting that helped persuade Barr to hold the line.

Our reporting uncovered previously undisclosed aspects of a federal effort to safeguard the results of the 2020 vote, which involved at least 75 people across several agencies. Today, nearly all of those people are gone, having resigned, been fired or been reassigned, particularly in the departments of Justice and Homeland Security. That included the cybersecurity specialists who had established that the Antrim County allegations were false and reported their findings to Barr. 

The people we identified as resisting attempts to overturn the 2020 results have been replaced by roughly two dozen people Trump has installed in positions that could affect elections. Ten of them actively worked to reverse the 2020 vote, and the rest are associates of such people. In some cases, ProPublica found, officials have been hired from activist groups that are pillars of the election denial movement. Experts warn that shows the movement has merged with the federal government.

These new officials could influence how Trump reacts to the upcoming midterms as polling shows Republicans are approaching what could be a significant electoral loss, with the president’s approval rating nearing record lows, and public concern growing about the weak economy, the administration’s mass deportation effort and the war on Iran. Seemingly in preparation to head off such a blow, Trump has stepped up his efforts to “nationalize” the 2026 elections, saying that Republicans need “to take over” the midterms. Democrats who monitored Trump’s attempts to block his 2020 loss have begun to question whether he will allow a “blue wave,” particularly if it flips control of a House of Representatives that impeached him twice in his first term.

ProPublica’s examination reveals new details on how the president has unleashed his loyalists to transform elections. This includes the background of this year’s FBI raid in Georgia to seize 2020 election materials and how they are using federal resources to search for noncitizens voting. Ultimately, ProPublica’s reporting shows how thoroughly and expansively the Trump administration has overhauled the federal government into what some fear is a vehicle for making sure elections go his way.

ProPublica’s reporting is based on interviews with roughly 30 current or former executive branch officials familiar with the work of Trump loyalists installed in election roles. Most spoke on condition of anonymity because they fear retribution, including those knowledgeable about the December 2020 Barr meeting. 

The Trump administration maintains its actions will make U.S. elections fairer and more secure — and keep those prohibited from voting, such as noncitizens, from doing so.

“Election integrity has always been a top priority for President Trump,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement. “The President will do everything in his power to defend the safety and security of American elections and to ensure that only American citizens are voting in them.”

Spokespeople for the DOJ and DHS emphasized that their departments are focused on ensuring elections are free and fair, and that they are working closely with the states to achieve those goals. Contentions to the contrary, they say, are false.

A few guardrails have endured, preventing Trump from fully realizing his agenda for elections. Judges have blocked key parts of a March 2025 executive order in which Trump attempted to exert greater federal control over aspects of voting, and some Republican state officials have fought back against Justice Department lawsuits demanding state voter rolls. 

Late last month, Trump issued another executive order on elections that attempts to exert unparalleled federal control over mail-in voting and voter eligibility, which Democrats and voting rights groups are challenging in court.

Experts say 2026 will serve as an unprecedented stress test of the integrity of American elections.   

“Our election system withstood” Trump’s “attacks following the 2020 election,” said Sen. Alex Padilla, a California Democrat who has led the pushback to the administration’s actions on elections, “but this will be an even tougher test, with more election deniers having access to federal power than ever before.”

The Dismantling

Barr has said that in the high-stakes days following the 2020 election, he felt like he was playing Whac-A-Mole with Trump’s “avalanche” of false election claims.

The investigators at DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency supplied intelligence that disproved many of them, not just those involving Antrim County.

CISA was created by Trump in his first term to counter cyber threats in the aftermath of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 vote. It soon came to provide crucial expertise and support to thousands of local election officials grappling with increasingly sophisticated attacks. 

After the 2020 election, it also played a crucial part in puncturing fallacies spread by Trump supporters, producing a “Rumor Control” website to rebut them. And it partnered with state officials and technology vendors to release a statement calling the election “the most secure in American history.” Trump swiftly fired Chris Krebs, whom he had appointed to lead CISA, but Krebs’ defense of the election’s soundness reverberated widely in the media and on Capitol Hill.

Among Trump’s first actions upon returning to the Oval Office was eviscerating CISA. 

Starting in February 2025, DHS leadership put employees focused on countering disinformation and helping safeguard elections on leave. The leadership also froze the agency’s other election security work, which included assessing local election offices for physical and cybersecurity risks, and disseminating sensitive intelligence information on threats. Eventually, all three dozen or so CISA employees specializing in elections were fired or transferred to work in other areas. 

“It took years of dedicated, bipartisan, cross-sector partnership to build the security infrastructure we’ve had, and dismantling CISA leaves a gaping hole,” said Kathy Boockvar, an elections security expert who served as Pennsylvania’s secretary of state from 2019 to 2021. “We are making the job of securing our democracy exponentially harder.”

A DHS spokesperson told ProPublica that the changes at CISA were in response to “a ballooning budget concealing a dangerous departure from its statutory mission,” which included “electioneering instead of defending America’s critical infrastructure.” The spokesperson said that CISA’s mission is still to coordinate protection of critical infrastructure, including by supporting local partners against cyber threats.

It isn’t just CISA that’s been gutted. 

The Trump administration has discarded or diminished other federal initiatives with roles in protecting election integrity or blocking foreign interference. While many of these actions have been reported, together they reveal the full sweep of the changes. 

First, the administration got rid of the National Security Council’s election security group, which convened departmental leaders to coordinate federal actions related to voting. Then in August, the administration dismantled the Foreign Malign Influence Center, a branch of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that had stymied efforts by Russia, China and Iran to interfere in the 2024 election. 

A spokesperson for ODNI said the center was redundant and that its functions were folded into other parts of the office’s intelligence apparatus in ways that “arguably makes our ability to monitor and address threats from foreign adversaries stronger, more efficient and more effective.”

However, former national security officials, including one who had worked at the center, told ProPublica that its functions had largely ceased. Caitlin Durkovich, who led the NSC’s election security work during the Biden administration, said that under Trump the federal government has “abandoned” its traditional role in preserving election integrity and security.

“Nearly every program and capability to stop bad actors and support election administrators has been dismantled,” she said. “Heading into the midterms, this leaves states and localities exposed, without the intelligence support or federal coordination they need to detect and respond to threats in real time — precisely when the stakes are highest.”

The early months of the second Trump administration also brought seismic changes to three parts of federal law enforcement with central roles in elections.

Kash Patel, the FBI’s new director, dismantled the public corruption team, which had been deployed in previous administrations to help monitor possible criminal activity on Election Day. The Foreign Influence Task Force, which aimed to combat foreign influence in U.S. politics, was also disbanded. (An FBI spokesperson said the bureau “remains committed to detecting and countering foreign influence efforts by adversarial nations.”)

Furthermore, the Justice Department substantially reduced the role of its Public Integrity Section, which had been responsible for making sure the department’s inquiries weren’t improperly influenced by politics. 

After the 2020 election, senior lawyers in the section warned against having the FBI investigate fraud claims raised by Trump allies, saying that the agency’s involvement could damage its reputation and appear motivated by partisanship. In this instance, they were overruled by Barr and his deputies, but former officials said this was a rare case in which their guidance was ignored. The need to directly overrule the unit, they said, made it a roadblock — one that no longer exists.

A month after Trump returned to the Oval Office, the unit’s top staff resigned when agency leaders directed them to dismiss corruption charges against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams. More resigned later or were transferred. The 36-person section was reduced to two. The administration no longer mandates that it review politically sensitive cases, according to multiple people familiar with the matter.

Another key DOJ office, the Civil Rights Division’s voting section, had enforced federal laws that protect voting rights, particularly those that combat racial discrimination. In December 2020, the assistant attorney general overseeing the Civil Rights Division was one of the many department leaders who said they would resign if Trump promoted Jeffrey Clark, a leader who supported Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results, to head the department after Barr’s resignation. This mass threat of resignation ultimately led Trump to not promote Clark.

But now, nearly all of the section’s roughly 30 career lawyers have resigned or been moved. This largely started last spring after Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, put out a memo saying their mission would shift from ensuring voting rights to enforcing Trump’s executive order on elections.

The Trump administration then filled the section with conservative lawyers who are now litigating against the lawyers they replaced. At least four of those newly appointed lawyers participated in challenging the 2020 vote or have worked with people who helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 election.

“It’s just a shocking and depressing reversal of the federal government’s role in making real the promise of nondiscrimination in voting and racial equality,” said Anna Baldwin, an appellate attorney for the Civil Rights Division who resigned last year and is now one of those litigating against the Justice Department in a new role at Campaign Legal Center.

The Justice Department didn’t respond to specific questions about the dismantling of the Public Integrity Section or the change in mission for the Civil Rights Division.

In all, at least 75 career officials who’d played important roles in elections work at DHS, DOJ and other departments have left or been fired, ProPublica found.

Team America

Late last summer, after the Trump administration had forced out most of the career specialists, a small group of political appointees began convening at the Department of Homeland Security’s headquarters. 

The group — which once called itself “Team America,” according to sources familiar with the matter — looked for federal levers it could pull to make Trump’s March executive order about elections a reality, an effort that has not been previously reported. 

They represented the new type of people running the show.

Its core members included David Harvilicz, a DHS assistant secretary tasked with overseeing the security of election infrastructure, including voting machines, and three of his top staffers. As ProPublica has reported, Harvilicz had co-founded an AI company with an architect of Trump’s claims about Antrim County.

Despite the setbacks the executive order had met with in court, there “was not a whole lot of discussion or disagreement” about acting on the directive from Harvilicz or one of his deputies, said a former federal official who interacted with group members. “It was just us saluting to do it.” 

This small group was part of a wider team at DHS, DOJ and the White House seeking to push forward the president’s agenda. Some of Trump’s new guard are well known: After the 2020 election, Patel pressured military officials to help investigate a conspiracy theory about voting machines, according to a former Justice Department official. (Patel did not respond to a request for comment but claimed in congressional testimony that he did not recall the event.) Others, like Harvilicz, are more obscure but still wield consequential powers.

These newcomers are seeking to carry out Trump’s executive orders and are unlikely to push back against his false claims that American elections are rife with fraud. 

Team America members have echoed or spread such material themselves. 

Heather Honey, who serves under Harvilicz in a newly created position focused on elections, falsely asserted that there were more ballots cast in Pennsylvania than voters in the 2020 presidential election. Trump cited this claim, which has been traced back to her, while exhorting his followers to march on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. 

At least 11 administration appointees, including Honey, have ties to the Election Integrity Network, a conservative grassroots organization seeking to transform American elections. It is led by Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election. Gineen Bresso, who holds a top job in the White House counsel’s office, coordinated with the network’s leadership in 2024 as the Republican National Committee’s election integrity chair, ProPublica has reported. Since moving into government, Honey has maintained close ties to Mitchell’s organization, and she and at least two other federal officials have given its members private briefings. 

Experts say these former activists who helped forge a movement built on the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump are seeking to make sure that does not happen again.

“The election denial movement is now interwoven within the federal government, and they are working together toward a shared goal of reshaping elections” in ways that undermine the freedom to vote, said Brendan Fischer, a director at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan, pro-democracy legal organization. “It’s not just last-minute slapdash attempts to overturn the results” as in 2020, “but more systematic efforts to influence how elections are run months ahead of time.”

In response to questions sent to DHS, Harvilicz and Honey, a DHS spokesperson disputed that they were seeking to use the department’s powers to advantage Trump, writing that its employees “are focused on keeping our elections safe, secure, and free” and working to “implement the President’s policies.” In response to questions about their ties to the election denial movement, the spokesperson wrote, “To meet the diverse and evolving challenges the Department faces, we hire experts with diverse backgrounds who go through a rigorous vetting process.”

Mitchell did not respond to detailed questions from ProPublica. The White House answered questions sent to Bresso about her connection to Mitchell’s network by reiterating its commitment to making American elections secure. 

Through the fall and winter, as the Justice Department demanded that states turn over confidential voter roll information, Team America worked to solve problems hindering the use of digital tools to comb the lists for noncitizens who had illegally registered to vote. Honey and others ironed out the technical details of merging information from different agencies and crafted data-sharing contracts. When Honey or others hit roadblocks, they’d go to the White House or senior DHS leaders who “would come in hot” to clear her path, said officials who interacted with them. 

Initially, the plan was to run voter information obtained by DOJ through a Homeland Security tool called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system. 

More recently, according to two people familiar with the matter, Team America has worked to harness a more powerful tool used by another branch of DHS, Homeland Security Investigations, to increase its ability to search for noncitizen voters and bring criminal charges against them. 

While DHS told ProPublica that SAVE has identified more than 21,000 potential noncitizens on voter rolls in the past year, officials who have checked those results in detail have found vast inaccuracies, as ProPublica has reported. Most states — including those with millions of voters — have eventually marked only a few to a few hundred potential noncitizens as registered to vote, and far less have ever voted. The DHS spokesperson also called SAVE “secure and reliable.”

As the election approaches, current and former officials and election security experts expressed concerns that Harvilicz and Honey, who’ve espoused debunked conspiracy theories about elections, are in positions to control the narrative around the vote’s soundness. 

It’s hard to debunk false claims “coming with the seal of the federal government,” said Derek Tisler, counsel and manager with the Brennan Center for Justice’s elections and government program. “I certainly worry what damage that could do to voters’ confidence.”

Red Flags

Perhaps nothing better reflects the breakdown of the guardrails that thwarted Trump’s rashest impulses in 2020 than his creation last fall of a special White House post reinvestigating his loss to Biden. 

In December 2020, just days after Barr rebuffed Trump’s Antrim County claims, lawyers in the White House counsel’s office helped prevent the president from heeding activists’ call to essentially declare martial law to seize voting machines. This multihour shouting and cussing match has been called the craziest meeting of the first Trump administration.

But the lawyer whom Trump hired in 2025 as his director of election security and integrity, Kurt Olsen, had worked to overturn Trump’s loss in court in 2020 and was later sanctioned by judges, including for making baseless allegations about Arizona elections.

Olsen’s work in the second Trump administration has breached the firewall between the White House and DOJ officials, established after Watergate to prevent law enforcement officers from making decisions based on political pressure, said Gary Restaino, a former U.S. attorney in Arizona.

“This is not a constitutional or even a statutory requirement,” Restaino said, “but it’s a democracy requirement to make sure that citizens throughout America understand that decisions about life and liberty are being made in an objective and consistent manner.”

In a previously unreported series of events, around the end of 2025, Olsen flew to Georgia to meet with Paul Brown, the head of the FBI’s Atlanta field office, according to people familiar with the matter. 

Olsen wanted the FBI to seize 2020 ballots from Fulton County, a Democratic stronghold, and gave Brown a report he claimed would justify the extraordinary action. Brown and his team emphasized to Olsen that any investigation his team did would be independent and fair. 

When Brown and his team examined the report, they found that Georgia’s election board had already looked into its allegations, dismissing many altogether, and concluding that others came down to human error, not criminal wrongdoing. The report had been assembled by a longtime ally of Olsen’s and participant in the Election Integrity Network who had a history of discredited claims, ProPublica has reported.

Based on their own investigation, Brown’s team submitted an affidavit to their superiors at DOJ that did not make a strong enough case to move forward with what Olsen wanted.

Soon after, Brown was offered a choice: retire or be moved to a new office, people with knowledge of the exchange told ProPublica. 

Olsen did not respond to requests for comment.

An FBI spokesperson said that Brown “elected to retire” and that its “work in the election security space is entirely consistent with the law.”

Brown’s ouster after refusing to carry out the seizure of 2020 election materials has been reported, but Olsen’s involvement and the details of their interactions leading to Brown’s retirement have not been previously disclosed. 

With Brown gone, the case moved ahead under his replacement. 

Trump administration officials also took another step to keep control of the investigation. 

Then-Attorney General Pam Bondi chose Thomas Albus, whom Trump had appointed as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri, to prosecute the case even though it fell far outside his usual regional jurisdiction. Albus had been meeting with Olsen since around the time the White House lawyer was hired, ProPublica has reported. (Albus declined a request for comment.)

In late January, the FBI carried out an unprecedented raid in Fulton County — and the agency’s affidavit, put together by Albus and Brown’s replacement, cited a version of the report Olsen gave to Brown as evidence supporting the seizure. ProPublica was part of a news coalition that sued to unseal the affidavit.

An FBI spokesperson said that its agents “followed all procedure to ensure everything was in proper order, and FBI evidence team had the necessary court-authorized search warrant before they arrived on site.” 

Ryan Crosswell, who worked in the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section for around half a decade, handling a number of election cases, called Brown’s replacement and Albus’ involvement a “red flag” because of the unusual circumstances of their appointments. 

“They’re just moving through people until they find someone who’s willing to do exactly what they want,” Crosswell said.

The Justice Department did not respond to a question about Crosswell’s comment.  

The extraordinary raid was also enabled in a previously unreported way by the destruction of the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section.

Multiple former lawyers for the section said they likely would have tried to block the Fulton County investigation because it lacked strong evidence, had a clear political slant and went against department directives that actions should not be taken “for the purpose of giving an advantage or disadvantage to any candidate or political party.” 

Crosswell said, “Based on everything we know, if PIN was still there, we’d say no.”

John Keller was principal deputy chief of the Public Integrity Section from 2020 to 2025 and was acting chief when he resigned in early 2025. He worries that allegations of irregularities in the upcoming election will be handled on a partisan basis.  

“Without that review and without apolitical, objective, honest brokers involved in the process, there is a much greater risk for intentional manipulation or inadvertent interference,” Keller said.

“Dismantling the Brain”

The week the FBI seized Fulton County’s ballots, about half of the nation’s secretaries of state converged on Washington, D.C., for their winter conference. 

They had urgent questions about elections for Bondi, then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and other luminaries who had promised to appear at the event. But none of the headline names showed, leaving conference attendees staring at an empty podium, until the session was abruptly canceled.

The breakdown was emblematic of a widening chasm between state officials and the parts of the federal government that had, until recently, worked with them to secure American elections.

Shenna Bellows, Maine’s Democratic secretary of state, said in an interview that the trust between the Trump administration and states is “absolutely demolished.” 

This loss of trust reflects that election deniers have assumed so many top roles at federal agencies. Honey sometimes represents DHS on cross-departmental conference calls with state election chiefs, an unsettling reality for those who spent years countering the false claims she made from outside the government. 

On a February call, state officials expressed confusion about whether the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency would still assess their election systems for physical and cyber vulnerabilities. Honey said it would, but Bellows said she’d been told it wouldn’t. 

Two DHS officials told ProPublica CISA’s remaining staff avoids election work, afraid they could lose their jobs if they engage with state and local officials. “In CISA, elections are a toxic poison,” one said. 

A DHS spokesperson said state and federal officials are still working together “every single day” to protect elections and that “The claim that DHS has a broken partnership with states and made our elections less secure is simply false.”

The cuts to career election specialists and their divisions have eliminated information channels that spotlighted threats as voting took place, including Election Day command posts run by the Justice Department and FBI. Another information channel, which DHS used to fund, will still operate but will be available only to state and local election offices, not the federal government.

Jessica Cadigan, a former FBI intelligence analyst who investigated Election Day threats, said FBI headquarters’ command post was critical to her cases.

“That is dismantling the brain, if you will,” she said. “They are the ones that piece the whole thing together.”

An FBI spokesperson said the agency will still have capabilities to monitor the situation on the ground through designated election crimes coordinator experts in all its field offices.

Jena Griswold, Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state, has come to see the federal government as adversarial to elections and election administration, rather than a partner. 

Colorado is one of around 30 states the Justice Department has sued for confidential voter roll information. At least four courts that have fully considered those cases so far have dismissed them, although the Justice Department has appealed most of the decisions. (The others are pending.) Griswold told ProPublica she has added another lawyer to her staff to fight whatever comes next from the Trump administration.

“Donald Trump,” she said, “has made American elections less safe.”

The post Inside Trump’s Effort to “Take Over” the Midterm Elections appeared first on ProPublica.

A steely voice on the other end of the line greeted me, identifying himself as an official with the Canadian military.

He had a question: Had I been reaching out to him on WhatsApp, trying to work him for information?

I paused. As an investigative reporter at ProPublica, I’m reaching out to a lot of people all the time. But as I racked my brain, I couldn’t think of any Canadians I had recently tried to develop as sources.

It seems as though someone is impersonating you, the man warned.

I was at a loss. What was Fake Me asking about? Were they just using my name or my picture too? How could I be sure the person warning me about this impostor wasn’t actually an impostor himself?

The Canadian official assured me he’d send a message from his government email to confirm his identity, and he’d include screenshots of his conversation with Fake Me. I thanked him, and we exchanged some pleasantries. Before saying goodbye, I asked him if there was anything he’d like to get on the radar of an investigative reporter. (Without even realizing it, I was working him for information. Maybe Fake Me and Real Me aren’t so different.)

The screenshots the Canadian sent over later showed someone with a Miami number using my ProPublica headshot as their profile pic. I’ve never lived in Florida.

“This is Robert Faturechi from ProPublica,” Fake Me wrote. “I really need to get in touch with you.”

The Canadian asked me not to publicly reveal too many details about his work, but it involves dealing with other countries, including Ukraine.

I alerted our security team at ProPublica. They told me that there was little we could do aside from reporting the fake account to WhatsApp.

We did, and I put the matter behind me — until two weeks later, when I got another warning.

This time it was a Latvian businessman who said he runs an organization providing equipment to the Ukrainian military and is involved in a drone development project with Ukrainian forces.

“Hey!” the Latvian wrote to me on LinkedIn. “Was good to chat on Signal! Let’s connect here as well!”

The only problem was I had never chatted with him on Signal, the encrypted messaging app.

The Latvian reached out to me on LinkedIn because he was concerned he wasn’t talking to Real Me on Signal. He sent over screenshots of someone using my headshot and claiming to be me.

“Am I right in understanding that you are an expert in the field of UAVs?” Fake Me had messaged the Latvian, referring to unmanned aerial vehicles, a fancy term for drones.

“My clients,” the impostor explained, “are particularly interested in the application of UAVs in Ukraine.”

The Latvian had offered to discuss the topic in a phone call, but Fake Me (who could be a man or woman) declined, saying they weren’t “comfortable” talking on the phone. They asked to continue the “conversation in written format” or if the Latvian could “record a voice message on this topic.”

The Latvian, growing suspicious, insisted on a video call. Fake Me relented, sending him step-by-step instructions they said would result in a secure video chat, but that actually appeared to have been an attempt to trick the Latvian into giving up access to his email account.

The Latvian ultimately blocked Fake Me.

The impersonations were disquieting. Investigative reporting is hard enough with public trust in media so low and those in power stepping up attacks against journalists. Scammers giving potential sources another thing to worry about just makes our work more difficult.

I can’t be certain what Fake Me is up to, but posing as a journalist in this way seems to be the latest evolution in online deception. ProPublica has chronicled the dark world of pig butchering, in which human traffickers in Asia force their victims to scam people by posing as friends or potential romantic interests. In those cases, the goal is cash.

But sometimes the objective is stealing sensitive information. And even sophisticated actors can fall victim to so-called phishing attacks, in which scammers impersonate legitimate entities. One of the most notable and perhaps consequential instances was when John Podesta, chair of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, fell victim to an email purporting to be a Google security alert, giving hackers access to his personal Gmail account. Thousands of his emails, some of them quite damaging to Clinton and the Democratic Party, were published online.

From the screenshots the Canadian and Latvian sent me, I could tell Fake Me wasn’t asking for credit card info or urging anyone to buy a gift card. It didn’t appear to be a moneymaking scam.

I’m not sure who else they’ve reached out to, but in both cases I was alerted to, Fake Me seemed to have an interest in foreign militaries. Maybe some clunky intelligence operation?

I tried calling Fake Me using the phone number they used to reach out to the Canadian defense official. I got a recorded message saying the line was not in service.

On Signal and WhatsApp, the number rang and rang, without an answer.

There was even less we could do about the second impersonation than we could about the first.

Signal keeps extremely little information about its users; it knows when someone first created their account and the phone number they used to do so but stores nothing about who they’re messaging. That’s by design. The hands-off approach is part of why it’s a safe platform for journalists to talk securely to sources. But it also makes catching impostor accounts difficult. Red flags, like sending messages with suspicious links, aren’t detectable by Signal. (WhatsApp can’t see the content of messages unless a user reports them. It has the ability to see who its users are messaging, but a spokesperson said it’s rare for the company to store that data.)

Cooper Quintin, a technologist at the digital privacy nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation, said he had never heard of a case like mine on Signal. But overall he was noticing an upswing in scams on the secure messaging app. Signal was doing what it could, he said, such as adding a feature that slows down would-be spammers trying to send many messages in a short time frame. Signal also makes links from unknown senders unclickable. But there are limits to what Signal can do, he said, without compromising its hallmark privacy protections for its users.

“This fits a trajectory. As Signal gets more popular, more attackers start to view it as a potential platform for attacks,” said Quintin, who insisted we talk via video chat so he could be sure I wasn’t an online impersonator asking to interview him about being impersonated online.

Some platforms — such as Facebook and Instagram — allow users to get verified accounts in which the site essentially confirms they are who they claim to be. But it wouldn’t be feasible for Signal to do the same, said digital security expert Runa Sandvik, who consults on security matters for ProPublica. The nonprofit that runs Signal is small, and verification would require staffing it doesn’t have. More significantly, she said, it would require Signal to collect more information about its users, eroding the privacy protections that make it popular.

Signal did not provide comment for this article. A spokesperson for WhatsApp said “we have a strong track record of banning those trying to scam others and staying ahead of scammers and their tactics.” The spokesperson said WhatsApp “took appropriate action in line with our policies” against the account spoofing me but declined to say what that action was. In general, WhatsApp tries to root out scam accounts, even before they’re reported, by monitoring for suspicious behavior that includes attempting to launch many accounts from a single location.

It turns out, if you’re contacted by someone pretending to be a reporter, the best way to scuttle their scam is to do a little reporting of your own.

Every journalist at ProPublica has a bio page. Here is mine. On my bio page, you’ll find my Signal handle and email if you click on the Contact Me button. You can always check the Signal information or email address on my bio page to verify that I’m the person contacting you.

This is true for every ProPublica reporter: We all have our Signal numbers or usernames on our profiles, and we all have an email ending in @propublica.org.

The same goes for reporters at other outlets. If one reaches out to you and you have doubts, check their website and social accounts to verify their email or Signal or WhatsApp numbers. We’ve heard through the media grapevine and in published accounts about scams similar to mine hitting other organizations as well.

They include smaller-scale deceptions. The New York Times recently flagged an account on X falsely claiming to be an intern for the news organization. In 2023, Reuters reported that two of its reporters in China were being impersonated via Instagram and Telegram accounts that were attempting to get information on activists protesting the country’s COVID-19 policies. And just this month, a correspondent for Reuters in Saudi Arabia warned his followers that someone was impersonating him on WhatsApp.

There are also more sophisticated campaigns to be on alert for. The German government this year released a vague warning about what it described as likely a state-sponsored actor attempting to commandeer the Signal accounts of government officials and reporters across Europe. And last month, the FBI announced that individuals associated with Russian intelligence were posing as Signal’s security department to fool American government officials and journalists into providing information that would allow the hackers to take over their accounts. Once they had access, the FBI warned, they could see conversations and contact lists, and send messages as the victim.

These scams should worry anyone who cares about investigative reporting. Throughout my career, I’ve done sensitive stories exposing wrongs in politics, finance, the military and law enforcement. Many of them relied on courageous individuals who have taken leaps of faith and shared information, sometimes at real personal risk. I go to great lengths to protect my sources and make sure they are comfortable taking that risk. If potential sources have to doubt that I am who I say I am, they may be less likely to engage.

When journalists are impersonated online, like I have been, Sandvik said they shouldn’t be quiet about it.

“If and when it does happen, be very public about it, which is what you’re doing now,” she said. “Let people know this is happening so if people hear from you, they know this is something to look out for.”

The post Who’s Been Impersonating This ProPublica Reporter? appeared first on ProPublica.

During a hearing, U.S. District Judge Alfred H. Bennett questioned why the settlement had no compensation for those who were harmed and grilled a federal prosecutor over $20 million devoted to police and immigration enforcement. He said he was uncomfortable with the provision because the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Colony Ridge, which has massive subdivisions north of Houston, mentioned nothing about public safety or immigration.

“I thought I was dealing with … folks who had been defrauded, with allegations of above-market interest rates, improper foreclosures,” Bennett said, holding up the original lawsuit in his right hand and the settlement in his left. “Now, all of the sudden, I’m being asked to OK increased law enforcement?”

“Who in the settlement room said it would be a good idea to give $20 million to law enforcement?” Bennett asked early in the hearing. “Where did that come from?”

The original idea came from the state, said Justice Department senior prosecutor Varda Hussain, referring to the office of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Paxton’s office filed a similar lawsuit that would also be resolved through the settlement. He did not respond to a request for comment. Hussain, a principal deputy chief at the Justice Department’s Washington headquarters, said that the federal government stood by the provision even though neither its lawsuit nor the state’s raised concerns about crime.

Colony Ridge residents told federal investigators that they were worried about crime in the development after the lawsuit was filed, Hussain said.

“I understand what it might look like to you, but I am telling you that this is a concern that friends of the court and residents will tell you exists,” Hussain said.

The settlement ends a three-year legal dispute in which the Justice Department and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau accused Colony Ridge of deceiving tens of thousands of Hispanic consumers into taking out high-interest loans that many could not afford. The developer then benefited when it foreclosed on their properties, prosecutors said.

Former attorneys and investigators with the Justice Department and CPFB, including those involved in filing the original lawsuit in 2023, told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune they were stunned that the Trump administration had reached a settlement that did not seek to compensate victims.

Of the 183 housing and civil enforcement settlements the Justice Department has announced since 2018, only 6% lacked money for victims, and none included funding for police or immigration enforcement, an analysis by the news organizations found.

Including such a provision in a predatory lending case has never been done before, said Bennett, who sought to find a compromise.

An hour into the hearing, Bennett asked the Justice Department and the attorneys for Colony Ridge, which has denied any wrongdoing, whether they would consider his suggestions to revise the settlement to obtain his approval.

Colony Ridge attorney Jason Ray said his client would consider it. Hussain said the Justice Department wasn’t interested.

Instead, the Justice Department said it would pursue the settlement without seeking judicial approval under a provision of federal law that allows it to do so. That means the court will not supervise Colony Ridge to ensure the developer follows the terms of the settlement, said Johnathan Smith, former deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights during the Biden administration.

Smith, who helped assemble the Colony Ridge lawsuit three years ago, said now the case simply goes away because there is no one to enforce it. He added that the Justice Department cannot sue Colony Ridge based on the same claims in the future.

“By having settlements that are public and that are court-enforced, it sends a clear message to other potential bad actors that there could be real consequences for their actions,” Smith said in an email.

He said the Justice Department’s decision amounts to a “get out of jail free card.”

The “DOJ is turning its back on the victims, and those victims are left with no recourse and no assurance that any actions will be taken to remedy the harms that were identified in DOJ’s original complaint,” Smith said.

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment about Smith’s criticisms. During the hearing, however, Hussain said the department would ensure Colony Ridge abides by the settlement. In a court filing, the developer said it had already started implementing the provisions, which include adopting stricter lending standards.

Keilah Sanchez, a former Colony Ridge landowner who, along with her sister, collected complaints from residents who said they had been mistreated by the developer, said it was crushing to see the settlement be implemented without helping past victims.

“It’s unbelievable, but at this point, I don’t expect much from these agencies,” she said.

The post A Judge Worried a Proposed Settlement Doesn’t Do Enough to Help Victims. The DOJ Is Still Moving Forward. appeared first on ProPublica.

Gov. Bill Lee is expected to sign the bill, which will require that school officials only report student threats to police if a threat is “credible,” meaning reasonably expected to be carried out. Previously, a school administrator who failed to report any threat of mass violence could be charged with a misdemeanor.

The change comes after pressure from advocates and an investigation by ProPublica and WPLN. Many of the children charged had disabilities and were students of color. One of the youngest children charged with a felony last year was 6.

In one case ProPublica and WPLN investigated, an autistic teenager with an intellectual disability told his teacher that his backpack would blow up if anyone touched it. Police only found a stuffed bunny inside, but they arrested and charged him with making a threat of mass violence. That child’s mother is now suing the school district; the case is ongoing.

Another family ProPublica and WPLN wrote about later won a $100,000 settlement against a Chattanooga public charter school; family members argued in a federal lawsuit that the school wrongly reported their 11-year-old autistic child to the police.

Multiple parents also filed a lawsuit against Williamson County Schools, outside of Nashville, claiming their children were wrongly suspended and arrested after being accused of making threats of mass violence at school. The school board disputed the claims in court records and moved to dismiss the lawsuit. In an initial ruling, the judge said the families had a “plausible claim” and allowed the case to move forward.

Sen. Ferrell Haile, who co-authored this year’s bill, said during a late March committee hearing that he hoped it would prevent students with disabilities from being needlessly arrested for statements “they have no ability to carry out.”

He said he was inspired by the story of a fifth grader with a disability in his district who made a statement out of frustration one day at school. The school police officer told the family he didn’t want to arrest the child but the law required him to, whether or not the threat was credible. His superiors charged the child with a felony.

“In some counties, it has become a standard practice to charge every threat even if it has been deemed not credible,” Haile said at the hearing.

Haile’s current stance is a departure from his prior position and those of most other Tennessee Republicans, who refused to back similar language as recently as last winter. In fact, in 2025, Haile proposed a bill that would extend the felony threats law to more locations, including child care agencies, preschools and churches.

When a Democratic colleague asked him during a hearing to consider only applying the felony charge to people who intended to carry out the threats, Haile said no. Police and district attorneys — not school principals or counselors — should be responsible for determining whether a threat was credible, he said last year.

Haile did not respond to a request for comment.

Advocates are applauding the recent change to the law but warn that it isn’t a panacea. Tennessee law still does not require police to consider whether a threat is credible before charging or arresting youth.

“This is not a total solution to threats of mass violence,” said Zoe Jamail, an advocate for children with the nonprofit Raphah Institute. “It is a huge step forward in terms of signifying an intent by the legislature that noncredible threats shouldn’t be prosecuted.”

The post Tennessee Lawmakers Pass Fix to School Threats Law After Kids Were Arrested for Jokes and Misunderstandings appeared first on ProPublica.

Colony Ridge, which sold plots in massive subdivisions north of Houston, had become a “one-stop shop for discriminatory lending,” Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general for civil rights, said at a news conference announcing the lawsuit. The developer targeted Hispanic applicants through false advertising and persuaded them to take out high-interest loans that many could not afford, then benefited when it foreclosed on their properties, the lawsuit alleged.

“Our goal at the end of the day is to ensure that victims are compensated for their loss,” Clarke declared.

Three years later, the Trump administration and Colony Ridge are on the verge of resolving the case. But the $68 million proposed settlement provides no money for victims of the alleged scheme. Instead, it sets aside $20 million for policing and immigration enforcement — a provision that may be used to target the very people who were victimized by the developer, according to former government officials who worked on such cases.

“I’ve never seen a settlement like this, with a complete misalignment between what you’re settling and what the resolution is,” said Elena Babinecz, who led fair lending investigations at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for 12 years under the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations, before leaving in October.

“It’s a slap in the face to the individuals that were harmed; that the Justice Department acknowledges were harmed,” said Babinecz, who was at the bureau when it joined the Justice Department in filing suit against Colony Ridge. “It’s a complete misjustice, and it’s not at all why these civil rights laws were passed.”

Seven other attorneys and investigators who formerly enforced the federal government’s lending and housing civil rights laws also told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune that they were stunned by the agreement, which a U.S. district judge must still approve. Indeed, Colony Ridge is the largest Justice Department case since at least 2018 in which the settlement includes no monetary compensation for victims. The judge has scheduled a hearing on Friday over the proposal.

A coalition of fair housing and civil rights groups has urged the court to reject the settlement, arguing the lawsuit is the only realistic prospect for many consumers to get recompense because they cannot afford private attorneys.

The Justice Department had built a case against Colony Ridge with “stark and overwhelming evidence,” Clarke told the news organizations. Prosecutors said Colony Ridge repeatedly misled consumers about the condition of lots they purchased, forcing them to spend hundreds or thousands on drainage improvements and utility connections they hadn’t known the land needed. This contributed to consumers defaulting on high-interest loans, according to the lawsuit. Colony Ridge then benefited from the improvements made to the land it foreclosed on and resold the lots at higher prices.

In the end, tens of thousands of victims were exploited through the developer’s predatory practices in a span of eight years, the government argued. Colony Ridge repossessed more than 15,000 lots, many owned by immigrants, a 2023 investigation by the Houston Landing found.

Of the 183 housing and civil enforcement Justice Department settlements since 2018, only 6% did not include money for victims. Each of those cases was smaller in scope than Colony Ridge. They included a suburban Maryland car dealership accused of racial discrimination in loan offers over a seven-month period and a California landlord who allegedly refused to provide handicapped parking to one tenant.

None of the settlements — except for Colony Ridge — includes funding for police or immigration enforcement.

As federal investigators built a case around how Colony Ridge had treated its largely immigrant customers, conservative media and politicians aligned with Trump — who had made immigration enforcement a cornerstone of his campaign — did not focus on how consumers had been harmed. They instead accused the development of being a haven for immigrants.

They claimed, without providing evidence, that the development was a base for Mexican drug cartels and a “no-go” zone for police. Local law enforcement disputed the assertions, saying that violent crime there was no different from other neighborhoods in and around Houston. State legislative panels convened to investigate the allegations also fizzled out after they were unable to substantiate such claims.

Neither the federal government nor a lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton months later raised public safety concerns or a need for more policing or immigration enforcement.

The Justice Department declined to comment and did not respond to the concerns raised by former employees and people involved in the case. Paxton’s office did not respond to multiple emails. But while announcing the settlement in February, Harmeet K. Dhillon, who leads the department’s Civil Rights Division, argued that Colony Ridge had encouraged illegal immigration by targeting Hispanic consumers with the bait of affordable homeownership. “This DOJ will go after all lenders, financiers, and land developers who participate in schemes which ultimately encourage illegal immigration,” she said. In his own news release about the settlement, which would also resolve the Texas suit, Paxton focused primarily on funding set aside for immigration enforcement. “Under my watch, Texas will never be a sanctuary for illegals,” he said.

The focus on immigration makes the lives of those who were harmed more difficult, said Catherine Bendor, a manager in the Justice Department’s Housing and Civil Enforcement Section for eight years until 2024.

“Even if they’re citizens, they’ll likely be hassled by immigration agents who target people based on appearance or accent,” she said.

John Harris, Colony Ridge’s CEO, declined to be interviewed. The settlement does not include an admission of wrongdoing. He has long maintained that his company, which started in 2011 and offered mortgages for as little as a 1% down payment, has not preyed on its customers.

The financing terms helped the development grow rapidly, albeit inconsistently, with neat modular homes, trailers and abandoned or vacant lots across more than 33,000 acres. Matt Rascon, a spokesperson for Colony Ridge, said the company “found success offering a path to land ownership through flexible financing options with no credit checks.” His comments echoed the company’s argument in court that it created a path to homeownership for thousands of lower-income consumers whom risk-averse banks reject.

Offering loans when others wouldn’t is the most common argument predatory lenders make to justify their practices, said Nathalie Martin, a University of New Mexico law professor who has studied high-cost loans.

“You can see from this situation, it doesn’t help people to get them into loans that are more costly than they need to be,” Martin said.

Former federal officials and Colony Ridge property owners acknowledge that the settlement includes some provisions to protect consumers in the future. It would require Colony Ridge to adopt stricter lending standards and allow buyers to back out of purchases without penalty within two months. The developer would also make $48 million in infrastructure upgrades and provide transparent, bilingual marketing and communication.

Another provision bars Colony Ridge from developing new lots to sell for three years. But the agreement exempts 674 acres that the developer has already subdivided.

The concessions are helpful but inadequate because they miss a clear opportunity to help victims recover money they lost, which is a key reason such cases are filed, said Jon Seward, who was principal deputy chief for the Justice Department when he left in May 2023 after 17 years in its Housing and Civil Enforcement Section.

One such victim was Maria Acevedo, who describes herself as a lifelong Republican and U.S. citizen who said she voted for Trump three times.

A former land developer herself, Acevedo took out a high-interest $40,000 loan in 2018 to buy a half-acre of land where she planned to retire. She then spent an additional $60,000 on surveying, engineering and adding dirt to protect against flooding.

Acevedo said she planned to refinance her loan but learned that she couldn’t because the property had a lien from a previous owner. Colony Ridge foreclosed on the property three years later, even though Acevedo said she was making payments. Colony Ridge did not comment on Acevedo’s case or those of other individuals in this story. The foreclosure ruined her retirement plans, Acevedo said, adding that the challenges strained her marriage and eventually led to divorce.

She considered finding a lawyer to sue. But she said she decided to “become a team player” and serve as a government witness after federal investigators pledged to help victims like her recover what they lost.

Now, Acevedo said, she feels betrayed by a settlement that ignores Hispanic consumers like her.

“I know we were targeted. A blind man could see it,” Acevedo said. 

She added that the lawsuit was “going smooth, but once the Trump administration came in and took it over, it changed.”

Even if she could now find a lawyer, her window to file a lawsuit has expired because state and federal laws require they be brought within five years.

Since returning to office, the Trump administration has abandoned an $80 million settlement with Navy Federal Credit Union over illegal overdraft fees, which allowed the bank to continue operating without penalty, and halted dozens of investigations, including a case accusing a major Pennsylvania lender of defrauding student borrowers. Both defendants have denied wrongdoing.

The Trump administration and White House budget director Russell Vought have taken aim at the CFPB, which was formed to protect consumers from getting ripped off by businesses. For Vought, the agency was an example of government overreach. It was also one of the first targets for Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency. In April, in response to a lawsuit by bureau employees over the CFPB’s attempt to lay off 90% of its staff, the administration offered a compromise proposal: slashing two-thirds.

The White House and Vought’s office declined to comment, but the administration has argued the agency was needlessly aggressive and wasteful.

The shift away from pursuing consumer protection cases gives the impression that the federal government is no longer serious about protecting regular people from unscrupulous businesses,  former Justice Department and CFPB employees said.

Investigators spent months gathering stories and building trust with residents who were wary of cooperating, said Johnathan Smith, a former deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights during the Biden administration, who visited the development before the lawsuit. The team worked to ensure that the community “believed something was going to be different because the Justice Department got involved.”

“It’s just heartbreaking how the settlement failed to meet that mark,” he said.

SuEllen Sanchez and her sister, Keilah Sanchez, were among those who shared their stories with investigators, expecting the government would help them reclaim what they lost. They also provided investigators with hundreds of records from neighbors who said they’d been scammed.

A U.S. citizen born in Puerto Rico, SuEllen Sanchez had purchased five lots in Colony Ridge in 2020. She saw it as a way to invest money she’d earned as an aesthetician and perhaps open a business there.

Sanchez said the advertisements and sales representatives for Colony Ridge led her to believe the lots would be ready to build on. They weren’t. Clearing the land for development, acquiring permits and connecting utilities cost her more than $10,000. Colony Ridge foreclosed on one of the lots in 2021, according to Sanchez, who disputes the developer’s claims that she had missed loan payments.

Sanchez wondered if others also believed they’d been scammed. That’s when she and her sister, a web developer who also had purchased Colony Ridge properties, launched a website asking residents to share their experiences with the developer.

Sanchez said she was dismayed that all of their efforts resulted in the proposed settlement.

“These were consumer-based lawsuits, so you would think they’d actually do something for consumers with everything that they stipulated that this company did wrong,” Sanchez said. “There’s no way somebody who has all these violations should still be operating.”

Acevedo feels the same way, and she wants the judge to know it as he mulls the settlement. She doesn’t have a lawyer, but after the Justice Department proposed it, she filed a legal brief in the case demanding compensation as a victim. She offered to testify and present evidence.

“I want the court to hear me directly,” she wrote to Judge Alfred H. Bennett. “I am willing to swear to my experience.”

On Friday, she plans to drive 30 miles to Courtroom 9A in the Houston federal building for the settlement hearing, hoping for the judge to grant her request to be heard.

The post “A Slap in the Face”: Trump’s DOJ Plans to Settle Predatory Lending Case Without Compensating Victims appeared first on ProPublica.

He had just returned from a church service in 2023 where the company’s founder and owner, a charismatic Christian from Eastern Kentucky, preached about the value of getting sober to hundreds of clients and staff at Addiction Recovery Care.

Shirley, 58, who led recovery group discussions at ARC, said one of his supervisors told him to submit an invoice for the day’s canceled treatment sessions. With it, Shirley said, he was told to fabricate the details of a group discussion, including quotations from clients, as if they had attended a meeting.

“It was fraud,” Shirley told the Lexington Herald-Leader and ProPublica, adding that he refused. But he said he saw others do it often when they gathered to enter their reports into the billing system.

Shirley and ARC were part of a new economy, a boom fueled by misery and addiction and easy money from government officials desperate to curtail the opioid crisis that was devastating rural America. Kentucky’s payouts for drug treatment became so lucrative that companies bused in clients from other states to fill their treatment centers.

ARC reigned above them all, providing more than two-thirds of all treatment beds in Kentucky at its peak in 2024. Between 2019 and 2024 ARC billed the state $1.7 billion, of which it was paid more than $377 million in state Medicaid money for addiction treatment services.

During those years ARC won praise for its programs. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services lauded ARC as a model, and Newsweek named the company one of the best addiction treatment providers in the country. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear called its founder “an essential partner in our fight against addiction.”

But ARC’s growth was fueled in part by billing practices that federal prosecutors and former employees now allege may have amounted to fraud. FBI investigators were alerted to the case through a whistleblower suit filed in 2023, which alleged ARC fraudulently billed Medicaid for a therapeutic service called psychoeducation. The FBI has asked those who “believe you were victimized by ARC” to fill out a tip form. That investigation is ongoing, according to the FBI.

ProPublica and the Herald-Leader interviewed six people affiliated with the company over the last six years, including former staff members, clients and some who came for treatment and were later hired on. They shared publicly for the first time how they came to ARC seeking help for addiction but became reluctant participants in the company’s alleged billing scheme. Two of them have said they made similar statements to federal investigators.

Part of the fraud, three of them said, was committed at the explicit urging of supervisors who told them they were under pressure to meet billing targets set by ARC leaders — a circumstance exacerbated by a persistent lack of qualified staff, they said.

Those who talked to the news organizations did not keep contemporaneous notes and do not have access to company emails that could support their claims because they no longer work for ARC. But their accounts are corroborated by other clients and referred to in two key documents.

The first was a draft settlement agreement between ARC, the state of Kentucky and the Department of Justice filed by lawyers suing ARC in January as evidence in an unrelated civil suit. That suit, which is pending, alleges that ARC failed to repay at least $8 million it borrowed from two loan companies to pay the DOJ settlement. ARC denied it failed to pay the company.

The draft DOJ settlement document alleges that ARC knowingly falsified some medical records from 2018 to the start of 2024 in order to collect $16 million for group meetings like Shirley described. It allegedly collected millions more by using low-level staff to bill the state for services that under the law must be delivered by a doctor or licensed therapist.

The second document was a 2025 investigative report by the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services that has yet to be released but was obtained by ProPublica and the Herald-Leader. That report said state investigators found that ARC had violated so many regulatory standards, lack of staff chief among them, that the conditions posed “an immediate danger to client health, safety and welfare.”

In response to questions for this story, ARC said it “voluntarily disclosed” billing errors to state and federal authorities after the company hired an outside agency to audit its billing practices. The draft settlement with the DOJ, the company said, was not supposed to be made public and therefore it could not comment. The draft settlement was unsigned.

“ARC has never knowingly or fraudulently billed Medicaid for services, and there is no evidence that the organization encouraged employees to falsify group notes for billing purposes,” ARC’s Vice President of Marketing Vanessa Keeton wrote in a March 23 email in response to written questions about the company’s billing practices and employee allegations.

She said that the company could not comment on staff, but that it “maintains a strict, zero-tolerance policy for fraud and non-compliant billing practices.” Keeton added that “any claims from clients or Peer Support Specialists about whether a specific service was billed are based on assumptions and do not accurately reflect actual billing practices.”

Nearly all of the people interviewed for this story credit ARC with playing a key role in their sobriety. But most also said they felt betrayed by an organization that publicly touted a Christian message and a commitment to helping others while internally prioritizing money over the well-being of their clients and staff.

Called by God

In late 2008, ARC owner Tim Robinson was working as an assistant county attorney near Ashland when he had an epiphany. An evangelical Christian who’d recently gotten sober from alcoholism, Robinson has said God told him to start a “health care ministry” to help his neighbors in the mountains and hollows of Appalachia hit hard by the opioid crisis. There were few treatment centers in the state at the time.

Robinson in 2010 opened the first ARC center in Louisa, a small town on the West Virginia border, 30 miles from his hometown in Martin County. ARC steadily grew across Eastern Kentucky. In 2015, the company was the state’s first drug treatment provider to accept Medicaid patients, which dramatically increased the number of available clients. The following year, ARC unveiled its yearlong “crisis-to-career” program, equal parts drug treatment and job training that ultimately helped clients become staff at ARC.

But it was during the COVID-19 pandemic that ARC exploded in size, thanks in large part to changes to billing rules put in place by the governor. As the global health crisis unfolded, Robinson — a well-connected political donor who has given hundreds of thousands to people from both major parties, including Beshear, a Democrat — emailed the governor and said drug treatment centers needed help to stay afloat amid pandemic restrictions.

In March 2020 Beshear signed an executive order that gave companies providing addiction services new latitude: The seven managed care organizations that controlled Medicaid billing in the state would need to allow providers to bill for an expanded menu of services without prior approval. Beshear said last month that order helped the commonwealth make significant and important progress in the fight against addiction.

“Kentucky has lost far too many children of God to overdose related deaths,” he said, citing the recent decline in overdose deaths in the state.

The decision meant companies could easily bill for what are known as peer support services, which are designed to help clients follow a treatment plan; these can be provided by staff who complete a 30-hour training course. ARC encouraged clients like Shirley to take the course and get credentialed as peer support specialists. Then, once they graduated from ARC’s program, many transitioned to staff and provided services they could bill to Medicaid.

The order also allowed easier billing for psychoeducation, a session during which a clinician talks to a patient about their diagnosis and treatment. The broadly defined service, which at the time could be billed for multiple times a week, is usually provided as part of a clinical therapy session, but Kentucky allows it to be billed as a separate service — which state Medicaid experts opposed because it drives up the cost of treatment.

From 2019 to 2024, ARC billed the state over $400 million for psychoeducation and peer support, earning the company more than $125 million, about a quarter of all reimbursements paid to Kentucky providers during that time. The revenue allowed it to open at least four new centers, including the roughly 700-bed Crown Recovery Center on a former college campus in Springfield, and to purchase a shuttered hospital campus in Ashland that ARC now uses for inpatient, outpatient and psychiatric services.

ARC Billed Medicaid for Tens of Millions Annually in Psychoeducation and Peer Support Services in Recent Years

Psychoeducation soon became ARC’s most lucrative service, accounting for almost half of its reimbursement from Medicaid in 2024. ARC said its billing for the service was in accordance with applicable laws and regulations and followed established billing protocols.

The spike in billing caught the attention of the companies that oversee state Medicaid spending. Liz Stearman, director of behavioral health for Humana, and other Medicaid experts repeatedly warned Kentucky officials that the state’s high spending on lower-level peer support and psychoeducation without the attendant clinical services wasn’t helping people seeking addiction treatment. They said in a letter to the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services that evidence showed clients in the state had more emergency department visits and more admissions and readmissions to hospitals and residential drug treatment facilities.

Stearman reminded lawmakers that Kentucky was one of the few states that allowed the service to be billed separately. Psychoeducation “does not have any national standards of clinical criteria that exist anywhere in the country, and the vast majority of states do not actually cover (it) as a standalone service,” she told a state legislative committee on Dec. 3, 2024. “Unfortunately we’re paying a higher amount of Medicaid dollars for less evidence-based services,” she said.

Beshear’s 2020 order and permission from Kentucky Medicaid to bill psychoeducation as a separate service helped create a new revenue stream for providers.

Still, on the surface the expansion of Robinson’s company was a good thing, giving Kentucky more treatment beds per capita than any other state — a fact Beshear and other elected officials touted. “I remember not too long ago when finding a treatment bed meant driving hours away or sitting on endless waiting lists. That’s all changed,” state Attorney General Russell Coleman said in a 2024 press conference.

By that point, ARC was operating as many as 30 facilities in more than 20 Eastern and Central Kentucky counties. That year Robinson announced ARC would expand into Ohio and West Virginia.

“It Was Just Herding Cattle”

During these years staff members said they were repeatedly asked to falsify bills for nonexistent treatment. ARC said it has since invested significant funds to hire a compliance and auditing team.

The half dozen people who spoke to the Herald-Leader and ProPublica said the company sometimes billed when a gathering did not meet the requirements of a meeting, such as when clients watched movies unrelated to recovery or had informal discussions while traveling in ARC vans. Other times clients played board games in lieu of group meetings, or the gatherings simply didn’t happen but were billed for anyway, three former peer support specialists said.

When Shirley was a client at Crown, ARC’s largest center, he said it was common for a peer support specialist to “sometimes walk in, ask me what I was grateful for. I would write it on a piece of paper, then they would leave.” Shirley said from talking with other staff members that this was a strategy often used to submit bills for group meetings that did not occur.

Odell Hager arrived as a client at ARC in 2015, after a judge ordered him to do so for carrying drugs. He ping-ponged between treatment and jail for the next few years until he landed in 2021 at May Hill, one of ARC’s centers in Louisa.

During his time there, first as a client and then as a peer support specialist, Hager saw examples of well-run peer support groups but said they were rare.

“Our peer support group was, ‘All right, you all just sit in the living room and watch a movie,’” while group leaders sat in the office on their phones, he said.

Hager, who worked at three ARC centers during the span of nearly a decade, said those kinds of groups that ARC billed for were the standard and forging group notes was common. Hager’s account was corroborated by an ARC client who overlapped with him. Hager said he also relayed his experience to the FBI in an interview.

“In my mind, it was no different than a prison system,” Hager said. “It was just herding cattle: get them in, get them out, get them in, get them out.”

Individual peer support is intended to be a check-in with a client: “How are you doing, are you having thoughts of relapse, are you feeling good right now?” Hager said.

At the end of the check-in, a peer support specialist sent in quotes from the client to ARC’s billing department to prove the discussion took place so the company could then bill Medicaid for the service. “But we were doing that with people we wouldn’t even see because we were so behind,” Hager said.

Hager said he doesn’t blame low-level peer support specialists for falsely logging group notes. Many peer support specialists, newly in recovery and overworked, were following orders from their supervisors or didn’t know any better, he said. Hager counts himself among them.

“I’m not justifying it,” he said. “When we were doing it we didn’t know it was a bad thing.”

Dustin Cornett, 34, was a client at Crown. After years of addiction, Cornett, who’s from South Eastern Kentucky, admitted himself in 2022 to ARC. He said he was disappointed when he attended peer support groups that largely consisted of watching popular movies. “We never did a damn thing,” he said. “We all knew it was just a money racket, an insurance scam.”

Peer support staff said they were asked to meet billing “quotas” each week. Pressure to meet those expectations sometimes resulted in staff falsely recording group notes, said Hager and Beckie Rose-Bowman, who was initially a client at ARC and later director of Riverplace, a 120-bed ARC facility in Pikeville, which has since closed.

“There were days I had peer support groups booked back-to-back in one- and two-hour increments with no space in between,” Rose-Bowman said. Billing was “100% their emphasis,” she said. ARC supervisors above her monitored peer support group attendance and would “come down” on staff if their attendance was short in the notes they submitted for billing, Rose-Bowman remembered. Other times, if a client was missing from a group, staff would count them as being present, she said.

In addition to denying that ARC encouraged such fraud, Keeton, the company spokesperson, said it had processes in place to ensure appropriate billing. “When issues are identified, for example, a peer support group watching a movie rather than receiving prescribed services, corrective action is taken immediately, and those services are not billed,” she said.

“I Don’t Have Enough Staff”

As ARC expanded, its staffing shortage grew more dire.

Lack of staff, including licensed clinicians, was one of several “systemic deficiencies” the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services found during the 2025 investigation of ARC’s operations.

State officials conducted multiple site visits at three of ARC’s largest centers after a client died in July 2025 at Riverplace, where Shirley worked. The probe, which lasted from August to November 2025, was also partly triggered by separate allegations that clients “did not receive timely or appropriate care.” The report did not disclose the source of the allegations.

Keeton said the company was “extremely saddened” by the client’s death and, following an internal review, concluded there was “no indication that the death resulted from any action or inaction on the part of ARC.”

But those Kentucky investigators concluded that ARC operated with an “absence of qualified, licensed clinical personnel,” calling it a “sustained and systemic pattern.” In some instances, state investigators found clients were recording and reporting their own vital signs, a violation of state and clinical rules.

That full report, obtained by the Herald-Leader and ProPublica, shows employees regularly complained to ARC supervisors and administrators with “persistent concerns” that a shortage of staff was putting clients’ health and safety at risk and hamstringing staff’s ability to properly run groups. 

ARC staff raised this issue to supervisors and state investigators, according to the report, saying “it feels like we are working around the clock” and “my life is about to become unmanageable because I don’t have enough staff.” Another employee, according to the findings, implied the shortage was so dire, “I am scared to take vacation.”

To help deal with the shortages, the company began sending clients to its own college to get trained as counselors to work at ARC. Roughly 60% of ARC’s workforce is former clients, the company’s spokesperson said.

ARC said it disputed the findings of the report to the state and requested a hearing. It noted that the Cabinet did not suspend or close the facilities and that the company “continues to operate and accept clients across all applicable levels of care with the knowledge and approval of the Cabinet.”

The state said the report has not been released because the investigation was ongoing. 

People inside the company said that those newly trained staff were often used when ARC couldn’t provide regular visits with licensed clinical professionals.

Shannon Gray, who started at ARC in 2021 and oversaw all treatment services there until early 2025, said clients rarely saw psychologists and counselors and did not receive enough treatment from more highly trained clinicians. Instead, ARC relied too much on peer-led sessions billed under peer support and psychoeducation, Gray said.

“From a therapeutic value, (that’s) too many services, too many groups,” said Gray, who also wrote the curriculum that Shirley and others used when leading groups. “I argued it many times, but even though I voiced concern, I still stayed there, so I’ll call myself out on this.”

The state’s 2025 investigative report agreed with Gray, saying unlicensed employees at ARC were often asked to do jobs for which they were not qualified, such as medication oversight. This was “despite the lack of licensure, training and clinical competency required by state regulation,” the Cabinet found.

The draft DOJ settlement alleges something similar: Between 2018 and March 2024, ARC “knew or recklessly disregarded” Medicaid rules by allowing unlicensed staff — “practitioners that did not have a professional credential” — to bill for behavioral health services that should’ve been provided by a therapist or professional counselor.

Shirley, who had minimal training, said the company’s computer billing system only allowed him to bill peer support groups under the psychoeducation code, which yielded a higher reimbursement rate, even if a clinician wasn’t present with him when leading a group.

“There was never a discussion about any other code to use,” said Shirley, adding that he didn’t know at the time how lucrative the psychoeducation code was. He only knew “everybody was using it.”

Keeton disputed this allegation, saying that while ARC did receive millions from Medicaid for peer support and psychoeducation, “there was no directive requiring staff to bill exclusively under a single code.”

Legislators Step In

Today, Robinson’s grand vision has begun to unravel.

In 2024, the seven managed care organizations in Kentucky raised alarms in a letter to the state’s health and welfare agency citing high costs and poor outcomes.

That year Republicans in the Kentucky General Assembly acted, reducing the amount Medicaid would pay for psychoeducation and peer support, and ARC’s major source of income began to decline, state data shows. Republicans also reinstated the requirement that providers seek authorization from insurers before they provide services.

In March of this year, a Kentucky lawmaker introduced a bill that outlawed billing for psychoeducational services in the state. The legislature delivered the bill to Beshear’s desk in late March. It is awaiting his decision.

Kentucky Republican state Rep. Kim Moser, the bill’s sponsor, said the measure is urgent because billing for psychoeducation has grown exponentially.

“We can look at the numbers and see that it’s being overused,” Moser said. “I just think we need to do something about it.”

ARC continues to bill Medicaid and Medicare. But since the state’s cuts to Medicaid payments for certain services, and the launch of the FBI investigation in 2024, ARC has laid off hundreds of employees and shuttered dozens of facilities, leaving some clients homeless.

Last year, ARC’s founder tried to sell off most of the company in part to pay the DOJ’s settlement, according to the creditors’ suit, but that deal fell through in December. When the two loan companies sued ARC in January 2026 for allegedly refusing to pay back millions they were owed, they claimed ARC was in “desperate financial straits” and facing “imminent bankruptcy.”

ARC claimed in a separate filing it needed that money for operating costs and called the demands for repayment “unduly burdensome.” The company is still seeking a buyer.

Even with the recent changes, lawmakers say Medicaid spending on drug treatment is still too high. In part this is because “there’s big money in making sure that addicts don’t actually enter into recovery,” Kentucky state Sen. Chris McDaniel, who co-chairs the legislature’s appropriations and revenue committee, said during a Feb. 24 hearing.

“I’ve never met an industry that can so effectively obfuscate the results of their work as the substance use industry,” he said in the February hearing. “At some point, we have to ask ourselves, how much of Medicaid is about patients, and how much is about profits?”

As for Shirley, he was laid off last year. He now works at a different residential recovery center in Western Kentucky — a move that he said opened his eyes to how poorly clients were treated at ARC and how little clinical care they received.

“Their model is not to help clients,” he said of ARC. “For them, it’s a revolving door. It’s warehousing.”

Keeton said this assessment isn’t reflective of ARC’s mission or the success of the thousands of individuals it serves. “We don’t ‘warehouse’ people,” she said. “We invest in them.”

The post They Needed Treatment for Drug Addiction. The Company They Turned to May Have Used Them to Commit Fraud. appeared first on ProPublica.

Amid a debt-fueled acquisition spree that saw the small California company grow to 17 hospitals in six states, Prospect was repeatedly cited for dangerous medical care, poor infection control and unsanitary facilities. The company stiffed state and local governments on more than $135 million in taxes and didn’t pay vendors for equipment, services and supplies. It shuttered four safety-net hospitals in a Philadelphia suburb that it had promised to keep open, laying off thousands. 

Now, more than a year after the company filed for bankruptcy in January 2025, a new layer of harm has emerged: Prospect had promised to provide malpractice coverage for its hospitals and many of its doctors, but court filings show it set aside no money to pay those costs — or to compensate injured patients. 

As a result, hundreds of people with pending malpractice cases against the company may never have a shot at meaningful redress.

One of them is Pamela Dorn. The lawsuit she filed against Prospect in 2024 has stalled, and it’s now doubtful she’ll ever be able to hold the company accountable for the negligent care she says it provided her husband. 

Bob Dorn, 75, suffered from such severe dementia that he couldn’t chew and was on a liquid diet. But when he became aggressive in March 2022 and was taken to Prospect’s emergency room in Waterbury, Connecticut, the medical staff sedated him, then left him unattended with a meal of macaroni and cheese and broccoli, according to Dorn’s lawsuit and an interview with her. Hospital staff later found her husband choking and struggling to breathe. He was intubated and taken to the intensive care unit but never regained consciousness. His death certificate said he died from asphyxia due to food blocking his airway.

“I didn’t want the same thing to happen to somebody else,” Dorn said, explaining why she filed the case. “How a hospital system operates without malpractice insurance is beyond me. It’s irresponsible.” (In court filings, attorneys for Prospect and the ER doctors have denied the negligence allegations.) 

Compounding the shock for plaintiffs like Dorn, as well as former Prospect doctors and their lawyers, is that Prospect wasn’t legally obligated to prove it could actually pay its malpractice costs. 

Like a growing number of health care companies, Prospect had saved money by “self-insuring” against these claims. Instead of paying premiums to a commercial insurer, the company pledged to pay directly for the legal defense of its facilities and doctors and to cover negotiated settlements or trial awards up to certain amounts — for many cases, up to $7.5 million. 

States typically require commercial insurers to file audited statements showing they’ve set aside sufficient funds for malpractice obligations and to contribute to a guaranty fund that pays a portion of claims if an insurer goes belly-up. 

But there’s little oversight — and no safety-net fund to tap — when companies self-insure. The problem has also surfaced in the bankruptcies of two other private-equity-backed health care companies, the Steward hospital chain and Genesis HealthCare, once the nation’s largest nursing home company. (Genesis agreed to at least 155 malpractice settlements totalling $58 million but filed for bankruptcy before paying most plaintiffs, KFF Health News reported. The company denied wrongdoing.)

“It seems like a gaping hole,” said Connecticut Rep. Cristin McCarthy Vahey, who co-chairs the state legislature’s public health committee. She called Prospect’s lack of coverage “awful, devastating and infuriating. … What has happened with Prospect is like peeling an onion. The more we peel, the more we cry.”

In emailed responses to questions from ProPublica, insurance regulators in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania said they are troubled by the harm caused by Prospect’s failure to fund malpractice coverage, a problem they hadn’t encountered before. All said they have limited authority to regulate companies that self-insure. 

In Connecticut, where Prospect owned three hospitals, a spokesperson for the insurance department wrote that state law allows health systems “to meet malpractice obligations through self-insured options” and the agency has no responsibility for “solvency oversight.” Prospect also owned insurance subsidiaries that provided some coverage for its hospitals. But they were headquartered in Vermont and offshore, in the Cayman Islands — which is legal but puts them beyond Pennsylvania’s reach, a spokesperson for the state’s insurance department said.

Rhode Island requires hospital companies to receive formal approval to self-insure and to submit financial information annually to regulators, but a spokesperson for the state Department of Business Regulation acknowledged Prospect had filed no such documents since 2019, despite self-insuring until 2025 when it filed for bankruptcy. Agency records show the state has taken no action against the company. (Open investigations are confidential, and the spokesperson said he could not comment on whether one is underway.) 

Connecticut plaintiff attorney Mike D’Amico, who represents Dorn, has been handling malpractice cases for four decades. The Prospect situation is “a disaster” and “something I’ve never seen before,” he said. “You have a lot of people that have been harmed by negligent conduct that have no recourse.” 

Prospect, which ProPublica reported on in 2020, has become a case study on the public harms that can stem from private equity’s growing involvement in health care. In the decade after Leonard Green & Partners bought majority control of Prospect in 2010, the firm and the company’s founders, Sam Lee and David Topper, together extracted $658 million in fees and dividends for themselves and other investors, according to Securities and Exchange Commission filings and financial statements. This starved the business of money for staffing, maintenance and critical supplies while loading it up with debt. 

Unable to find an outside buyer for the now financially decimated company, Leonard Green finally sold its majority stake back to Lee and Topper in 2021. Prospect’s January 2025 bankruptcy filing came just four days after the release of a bipartisan U.S. Senate Budget Committee investigation into how private-equity ownership affects care. Titled “Profits Over Patients,” the report offered a harsh verdict on Prospect, saying its “primary focus was on financial goals rather than quality of care at their hospitals,” and that it had caused “the collapse of critical health care services in the communities it served.” Prospect, which has denied any misconduct or negligent care, has now sold or closed all of its hospitals.

Leonard Green, which disputed the Senate report’s conclusions, declined  to respond to questions from ProPublica. Lee, estimated to have personally received $128 million from the company, could not be reached for comment; an attorney who previously represented him did not respond to a call and email. Topper, who received $94 million from Prospect through a family trust, responded to questions posed by a reporter in a brief phone conversation with “no comment.” 

Prospect’s bankruptcy filing placed an automatic hold on more than 300 lawsuits filed against the company, seeking a total of more than $800 million in damages, according to bankruptcy court filings. Some of the malpractice cases awaiting resolution were near settlement or scheduled to go to trial when the hold began. Many alleged egregious harms, including wrongful deaths or debilitating injuries requiring costly care.

The widower of a 39-year-old physician sued the company in state court in Hartford, Connecticut, in 2022, alleging his wife died from negligent care following an emergency cesarean section at the Prospect hospital where she worked. Parents of a 10-month-old boy filed suit in state court in Philadelphia in 2023, claiming he’d required multiple operations (and eventually removal of his esophagus) after ER doctors failed to conduct tests revealing that he’d swallowed a button battery. A 2019 Pennsylvania case claimed a man’s bowel was perforated during a hernia repair, triggering life-threatening complications that required five more surgeries. In court filings in each of these cases, Prospect, its hospitals and its doctors denied the allegations of malpractice, negligence or wrongful death.

The insurance chaos began to surface in late October, after the Texas judge presiding over Prospect’s bankruptcy lifted the initial litigation hold. Her move followed failed efforts to persuade private insurers responsible for covering awards in excess of what Prospect’s self-insurance provided to kick in money for mediated settlements. The private insurers’ reasoning, according to bankruptcy court filings: their “reinsurance” contracts required them to pay only in cases where Prospect had already paid its entire share, similar to an auto insurance deductible.

In Connecticut and Rhode Island, Prospect had promised to pay $7.5 million for each lawsuit before any outside coverage kicked in. In Pennsylvania, Prospect relied on another form of self-insurance: a Vermont-based insurance subsidiary. That business was supposed to pay the first $500,000 of Pennsylvania malpractice costs, but it appears Prospect underfunded the subsidiary. (By exactly how much remains unclear.) Complicating matters further: For Pennsylvania cases filed after October 2020, the subsidiary wasn’t required to contribute until after Prospect had covered the first $250,000.

There are similar problems in California, where Prospect sold its six hospitals in the bankruptcy proceedings to a new for-profit company. Los Angeles attorney Judith Tishkoff, whose firm has represented Prospect for years, last week filed to withdraw from seven malpractice cases, saying Prospect’s general counsel has told her there is no insurance coverage and no money to pay any defense costs or legal fees.

Even those who win court awards or settlements against Prospect seem destined to be treated as unsecured claims in the company’s bankruptcy. Like vendors with unpaid bills for hospital linens and bandages, they’re likely to receive just pennies on the dollar, bankruptcy lawyers told ProPublica. Some plaintiffs lawyers, who get paid on a contingency basis, say they’re declining to take on new malpractice cases involving Prospect, given the difficulty of obtaining any recovery. 

Pennsylvania attorney Leonard Sloane is among them. “It’s a gamble to take on a new case,” said Sloane. “To pursue one of these claims is very expensive. There’s gotta be something at the end, otherwise what’s the sense of pursuing on behalf of a client who gets nothing?” Sloane represents the survivors of a 67-year-old woman who died in 2022 after a Prospect surgeon performing a partial lung removal mistakenly cut a pulmonary vein, leading to a cascade of complications. The doctor acknowledged in medical records that he’d made “a technical mistake,” but the lawyer representing him and Prospect has moved to throw out claims for punitive damages, denying his actions met the legal standard of “recklessness.” Sloane, who has been practicing for 50 years, believes the family’s case is strong, “but if there’s no coverage, that’s the end.”

Prospect promised the doctors it employed malpractice coverage, but those facing lawsuits have learned they may have to foot hundreds of thousands in legal costs personally, plus any settlements or court awards.

Dr. John Horan, 69, is a family physician in Rhode Island who has been practicing medicine for 41 years. He sold his practice to Prospect in 2016 and worked for the company until 2022. That year, the family of a patient who died filed a lawsuit blaming him for failing to diagnose her lung cancer. Horan denies he’s at fault. In December 2025, Horan’s lawyer told him Prospect was refusing to defend him or pay any of his costs. “I was nauseous for the next month,” he told ProPublica. Horan and his wife have met with a bankruptcy lawyer.

Paul Galamaga, Horan’s defense attorney, said he was handling 10 Prospect-related cases in Rhode Island when the company filed for bankruptcy. Prospect owes him about $183,000. He’s won court approval to withdraw from seven of the lawsuits but continues to represent Horan and two other physicians, who he says will now have to pay him personally. “There’s no money to pay me or defend any of the doctors,” Galamaga said.

Some defense lawyers have sought to reimpose a freeze on proceedings, citing the uncertainty about Prospect’s ability to pay. In Pennsylvania, attorney Ben Post, whose firm is listed in court filings as defense counsel in 16 Prospect malpractice lawsuits, filed motions late last year seeking to clamp a stay on several malpractice cases. If he didn’t get it, he said, he’d have “no choice” but to withdraw. 

In response to one such filing, plaintiffs attorney Francis Curran wrote that his 83-year-old client had been seeking redress for her husband’s death for nine years. “With each additional delay,” he said, “it becomes less and less likely that Plaintiff will receive just compensation during her lifetime.” (Although one of Post’s stay requests has already been denied, a lawyer his firm has retained to help navigate the insurance uncertainty said Post has no immediate plans to withdraw from any cases.)

In February, the Rhode Island legislature approved an $18 million emergency loan guarantee to assure the long-delayed sale of Prospect’s two struggling Providence-area hospitals, Our Lady of Fatima and Roger Williams Medical Center, to a Georgia-based nonprofit. Rep. Charlene Lima took to the floor to talk about the risk to local physicians left without promised malpractice coverage, warning that it could force them into bankruptcy and worsen the shortage of primary care doctors in Rhode Island. 

“The state shares culpability in this situation,” Lima said in an interview, adding that she’d support regulations to ensure this doesn’t happen again. “We weren’t looking at this or regulating this. It’s like nobody was watching the henhouse except the foxes maybe.” 

The harms of porous insurance oversight have also surfaced in the bankruptcy of Steward Health Care, an even larger hospital chain bankrolled by private equity. 

Backed by giant Cerberus Capital Management in 2010, Steward grew to 37 hospitals over a decade. In 2021, Cerberus exited the investment with a reported $800 million in profits, while Steward CEO Ralph de la Torre, a former heart surgeon who reaped more than $250 million from the company, bought himself a $40 million yacht. Three years later, Steward filed for bankruptcy, owing hundreds of millions to vendors and employees and facing accusations of fraud and abysmal patient care. 

(Cerberus declined to respond to questions from ProPublica, instead pointing to a public statement in which it said Steward’s problems “appear to be overwhelmingly related to the post-Cerberus ownership period.” A spokesperson for de la Torre, who led the ownership group until he resigned in late 2024, said he “firmly disputes” the allegations against him, “including claims of greed and bad-faith misconduct,” and intends to “vigorously defend himself against them.”)

To cover its malpractice costs, Steward operated a self-insurance subsidiary, called TRACO, which it had relocated to Panama, where it faced little regulatory oversight. According to a Boston Globe investigation, instead of setting aside adequate reserves, Steward treated TRACO like “a piggy bank,” siphoning out hundreds of millions to pay operating costs and buy more hospitals. By 2024, when Steward went bankrupt, TRACO had just $3.5 million left to defend and pay for more than 500 malpractice lawsuits, according to documents cited by the Globe.

Last year, a malpractice case brought against a Steward hospital outside Salt Lake City went before a Utah state judge. It involved allegations that a 19-year-old pregnant woman’s delivery was botched by inexperienced, ill-trained nurses. According to medical records and court testimony, they gave her overdoses of the labor-inducing drug Pitocin, starving her baby of blood and oxygen, then ignored fetal monitoring that signaled distress while an on-call doctor dozed in a room nearby. The baby suffered brain damage that has left her largely unable to speak. She is likely to remain disabled for life. 

Steward’s defense lawyers had withdrawn after the company stopped paying and communicating with them, leaving the family and its expert witnesses to present their case. In an emotional 42-minute discourse from the bench, Judge Patrick Corum said what had happened “literally took my breath away.” The family “would have been better off delivering this baby in the bathroom of a gas station, or in a hut somewhere in Africa, than in this hospital,” he declared. In October, he awarded the family $543.2 million in damages, one of the biggest malpractice awards in Utah’s history.

The injured child is now 6 and requires costly care. But because TRACO has no money — and Steward’s “excess” insurers are refusing to step in because TRACO hasn’t paid its share — it’s unclear when, or whether, the family will get anything. David Creasy, the family’s attorney, said the battle to resolve the matter could take years. “We’ve got to be able to find some way to get them the money they need to take care of her,” he said in an interview. “There was absolutely no oversight of TRACO.”

The Steward and Prospect bankruptcies make clear “this is a national issue,” said Stacy Paterno, CEO of the Rhode Island Medical Society. Paterno said she has begun convening regular meetings with her counterparts from a half-dozen states where Prospect and Steward operated hospitals about the risks posed by unregulated self-insurance plans, both to doctors and injured patients.

Steward’s creditors are trying to claw back money from the company’s former leaders. In November, a Steward creditors committee filed a 178-page lawsuit against former CEO de la Torre and more than a dozen other individuals and corporate entities that details the company’s alleged plundering of TRACO’s insurance reserves. The complaint does not name Cerberus as a defendant but suggests Cerberus may be a future target of the creditors’ “ongoing” investigation. (In court filings, de la Torre and other Steward defendants have denied the creditor lawsuit’s allegations.)

Prospect’s creditors are poised to launch a similar effort. The bankruptcy court has  approved $10 million to pursue legal claims against former Prospect principals, with Leonard Green and Prospect’s former top executives, Lee and Topper, as the big targets. “We really do believe there are potentially hundreds of millions” that can be recouped from those who “may have contributed to the downfall of this company,” Charles Persons, an attorney for the unsecured creditors committee, told the judge at a Dec. 12 court hearing. 

It’s unclear how much might be recovered, but it would likely be a fraction of what the company owes, and malpractice victims would share these funds with thousands of other unsecured creditors.

“The folks who have the lawsuits,” said D’Amico, the lawyer representing Dorn, “essentially go to the bottom of the barrel.”

The post For-Profit Hospital Chain Never Put Aside Money for Malpractice Insurance to Compensate Injured Patients appeared first on ProPublica.

The drop represents nearly 47% of the state’s participants in the program better known as food stamps and includes about 180,000 children, according to the Arizona Department of Economic Security, which administers the program.

On Wednesday, the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities released data through February showing that the reduction in Arizona has far outstripped other states. After Arizona, the largest loss of participants was in Florida, where less than 16% of recipients lost benefits since July, according to the center’s analysis.

Arizona officials attribute the plunging caseload to swift implementation of policy changes forced by the bill, including new work requirements.

But interviews suggest that Arizona’s efforts to comply, combined with cuts to the agency that runs the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, have contributed to the decline — making it more difficult to apply and causing people who are eligible to be denied. The state’s drop has exceeded previous projections.

“Arizona is just the alarm bell,” said Joseph Palomino, executive director of the Arizona Center for Economic Progress, a nonpartisan advocacy organization. “This is likely going to happen in every state.”

The bill, which places a larger share of the program’s costs onto states, expanded work requirements for some recipients and eliminated work exemptions for others, such as people who are homeless or aging out of foster care.

In addition, the bill mandates that states reduce their payment error rates — which measure the accuracy of eligibility and payment determinations — or face millions in penalties. Although some changes don’t fully take effect until the fall, experts say Arizona’s experience suggests people are already going hungry as a result of the legislation’s changes.

Charisma Garcia, a 25-year-old mother of two, has tried for months to obtain an interview to complete a SNAP application. After weeks calling the agency only to get a recorded message, she woke before sunrise recently to wait in line at an Arizona Department of Economic Security office in south Phoenix.

A security guard told her the agency wasn’t doing in-person interviews, so she headed to a food bank instead. She needed to feed her children, ages 3 and 6.

“I need to do the thing that gets me the food,” she said.

Brett Bezio, a spokesperson for DES, said the agency is focusing on reducing the state’s error rate to ensure “the program remains a stable resource for vulnerable Arizonans.” Although Arizona’s rate of 8.8% is below the national average, the new federal regulations require that it be brought down to 6%. If officials don’t reduce the rate, Arizona could face penalties of $195.4 million in two years, which is more than double the amount it pays to operate the program. The department said it expects participation to stabilize in the months ahead.

The choices Arizona is making are “a reality that every state is facing,” said Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Congress created a “terrible incentive” by requiring states to reduce their error rate and shoulder more of the program’s costs, she said.

Nationwide, SNAP enrollment plummeted 8% from December 2024 to December 2025, according to estimates from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which runs SNAP. Trump has touted it as a success.
“We lifted 3.3 million Americans off of food stamps,” he said, referencing figures since he took office. “That’s a record.”

Asked about the sharp decline in SNAP participants, Gov. Katie Hobbs’ press secretary, Liliana Soto, blamed Trump administration policies, which have “increased bureaucracy and red tape on states across the country, and forced DES to take difficult but necessary steps to reduce the state’s payment error rate.” Hobbs’ administration is taking these steps “to avoid staggering fines of hundreds of millions of dollars that would further endanger food assistance for vulnerable Arizonans,” Soto said in a statement.

But other factors have aggravated Arizona’s situation. In 2021, the state Legislature and then-Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, passed a flat 2.5% income tax largely benefiting the wealthy, which has forced more than $1 billion in spending cuts and fund swaps to balance the state budget in subsequent years. (Ducey has defended the flat tax as necessary to ensure the state continues to be competitive and “a jobs magnet and generator of opportunity.”)

Last summer, DES also laid off about 500 employees in response to the elimination of federal grants and in anticipation of additional federal cuts. Officials said that about 160 eligibility specialists lost their jobs, a 40% decline since July 2024. 

In December, Hobbs, a Democrat, allocated $7.5 million to DES, most of which was used to hire more than 100 workers and increase overtime to handle SNAP cases. A spokesperson said applications are also slowed by “1980s technology” it uses to administer benefits.

Hobbs asked for an additional $48.4 million in her 2027 budget proposal to help the department administer SNAP.  The most recent federal data, from 2023, shows that the state spends $70 million to operate the $2 billion program.

Meanwhile, some seeking SNAP assistance told ProPublica that their applications remain in limbo, sometimes for months.

Garcia, the mother of two, said she will keep trying to obtain the benefits. She’s looking for work as a cook after being laid off from a car wash in January. Her family is living with her grandparents, where groceries are shared among six people.

Sometimes, her 3-year-old pats his belly when he’s hungry for his favorite fruits like strawberries. At times, she hasn’t received fruit in the boxes she receives from the food bank.

“I’m in a pinch,” she said. “I’m struggling.

The post “The Alarm Bell”: Arizona’s Drop in SNAP Participation Signals Potential Nationwide Impact of Trump Legislation appeared first on ProPublica.

A ProPublica investigation has found that most of these bills are part of a coordinated effort, orchestrated by a constellation of groups that share staff or have funding ties to the prominent conservative activist Leonard Leo, who is credited with placing conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. These groups have drafted state legislation, planned its dissemination and engaged a well-connected lobbying firm to get them signed into law.

The effort is unfolding as courts are weighing more than 30 significant lawsuits by states, counties and municipalities accusing fossil fuel companies of misrepresenting the risks their products posed to consumers and seeking to recoup the costs of disasters and other climate impacts like wildfire losses or coastal flooding that their products helped cause. A goal of the legislation is to block these cases from going forward and prevent new ones from being filed.

The strategy to establish state laws that will make it all but impossible to sue oil and gas companies was laid out in detail by a group of lobbyists and political operatives in December, during a panel presentation at the annual States and Nation Policy Summit of the American Legislative Exchange Council — the influential organization that brings together state lawmakers, corporate leaders and conservative activists to draft and promote legislation.

During the session, one of the panelists, Will Hild, the executive director of a nonprofit called Consumers’ Research, described the climate cases as a liberal effort to use the judicial system to exact a new tax on energy companies in the form of civil judgments. Another panelist, Oramel H. Skinner, the former solicitor general for Arizona and the executive director of the nonprofit Alliance for Consumers, warned that those judgments will trickle down to make citizens’ lives less affordable and ultimately make many of their choices — whether to own pickup trucks or purchase a side of beef — illegal.

ProPublica reviewed an audio recording of the event obtained by the nonpartisan watchdog group Documented.

Hild and Skinner had come to the session with a ready-made fix: a set of pre-written bills and plenty of funding.

Consumers’ Research and the Alliance for Consumers are both funded by organizations connected to Leo. ProPublica examined lobbying records across 25 states, federal tax disclosures for more than a dozen organizations and notes from other closed-door strategy sessions among ALEC members and found that several Leo-supported groups are part of a national strategy to give legal immunity to companies for their climate emissions.

Since 2021, Leo has been deploying a $1.6 billion gift through a series of nonprofits and other organizations that obscure the source and the recipients of donations — so-called dark money groups. Much of that money has been routed through a nonprofit judicial advocacy group Leo founded — now called The 85 Fund — which both receives and disseminates Leo’s funding. Many of these nonprofits are increasingly focused on issues related to climate change.

The panel session’s moderator, Michael Thompson, is a senior vice president at CRC Advisors, Leo’s for-profit Virginia-based political and corporate consulting firm. He also sits on ALEC’s Private Enterprise Advisory Council. Hild’s organization, Consumers’ Research, received more than 65% of its funding in 2024 through a dark money group called Donors Trust. The 85 Fund contributed more than $67 million to Donors Trust in 2024. Consumers’ Research also works closely with — and contracted more than $670,000 of work in 2024 to — CRC Advisors. Another panelist, Paul N. Watkins, was a legal fellow at Consumers’ Research. According to tax filings, his law firm received more than $2.2 million in 2024 from the group. As recently as 2024, Skinner was also counsel for Leo’s 85 Fund, according to the nonprofit’s tax filings.

“For decades, the left has leveraged immense resources to capture the institutions that shape our society — the legal system, universities, medical and scientific bodies, the entertainment industry, and our biggest corporations,” Leo wrote to ProPublica in a text message. “That takeover resulted in a radically woke culture that does not reflect the will of the American people, or the pillars of limited constitutional government that made our country great. That is why our enterprise supports organizations that are committed to crushing liberal dominance and restoring balance in the institutions that shape society.”

At the ALEC session, Skinner presented a model bill that would effectively bar cities and towns from bringing public nuisance lawsuits against corporations and others when the issue is a broad public harm like climate change. In several cases, plaintiffs have argued that the impacts of climate change — the buckling of a road from extreme swings in temperature, for example — are a “nuisance” caused by fossil fuel companies.

Nuisance claims are common in the American legal system, giving individuals, companies or communities a way to sue when someone else’s actions damage their property, degrade the health or safety of the environment around them or interfere with their rights. Under these laws, parties can ask for financial compensation or seek court orders to remedy problems, such as pollution. Skinner, however, argues that nuisance laws should only be used to address local, easily fixable problems, like excessive noise from a bar. His bill would curtail the use of public nuisance suits in climate cases by limiting liability for manufacturers and other businesses and giving state attorneys general the sole authority to bring them.

“Think really hard about every lever you have in your states to shut off the ability for this woke lawfare machine to churn,” Skinner told the audience. “The left’s goal is to reshape society around you using the courtroom.”

The second draft law, called the Energy Freedom Act, was produced by the policy nonprofit associated with Hild’s organization. It would, among many provisions, shield businesses from liability related to emissions of greenhouse gases if those releases did not violate the federal Clean Air Act.

Critics of the bills say they subvert the rights of local communities. They send the message that “you can pollute with impunity,” said Carly Phillips, a senior scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It’s really a thumb in the eye of places that are affected by climate change.”

The push to block climate suits across the states comes as several of the cases against the oil industry approach, or have already entered, the perilous legal phases of discovery, when plaintiffs will have the opportunity to seek confidential industry documents and depose oil executives. The stakes for oil companies are enormous. By some estimates more than $10 trillion in damages can be attributed to U.S. emissions.

There’s a reason why state and local governments have increasingly brought these suits. The frequency and cost of climate-influenced disasters, including severe storms, drought and flooding, continues to mount — between $350 billion and $450 billion in each of the last three years — stretching government budgets. Significantly, the science that makes it possible to attribute how much any one disaster was influenced by climate change has steadily advanced. To cite one example, the March heat waves across the U.S. would have been virtually impossible without the emissions that have caused climate change, according to the European science group World Weather Attribution, and were about four times as likely to happen as they were a decade ago.

Boulder, Colorado, is among the places facing increasing droughts, more extreme precipitation and larger wildfires — all of which are significantly propelled by climate change linked to the emissions from the use of fossil fuels. The state has estimated the costs of these perils will run into the many hundreds of millions of dollars. In 2018, Boulder County sued Exxon Mobil and the Canadian oil company Suncor Energy, accusing the companies of “intentional, reckless and negligent conduct.”

Among its claims, the county alleged the oil companies engaged in a conspiracy to mislead the public and violated consumer protection rules by mischaracterizing the dangers of their products. They accused the oil companies of creating a public nuisance by altering the environment and leaving the county to pay to abate growing hazards such as the flooding that tests roads and bridges. Exxon Mobil and Suncor Energy have never filed a response in Colorado but asked for the case to be dismissed.

Ever since, the lawsuit has been mired in a dispute over whether Colorado courts were the correct venue, with the state Supreme Court ultimately ruling last May that they were. Suncor filed to the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider, and this fall it will weigh the company’s petition asking whether federal environmental law preempts the state law.

The high-profile national court case is just one facet in an increasingly tense fight over liability for the fossil fuel industry. In January, the American Petroleum Institute, the largest fossil fuel industry group in the United States, said fighting the climate liability lawsuits was one of its top priorities in 2026. Lobbying records for the group from last year show that it advocated for legislation to protect oil producers from climate lawsuits at the state level. The Trump administration; other industry groups, including the Chamber of Commerce; and several of the nonprofit advocacy groups associated with Leo have argued that state courts are the wrong venue for claims that ultimately concern emissions that drift widely across borders, and they wish to see other cases moved or dismissed. They say that because the federal government already has the authority to regulate those emissions, the federal courts, not the states, should hear the claims.

In an interview, Hild told ProPublica that he sees the suits as an illegitimate effort to enact policy through the courts and to “regulate the entire U.S. economy from a single state.”

In an email, Skinner wrote: “Our effort is not one focused on climate change. But it is true that left-wing activists and their dark money donors have put vast sums of money and years of groundwork into pushing a coast-to-coast campaign of climate-focused public nuisance lawsuits.”

Neither Watkins nor Thompson responded to requests for comment.

When Skinner and Hild finished their presentation at ALEC they made a QR code available to download the language of the model bills and directed the audience to a woman named Catherine Gunsalus, who was in the back of the room. She would be able to answer any questions, they said.

Gunsalus until recently worked for the Heritage Action Fund, the political and lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation, the Trump-aligned think tank that is most recently known for promoting the Project 2025 agenda. Records show that Gunsalus has also lobbied in collaboration with another Leo-affiliated group, Americans for Public Trust.

In April 2025, she formed a lobbying firm called Varidon Strategies and began registering in states almost immediately afterward, according to records. By mid-summer, Varidon was representing Alliance for Consumers Action Fund; Consumers’ Research; The Honest Election Project, an affiliate of The 85 Fund; as well as other Leo entities in 25 states. In the majority of those filings, Varidon used an email address at the domain of Holtzman Vogel, a Virginia-based law firm that is often retained by Leo’s organizations.

Gunsalus did not reply to a detailed list of questions.

In the four months since the ALEC summit, there has been substantial activity in the states where Varidon has registered. On Jan. 5, representatives in Missouri introduced the loosely related Eliminate Criminal Profiteering Act, which could stop revenues flowing to law firms from settlements in the sort of nuisance suits often used in climate cases. Two days later, legislators took up the Public Nuisance Reform Act, which proposes narrowing the definition of what could be considered a nuisance.

That same month, similar bills were introduced in Indiana, Oklahoma and Tennessee. In February, eight more followed in Oklahoma, Iowa, South Carolina, Utah, Louisiana and Kansas. Skinner, who is registered to lobby in Kansas, was invited to testify in a hearing about that state’s bill and launched a new “End the Lawfare” website targeting the “left-wing” agenda. As of April 2, versions of the model legislation offered at the ALEC meeting have been introduced across 11 states altogether. In Utah, the governor has signed two related bills into law, and in Tennessee and Indiana, bills are awaiting their governors’ signature.

The more states there are with some sort of waiver in place, the narrower the pathway for cities and states to seek redress as environmental conditions worsen, and the costs continue to rise. Hild and Skinner and the Leo network’s bills also serve another purpose: teeing up a conflict that pits states against one another, a conflict that only the Supreme Court or Congress can finally resolve.

As Hild put it at the ALEC gathering, “This is economic civil war.”

The post “Economic Civil War”: States Push Laws to Shield Oil and Gas Companies From Accountability appeared first on ProPublica.

This emerging technology has its grip on everyone: Home users, corporations and the federal government are all rushing to use it. President Donald Trump and his Cabinet say AI will transform the nation, making us more prosperous, efficient and secure — if only we can adopt it fast enough. 

But this messaging isn’t new. President Barack Obama’s administration used nearly identical language a decade and a half ago as the U.S. barreled into the technological revolution of cloud computing.

I’ve studied how the federal government has handled — and mishandled — this transition over the past two decades, and my reporting offers some cautionary tales and valuable lessons as policymakers encourage the use of AI and federal agencies adopt the technology.

Lesson 1: There’s no such thing as a free lunch 

Then: In the early 2020s, a series of cyberattacks linked to Russia, China and Iran left the federal government reeling. The Biden administration called on major tech companies to help the U.S. bolster its defenses. In response, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella pledged to give the government $150 million in technical services to help upgrade its digital security. It also offered a “free” security upgrade for government customers.

Now: Last year, the Trump administration announced a raft of agreements with tech companies that were meant to help federal agencies “purchase enterprise AI tools at government-friendly pricing.” Agencies could use OpenAI’s ChatGPT for $1. Google’s Gemini for 47 cents. Grok by xAI for 42 cents. The administration hoped that the low-cost pricing would make it “easier for federal teams to acquire powerful AI capabilities … to enhance mission delivery and operational efficiency.”

The takeaway: Be wary of freebies. Our investigation into Microsoft’s seemingly straightforward commitment revealed a more complex, profit-driven agenda. After installing the upgrades, federal customers would be effectively locked in, because shifting to a competitor after the free trial would be cumbersome and costly. At that point, the customer would have little choice but to pay for the higher subscription fees. The plan worked: One former Microsoft salesperson told me “it was successful beyond what any of us could have imagined.” In response to questions about the commitment, Microsoft has said its “sole goal during this period was to support an urgent request by the Administration to enhance the security posture of federal agencies who were continuously being targeted by sophisticated nation-state threat actors.”

Agencies looking to buy AI tools at discounted rates today must consider how the costs might balloon down the road. The General Services Administration warns that AI “usage costs can grow quickly without proper monitoring and management controls” and advises agencies to “set usage limits and regularly review consumption reports.”

Lesson 2: Oversight programs are only as effective as their resources

Then: In the Obama era, the federal government shifted its sensitive information and computing needs to data centers owned and operated by private companies. Acknowledging the potential risks, the administration created the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, or FedRAMP, in 2011 to help ensure the security of the cloud computing services that it was encouraging U.S. agencies to use.

But in my recent investigation of the program, I found it was no match for Microsoft, which effectively wore down the FedRAMP team over five years as the company sought the program’s seal of approval for a major cloud offering known as GCC High. Despite serious reservations about its cybersecurity, FedRAMP ultimately authorized the product, in part because it lacked the resources to keep going. In response to questions, Microsoft told me: “We stand by our products and the comprehensive steps we’ve taken to ensure all FedRAMP-authorized products meet the security and compliance requirements necessary.”

Now: Today, this tiny outpost within the General Services Administration has even fewer resources to oversee the cloud technology on which the government relies — including AI. FedRAMP says it now operates “with an absolute minimum of support staff” and “limited customer service.” The program was an early target of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency. 

The takeaway: FedRAMP, which a 2024 White House memo said “must be an expert program that can analyze and validate the security claims” of cloud providers, is now little more than a rubber stamp for the tech industry, former employees told me. As federal agencies adopt AI tools that draw upon reams of sensitive information, the implications of this downsizing for federal cybersecurity are far-reaching. A GSA spokesperson defended the program and said FedRAMP now “operates with strengthened oversight and accountability mechanisms.”

Lesson 3: “Independent” reviews are only so independent  

Then: The government has long relied on so-called third-party assessors to verify the security claims made by cloud service providers like Microsoft and Google. In theory, these firms are supposed to be independent experts that offer a recommendation to FedRAMP on whether a product meets federal standards. But in practice, their independence has an asterisk: They are paid by the companies they are evaluating.

My recent investigation found that this setup creates an inherent conflict of interest. In the case of Microsoft’s GCC High, two assessors recommended the product despite being unable to fully vet it, according to a former FedRAMP reviewer. One of those firms did not respond to my questions and the other denied this account.

Read More

Federal Cyber Experts Thought Microsoft’s Cloud Was “a Pile of Shit.” They Approved It Anyway.

FedRAMP, we found, is well aware of how the financial arrangement between the cloud companies and their assessors can distort official findings about cybersecurity problems. The program even created a “back channel” to encourage assessors to share concerns they might not otherwise raise in their official reports for fear of angering their tech clients and losing business.

Now: With FedRAMP reduced to being a “paper pusher,” as one former GSA official put it, these third-party assessment firms have taken on even more importance in the vetting process. In response to questions from ProPublica, the GSA said that FedRAMP’s system “does not create an inherent conflict of interest for professional auditors who meet ethical and contractual performance expectations.” It did not respond to questions about the program’s back channel.

The takeaway: The pendulum has essentially swung back to the pre-FedRAMP era, when each federal agency was individually responsible for vetting the products it used. The GSA told me that FedRAMP’s job is “to ensure agencies have sufficient information to make these risk decisions.” The problem is that agencies often lack the staff and resources to do thorough reviews, which means the whole system is leaning on the claims of the cloud companies and the assessments of the third-party firms they pay to evaluate them.

The post The Federal Government Is Rushing Toward AI. Our Reporting Offers Three Cautionary Tales. appeared first on ProPublica.

Now, under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the agency is poised to reverse itself. That’s despite few clinical studies supporting the effectiveness or safety of these peptides, which are amino acid chains meant to help regulate functions in the body and have become popular among fitness and longevity enthusiasts.

In February, Kennedy said the FDA acted illegally in 2023 when it categorized 19 peptides as too unsafe for compounders, whose final products aren’t tested or approved by the FDA. Kennedy, who described himself as a “big fan” of peptides, has used the therapies himself.

“It was illegal because they’re not supposed to do that unless there’s a safety signal,” Kennedy said on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast, referring to adverse events related to medications. “And they didn’t have a safety signal. They’re not allowed to look at efficacy. They’re not allowed to say, ‘Well, we don’t believe these are efficacious,’ or whatever. They can only look at safety.”

But three former FDA officials closely familiar with how the agency created the criteria to assess the peptides in the first place say Kennedy has mischaracterized their work. The agency’s 2023 decision to ban certain peptides was supported by numerous documented safety concerns, they said. FDA regulations also require the agency to assess both safety and effectiveness before approving a substance for compounding.

“It would be a disruption of the societal pact we have had since 1962 that drugs will be studied to see if they work before they are marketed in the U.S.,” said Janet Woodcock, a former FDA acting commissioner.

If Kennedy justifies reversal of the previous work by suggesting there were no safety concerns, it would give a false imprimatur of safety to more than a dozen unapproved, untested drugs, the officials said.

There’s been little new science on the 19 peptides since the FDA’s 2023 decision to categorize them as unsafe. But demand for the drugs has exploded as influencers have flooded social media with promises of sculpted physiques, glowing skin, luscious hair, rapidly healing injuries, youthful energy and blazing sex lives.

The demand has given rise to a burgeoning gray market, where wellness spas, multilevel marketers and telehealth websites ply the public with vials of “research grade” peptides labeled “not for human use.”

“More people want to use them,” said Lauren Colenso-Semple, a muscle physiology researcher and science communication specialist who follows scientific studies of peptides as part of her work. “That’s what’s changed.”

FDA-approved peptide drugs such as insulin and oxytocin have been available for decades. Newer ones such as semaglutide and tirzepatide, broadly known as GLP-1s, have exploded in popularity for weight loss and have shown promise for treating other conditions, such as addictions and neurodegenerative and liver diseases. The popularity of these drugs has led the public to become more comfortable with injectables and has helped drive attention to other gray-market peptides.

Last year, at a Las Vegas conference promising radical life extension, two women became critically ill after being injected with peptides the FDA had categorized as unsafe. Although Nevada regulators investigated and fined the health practitioners involved in administering the peptides, investigators weren’t able to determine the exact cause of the reaction. The doctor who ran the booth where the women became ill said he didn’t believe that the peptides caused their reactions but apologized for the incident and said he would review his practices.

The Alliance for Pharmacy Compounding, one of the largest industry associations lobbying for the FDA to change its stance on peptides, acknowledges it knows little about the safety of individual peptides being sold to the public. (Its CEO says it is an advocacy organization, not a scientific one.) But the group argues the public would be safer if peptides were handled by regulated compounding pharmacies instead of the gray market. The FDA should forgo the usual human clinical trials in order to bring about this shift, a spokesperson for the alliance said.

“Where we don’t have research, clinical trials, what we’ve got a ton of, is, shall we say, testimonials, patient affidavits, attesting to the wonders of the drug,” said Scott Brunner, the alliance’s chief executive officer. “And RFK Jr. is one of those testifiers.”

On the Rogan podcast, Kennedy wasn’t clear on exactly how the FDA would let compounders start dispensing peptides, describing it only as “some kind of action” to make “about 14” peptides “more accessible.” Nor has he specified which peptides he wants to make available. (Neither the FDA nor HHS responded to ProPublica’s requests for more information.) But several regulatory shortcuts exist and, ultimately, Kennedy could simply declare the ingredients are legal.

“He has all of the authority,” said Woodcock, likening such a declaration to former HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’ unilateral 2011 reversal of the FDA’s decision to lift age restrictions on the emergency contraception Plan B. (A judge ultimately found Sebelius’ move to be arbitrary and capricious and nullified it.)

“The secretary can do anything they want.”

The Bulks List

The FDA’s road to regulating compounding pharmacies — and by extension the peptides they seek to dispense — has been long and tedious. Much of the regulatory fight has focused on which ingredients compounders should be allowed to use.

Under a 1997 law, the first passed by Congress to regulate the industry, compounders can only use ingredients that are a component of an approved drug, have what’s known as a USP monograph (essentially a third-party certified recipe for a drug used mainly by manufacturers of generics), or are listed as approved substances by the FDA.

This FDA list, known as “the bulks list,” is at the center of the ongoing peptide debate.

Litigation and pressure from the industry and lawmakers delayed for decades the creation of the bulks list, leaving compounders in limbo on scores of substances, not just peptides.

“Everything was a fight. It was a huge fight,” said one former FDA official who has spent more than 30 years working on compounding policies. The former official asked not to be named to avoid a public debate with the industry.

The need for the list took on new urgency in 2012, when more than 60 people died from fungal meningitis infections contracted from a drug produced at a compounding facility and dispensed to hundreds of people. Congress passed another law further regulating large compounders that sell medications to doctors’ offices and hospitals rather than individual patients. The new law also prompted the agency to move more quickly on establishing the bulks list.

The FDA asked the industry to nominate substances for inclusion on the list. It did so, nominating thousands of ingredients, including, for example, purified water and asparagus.

“They put in everything,” the official said. “Literally thousands of nominations with absolutely no justification for why it needed to be there.”

Each substance would have to be reviewed individually before it could be added to the bulks list. The agency would have to solicit public comment and an advisory committee of health and pharmacy experts would have to review the FDA’s research.

Reviewing them “was a massive effort. The agency proceeded glacially, but really we were speeding as fast as we could,” the official said.

In 2017, under pressure to move more quickly, the FDA came up with an interim solution. It substantially narrowed the list of nominated ingredients, quickly reviewed each remaining substance and placed them into three categories. The first was substances with enough of a safety track record that the agency felt comfortable letting compounders use them while the final list was assembled. The second category included substances considered too risky for compounding. And the third included those without enough supporting information for the FDA to make an informed decision and therefore wouldn’t be used for compounding.

This categorization didn’t constitute a formal regulation; rather the agency was using its discretion not to go after compounders who used ingredients it deemed safe — those from the first category.

In 2023, the FDA placed 19 peptides in Category 2, which already included a handful of substances the agency considered to be dangerous.

This is what Kennedy has called “the war on peptides.”

In explaining its decisions, the FDA pointed to well-established research in peptide drug development that injectable peptides carry the risk of causing immune reactions. Such reactions can range from responses with “no clinical manifestations” to irritating rashes to life-threatening conditions such as anaphylactic shock, which constricts breathing and impairs motor function.

Peptides occur naturally in the body but break down quickly after serving their purpose. Peptide drugs, on the other hand, are manufactured to last longer in the body to create a therapeutic response, such as controlling appetite or promoting the growth of new blood vessels, bone density or muscle.

“Now that it’s been tweaked to make it something else, the immune system can recognize it as foreign and there’s the potential issue of having an unwanted immune response,” Colenso-Semple said.

The manufacturing process can also introduce impurities — like bacteria or heavy metals — into peptide drugs. They also are sensitive to environmental conditions and can change chemical composition if stored at the wrong temperatures or shaken too vigorously, increasing the risk of an immune response or decreasing their effectiveness. And when a substance is injected, as opposed to taken orally, it bypasses most of the body’s natural defenses.

The risk of an immune response is common to peptide drugs in general. But individual peptides also present specific potential risks.

The FDA reviewed data to assess these risks and found limited human studies on a few peptide therapies; most have only been studied in animals or in clinical populations like HIV patients. What human data the FDA did find for individual peptides indicated the potential for harm. Subjects in studies of six individual peptides — growth hormone releasing peptide-2, ibutamoren mesylate, ipamorelin, CJC-1295, AOD-9604 and melanotan II — experienced adverse events, including death. (It wasn’t proven whether the deaths were caused by the peptides or by something else.) Ultimately, the FDA decided not enough data existed to allay the known safety concerns.

“Of course any adverse event can be a flag,” said another former FDA official who worked in the compounding division when the peptides were categorized as unsafe. The former official asked not to be named because they work in public health and don’t want to antagonize the current administration. “Also, if there is no clinical data for a substance, and an awareness that the substance has the propensity for harm, that could make it an appropriate placement on the Category 2 list.”

Are They Safe?

Putting the peptides on the unsafe list didn’t change much for compounders. Because those peptides aren’t components of an approved drug and don’t carry a USP monograph, compounders weren’t allowed to dispense them anyway.

“All that did was put an exclamation point on it,” Brunner said. In the months after the FDA’s announcement, his organization repeatedly warned its members not to dispense peptides.

But the listing prompted at least two peptide companies to sue the FDA, arguing it was dragging its feet on creating the bulks list of allowed compounding substances. To date, only six substances have made it through the process to be put on the list, none of which are peptides and none of which are injectables. As the lawsuit wound its way through federal court, the FDA agreed to accelerate the review of four peptides named in the lawsuit: CJC-1295, AOD-9604, thymosin-alpha and ipamorelin acetate. It also decided to move forward on two other peptides not listed in the complaint: kisspeptin and ibutamoren mesylate. Online marketing claims these peptides help with, among other things, weight loss, muscle-building, anti-aging, insomnia, tissue repair and sexual dysfunction. Marketers also claim thymosin-alpha, one of the more studied peptides, can help with immune function, Lyme disease and COVID-19.

In the final months of the Biden administration, the FDA convened the expert advisory committee and presented its research on the six peptides. In reports up to 158 pages long, the agency detailed the science behind the immune response risk in synthetic peptides, listed documented adverse events associated with the drugs and summarized the limited research on human subjects. In each case, the FDA recommended against putting the peptide on the bulks list for compounders.

“I can’t imagine anybody looking at this data and being comfortable” making these available to the public, Colenso-Semple said.

The peptide industry was given just 10 minutes before the committee to present arguments that the six peptides were safe. Speakers offered anecdotal evidence from their own and others’ practices. Even though peptides can’t legally be used by compounders, many were dispensing the drugs because the FDA has been lax in enforcing its regulations.

“Many of the peptides that have been placed on Category 2 have been used successfully by thousands of our practitioners treating hundreds of thousands of patients who utilize these compounds to energize cellular function and give the body what it needs to help address sickness and disease, including obesity, diabetes and addiction,” said Dan DeNeui, CEO of one of the peptide companies that sued the FDA.

His wife, Terri DeNeui, a nurse practitioner and founder of their company Evexias Health Solutions, presented information from a survey of 508 patients treated with various peptides that said 19% reported uncomfortable side effects and less than 1% experienced an adverse event.

They also contended peptides would be more safely dispensed by regulated compounders than on the gray market — the argument now being made by the Alliance for Compounding Pharmacies. The active ingredients in the drugs would be manufactured at an FDA-registered facility subject to inspection, and compounders are overseen by state boards of pharmacies to ensure sterile conditions.

That’s “a heck of a lot better than what many consumers are doing,” getting advice in chat rooms and “ordering some substance that purports to be a peptide and may or may not be,” Brunner told ProPublica.

While that argument addresses quality-control concerns associated with the gray market, it doesn’t confront the fundamental question of whether peptides are safe.

“They’re totally unapproved drugs,” said one of the former FDA officials. “Would you let a pharmaceutical company do this? No. No way.”

In the end, the advisory committee sided with the FDA and endorsed its initial decision that the six peptides were too risky to be dispensed to the public.

What Happens Now?

Unhappy with the advisory committee’s decision, the compounding industry has amplified its argument that the FDA review process for the bulks list is broken. The advisory committee had few working compounders on it and didn’t give those who opposed the decision on peptides enough time to present its arguments, industry advocates say.

With a new administration, whose health secretary has used peptides himself and is trying to advance alternative health practices, they see an opportunity. They hope the FDA will appoint more members with compounding experience to the committee and ease enforcement on peptides while it continues the established regulatory process.

“Given the scale of demand — demand that is going to be met, if not by a state licensed compounding pharmacy, then by the black and gray markets — we believe the lens that the FDA is using related to these peptides, at least some of the peptides, is the wrong lens,” Brunner said. “They’re wanting research, clinical trials. They’re wanting a certain amount of certitude that, frankly, is appropriate for most drugs, but not for this moment.”

Regulatory shortcuts exist that would allow the FDA to skip the more laborious approval process. The FDA could simply remove the peptides from Category 2, those it considers unsafe. It could place them in Category 1, allowing them to be used in compounding. Or it could announce it’s changing its enforcement strategy and not going after compounders who work with these substances.

None of that would be safe for the public, Woodcock contends. Congress intended for the FDA to “refer to a substantive body of evidence about the safety and effectiveness” of ingredients put on the bulks list, she said.

“This wasn’t supposed to be a route for unapproved drugs to get into the market,” she said. “Not even Congress was thinking that.”

The post RFK Jr. May Reverse a Peptide Ban He Calls “Illegal.” Former FDA Officials Say He Mischaracterized Their Work. appeared first on ProPublica.

Nearly all of these charges originated from cases along the U.S. southern border, where last spring, the White House designated large swaths of land as national defense areas. Putting them under military authority allowed troops to play an unprecedented role in apprehending undocumented immigrants; federal soldiers are generally barred from enforcing the law on domestic soil. If you were caught in one of these zones, the government could also now prosecute you for breaking federal laws, including one enacted in 1909 to keep spies away from arsenals.

In an investigation we published recently, my co-reporters Perla Trevizo, Abe Streep, Pratheek Rebala and I dug into what experts say is a major flaw afflicting these prosecutions that threatens to ensnare people for crimes they did not commit: Migrants didn’t know the land they were crossing now belonged to the armed forces. And many judges have ruled that you can’t be guilty of trespassing on military land if you had no idea you were on it.

Since April of last year, we found, at least 4,700 immigrants already charged with entering the country illegally faced these military trespass charges; at least one had to wait in jail for more than a month to stand trial. Most of the charges didn’t stick. In fact, we found that in 60% of the resolved cases, the trespass charges were dropped or dismissed. Yet prosecutors kept filing them.

Download the full data used in our analysis on our GitHub page.

As we visited courtrooms in West Texas and New Mexico and pored through case records, it became clear how hard it would be to prove that someone knowingly trespassed on military land. Some couldn’t read. At least one person didn’t speak English or Spanish. The small signs are spaced far apart and easy to miss, and many migrants were arrested far away from them.

A Justice Department spokesperson said the prosecutions have deterred unauthorized border crossings and cartel activity. And prosecutors have argued in court that illegally crossing is enough to prove criminal intent for the military trespassing charges. Senior officials in the U.S. attorney’s offices handling trespass cases declined repeated interview requests.

In November, Perla, Abe and I set out to report throughout southern New Mexico and West Texas to see for ourselves what information we could gather about where the zones were and how they were marked.

Abe and I arranged a ride-along with Doña Ana County Sheriff Kim Stewart, whose New Mexico agency shares jurisdiction with Border Patrol and the military in one of the zones.  A sergeant from her office drove us along a dirt road that parallels the border as she pointed out 12-by-18-inch red and white signs opposite the fence. She told us her office hadn’t received specific information about where the military zone boundaries were; all they had were the signs. Even in broad daylight, it was difficult to read the words on them unless we got within a few feet.

On another outing in New Mexico — this time with the photographer Paul Ratje — I went to a spot in Sunland Park where Ratje said he’d previously taken photos of the border fence. The 2-acre dirt lot sat less than a mile from residential neighborhoods and a popular Italian restaurant. From the lot, we could see more red and white signs along the nearby border road.

While we were taking pictures, a pickup truck with a Border Patrol livery approached us. I was surprised to see that inside, instead of Border Patrol agents, there were two Army soldiers. The soldier in the passenger seat pointed to the signage along the border road and told us not to go past there. The border road was part of the defense area, he told us, though the lot we were standing in wasn’t.

The next day, Perla and I returned to the same location. This time, a Border Patrol agent drove up. The lot was part of the defense area, he told us. When I pointed out that I had been given conflicting information the previous day, the agent said he was told by the military that people couldn’t be in this area. We left. (An Army spokesperson said that the base responsible for the defense area in New Mexico published a map in December; the lot was not included in it.)

My interactions with Border Patrol and the military had so far only added to our confusion about these areas. Later that day, Perla and I drove south to a stretch of border fence along the Rio Grande near Tornillo, Texas. We saw a Border Patrol van near a gate in the fence. We thought we’d try to ask where the defense area was. Before we could do that, another Border Patrol van pulled up to us. Soldiers, including one with a rifle strapped across his shoulder, emerged from both vehicles. Another soldier told us he was “not at liberty to discuss” the national defense area’s exact location. 

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The response bewildered us. We asked him how we were supposed to know whether we were trespassing. He shrugged. (Spokespeople for U.S. Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Defense did not directly answer questions about these interactions.)

As we got back into our rental SUV, Perla and I wondered: If we, as reporters who investigate things for a living, couldn’t get a straight answer on where these military zones were, how did the government expect people crossing the border to do better? 

In the four months between our reporting trip and the publication of our investigation on March 16, the government continued to file military trespassing charges in more than 1,300 cases. And it’s established new military zones, too, in Arizona, California and Texas.

The post Why We Went Looking for National Defense Areas Along the U.S. Southern Border appeared first on ProPublica.

Aaron Szabo, an assistant administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, is listed in PDF metadata as the author of a January 2022 comment letter objecting to proposed controls on methane emissions in the oil and gas industry. The letter was submitted to the EPA by the American Exploration and Production Council, which represents some of the industry’s largest emitters of the planet-warming gas, including ConocoPhillips, Diversified Energy and Hilcorp. Szabo’s name does not appear in the document itself, but it can be found in information embedded by the software used to create the PDF file.

Szabo was registered as a lobbyist for one of the AXPC’s lesser-known members, Ovintiv, when he drafted the arguments against the restrictions, which were finalized later in the Biden administration. He has also lobbied for other clients in the oil and chemicals sectors. While he did not hide that work during his confirmation last year as head of the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, he described it in terms that avoided any mention of efforts to influence climate policy: “I learned how regulated entities comply with the federal government’s thousands of regulations and policies. I also saw firsthand that the people working in these companies want to ensure the environment is properly protected.”

In his current role overseeing federal climate rules at the EPA, Szabo has been soliciting input and even specific regulatory language from oil industry groups that stand to gain from watered-down methane rules, according to internal emails, calendar entries and records of closed-door conversations reviewed by ProPublica.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., the ranking Democrat on the Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, pointed to Szabo’s previous lobbying as evidence that the EPA had effectively been captured by the oil and gas industry. “Now he can do Big Oil’s dirty work from inside the EPA,” Whitehouse told ProPublica in an email.

As part of its plan to “unleash American energy,” the Trump administration has waged an unprecedented campaign against regulations on fossil fuels, the main cause of global warming. One of its biggest moves was to repeal the “endangerment finding” that classified greenhouse gases as pollutants — the basis for the EPA’s authority to limit emissions at all. Rather than throw out the methane rules entirely, however, Szabo’s office is working to revise them, emails and documents show. It has already delayed many of the compliance deadlines until next year.

Methane, the main component of natural gas, is a climate superpollutant, responsible for one-third of the rise in global temperatures since preindustrial times, according to the United Nations Environment Programme. When it escapes into the atmosphere without being burned for energy, it can trap 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide, research shows. The oil and gas business is the largest industrial source of U.S. methane emissions, in part because of leaks from poorly maintained equipment. If it is uneconomical to collect the gas for sale, companies sometimes intentionally release it in a process known as venting.

To cut down on methane discharges, President Joe Biden’s EPA imposed much stricter controls on oil and gas operations, including requiring increased monitoring for leaks and equipment upgrades. According to agency estimates, the new rules would have lowered the industry’s methane emissions by nearly 80%. And, given that the gas breaks down relatively quickly, this would have been one of the fastest ways to reduce global warming.

Industry groups pushed back. In the January 2022 letter that Szabo helped to draft, the AXPC used the word “burdensome” 10 times to describe the new requirements and pushed for more “flexibility” to allow for less expensive leak-detection methods and less frequent monitoring, among other requests.

The group also cast doubt on the rules’ expected climate and health benefits, highlighting what it called “the importance of communicating the significant uncertainties within the estimates.” The AXPC’s chief executive, Anne Bradbury, added in a later statement that the rules risked “undercutting US production in the near and long-term — which will lead to increased energy costs and reduced energy security.”

The AXPC failed to persuade the Biden administration to change its approach. But it renewed its push after President Donald Trump returned to office and ordered federal agencies to “suspend, revise, or rescind” any “undue burden” on domestic energy production.

Szabo, after two years as a fellow at the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute, joined the administration on Day 1 as an adviser to EPA chief Lee Zeldin. He immediately signaled that he planned to weaken the regulations he had argued against as a lobbyist. His staff met with AXPC representatives as early as Feb. 6, 2025, less than three weeks after Trump’s inauguration, to discuss its petition to “reconsider” the methane rules, according to emails and calendar entries obtained through public records requests and shared with ProPublica by Fieldnotes, a watchdog group that investigates the oil and gas industry. His staff went on to meet with them at least twice more, and Szabo himself was listed as a required attendee for a meeting with Bradbury last July.

The AXPC didn’t respond to emails from ProPublica seeking comment.

According to records of closed-door conversations reviewed by ProPublica, other oil industry representatives have described their meetings with Szabo and his staff as highly favorable to their interests. “Mr. Szabo assured us that the EPA is focused on these [methane] rules and doing everything that can be done to limit the damage they will cause,” the leadership of a major trade group wrote to its members last year in an internal newsletter.

Lee Fuller, of the Independent Petroleum Association of America, also spoke glowingly about his meeting with Szabo’s office on a conference call with industry representatives last year.

“It was one of the more fascinating meetings that we’ve ever had, just because they were suddenly willing to talk to us,” he said. “And they’re also suddenly willing to talk about things that we’ve been trying to get them to do for years, and they’ve never even let it kind of come onto the radar screen.”

The IPAA declined to answer specific questions from ProPublica but linked to a September 2025 letter in which the group publicly asked the EPA for exceptions to the methane rules.

Szabo’s office has even invited oil industry groups to offer specific wording for the revised rules. “We had a call several weeks back re. pneumatics on temporary equipment,” Mike O’Connor of the American Petroleum Institute wrote to an EPA official, referring to devices that are a major source of methane emissions. “EPA had informally requested input on this topic and any suggested reg. text language. We are providing the attached draft document as informal input to EPA’s inquiry.” The draft called for a number of exemptions.

The shift in priorities under Szabo can also be seen in communications from the EPA itself. In a June 2025 email reviewed by ProPublica, an agency official asked O’Connor to meet and discuss alternative leak-detection methods. Echoing the language in the AXPC comment that Szabo helped to draft, the official spoke of “the additional flexibility we would like to pursue.”

“I think their agenda was, from what I could tell, to do what industry wanted,” one former EPA official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe confidential discussions, said of Szabo and other Trump appointees at the agency.

“Since when is it a bad thing for public officials to ask the public what they think?” the EPA said in an emailed statement, referring to Szabo’s interactions with oil industry representatives. Szabo “fulfilled all his ethical obligations to the letter. He met with EPA career ethics staff when he started at EPA to ensure he is aware of and complies with federal ethics requirements.”

Szabo’s affinities are hardly a secret. He is thanked by name in the EPA chapter of Project 2025, the deregulatory blueprint for the second Trump administration. As part of the nomination process for his appointment at the EPA, he also submitted ethics disclosures listing oil, natural gas and chemicals companies he had lobbied for.

Still, at his confirmation hearing on March 5 last year, he repeatedly declined to elaborate on his role in Project 2025, beyond saying he provided “general advice and thoughts” on the Clean Air Act.

The post The Trump EPA Official in Charge of Methane Regulations Helped Write an Oil Industry Argument Against Those Rules appeared first on ProPublica.

The cases included an investigation into a Virginia nursing home with a recent record of patient abuse; probes of fraud involving several New Jersey labor unions, including one opened after a top official of a national union was accused of embezzlement; and an investigation into a cryptocurrency company suspected of cheating investors.

In total, the DOJ quietly closed more than 23,000 criminal cases in the first six months of President Donald Trump’s administration, abandoning hundreds of investigations into terrorism, white-collar crime, drugs and other offenses as it shifted resources to pursue immigration cases, according to an analysis by ProPublica.

The bulk of these cases, which were closed without prosecution and known as declinations, had been referred to the DOJ by law enforcement agencies under prior administrations that believed a federal crime may have been committed. The DOJ routinely declines to prosecute cases for any number of reasons, including insufficient evidence or because a case is not a priority for enforcement.

But the number of declinations under Bondi marks a striking departure not only from the Biden administration but also the first Trump term, according to the ProPublica analysis, which examined two decades of DOJ data, including the first six months of Trump’s second term. ProPublica determined the increase is not the result of inheriting a larger caseload or more referrals from law enforcement.

In February 2025 alone, which included the first weeks of Bondi’s tenure, nearly 11,000 cases were declined, the most in a month since at least 2004. The previous high was just over 6,500 cases in September 2019, during Trump’s first administration.

Some of the cases shut down were the result of yearslong investigations by federal agencies such as the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration. For complex cases, the DOJ can take years before deciding whether to bring charges.

The shift comes as the DOJ has undergone an extraordinary overhaul under the Trump administration, with entire units shuttered, directives to abandon pursuit of certain crimes and thousands of lawyers quitting or, in some cases, being forced out of the agency.

In doing so, the DOJ is retreating from its mission to impartially uphold the rule of law, keep the country safe and protect civil rights, according to interviews with a dozen prosecutors and an open letter from nearly 300 DOJ employees who have left the department under Trump. The Trump DOJ, the employees wrote, is “taking a sledgehammer” to long-standing work to “protect communities and the rule of law.”

The change in priorities was outlined in a series of memos sent to attorneys early last year. Trump’s DOJ has said it is “turning a new page on white-collar and corporate enforcement” and emphasizing the pursuit of drug cartels, illegal immigrants and institutions that promote “divisive DEI policies.” Trump, in an address last March at the department, said the changes were necessary after a “surrender to violent criminals” during the past administration and would result in a restoration of “fair, equal and impartial justice under the constitutional rule of law.”

The department prosecuted 32,000 new immigration cases in the first six months of the administration, which was nearly triple the number under the Biden administration and a 15% increase from the first Trump term. It has pursued fewer prosecutions of nearly every other type of crime — from drug offenses to corruption — than new administrations in their first six months dating back to 2009.

The DOJ has also closed hundreds of cases involving alleged crimes that the administration has publicly emphasized as enforcement priorities. Even as the Trump administration unleashed Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency operatives to root out waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government, the DOJ declined over 900 cases of federal program or procurement fraud. About three times as many cases of major fraud against the U.S. were declined under Trump compared with the average of similar time periods under prior administrations. And while the Trump administration has promised to “make America safe again,” its DOJ has declined more than 1,000 terrorism cases, also more than prior administrations.

Federal prosecutor Joseph Gerbasi had spent years in the department’s Narcotic and Dangerous Drug Section helping build cases against major suppliers of fentanyl ingredients in India and China. After Bondi came in, he was left bewildered when his team was ordered to abandon its work.

“All of the building blocks of what would become successful prosecutions were pulled out,” said Gerbasi, who retired as the section’s acting deputy chief for policy in March 2025 after 28 years with the department.

The move had an “overwhelming deflating effect on morale,” he said.

After Trump’s Inauguration, the Department of Justice Turned Down a Record Number of Cases

The first quarter of 2025, and especially February of that year, saw the department declining to prosecute cases against thousands of defendants outside of its regular six-month review process.

Barbara McQuade, who worked as a federal prosecutor in Michigan for two decades until 2017 during Republican and Democratic administrations, said it was not unusual for new administrations to come to office with a few “pet priorities” — such as a focus on violent crime or drug trafficking. But she said those changes usually involved modest adjustments in policy and that most of the decisions on what crimes to focus on were typically made at the local level by the district U.S. attorney in coordination with the FBI or other agencies.

“We would revise those about every five years, not having anything to do with any administration, just because it made sense,” she said.

A DOJ spokesperson, in an emailed response to questions about the spike in declinations, said that in “an effort to clean, remediate, and validate data in U.S. Attorneys’ case management system,” the department reviewed all pending criminal matters opened prior to the 2023 fiscal year, which included updating the status of closed cases. “This Department of Justice remains committed to investigating and prosecuting all types of crime to keep the American people safe, and the number of declinations is a direct result of our efforts to run the agency in a more efficient manner.”

The agency did not respond to questions about the types of cases declined.

The spike of declined cases began in February 2025 when the department ordered prosecutors to review every open case launched prior to October 2022 and determine whether to close it. Such a review would typically take months, according to one attorney tasked with reviewing cases. A memo, which was described to ProPublica reporters, ordered the review to be completed within 10 days.

Former DOJ prosecutors told ProPublica that they typically reviewed caseloads every six months with supervisors and that closing out languishing cases wouldn’t ordinarily be cause for concern. They said the February directive, however, was unusual. None could recall a similar order.

The directive came as higher-ups in the department had begun making frequent demands for data about specific types of cases and charging decisions, such as the outcome of fentanyl cases, according to former prosecutor Michael Gordon. Gordon, who helped prosecute Jan. 6 cases before moving to white-collar crime prosecutions, said the “fire drills” from officials in Washington became so regular that he grew used to the forlorn look on his supervisor’s face when he showed up at Gordon’s door, apologetically delivering yet another frantic request.

“It was either ‘give us stats we can use to make ourselves look good’ or ‘give us the stats to show how bad things are in this area,’” Gordon said. “It was never productive fact-finding.”

Though Gordon didn’t see the memo, he remembered getting the request to review all cases that had been open for more than two years and report back on their status, entering into a master spreadsheet basic information about any that he wanted to keep pursuing.

“The office was pushing us to close everything by a certain date so that when they had to report up to D.C. they had a low number of open cases,” he said. “You really had to go to bat to keep open a case that was more than two years old.”

Gordon said he was fired by the DOJ last June. He has filed a lawsuit alleging his termination was politically motivated. The department did not respond to questions about Gordon’s comments or his lawsuit. The government filed a motion to dismiss the case late last year, arguing that the federal court did not have jurisdiction over the matter. The court has not yet ruled on that motion, and the case is still pending.

Investigations into individuals or corporations declined for prosecution are generally not reported to courts and usually only disclosed in summary form by the DOJ in annual reports. To conduct its analysis, ProPublica obtained declination data from the DOJ and the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a center that obtains data through Freedom of Information Act requests.

The DOJ Declined a Slew of Cases Shortly After Pam Bondi Was Confirmed as Attorney General

Nearly 11,000 criminal cases were declined during her first month in office.

Here are some of the areas most impacted by the spike in declinations.

Drugs

As president, Trump has spoken frequently about the “scourge” of drugs coming into the country. At the same time, the Justice Department has declined to prosecute nearly 5,000 cases of federal drug law violations, including trafficking and money laundering. The number of declinations were 45% higher than the average of the prior three new administrations.

Gerbasi, the counternarcotics prosecutor, declined to comment on specific cases that might have been declined in his office. But, he said, once Bondi was appointed, the priority in the office became building cases against Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan group that the Trump administration has labeled a foreign terrorist organization.

“Tren de Aragua was not anywhere close to the scale or impact of the cartels we were focused on,” Gerbasi said. “But we were told to generate those cases.”

He said his office had to scramble to fly people to investigate local gangs in small towns that were reportedly affiliated with Tren de Aragua. “They never would have merited a full-scale federal investigation,” he said.

“It told me that decisions were going to be based on political appearances and not based on the merits of where investigative resources should be placed.”

The DOJ declined to comment on Gerbasi’s remarks.

Trump’s DOJ Has Rejected Far More Cases Than Previous Administrations Across a Wide Range of Categories

Many of the dropped cases were in programs the DOJ has claimed were priorities.

National Security

Under Bondi, the DOJ declined more than 1,300 cases involving terrorism and national security, nearly twice what was typical at the start of the most recent new administrations. While domestic terrorism was the hardest-hit program, just over 300 cases involving charges of providing material support to foreign terrorist organizations were also dropped.

The DOJ program handling matters relating to national internal security — which considers cases of alleged spy activity and the security of classified information — saw over 200 declinations, which is four times as many as typical in the first six months of a new administration. Some of the cases related to serving as an unregistered foreign agent, a charge Bondi ordered prosecutors to stop pursuing unless they involved “conduct similar to more traditional espionage by foreign government actors.”

Jimmy Gurulé, a former federal prosecutor and George W. Bush appointee to the U.S. Treasury Department who investigated the financing of terrorism, said the decline in terrorism cases was troubling.

“The Trump DOJ has been used as a political weapon,” he said. “It’s a question of prioritizing resources. Are they going to be used for national security threats or to prosecute his political enemies and critics?” The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment on Gurulé’s remarks.

Labor

The DOJ shut down over 60 union corruption and labor racketeering cases, 2.5 times the number in Trump’s first term. Nearly half of the cases turned down for those offenses were out of the New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office, which in the past has aggressively pursued alleged union corruption. All were noted as declined for insufficient evidence.

Most of those cases had been opened by Grady O’Malley, an assistant U.S. attorney who oversaw several prosecutions of union corruption while working in the New Jersey office over four decades. He retired in 2023 and was disturbed to learn from former colleagues that the office was shutting down the open union probes.

A Trump supporter, O’Malley said that while he doesn’t blame the president, he worries the decision to drop so many cases could embolden unions that he and his colleagues spent years working to hold accountable. “No one is assigned to do labor union cases, and the unions have every reason to believe no one is looking.”

The New Jersey U.S. attorney’s office said it had no comment on the declination of labor cases.

White-Collar Crime

The Trump administration has pledged to root out “rampant” fraud in federal benefit programs like food stamps and welfare. The controversial surging of federal agents to Minnesota in January began as a stated crackdown on noncitizens allegedly ripping off nutrition and child care programs.

The DOJ, however, shut down more than 900 cases of federal program or procurement fraud in the first six months of the administration, including one targeting a mortgage lender accused by several state regulators of defrauding the Federal Housing Administration. The case was dropped due to “prioritization of federal resources and interests.” The U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of Alabama, which declined the case, did not reply to a request for comment. The number of fraud cases closed was about double that in the same time period of the Biden and first Trump administrations.

The agency also closed over 100 health care fraud cases as a result of “prioritization of resources and interests” even though the Trump administration has said it is making this area of enforcement a priority.

Among other cases the DOJ determined weren’t a priority: the probe into the Virginia nursing home accused of abuse, as well as investigations in Tennessee into fraud at a national hospital chain and one of the largest Medicaid managed care companies.

The Western District of Virginia U.S. attorney’s office, through a spokesperson, declined to comment on the nursing home case. A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney in the Middle District of Tennessee said the office does not comment on investigations that do not result in public charges.

The DOJ’s Antitrust Division, which focuses on preventing big businesses from creating harmful monopolies, also declined an unusually high number of cases in Trump’s second term. More than 40 cases were dropped within the first six months of Bondi’s tenure. That’s more than double the number declined in the same time period by the prior three new administrations.

Despite the declinations, the department said it charged slightly more people with fraud in 2025 compared with the final year of the Biden administration, and those cases alleged larger financial losses.

Promises Kept

The DOJ under Bondi has also rapidly pursued many of the priorities laid out in Trump’s early executive orders and her own “first day” directives to staff.

Trump in February 2025 issued an executive order pausing new investigations under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which prohibits citizens and companies from bribing foreign entities to advance their business interests. The order asked the attorney general to review and “take appropriate action” on any existing probes to “preserve Presidential foreign policy prerogatives.”

In the first six months, Bondi’s DOJ shut down 25 such cases, which is more than the combined number dropped by the prior three new administrations over the same time period. One of the cases declined for prosecution involved a major car manufacturer, which had reported possible anti-bribery violations to federal investigators involving a foreign subsidiary. The DOJ declined the case for prosecution last June, citing the “prioritization of federal resources and interests.”

On her first day, Bondi ordered a review of criminal prosecutions under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances, or FACE Act, which prohibits people from illegally blocking access to abortion clinics and places of worship. The department dropped as many cases under the act in its first six months as the past three new administrations combined, over the same time frame. Bondi’s order focused on “non-violent protest activity,” although at least one of the closed cases was being investigated as a violent crime. The DOJ has since charged protesters against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and journalists in Minneapolis under the FACE Act. The defendants in the case have pleaded not guilty.

The agency closed three times the number of cases alleging environmental crimes as the Biden administration did and one-and-a-half times as many as compared with Trump’s first term. The declinations came as the DOJ reassigned and cut prosecutors working on environmental cases. One-fifth of all of the dropped environmental protection cases were shut down for “prioritization of federal resources and interests.”

The post Trump’s Justice Department Dropped 23,000 Criminal Investigations in Shift to Immigration appeared first on ProPublica.

Coulson had been admitted to Hillview Post Acute and Rehabilitation Center in Little Rock, Arkansas, in January 2016, after Parkinson’s disease left her at risk of choking when she swallowed. That April, the facility’s operations were taken over by Skyline Healthcare, a New Jersey-based company that was buying up nursing homes across the country.

Medical records for the retired cardiac nurse, then 71, were marked “NPO” — nothing by mouth.

Then that September, a nursing assistant found Coulson unresponsive and hanging off the side of her bed, her skin ashy and her breathing shallow. She was taken to a hospital in a coma and died several days later. The chief cause of death was aspiration pneumonia, according to her death certificate.

“The doctors said they found scrambled eggs in her lungs,” said her daughter Melissa Coulson.

Coulson’s death and the circumstances surrounding it led her family to file a lawsuit against Skyline and its owner, the New Jersey businessman Joseph Schwartz, alleging that cost-cutting at Hillview left Coulson without the care she needed. It was one of several lawsuits tied to patient outcomes as Schwartz’s empire expanded and then unraveled, with much of the chain collapsing by 2018.

Schwartz didn’t contest the case, and a judge in 2020 awarded nearly $19 million in damages. Coulson’s family has never been able to collect. Schwartz had by that time relinquished all of his property in Arkansas, so there was nothing left in the state for the family’s lawyer to try to seize, nor was there enough information about assets he may hold in other states.

Coulson’s civil action was one of several efforts to hold Schwartz accountable for what happened at his nursing homes. In perhaps the most sweeping move, federal prosecutors in New Jersey charged Schwartz with orchestrating a $39 million payroll tax scheme connected to his nursing home empire.

He pleaded guilty last April to failure to pay the IRS taxes withheld from employees and failing to file a financial report for his employees’ benefit plan. A federal judge sentenced him to three years in prison.

But Schwartz served just three months. In November, President Donald Trump granted him a full pardon, negating his criminal conviction — part of a series of clemency decisions in the president’s second term that have benefited well-connected defendants, including political allies with access to the White House and individuals like Schwartz who had spent heavily on lobbyists.

Often overshadowed in the attention around Trump’s decisions is the emotional and financial devastation left behind. Few clemency decisions illustrate that more clearly than the case of Schwartz, who paid himself millions of dollars from his nursing homes while diverting tens of millions owed to taxpayers and employees, and who has failed to satisfy at least three multimillion-dollar judgments awarded to grieving families.

In the Coulson case, Schwartz later claimed he never received key filings and had mistaken the complaint for the same lawsuit first filed in 2017, which he believed his insurer had already handled before it was withdrawn and refiled. And he argued the company that took over Hillside and canceled insurance coverage — not him — was the proper defendant. He also said he was representing himself, in poor health and isolating because of COVID-19 risks. A judge denied his request to put the case on hold.

Kevin Marino, a lawyer representing Schwartz and Skyline, said he and Schwartz had no comment. He did not respond to a follow-up email containing a detailed list of questions.

Trump has granted clemency to several figures in major health care fraud cases. In 2020, he commuted the 20-year federal prison sentence of Philip Esformes, a Florida nursing home magnate convicted in a scheme that prosecutors said involved about $1.3 billion in fraudulent Medicare and Medicaid claims. The White House cited allegations of prosecutorial misconduct, echoing claims from Esformes’ defense that prosecutors improperly invaded attorney-client privilege by reviewing documents seized in an FBI raid. Although appeals courts did not overturn the conviction based on this argument, Esformes had support from two former U.S. attorneys general.

That same year, Trump commuted the sentence of Judith Negron, convicted in a $200 million Medicare fraud case. Trump’s clemency grant said the “ends of justice” did not require her to serve another two decades in prison.

Lawyers for Esformes and Negron did not respond to requests for comment.

Trump has also nominated nursing home owner Benjamin Landa as ambassador to Hungary. The nomination has remained in place even as a facility Landa co-owns faces a federal audit alleging there were more than $31 million in Medicare overpayments. Landa is suing the administration to block repayment. An attorney for Landa did not respond to a request for comment but has previously denied wrongdoing by his client, saying in a statement the issues identified in the audit occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic when nursing homes were in the midst of a crisis and that the company was committed to patient care.

Schwartz’s case was highlighted by the far-right activist and Trump ally Laura Loomer, who had previously worked on other issues alongside the lobbyists Schwartz hired to press his case in Washington. Loomer published a series of posts on X that falsely claimed that Schwartz was not responsible for the tax violations, that he had been unfairly blamed for the collapse of his nursing home chain and that he had paid back “every dime.”

She also accused the judge in the case of antisemitism against Schwartz, who is Jewish, though she offered no evidence. She also said Schwartz was in “extremely poor health” and that prison would be a “death sentence,” though the judge found no evidence that Schwartz was unfit for prison.

Versions of Loomer’s narrative surfaced in the White House’s explanation for the pardon. A White House official said in response to questions from ProPublica that Schwartz “relied on a third-party entity” to manage tax filings, that he paid restitution, that no funds were used for personal enrichment, that the sentence was exceptionally harmful to a 65-year-old man in deteriorating health and that it was “an example of over prosecution.”

But those claims are contradicted by the court record and Schwartz’s own guilty plea, in which he acknowledged responsibility for the unpaid payroll taxes. While he repaid $5 million, that covered only a fraction of what he owed. Federal prosecutors said that under Schwartz’s plea agreement, the IRS could have pursued the remaining balance — an effort that now appears far less likely following the pardon. And his three-year sentence fell in the middle of the range recommended under federal sentencing guidelines.

Asked about those statements and how they square with the court record, the White House did not respond.

Schwartz’s faith also became part of the Trump administration’s public celebration of the decision. Alice Marie Johnson, who has advised the White House on clemency, wrote online that the pardon meant Schwartz could now join his family for Shabbat, and weeks later, he attended the White House Hanukkah party.

Schwartz paid more than $1 million to lobbyists to press the White House, the Justice Department and Congress on his behalf — including on his efforts to secure a pardon — according to lobbying disclosure forms. The White House has insisted that paid lobbyists have no influence on pardons.

Loomer said she was not paid for her advocacy. She said she heard about Schwartz’s case in a group chat with members of an orthodox Jewish outreach movement, who asked her to look into it. She also pointed to her influence within the Trump administration, citing several instances in which she publicly urged specific actions that the president ultimately took. She said Schwartz approached her at the Hanukkah party to thank her.

Melissa Coulson said Trump’s pardon of Schwartz reinforced her belief that justice is not applied equally.

“Apparently he’s got money somewhere,” Coulson said.

Her lawyer hopes to find it.

From the outside, Schwartz’s operation doesn’t look like a corporate empire. The headquarters of Skyline’s fast-growing nursing home network was a second-floor office above a pizza parlor in Wood-Ridge, New Jersey.

Schwartz entered the nursing home business in the late 2000s and formed Skyline to acquire and operate skilled nursing facilities, initially in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. He sold a Florida-based insurance business in 2015 for $22 million, allowing him to rapidly expand Skyline. By 2017, Skyline and the related companies Schwartz controlled cared for approximately 15,000 residents in roughly 100 facilities in 11 states.

In a 2017 deposition in a wrongful death suit in Philadelphia, Schwartz defended the care at his facilities as “superb” while distancing himself from day-to-day operations by saying he relied on facility-level administrators and nursing directors. The suit was settled without Schwartz admitting wrongdoing.

In the deposition, Schwartz minimized reports of staffing shortages and unpaid bills as simple business “disagreements.” Asked about the facility’s one-star federal staffing ratings from 2010 to 2014 — the lowest possible score under the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Five-Star system — Schwartz said he recalled having “a good star rating” and that his nursing homes had tried their hardest to provide as much staffing as possible, insisting that they were “very, very, very, very, very compliant” and that residents were “happy and satisfied.”

The collapse was swift. Skyline facilities failed to make payments for food and medical supplies, and cut hours for nursing home staff. At the same time, Schwartz began to siphon money from multiple sources — overbilling Medicaid and withholding millions of dollars in payroll taxes from workers’ paychecks but never sending the money to the IRS, he admitted later. What’s more, Schwartz paid himself $5 million as what one federal prosecutor described as a “ghost employee” at some of his facilities.

As conditions in the homes deteriorated, health officials in at least six states from Nebraska to Massachusetts seized or transferred control of his facilities or relocated residents. In South Dakota, a vice president who oversaw 18 Schwartz-owned nursing homes began sending increasingly desperate emails to state health officials, according to court records.

Debbie Menzenberg wrote in the emails that Schwartz’s son Louis, an executive officer for Skyline, had called her to say the state “has to do something — there is no money — he told me to discharge residents???”

Then Menzenberg’s emails to the state became more urgent:

“I need water paid at Bella Vista and Prairie Hills today or it will be SHUT OFF — Skyline is SILENT!!!”

“Disconnect notice came today for Pierre May 8 electric.”

“I NEED HELP!!!!!”

“CEO’s are aware of stuff going on!!!”

Neither Menzenberg nor Louis Schwartz could be reached for comment.

A group of employees at Skyline nursing homes across the country later filed a lawsuit alleging that Skyline withheld more than $2 million in health insurance premiums from more than 1,000 workers’ paychecks but failed to provide coverage. That left some of his employees with denied health insurance claims and mounting medical bills.

Schwartz has not defended himself against the claim, and a lawyer for the employees has asked a judge to award a $2.4 million default judgment. The case remains pending in federal court in New Jersey.

One of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, an activities director at a nursing home in Arkansas, said that she was left with more than $50,000 in medical bills after surgery on her back and neck. She said she couldn’t pay the bills and that the debt ultimately wrecked her credit.

“They withheld over $1,000 from my paycheck for insurance premiums and did nothing with them except abscond with them,” said the employee, Margaret Gates.

Under Schwartz’s ownership, residents suffered — and some died.

In a lawsuit against Schwartz, Zelma Grissom’s family said the conditions at Hillview, the same facility where Doris Coulson was living, left residents without even basic care. The mother of six had entered the facility after brain surgery left her unable to move on her own and dependent on staff to turn her in bed.

Grissom’s son, LeVester Ivy, said Hillview appeared chronically short-staffed. One day, Ivy said, a wound-care nurse called the family into his mother’s room and showed them a severe pressure sore that had developed after Grissom hadn’t been turned regularly. Surgeons had to cut away infected tissue, leaving a large open wound. After that, he said, her health spiraled.

“She started getting infection after infection,” Ivy recalled.

During one late-night ambulance transfer, he said, an emergency medical worker quietly told him how his mother had arrived. “She pulled me to the side and told me how dirty and nasty, how wet she was,” Ivy said.

The family’s lawyers said she died of sepsis from the bedsores that Hillview caregivers allowed to become infected.

A judge in February 2023 ordered Schwartz to pay Grissom’s family $15.7 million after neither Schwartz nor any representative challenged the family’s wrongful death claim. Schwartz later tried to overturn the ruling, claiming poor health, lack of notice and that he was merely an investor with no role in operations, but a judge rejected the effort.

Ivy said the family sued Schwartz because “we wanted nobody else to go through the things we had to go through.” Schwartz has not paid the judgment, and the family’s lawyer said in an interview that he does not have enough information about Schwartz’s assets to try to recover the money.

The suffering described in cases like Coulson’s and Grissom’s was not part of the tax case against Schwartz that landed him in prison. But it loomed over the proceedings when he appeared for sentencing in federal court in Newark, New Jersey, last April. Schwartz had pleaded guilty to withholding $39 million in payroll taxes from his employees and failing to send the money to the IRS.

The investigation never determined where the money went. Prosecutors said they were not able to establish that Schwartz had used the money on a lavish lifestyle. But they said they never completed a forensic accounting of his finances, which moved money through more than 200 bank accounts. They said they believed Schwartz still controlled more than $50 million in assets.

His attorneys argued that his actions were not an attempt at personal enrichment but the result of a businessman who expanded too quickly, fell behind on bills and then made a series of financial decisions — some of them admittedly criminal. But, they argued, he was simply trying to save his company.

Schwartz apologized for his conduct and told U.S. District Judge Susan D. Wigenton that he “always tried to live the right way” and set a good example. But he acknowledged that he’d failed to do so in this instance.

Wigenton said she could not understand why prosecutors had agreed to a sentence of just a year and a day. Even years into the investigation, she noted, it remained unclear where much of the money had gone. And because so many of the letters submitted on Schwartz’s behalf described him as a brilliant businessman, Wigenton said the “number of layers and businesses and LLCs that were created” made it hard to see him as someone who had been fooled or confused.

“Not a single asset is in your name,” she said. “Not one.”

Wigenton said the case was not merely an abstract tax case, citing the collapse of Skyline’s nursing homes and the harm to patients. She said there was a need for deterrence in sentencing.

The judge sentenced Schwartz to three years in prison and ordered him to pay restitution of $5 million — the amount he had paid himself as a ghost employee — which he did. The remaining taxes were not part of the criminal sentence because prosecutors said they were used to fund his collapsing business rather than for personal enrichment. They said the IRS could try to recover the rest through a civil case.

Trump’s pardon wiped away Schwartz’s federal prison sentence — and likely any IRS effort to claw back the rest of the stolen taxes. But it did not affect a separate Arkansas state conviction for Medicaid fraud and tax evasion, in which Schwartz admitted submitting false and misleading information that inflated the Medicaid rates paid to his facilities in the state.

A judge in Little Rock had sentenced Schwartz to one year in state prison, ordered to run at the same time as his federal term. Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin, who had announced Schwartz’s conviction as a signature achievement, made clear after Trump’s pardon that the state prosecution stood on its own.

Schwartz, Griffin said at the time, owed the state of Arkansas nine months in prison and $1.8 million in restitution. A spokesman for Griffin said last week that, after making some payments — on schedule — Schwartz owed the state about $1.2 million, which must be fully repaid by April 2027.

One of the lobbyists whom Schwartz hired, Joshua Nass, worked to try to reduce Schwartz’s sentence in Arkansas. Nass declined to comment. He was later charged with attempting to extort $500,000 from a client and his son. Although the victims are not identified in the case, the circumstances match those of Schwartz.

Nass was released from federal custody after posting a $5 million bond. He has not yet responded to the charge. Prosecutors said in a court filing they were negotiating with Nass for a plea deal that could resolve the case without a trial.

Schwartz reported to an Arkansas prison on Dec. 29, creating an opportunity for the lawyers representing families who had won judgments against him. At the height of Skyline’s expansion, the company controlled nearly 1 in 10 nursing home beds in the state. But by the time families won their cases, Schwartz had relinquished or sold his Arkansas facilities, leaving no clear assets for lawyers to pursue.

Because Schwartz was in state custody again, lawyers could serve him with court papers and ask a judge to compel him to answer questions under oath about his finances — requiring him to disclose bank accounts, companies and other assets and to turn over financial records. Those proceedings are often the first step in tracing money and identifying property that might be used to satisfy a judgment. From there, attorneys could ask courts in other states to recognize and enforce the Arkansas judgments so they could pursue assets located elsewhere.

John Landis, an attorney for Reddick Law, which represents the Coulson and Grissom families, said he and another attorney representing yet another client with a judgment against Schwartz, contacted the state prison system to set up depositions of Schwartz. But the window proved too brief. The Arkansas parole board released Schwartz after just three weeks.

Before they could ask a single question, the chance to follow the money was gone.

The post A Nursing Home Owner Got a Trump Pardon. The Families of His Patients Got Nothing. appeared first on ProPublica.

That will change soon. Earlier this month, state lawmakers passed a bill that prohibits police and other government officials from requesting polygraph tests for alleged sex assault victims. Gov. Spencer Cox signed it into law on Thursday, and it goes into effect in May. 

Experts say these tests are known to be especially unreliable with victims of sexual abuse. That’s because victims may have stress and anxiety recounting their assault that the polygraph may interpret as deception. Other states don’t allow them to be used with assault victims for this reason.

It took two years and three legislative sessions for Utah state Rep. Angela Romero, the House minority leader, to get the bill across the finish line. When she first sponsored it in 2024, she cited reporting from The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica as she told her fellow legislators the damaging effects polygraph tests can have on people who are reporting sexual abuse. 

In the case covered by the news outlets, state licensors asked a man to take a polygraph test after he reported that his therapist, Scott Owen, had touched him inappropriately. The test results indicated he was being deceptive, and that led the patient to drop his complaint. Owen was allowed to continue to practice for two more years, until others came forward with similar allegations. Owen is now in prison after admitting he sexually abused patients.

Romero said in a recent interview that she was determined to bring the bill back for that former patient.

“For me, it was really specifically for that one individual who was not believed,” Romero said, “and then their perpetrator went on to harm other people.”

Cox signed the legislation during a small ceremony at his office, telling Romero that she “has been such a champion, and made a difference and saved lives.” The governor also nodded to The Tribune and ProPublica’s reporting driving change.

Provo police began investigating Owen in 2023 after The Tribune and ProPublica published a story that detailed a range of sexual assault allegations from the man given the polygraph test, identified in previous reporting under the pseudonym Andrew, and three others. 

Former patients who spoke to the news outlets said they sought Owen’s help because he was a therapist who had built a reputation as a specialist who could help gay men who were members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They said he touched them inappropriately during those sessions, some of which were paid for with church funds.

Half of states have laws that explicitly prohibit law enforcement from conducting a polygraph test with someone reporting a sexual assault. Some go further, barring a broader group of government employees beyond law enforcement from requiring an alleged sexual assault victim to take one. 

Although Romero’s bill had support from prosecutors and police each session she proposed it, there was pushback from defense attorneys and some fellow legislators who wanted to keep polygraph tests as an option because alleged sex assaults often have no other witnesses.

Polygraph test results are not admissible in court because of their unreliability. But Steve Burton, with the Utah Defense Attorney Association, said in a recent legislative hearing that it is still valuable for prosecutors and investigators to consider those results before deciding whether to pursue criminal charges.

“This is often one of the only things that a defense attorney can ask for or use in order to try to show that their client may be telling the truth,” he said.

Romero pushed back on that idea, saying there are other kinds of interview techniques that authorities can use to help determine whether someone’s account is truthful.

“This is not a way,” she said. “Especially when you’re dealing with someone who has been a victim. You could revictimize that person. And it also could discourage that person from going forward and participating in the process of criminally prosecuting their perpetrator.”

“The Worst Thing I’ve Ever Gone Through”

Reporting from The Tribune and ProPublica showed the damaging effects a polygraph test had on the man who reported Owen to state licensors.

Andrew reported Owen to Utah’s Division of Professional Licensing in 2016. As part of the investigation, licensors offered polygraph tests to both Andrew and Owen.

Owen declined. Andrew agreed, recalling that an investigator told him passing would bolster what was essentially one person’s word against another’s.

But the polygraph results, Andrew said, suggested he was being deceptive. Polygraph tests generally function to record signs of internal stress, which could suggest someone is not telling the truth.

“I had so much trauma,” he told The Tribune and ProPublica. “And so, certainly, when they asked me questions about the particular things that happened in therapy, it’s going to elicit a very strong emotional response.”

The result affected his mental health, he said, and he told an investigator he no longer wanted to pursue the complaint.

In a 2016 public reprimand from licensors, Owen admitted giving Andrew hugs — touching he called inappropriate but “non-sexual.” Andrew had reported that Owen groped him, encouraged him to undress and kissed him during sessions.

Officials with DOPL said they believe they responded appropriately to the complaint. But communications between Andrew and an investigator suggest that the agency’s decision not to more harshly discipline Owen rested largely on his denial and on Andrew’s polygraph results.

Owen pleaded guilty to felony charges in February 2025, admitting he sexually abused two patients and led them to believe that sexual touching was part of therapy. He pleaded no contest in a third patient’s case.

Andrew was among more than half a dozen men — mostly former patients — who spoke during Owen’s sentencing hearing a month later about how he had harmed them. 

“The experience with Scott Owen has been the worst thing I’ve ever gone through,” Andrew said. “I don’t think he belongs in society anymore.”

A judge sentenced Owen to at least 15 years in prison. He’s currently at the central Utah prison facility.

A New State Task Force

The state is addressing some of the shortcomings identified by The Tribune and ProPublica in another way as well: creating a task force to look into a rise in sexual misconduct complaints that state licensors say they’ve seen against licensed professionals. The task force will focus on health care, mental health and massage therapy, professions state officials say have historically received the highest percentage of sexual misconduct complaints.

The news organizations reported that more than a third of mental health professionals who received discipline from licensors beginning in 2012 were accused of sexual misconduct. In 2023, DOPL spokesperson Melanie Hall said the agency was aware that certain license types “have a tendency towards certain types of violations.” The agency, she said, “takes these factors into account when investigating complaints, and takes appropriate disciplinary action when necessary.”

The task force, which was announced earlier this month, will focus on suggesting changes to the law and creating resources to help victims more easily report misconduct to the state. 

It also plans to develop a standardized process for sharing reports among agencies that might have knowledge of an accusation — something that is not currently legally required. The Tribune and ProPublica highlighted this gap in their reporting on Owen’s case: Although Andrew and at least two others reported Owen to DOPL, licensors never shared those reports with Provo police. 

Margaret Busse is the executive director of the Utah Department of Commerce, which houses DOPL. She said in a statement that licensed professionals who engage in sexual misconduct violate not just their clients’ trust, but the public’s confidence in their profession.

“These heinous acts inflict profound harm to victims and damage the reputations of entire industries,” she said. “This task force is our unequivocal declaration: Utah will hold licensed professionals accountable to protect our communities and the integrity of state-regulated industries.”

The post Utah Bans Polygraph Tests for Those Reporting Sexual Assault appeared first on ProPublica.

Before vaccines, death and disability stalked children. Then shots turned once-common infections into something doctors only read about in textbooks.

When immunization rates drop, however, plagues from the past can come roaring back, as measles has in American communities where parents decided not to vaccinate their children.

Imagine what would happen if even the people who wanted shots couldn’t get them.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who founded an antivaccination group, is considering changes that could prompt the handful of companies that make most shots for American children to stop selling them here. Over the last year, he has been transforming a government that long championed the lifesaving benefits of vaccines into one that questions their safety here and around the world.

Shortly after Kennedy was nominated, questions swirled over how he might overhaul America’s immunization system. Two Stanford University researchers wondered how many people would suffer if vaccination rates dropped or shots became entirely unavailable for four of the most infamous diseases: polio, measles, rubella and diphtheria. 

Outbreaks often start when an American catches one of these illnesses abroad and returns home. So epidemiologists Mathew Kiang and Nathan Lo, who is also an infectious diseases doctor, built a model to simulate how the four contagions could spread from sick travelers based on each state’s vaccination rates.

Since a sizable chunk of the population is currently vaccinated, some of the infections wouldn’t get a foothold right away. But over time, as more babies are born and not vaccinated, a larger share of the population would become susceptible. 

The professors ran thousands of simulations for each disease, producing a range of possible outcomes. From there, they figured out the average number of deaths and disabilities over a 25-year period.

Their model shows that at current vaccination rates, the nation is already teetering on the brink of an explosion in measles cases — one that would be virtually wiped out with just a 5% increase in vaccination. But if current rates drop by half, all four diseases could return. 

The researchers’ modeling of the worst-case scenario assumes a quarter century where no one could get the shots. It doesn’t account for the likelihood of parents going abroad to find vaccines or politicians intervening to ensure drugmakers offer them again. 

But the results demonstrate in stark terms how vital shots are and what’s at stake if policy changes interfere with Americans’ ability to vaccinate their kids. 

ProPublica shared the key findings of that scenario with the Department of Health and Human Services. An agency spokesperson didn’t address the modeling but said “HHS has not limited access or insurance coverage to any FDA-approved vaccines” and continues to routinely recommend the shots for children.

When they published their paper in early 2025, Kiang and Lo emphasized the outcomes from less extreme drops in vaccination rates, in part because the peer reviewers suggested those were more realistic. Back then, Kennedy was in his earliest days at HHS. 

A year later, though, a scenario where no one can get these vaccines doesn’t feel as far-fetched, Kiang said. “Every week that goes by,” he said, “that seems more plausible.” 

Lo said that their goal was to show policy makers, “if we make certain decisions, this is what could happen.” 

So ProPublica decided to illustrate what a future without vaccines could look like.

If We Lost the Vaccine for Polio

Polio, which mainly affects young children, can invade the nervous system and cause paralysis in the limbs or in the muscles needed to breathe. In the 1950s, many people were kept alive in iron lungs, huge metal contraptions that encased the body up to the neck and used pressure to force air in and out of the lungs.

Ventilators have since replaced the antiquated equipment, but modern medicine can’t reverse the paralysis. The model assumes 1 out of every 200 unvaccinated people who catch polio would become paralyzed.

Imagine if this group of kindergartners became paralyzed by polio.

They would be a tiny sliver of the 23,000 people the model predicts could be paralyzed by polio over 25 years if no one is getting the vaccine.

That 23,000 is the model’s average. It’s the equivalent of more than a thousand kindergarten classes. (The model results range from 0 to more than 70,000 cases of paralytic polio.)

If We Lost the Vaccine for Measles

Measles is among the most contagious diseases in history. A child can spread it before they even get a rash, and the virus can linger in the air for up to two hours after they leave a room. 

Famous for its blotchy spots covering the body, measles is a respiratory disease that can lead to pneumonia and swelling of the brain. Before the vaccine, just about everyone got measles, and every year 400 to 500 Americans died.

The model assumes that 3 out of every 1,000 people infected with measles would die.

Over the last 25 years, six people who contracted measles in the U.S. died from the disease.

If Americans could no longer get the vaccine, the model predicts measles would spread quickly.

The model shows that measles could kill about 290,000 people over 25 years.

If We Lost the Vaccine for Rubella

Rubella, also known as German measles, is usually mild in kids and adults. But it’s devastating to a developing fetus. If an infection occurs very early in pregnancy, there’s up to a 90% chance that the baby will be born with congenital rubella syndrome. These children frequently have heart defects, deafness or blindness — and sometimes all three. Many have intellectual disabilities, too. About a third of babies with the syndrome die before their first birthday. A U.S. rubella epidemic in the mid-1960s left 20,000 newborns with congenital rubella syndrome.

If the vaccine went away, we wouldn’t see babies born with congenital rubella syndrome right away. The unvaccinated children would first need to grow into their childbearing years.

The model shows that cases would begin to climb after about 15 years. And within 25 years, 41,000 babies could be born with congenital rubella syndrome.

If We Lost the Vaccine for Diphtheria

Diphtheria, a major killer of children in the 1900s, was known as the “strangling angel.” 

The disease’s name comes from the Greek word for leather because diphtheria’s toxin attacks the respiratory tract. Dead tissue builds up in the throat like a thick piece of hide, sealing off a swollen airway. 

For those who escape suffocation, the toxin can damage the nerves and heart. Patients who seem better can drop dead weeks later.

An antitoxin made from the blood of horses needs to be given promptly, but it is in short supply. Children elsewhere in the world have died waiting for it.

The disease is rare and much less contagious than measles or rubella. But it’s also far more deadly. The model assumes only one infected traveler would arrive every five years and that 1 out of every 10 unvaccinated people who catch diphtheria would die.

The researchers found it’s very possible nobody would die of diphtheria in the 25-year period their model covers. But we would be playing a game of high-stakes roulette if we lost the vaccine. There is a chance that the strangling angel could become devastating again.

Remember the 23,000 people who could be paralyzed without a polio vaccine? A world without a diphtheria vaccine could be even worse.

On average, the model predicts 138,000 deaths from diphtheria.

In the worst-case scenario, though, the model shows that more than a million people could die from diphtheria in 25 years without a vaccine.

The chance of that is remote, but it’s the gamble we’d all be taking.

The post The Horrors That Could Lie Ahead if Vaccines Vanish appeared first on ProPublica.

The OB-GYN, Dr. Mark Mulholland, stood between her legs, inquiring about the woman’s sex life as he had in prior visits, she wrote in a complaint filed with Washington state health care regulators.

She said Mulholland had previously asked about her enjoyment of sex and if she had a boyfriend, a strange way to learn about a patient’s sexual activity, she thought. But this was her last checkup after her hysterectomy and the last time she expected to see Mulholland.

“Do you masturbate?” Mulholland asked the woman during their final appointment, according to her complaint.

The question shocked her. She wrote that Mulholland explained he wanted to “make sure the nerves were intact.”

Then, the woman wrote, he inserted his fingers into her vagina and pumped his hand back and forth in a way she said felt “sexual and not medical.”

“Does that hurt?” the woman said Mulholland asked her, before ending their visit by saying “the playroom is open” — a comment she interpreted as Mulholland clearing her for sexual activity.

The woman said she left the room in shock. She made her way to the parking lot of the Kadlec Clinic-Associated Physicians for Women, climbed inside her car and sat, incredulous, she said in an interview with KUOW and ProPublica. What happened felt terribly wrong, she said.

Mulholland did not respond to requests for comment for this article after being sent a detailed list of findings by email and by letter. His attorney declined to comment.

What the woman didn’t know was that by the time of her exam in February 2025, the Washington Medical Commission had already received complaints from four other women since 2022 accusing Mulholland of sexual misconduct. And yet he was allowed to keep seeing patients throughout.

The accounts related by the women, whom KUOW and ProPublica are not naming to protect their privacy, included descriptions of Mulholland touching them unnecessarily, using sexually charged language, or performing painful or seemingly sexual pelvic exams that involved moving his fingers in and out.

The commission also gathered testimony a year before the woman’s February 2025 appointment from three of Mulholland’s colleagues with their own troubling accounts. These included hearing firsthand about or observing him telling patients they had “tight” and “pretty” vaginas, touching and slapping his patients’ legs, and aggressively pulling a patient’s pants down without permission. 

Washington law allows the commission to take emergency action and suspend a doctor’s license while disciplinary proceedings are pending. The law says a suspension is defensible if it’s more probable than not that the physician poses an “immediate threat to the public health and safety.”

In Mulholland’s case, the commission did not choose suspension. Instead, it issued a formal statement of charges accusing Mulholland of abuse and unprofessional conduct in April 2025 — more than a year after the commission’s investigator submitted her reports on two of the complaints for review and 11 months after Mulholland was offered an informal settlement that he apparently did not sign.

Even after the commission declared its charges against Mulholland, he was allowed to keep practicing while the case proceeded. He saw patients as late as May, before he went on leave.

At least 84 patients have filed lawsuits against Mulholland or his employer since the state’s investigation became public. Court filings by Mulholland’s attorney, made in response to the lawsuits, have denied wrongdoing or improper conduct toward women. He also has denied the allegations made by the medical commission and is entitled to a hearing to contest them.

Emily Volland, a spokesperson for Kadlec and its affiliate, the Providence health system, said Mulholland is no longer employed by Kadlec. Volland declined to comment on the allegations against him but said via email: “We take our patient’s safety very seriously and are fully cooperating with the state in this matter.”

The lawsuits against Mulholland, Kadlec and Providence are ongoing. Lawyers for Providence and Kadlec in court filings denied allegations of negligence and wrongdoing.

While other news coverage has described the lawsuits and the commission’s actions in 2025, none has focused on how the state dealt with complaints against Mulholland during the three years before he agreed to restrictions on his license.

Washington state has faced criticism in the past for its handling of sexual misconduct complaints. A 2021 Seattle Times investigation found that in 282 cases of alleged sexual misconduct since 2009, state regulators took more than a year to impose discipline.

Several other states in recent years have dealt with their own high-profile cases of sexual misconduct involving OB-GYNs. On March 10, for instance, Columbia University in New York released a report detailing how a culture of silence at the institution had allowed OB-GYN Robert Hadden to abuse more than 1,000 patients over decades. 

States like Ohio and Delaware have moved aggressively to make it easier to keep doctors accused of sexual misconduct away from patients.

In Washington, the medical commission wasn’t the only organization that allowed Mulholland to keep practicing.

A Kadlec risk management employee, through an attorney, acknowledged to the commission that the clinic had received patient complaints against the doctor and said they were investigated. (The letter did not describe the complaints but said they included “communication with patients regarding obesity.”) Mulholland’s privileges were never restricted or terminated, the statement said.

When local news stories covered the commission’s charges against Mulholland in June, it unleashed a deluge of 18 new complaints in the following three months.

In September, the commission placed restrictions on his license that prevented him from seeing female patients. Mulholland agreed pending a hearing on his case.

Yanling Yu, a former Washington medical commissioner and a patient advocate with Washington Advocates for Patient Safety, wouldn’t comment on the Mulholland case directly. But she said it’s ethically wrong to allow a doctor facing serious allegations of sexual misconduct to continue seeing any patients while an investigation is ongoing.

“In an ideal regulatory system, if there has been enough or strong evidence to support the allegation, the doctor’s practice should be temporarily suspended or at least summarily restricted to protect patients’ safety,” she wrote in an email.

Kyle Karinen, executive director of the Washington Medical Commission, said the agency wasn’t slow to act and that it must operate under the system lawmakers created.

“I acknowledge that sometimes it takes longer than people would like, but we take that process really seriously,” Karinen said. “When we file a case and go to a hearing, we want to make sure that everybody has the opportunity to be heard on a particular topic.”

The woman who saw Mulholland in February 2025 filed a lawsuit against the clinic and a board complaint against the doctor, both in August. She said she was indignant after learning about the earlier complaints.

She said the commission should have taken those women more seriously. “They just let him keep practicing,” she said.

2022: The First Complaint 

The first sexual misconduct allegation against Mulholland landed in the commission’s email inbox in January 2022. The author was a first-time mother who, at 41 weeks pregnant, went to have labor induced at the Kadlec Regional Medical Center.

The woman said she had hoped a female doctor would deliver the baby. But Mulholland was the on-call doctor assigned the day she arrived. When she saw that the doctor was a man, she asked if the female nurse who was there could perform her predelivery cervical check instead, according to her complaint.

Mulholland insisted, she said. (He later told a commission investigator that because the woman was having labor induced, he had to personally know her cervical dilation and consistency, whether the fetus was in breech position or if her amniotic sac was intact. He also said because she was experiencing high blood pressure, her delivery couldn’t wait to be rescheduled with a female doctor.)

“I didn’t have a choice but to trust who was supposed to be trustworthy,” the woman said in an interview with KUOW and ProPublica.

In her complaint, she said Mulholland was inappropriate. When the nurse asked her if she still had her underwear on, Mulholland joked that he still had his on too, she wrote.

During the cervical check, with his fingers inside the expectant mother, he pressed in different directions, according to her complaint. The woman said Mulholland told her he doesn’t perform exams this way because it hurts. Then he showed her what he described as the correct way, she said in the complaint.

“The cervical check was the longest and most painful one I have ever had,” she said in the complaint.

Three OB-GYNs, when presented by KUOW and ProPublica with the woman’s description of the pelvic exam, said the maneuver sounded unnecessarily painful.

“That sounds strange,” said Alson Burke, an associate professor at the University of Washington who teaches medical students how to perform pelvic exams. “Saying ‘I don’t do something because it hurts’ and then doing it doesn’t make sense to me.”

Commission records show that Mulholland said the allegation that his cervical exam was longer than what’s typical was absurd.

“I do try to be as careful, quick, gentle, and efficient as I can be when doing a pelvic exam whether it is for gynecology or obstetrics,” he wrote in an email to a commission clinical health care investigator. “With regards to being the most painful one she ever had, for that I am surprised as well as sorry. I pride myself on trying to be as gentle as absolutely possible. I get frequent compliments on how much less uncomfortable my exams are than most other providers, male or female.”

The nurse present during the woman’s exam told the commission it seemed “no longer or any more painful than these types of exams are typically.”

Up until that day, the patient’s pregnancy had been a joyous experience, she said in an interview with KUOW and ProPublica. She was excited to meet her daughter and picked out the outfit she’d arrive home in.

The nurse was ultimately able to line up a midwife to assist with the woman’s delivery in place of Mulholland.

But her cervical exam with Mulholland made the birth experience “worse than we could have ever imagined,” the woman, now 27, said in an interview with KUOW and ProPublica. It brought about depression and anxiety, she said.

“My daughter’s an only child, and I’m not sure if she ever will get a sibling because of how traumatic that was,” she told the news organizations.

By the end of July 2022, the new mother’s case was closed without any disciplinary action.

At the time, it was an isolated complaint in the record of a doctor who, records show, had not faced accusations of sexual misconduct with the medical commission before.

Then, a little over a year later, came another complaint, this time filed by a woman who had worked with Mulholland for nearly a decade.

October 2023: A Co-worker and Patient Speaks Out

According to an investigator’s report, the woman said she had worked at Kadlec Regional Medical Center for nine years and her interactions as Mulholland’s colleague had always been professional.

The complaint she filed in October 2023 concerned events she said took place when she was Mulholland’s patient. She’d had her fallopian tubes and the tissue lining her uterus removed and developed pain that was only present when she was menstruating.

On the day of her appointment, her complaint said, she’d explained all this to Mulholland when he began a line of questioning.

“Does it hurt you to have intercourse?”

“No,” she replied.

Then, the woman wrote in her complaint to the medical commission, Mulholland stood close to her and in a lower tone asked. “Not even when he’s deep inside you?”

“No,” she said she asserted.

Mulholland told the woman he needed to do a pelvic exam, according to the complaint.

While examining her, the woman wrote, Mulholland used one hand to push down on the top of her abdomen and with the other hand began repeatedly and “powerfully” thrusting his fingers into her vagina.

Burke, the associate professor of medicine at the University of Washington, said repeated “thrusting” is neither a technique she uses nor something she has ever observed.

“The reason I wouldn’t recommend it is because it could be triggering and really uncomfortable for someone,” Burke said. “Is that actually helping you gather the information? And is the patient feeling safe in the way that you are examining them?”

She said that no part of the pelvic exam should be performed in such a way that its intent could be perceived as sexual.

According to the former colleague’s complaint, each time Mulholland shoved his fingers inside, he leaned in close and asked, “Is this the same as the pain you felt?”

The woman wrote that Mulholland was “effectively holding her in place” on the exam table and she was unable to move to escape the pain. A medical assistant was nearby, she said.

After the pelvic exam, she said, the assistant left. Mulholland told the woman that she had a “great looking vagina,” she wrote, and that he usually had to use three fingers, but with her, he could only use two. Before leaving, the woman said in her complaint, the doctor asked her if she worked out and said he could tell she did.

Through an attorney, Mulholland later told the commission that he conducts all of his exams “as respectfully as possible” and that he is “very cognizant of his patient’s reactions.”

The doctor was responding to a commission investigator’s December 2023 request for his version of what happened during the woman’s visit.

That same month, a complaint from a third woman arrived.

December 2023: Another Exam Complaint

It was three weeks before the new year when the woman went to the medical commission for help.

The patient, whose primary language is Spanish, had an interpreter join her in-person appointment virtually. A physician’s assistant had referred the woman to Mulholland to discuss a possible hysterectomy to relieve pain.

The woman later told a commission investigator that during her appointment, Mulholland entered the exam room and introduced himself. Then he lifted the paper sheet that covered her naked lower half, looked at her genital area, then looked back at her, which made her uncomfortable. Without asking her to reposition herself, he grabbed her by the butt to move her down the exam table, she said.

Mulholland’s pelvic exam was aggressive, she said in her written complaint to the commission. The investigator who interviewed her wrote that the woman said he’d moved his fingers in and out and that she felt a lot of pressure.

“I yelled at some point,” she wrote in her complaint.

A nurse was present but seemed fixated on the computer screen, the woman said.

Before the appointment ended, Mulholland said he was “eager to see” the woman’s vagina again, laughed and then said he was looking forward to reuniting with her womb, the investigator quoted the woman as saying. When the Spanish-language interpreter on the computer screen went quiet and asked Mulholland to repeat what he said, the woman wrote in her complaint, the doctor told the interpreter there was no need to relay that last message.

The woman was left in pain for 12 days after her appointment with Mulholland, she told the investigator, adding that she didn’t want others to go through what she had.

In response to this complaint, Mulholland’s attorney wrote to the commission, “at no time has he ever simply moved his fingers in and out several times with this patient or any other.”

(A separate report the woman filed with the Richland Police Department, which the department classified as a potential sex offense with “forcible fondling,” was closed in 14 days. The responding officer wrote that he hadn’t found facts to indicate a crime was committed “on the basis that the alleged incident occurred during a medical examination.”)

The state medical commission pressed ahead with its investigations into the two 2023 complaints, both of which asserted Mulholland had moved his fingers in and out during a pelvic exam.

The investigator assigned to both cases turned to Mulholland’s current and former colleagues. Two said that while some patients complained about the way Mulholland communicated with them about weight issues, they personally did not have concerns. Three other current or former colleagues, meanwhile, described problems.

Alexis Tuck, an OB-GYN who worked at Kadlec from 2017 to 2022, said in a statement to the commission that she noticed a pattern of Mulholland’s patients switching providers because they wanted anyone “except Dr. Mulholland,” and sometimes requested her.

She said that when she asked these patients about the reason behind their switch they replied:

“He grabbed my belly fat and shook it in front of my husband.”

“He called me fat and made fun of me.”

“He told me my vagina is tight during a pelvic exam.”

“He told me I have a pretty vagina during a pap smear.”

“He made a comment about my vagina being tight and I talked to my mom about him. Apparently she had a similar weird experience with him.”

Tuck told the commission that more than once, patients cried in her office while sharing their stories.

“These accounts were consistent in their tone and content, painting a troubling picture of a physician whose behavior repeatedly crossed the line of professional and ethical conduct,” she wrote to the commission.

Tuck told the commission that the woman who filed the October 2023 complaint was among those who described their experiences to her. Tuck said the woman was “visibly shaken and emotional” when she detailed what happened, which, based on Tuck’s retelling, was generally consistent with the woman’s complaint to the medical commission.

Another colleague told the commission that Mulholland once told her as a patient was leaving the office, “I bet you were skinny like her when you were pregnant,” and that another time he said he thought he’d seen her driving a BMW and that she looked “hot.” Another said she found Mulholland’s comments about overweight women disrespectful.

The claims against Mulholland were piling up.

In February and March 2024, Britta Fischer, commission investigator, submitted the 2023 cases for review.

What to do next was soon in the hands of commissioners.

March-September 2024: A Decision Awaits 

The medical commission takes its guidance on how to handle allegations against a doctor from Washington statutes, which prohibit physicians from engaging in a range of behavior defined as sexual misconduct.

The law bans statements about a patient’s “body, appearance, sexual history, or sexual orientation” except for legitimate purposes of care. The law also bars behavior, gestures or expressions that could “reasonably be interpreted as seductive or sexual.”

A doctor can’t remove a patient’s gown or draping unless it’s with a patient’s consent, during emergency care or in a custodial setting.

A doctor can’t touch a person’s breasts, genitals, anus or other “sexualized body part” unless it’s “consistent with accepted community standards of practice for examination, diagnosis and treatment and within the health care practitioner’s scope of practice.”

Determining whether or not behavior is appropriate can be particularly difficult when it comes to OB-GYNs, said Emily Anderson, professor at Neiswanger Institute for Bioethics and Healthcare Leadership and Loyola University Chicago’s Stritch School of Medicine.

“They have access to our naked bodies as women, to our vaginas, to our breasts,” Anderson said. “They are allowed to do things that we don’t give other people permission to do, and that’s part of their job.”

There are standards for physical exams. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists’ Committee on Ethics wrote that exams should be explained appropriately, done only with patient consent and “performed with the minimum amount of physical contact required to obtain data for diagnosis and treatment.”

State medical boards can also look to patterns of behavior.

Two of the three complaints against Mulholland from 2022 through 2023 mentioned movement in and out during pelvic exams, while all three described painful pelvic exams and comments the women considered inappropriate. Three colleagues also had described hearing about or witnessing him making disrespectful or inappropriate remarks, including one who said they were directed at her.

Anderson, in a journal article, wrote that it’s common to find repeated, lesser forms of misconduct in the backgrounds of doctors who act egregiously.

“For example, sexual violations are nearly always preceded by boundary violations such as inappropriate comments or touching,” the article said.

Anderson and her colleagues recommended state regulators consider restricting a doctor’s license for multiple smaller offenses.

Stephanie Loucka, executive director of Ohio’s medical board, said that if patterns of misconduct exist, the process will find them — even when an OB-GYN’s actions occur under the guise of legitimate care. Ohio began its overhaul of sexual misconduct investigations seven years ago.

“If a complaint gets made, we’re going to work the fact pattern from the assumption that there might be something there, and we’re going to gather the evidence and see where the evidence takes us,” she said. “And it typically takes us clearly one way or the other.”

If there’s a threat of immediate harm in cases of sexual misconduct, Loucka said, Ohio moves “with a sense of urgency” to file an emergency suspension. She estimated it has taken the Ohio board from six weeks to nine months to do so.

In Washington, the medical commission reviewed the investigator’s reports on  the 2023 cases and decided on what it considered an appropriate resolution.

It proposed an “informal way of settling” allegations against Mulholland.

A heavily redacted May 31, 2024, letter sent to Mulholland’s attorney by the commission does not reveal the terms of the settlement. But the letter said the settlement would not require an admission of “any unprofessional conduct or wrongdoing.” Although settlements appear in the commission’s newsletter with brief summaries, the letter told Mulholland that a settlement would avoid a hearing, typically a public process.

All Mulholland had to do was sign.

Months passed. Mulholland’s attorney asked for the information gathered about his client, and the commission sent it. A June 2024 deadline for him to accept the agreement passed, as did a subsequent one in August. Nothing in documents released by the commission indicates he signed — or that the commission took any disciplinary action.

Mulholland kept seeing patients.

2018-2023: What the Hospital Knew

Long before the commission’s investigator filed her report with her superiors, Mulholland’s employer had also heard repeated concerns, according to Kadlec Clinic records acquired by attorneys in a lawsuit against Providence and the clinic. The attorneys submitted the documents as an exhibit in court.

(In court filings, Providence and Kadlec denied that they were negligent or that they knew or should have known about the abuse the plaintiffs alleged.)

Kadlec’s records in the lawsuit show that the clinic conducted a 2018 human resources investigation into allegations that Mulholland had mocked a co-worker’s sexuality and religion, concluding that it was “more likely than not” the allegations were true. Afterward, the records say, Mulholland’s employer provided him “coaching.”

Kadlec’s records also say that the clinic conducted a 2019 workplace investigation into allegations that Mulholland made sex jokes and condescending remarks, displayed discrimination toward women, and challenged a co-worker who complained about him.

A labor nurse told a Providence investigator that year that Mulholland had pinched a patient’s labia while she was in labor and asked if she was hurting. A colleague told the nurse that Mulholland had done the same to another patient who was giving birth, according to the labor nurse’s account as written down by the investigator.

A different colleague reported to a Kadlec workplace investigator that a patient had disclosed that Mulholland told her to “masturbate more often,” Kadlec records say.

Separately, Tuck, the OB-GYN who worked alongside Mulholland, told a Kadlec investigator that a patient disclosed she felt Mulholland had assaulted her but that the woman didn’t report it because she felt no one would believe her.

Following the 2019 workplace investigation, Kadlec’s records say, Mulholland’s employer concluded in 2020 that he “engaged in multiple instances of inappropriate behavior” that violated the medical center’s expectations. He was placed on a “behavior agreement” and required to take harassment prevention training.

In 2022, Kadlec records show, more emails were sent to clinic leadership alleging that Mulholland was demeaning to patients and co-workers. They described a “toxic work environment” and said management failed to address employees’ concerns about the doctor.

Read More

Concerned About Your OB-GYN Visit? A Guide to What Should Happen — and What Shouldn’t.

Tuck departed the clinic sometime that same year. She later told the medical commission she left because management failed to take action against him.

Tuck raised concerns about Mulholland within an email to Chief Medical Officer Rich Meadows in July 2022, writing that patients “felt they had been insulted/assaulted” by Mulholland.

Kadlec’s records in the lawsuit show that Tuck had also told a Kadlec workplace investigator in 2019 that the clinic manager, Lisa Mallory, protected Mulholland. In the statement she later gave the state medical commission, Tuck said when she brought concerns about Mulholland to Mallory, she responded, “He’s always been like that.”

Mallory, in response to a request for comment from KUOW and ProPublica, said this statement was taken out of context. She declined to say more. Meadows, through a Providence spokesperson, declined to comment.

In June 2023, clinic records in the lawsuit say, Kadlec took a phone call from a patient who said Mulholland shoved his two fingers inside of her so hard during a pelvic exam that she felt his knuckles slam up against her vagina and anus.

“Rough, jabbing and pushing up, like he was trying to arouse me or something,” according to Kadlec’s narrative describing the woman’s complaint.

She told Kadlec that she had alerted Mulholland before the exam that her vagina was prone to tearing and that she experienced vaginal pain with as little as a sneeze or a cough.

Kadlec’s summary of the woman’s account said that after a rectal exam, Mulholland told the patient: “Well, you took that surprisingly well. It’s a good thing my fingers are small.”

The woman said her body where Mulholland touched her was inflamed for two and a half days.

When the commission eventually contacted Mallory as part of the state’s own investigation, the clinic manager acknowledged there had been complaints within Kadlec. She did not seem to give them much credence.

“Dr. Mulholland has received his fair share of complaints over the years as have all the other providers here” at the Kadlec clinic, she wrote in a statement to the state board. “From what I have observed, he cares deeply for his patients and has spent his career trying to educate women on their health. They have not always appreciated how he has done that.”

September 2024: State’s Investigation Resumes

By September 2024, more than two years had elapsed since the state received its first complaint about a pelvic exam performed by Mulholland. Six months had passed since an investigator forwarded her report on two other pelvic exam complaints. That month, the commission learned of a new one.

“During examination, he said my vagina was very dry and that my husband wasn’t doing his job,” the woman wrote in her complaint.

The woman also described her interaction with Mulholland to a commission investigator. At the appointment, the woman had told a medical assistant that she was concerned about a fishy smell, she said. Upon entering the exam room, she told the investigator, Mulholland said loudly, “Hey, I heard you had a vagina that smells like fish.”

When he conducted his physical examination, the woman told the investigator, Mulholland penetrated her with his fingers and was “going in and out” and touching her clitoris.

The patient said she asked Mulholland to stop more than once. She was uncomfortable and what Mulholland was doing reminded her of her past sexual abuse, she wrote in her complaint. She said he eventually stopped.

Next, according to an investigator’s memo outlining the patient’s interview, Mulholland asked her if she masturbated and if she used sex toys or her fingers to do so. When the patient said she did not, Mulholland encouraged her to purchase some toys and to use them alone, she said. Then, according to the memo describing the woman’s account, Mulholland rubbed her shoulder and said, “You’re too young not to have good sex.”

A mandatory reporter filed a complaint supplementing the woman’s filing at around the same time.

By that time, the woman’s account brought to four the number of women asserting sexual misconduct by Mulholland since 2022. Counting a woman who reported rude behavior in a submission that was not marked as alleging sexual misconduct and that the commission closed, Mulholland had been named in six complaints.

Only 11 licensed physicians and physician assistants were the subject of six or more complaints in that time frame, the commission’s spokesperson said. As of last year, 41,256 people held this type of license in Washington.

A week after the mandatory reporter contacted the commission, Kelly Elder, a Washington Medical Commission staff attorney, sent the two pending 2023 cases back to Freda Pace, the commission’s director of investigations.

Elder asked Pace to have investigators try and reach people whose statements hadn’t been collected before.

Medical commission records show that investigator Britta Fischer also began looking into the new allegation.

Fischer’s inquiries produced statements from co-workers attesting to Mulholland’s good character and stating that they were unaware of any concerns raised by patients.

Mulholland himself, in a statement his attorney gave to the commission, said he didn’t have a “firm recollection” of the appointment the patient described in her complaint. He said he would never tell a patient anything to the effect that her husband was not doing his job. He said he addresses masturbation with patients who complain of sexual dryness or pain during sex, and he denied stroking the patient’s shoulder in a “suggestive way.”

Due to “unjustified allegations,” the statement said, Mulholland had changed the way he worked with patients. The statement said these changes included always trying to have a chaperone present instead of just during physical exams. He also started creating more physical distance from the patient during counseling and exploring “tangential issues, such as sexual health and wellbeing” only when a patient brought them up.

“Dr. Mulholland is truly sorry if his previous long-standing practice patterns have caused any patient any type of duress or anguish because of misinterpretation of what Dr. Mulholland was attempting to accomplish — excellent patient care,” the statement sent to the commission said.

Still, the commission also had the prior, adverse statements from colleagues and patients. In April 2025, the agency formally accused Mulholland of abuse and unprofessional conduct. (The allegations would later be amended to include sexual misconduct.)

Neither the medical commission nor the Washington State Department of Health, which oversees it, posted a news release on their websites. Members of the general public could have learned of the charges — if they knew to search for Mulholland’s name on the Health Department’s “provider credential search” page. Stephanie Mason, spokesperson for the commission, said the statement of charges would also go out to anyone who subscribed to quarterly email updates from the commission.

It wasn’t until a June Tri-City Herald story that the commission’s claims seemed to become widely known.

The outpouring of new patient complaints that followed echoed what the commission had already heard.

Their accounts included allegations that Mulholland had peeked at their pubic hair under the sheet, physically pulled them down the exam table, used sexual language and performed extremely painful vaginal exams.

Two of the women who have filed lawsuits against Mulholland or his employers told KUOW and ProPublica they attended appointments with him after the commission had received multiple complaints and before he agreed to restrictions on his license.

One said she was angry she hadn’t heard about allegations against Mulholland sooner. After a hysterectomy, she was directed to see him every four months for a year for pap smears.

She saw Mulholland for the last time on May 1, 2025 — two days after the commission filed its allegations against him. She learned about the commission’s case after the media coverage began.

“I don’t know if I expected the lady at the counter when you’re checking in to warn you and say, ‘Hey, you’re gonna see Mulholland, and he’s had complaints,’” she said in an interview with KUOW and ProPublica. “I don’t see a company or whatever ever doing that, but it would have been nice to know. I would have picked a different doctor.”

Another woman who sued, Torryn Kerley, said she was angry at Kadlec to learn of all the women coming forward in lawsuits after she had already complained to the clinic about Mulholland.

“Nobody was listening to me, and I did everything that I should have done,” said Kerley, who asked to be identified by name for this article. “I reported it. I told people about it. I told doctors in the office about it.”

Karinen, the medical commission director, said it’s very unusual for the commission to file a statement of charges and then get dozens of complaints in the same vein against that same doctor, as happened with Mulholland.

“That’s unheard of,” he said.

Mason, the commission spokesperson, cast the arrival of the new complaints as a positive outcome of the action that commissioners took against Mulholland.

“That’s what opened the door to these women coming forward, because at that point, really not very many people had said anything at all, by comparison,” Mason said.

No date has been set yet for a hearing in which Mulholland can challenge the commission’s allegations against him.

The post An OB-GYN Was Repeatedly Accused of Sexual Misconduct. The State Medical Board Let Him Keep Practicing. appeared first on ProPublica.

The first thing I photographed that day was a woman trying to calm a man with a hug. “There was a young man right at the police tape, honestly inches away from some of the agents, and he was so angry,” she told me later. “I was getting really scared for him.” Not long after, the scene grew volatile, as federal, state and city police forces tear-gassed and detained protesters in a standoff that lasted for hours.

Kristin Heiberg, I learned, is a 64-year-old technical writer, a volunteer at an animal shelter and a cancer survivor. And, like many other people here, she patrols her neighborhood with a whistle, on the lookout for Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

As I’ve watched the Twin Cities rally to respond to Operation Metro Surge, I’ve wanted to see the one thing I had not: What do these people look like in their day-to-day lives? I wanted to know who they are and what motivated them to patrol their streets, drive strangers to work and provide food and rent money for the families who have been in hiding since the surge began. While media coverage has moved on, and there are fewer ICE agents on the streets, they’re still here, and my neighbors are still providing mutual aid.

When I asked Heiberg who she felt was involved, she said: “Everyone in the community. Anyone with a heart.” This is how it has felt to me as well. Whether gathering with friends or ordering coffee or running into a neighbor while walking my dog, every recent conversation has led to the same place: What are you doing to meet this moment? 

Each of the people I photographed scoffed at the idea that they were paid agitators, or that they were led in their efforts by state or city officials. They said they just wanted to help their neighbors.

These are my neighbors, in their city, in their own words.

The post “This Is What It Means to Be Minnesotan”: Why My Neighbors Continue to Stand Up Against ICE appeared first on ProPublica.

“I believe we are in compliance with the court order. We’re not a racist organization, and we don’t racial profile,” he said on Phoenix-area talk radio in March 2025. 

In May, he told the same radio host: “Is the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office racially profiling or are they racially biased? We have documentation for well over 10 years that that is not the case.”

His evidence for ending oversight stemming from Melendres v. Arpaio, the federal case whose 2013 settlement imposed parameters the department has operated under ever since, was a monthly sampling of a few dozen traffic stops. The settlement requires deputies to document each stop in exacting detail. The report, analyzed by a court-appointed monitor, showed individual deputies had not used race to initiate that limited sample of traffic stops.

But annual reviews of every traffic stop or arrest of a Latino driver have repeatedly contradicted Sheridan’s claim. With the exception of one year, each of the past 10 reports showed disparities affecting Latino drivers. The latest, covering 2024, found, “Stops involving Hispanic drivers were more likely to result in an arrest than stops involving White drivers.”

Under Sheriff Arpaio, deputies began in 2007 to use traffic stops to arrest people on immigration charges, illegally racially profiling Latinos in the process. When the constitutional violations spurred the Melendres lawsuit, a judge found they were so widespread that he included the county’s more than 1 million Latino residents as plaintiffs in the case. Fallout from it ended Arpaio’s political career.

Sheridan, a Republican, was Arpaio’s second-in-command. During his campaign for sheriff in 2024, Sheridan pledged to cooperate with the court-appointed monitor. He predicted that the judge overseeing the case, U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow, would be pleased to see him back in the courtroom given his understanding of the settlement. He could hit the ground running and bring the case to a close, Sheridan said.

In June 2025, the latest report finding bias against Latino drivers was released. Months later, in October, Sheridan was back on the radio repeating his argument: “There has been no racial profiling or bias in well over 10 years, and that’s the gist of this lawsuit. The judge didn’t want MCSO to racially profile or be biased, and we have proven time and time again that the deputies are not.”

Latino activists and residents who endured the racial profiling and anti-immigrant policing of the Arpaio era tracked Sheridan’s first year as sheriff with growing alarm. 

They remembered that as chief deputy, Sheridan was caught on camera telling deputies that court-mandated reforms were “ludicrous” and “crap.” (He later apologized to the judge.) They also pointed out that Sheridan staffed his administration with key figures from Arpaio’s time.

The activists and residents said their concerns were also rooted in the reality of the second Trump administration.

As Sheridan took office, President Donald Trump was initiating plans for mass deportations. Trump tasked Immigration and Customs Enforcement with expanding local law enforcement’s involvement in street and workplace operations. If the case ended now, Sheridan would be free to join forces with ICE, critics said. Without the court to keep it in check, the Sheriff’s Office could backslide. 

The anxiety and anger were evident in the town of Guadalupe in February 2025, as Sheridan arrived for his first court-mandated public meeting as sheriff. Guadalupe was among the communities most affected by Arpaio’s immigration patrols and workplace raids. Residents, who were there to receive an update on the court case, greeted the new sheriff with signs saying, “Deport Jerry Sheridan,” and “We belong together not separated.”

The court-appointed monitor, Robert Warshaw, told the crowd inside an elementary school cafeteria that Sheridan had requested that the meeting be canceled, citing safety concerns related to ongoing anti-ICE protests around metro Phoenix. (The request was denied.) This angered the residents.

Their frustration grew as Warshaw noted that although the Sheriff’s Office was complying with more than 90% of the settlement, it fell short in two critical areas: continued racial disparities in traffic stops and failure to quickly investigate misconduct claims against deputies. Long delays in such investigations discouraged the public from reporting wrongdoing by deputies, attorneys and advocates said.

When it was Sheridan’s time to speak, he addressed the doubters, citing the sample of traffic stops that showed deputies didn’t use race to initiate traffic stops. He has also noted that the department is prioritizing the investigation of deputy misconduct complaints from Latino residents.

“The judge wants bias-free policing, and I want bias-free policing,” Sheridan said. “All I can ask from all of you in this room, the people that live in this community, and the 4.6 million people in Maricopa County, is to let me show you by actions the things that I have said and the fact that we all want bias-free police.”

Joel Cornejo, a community activist from south Phoenix who had protested Sheridan’s arrival, told the sheriff that he’d come of age during Arpaio’s raids. He said he was skeptical that Sheridan would fully comply with the lawsuit.

“We learned to fight your department,” Cornejo said. “We destroyed Joe Arpaio’s career. And if you target our community, we will do the same to your career.”

Sheridan repeated his pledge to show them the department had truly changed.

“I need that opportunity from you, to give me that chance,” he said.

Sheridan’s victory in the sheriff’s race capped a comeback that began after Arpaio lost reelection in 2016.

Under Arpaio, Sheridan rose through the ranks to chief of custody in 1999, running the county’s jails. In 2010, Arpaio elevated him to chief deputy, helping oversee the entire department. He held the job for six years.

During those years, Snow later ruled, the Sheriff’s Office illegally enforced federal immigration laws, violated residents’ constitutional rights and ignored the judge’s orders to end these practices.

Sheridan tried to distance himself from the controversies that led to Arpaio’s defeat, rarely speaking of his former boss. He maintained that the immigration sweeps and patrols were carried out by a separate division while he was focused on running the jails.

Sheridan stands by his work as detention chief, which included supervising 60 detention officers certified through an ICE program known as 287(g), allowing the department to process people in its jails for deportation. Maricopa County remains the only Arizona county to provide office space for ICE agents in its jails.

Arpaio’s efforts to arrest undocumented immigrants began under the same 287(g) agreement, which also allowed local officers to question individuals’ immigration status during routine policing. Sheridan says he disagreed with Arpaio’s tactics and tried to persuade him to not target day laborers or set up patrols in mostly Latino communities like Guadalupe. (Arpaio told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica that he considered enforcing immigration laws to be part of his job.)

During a 2015 court hearing, Sheridan denied that he knew about a 2011 preliminary injunction — issued while he was Arpaio’s chief deputy — barring the Sheriff’s Office from making immigration arrests. He didn’t learn about the injunction until 2014, Sheridan said.

Evidence presented in court showed Sheridan had been notified starting in 2011. Snow accused Sheridan and Arpaio of “deliberately” violating the order, withholding evidence and failing to investigate and discipline deputy misconduct, among other things. “Sheriff Arpaio and Chief Deputy Sheridan are the authors of the manipulation and misconduct that has prevented the fair, uniform, and appropriate application of discipline on MCSO employees,” Snow wrote in a 2016 ruling. He held them in civil contempt of court.

“I don’t even remember exactly why the judge held me in contempt of the court — what exactly he used against me,” Sheridan told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica. “He didn’t think that I was truthful because I wasn’t aware of something. And I was very truthful.”

Arpaio did not endorse Sheridan’s 2024 bid for sheriff and has declined to talk about him while hinting at a falling-out. “I made a couple mistakes, which are management mistakes,” Arpaio told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica. “I may have appointed a couple of wrong people. But in managing, you try to back up your people and so on. So, in any big organization, you can’t be perfect.”

Sheridan filled key leadership positions in his administration with former colleagues who worked under Arpaio and who, like Sheridan, had left the Sheriff’s Office after Arpaio lost reelection. Sheridan appointed retired Sgt. Clint Doyle to the Court Implementation Division, which is responsible for enforcing the court’s mandates. And he rehired Paul Chagolla, who ran public relations at the time of Arpaio’s raids and sweeps. Snow criticized Doyle’s appointment, calling out Sheridan for attempting to bypass a court requirement that key leadership roles dealing with the Melendres settlement be approved by the monitor.

Doyle and Chagolla didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

Christine Wee, the lead attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica that it was alarming to see so many from Arpaio’s administration return. “These folks were instrumental in the abuse and the terror that so many of our clients had to experience,” she said. “And then to bring them back in again, I think it sends a dangerous message to the community.” 

Sheridan acknowledges the criticism, but points to improvements like significantly reducing the misconduct complaints backlog. “From the sins of the previous administration, we’re now three different sheriffs since then, and some people just don’t want to let go.”

Since Sheridan took office last January, Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica have attended seven of his public appearances, reviewed his public remarks and interviewed him on three occasions. During that time, his assertions that the department had done enough to justify ending court oversight grew bolder, and Republican allies amplified his efforts.

“It’s about time that the public gets over some of the things that happened well over a decade ago and to realize the deputy sheriffs that work in their community are really good law enforcement officers,” he told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica in a March 2025 interview.

Ending the settlement would eliminate the near-constant recordkeeping tasks deputies face while on duty, including documenting 13 details about each traffic stop. This hampers their “ability to do the job,” Sheridan said, and discourages interacting with the public. Deputies fear prolonging a traffic stop, even for a brief chat, will lead to discipline.

“If they see somebody walking down the street, they can’t just pull over and say, ‘Hi, how are you doing?’” Sheridan told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica. “Every time they contact a member of the public, it is a lengthy process. And so it slows them down and it intimidates them not to want to do it.”

Last March, Sheridan began organizing meetings, in addition to the court-ordered gatherings, in rural communities policed by the Sheriff’s Office.

In Gila Bend, a town of about 1,800 southwest of Phoenix, Sheridan said he wanted to hear about locals’ needs. The town pays more than $900,000 a year to the Sheriff’s Office for public safety services.

“I’m a good leader and our deputies are responsive to your needs,” Sheridan told the group inside a community center. “And that’s really what this is all about, right? The sheriff’s main job is to keep people safe.”

A slide displayed data about traffic stops, calls for service and dispatch times. “For the population that’s here in Gila Bend, for the number of violent crimes — at least the ones that are notated here -– you guys are a very safe community,” a sheriff’s office lieutenant told the group.

The town’s vice mayor, Chris Riggs, a former deputy himself, disagreed. Crimes weren’t being reported, making the town seem safer than it is, he said. 

Residents “just don’t trust MCSO anymore,” Riggs said. “They’ll deal with it themselves.” Several residents agreed. 

No deputies live in Gila Bend, where response times lag and police services have suffered, they said.

“Deputies aren’t like they used to be, where they get out and they mingle with the community,” Riggs said.

Sheridan blamed the settlement for overburdening the department.

Ten days later, residents of Aguila, an unincorporated community nestled among farms where the population swells to about 1,000 during the winter growing season, told the sheriff they too felt neglected by deputies.

“We have 9,224 square miles to cover” and limited resources, Sheridan said. 

Sheridan has tried to address this. When he took office, there were about 140 vacancies for patrol deputies. He raised starting pay to compete with other local law enforcement agencies in the county. By the start of 2026, vacancies declined to 65, according to his office. Sheridan called it one of his biggest successes in his first year.

But hiring was still hindered by the paperwork deputies do to comply with the settlement, he said.

The Sheriff’s Office has made significant progress on a key requirement of the court: reducing the backlog of misconduct investigations. Although it has been cut by 76% since November 2022, there are still about 475 claims that haven’t been investigated, and three recently completed investigations dated from 2017.

In June, the Sheriff’s Office released the court-mandated traffic stop report for 2024.

It tracked some improvements. But when all traffic stops by deputies were analyzed, the report concluded: “Stops involving Hispanic drivers were more likely to result in an arrest than stops involving White drivers”; and traffic stops involving Black drivers, who are not covered in the Melendres settlement, were more likely to take longer and result in an arrest compared to stops of white drivers.

Despite the findings, Sheridan insisted there was no racial profiling at the department. 

In July, the court’s monitor team held another community meeting to review the Sheriff’s Office’s progress. It was in Maryvale, a West Phoenix neighborhood where three-quarters of the residents identify as Latino.

Before it began, Sheridan told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica that while he remained committed to reaching full compliance with the court’s requirements, a majority of Republicans on the county’s governing board “have a different perspective because they’re the ones that fund what the sheriff does.”

Three members of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors were at the meeting.

Latino residents and advocates from the heavily Democratic area typically made up a majority of attendees. But this crowd was mostly white Republicans, including some from retirement communities miles away. From the front of the gym, Sheridan could see signs that read, “We support MCSO,” and, “Take the handcuffs off Jerry!”

Republican Supervisor Debbie Lesko, who represents retirement communities in western parts of the metro area, said she believed the settlement was getting in the way of public safety. “They’re spending a lot of time on paperwork instead of being able to provide public safety. And when I talked to the sheriff’s department, they said it’s hurting the morale of the deputies.”

When Latino residents asked questions and voiced concerns, they were interrupted by jeers and groans from white members of the audience.

Warshaw, the court monitor, pleaded for the crowd to allow others to speak.

Sheridan’s supporters focused on $350 million the county supervisors had approved since 2013 to implement the court-mandated reforms, including $226 million allocated to the Sheriff’s Office. The monitor later found that the Sheriff’s Office had greatly exaggerated total expenses, and the judge cautioned county leaders against citing the dollar figure because it was misleading.

“Mr. Warshaw, tell the judge to stop looting Maricopa County tax dollars to pay for that oversight,” Tom Berry, a retiree from Sun City, said to the monitor. “Advise the judge to stop the oversight.”

The case hinges on how well the Sheriff’s Office complies with 368 paragraphs outlined in four court orders aimed at rooting out racial profiling, Warshaw responded. “Is there still work to be done? Yes, there is still work to be done. Is this thing going to go on forever? No.”

“It looks like it,” a woman blurted.

Salvador Reza is a longtime organizer of Latino communities and day laborers who regularly attends meetings related to the settlement. He said it appeared Republicans were organizing to call for an immediate end to court oversight, which Sheridan would welcome.

“That’s what he’s hoping, that the federal court lets him off the hook so he can do whatever he wants,” Reza said, noting he was concerned by Sheridan’s history with Arpaio and approach to the case since taking office. “So there’s no way that we can rebuild trust in the community knowing very well who Sheridan is.”

Sheridan denied he had coordinated with the supervisors to publicly call for an end to the settlement.

Months later, debate over the settlement’s cost came to a head.

Community members asked for details about how the $226 million the sheriff’s department had attributed to enforcing the settlement was spent. The monitor’s team published a report in October that concluded the Sheriff’s Office had greatly exaggerated the cost. More than $163 million, about 72%, of the total attributed to the reforms was unrelated or lacked justification, the report found.

Sheridan attacked the audit.

“These guys are not CPAs, they don’t have the experience to do an audit of a huge government operation,” he said on the conservative talk radio show where he regularly appeared. “The sheriff’s budget is about $700 million a year, and the county’s budget is a couple of billion. They don’t have the expertise to do this, and so they come up with this report.”

He listed some expenses, including an order to create and staff new divisions. “We have three Ph.D.s that are analysts, and all of this has led to the fact that there has been no racial profiling or bias in well over 10 years, and that’s the gist of this lawsuit.”

Sheridan’s attorneys petitioned the court to dispute the audit but later dropped the challenge, saying the county wanted to avoid additional “unnecessary” expenses.

The audit reinforced many Latino community members’ belief that the agency couldn’t be trusted.

After the raucous gathering in Maryvale, advocates alleged there had been an effort to intimidate Latino residents, including the use of racial insults in a forum intended to gather their input and check on the Sheriff’s Office’s progress. 

Judge Snow held the next public meeting at the federal courthouse. He acknowledged the increasingly vocal opposition to the settlement and its costs, but defended it as necessary.

“This is not an easy case. It is an expensive case. It is a case where everybody in Maricopa County has benefited, whether or not they appreciate it,” Snow said, before noting there was still work to do resolving the backlog of misconduct reports. “Sheriff Sheridan has done a considerable amount in reducing the backlog he was left with, but there is still a considerable backlog to be resolved.”

Sheridan conceded the settlement had made his office better, even if it sometimes caused friction. Still, attorneys for the Sheriff’s Office and the county government argued to Snow that they had done enough to end his oversight.

In December, the county filed a motion to sidestep the remaining reforms and end court supervision. Sheridan’s attorneys signed onto the motion in January. 

“After 14 years, four sheriffs, and hundreds of millions spent tax dollars, it is essential to defend taxpayer money if federal oversight is no longer warranted,” Thomas Galvin, the Republican chair of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors at the time, said in a video statement released after the motion was filed.

Attorneys representing Latino residents in the Melendres case opposed the bid to end court oversight. Snow has yet to rule on the motion.

Raul Piña, a member of a court-mandated Community Advisory Board tasked with helping the Sheriff’s Office rebuild trust with Latinos, said the push to end oversight ignored a plain fact: The most comprehensive data still showed the department hadn’t eliminated bias from its policing.

“If Melendres goes away, that takes away significant protections for brown and Black people or the immigrant community in Maricopa County,” he said.

Since it joined the Melendres case and settlement in 2015, the U.S. Department of Justice had supported the reforms. But with Trump back in the White House, Suraj Kumar, an attorney in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, informed Snow in January that the DOJ backed efforts to end oversight of the Sheriff’s Office.

This added to Latino community leaders’ worries that the Sheriff’s Office could once again, as it had under Arpaio, partner with ICE and allow deputies to enforce immigration laws.

Sheridan tried to put those concerns to rest, saying that if court oversight ended, he would not enter such an agreement.

But the questions grew louder as ICE surged into Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis to carry out mass deportations. Phoenix was reportedly next. 

After a U.S. citizen was killed during ICE operations in Minnesota, Sheridan was asked on a conservative radio talk show what he would do if something similar happened in Arizona.

His deputies would step in if ICE agents did anything “illegal,” Sheridan said in the mid-January interview.

Four days later, Sheridan backtracked, saying he would instead side with immigration officers: “I will be here to protect them to do that and keep people from interfering with them.”

Cornejo, the community activist who attended the meeting in Guadalupe, read the reversal as a sign that Sheridan was too easily swayed and could not be trusted without court oversight. “Facing a crowd that tends to lean to the left, he’s going to give rhetoric that kind of says that he’s working on those things that he’s supposed to be,” Cornejo said. “If he’s with more conservatives, his language and rhetoric is completely different.”

Sheridan said that his position has not changed and that he “firmly believes that the Sheriff’s Office is in full compliance and that the current oversight should be concluded.”

Later that month, ICE raided 15 metro Phoenix restaurants that federal prosecutors alleged had knowingly hired undocumented laborers. Protests erupted outside some of the raided restaurants.

Sheridan sent deputies to help with crowd control, saying ICE had first asked Tempe police for assistance but the request was declined.

“We went out there, not to facilitate what ICE was doing or get involved in their business, because we don’t do that,” Sheridan told Latino faith leaders and residents at a February town hall in the suburb of Gilbert. “We were there to keep the peace.”

The Tempe Police Department told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica that it did not receive a request for help from ICE, nor was it notified in advance of the immigration operation. ICE did not respond to a question about local law enforcement participation in the raids. 

Latino activists said the episode raised more questions about Sheridan’s willingness to collaborate with ICE and whether he would be transparent about his intentions. It would be harder for him to earn back their trust, they said.

The post This Sheriff Says His Department Eliminated Racial Bias. Data Shows Otherwise. appeared first on ProPublica.