After years of community opposition, Detroit city officials have taken steps to stop a concrete mixing facility from further expanding into a residential neighborhood.

City Council members, acting on a recommendation last week from planning officials, will soon consider a rezoning measure that would restrict industrial activity at the site of the Kronos concrete plant and surrounding area. The concrete facility at its current size could stay and continue to operate as normal.

The planning recommendation comes after a BridgeDetroit and ProPublica investigation this year revealed how city officials helped Crown Enterprises, a real estate company owned by Detroit’s wealthy Moroun family, obtain property in Cadillac Heights and then provided latitude when its Kronos facility violated environmental laws. Residents have been filing complaints and protesting Kronos for years, frustrated by the dust, noise and other issues created by the concrete operation.

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Left in the Dust: How a Billionaire-Owned Concrete Plant Took Over a Detroit Community

The City Planning Commission voted Oct. 22 to recommend a change to some of the zoning in the neighborhood from heavy to light industrial, which allows buildings such as warehouses but excludes facilities like concrete plants. The commission also recommended that other lots be zoned for residential and commercial purposes. Earlier this month, the commissioners unanimously voted to exclude industrial zoning in the area adjacent to Kronos, but they stepped back from that last week.

Crown has objected to any zoning change.

Sharon Buttry, who helped organize residents to protest against the Kronos plant, said she is  glad the lots would be rezoned but was disappointed that the earlier recommendation, which was more pedestrian- and transit-friendly, didn’t stand.

Buttry said she fears that the latest zoning recommendation would make it easier for Crown to expand eventually. “We still want them to shut down or move,” she said.

The zoning plan was revisited at the request of City Planning Commissioner Fred Russell Jr., who said the adjustment would create a buffer between residents and the existing concrete plant.

The City Council, which will ultimately decide on the rezoning, has scheduled a public hearing for Nov. 19.

Over the last seven years, Crown has obtained dozens of parcels in Cadillac Heights — some through a land deal with the city in 2019 and others after residents sold their parcels and left. In all, the company now owns more than 160 lots in the neighborhood, most of which are barren.

In a letter to Detroit officials in mid-September and Oct. 22, a law firm representing Crown threatened legal action if city officials change the zoning, arguing that doing so would devalue the property and create uncertainty about future development.

Attorney Melvin Butch Hollowell also said if the rezoning goes through, the city would be backtracking on its commitment to support Crown’s development in Cadillac Heights. Crown obtained the land there in exchange for the company swapping property in another part of the city, which allowed automaker Stellantis to open the first new car plant in Detroit in three decades.

City officials have said they didn’t know Crown’s plans included a concrete facility. Crown did not present a specific plan at the time of the land transfer. But after the concrete plant opened, the city in 2022 signed a first-of-its-kind agreement with Crown that gave the company time to fix issues before being penalized. The agreement has allowed the company to avoid fines on several occasions, the news organizations have documented.

In response to questions from BridgeDetroit and ProPublica, a Crown spokesperson said the company has invested more than $10 million to develop the concrete operation based “on the City’s promises and actions of approving our plans for this facility.”

“The property was traded to us for the express purpose of redevelopment,” the spokesperson, Kenneth Dobson, wrote.

Dobson said that if the zoning changes, the company will not make the improvements it has promised, including new landscaping and sidewalks. He claimed the improvements would not be allowed under the new zoning and that they also wouldn’t be a sound business decision. City planning staff, however, said the company can still make the improvements.

The neighborhood surrounding Kronos has been zoned to allow heavy industry since the 1940s, when a rail line operated there. Before the concrete operation, the land was occupied by a trucking depot for decades.

Despite the zoning designation, the neighborhood attracted working-class families who lived in modest single-family houses. Buddy’s Pizza, famous as the birthplace of Detroit-style pizza, was founded there and drew crowds from across the city.

The City Planning Commission’s votes this month were four years in the making and part of a broader evaluation of land near the proposed Joe Louis Greenway, a walking and biking trail that will traverse the city and is already under construction.

Scott Benson, the council member who represents Cadillac Heights, asked the planning commission in 2023 to consider whether the industrial zoned areas along the greenway should be rezoned to a use that better supports safety and public health. He said the request at first was unrelated to Kronos, but then community input further influenced the desire for change.

“That did play a role here,” he said in an interview. “The community came out and said, ‘Yes, we especially want this part done and it abuts the Joe Louis Greenway.’”

More than 30 people — some in favor of a zoning change and some against — spoke out at recent commission meetings. Kronos employees and others told the commission that the company has created jobs for Detroit residents and said Crown has invested in the neighborhood with new paving.

Terrell Daniel, whom the city identified in meeting minutes as a Kronos employee, urged the commission at its Oct. 1 meeting to continue to allow industry in the neighborhood.

“It’s bringing back the backbone of Detroit,” he said. He said the concrete plant has provided an opportunity “for guys who never had a chance to work in the city.”

Those in support of rezoning expressed concerns about the dust, air quality and Crown’s track record of not taking care of the neighborhood, which has included leaving vacant homes unsecured and messy.

Residents have filed about 80 complaints to both city and state environmental offices, according to records obtained by BridgeDetroit and ProPublica. They have described “literal whiteout conditions” and “dust clouds” that blanket their neighborhood and irritate their eyes.

The city has issued several tickets to Kronos for violating Detroit’s fugitive dust ordinance, passed in 2024 to limit pollution. The law requires businesses such as concrete plants and scrapyards to submit plans to limit dust and prevent it from spreading into neighborhoods.

On Oct. 7, the city received a complaint about Kronos and an inspector found the company had spread dust in the neighborhood and had piles of materials that should have been blocked from view, according to city spokesperson Georgette Johnson.

Kronos wrote in a letter to the city that it swept and watered the streets and reduced the height of the piles. Johnson said Crown corrected the problems.

Dobson said readings from its air monitors have never exceeded the city’s pollution limits and that a small number of people regularly complain. He previously said that the company planned to demolish a vacant home littered with trash but was waiting on utilities to be disconnected.

The post Detroit Could Block Billionaire-Owned Concrete Plant From Further Neighborhood Expansion appeared first on ProPublica.

Last November, the Department of Health and Human Services announced the elimination of “black box” warnings on hormone replacement therapies, aiming to reverse nearly two decades of stigma surrounding a key treatment for menopause symptoms.  

Among the officials at a press conference about the decision was Alicia Jackson, director of a federal health agency that invests taxpayer money in medical technology and research. As Jackson stood behind a lectern adorned with the HHS logo, she praised the new policy, calling it a victory for women and science.

“Today we have the opportunity to add up to a decade of healthy years to the life of every woman that you love,” Jackson said. “The science is clear: Hormone therapy is safe and effective. And it is hugely beneficial to the vast majority of women.”

Less clear that day were the financial benefits the new policy could bring Jackson, according to disclosure records obtained by ProPublica.  

Jackson is the founder and former chief executive of Evernow, an online platform that connects women with medical experts who treat the symptoms of menopause. Although she left for federal service last year, she kept at least $115,000 in Evernow stock and an unknown amount of stock options, records show. 

Those are just part of a multimillion-dollar portfolio Jackson holds with her husband, a venture capitalist, that poses potential conflicts of interest with her work overseeing the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, known as ARPA-H.

It’s unclear what role, if any, Jackson played in dropping the black box warning, the most serious type of federal safety warning that is reserved for drugs with severe side effects or life-threatening risks. A different agency, the Food and Drug Administration, regulates drugs, and its panel of experts had recommended an end to the warning requirement months before Jackson arrived in government.

But ethics experts called Jackson’s official endorsement of the warning removal “alarming” and an “obvious conflict of interest,” noting federal law prohibits government employees from participating “personally and substantially” in matters that could influence their personal finances — even making statements at a press conference or in a news release, as she also did.

“We should care because her company is apparently intending to profit off this change in policy that she endorsed as a government official while still retaining a financial interest in the company,” said Virginia Canter, who served as an ethics lawyer at the White House, Treasury Department and Securities and Exchange Commission during the presidencies of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

“I say it puts her within the zone of a potential violation,” she said.   

Months after the announced end to the warning notices, Evernow launched a nationwide expansion. 

Under federal law, agency officials like Jackson are required to submit financial disclosure forms, which must then be certified as complying with ethics laws. But Jackson’s two financial disclosures — filed last October and two months ago — remain uncertified. Canter said it is not unusual for an agency’s ethics office to ask the inspector general to investigate if staff cannot certify that an individual’s disclosure forms meet ethics standards.     

Over two months, ProPublica sought comment from Jackson and submitted questions about her work, investments and ethics records. Jackson did not respond, and HHS never addressed our detailed questions. 

But in a statement to ProPublica last week, an agency spokesperson said Jackson has been placed on administrative leave and HHS would “assess the facts before determining any change in her status. HHS requires all officials to comply with federal ethics laws, regulations, and policies.” 

HHS declined to answer additional questions about the reasons for Jackson’s leave, the decision’s timing or whether the inspector general was investigating. 

Earlier this week, Bloomberg Law reported on the HHS statement that Jackson was on leave and made public a draft memo by one of the agency’s senior officials that would have granted Jackson a conflict waiver involving many of her and her husband’s extensive investments. Since she joined ARPA-H, the memo said, Jackson and her husband’s financial ties required her to recuse herself from “a significant portion” of her duties, including discussions about funding awarded by her agency. The waiver named 30 investments and would have allowed Jackson to take part in decisions that could affect those interests. Evernow is not listed. 

Bloomberg reported that two firms with ties to Jackson sought ARPA-H funding, but it was unclear if either received any. HHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions asking whether the waiver was ever granted or if the firms had received money from ARPA-H. The Office of Government Ethics does not list Jackson among federal officials who have received waivers.

Jackson’s disclosures are among 2,400 added Thursday to ProPublica’s Trump Team Financials database, a searchable tool launched in March. The records detail the finances of more than 2,300 officials appointed by President Donald Trump. Since last year, we’ve requested disclosure records from 127 federal agencies and the White House. Disclosures from roughly 1,500 appointees remain unreleased. 

The Trump administration’s massive cuts to the federal bureaucracy have taken a toll on the ranks of ethics staff. By the end of 2025, there were 274 fewer full-time ethics officials, according to a recent analysis of federal survey records by the government watchdog group Campaign Legal Center. Some agencies said the losses hampered ethics officers’ ability to conduct training and monitor employee compliance. 

Trump appointees failed to file nearly 420 legally mandated public financial disclosure reports last year, almost a fourfold spike compared with the Biden administration’s last full year, the center found. Nevertheless, our database provides the most complete source yet for this administration’s ethics documents. 

Potential Serious Conflicts

Jackson spent years navigating the worlds of technological research, government and entrepreneurship, according to her government bio and LinkedIn profile. 

After earning a doctorate in materials science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2007, she worked briefly as a U.S. Senate policy staffer. She subsequently joined the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as a program manager, later becoming deputy director of its first biotechnology office.

Jackson left the Defense Department in mid-2015, going on to lead several biotech businesses before starting Evernow in 2019. The San Francisco-based company connects women experiencing sometimes debilitating menopause symptoms with medical providers who prescribe treatments. 

Evernow offers patients one-time treatments or memberships for frequent care. Its website lists celebrity angel investors, including Gwyneth Paltrow, Cameron Diaz, Demi Moore and Drew Barrymore.

Jackson was appointed by Trump as ARPA-H’s second director and was sworn in on Oct. 20, 2025. The agency, created three years earlier to spur revolutionary biomedical research and technologies, has a $1.5 billion budget. It has issued numerous contracts and grants, including $160 million for genetic medicines combating rare diseases and $144 million to study existing treatments for age-related illnesses.

In both of her financial statements, Jackson said she owned Evernow stock worth between $115,002 and $300,000. (Federal disclosures include value ranges, not specific figures.) She also listed company stock options whose value, she said in her most recent financial report, were “not readily ascertainable.” (In a statement late Wednesday, Evernow said Jackson does not currently hold a financial interest in the company. The firm did not immediately respond to follow-up questions.)

Jackson’s disclosures also show investments in Gameto Inc., a Texas-based biotechnology company working through a two-year, $10 million award from ARPA-H to create ovarian treatments preventing menopause-related diseases. The award predated Jackson joining ARPA-H. But as her office oversaw Gameto’s project, her stock’s value increased, documents show. 

Jackson’s Gameto investment was worth between $15,001 and $50,000 in her October 2025 disclosure. Her Aug. 13 filing shows it grew to between $50,001 and $100,000. It’s unclear what drove the increase in value.

In addition, Jackson owns more than 60 venture capital and private equity funds that she says do not disclose their holdings to investors. 

These include at least 13 funds managed by 137 Ventures, a venture capital firm co-founded by Jackson’s husband, Alex Jacobson. The company invests in a wide range of industries, including healthcare, digital health and medical device companies, according to its website. 

Federal appointees must list their spouses’ employment, but Jackson never included her husband’s role at 137 Ventures on her public disclosures. Jacobson did not respond to requests for comment.

Ethics experts said Jackson’s funds could pose a serious conflict of interest if the underlying businesses they invested in received grants or contracts from her agency. To resolve such risks, federal agencies typically require employees to work with the investment vehicles to identify the contents of such funds. If the investment firms insisted on anonymity, employees could be required to sell the funds or recuse themselves from actions potentially affecting the assets, the experts said. 

However, 10 months after starting work at HHS, Jackson retained the funds and their underlying investments remained undisclosed, according to her August financial statement. 

Kedric Payne, Campaign Legal Center’s vice president, general counsel and senior director for ethics, said Jackson’s lack of disclosure about her husband and the funds she owns “suggests that agency leaders may be hiding their conflicts of interest from the public, and there is no ethics enforcement to stop it.”

The disclosures also show her husband owns between $5 million and $25 million worth of stock in Palantir Technologies, which had a $19 million contract from Jackson’s agency when she became ARPA-H director. Palantir, which has similar contracts with other federal agencies, is using its software and AI technology to build and improve ARPA-H’s data infrastructure and operational systems. In June, ARPA-H extended the company’s contract by a year, records show. The renewal is worth up to $13.7 million for Palantir.

The draft waiver obtained by Bloomberg would have allowed Jackson to take part in decisions that could affect Palantir, Gameto and more than two dozen other investments but says she must still comply with the terms of an ethics agreement. The draft waiver includes a note dated April 30 — six months after Jackson started the job — that says discussions about the ethics agreement were ongoing. In addition to Evernow, the waiver does not specifically mention the funds managed by 137 Ventures. 

HHS officials would not answer repeated questions about whether Jackson recused herself from Palantir’s contract, has an ethics agreement or has divested any assets. The agency has not produced an ethics agreement in response to a July Freedom of Information Act request. 

Public Good or Personal Gain?

Since January 2025, ProPublica has continually obtained disclosure records to investigate how personal financial interests have intersected with government decision-making inside the Trump administration. The new disclosures added to our searchable tool Thursday include many that have raised concerns about additional conflicts of interest, including at HHS. 

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Jackson’s ultimate boss, has drawn questions about whether he used his office to help his wife, actress Cheryl Hines.

According to his latest financial disclosure, Hines’ media company, Youngster Productions Inc., received $210,000 in consulting fees from MAHA Action, a nonprofit promoting Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again agenda. Under the contract, Hines has vigorously advocated for MAHA Action, appearing in several videos and press releases. The group has also claimed credit for policy actions launched by Kennedy’s HHS.

News of the contract, first reported by The New York Times, prompted the Campaign Legal Center to ask the HHS inspector general to examine whether Kennedy made or influenced policies that benefited his wife. Kennedy also received more than $270,000 in gifts from allies working to bolster MAHA, his disclosure showed.

“Americans deserve to know whether their leaders are prioritizing the public good or focusing more on their personal financial gain,” said Payne of Campaign Legal Center. 

HHS denied any wrongdoing by Kennedy, telling the Times the secretary “complies with all applicable federal ethics laws, regulations and financial disclosure requirements.”

Campaign Legal Center’s analysis of federal ethics staff this year found Kennedy’s cuts to the agency eliminated nearly 30% of HHS’ full-time ethics workers. 

Another HHS official whose disclosures raised ethical alarms was the agency’s top attorney, Mike Stuart. Stuart was reassigned after a Washington Sun investigation found he invested in a company doing business with the department and repurchased stock in other businesses that ethics officials had required him to sell. 

The Office of Government Ethics refused to certify Stuart’s annual disclosure report “due to continued non-compliance” with his ethics agreement, the Sun revealed.

Stuart said he didn’t know of the company’s involvement with the department and immediately sold his stock when ethics officials raised questions. “My whole career, I’ve never had even a whiff of an ethical issue. I’m extra careful that I am completely in compliance,” Stuart told the Sun. 

The disclosures obtained by ProPublica since early last year have revealed potential conflicts across the federal government, including at the highest levels.

In December, ProPublica reported that Trump had appointed more than 200 people who collectively owned — personally or with their spouses — between $175 million and $340 million in cryptocurrency investments at the time they filed their disclosures. Some hold positions overseeing or influencing crypto industry regulation. 

Among them is Todd Blanche, Trump’s former criminal defense attorney and now the nation’s attorney general. Blanche’s disclosures show that he owned at least $159,000 in crypto-related assets last year when, as the Justice Department’s second-highest official, he shut down investigations into crypto companies, dealers and exchanges. 

Democrats in Congress accused Blanche of a “glaring conflict of interest”; a Justice Department spokesperson said Blanche’s action was “appropriately flagged, addressed and cleared in advance.” An Office of Government Ethics official noted on Blanche’s latest disclosure that the inspector general “declined further action” related to the crypto holdings.

Other disclosures helped show that senior executive branch officials, including Pam Bondi when she was attorney general, made well-timed securities trades, selling stocks just before markets plunged because Trump announced new tariffs. (The officials either did not respond to requests for comment or denied having insider information before trading.)

Disclosure forms also revealed in July that Federal Communications Commission officials took pricey gifts from Paramount, including tickets worth $12,000 and skybox seats worth $125,000 each for the annual honors gala at the Kennedy Center. The media giant provided the perks while seeking FCC approval for its mergers with Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery. (The FCC said agency ethics officers approved the commissioners’ attendance as consistent with ethics law.)

Our database has helped other news organizations uncover potential conflicts of interest. The Lever, for instance, found that the Pentagon’s chief technology officer was “a central figure in the decision to blacklist the AI company Anthropic” while owning a stake in a competitive AI developer. A Defense Department spokesperson said the official, Emil Michael, fully complied with ethics requirements.

The post Top U.S. Health Official Backed a Medication Policy Shift That Benefited a Company She Has Stock In appeared first on ProPublica.

The plastics industry spent decades convincing consumers that throwing used products stamped with the “chasing arrows” symbol into a curbside bin meant they would be recycled.

Now, amid growing awareness that many of those items never get reprocessed, the industry is championing a pair of proposals in Congress that would give misleading recycling claims the support of federal law.

On the surface, the two bipartisan House bills promise transparency for consumers by establishing national standards for recycling and recycled content labels. 

But the legislation — promoted by oil, chemical and packaging companies that spend millions of dollars lobbying Congress each year — would forbid states from setting stricter requirements. That would neutralize efforts like California’s “truth in labeling” law, which bans the chasing arrow symbol on plastic products that contain toxic chemicals or that can’t realistically be recycled.

One of the measures would endorse a controversial form of “mass balance” accounting that allows companies to claim a product contains recycled content when virtually none of it came from reprocessed plastic. Two years ago, a ProPublica investigation exposed the misleading, mathematical sleight of hand used in that type of mass balance, which the Biden administration subsequently prohibited for specific products.

Both bills, which have gained momentum and could face a full House vote after the midterm elections, “are peak greenwashing,” Rachel Fullmer, a staff attorney on toxics and environmental health at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in an email. They “champion deceptive, anti-consumer policies which would result in an increase in plastic production and plastic waste incineration, all while hiding behind the false brand of ‘recycling.’”

Experts say the best solution to the plastics crisis wreaking havoc on human health and the environment is to make and use less of the material; recycling remains a marginal solution at best.

The bills tackle a growing threat to the industry, as several states have proposed or passed laws that require manufacturers to more honestly acknowledge the challenges of recycling plastic. Those measures could force companies to spend money changing their packaging or labels.

The Consumer Brands Association, which represents the packaged goods industry including Amazon, PepsiCo and Land O’Lakes, praised the House bills. 

These proposals “work in tandem to reduce consumer confusion and plastic waste while providing much-needed clarity to support new domestic innovations and investments,” the organization wrote to the leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in July. They “demonstrate that consumer protection and recycling-focused efforts go hand-in-hand with promoting affordability and manufacturing investments, and we strongly encourage your support for both bills.”  

The association spent $2.4 million in the first half of 2026 lobbying on these bills and other issues, according to data from OpenSecrets. In September, the two recycling bills cleared the House committee.

Five Democratic House members, including three from Texas, are among the 13 co-sponsors of the bill that endorses mass balance accounting. The other has 19 co-sponsors, including one Democrat. 

A few weeks ago, Sen. John Curtis, a Utah Republican, introduced the mass balance bill in the Senate; it currently has no other co-sponsors. 

Sheen of Recyclability

Consumers have long been confused by the chasing arrows symbol on many plastic containers. The label was created in 1970 to encourage paper recycling. The plastics industry began placing it on its products in the 1980s to quell public outrage over plastic pollution. 

The symbol gave plastic the sheen of recyclability, even though most items cannot be reprocessed due to economic or technical barriers. The Environmental Protection Agency estimated that 8.7% of U.S. plastic waste was recycled in 2018; the rest ended up in landfills or was incinerated. In 2019, the Department of Energy estimated the national plastic recycling rate at 5%. 

In recent years, the plastics industry has touted the promise of chemical recycling, a set of costly, often polluting technologies that break plastic into its molecular building blocks. Theoretically, these processes could take the most stubborn, unrecyclable plastics, like grocery store bags or string cheese wrappers, and rebuild them into new products.

That rarely happens. 

Take ExxonMobil’s chemical recycling plant in Baytown, Texas. It uses oil refinery equipment to heat up the plastic and transform it into different chemical compounds. 

Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, visited the Baytown plant last year. He later appeared in a promotional video, calling the facility a “proof of concept” for chemical recycling that could inspire “this entire country.”

But only 8% of the plastic waste processed by ExxonMobil gets transformed into new plastic, according to the California attorney general’s office, which sued the company in 2024 over “deceptively” promoting chemical recycling as an environmental solution. The other 92% mostly becomes fuel, which is burned rather than made into plastic products. 

Citing internal company records, the lawsuit states that the recycled plastic is so heavily diluted with new plastic, the resulting products contain less than 0.1% recycled content. 

In response, the company said in a court filing that while the state of California may not believe ExxonMobil’s recycling technologies are sufficient to solve the plastic waste crisis, “ExxonMobil did not assume liability for global pollution by innovating solutions to the problem.”

The company has marketed its chemically recycled products as containing “30% ISCC PLUS certified-circular” content, a technical term that could easily be misinterpreted as meaning 30% recycled material. That label is possible through a specific type of mass balance, which allows companies to claim credit in a new plastic product for the recycled molecules going into other things made in the chemical recycling process. Manufacturers can inflate the reported recycledness, or “circularity,” of the more lucrative products like plastic, while reducing the advertised recycled content of less valuable products. 

The Recycled Materials Attribution Act, introduced by Rep. Nick Langworthy, a New York Republican, would require the Federal Trade Commission to edit the Green Guides — advertising guidelines designed to prevent greenwashing — so mass balance is recognized as “an acceptable method for substantiating recycled content claims.” 

It would bypass the FTC’s own process for revising the Green Guides, which began several years ago. The agency had collected more than 1,000 public comments, including ones on whether limits should be placed on mass balance. 

The bill also prevents states from adopting stricter laws on mass balance. 

The Recycling Leadership Council is an industry consortium supporting Langworthy’s bill. The consortium quoted Langworthy in its February press release, touting the legislation as modernizing recycling guidelines “with a uniform national standard that protects consumers from misleading claims while giving American manufacturers the certainty they need to invest, innovate, and compete.”

In the first half of this year, the council spent $120,000 lobbying for Langworthy’s bill and related issues, including “advanced recycling” — the industry’s preferred term for chemical recycling.

“Advanced recycling technologies offer an important opportunity to keep more plastic waste out of landfills,” John Hewitt, spokesperson for the Recycling Leadership Council, said in an email. 

Hewitt, who also represents the Consumer Brands Association, cited a report from a center-left think tank, which concluded that investing in chemical recycling could more than double the U.S. plastic recycling rate.

Hewitt also defended the bill’s endorsement of mass balance, which “is an established method for tracking recycled materials through complex manufacturing processes, allowing companies to incorporate more recycled content into products.”

Chemical recycling has struggled to operate at scale. If the mass balance bill passes, it could help ExxonMobil and other companies grow their business, as consumers are willing to pay a premium for sustainable products.

ExxonMobil spent more than $5 million in the first half of 2026 lobbying on the mass balance bill and many other energy or environmental issues. The company didn’t return requests for comment.

Langworthy’s campaign committee received $157,000 from the energy sector in the 2026 election cycle, including oil and gas producers and chemical companies. He did not respond to requests for comment.

Bound for a Landfill

The other bill, the Packaging and Claims Knowledge (PACK) Act, would regulate which items can be marketed as recyclable, compostable or reusable. Consumer product packaging could only be stamped with the chasing arrows recycling symbol if at least 60% of consumers have access to recycling programs that accept the product. The item must also be technically recyclable, meaning it “can be” reprocessed into a new product — but there’s no requirement to show it’s economically feasible to do so. 

Recycling programs sometimes accept plastic products even when there’s no affordable way to ship them to a factory that will make them into something new; as a result, plastic that’s been collected for recycling ends up in a landfill or incinerator.

Products not meeting the 60% criteria must include qualifying language, such as “check locally” to see if it’s accepted for recycling.

The bill, introduced by Rep. Randy Weber, a Texas Republican, targets states like California that have stronger requirements for the chasing arrows symbol. A recent California law requires 60% of Californians to have access to facilities that routinely collect, sort and sell the products for reprocessing. In addition, products will be disqualified if they have inks or labels that prevent recycling, or if they contain certain levels of heavy metals and the “forever chemicals” known as PFAS, some of which are carcinogenic. 

When Weber introduced the bill last December, his press release called out California’s law: “Packaging and labeling standards in the United States are increasingly influenced by state-level regulations, particularly those adopted in California.” 

“The PACK Act cuts through that confusion,” he said in the press release. “It’s pro-environment, pro-business, and rooted in common sense.”

Weber did not return calls for comment. His campaign committee has received $206,000 from the energy sector and chemical companies during the 2026 election cycle. 

The bill provides little detail about who will make the crucial decisions on which products qualify or what data will be used. 

But at least some power will be given to unspecified “accredited third-party certification” groups, which will certify every product’s recyclability claim. These nominally independent organizations provide sustainability labels for various companies. 

One example of such a group is How2Recycle, which provides recycling labels — for a fee — to companies. The labels are meant to erase consumer confusion, by instructing them to “empty and replace cap” before recycling a particular kind of bottle, for instance. 

These third-party groups are supposed to be independent, but they’re easily captured by industry interests, said Kate O’Neill, an environmental science professor at the University of California-Berkeley who specializes in the politics of recycling.

How2Recycle’s parent organization, the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, has a membership dominated by retailers, brands and packaging companies. Members include Google, Chobani, 3M, Clorox and Lego. (The EPA and United States Postal Service are also members.) Several years ago, How2Recycle made the questionable claim that No. 5 plastics, used in yogurt tubs, were widely accepted for recycling. 

How2Recycle and the Sustainable Packaging Coalition didn’t return requests for comment before publication.

California’s law is under a preliminary injunction due to a lawsuit from food producers and packaging companies. However, consumers can still bring private lawsuits if they suspect companies of falsely using the recycling symbol on their products, Lynn Dyer, president of the packaging trade group Ameripen, said in an email.

“AMERIPEN recognized early that differing state rules could make it harder for businesses to explain how consumers should handle packaging after use,” Dyer said. So Ameripen brought together a coalition and “helped make the case to Congress,” resulting in Weber’s bill. The group has “been engaged in discussions with congressional staff from the outset, have closely followed the bill’s development, and draw on the experience of organizations across the packaging value chain.”

In July, Ameripen urged manufacturers, retailers and brands to tell their members of Congress to back the bill. Ameripen spent $160,000 lobbying for the legislation and other environmental issues from January to June 2026. 

ProPublica reached out to every co-sponsor of the House bills. Rep. Earl L. “Buddy” Carter, a Republican from Georgia who supports the PACK Act, was the only lawmaker who responded. 

“American consumers deserve clear, consistent, and reliable information about the products they purchase, and our manufacturers deserve a predictable set of rules to follow,” Carter said in a statement. “The PACK Act is about establishing a uniform national standard that eliminates confusion, supports American manufacturing, and provides greater certainty for businesses and consumers alike. We can promote responsible recycling practices without forcing American businesses to navigate a patchwork of conflicting state regulations.”

The co-sponsors of the Packaging and Claims Knowledge (PACK) Act are:

Rep. Troy Balderson, Republican of Ohio
Rep. Earl L. “Buddy” Carter, Republican of Georgia
Rep. Dan Crenshaw, Republican of Texas
Rep. Neal Dunn, Republican of Florida
Rep. Randy Feenstra, Republican of Iowa
Rep. Russ Fulcher, Republican of Idaho
Rep. Adam Gray, Democrat of California
Rep. Glenn Grothman, Republican of Wisconsin
Rep. David Joyce, Republican of Ohio
Rep. John Joyce, Republican of Pennsylvania
Rep. Nick Langworthy, Republican of New York
Rep. Laurel M. Lee, Republican of Florida
Rep. Addison McDowell, Republican of North Carolina
Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, Republican of Iowa
Rep. Barry Moore, Republican of Alabama
Rep. Michael Rulli, Republican of Ohio
Rep. Bryan Steil, Republican of Wisconsin
Rep. Glenn Thompson, Republican of Pennsylvania
Rep. Tony Wied, Republican of Wisconsin

The co-sponsors of the Recycled Materials Attribution Act are:

Rep. Troy Balderson, Republican of Ohio
Rep. Dan Crenshaw, Republican of Texas
Rep. Henry Cuellar, Democrat of Texas
Rep. Donald Davis, Democrat of North Carolina
Rep. Gabe Evans, Republican of Colorado
Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, Democrat of Texas
Rep. Jeff Hurd, Republican of Colorado
Rep. Jonathan Jackson, Democrat of Illinois
Rep. Michael Lawler, Republican of New York
Rep. Addison McDowell, Republican of North Carolina
Rep. August Pfluger, Republican of Texas
Rep. Marc Veasey, Democrat of Texas
Rep. Randy Weber, Republican of Texas

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The Delusion of “Advanced” Plastic Recycling

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ProPublica’s Emerging Reporters Program provides support and mentorships to college students who are pursuing careers in investigative journalism and need additional training and financial support to help advance their goals.

Participants receive a $9,000 stipend, a trip to the annual NICAR investigative journalism conference, occasional training and presentations by speakers. They’ll also be paired one-on-one with ProPublica journalists who can help counsel them on stories, build their connections in the industry and expose them to the varied paths that careers in investigative journalism can take. Past Emerging Reporters have gone on to work at The New York Times, The Associated Press, Fresnoland, Capital B, The Tributary and other outlets.

Our goal is to encourage the next generation of journalists who seek to shine a light on abuses of power and produce stories with moral force that provoke change. In choosing the class, we look for students who demonstrate an early dedication to journalism as a career, through internships, work at local news outlets or work at campus publications. And where those opportunities — which are often unpaid — aren’t accessible, we look for other ways the student has shown an eagerness and a drive to learn the craft.

This year’s class of exceptional student journalists are from schools in Illinois, Texas, Nebraska, Iowa and New York.

Meet our 2026 class:

Annisyn Krebs-Carr (she/her)

Annisyn Krebs-Carr is a senior at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign studying journalism and animal sciences. She is a reporter for Illinois Public Media Student Newsroom, where she reports on the ongoing housing crisis in Champaign-Urbana. Previously, she served as the arts and entertainment editor at The Daily Illini, the independent newspaper at the university. She is now the managing editor and oversees content produced by the entire newsroom. In 2026, she interned for St. Louis Public Radio and formed relationships with the investigative reporters at NPR’s Midwest Newsroom. This is where she developed a deeper appreciation for investigative journalism. As she continues her journalism career, she wants to focus on how the criminal justice system has failed, and continues to fail, Black people. She also wants to explore how environmental racism has impacted lower-income communities. After graduation, she hopes to work in a public media newsroom and report on local stories while honing her investigative journalism skills. Long term, Annisyn hopes to build a dedicated career as an investigative journalist in public media.

Jessica Meza (she/her)

Jessica Meza is a senior at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln studying journalism, advertising and public relations. Jessica works across mediums, including in data visualizations, video, print and social media, with an emphasis on audio reporting. Jessica hopes to begin her career in investigative, in-depth reporting, focusing on marginalized communities. She hopes to use her reporting to amplify the voice of people facing hidden injustices in her community. Other interests include housing, immigration and food reporting. Jessica currently works at Nebraska Public Media as a reporting intern. She previously interned at NPR’s Midwest Newsroom and, as the Hortencia Zavala Foundation intern, wrote for The Fulcrum and the Latino News Network. In 2025, she was part of the team at Nebraska News Service that was awarded a regional Society of Professional Journalists Mark of Excellence Award for its investigative project on missing and murdered marginalized women.

Lajward Zahra (she/her)

Lajward Zahra is a senior English major at Rice University in Houston, originally from El Paso, Texas. Her reporting focuses on politics, immigration and the environment, particularly in Texas. She is a 2025 writing fellow at The Nation and has written for the magazine since 2023. She previously interned with the Houston Chronicle editorial board in summer 2025, reporting and writing on local and state politics, including the Texas Republican Party convention, among other issues. Lajward’s freelance work has also appeared in publications including The American Prospect, Teen Vogue, Business Insider, Rewire News Group and Scalawag. She was a 2024 Asian American Journalists Association Voices fellow.

Thai Theodoro (she/her)

Originally from Brazil, Thai Theodoro studies political science with a concentration in Latin American studies at Grinnell College in Iowa. Now in her senior year, she is the managing editor of The Scarlet & Black, Grinnell’s independent student newspaper. Thai has interned at The Boston Globe, the Des Moines Register and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and her reporting has been published in dozens of newspapers across the country. She is a member of the New York Times Corps and a former participant in the National Association of Hispanic Journalists’ Student Project. Thai is passionate about telling untold stories, pursuing investigative reporting with the power to challenge the status quo, using the three languages she speaks to reach underrepresented communities, and, of course, writing the occasional quirky story.

Tsehai Alfred (she/her)

Tsehai Alfred is a senior at Columbia University studying English. She is the 150th editor-in-chief and president of the Columbia Daily Spectator, the campus newspaper, and is also an intern on CNN’s criminal justice team. Over the summer, she was a Dow Jones News Fund intern at VTDigger, an accountability-focused newsroom in Vermont, investigating the troubled integration of AI into healthcare, a struggling dairy farming industry, and soaring police use-of-force payouts. Previously, she has interned at City & State New York, covering the 2025 mayoral race and city council; at PBS News as a Gwen Ifill Journalism Fellow; and at her local news outlet, the Virgin Islands Consortium. Her reporting interests include local government, economic inequality, and political and corporate accountability.

The post Meet ProPublica’s 2026 Class of Emerging Reporters appeared first on ProPublica.

In July, not long before President Donald Trump delivered a primetime address questioning the legitimacy of American elections, the pioneering conservative election lawyer Cleta Mitchell and about two dozen of her associates logged onto a private video briefing with the White House.

Mitchell, who holds no formal position in the Trump administration, had been pivotal to Trump’s bid to challenge his loss in 2020, spearheading efforts to prove his claims of fraud and reverse his defeat in court.

After Joe Biden took office, when others abandoned the fight or scoffed as Trump clung to conspiracy theories, Mitchell doubled down, founding a grassroots organization devoted to rewriting election laws and rules to be more restrictive. Members of her group, the Election Integrity Network, were named to vital election-related positions in swing states and, later, in the second Trump administration.

The pre-speech briefing was an acknowledgment of just how consequential Mitchell and her organization had become. The White House had held similar sessions for key political players, such as governors, members of Congress and major press outlets.

At the appointed time, the screen filled with the faces of EIN leaders and supporters, some sitting in front of digital backgrounds with the group’s logo on them. Mitchell shushed those who’d forgotten to mute and introduced John Solomon, an ally of hers who was helping prepare the speech.

Mitchell and her network hardly needed the run-through, though: Much of the speech was a compendium of allegations and conspiracy theories they had originated or spread.

Her lieutenants were thrilled to hear that the president would assert there were more than 275,000 noncitizens on state voter rolls — a since-debunked claim based on work led by one of her proteges, who occupied a top post at the Department of Homeland Security.

The speech would end with an exhortation for Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, a bill requiring voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship to register, which Mitchell had helped draft.

To Seth Keshel, an EIN adviser on the call, none of it was surprising — Mitchell was in and out of the White House all the time. He’d joined her for one such meeting.

“She’s got an open door with the president,” he said.

“Opposed to Honest Elections”

No one besides Trump himself has done more than Mitchell, 76, to turn the mundane processes of how ballots are cast and counted in American elections into mortal combat.

Since Trump returned to the White House, Mitchell and her acolytes have been deeply entwined in his unprecedented bid to assert federal control over voting, an effort that has increasingly defined his second term.

Friends and enemies alike credit her with providing much of the administration’s election road map. The White House has turned to those close to her to enact the plan, appointing her associates to help lead the hunt for noncitizens on voter rolls and to reinvestigate 2020 voting irregularities.

“She has the president’s ear,” Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and a close ally of Mitchell’s, said in a July interview. “A lot of the momentum things we’ve seen over the last six months or so come directly from Cleta’s involvement.”

To understand how Mitchell became the hand behind this transformational push, ProPublica traced her obsession with politics and elections back to its roots.

From the start, those who knew her told us, she stood out for her willingness to embrace options others wouldn’t and to do whatever it took to win.

Her relentlessness and long-term strategic vision have enabled her to outflank or outlast not only her liberal opponents, but her conservative rivals.

Much of Mitchell’s influence derives from years of groundwork she’s done to put a foundation under the so-called election-integrity movement, once dismissed as a collection of oddballs and fringe actors.

Beyond building the EIN and raising millions of dollars to fund its activities, she’s helped direct tens of millions more to like-minded policy shops, researchers, law firms and advocacy groups.

The net effect has been to make an agreed-upon set of beliefs about elections — that the 2020 presidential vote was stolen, that U.S. voting systems are rigged, that there’s rampant voting by noncitizens — a core part of conservatism.

Rick Wilson, a former Republican strategist who collaborated with Mitchell before Trump’s election and now heads the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, said she had been crucial in building the institutional infrastructure that has sustained Trump’s “big lie.”

“What she found in Trump was less of a client and more of a movement,” he said.

Mitchell declined multiple requests to speak with ProPublica for this article but occasionally answered emails. “Hahahaha!!!” she wrote in response to one email asking for an interview. To another, she replied: “You’re my opponent. … You’re never going to write in any objective, non-judgmental way about the election integrity movement.”

She responded in writing to about a quarter of our detailed questions, disputing that her efforts were designed to undermine elections or upend their results.

“Nothing that we do is designed or intended to ‘sway’ any election outcomes,” she wrote. “What we focus on is making sure the election process is accurate, transparent, and honest. The ONLY steps I’ve urged the Administration to take are those that will give the voters — ALL voters — confidence that the outcomes are correct.”

A White House spokesperson didn’t answer specific questions about Mitchell, saying she has no official role in election policy but is an effective private advocate.

To tell Mitchell’s story, ProPublica interviewed more than 35 people who have worked with her or know her personally, including participants in her network, Republican election lawyers, current and former Trump administration officials, family members and friends. Many, especially conservatives who’ve fallen out with her, spoke on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution.

We examined thousands of emails related to her work obtained from public records requests and sources, as well as court filings and an oral history she gave in 2007.

We also reviewed hundreds of hours of recordings of her network’s organizing calls spanning a four-year period, many of which were shared exclusively with ProPublica, as well as numerous speeches she’s given at private events for conservatives.

On a call earlier this year, she emphasized that Democrats “only win when they cheat” and that people who resist EIN’s agenda are “opposed to honest elections” and “depraved.”

As much as Mitchell has been able to achieve with Trump in the White House, several people we spoke with noted she hasn’t been able to push important parts of her agenda over the finish line.

Her signature legislation — the SAVE Act and its successor, the SAVE America Act — have been blocked by moderate Republicans in the Senate. Election changes she’d hoped the president could push through before the midterms, such as compelling states to turn over confidential voter information to the Justice Department, have been blocked by the courts. And Trump’s mid-July address on elections drew shrugs even from some conservative media.

Critics, including some inside the election-integrity movement, told ProPublica they are worried that Mitchell’s growing frustration is prompting her to press Trump and his allies toward ever more extreme actions. Her lifelong pattern, ProPublica’s reporting shows, has been to escalate conflicts into winner-take-all battles — a pattern playing out now as she tries to shape the midterms.

Hours after Trump’s speech, Mitchell appeared on Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, sounding openly exasperated at the dismissive coverage, her lips pressed into a thin line.

Bannon suggested the evidence of election fraud cited by the president justified declaring a national emergency, which he argued would enable Trump to immediately force states to implement parts of the SAVE America Act.

Mitchell went even further, one-upping the right-wing provocateur. Trump needn’t bother with this step, she said, which would inevitably be met with court challenges. He already had authority under a law empowering the government to protect critical infrastructure to unilaterally enforce the bill’s requirements, she insisted.

“We’ve got the blueprint. We’ll help,” she said. “We just need someone in authority to say, ‘Let’s do it.’”

“I Was Always Interested in Politics”

Mitchell’s fascination with politics and voting began at an early age.

One of her first memories, she would recount in the 2007 oral history, was begging her mother “please not to go vote” until she got home from school and could accompany her. Later, she recalled, “I would study all the voter guides and tell my mother who I thought she ought to vote for.”

Mitchell grew up poor in Oklahoma City, the third of six children born to Jack Deatherage and Modean Lane. She’s often credited her mother, a secretary, for pushing her relentlessly to excel. About her father, she’s said much less, telling The Wall Street Journal only that he was “kind of a no-account.”

According to court records, their home life was highly volatile. Her mother initiated divorce proceedings at least five times, citing her father’s chronic unemployment, drinking, cruelty and violence. The couple split up for good in 1962, when Cleta was 11.

She hid the family’s struggles behind a peppy disposition, piling up accolades at school. At 15, she was runner-up in the Oklahoma City Junior Miss pageant. (Asked about these events, Mitchell replied: “I am peppy. I was also named Miss Congeniality in that pageant.”)

At the University of Oklahoma, which she attended on a journalism scholarship, Cleta was known as a “good girl, sorority girl, untouched by the sexual revolution,” one contemporary said.

Before long, she found a seemingly perfect consort: Duane Draper, who’d been the university’s student body president. While friends believed their shared interest in politics brought them together, they had another bond: He, too, had grown up with an abusive father.

“They were mirror images,” said Conrad Draper, Duane’s brother. “They both felt powerless in their childhood, so in their adulthood they constantly pursued power.”

They married in 1971, when Cleta was a junior. When she ran to be student body president, he served as her unofficial campaign manager.

She lost, a setback she blamed mostly on misogyny. Still, she emerged as ambitious as ever. She spearheaded voter drives to defeat Republicans, worked to expand students’ access to voting and helped launch the Oklahoma chapter of the National Women’s Political Caucus. She served as a delegate at the 1972 Democratic National Convention.

As soon as she graduated from law school, Cleta ran for a seat in the Oklahoma House of Representatives, taking on an incumbent Republican. She knocked on every door in her district, prospecting for votes at bowling alleys, beauty shops and high school football games. When she won, Duane had the campaigning shoes she’d worn to near-shreds bronzed.

At 26, she joined a Legislature that was literally smoke-filled (it hadn’t banned cigars) and full of men uneasy at the arrival of “this young, pretty, opinionated blond,” she said in the oral history. She was undaunted, swiftly moving up the ranks by cultivating wealthy donors and building a fundraising machine.

Less than two years later, when Cal Hobson, a small-town mayor contemplating a House run, asked whose backing he should seek, he was sent to Cleta. She had only one question when he sought her endorsement, he recalled: Did he back the Equal Rights Amendment, the proposed constitutional change to guarantee women the same legal rights as men? Hobson said yes and became her ally in the Legislature, watching as she made “some friends and a lot of enemies.”

With Democrats in control of the Oklahoma House, she exploited a battle between candidates for speaker to win a top post on the powerful Appropriations and Budget Committee, then became its chair.

Once in leadership, she backed a slate of liberal initiatives, from expanding open records laws to creating training centers to help divorced women improve their career prospects.

But her idealism coexisted with a ruthless pragmatism, said David Walters, who came up in Democratic politics in the same era and would eventually become the state’s governor. He remembered his shock when she promised him she’d oppose a powerful state development official in a battle over a new building on the University of Oklahoma campus, then switched sides behind the scenes.

“It was quite remarkable,” Walters said. “This was an example of Cleta saying one thing publicly and doing in private something entirely different.”

In 1982, with her political fortunes on the rise, Cleta’s marriage to Duane ended. The filings offered little explanation, citing only “incompatibility,” but those close to her knew Duane had come out as gay. The heartbreak was “devastating,” Hobson said.

Duane left Oklahoma for Boston, where he became a gay-rights activist. He died of AIDS in 1991.

After the divorce, Cleta did what she’d always done: She “put her nose to the grindstone,” Hobson said, “writing the budget and getting her way at the Capitol.”

She found a new partner in Dale Mitchell, a former college baseball player, registered Republican and bank executive. In 1984, when they married, they agreed that Dale would change his party affiliation if Cleta would take his last name.

Later that year, Time magazine named the newly minted Cleta Mitchell as one of a group of star Democratic state legislators, all female, who might one day “set their sights on a higher prize: the presidency itself.” About a year after they got married, they welcomed a baby girl.

Then, over two years, their life collapsed.

Her political fortunes waned after the ERA, her signature issue, failed to pass in Oklahoma and nationally. Her main political patron, the speaker of the House, had become entangled in a voting-fraud scandal, costing her her position in leadership. She chose not to defend her House seat, then two years later ran for lieutenant governor. When she lost, she found herself out of office completely.

Dale’s troubles dwarfed hers. When oil prices sank, his overleveraged bank collapsed and federal regulators shut it down. He was banned from the banking industry and later convicted on multiple counts of bank fraud, for which he was put on five years’ probation and ordered to pay $3 million in restitution. The crisis ruined them financially.

Cleta emerged from the ordeal infuriated by what she viewed as federal government’s overreach in prosecuting her husband, whom she has defended as “the most honest person I’ve ever known.”

Once out of Democratic politics, Mitchell gravitated toward conservatives, who were gaining ground in much of the country. She explained the shift as a way to realign her politics to match her personal philosophy of self-sufficiency (and no government handouts). Others say she saw a route back to power and took it.

Hobson, who rose to lead Oklahoma’s senate, was gobsmacked by her transformation.

“No one,” he said, “has changed more politically in my lifetime than Cleta Deatherage Mitchell.”

“Consigliere to the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy”

Starting in the early 1990s, Mitchell embarked upon a three-and-a-half decade climb up the conservative power ladder.

She and Dale moved to Washington, D.C., so she could help lead a mostly Republican campaign for congressional term limits. Though ultimately unsuccessful, the fight endeared Mitchell, brought in as the token Democrat, to the conservative elite. She switched her party affiliation in 1996 and, within the next few years, had recovered enough financially to buy a home in an upscale gated community and a luxury vacation getaway in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

After the 2000 election, as George W. Bush fought to hold onto a narrow lead over Al Gore in Florida, Mitchell became one of the Bush campaign’s high-profile media surrogates and defenders. In TV appearances, she argued that Democrats’ demands for recounts were an attempt to manipulate the election system.

She emerged determined to focus more of her legal practice on countering what she saw as an assault by progressive groups on election integrity. If “Republicans don’t commit themselves to learning and practicing the art of political war,” she wrote in a Wall Street Journal column, “there may not be much of a GOP to kick around anymore in the future.”

Over the next eight years, she became a go-to election lawyer for Republican politicians and a partner at a powerful D.C. law firm. Later, when the Tea Party emerged, Mitchell embraced hard-right candidates and causes that some other GOP attorneys would not.

She jokingly described herself as the “consigliere to the vast right-wing conspiracy” — a title others found increasingly on the mark.

As an attorney, Mitchell didn’t particularly shine in the courtroom, those who worked with her said, but she was a masterful and aggressive backroom negotiator and strategist.

No longer a candidate herself, she was free not to be “Miss Congeniality,” she acknowledged in a mentorship speech to conservative women titled “It’s Better to Be Respected Than Liked.” She won over allies with Southern warmth but could be a dangerous enemy if crossed. She’d do anything — within the law — to win, a dynamic one fellow election lawyer called “part of her brand.” (Mitchell didn’t respond to the questions about these assessments.)

Mitchell was one of the first Republican lawyers to support Trump’s presidential ambitions.

Starting in 2011, she defended him against a Federal Election Commission complaint that a website floating a possible Trump run constituted an undeclared candidacy.

Michael Cohen, Trump’s fixer, who helped launch the exploratory bid, said Mitchell had come recommended as the most aggressive lawyer in the field and first met the future president when she came to Trump Tower to discuss the case. Cohen said Trump subsequently retained Mitchell several more times.

“Each matter was resolved to our benefit, something both Trump and I appreciated,” Cohen said in a brief phone interview. When ProPublica asked what the other matters were, Cohen responded, “I can’t disclose those,” then hung up.

When Trump ran for real in 2016, Mitchell transferred her support to him once he’d knocked out her longtime client Marco Rubio. Some of her allies were shocked she’d back an insurgent candidate who often chafed at constitutional limits on executive power and violated conservative principles she’d long espoused.

During Trump’s first term, Reuters reported, Mitchell teamed with other prominent GOP lawyers on efforts to tighten election laws and rules, focusing on those related to mail-in voting and voter ID. Mitchell helped steer millions of dollars into these initiatives, as well as backing lawsuits against Democratic-leaning cities and counties aimed at compelling them to purge voters from their rolls.

In the run-up to the 2020 election, Mitchell was among the first GOP lawyers to urge the Trump campaign to develop plans to dispute the contest’s results, focusing on six to eight battleground states.

Mitchell’s subsequent role in helping Trump try to challenge his loss has been much chronicled in news articles and examined in multiple investigations. Over time, experts said, it’s become clear she helped originate several of the most aggressive actions taken by the president and his allies.

“She had her finger in just about every pie the select committee looked at,” said Marc Harris, senior investigative counsel to the House congressional committee that investigated the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the capitol.

Mitchell led litigation on the president’s behalf in Georgia, accumulating 1,800 pages of election fraud allegations. She maintains events moved too fast for this material to be properly evaluated by a judge. “President Trump NEVER got his day in court in GA,” she wrote in response to ProPublica’s questions.

These claims figured prominently in the infamous phone call on which she joined Trump as he pressed Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him enough votes to overcome Biden’s slim margin in the state.

As Trump poured on the pressure, Mitchell fed him details of election irregularities from her case and demanded that Raffensperger share his findings from investigations into them.

Mitchell insisted to ProPublica they merely wanted to provide Raffensperger with evidence, not to push him “to take any official action to ‘overturn the election.’”

In the call, Trump made clear what he wanted.

“All we have to do, Cleta, is find 11,000-plus votes,” he said.

Mitchell also played a largely overlooked role in launching Trump’s final and most extreme gambit, the so-called fake electors strategy.

She recruited her longtime friend, law professor John Eastman, to prepare a memo outlining a constitutional framework under which Republican legislators in swing states where Trump had lost could appoint alternate electors who’d support him.

In her emailed responses to ProPublica, Mitchell called the idea an outgrowth of work she’d done early that year advising the American Legislative Exchange Council about steps state lawmakers could take to help Trump in a contested election.

“A movement is stirring,” Mitchell wrote to Eastman in an email two days after the election released by the House Jan. 6 Committee. “But needs constitutional support.”

Ultimately, what congressional investigators came to call the “Trump-Eastman scheme” culminated with a plan for Vice President Mike Pence to certify the fake electors’ votes, flipping the Electoral College in Trump’s favor. But Pence rejected the idea, becoming the target of enraged Trump supporters when they stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Experts said Mitchell helped set the day’s events in motion though she was not at the riot.

“She worked closely with John Eastman in developing and seeking to implement dubious legal strategies to overturn the election result,” Harris said. “She encouraged the selection of fake electors.”

Mitchell denied any responsibility for Eastman’s work or what ensued.

“I was completely uninvolved in the Jan 6 rally at the Capitol,” she wrote in response to ProPublica’s questions. “I had nothing to do with the issues and advice from Dr. Eastman to the President, the Vice-President, or anyone else involved in that. None whatsoever.”

In an email responding to ProPublica’s questions, Eastman acknowledged Mitchell had solicited the memo but disputed his strategy was aimed at upending the election.

The California Supreme Court disbarred Eastman for his actions.

Mitchell resigned from her law firm after the Raffensperger call sparked backlash, blaming her exit on pressure from anti-Trump groups.

But unlike many who’d fought alongside her, Mitchell wasn’t dispirited once Biden entered the White House. She was just getting started.

“Hand-to-Hand Combat With the Left, Starting at the Local Level”

In 2022, behind the closed doors of hotel ballrooms and conference suites, Mitchell appealed to crowds of conservatives in seven swing states, asking them to help her overhaul U.S. elections.

“Welcome, fellow deplorables!” she said to open the proceedings in Michigan, after a welcome video from Trump urging the crowd to get behind her. “As an old Southern Baptist, I like evangelizing. So, this is your Bible!”

Brandishing the 20-page manual provided to each participant, Mitchell implored attendees to master the arcane rules of American elections, work the polls and cozy up to — or, better yet, serve on — local election boards.

The tour was part of the nationwide launch of the Election Integrity Network. In the aftermath of losing the fight over 2020, Mitchell decided she needed an army — a popular movement large and loud enough to tear down what she saw as an election system dominated by Democrats. 

“My sole focus has been for the last year and a half, how we as conservatives could build an infrastructure to do hand-to-hand combat with the Left, starting at the local level,” she said on a September 2022 EIN organizing call.

The network served as the centerpiece, providing the boots on the ground, but Mitchell also created an ecosystem to support it, spreading money to allied researchers, law firms and policy shops.

A ProPublica analysis of data from the Campaign Legal Center, a government watchdog nonprofit, shows that between 2021 and 2025, Mitchell helped put more than $70 million into this work. According to tax filings, at least $11 million of that total came from nonprofits she oversaw. Tens of millions more came from the Bradley Foundation, where she served on the board, and the Conservative Partnership Institute, a Trump-aligned think tank where she was a senior legal fellow.

Roughly 30 conservative election-integrity nonprofits were started after 2020. Well over half have received money from Mitchell or have close ties with her, the data shows.

“She occupies a unique position,” connecting donors, activists and political leaders, said Brendan Fischer, the Campaign Legal Center’s director of strategic investigations. She’s leveraged this spot, he said, “to turn election denial from a fringe position into an organized national movement.”

In assembling the EIN, Mitchell built chapters from scratch in some states; in others, she absorbed long-standing groups that did similar work.

Much of the network’s organizing takes place on the regular video calls held by each state chapter and about half a dozen national working groups, which focus on subjects such as reshaping voter rolls and scrutinizing voting machines.

In reviewing hundreds of hours of these meetings, ProPublica found a mixture of mind-numbing technical discussions, wild speculation and hyperpartisan vitriol.

On a July 2025 call to honor Eastman, he urged network leaders to assault the Left as the Romans attacked the ancient city of Carthage. “They will never stop until not only are they defeated, but the land from which they came is salted over so they can’t grow up again,” he said.

Mitchell disputed that EIN was partisan. “I defy you to show me hyperpartisan vitriol on any EIN related call,” she wrote to ProPublica. “That is not what we do. Mind-numbing technical discussions, yes.”

Local calls often fixate on micro-efforts aimed at a single county or election office. Members — who sometimes call themselves “election believers,” a counter to the “election denier” label used by critics — discuss lobbying particular politicians or combing voting records for evidence of fraud. If, as often happens, they find no widespread problems, the meetings serve as echo chambers in which supporters are urged to keep the faith and see conspiracies behind small bureaucratic mistakes.

Current and former members said being in the network made them feel like part of a special strike force saving America. Mitchell’s charm could be irresistible.

“It’s like she’s the sun and you’re the sunflower,” a former EIN leader said, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. But Mitchell’s wrath could be volcanic if members disagreed with her or explored working with other election-integrity groups.

“Vindictive is not a strong enough word,” the former EIN leader said. “She treats you like a heretic.”

(Mitchell didn’t respond to these observations.)

Mitchell joins rank-and-file calls every month or so, on which she’s praised effusively and given titles like “the world’s leading expert on election integrity” and “our patron saint.” She also chairs a Friday morning leadership meeting that draws high-profile guests like Lisa Nelson, the head of the American Legislative Exchange Council, state election officials and luminaries from conservative think tanks. “It’s a who’s-who of who matters in the movement,” the former member said.

Since Trump retook the White House, officials from his administration have occasionally attended, discussing how they can coordinate with the network’s activists.

In summer 2025, a DHS official joined a network call to discuss an effort to persuade states to use an agency tool to search their voter rolls for noncitizens. Many states had resisted, uneasy about sharing confidential data with the federal government. The official wanted network members to encourage state and local officials to cooperate.

“This is your team,” an EIN leader said. “These are the people that are going to do the work in the states that you need to make this magic happen.”

Early on, many EIN branches weren’t particularly effective and several had notable stumbles. A then-participant in North Carolina’s chapter accompanied a group that unsuccessfully tried to force its way into a voting office. The chapter’s leader was accused of following election workers in his car and other disruptive behavior. (He denied his actions were problematic.)

But by 2023, the network started getting significant wins.

Mitchell and EIN were instrumental in spurring Republican states to pull out of a program to cross-check voter rolls for duplicate registrations. Mitchell claimed the program aided Democrats by requiring states to encourage unregistered residents to sign up to vote.

EIN members also helped persuade numerous states to pass laws banning “Zuckerbucks” — private donations from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and others aimed at bolstering underfunded local election offices. Mitchell had claimed the donations helped Democratic turnout, paying for things like Spanish translators in election offices.

EIN continued to grow, expanding from seven chapters in 2022 to at least 26 today.

In Georgia, the network came close to realizing the goals Mitchell sketched out when she first pitched the group.

EIN members secretly pushed a rule through the State Election Board allowing local officials to delay certifying the state’s vote count — a step experts warned could enable them to dispute a Trump loss in the upcoming 2024 election. (Mitchell disputed that the rule change was aimed at this.)

A court struck down the rule, but that didn’t stop a group aligned with Mitchell from mounting an ad campaign urging election officials nationwide not to certify results they didn’t like.

As her state-level plans advanced, Mitchell readied an even bigger swing, one aimed at changing elections across the country and setting the agenda for a second Trump administration.

“God Made Me Do This”

In January 2024, Mitchell met with a small group of Republican lawyers and election-integrity leaders to discuss how best to prevent fraud in the November presidential election.

Those gathered in the Arizona hotel room were especially worried about noncitizen voting, though numerous audits, studies and analyses — even those by Republican groups and states — show it is vanishingly rare.

Arizona had passed a law compelling residents to provide proof of citizenship when they registered, rather than just swearing they were citizens under penalty of perjury, as is typical in most states.

Mitchell suddenly had an inspiration, she later recounted in a private speech to Virginia’s EIN chapter: She’d lead a push for a similar federal law. “I didn’t think of this,” she told those at the event. “God made me do this.”

When Mitchell returned from Arizona, she was, indeed, a woman on a mission. She convened her closest congressional allies, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and Rep. Chip Roy of Texas. Their staffers met with her to help draft the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act.

The bill set a high bar for proving citizenship, demanding that would-be voters produce documents like certified birth certificates and passports that many Americans don’t have. It also required states to use the DHS’ databases to purge noncitizens from their voter rolls.

The ideas in the measure would presage some of the second Trump administration’s most norm-breaking actions. “When we look back to the original SAVE Act in 2024 to the administration’s actions today, the through line is clear,” said Michael McNulty, a director for the watchdog nonprofit Issue One.

Mitchell knew the initial version of the act wouldn’t pass. When it was introduced in May 2024, Democrats controlled the Senate and the White House.

Rather, people in the election-integrity world said, she saw the measure as a strategic opportunity — both to cement her position atop the movement and to reignite the fervor for voting restrictions among the Trump faithful. For years, she’d fought behind the scenes for Trump’s ear on election issues, vying with more moderate Republican election experts as well as fringe activists.

To make sure her rivals had no choice but to support the SAVE Act, she brought on a backer too powerful to ignore: Stephen Miller, senior adviser to Trump in his first term and architect of his immigration policy. (Miller didn’t respond to questions about his relationship to Mitchell or the SAVE Act.)

Mitchell denied Miller had a hand in the measure. “Stephen is someone I greatly admire but we never worked together on the SAVE Act,” she wrote to ProPublica.

But Roy, the bill’s House sponsor, said in a podcast interview that Miller helped draft it. Mitchell sought to dovetail her election agenda with Miller’s immigration agenda, those who’ve worked with them said. They stood side by side at an event at the Capitol to launch the bill, warning that Democrats were letting people into the country illegally in part to swing elections.

In a coup for Mitchell — anointed the Mother of the SAVE Act — pretty much every significant player in the election-integrity space joined the Only Citizens Vote Coalition, a group she launched to back the bill.

Mitchell directed more than $6 million to groups that bought ads, put out research and took other actions supporting SAVE, tax filings show. Some $800,000 went to the nonprofit arm of the conservative media organization The Federalist, which provided glowing coverage of the legislation.

Sean Davis, The Federalist’s CEO, didn’t answer questions about whether the donation affected coverage. “Cleta Mitchell is a saint,” he said in an email.

The measure sailed through the House in July 2024, then predictably died in the Senate. The bill had drawn fire from voting advocacy groups, which said the measure could disenfranchise millions of eligible voters, particularly women, the poor and minorities, all critical Democratic voting blocs.

Mitchell hardly missed a beat. That same month, she led a panel at an American Legislative Exchange Council conference that approved model legislation similar to the SAVE Act for conservative lawmakers to introduce in states across the country. Twelve states have since passed laws that strongly resembled SAVE and 23 have changed their voting procedures to reflect aspects of it.

That November, Trump won back the presidency and Republicans secured majorities in both chambers of Congress.

Mitchell saw the chance not only to pass an even tougher federal version of SAVE — a “SAVE Act on steroids” as she called it in a November organizing call — but to make even more far-reaching changes to American elections.

“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity,” she told attendees on the call. “I don’t want us to miss this.”

“If Plan A Doesn’t Work, I Have a Plan B”

Two months after Trump took the oath of office, America got its first glimpse of how he planned to overhaul the nation’s election system.

His March 25, 2025, executive order — titled Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections — looked a lot like the SAVE Act. It required voters to prove their citizenship when they registered, mirroring the types of identification listed in the bill.

It also expanded on the notion of using DHS data to verify voters’ eligibility, saying that all of the federal government’s relevant troves of sensitive information should be made available for this use. Further, it directed the Justice Department to prioritize the prosecution of election crimes and noncitizen voting.

Mitchell was close to a pair of White House lawyers involved in drafting the order and was among a small group of outside attorneys who provided suggestions for it, according to several people who helped write it.

The order was the first in a string of behind-the-scenes victories that have not only allowed Mitchell to shape the Trump administration’s election blueprint, but have given her substantial influence over who’s been chosen to carry it out.

At least 25 administration appointees have close ties to Mitchell, ProPublica’s reporting shows, with several holding key posts directly related to elections.

“She’s had a lot to do with even White House hires in this regard,” Bannon said. (The White House denied Mitchell had swayed its hiring decisions.)

Heather Honey, a senior counselor to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, has a portfolio that touches on almost everything the administration does on elections. She’s figured centrally in the government’s efforts to find and prosecute noncitizen voters.

Before joining DHS, Honey was a Mitchell protege and led EIN’s Pennsylvania chapter. A high-ranking federal official knowledgeable about the hiring process told ProPublica that the agency hired Honey over more experienced candidates. Her “sole qualification was who she worked with,” the former official said. “She worked with Cleta.”

A DHS spokesperson called this “false,” saying Honey had been recommended by senior government leaders for her election expertise.

Mitchell also has had a hand in shaping the administration’s reinvestigation of fraud allegations involving the 2020 election, beginning with the FBI’s seizure of election records from Fulton County, Georgia.

As ProPublica has reported, the affidavit justifying the raid included material compiled by an EIN-affiliated researcher and cited network participants as witnesses.

When the case bogged down as the prosecutor overseeing it began to doubt its strength, Mitchell was among those who recommended a replacement: Dan Bishop, a former North Carolina congressman whom she’s praised on social media and supported with campaign donations.

At a May meeting, a Georgia EIN leader said Bishop was tapped “thanks in large part to Cleta Mitchell,” an account echoed by an administration official familiar with the matter.

A Justice Department spokesperson said the agency “has no knowledge of any role Cleta Mitchell played” in Bishop’s appointment.

Mitchell told ProPublica she didn’t believe she’d affected this decision. “I was very worried about the direction of the case earlier this year and made known my displeasure quite strongly,” she said. “The decision to appoint Dan was made by the President and I applaud it, but I cannot claim credit for that brilliant idea.”

Soon after stepping in, Bishop tried to subpoena personal information for thousands of Fulton County poll workers, a move the county and election experts denounced as politically motivated intimidation. A court quashed the subpoena. Bishop has appealed.

As she’d envisioned in her call with EIN members just after the 2024 election, Mitchell has gotten the president to sink enormous political capital into passing even tougher versions of the bill, now known as the SAVE America Act.

The 2026 measure would require voters nationwide to present photo ID to vote and compel states to turn over their voter rolls to DHS, which would scour them for noncitizens. Trump has repeatedly called the measure his top legislative priority, threatening not to sign other bills until it passes.

Lee, the Utah senator who sponsored the bill, said Mitchell was central to the updated version, especially the strict voter ID provisions. Trump, he added, gave it the new name.

Former officials and people in the election-integrity movement told ProPublica that Mitchell has had to overcome naysayers within the administration, including White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.

On an EIN call in early 2025, Mitchell complained that Wiles had responded frostily to plans she offered for the incoming administration, “saying, ‘Thank you, I’ll take a look as soon as I come up for air.’”

At the time, Mitchell said she’d wanted to reply that wouldn’t happen for four years. When ProPublica followed up about the incident, she wrote: “Susie is remarkable and a great chief of staff. She doesn’t have time to read all the things that people like me send her.”

Mitchell has surmounted these obstacles, in part, by continuing to build out her array of alliances.

By the middle of this year, when the White House brought on Solomon — a longtime Mitchell supporter who vetted material for Trump’s prime-time elections address — it was clear she had found another way in. (A White House spokesperson said that Solomon, who also runs a conservative news site, interacted with Mitchell as a journalist would speak to a subject-matter expert.)

A former administration official who said he’d tried to stymie Mitchell acknowledged she’d won out. “The White House listens to her,” he said.

Mitchell had told her EIN disciples not to worry after Wiles’ brush off. She had more cards to play, she assured them.

“I always know if plan A doesn’t work, I have a plan B,” she said. “If plan B doesn’t work, I have a plan C. And so forth.”

“Today”

By the time the first mail-in ballots of the midterms were cast in September, Mitchell had shaped and staffed the Trump administration’s election efforts to an astonishing extent. And yet, the knockout blow had eluded her.

Courts had blocked large parts of Trump’s executive orders. The hunt for noncitizen voters and the reinvestigation of 2020 voting irregularities had produced little of consequence, despite the considerable resources poured into them.

Mitchell’s critics and even her allies, including some in the election-integrity movement, say frustration has prompted her to push for more drastic steps.

During the summer, she mounted an escalating pressure campaign to save the SAVE America Act, mobilizing EIN members to badger recalcitrant senators, according to recordings of EIN meetings. She also worked with the bill’s Senate sponsor and Trump to kill the filibuster, a pathway known as the nuclear option, to get the bill over the line, but was blocked by a handful of moderate Republicans.

Mitchell has taken a similarly all-or-nothing approach in pressing states to pass laws modeled on the SAVE America Act, sometimes with similarly self-defeating results.

Earlier this year, she waded into a battle over an Ohio bill despite being warned that the governor would veto the tougher version she preferred. The final bill contained the provision Mitchell sought. The governor promptly vetoed it.

Former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, an election-integrity movement leader who’s worked with Mitchell for decades, said Mitchell sometimes runs the risk of making elections less secure by torpedoing practical solutions.

“It was her way or the highway,” he said. “We need to focus on getting concrete wins.”

(Mitchell didn’t respond to Blackwell’s broader criticism but called the more moderate election measure he’s backed in Ohio “not nearly as good as it should be.”)

As the midterms near, she has become increasingly vocal — in media appearances, online and with her network members — in calling for the president to exert unprecedented powers to sway the vote.

“Even if she fails, she always finds another point of attack,” said Max Flugrath, a director at the voting advocacy group Fair Fight. “She’s relentless.”

On the Oct. 6 episode of “War Room,” Mitchell angrily pounded home that several agencies, particularly the Commerce Department, could intervene “today” to shore up purported vulnerabilities in voting machines. She repeated the word “today” seven times during the appearance, like a drumbeat.

Some of those who’ve known Mitchell the longest say her urgency has crescendoed as, at 76, she’s confronted the possibility that this administration is her last chance to realize her goals.

“In her mind, in her timeline, it’s existential,” the former network leader said. “She’s got to do it all, and she’s got to do it now. … The election integrity movement, c’est moi.”

The post How Cleta Mitchell Turned Trump’s “Big Lie” Into a Movement appeared first on ProPublica.

In June 2023, staff at an Oklahoma regulatory agency were fed up. The state isn’t known for cracking down on oil and gas companies for polluting the environment, but for over a year, the staff had been building a case to punish Citation Oil & Gas, one of the nation’s largest privately owned oil companies. 

About 30 miles north of the Texas border, toxic wastewater was gushing from the ground outside the small city of Ardmore. In the mile-wide oil field known as the Bayou, an oily sheen glistened on creeks and long streaks of salt scarred the land. The so-called purges, bubbling up among stands of oak and walnut trees, also threatened drinking water sources, drawing attention from the Environmental Protection Agency, according to a federal report.

State investigators pinned the blame on Citation’s injection wells, which pump wastewater from oil production back underground at high pressures and volumes in order to produce more oil. But this injection came with risks. 

Days earlier, the agency had asked Citation to cut injection pressures in half. The company refused, prompting staff at the oil division of the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, the state’s oil and gas regulator, to recommend an official punishment through the agency’s court system.

“This will be an important case to get some of these purges stopped and particularly concerning Citation’s operations,” Danny Ray, an agency manager at the time, emailed his colleagues.

He restated the urgency three days later in an email to oil division leaders and Citation officials: “We consider this an emergency situation that needs to be addressed promptly.”

To stop the flow of wastewater, the agency temporarily shut down the Bayou’s 22 injection wells — all but three of which were owned by Citation — kicking off a yearlong fight over the terms under which injection could restart. 

Under state rules, companies must not pollute, and oil and gas regulators at the Corporation Commission can revoke injection permits and issue fines to those that violate regulations. 

But agency leadership ultimately did not follow staff guidance to punish Citation through the commission’s administrative law court. Instead, in April 2024, state officials, including the oil division’s then-Director Robyn Strickland, would allow Citation to restart injection at higher-than-recommended pressures. 

Agency leaders’ reluctance to punish Citation reflects a longstanding pattern of Oklahoma regulators letting oil companies contaminate drinking water, farmland and people’s homes with scant consequences, The Frontier and ProPublica have found in a yearlong investigation. 

In fact the commission has no record of ever fining or completing an enforcement case against Citation, the company named more than any other in the agency’s database of pollution reports and other rule violations, listed more than 1,000 times over the past decade. That’s hundreds more incidents than any other operator, including comparably sized companies. In recent years, purges linked to Citation include some of Oklahoma’s longest, most damaging oil field pollution events.

Current and former employees at the Oklahoma Corporation Commission describe top agency officials as wary of going after habitual violators like Citation. Citation has become Oklahoma’s second-largest well owner after taking over collections of aging, low-producing wells from oil giants that have largely left the state for more lucrative oil fields in Texas and elsewhere; the company acquired its Bayou wells in 2010. Regulators treat Citation gently, current and former agency employees say, because the company holds onto aging wells that are worth little — wells that could easily become a financial liability for the state if Citation were to sell or walk away from them. 

A spokesperson for the Oklahoma Corporation Commission declined to answer questions about the regulatory agency’s handling of Citation’s record, noting the possibility of future enforcement actions or litigation involving the company. 

“The OCC Oil and Gas Conservation Division must remain mindful of its regulatory and adjudicatory responsibilities and avoid making public statements that could potentially affect future proceedings or legal considerations,” spokesperson Jack Damrill said in an email. 

Strickland has since left the agency for a job as chief projects officer for the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, a quasi-governmental organization that often advocates for industry interests. She did not respond to requests for comment.

A Citation executive declined to comment in response to written questions. 

Regulators in other jurisdictions have at times come down hard on Citation, which owns wells in 11 other states. In 2017, the company settled with the U.S. Department of Justice for $2.25 million over allegations of underpaid royalties from drilling on federal land in Wyoming, though the settlement did not rule that the company was liable in the case. And in 2025, Utah reached a $700,000 settlement with the company after a crude oil and wastewater spill. Texas and Colorado have also fined Citation in recent years for violations. 

“Citation has been the thorn in my side for a long time,” said a current manager at the Oklahoma agency who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their job. “They just operate however they want. They’ve had major pollution issues, and you can’t really touch them.”

Preparing a Case for Punishment

In November 2023, five months into the wells’ shutdown, Citation was getting antsy. Its officials had repeatedly demanded permission to restart their wells and had even challenged the state through the commission’s court to prove the connection between the Bayou purges and its operations. Regulators and company officials packed into a small conference room in the Oklahoma Corporation Commission’s Oklahoma City headquarters to discuss how that might happen. More than a dozen others joined via video. 

On the state’s side, a team of consultants took the lead, displaying a report with evidence that tied Citation’s injection to the wastewater that gushed to the surface in the Bayou. The state had hired the environmental engineering firm Halff earlier that year on a $550,000 contract to investigate the fast-growing number of oil field wastewater eruptions around Oklahoma. The consultants and agency staff presented a unified front in identifying the problem: Citation’s nearly two dozen Bayou injection wells were operating at unsafely high pressures, according to a video recording of the meeting obtained by The Frontier and ProPublica. Over the years, the injected wastewater had shattered underground rock layers, allowing the toxic fluid to spread uncontrollably. 

“You definitely have overpressurization,” Carolyn May, Halff’s director of environmental remediation, told Citation officials as she presented her team’s calculations, which were based on well records, field data collected by agency staff and a standard set by the federal government. “It’s allowing that rock to fracture.”

The consultants were meant to serve as independent experts to mediate any disagreements within the agency over what to do about the wastewater eruptions, according to current and former commission officials.

In the meeting, May and agency staffers ticked off a number of problems with Citation’s wells that regulators had overlooked for years. Not only had they allowed the company to inject wastewater at excessive pressures, regulators had also given out more than a dozen exemptions to testing and well-construction standards that endangered groundwater. Several wells had checkered compliance records; agency documents noted that one had been in “perpetual violation” of its permit for “nine years running,” injecting tens of millions of gallons of wastewater beyond the legal limit. 

Citation’s active wells weren’t the only issue, they said. Nearby were dozens of abandoned, unplugged wells that offered the pressurized wastewater open pathways to reach shallow freshwater sources and the surface. May singled out a handful of those wells that especially troubled her team, and oil division deputy director Mike McGinnis suggested that Citation permanently plug them.

May noted that imaging below the surface by agency staff showed a distinct plume of highly polluted wastewater rising from deep underground, where injection took place. This posed a threat to the freshwater sources beneath the Bayou, she said — water that some residents rely on for drinking and cooking. “That’s our primary concern here.” 

The consultants were not alone in this fear. Earlier in 2023, the Environmental Protection Agency had warned of “potential endangerment to underground sources of drinking water” in the Bayou from oil field injection. Groundwater tests taken near the purge sites showed evidence of oil field wastewater pollution, including high levels of salt, bromide and the carcinogen benzene, which exceeded the EPA drinking water standard by five times.

For its part, Citation came to the meeting armed with a very different argument: the pollution was caused by a combination of historic oil drilling and recent rainfall — not by the company. 

It was a claim the company had repeatedly made, especially in the months since the agency had shut down its wells. To bolster its case, the company’s consultants had produced a series of detailed reports citing the area’s history of oil production, along with Citation’s own water testing data. Oil drilling began in the Bayou in the 1920s, a time of lawless extraction, and for decades, companies would simply dump their wastewater into large, unlined pits, allowing the fluid to seep into the ground. Old pollution that saturated the land was being flushed to the surface by rainfall, the reports argued. Each one concluded that there was no link between Citation’s injection and the Bayou pollution. 

At the meeting with regulators, company representatives reiterated these arguments. Jeff Lewis, a Citation engineering manager, assured the agency that the company’s data indicated that its wells were not behind the Bayou purges and that it could safely inject at pressures higher than Halff had recommended. He proposed that the company restart injection on its deeper wells because they were separated by layers of rock from the abandoned wells that Halff identified as likely pathways for the wastewater to surface. 

Agency staff did not buy this. In prior internal meetings and emails, staff and consultants had criticized Citation’s water sampling practices as biased in favor of the company’s conclusion that rainfall was causing old pollution to resurface. There was no question that old pollution covered the Bayou, but in recent purges, wastewater had pushed to the surface in significant volumes, covering creek beds in layers of snow-white salt. Old pollution would not be this forceful, according to internal documents written by agency staff.

“A purge is created by pressure and is not due to old pits,” Ray, the agency manager, wrote in a memo distributed months earlier within the oil division that urged agency leaders not to allow Citation to restart injection.

May, the agency’s consultant, echoed these rebuttals during the meeting and said the state’s evidence pointed to an injection problem. She concluded her presentation with a warning: Citation must change its injection practices in the Bayou. 

“If y’all want to start injecting again,” she told company representatives, “I think we’re going to have to look at those pressures and the volumes very carefully.”

The meeting ended without a resolution.

“They Wore Us Out”

Over the next four months, Citation and state regulators would continue to debate the terms of restarting the Bayou. Neither side budged. By the time they gathered for another face-off in March 2024, oil division leaders appeared weary of fighting.

May and the Halff geologists from the consulting firm began by again insisting that Citation substantially reduce pressures in order to be allowed to restart a handful of wells. But even as they presented their case, Citation representatives including Lewis, the engineer, and Bob Redweik, a company vice president, repeatedly spoke over them. After more than two hours of disagreement, Redweik and Citation’s attorney ended the meeting abruptly. “We’re not going anywhere,” Redweik said.  

Several top oil division officials attended, including Strickland, McGinnis and commission attorney Tyler Trout. They remained largely silent throughout. 

The next week, Trout tried to end the impasse by passing along a memo from Citation. 

“In an effort to reach an agreement and move this situation forward,” Trout wrote to top oil division officials and May, “would we consider meeting Citation in the middle as far as recommended injection pressures are concerned?” 

May stood firm. “From Halff’s standpoint, our recommendations aren’t going to change,” she responded, adding that it would ultimately be up to agency leaders. 

In early April, the agency went with a compromise, approving a plan to bring seven of Citation’s 19 Bayou injection wells back online. The company would be able to inject at pressures higher than Halff had recommended, though less than Citation had requested.

Current and former employees say that the decision to restart injection came from the top of the oil division, including Strickland and McGinnis, among others — bypassing staff who objected to the plan. Like Strickland, McGinnis did not respond to requests for comment.

“They wore us out,” said an agency manager who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their job. 

Before injection restarted, three oil division officials chosen by Strickland conducted a walkthrough of the Bayou with Halff and Citation, according to an email from Strickland. The rest of the division was left in the dark. That same day, a pollution abatement manager noted in an email to the commission’s general counsel that agency critics of the plan had not been invited.

Around the time agency leaders allowed Citation to restart injection in the Bayou, staff were drafting an extensive contempt case against the company for rule violations in other parts of the state, according to public records obtained by The Frontier and ProPublica. Field staff and consultants were still turning up considerable problems related to Citation’s injection, including excessive pressures at the sites of destructive eruptions of wastewater. The staff complaint called for the agency to issue fines and to terminate well permits. But oil division leaders never signed the paperwork for the case. 

There was ongoing trouble in the Bayou as well. Weeks after Citation restarted injection, field staff discovered a “severely contaminated” private water well nearby that had been polluted by oil field waste. Testing showed high levels of salt as well as the “highest levels of bromide that we have ever sampled,” according to internal emails, referring to another chemical constituent of oil and gas waste that poses a public health risk. (The landowners declined to comment because of an ongoing lawsuit against Citation, but according to court records, they do not drink from the well. The company, which has fought the family’s claims, says in a court filing that it has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars addressing the pollution on their land as part of a plan approved by the commission.) 

By the end of 2024, oil division leaders had allowed six more Citation wells back online, bringing the total to 13. And the next spring, the agency closed the Bayou investigation, along with several others related to Citation, without taking further action.

Collection of New Complaints

In the year and a half since the Bayou case closed, several of the oil division staff who had pushed agency leaders to punish Citation have left the agency, as have a handful of senior leaders. Staffers told The Frontier and ProPublica they grew frustrated with the agency’s unwillingness to crack down on repeat corporate offenders that agency staff had spent months — at times, years — investigating.

Tracy Case, an attorney for the oil and gas division, admitted as much at a national conference for oil regulators in Oklahoma City in May. “I’ve been there 11 years doing this and we’ve never pursued what we call our ‘bad actors,’” she said, according to a recording of a meeting obtained by the news outlets. She explained that the oil division is extremely short-staffed while dealing with hundreds of potential enforcement cases at any one time. An agency spokesperson declined to comment on behalf of Case. 

Less than a third of the roughly 750 enforcement cases filed by the oil division in the agency’s administrative law courts since 2023 have resulted in punishment so far, according to a review by The Frontier and ProPublica. The average fine given out by the agency was about $1,700. The most common punishment was a $500 fine, combined with using company insurance money to plug unused wells.  

Neither the Oklahoma Corporation Commission nor Halff responded to questions about whether the consulting firm still has a role at the state agency.

At the Bayou, nearly all of Citation’s wastewater injection wells are back on, many operating at pressures beyond Halff’s recommendations. And industry data indicates that Citation has ramped up oil production to pre-shutdown levels even as evidence of new purges continues to emerge. In September, fresh layers of salt — residue of the wastewater — covered the dirt near yellowish puddles of standing water. Nearby, streaks of oil shone on the ground. The preceding weeks had been hot and dry, with hardly any rain. 

In early October, an agency field staffer requested that Citation install a specialized well in the Bayou to pump out polluted groundwater, according to a report in the agency’s incident database. 

A slew of new pollution complaints against Citation have continued to appear in that state database, including more than 60 spills and leaks at well sites over the past year. Among the complaints were three purges that blew out in southern Oklahoma over the last three months. All those investigations remain active, according to state records.  

Another ongoing complaint against Citation originated about 10 miles east of the Bayou, where a rancher named Mike Faulkner noticed an unusual amount of salt water gurgling to the surface and flowing down a creek on his land in April. Nearby, dozens of Citation wells pump wastewater underground.

In response, Citation once again blamed the pollution on old drilling practices, according to an email from one of the company’s engineers to the Oklahoma Corporation Commission.

Nevertheless, the agency told the company to temporarily shut down some of its nearby injection wells, and, according to Faulkner, the purge on his land dried up for the first time in years. 

“That tells me that they know the why and the how of that saltwater purging,” he said in July. 

The agency also instructed Citation to install monitoring wells to test for pollution and to build a pit with a rock dam on Faulkner’s land to catch the polluted water, along with a fence to keep the cattle out.

But in the months since, the agency has given Citation multiple extensions on the deadline to build the dam and the fencing. In September, Faulkner learned that the agency granted Citation yet another extension — until December, seven months after his initial pollution report. 

As of October, he said, the wells where the state had asked Citation to pause operations are injecting — at reduced pressure. 

Faulkner said he is fed up with Citation’s yearslong pattern of degrading his pastures. But he blames state officials for their unwillingness to rein in the company. 

“They’re like a spoiled kid,” he said. “They’ve just gotten away with it for a long time.”

The post This Oil Company Is Linked to 1,000 Pollution Incidents and Other Violations. Oklahoma Never Punished It. appeared first on ProPublica.

Not two weeks after the Tennessee legislature carved Memphis into three congressional districts this spring, in a move designed to eliminate Democratic representation, Republican state Sen. Brent Taylor made his electoral expectations clear in a photo posted on social media. 

Taylor and U.S. Rep. Tim Burchett, a fellow Republican, sat side by side on the U.S. Capitol steps. “My friend Tim Burchett showing me the dadgum ropes,” Taylor wrote in a Facebook post.

On May 7, the same day that the new districts were approved, Taylor had announced his bid to represent the redrawn Congressional District 9, which for more than four decades had stood as the state’s sole majority Black district. During that time, it covered mostly the Memphis area; it now stretches across half the state and is majority white.

Taylor, 58, already has a track record with many of the voters he is now seeking to represent in Washington, D. C.: In his nearly four years as a state senator, he has taken steps to strip authority from local officials elected by many of those same voters. With the backing of a Republican supermajority, Taylor, who is white, pushed through half a dozen laws that superseded the power and priorities of local politicians.

Around the country, state legislatures from both parties have used preemption laws to control local governments. That tactic has been embraced by Republican-dominated statehouses in recent years as a way to restrict the ability of Democratic-led cities to enact policies state leaders disagree with, including protections for civil rights, public health and workers. 

Memphis has long struggled with high rates of violent crime that have begun to fall only in the last couple of years. This is where Taylor focused his legislative efforts. He led the charge to prohibit judges from considering a defendant’s ability to pay when making bail decisions. He has tried to oust Steve Mulroy, the first Democrat elected as Shelby County district attorney in 25 years, and pushed through legislation authorizing the state to review every decision made by his office. And he co-sponsored a law that voided the Memphis City Council’s ban on police stops for minor traffic infractions, which had been passed after the 2023 beating death of Black motorist Tyré Nichols.

The question of how to keep communities safe has drawn divergent political approaches in Memphis — from Mulroy’s focus on rehabilitation as part of his effort to lower violent crime, to Taylor’s emphasis on aggressive prosecution and incarceration. Those approaches can mean very different experiences for the people of Memphis, which makes up most of Shelby County. Some elected officials and criminal justice experts warn that the laws Taylor has championed will embolden police to detain drivers without justification and the criminal justice system to lock up more people for longer periods in the already overcrowded county jail, where more than 65 people have died since 2018. 

“I think he’s very dangerous for Shelby County, and he’s going to be very dangerous for the Ninth District if he gets elected,” said former Shelby County General Sessions Court Judge Bill Anderson, referring to how Taylor’s policies could especially harm Black men. Anderson retired in May 2025 after clashing publicly with Taylor over bail reform measures. (Anderson supported them; Taylor opposed them.)

Taylor is favored to win because of redistricting by Tennessee Republicans after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in April made it harder to challenge gerrymandering that dilutes the Black vote. The Mississippi native, who lives in an antebellum-style mansion in a tiny and heavily white community east of Memphis, has loaned his congressional campaign $1.5 million. The candidate made millions after selling his funeral home businesses to a private equity firm. 

Taylor’s opponent is state Rep. Justin J. Pearson, a 31-year-old Black Democrat who has taken a very different approach to what the district needs. Pearson has called for addressing the root causes of crime by improving schools and economic opportunities instead of a singular focus on incarceration. He first made national headlines for his role in stopping the construction of an oil pipeline in a Black Memphis neighborhood. He is also one of two Democratic legislators expelled by the Republican supermajority after leading a protest calling for gun control following a 2023 school shooting. With deep family roots in southwest Memphis, Pearson has positioned himself as the better fit for the historically Democratic Ninth Congressional District. He has also received support from national Democrats and has outraised Taylor in campaign donations.

Taylor, who declined to be interviewed for this story, has said that the laws he has championed prioritize public safety. He did not respond to detailed questions.

But John Pfaff, a professor at Fordham School of Law who has studied how state preemption laws impact prosecutors, said tough-on-crime laws like the ones Taylor helped pass have historically been “a form of social control against disliked minority groups” under the guise of public safety.

Non-urban voters, Pfaff said, “do feel, however incorrectly, sort of victimized by expanding civil rights” that urban voters choose. While these voters cannot cast ballots in city elections, he said, they have another path by which to exert power: “If the suburbs and rural areas control the governor’s mansion and the state legislature, they then can use their power there through preemption laws that finally tell Memphis what they want Memphis to do.”

Prohibiting Limits on Police Traffic Stops

In January 2023, the month Taylor took office, the nation was shaken by video of violent policing in Memphis.

A street surveillance camera and police body cameras captured what happened after undercover Memphis police officers pulled over 29-year-old Nichols just a few blocks from his mother’s home. For three minutes, officers repeatedly punched the unarmed man in the face, hit him with a baton and kicked him as he screamed for his mom. Nichols would die from his injuries in the hospital three days later.

After pressure from Nichols’ family and community organizers, the Memphis City Council unanimously passed an ordinance in April of that year barring police from pulling motorists over for minor traffic violations, such as a broken tail light, as a pretext for investigating an unrelated, more serious crime. Research shows that these stops are disproportionately used to detain Black drivers, undermine the public’s trust in police and create unnecessary police encounters that can turn deadly. 

Taylor, who had been in the state Senate for a few months when the city ordinance passed, said it made the public less safe by limiting the potential for police to investigate more serious crimes. The next year, he and state Rep. John Gillespie, a Shelby County Republican, sponsored legislation that prohibited local government from curbing law enforcement’s ability to conduct traffic stops, effectively undoing Memphis’ ordinance.

Nichols’ mother, RowVaughn Wells, pleaded with lawmakers to drop the bill. Speaking on the Senate floor, Taylor responded, saying that as a funeral home director, he empathized with the Nichols’ family, but “we can’t let that empathy, Mr. Speaker, cloud our judgment in protecting 7 million Tennesseans.”

Taylor’s intervention suggests “that Memphis voters don’t know what their best interests are,” said Martavius Jones, who was chair of the Memphis City Council when the city ordinance passed. “What we were trying to do would not jeopardize the safety of anyone — not even in Memphis, but much less the rest of the population of Tennessee.” 

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican, told reporters before signing the law that no one should limit police in their enforcement methods and officers should be held accountable for their actions.

“I think what’s most important for us to remember is that we can give law enforcement tools,” Lee said, “but we’ve got to hold law enforcement to a standard of using those tools appropriately, where there’s an appropriate interaction with the public.” 

Eight months after Tennessee lawmakers passed Taylor’s preemption bill, the U.S. Department of Justice released its investigation of the Memphis Police Department, finding that its aggressive traffic enforcement had harmed Memphians. The Justice Department recommended that the city limit the use of pretextual stops. Such police activity enabled the “regular use of excessive force with impunity” and unlawfully discriminated against Black residents, the Biden administration’s report said. When President Donald Trump took office in 2025, his Justice Department retracted those findings. 

Over the last year, law enforcement has ramped up the use of such stops, especially in immigration enforcement, as Trump’s Memphis Safe Task Force — a collection of more than two dozen state and federal law enforcement agencies, including the National Guard — descended upon the city. Taylor supported the effort, testifying before the U.S. Senate days before it began that the task force would “succeed in doing the hard work to infiltrate gangs and arrest more routine criminals.”

Unprecedented Scrutiny of a District Attorney

Since his first year in the state Senate, Taylor had also been working to displace the decision-making authority of another locally elected office: district attorneys, especially Mulroy, one of Tennessee’s two Democratic county prosecutors. Taylor called him a “far-left zealot” who “has the potential to make the scourge of violent crime even worse.”  

In 2023, Taylor sponsored a law that transferred the power to review certain death penalty cases from county prosecutors, who are elected, to the state attorney general, who is appointed by the state Supreme Court. While the law applied statewide, it disproportionately impacted Shelby County, where half of the state’s 40 death row prisoners were prosecuted. The law, Mulroy said at the time, “effectively disenfranchises the voters” who chose their district attorney. 

Taylor would go on to further weaken Mulroy’s office following Trump’s 2025 deployment of his crime task force to Memphis. As arrests soared, Taylor worked to place the district attorney’s decisions under unprecedented scrutiny, saying he wanted to ensure that the prosecution of task force cases was as aggressive as the task force itself. 

One new law, co-sponsored by Taylor, authorized the state attorney general to review every case that comes through Mulroy’s office, including those that stem from arrests made by Trump’s task force, “to ensure the proper administration of justice necessary to protect the safety of the community.” The dispositions of each case, along with bail recommendations, would be reported to legislative leaders. 

Republican state Rep. Andrew Farmer, who introduced the bill in the House, noted that it is designed to ensure that “all crimes that deserve to be prosecuted are prosecuted.” 

Mulroy is “just going to have to work harder and ensure that people are continuing to stay safe,” Farmer said on the House floor. “We want Memphis to continue on the path that it’s going —  up.”

The state’s district attorneys general conference, led by Republican former District Attorney Stephen Crump, opposed an early version of the bill, which would have applied to district attorneys across the state, because it could lead prosecutors to second-guess their decisions. He dropped his objections after the bill was narrowed to apply to only Mulroy.

That law has another provision aimed at Mulroy as well: If he declines to prosecute specific categories of crime, the state attorney general can ask the state Supreme Court to intervene by installing a temporary district attorney who would then decide whether to prosecute. Taylor has long sought to limit Mulroy’s authority, and the provision would be a way to do so. Mulroy said the effect would be “an unelected shadow DA operating in parallel to the duly elected DA.” 

“Prosecutorial discretion and prosecutorial independence is a key fundamental part of our criminal justice system,” Mulroy said. “It’s clear under both the text of the Tennessee constitution and Tennessee Supreme Court case law, and this bill does great violence to those principles.”

Taylor co-sponsored a second law, passed in May, that requires Mulroy’s office to report to the state and the U.S. Department of Justice within 10 business days every time it has entered into a plea deal, or dismissed or lowered the charges on a felony offense that resulted from a task force arrest. 

“Memphis residents deserve confidence that the significant investments being made to combat violent crime are matched with accountability at every level of the justice system,” Gillespie, who co-sponsored the bill in the House, said at the time. 

Taylor argued the reporting requirements were necessary to give the federal government an opportunity to prosecute cases Mulroy dismissed. In a post on X and a statement made before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, he called Mulroy “the weak link” in the task force’s efforts. He’s also claimed, without evidence, that Mulroy refuses to prosecute crimes.

In a rebuttal, Mulroy noted that more than 40,000 defendants are prosecuted by his office each year.

Mulroy has sued to stop both laws, claiming they are unconstitutional because they unfairly single out Shelby County and create an administrative burden. The lawsuit is pending in state court. Meanwhile, Mulroy has objected to his staff spending time on the reporting requirements, which he called “pointless busywork.” 

Mulroy’s election in 2022 as the county’s first Democratic district attorney in more than two decades came on the heels of a year with a record number of homicides. But Republicans’ tough-on-crime approach had grown unpopular with voters, and Mulroy vowed to be an alternative. He promised to deprioritize the prosecution of low-level offenses such as marijuana possession and shoplifting; emphasize rehabilitation such as drug treatment, mental health counseling and job training; and establish a unit to examine the validity of convictions.

One of the people who campaigned for him was William Arnold, who had spent nearly seven years in state prison before his conviction was dismissed following examination by a Davidson County conviction review unit. The community organizer said he saw Mulroy’s candidacy as a way to “support someone who could help Memphians in a different way.”

To see Mulroy’s power being muted by Taylor is disheartening, Arnold said. But that is not surprising to him, given how the state legislature has long treated the predominantly Black city, including replacing the Memphis Shelby County Schools’ elected board with a state-appointed one.

Bail Calculator Scrapped

Among the preemptive legislation Taylor has sponsored, a 2023 effort stood out: the dismantling of a bipartisan effort to ensure Shelby County’s bail practices did not discriminate against poor people, who are disproportionately Black.

Under state law, magistrates are to “impose the least onerous conditions” when deciding bail and should set bail “as low as the court determines is necessary” to assure the defendant returns to court.

But in practice, hundreds of people were being detained at the Shelby County Jail simply because they couldn’t afford bail, according to Just City, a Memphis criminal justice reform organization, which along with the American Civil Liberties Union threatened to sue the county in 2021 for violating existing state law. Being jailed while awaiting trial can cause arrestees to lose jobs and child custody, the organizations argued.

In August 2022, the organizations and county officials — including Mulroy’s predecessor, Republican District Attorney Amy Weirich — agreed on a new bail order that included an “ability to pay” calculator. 

That tool quickly drew Taylor’s ire, and by the following January he had co-sponsored a bill to kill it, characterizing the calculator in a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting as a way of “essentially asking defendants how much money they happen to have in their pocket so that they can make bail.”

The bill’s supporters said judges should prioritize public safety when deciding whether to release defendants. “There is blood running in the streets of Memphis today because they’re letting people out,” state Rep. William Lamberth, a Republican, said on the House floor.

State law requires judges, when setting bail, to consider several factors, including a defendant’s financial condition. And Josh Spickler, executive director of Just City, said that’s exactly what the tool helped judges do. 

Under Taylor’s law, however, “the defendant’s ability to pay shall not be considered.”

“That tied our hands as judges,” Anderson, the former Shelby County judge, said in an interview. 

A 2025 University of Memphis study found that the median bail amount increased after Taylor’s law took effect. And the law’s impact falls hardest on Black residents, Anderson said, because they are more likely to be low-income and make up a disproportionate share of Shelby County jail occupants. 

“To those of us in the system, it’s obvious what he’s doing,” said Anderson, who resigned in 2025 with six years left of his eight-year term. “He called them reform acts, but they’re not reform.”

The post In a Newly Drawn District, Black Voters May Get a Representative Who Spent Years Undermining Their Interests appeared first on ProPublica.

A Florida man who was the subject of a 2019 investigation by ProPublica was indicted last month on federal charges that he defrauded clients of his ransomware data recovery firm. 

According to the Justice Department, the man, Zohar Pinhasi, told customers he could recover their encrypted files without having to pay hackers, when, in reality, he paid the ransom and charged victims a hefty fee on top.

The indictment mirrors the findings from ProPublica’s 2019 article “The Trade Secret,” which centered on Pinhasi and his scheme. The outlet found that the ransomware victims were being harmed twice: once by the hackers, who locked their targets’ files and demanded ransom, and a second time by MonsterCloud, Pinhasi’s Florida-based data recovery firm, which misled its clients about not paying ransoms.

Read More

The Trade Secret: Firms That Promised High-Tech Ransomware Solutions Almost Always Just Pay the Hackers

“By falsely claiming to decrypt ransomware without paying off the ransomers, the defendant re-victimized his clients while extracting a hefty profit for himself,” U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella said in an Oct. 7 press release. “Our Office will vigorously prosecute ransomware attackers who prey on Americans from across the world and those who cynically profit from their criminal activity.”

When ProPublica published its story in 2019, ransomware was growing into one of the world’s most pervasive cyberthreats. Hackers locked the data of governments, schools and businesses, holding the decryption key for a ransom payment, which they usually demanded in bitcoin and other types of difficult-to-trace cryptocurrency. 

ProPublica’s reporting focused on how U.S. industries, from data recovery firms like MonsterCloud to insurance giants that cover ransom payments, all fueled the extortion economy. Ransomware remains a widespread threat today, and the threat to national security has grown as hackers linked to hostile foreign governments are believed to use ransomware as a cover for espionage. The prevalence of AI tools is also making it easier for attackers to spread ransomware.

Pinhasi, who went by the alias Zack Green, told ProPublica in 2019 that MonsterCloud never promised clients that their data will be recovered by any particular method. “How we do it, it’s our problem,” he told ProPublica. “You will get your data back. Sit back, relax and enjoy the ride.” He called MonsterCloud’s data recovery methods a “trade secret.”

Pinhasi hung up when reached on his cellphone this month. A message left with a representative at MonsterCloud’s office phone number and a message left with his attorney were not returned. A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office said Pinhasi pleaded not guilty to the federal charges.

In its 2019 investigation, ProPublica interviewed MonsterCloud’s clients and ransomware experts and found that in certain cases the firm must have paid ransoms on behalf of clients. MonsterCloud’s services were particularly popular with local law enforcement agencies, who are loath to engage with or pay criminal hackers. Several interviewed by ProPublica at the time said they chose MonsterCloud to help them recover from ransomware because they believed the firm would never pay a ransom.

Pinhasi, who described himself to ProPublica as a former IT security intelligence officer for the Israeli military, said in 2019 that MonsterCloud handled up to 30 calls a day and had about 20 employees in South Florida as well as extensive global contacts. 

Federal investigators found that, over the course of the scheme, Pinhasi allegedly charged clients more than $19 million and paid more than $8 million in ransom payments. In one example, Pinhasi made a ransom payment of about $8,200 but charged the client about $150,000. If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison.

In the Justice Department’s October press release, an FBI official said Pinhasi had “turned the victim’s crisis into his own profit center. This deception is unacceptable, and the FBI is committed to ensuring accountability for those who choose to victimize the very people who trusted them for help.”

The Justice Department did not address ProPublica’s 2019 finding that one of the FBI’s own was among Pinhasi’s associates at MonsterCloud. John Pistole, a former deputy director of the FBI under Robert Mueller, was prominently featured in a promotional video on MonsterCloud’s homepage. “Police departments, government agencies, hospitals, small business and Fortune 500 firms trust MonsterCloud to help recover from attacks and protect against new ones,” Pistole said in the video. “MonsterCloud’s proprietary technology and expertise protects their professional reputations and organizational integrity.”

Pistole was not mentioned by name in the Pinhasi indictment.

In 2019, Pinhasi touted MonsterCloud’s ties to law enforcement as evidence of its integrity. Pistole, who also headed the Transportation Security Administration under President Barack Obama, was listed on MonsterCloud’s website as the only member of its “Cyber Security Advisory Council.” 

Pistole did not respond to a request for comment for this story. In a 2019 interview, he said he became acquainted with Pinhasi after MonsterCloud reached him through a speaker’s bureau and that MonsterCloud paid him indirectly through that group. He said Pinhasi scripted his testimonial and that he was well aware that in most cases — including MonsterCloud’s — the only way to decrypt data locked by ransomware is to pay the hackers. “That’s the business model as I understood it,” Pistole told ProPublica at the time. “Based on my experience and knowledge, ransom is paid and they facilitate the best practices moving forward.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to comment on Pistole’s connection to MonsterCloud.

The post Cybersecurity CEO Indicted for Allegedly Scamming Millions From Ransomware Victims appeared first on ProPublica.

The new patrol officer parked his black Dodge Charger outside a house off Main Street and approached on foot. A Mexican ballad was playing. Someone had called in a noise complaint, claiming it sounded as if people were fighting.

But as the officer, Jaron Alexander, got closer, he found nothing of the sort. A middle-aged woman greeted him as her daughter, Joanna Martinez, petite and visibly pregnant, looked on. “What kind of party are you all having?” she remembers him asking. Behind her were three generations of an extended family. They were celebrating a 3-month-old’s baptism over pozole verde, horchata and beers.

Alexander ran some IDs and found no issues. The music wasn’t even that loud, he thought. He told them to have a good night, and then he left.

That encounter, in early October last year, was the first of many that Alexander and Martinez would have in tiny Ingram, Texas, a 1.5-square-mile town of 1,900 people beside the Guadalupe River. But it was the only one before Ingram signed an agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that would roil the town and tear Martinez’s family apart.

“Her and I, at the beginning, I felt like we were running into each other all the time,” Alexander told us, in one of eight conversations over four months that offer a rare window into the thoughts of one of the local police officers on the front lines of the Trump administration’s deportation campaign.

In a town as small as Ingram, drivable in five minutes end to end, more run-ins were probably inevitable. Later that October, Alexander pulled over a work truck for rolling through a stop sign, and soon there Martinez was, demanding that he let her friends go rather than let immigration take them. He didn’t. He pulled over another driver in November who turned out to be her cousin, the father of the baby they celebrated at the baptism party. Alexander handed him over to immigration agents as well.

He pulled over Martinez herself a few weeks before she was due to give birth, she says, surprising her when he knew her name and the type of car she typically drove. He warned her that the car’s window tint was illegal and let her go. After that, he says, he caught a glimpse of her and her husband and their newborn daughter in the toy aisle at Walmart. Martinez told us she doesn’t think it was even her that day — her baby girl was then just days old, and she couldn’t imagine running errands with her so soon. But in Alexander’s memory, she was shopping for Christmas presents, just like him.

Alexander, who is in his mid-30s, with dirty blond hair already turning gray, says he didn’t come back to Ingram to help deport his neighbors. In his telling, he just ended up making it part of his job. The town was where he started his law-enforcement career years earlier, before he took a better-paying position with the county, as a sheriff’s deputy. But things recently started to fall apart, first in his marriage, next at the sheriff’s office: A 185-page internal investigation found that he had an affair before his divorce was final and used a county vehicle to carry it out, then lied about it all. He says the investigator called him an “embarrassment to the profession.” The sheriff’s office fired him. (Alexander said at the time, and again to us, that he did not have the affair.)

Ingram’s Police Department took him back just when its new chief — its eighth in five years — was under pressure from the City Council to do more: more traffic stops, more citations, more arrests, more numbers. Alexander says he told the chief that the sheriff’s office had a deal with ICE and that Ingram should look into it; maybe it could help the department grow. “Blame me,” he eventually told people. “It’s my fault in a way.”

Donald Trump had retaken the presidency with a promise to carry out “the largest deportation in the history of our country.” America was still figuring out what that meant. Finding and expelling up to 4% of the U.S. population — the 14 million residents who are estimated to be undocumented — wasn’t something a few thousand ICE agents could do on their own.

Underway in Chicago that fall, and soon in Minneapolis, was one version of how the administration could try to do it: masked agents from across the federal government surging into a liberal city to round up immigrants, beating back — even killing — the citizens who tried to stand in their path.

But a quieter kind of surge was spreading across the country at the same time. In September 2025, ICE announced new incentives for a partnership program known as 287(g). The program’s most aggressive form, the so-called task force model, which Ingram opted in to, enlists local police officers as deputy immigration agents, and the new incentives included a $100,000 vehicle stipend, a $7,500 equipment stipend for every participating officer, quarterly performance bonuses and funding to help cover officer salaries and overtime. “By joining forces with ICE,” the announcement read, “you’re not just gaining access to these unprecedented reimbursement opportunities — you’re becoming part of a national effort to ensure the safety of every American family.”

Alexander completed an online course with ICE a few weeks after the baptism party, qualifying him for time-and-a-half pay whenever he helped the agency pick up immigrants. Here in the Texas Hill Country, he soon became the local face of the national crackdown.

Ingram was just starting to recover from its worst natural disaster in a century, the flood that summer that killed at least 139 people up and down the Guadalupe River, including 25 girls at Camp Mystic. In the riverbed, towering bald cypress trees now stood at a lean, their branches swept back by a 30-foot surge of water and mud, their trunks still plastered with debris. As construction workers rebuilding the community traveled to their jobsites via Junction Highway, Ingram’s five-lane main thoroughfare, a black Charger began stopping them before they could get there.

Within three months of the baptism party, Alexander and Ingram’s other patrol officer had delivered at least 70 people to immigration agents, picking off what the police chief called a “dumbfounding” number of undocumented drivers. Within a year, they would hand over the equivalent of 10% of Ingram to ICE.

The weight of what Alexander was doing started to settle on him after Christmas. He says he was out patrolling as one of his new ICE handlers, a man in a ball cap and dark glasses, hovered nearby in an unmarked SUV. Around lunchtime, Alexander followed two Latino men in a 2008 GMC truck for several blocks before stopping them, they recall him saying, for failing to signal a turn.

A young man sat in the passenger seat. Alexander checked his papers along with the driver’s and determined that both were undocumented. The agent in the unmarked SUV rolled up behind them. Alexander realized who the man in the passenger seat was only after Martinez arrived in tears. It was her husband, Ulices Macias, the father of her newborn daughter. 

“I don’t normally do this,” Martinez recalls Alexander telling her, “but I’m going to open up the car. I’m going to take the handcuffs off him.” He let the family have a moment together. In a video taken by Martinez’s younger sister, Alexander stood by, expressionless, as Martinez embraced Macias by the rear door of the Charger. He watched Macias cradle his 2-week-old baby girl, swaddled in a white blanket, and hug Martinez’s 4-year-old son, his stepson.

Then the ICE agent put the handcuffs back on Martinez’s husband, wrapped a chain around his waist and led him away. Alexander says Martinez threw herself to the ground and sobbed.

Images of the family he broke up shortly after Christmas would intrude on Alexander’s thoughts for months, he told us. But it didn’t keep him from doing his job. His next shift came a few days after he handed over Macias, and he was back in the Charger, back to stopping cars on Junction Highway.

“Mini Guanajuato”

Alexander says he didn’t always want to be a police officer. He describes himself as “kind of a chameleon.” He grew up in nearby Harper, tried a few different colleges without graduating and spent his 20s cycling though jobs in freight logistics, pest control and insurance.

Still seeking his calling, he arranged a ride-along with a police officer outside Austin. What sold him on policing was the suburban officer’s power to enforce the law as he saw fit. That day, they pulled over a woman who had a warrant out for her arrest. She was coming back from the store with children and groceries in the back seat.

“You can use your discretion,” Alexander recalls the officer telling him. Wouldn’t they be doing more harm if they took her? What would the kids do without their mother? And wouldn’t it all create more paperwork? The officer let her go. Alexander imagined himself making the same kinds of judgment calls. In 2021, he enrolled in the police academy.

Even before the floods, tensions were rising in Ingram. Hundreds of Mexican immigrants and their families had settled there in recent decades as an increasingly militarized border made it harder for seasonal ranch hands and other workers to cross back and forth. Latinos would come to make up 45% of its population, and some residents began affectionately calling Ingram “mini Guanajuato,” after the central Mexican state where many have roots. Yet when Alexander returned, Ingram’s City Council still consisted of six white men.

A council faction led by Claud Jordan, now the town’s mayor, and Rocky Hawkins, now the mayor pro tem, came to power in November 2020, in a revolt against a new sewer project. They abolished Ingram’s city administrator position and took direct control of the Police Department, cycling through chief after chief. Five former city employees say Hawkins regularly used racist slurs for Mexicans. Four say that he pressured the city to go after Latinos through code enforcement or targeted patrols, and two say that Jordan did, too. One of the employees recalls Hawkins complaining that Mexicans were “taking over Ingram.” (Hawkins and Jordan each declined to speak on the record or address detailed questions we sent them by email. In a brief text-message exchange, Hawkins said that none of it was right but declined to offer any specific concerns.)

These were the men the new chief, Dustin Breshears, had to answer to as ICE revived the task force program, which had been shut down for a dozen years until the day Trump returned to office in January 2025. ICE, under President Barack Obama, had phased out the program after some of the first sheriffs to participate in it, including Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, used it to disproportionately target Latinos in their communities. Investigations by the Department of Justice found that deputies in the task force program pulled over Latino drivers at up to nine times the rate of other drivers and that some retaliated violently against people who accused them of racial profiling. But now, under Trump, any law-enforcement agency, no matter how troubled or small, was encouraged to sign up.

Breshears began appearing at City Council meetings armed with statistics: number of arrests since the last meeting, number of traffic stops, number of cleared cases from the backlog of hundreds he inherited — and number of what he called “deportations.” (He later explained this was his imprecise shorthand for “immigration-related enforcement activities.”) At the council’s October 2025 meeting, held a couple of weeks after Alexander showed up at the Martinez family’s baptism party, Breshears reported a remarkable 162 traffic stops by Ingram’s two patrol officers — Alexander and Christian Perez, who was 25 — in just 20 days. (Perez declined to comment.) The officers made more stops in two months than the department had made in the entire previous year. The City Council gave Breshears an $18,000 raise.

Before Breshears arrived and Alexander returned in August 2025, the weekly blotter in The West Kerr Current, the local newspaper, documented the humdrum of community policing: loose dogs, neighborhood disputes, code violations. Then, suddenly, it was filled with drivers stopped for defective brake lights, damaged license plates, cracked windshields, illegal window tints or other unspecified “equipment violations.”

Breshears and Alexander strongly deny targeting Latinos. “It’s honestly not what’s happening,” Breshears says, noting that his half brother, wife and daughters have Mexican heritage. Ingram’s traffic stops were simply up across the board, he says, so more Latinos were getting stopped. He shared statistics showing that stops of Latinos were proportional to their share of the population.

Alexander, who on top of his roughly $70,000 base salary was now logging dozens of hours per month for ICE, told us the same. “I don’t care who’s in the car,” he says. “I really don’t.”

“El Charger Negro”

As the ICE program took hold in Ingram, warnings about Alexander and his black Charger — the department has several — spread through the Hill Country and far beyond. Groups on Facebook and WhatsApp seemed to track his every move. The Charger was outside Rita’s taco shop. The Charger was near Dollar General. The Charger was parked by the church. A member of one particularly active Facebook group texted him screenshots, and he scrolled through blurry photos of himself looming behind work trucks or leaning over car windows.

Many Latino motorists trying to reach worksites up the Guadalupe began driving an extra 90 minutes each day to avoid the section of Junction Highway that Alexander patrolled. Ranch hands began sleeping at their employers’ properties in nearby Hunt, coming to town only when they knew — or hoped — that Ingram’s officers would be off duty. Residents were rattled the day a Customs and Border Protection helicopter hovered above town and the elementary school went into lockdown as the police hunted for a Mexican man who had run from one of Alexander’s traffic stops.

Workers Driving Between Kerrville and Hunt Add an Extra 90 Minutes to Their Daily Commute to Avoid Traffic Stops in Ingram

One family notarized guardianship papers, in case the parents were detained and the children left behind. One woman swore Alexander showed up outside a memorial service and asked people for IDs. Another woman said he detained her and her husband when they returned home from church. Parties dwindled. Invite lists shrank. People began to move away, to Kerrville and San Antonio, and Alexander’s reputation reached as far as La Ceja, a village in the mountains of central Mexico, where an elderly resident said he and his neighbors were familiar with the Texas town’s police. “El Charger negro,” he said, with a knowing nod. He estimated that some 20 or 30 people in the village were recent deportees from Ingram.

Alexander’s fortunes seemed to rise as the Martinez family’s fell. With her husband gone, Joanna Martinez couldn’t afford payments on the trailer they shared. She and their infant and her 4-year-old son moved back into her childhood bedroom in her mother’s crowded home, where several relatives and their children also lived. She tried to stay connected with her husband, Macias, via WhatsApp calls while working as much as she could as a house cleaner to keep afloat. “I can’t lock myself up in my room and just cry,” Martinez says.

Winter for Martinez and her family brought a string of dark incidents. The January arrest of her cousin near the carwash as she drove to pick up her children from school. A canceled baby shower for her older sister, Jazmin, over a rumor that the Charger planned to show up. Another cousin, himself the father of a newborn, stopped and taken right in front of her mother’s house as Martinez watched.

A half dozen of the attendees from the October baptism party would soon be gone from Ingram, after being detained and deported or leaving to join relatives who had been. Some people had gotten wind that Alexander was making money off his enforcement. When a Spanish-language Facebook page shared a photo of him questioning the passenger of a beige Ford pickup, someone posted an animated image in the comments: a stack of green dollar bills growing taller and taller in an endless loop.

Alexander received his first ICE payments in early December. In January, as the country’s attention turned to the violent immigration crackdown in Minneapolis, he was often spending three or four hours a day and sometimes entire shifts working on behalf of the federal agency. By the time federal authorities announced a drawdown in Minneapolis on Feb. 12, Alexander had already made $3,264.46 from his task force hours, according to his pay stubs.

Ingram was by then one of more than 750 task force model partners around the country, up from not quite 500 when it signed up in October. At least 43 million U.S. residents, according to an analysis of ICE records by the legal data firm Titus Consulting, already lived in a county with an active task force agreement. Alexander was one of thousands of deputized officers in Texas alone.

Agencies With 287(g) Task Force Model Agreements

In interviews, Alexander described the immigration system he was enforcing as “skewed” and “weird,” but he saw himself as largely separate from these concerns. “If you’re taking federal money to do a job,” he says, “I think you should do the job.”

Still, he seemed to struggle with the contradictions of his role. He told us he sometimes shared his lunch with the people he detained and that he let them hold on to their phones to call loved ones from the rear seat of the Charger. He handcuffed them with their hands in the front rather than the back so they could use their hands.

Martinez told us about a moment when she watched him detain one of her cousins. He allowed the man’s wife and children to hug him goodbye and waited until his 7-year-old daughter wasn’t looking to handcuff him. To Martinez, it seemed as if Alexander was trying to prove to her that he wasn’t a bad person. “But I’m not going to fall for it,” she says.

There was a protest in Ingram the following day against Trump’s mass deportations. Martinez decided to go. As she stood among a few dozen protesters waving a handmade sign with the name “J. Alexander” circled and crossed out, she saw him drive by again and again.

A few weeks later, Katie Winer, the leader of the group that staged the protest, was following the Charger after Alexander detained another immigrant in a traffic stop. He approached her car and threatened to arrest her if she followed him in the future, on charges of interfering with public duties. But he also seemed to want to talk, and she recorded him as they discussed what was going on in Ingram. “I think you guys are making a bigger deal of it than they are,” he said of the people he handed over to ICE. The only outliers were “loudmouths” like Martinez and “her little crew.”

Winer interjected that Martinez’s husband was the family’s breadwinner, and it was Alexander’s actions that tore them apart.

“My actions did not,” Alexander said. “His actions did. I made a traffic stop. He was here illegally. That’s not my fault.”

Still, Alexander’s uncertainty seemed to be growing. In March, another of Martinez’s cousins confronted him outside the taco shop, pressing him about Macias as she filmed with her phone.

“If I’m being 100% honest,” he said, “I don’t enjoy when families are separated, like with the Joanna situation. That kind of fucked me up.”

“I Voted to Get the Bad Guys Out”

A month later, as Ingram’s handoffs to ICE surpassed 100 people, another video of Alexander circulated among a small group of community members. It showed an evening traffic stop, at least the fifth stop Alexander made that day. He had followed a silver Ford F-250 from the highway until it pulled into the gravel driveway of a mobile home. There, the man in the passenger seat, a landscaper named Victor Ramirez Hernandez, tried to hurry inside. Alexander grabbed him before he could get there.

The truck’s driver pulled out his phone and began filming. “Why are you arresting him?” he asked.

“I’m not,” Alexander answered, struggling to place handcuffs on Ramirez as he squirmed. “I’m detaining him.” Then he wrapped his hands around the laborer’s chest, lifted him off the ground and slammed him down on the driveway. “I played nice with you, and now I’m done,” he said. He straddled Ramirez and cuffed his hands behind his back.

“He’s bleeding because you hit him,” the driver said evenly. They argued back and forth.

“You’re an idiot,” Alexander said, his face reddening. “Shut up. The more you talk it’s just making you look stupider.” (Alexander declined to comment on this incident. Breshears, who reviewed body-camera footage, says Alexander’s use of force was justified to control a potentially dangerous situation.)

Acrimony pulsed through Ingram that spring. In the Latino community, family members and neighbors accused one another of snitching, which Alexander says did happen. Young women accused one another of having affairs with him, which he denies, insisting that people just misinterpreted his attempts to be kind. “I’m friendly with the people that I meet,” he says, “especially when they’re friendly to me.”

One subject of these rumors was Martinez. She and her older sister scoffed at them. “He’s taken our whole family at this point,” Jazmin says. “And she’s going to sleep with him? It’s really annoying.” But some in the community, even cousins, stopped speaking with her. “It’s like ‘Hunger Games,’” Martinez says.

As Latinos fled and avoided Ingram, the daily takeout orders at one Mexican restaurant on the edge of town dropped to 50 from 200. A corner store catering to immigrants lost around half its revenue and most of its Latino regulars. Landlords in a mobile-home park just outside town struggled to find tenants.

But it wasn’t just Ingram’s Latino community that was reeling. For Ingram’s non-Hispanic business owners, including many Republicans in a county that voted 77% for Trump in the 2024 election, the immigration crackdown was becoming an outrage. It was taking people they worked with and knew well. It was interfering with flood reconstruction. It was hurting the local economy.

The owner of a heavily damaged strip mall on the western edge of town, Steve Edelstein, lamented the loss of two workers who were helping him rebuild. “Technically local law enforcement is doing their job,” he told a reporter for The West Kerr Current, emphasizing that he supported Trump. “But it isn’t helping the community.” A manager overseeing the rebuilding of Ingram’s Little League field, which was washed away in the flood, made an angry call to the city after two of his workers were picked up, Breshears says. A contractor helping rebuild Hunt’s destroyed post office had his crew reduced to eight workers from 30 — causing what should have been a four-day job to stretch to two weeks.

Among the people who called Jordan, the mayor, to complain was his onetime high school classmate Neal Secor, who describes himself as “one of the most conservative guys you’ll ever meet.” His family business, a cluster of rental cabins called Waltonia on the River, was nearly destroyed by the flood. He was struggling to rebuild. He says that in the spring, in two separate stops, the Ingram police detained four of his workers and handed them over to ICE — the second set as they returned from a job repairing the docks at a nearby youth camp, a favor Secor was trying to do for a neighbor.

Secor says Jordan’s defense was simple: You voted for this. They’d all voted for this.

“Let me tell you something,” Secor says he told Jordan. “I didn’t vote for this. I voted to get the bad guys out.” The two employees detained coming back from the youth camp were like family, his friends and co-workers for over a decade. “There’s still a lot of bad guys here,” he continued. “These guys aren’t them.”

Secor recalls Jordan saying that Ingram’s officers were just following the law. But, Secor wondered, why was it that he could drive 85 every day on the 75-mile-an-hour interstate and police officers just let him pass? He told Jordan he’d put 175,000 miles on his truck and never been pulled over. “It’s a matter of what laws you want to pick and choose,” he recalls telling the mayor. “We all break laws every day if you really want to get down to it.”

“God Wanted Me to Meet You”

On an unpaved side street in the Ingram hills in April, Alexander again faced a decision over whether to separate a young family. This time he had more of a choice; ICE had yet to arrive. A woman named Norma Luján took his hand and said she was praying for him.

Luján, 61, runs a successful housecleaning company based in Ingram. She had heard of Alexander long before she confronted him. She had seen him in the Charger, too: on the side of Junction Highway as she made her way to jobs at vacation homes or youth camps up in Hunt. On the side of the highway on the way back. In her rearview mirror for four excruciating minutes one afternoon as her “girls,” as she called her crew, held their breath and sank into their seats, protected by the tint of her car’s windows and the fact that a license-plate reader would show it was registered to her, a Texas-born U.S. citizen.

In January, at the carwash, Alexander had helped a sheriff’s deputy take one of Luján’s best employees into custody. The woman, Cinthya Carranza, was a single mother and asylum seeker from Guanajuato — and Joanna Martinez’s cousin. Carranza was on her way to get her children from school after she and Luján spent the day cleaning houses. Later that day, Luján saw a Facebook post showing a familiar face in a mug shot: Carranza’s. Luján broke into tears. To her, the arrest was a signal event. The Charger had mostly stopped men up to that point. This was the moment she understood that no one was safe.

Luján started losing workers in droves after Carranza was taken — some to traffic stops, most for fear of having to drive through Ingram. Her crew of 30 people dropped to fewer than 10. She worried for her business, but she worried more, she said, for her workers, the lives they had made in Ingram and the relationships she had built with them. They invited her to parties and baptisms, surprised her with presents on her birthday. She often led them in prayer. “I love them,” she says. She promised she would try to protect them.

When Luján’s employee Maria called that April afternoon to say the officer in the Charger was outside her house, detaining her husband as he returned from work, Luján jumped into action. Maria (who asked to be identified by her middle name because she is undocumented) was eight months pregnant and already terrified that she would have to give birth alone. Alexander had taken her brother a week earlier. Now Maria was hiding behind the curtains of her home, sneaking peeks outside, hoping Alexander would let her husband go.

“Cálmate” — calm down — Luján told herself as she approached the Charger. “Cálmate.” She took a deep breath. She says Alexander was sitting in the driver’s seat with the door propped open, staring at a tablet computer.

“Look, his wife has had a complicated pregnancy,” she told him. (This was true.) “She’s in the hospital.” (For that lie, Luján says, she later prayed for forgiveness.)

Then Luján reached out and grabbed Alexander’s hand. “I pray for your being, for your soul,” she recalls telling him as she cried. “I want you to think about what you’re doing. Feel it. Feel it, please.” She squeezed his hand. “I need you to look inside your heart,” she continued, “and let him go.”

Alexander didn’t react at first, in Luján’s telling. “God wanted me to meet you,” she said. He met her gaze.

“I’m that guy that everyone talks about on Facebook,” she recalls him finally saying. “If you think I don’t lose any sleep, you’re wrong.”

Luján pushed through the lump in her throat to speak. “I’m going to pray for you every night,” she promised him. She says Alexander squeezed her hand back, then pulled away. He walked off to make a call. She couldn’t make out much of what he said. It was quiet, save for the sound of Luján’s sobs and the pebbles from the unpaved road crunching beneath the officer’s feet.

Then he returned to the Charger. “Get him out of the car,” Luján recalls him saying. “Hurry up.”

“God bless you,” Luján said. “God will repay you for this.”

Alexander says he doesn’t remember the details of his interaction with Luján, but he confirms that he let Maria’s husband go, calling it a matter of “human decency.” He knew how hard it was to raise children. “A woman needs rest,” he says. “She needs help.” Maria’s husband “needs to be there helping out.”

At first, nothing seemed to change. Over the next two months, as the Hill Country prepared to welcome summer tourists and campers back after the devastation of the floods, Alexander worked around 100 task force hours, earning close to $5,000 from ICE.

But the next time he ran into Joanna Martinez, he seemed to be having misgivings. It was early June, and he was eight months into the ICE program. He had pulled over another of her family friends on Junction Highway, a person she had known since childhood. Martinez got a phone call and rushed to the scene, as she had so many times before. “I don’t feel good about this,” she recalls him saying when she arrived. “I signed up to be a cop, not an ICE agent.” (Alexander says he remembers that they talked and that he could have said something like that.)

Later that month, he pulled over a young man from Honduras who was on his way to a soccer game with his cousin, a 12-year-old with developmental disabilities. The boy’s father says he and his wife hid across the street watching it all happen, too terrified to step out and claim their son. The parents sent a friend from church, but she was not a legal guardian. Alexander says he had no choice but to hand the boy over to ICE, adding though that if he was one of the parents, he would see it differently. “If I’m in that position, there’s no way I’m letting my kid go,” he told us. “I’m probably fighting someone.”

Within a couple of weeks, Alexander’s task force hours dropped by about 40%, according to his pay stubs. It remains unclear if he tried to step back from immigration work or whether the number of undocumented drivers in Ingram had simply dwindled because of all he had already done.

According to Chief Breshears, Ingram had logged 194 “immigration-related incidents” as of this August. Whether every handover led to a deportation, Breshears couldn’t say. Alexander says he doesn’t know how many of the 194 are people he stopped. But he says he has now let at least 10 people go — many, though not all of them, mothers of young children.

Alexander sees this, and his relationship to the Martinez family, as evidence of his humanity, despite what people say about him. “For context, I’ve deported like six of their family members, and they’re still friendly to me,” he says. “So I’m not the monster they make me out to be.”

On July 16, the skies over Ingram opened again, dropping nearly 19 inches of rain in a single day, and the Guadalupe again overtopped its banks, again destroying businesses and homes. In the predawn darkness in the early hours of the emergency, Alexander began racing toward Ingram in his black Charger to help. He had barely left his house when surging floodwaters consumed the vehicle, destroying the Charger’s engine block. A driver in a pickup truck took him back home, and that’s where he stayed until the storm receded.

“One Free Pass”

Alexander remains only one cog in a deportation machine for which the federal government has now earmarked $240 billion. Today more than 1,900 agencies in at least 30 states have signed up for ICE’s task force model, with more than 29,000 deputized officers. With their help, ICE recently hit a record of immigration arrests, totaling more than 50,000 in August.

On Sept. 11, Alexander met one of us at a taco spot on Junction Highway. Ingram had changed in the year since his return. Whole neighborhoods had emptied out, and residents noticed fewer drivers on the streets. In part because of the money from ICE, the Police Department had hired two additional officers. As a Mexican ballad played over the speakers, Alexander warned against making too much of the leniency he showed to families like Maria’s. “It’s like one free pass, I guess,” he said: If he encountered her husband again during a traffic stop, he would probably hand him over to ICE. He just thought letting the father-to-be go was the right call at the time. “I mean, don’t you?” he asked.

He said he hadn’t made all that much money working with ICE. But city records show that his earnings from the agency already totaled $18,793.25 in nine months, more than a quarter of his base salary. “I think it’s skewed a little bit,” he said, looking at the pay stubs we had gathered.

Alexander said it was hard for him to be out in public anymore. He can’t escape being recognized in Ingram and Kerrville. Sometimes he catches Latinos staring at him, then walking away, visibly uncomfortable. So he tries to do his shopping and errands in another town 30 minutes away.

He blamed the Facebook groups. They had created a climate of “unreasonable fear” in Ingram. “What do they think I’m going to do right now?” he asked, seated at his table in the taco shop. A steady stream of customers, many of them white, approached a counter staffed by two young Mexican sisters. He said their father used to hide out in Hunt to avoid being pulled over in town. Some of their co-workers had quit months before, too uncomfortable to serve Alexander when he came in for breakfast. But when the taco shop owner sees him, he said, she hugs him.

“I know the status of everybody in this room,” he said. He suggested everyone who worked there was undocumented. Whether they disappeared or were allowed to stay was up to him. And today, at least, he was just there for breakfast.

“They’re fine, right?”

The post A Texas Cop Signed on to Help ICE Deport His Neighbors. It Tore the Town Apart. appeared first on ProPublica.

The Trump administration this week announced an overhaul of the nation’s food stamp payment system, aimed at modernizing benefit cards to protect families from electronic theft. The move comes a week after ProPublica published an investigation showing how $470 million in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits were stolen from recipients last year alone, in large part because these cards are technologically outdated.

ProPublica’s story highlighted victims’ experiences and examined repeated failures by Congress and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to upgrade Electronic Benefits Transfer, or EBT, cards nationally. ProPublica’s reporting was shared around the department, according to two USDA officials.

The new proposed rule, officially issued by the USDA’s Food and Nutrition Administration on Friday, has been in the works since 2023 — but it was continually delayed until now. Reasons included understaffing at the USDA, especially in the wake of the Department of Government Efficiency’s cuts last year, and a backlog of other regulations that the White House budget office had prioritized. White House and USDA officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the sudden shift.

Read More

Scammers Are Stealing Millions From Food Stamp Recipients. Congress Could Fix It — but Won’t.

The rule will mandate that all 50 states transition from EBT cards with just a magnetic stripe on the back — which are easy for criminals to skim data from — to ones with digital microchips, which credit and debit cards have had for more than a decade, and tap-to-pay technology. Other changes include creating new federal “SNAP EBT Operating Standards” to be revised on an ongoing basis, so that the feds and states together can do a better job of keeping up with best practices in the credit card industry and the changing tactics of fraudsters.

A handful of states have already transitioned to chip cards on their own, including California, where the theft of SNAP and other public benefits was reduced by 83% in two years after the technology was adopted. But more than 40 states haven’t added chips, and hundreds of thousands of lower-income Americans continue to show up at grocery store checkout lines only to find that their food assistance for the month has been drained by thieves. NPR and other news outlets have also recently reported on this crisis.

Members of the public, including state SNAP administrators and grocery store owners who may have logistical questions about how to overhaul their EBT systems, now have 60 days to submit comments on the new USDA regulation; these will be reviewed by agency officials before the rule is formally enacted. After that, states will have two years to switch to chip cards, although their ability to meet that deadline will depend on several factors. For one, many are budget-strapped right now, due in large part to the fact that President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act slashed states’ funding for administering their SNAP programs — dollars that they could have used to upgrade their EBT systems and print and mail out the new cards. 

Multiple current and former FNA officials, as well as state program administrators, told ProPublica that they are worried the agency is mandating expensive changes for states but that Congress so far has shown little sign it will provide federal funding for the chip card transition. As ProPublica reported last week, the Senate’s version of this year’s Farm Bill includes money for this purpose, but the House version does not; Democrats and Republicans remain at loggerheads about overall SNAP spending, and it is unclear what will happen. The estimated total federal and state cost of the changes is $283 million, as compared with the more than $600 million in SNAP and other benefits that are stolen from existing cards every year.

Still, the mandate that all states implement chip EBT cards “is a big deal for low-income households,” said Justin King, a longtime safety net advocate who is now the policy director for Propel, a company that helps SNAP recipients access their benefit information. He added that he was “legit surprised” by the administration’s decision.

“Theft rings don’t care about state lines. You’re just squeezing a balloon if you update one state at a time,” King said of the prospect of individual states continuing to gradually adopt chip cards without a federal requirement. “A national standard means there’s nowhere left to go” for the criminals, he said. 

For the moment, at least, there are signs that the Trump administration’s posture toward this issue has shifted more broadly. On Wednesday, while barnstorming in Ohio for Republican candidates, Vice President JD Vance (whose roles include serving as the administration’s “fraud czar”) called a press conference and made a point of emphasizing that low-income families are often the victims of SNAP fraud. 

This was at odds with how Vance has portrayed the problem in the past. “There are people who have Lamborghinis who currently receive SNAP benefits,” he has previously said, in a typical comment. For ProPublica’s previous article, research reporter Gabriel Sandoval reviewed dozens of speeches, social media posts and press accounts of statements made by Vance and other Trump officials, and found that they have consistently portrayed SNAP recipients as the perpetrators of fraud. 

Vance also took a startlingly different tone this week toward the food stamp program itself. In his 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy,” which first propelled him to fame, he wrote that SNAP recipients in Kentucky and Ohio “live off of government largesse”; he said that people in that part of the country are largely “hardworking, except of course for the many food stamp recipients who show little interest in honest work.” 

But this week from the stage in southern Ohio, he said, “Step back for a minute and realize that the [SNAP] program is one of the most important social service programs that we have in the United States of America.” He went on at length: Food stamps ensure that “all of our fellow citizens, particularly children, are able to have a full belly at the end of every single night, that regardless of whether they can pay for a meal, we don’t let American children and American families go hungry. That is one of the most important and sacred things that our tax dollars go to.”

The White House and Vance’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on his rhetorical about-face.

Vance then had Attorney General Todd Blanche and other top officials give more details on multiple recent SNAP theft prosecutions. These included several ongoing EBT card skimming cases in Oregon in which criminal groups had allegedly pilfered the SNAP account numbers and PINs of legitimate beneficiaries and then used that data to buy bulk quantities of goods like energy drinks and baby formula — which the scammers resold for over $3 million. This is exactly the type of case that ProPublica reported on last week.

“The simple reality is that it is actually a very tough thing to go through a [grocery store checkout] line with kids,” Vance said. “To present that card, to expect to be able to take that food home to your family, to be able to cook it and provide a meal for your kids, and to be told that because of the theft of a fraudster, that you are being rejected. And there are hundreds of thousands of families all across our country, all across the state of Ohio who have had that experience.”

The post After Millions in Stolen SNAP Benefits, Trump Administration Moves to Fight Theft appeared first on ProPublica.

Four years after North Texas home builder Scott Sherman completed a federal prison sentence for mortgage fraud, his new construction materials business received a $600,000 cash infusion.

The financial boost came from a blind trust set up to prevent Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, from any overlap in their personal investments and their actions as elected officials. But previously unreleased records from the attorney general’s 2023 impeachment investigation show the trust was far from blind and did not shield the Paxtons from its business dealings, including the investment in Sherman’s business.

Before long, Wildcatter Sand Services and Grayson County Sand and Gravel, which Sherman built with his father, grew into a vast enterprise with various locations and subsidiaries. And along the way, some of those businesses stopped paying taxes to local governments, including school districts. 

But as their tax debts stacked up, Wildcatter companies wired the Paxtons tens of thousands of dollars in the months leading up to and during the attorney general’s impeachment on charges of corruption and bribery. Paxton was eventually acquitted by the Legislature and is now in an expensive and tight race for a U.S. Senate seat against Democrat James Talarico, a state lawmaker.

While Paxton has been in public office for more than two decades, the blind trust he established upon becoming attorney general has largely obscured his business dealings. The Paxtons’ investment in Wildcatter through that trust offers a new, previously unreported look at both the limits of that trust and the attorney general’s financial association with the very type of business executives whose prosecutions he typically celebrates.

“In Texas, we fight fraud head-on and will not rest until every last corrupt actor is brought to justice,” Paxton said in a news release last year. In a recent social media post linking to a newly released campaign ad, he wrote, “As Attorney General, I’ve made big pharma and fraudsters pay billions.”

Doing business with a recently convicted felon undermines that narrative and erodes public trust in his role as the state’s top anti-fraud watchdog, ethics experts told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.

Richard Painter, who served as the chief ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, said he would have thought “the attorney general of Texas would have the good sense not to be dealing with a convicted felon.”

“They’ll pay out their friends while they’re not paying their taxes, run up debt,” said Painter, who has been critical of staunch Paxton ally President Donald Trump. “But the question is, why is the attorney general of Texas dealing with those kinds of people?”

Ken Paxton did not answer detailed questions from the news organizations about the Wildcatter investment or whether he knew of Sherman’s conviction. He has previously defended his business dealings, saying he follows ethics laws. A spokesperson for Angela Paxton, who filed for divorce last year, said that she was not aware of Sherman’s criminal history. 

Sherman ran a homebuilding firm, Artisan Operating LP, when he pleaded guilty in 2014 for his role in a mortgage fraud conspiracy. The scheme involved artificially inflating home prices to obtain larger loans for more than two dozen properties in cities across the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Sherman did not respond to calls made to his cellphone and company or to emailed questions. 

Paxton’s connection to Sherman is the second revelation in recent weeks of the attorney general engaging with people charged with federal crimes. Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Paxton celebrated New Year’s Eve 2024 in Dubai with two Americans who failed to return to the U.S. after being indicted months before on federal healthcare-fraud charges. A spokesperson for Paxton didn’t address his association with the defendants but said in a statement to the Journal that the attorney general has been “politically persecuted for years.” 

ProPublica and the Tribune found the Paxtons’ investment in Wildcatter by reviewing records collected by impeachment investigators.

The records show that Ken Paxton had at least some knowledge of the blind trust’s investments, which could violate terms the Paxtons set when establishing the trust. 

It would also run afoul of U.S. Senate rules, which Paxton would be bound by if elected, said Donald Kettl, an ethics expert and former dean of the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy. Those rules, Kettl said, require senators with a blind trust to have no knowledge of its investments.

“It’s reasonable to ask whether a candidate for the U.S. Senate has followed the ethics rules for financial reporting of blind trusts that would be required if the candidate became a senator,” he said.

In setting up the blind trust, the Paxtons agreed that their friend Chip Loper would manage the assets without consulting with them or taking “any instructions regarding investment matters,” according to incorporation documents. Loper did not respond to a request for an interview and did not answer questions about the Paxtons’ involvement in selecting investments.

Text messages that emerged during the impeachment probe, however, showed he and Ken Paxton discussed certain investments. Mortgage and deed records show that Paxton purchased eight properties between 2015 and 2026 and then transferred them into the trust. 

The Wildcatter investment also appears to have slipped past the required firewall.

Angela Paxton served for years on a Wildcatter advisory board beginning in 2022. ProPublica and the Tribune could not find any documents describing her responsibilities in the role, which she described as “non-governing” on her personal financial disclosures. While on the board, she voted for legislation that shielded a subsidiary from certain environmental complaints.

The Paxtons also claimed more than $93,000 in itemized losses from Wildcatter Sand Services and Grayson County Sand and Gravel on their 2020 federal joint income tax return. 

“That is proof positive that there’s nothing blind about this trust,” said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who specializes in legal and government ethics. If Ken Paxton “can report on his tax return a transaction, then he is not blind to the transaction.”

A Board Seat and a Vote

After Wildcatter received the cash injection from the Paxtons’ blind trust, Sherman went on a shopping spree.

He purchased a sand mine in the North Texas town of Denison and a concrete plant 40 miles down the road in Gunter, a city of about 2,000 residents. Both are in Grayson County near the Oklahoma border.

Neighbors complained to Texas environmental regulators about clouds of dust from Wildcatter and other companies located at the Gunter site that they said coated their properties for up to 12 hours a day. 

In 2021 and 2022, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality issued violation notices to Wildcatter Redi-Mix, the company that runs the Gunter plant. At least one dust-related violation was resolved when a road leading to the plant was paved in 2022, according to TCEQ documents. TCEQ did not respond to a request for comment.

Neighbors continued to raise concerns about the plant.

Angela Paxton joined the advisory board of Wildcatter Materials, which owns Wildcatter Redi-Mix, a year later. The IRS defines advisory boards as lacking legal and financial authority over companies. She was still serving on the board in 2025 as of her last financial disclosure. 

Complaints against the company continued. At one point, Gunter resident Deirdre Diamond, a respiratory therapist and lead advocate for a local group created to fight pollution from concrete batch plants, reached out to her representative in the Legislature, then state Sen. Drew Springer.

Despite the TCEQ’s previous violation notices, Springer concluded that the neighbors’ complaints were “abusive” and filed a bill that he said at the time would prevent efforts to “weaponize the system.” He made similar comments in a recent interview with the news organizations. Springer’s bill allowed the TCEQ to ignore residents after more than five unsubstantiated complaints in seven years.

Diamond and other opponents believed the bill was an attempt to keep residents from exercising their rights and argued that the language was too vague. They said the legislation did not make clear what would constitute an unsubstantiated complaint and that some complaints may be repeated over the years because of TCEQ inaction. 

When the bill reached the Senate floor, Angela Paxton voted for its passage.

Matt Welch, a spokesperson for Angela Paxton, pointed to the measure’s bipartisan support in the Senate, saying it was needed “to stop a small group of environmental activists from wasting taxpayer dollars by weaponizing the complaint process.” 

He said that between 2019 and 2023, the group filed more than 100 complaints against Dallas-area industrial sites that did not result in findings by the state environmental agency. “These frivolous complaints divert state resources from legitimate violations.”

Angela Paxton did not recuse herself from voting on the bill because it did not relate to any specific company, Welch said. He added that Paxton’s role on the advisory board “carried no decision-making authority” and that she was unaware of any complaints or violations against Wildcatter.

Ethics experts said she should have disclosed her relationship with the company and recused herself. State law bars lawmakers from voting on bills that benefit them or their businesses. The prohibition does not, however, apply to legislation that regulates an entire industry, Senate Secretary Patsy Spaw said. 

Because lawmakers write the laws governing what they must disclose and when they should recuse themselves, “a good amount of the time, the guardrails that they create for themselves are not enough,” according to Andrew Cates, a San Antonio ethics lawyer, who said this is one such instance. 

Meanwhile, neighbors of Wildcatter’s Gunter plant said the new law left them demoralized and convinced that lawmakers were not interested in protecting them or their land. Diamond moved away after the bill passed. She said she feared the plants’ impact on her children’s health and believed the regulators were on the side of the company. 

She was stunned to learn about the Paxtons’ investment in the company.

“You can’t pretend to be about protecting the people when you directly profit from it,” Diamond said in an interview.

Wildcatter Helps Paxton in Difficult Times

In the months leading up to the bill passing the Legislature, four Wildcatter companies wired more than $73,000 to the Paxtons, according to bank statements reviewed by the news organizations that were part of the previously unreported impeachment documents. 

About $10,000 arrived in the two weeks before Angela Paxton voted on the environmental bill. An additional $12,000 was wired the week after the legislation passed in the Senate.

Because the records ProPublica and the Tribune reviewed are limited, the news organizations cannot say with certainty why the payments were made and how they were accounted for on the companies’ books.

The payments came as some Wildcatter companies were failing to pay local property taxes.

At the time, Wildcatter Sand Services, the company the Paxtons’ trust had invested in, already owed more than $31,000 in back taxes, according to Grayson County public records.

Several Wildcatter companies also owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in local taxes in 2023 that soon became delinquent.  

That year, Ken Paxton was facing his own troubles as allegations of bribery and corruption reached a fever pitch.

Early in 2023, the U.S. Justice Department’s public integrity unit, known for handling high-stakes political corruption cases, took over an investigation into allegations by Paxton’s senior advisers that he abused his office. (It was later dropped in 2025.) 

Paxton also reached a tentative $3.3 million settlement with some of those employees. They had accused him of firing them after they went to authorities with allegations that he had used his office to go after the enemies of an Austin real estate investor and donor. The proposed payout required legislative approval, drawing the ire of lawmakers who questioned why taxpayers should be on the hook. After the Legislature took no action, a judge awarded the whistleblowers $6.6 million in 2025. Paxton called the ruling a “bogus judgment in support of baseless claims by rogue employees.”

Some of the Wildcatter payments came while a House committee was investigating the whistleblowers’ claims about the attorney general’s conduct.  

On May 19, a week before Paxton was formally impeached, the blind trust wired $9,000 to attorney Mitch Little’s firm. Little later represented both the trust and Paxton in his impeachment trial. It’s unclear whether the money from Wildcatter was used to pay for the legal representation. The trust’s checking account would not have had enough money for that payment without deposits from the companies earlier in the month, records show. At the time, the trust also had an investment account with $9,300 in cash and just under $1 million in securities, but records do not show any distribution from that account to the checking account in that period.

Neither Loper nor Little, now a state representative, responded to questions about the transaction. Angela Paxton’s spokesperson said she has no knowledge of any payments for impeachment lawyers.

Craig Holman, ethics lobbyist for consumer-advocacy group Public Citizen in Washington, D.C., said it would be particularly problematic if any of the money was used as a “passthrough” for Paxton’s legal fees. 

All told, Wildcatter companies wired the Paxtons’ trust 15 payments between January and June 2023 totaling more than $83,000. It is unclear whether payments continued after that date because the records collected by impeachment investigators ended in June. 

The following year, two of those companies became delinquent on nearly $200,000 in 2023 property taxes to local schools, cities and counties. 

The governments had to sue to recover what they were owed.

The post Ken Paxton Says He’s Tough on Crime. His Trust Invested $600,000 in a Convicted Fraudster’s Company. appeared first on ProPublica.

The strain of bird flu that’s ripped through American barns for the last four years has killed two people who caught it from sick animals. But as far as anyone can tell, humans can’t spread it. The virus has remained a true “bird” flu, tailored to attach to avian cells, not invade human throats and noses, where coughing and sneezing reliably spew droplets. 

Under the right conditions, however, that could change. A single mutation could give the bird flu a foothold in people and spark a pandemic that experts fear could be deadlier than COVID-19. 

For that to happen, this bird flu would likely need to find an intermediate host — an animal vulnerable to viruses that infect both birds and humans. These animals would be crowded together, each infection raising the odds that a new strain could arise through mutation. Then, for that strain to jump across species, it would have to have access to humans and time to spread among them undetected.  

That perfect petri dish exists right now, a ProPublica investigation found. For over two months, an outbreak of bird flu has raged uncontrolled on a Utah farm that raises thousands of mink for fur. Mink have lungs and airways that on a cellular level are remarkably similar to those of people; they have caught and spread other flus and infected some humans with COVID-19. 

Instead of trying to stop the outbreak and prevent it from spilling into humans, state and federal officials have done little except try to keep its existence quiet, our investigation shows. The failure to act amounts to a cascade of missteps flu experts called “irresponsible” and “puzzling.” One called it “playing with fire.”

Utah agriculture officials learned in mid-August that mink were dying of bird flu on C&T Fenn Farms, about an hour’s drive south from Salt Lake City, according to communications released under the state’s public records law. 

Had poultry been infected, the playbook would have been clear: The strain is so virulent that if a single chicken tests positive, the U.S. government requires farmers to kill the whole flock to protect other farms as well as public health. Poultry farmers are reimbursed for the loss.

But there are no federal rules for how to deal with sick mink. 

Handling Utah’s response was state veterinarian Amanda Price, who sought help from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which takes the lead on bird flu outbreaks involving poultry and cows. 

USDA officials said they didn’t regulate mink or have a vaccine that was approved to give them. And though officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention spoke with Price’s health department counterparts who were less involved with the outbreak, they never talked to her, and she never reached out.

The threat of spillover has been far from the minds of Utah officials, records and interviews show. Instead, front and center have been the interests of a business raising animals to skin for luxury pelts to ship overseas. 

“It has been devastating,” Price told ProPublica of the outbreak and its impact on the farm’s owner. “This is his life’s work that he’s seeing be destroyed. I really hope that you understand the humanity behind this situation.”

Flu experts were unequivocal that the government should have ordered the farm to cull its mink, as other countries have done. 

But Utah never seriously considered it. A fur trade representative warned Price that doing so would kill the business and, ultimately, the industry. Farms spend decades breeding mink to develop unique genetic lineages. 

“There’s just not a lot of options out there other than kind of sitting and waiting and seeing what happens,” Price said, noting that USDA officials did not urge her to kill the mink or make her feel like bird flu in mink was any riskier than infections in other animals that have caught it, like ducks and cows.

Flu experts found that response surprising.

“Every other country that I’m aware of that has had H5N1 in fur farms, depopulation has happened pretty quickly,” said Tom Peacock, an avian influenza researcher at the Pirbright Institute. “The fact that the first instinct wasn’t just to depopulate and figure stuff out later is very concerning to me.”

And all the while, officials didn’t monitor the mink workers for symptoms, as guidance from the CDC urges. 

Their exposure is significant: Mink sneeze. They escape. They attack. “The mink are fierce,” said a Spanish-speaking “minkero” who works on a nearby farm, showing the scars he got from the aggressive, solitary creatures. “You get scared because the fucking thing bites, and it claws at you.”

Right now in Washington state, officials are working to track down the contacts of a symptomatic person exposed to dairy cattle infected with bird flu. The patient is isolating at home. Utah public health officials used to do similar, proactive monitoring. But they stopped after complaints from their colleagues in the agriculture department that farmers were annoyed by it.

“Us doing active monitoring was making it so that farms didn’t want to work with them,” said Pamela Gomez Pinedo, a respiratory disease epidemiologist for Utah’s health department. As a result, public health workers had a “pretty difficult time” getting details from agriculture officials, she said.

As part of a 2025 agreement, the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food agreed to share information about bird flu outbreaks on farms — so long as the health officials didn’t do anything to track workers’ health. 

“We will only do active monitoring in the case of evidence of human-to-human transmission,” Pinedo said in emails with a CDC epidemiologist. As the outbreak stretched to a month, CDC officials expressed concerns, asking how anyone would know if a worker had been infected if they weren’t getting tested.

Price said the state’s policy not to monitor workers is meant to allow farmers to decide whether to contact the health department, rather than “forcing it on them.” “If we started seeing people actively dying from this, obviously that would change how we respond to this,” she said. 

A telltale sign of bird flu infection in humans is eye redness. It is present in over 90% of cases and is often the sole symptom a person displays. 

Last Saturday, a ProPublica reporter tracked down two people who worked at the Utah mink farm. One had a visibly red eye. 

The CDC explicitly urges testing for the symptom. 

After ProPublica reached out to the farm, its owner, Chad Fenn, contacted the Utah County Health Department about the red eye, which had cleared up by Monday, he told ProPublica. He said the worker got dust in his eye; the department didn’t recommend testing.

“They’re not going to do anything,” Fenn said. “They said they don’t see that there’s a need.” He said the department recommended testing only if other symptoms, like a cough or sore throat, developed. 

A half dozen flu experts had no shortage of adjectives to describe their disbelief at the government decisions not to cull the mink or monitor and test the workers. 

“It’s amazing to me,” said Gail Hansen, a former Kansas state public health veterinarian and epidemiologist. “Utah doesn’t want to be the epicenter of the next human flu outbreak, right?”

Most of the new viruses that have shaken humanity in the past century have spilled over from animals. Ebolas likely came from fruit bats; HIV, from chimpanzees. The leading theory for COVID-19 is that it jumped from bats to humans via an intermediate host mammal such as a raccoon dog. And all the modern flu pandemics have been bird flu viruses that mutated to spread in humans. 

ProPublica reported extensively on spillover in a 2023 series called “Roots of an Outbreak.” To prevent more deadly spillovers, experts worldwide urge governments to take a “one health” approach to viral threats, treating dangers to animals as dangers to humans. 

That’s not happening in Utah, experts said after reviewing ProPublica’s findings. Both the state and federal government are to blame.

“There’s no leader of this ‘one health’ team to take charge,” said Erin Sorrell, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. “That is going to allow the virus to continue to circulate, potentially adapt and potentially spill over into another host, whether it’s avian, mammalian or human.”

This strain of bird flu, which began ripping through American poultry farms in early 2022, has proved adept at jumping to other species. It took hold in cows in 2024 and since then has run rampant through dairies.

Yet federal guidance to prevent the spread into mink farms hasn’t considered cows a threat. Farmers are encouraged to keep wild birds from infiltrating their barns and avoid feeding them raw poultry. It has said nothing about feeding beef parts to mink, which farmers commonly do in summer months to encourage the animals to put on weight and grow. 

Dairy cows, which are not “depopulated” if exposed to bird flu, can still be slaughtered with the meat sold to farms and humans even though researchers have found the virus in the tissues of sick cows. USDA officials have insisted that beef for human consumption is free of bird flu, in part because the virus concentrates itself in sections of the cow people don’t usually eat. Fenn said that the mink are routinely fed raw organs of livestock, including cows. 

The genomic data from the samples of mink lungs and brains sent from Utah to a USDA lab shows that the mink were stricken with the same strain of the virus that has spread in dairy herds. Officials said they didn’t know whether contaminated beef was the way the mink got infected.

In mink, the dairy strain of bird flu may have found a much better host for mutating into a human flu, because mink airways have an abundance of the type of cell receptors in people’s throats and noses that are a common pathway for infection.  

A 2024 study of the dairy strain of the bird flu found that a single mutation could switch the virus from preferring the bird-type receptors to human-type receptors. And in studies using ferrets, a close relative of mink, the virus acquired mutations that let it attack human-type cell receptors. 

It’s not clear to scientists just how much of an evolutionary leap would be needed for this strain of bird flu to spread among humans, or whether mink are the host that would allow that leap to happen. 

How this ultimately plays out “really depends on what happens with the virus,” said Meghan Davis, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University.

“We might get lucky, and a response that is not robust may not have dire consequences,” she said. “But we may get unlucky.”

There’s also a risk of something called “reassortment,” where another flu virus could infect the same cell as a bird flu virus and swap wide swaths of genetic code already adapted to humans. 

When the outbreak in the mink farm started, there was very little seasonal flu it could mix with, but September saw one of the earliest starts to flu season on record, compared with November, when flu normally takes off.

“The most likely scenario for a pandemic is that we have a virus that reassorts with another virus,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at the Brown University School of Public Health. “Obviously, having this circulate amid human flu season is not great.” 

Utah officials were far more responsive to the threat of spillover in 2020, when outbreaks of COVID-19 spread explosively on mink farms – including this very farm. They invited federal officials to the state to research how the virus adapted and moved.

Given mink’s reputation as escape artists, wildlife experts set up traps around infected farms. The traps frequently caught mink carrying COVID-19 that had originated in the nearby barns. The virus infected both escaped mink and wild mink they had come in contact with. Mink and farmworkers were frequently tested, tracking the way that the virus was spreading and mutating. 

As other states and countries took the same measures, they identified humans infected by the mink with COVID-19 and, ultimately, human-to-human transmission.

There are no similar efforts now in Utah with bird flu. 

A USDA spokesperson told ProPublica that it was more involved in 2020 because the virus that causes COVID-19 had “significant” potential to transmit between humans and animals and vice versa.

Scientists with the USDA sequenced and published bird flu genomic data from the first samples of dead mink. Those sequences didn’t show any particularly concerning mutations, experts and the CDC told ProPublica. 

But in the past two months, experts said, the virus is sure to have continued mutating as it spread – it’s only a question of whether those mutations could confer some advantage in infecting humans as well.

“As long as it continues to go mink to mink, then it becomes more and more likely that it could jump to a human,” Hansen said.

Fenn said new samples were taken two weeks ago. Price said she is still waiting for the results. 

John Korslund, a retired USDA official who helped coordinate the response to COVID-19 on mink farms several years prior, was one of several experts who said officials need to look closely at newer genetic samples to see how the virus is evolving. 

“I really want to know what the virus has done, from when it started to today,” he said. “Are we getting accumulated mutations making the virus more dangerous?”

ProPublica began reporting on the outbreak late this summer after the USDA updated a bird flu dashboard that showed seven captive mink had tested positive in Utah. But neither the USDA nor state officials had said anything publicly, and, when asked, they wouldn’t discuss what was actually happening on the farm.

Communications obtained under the state’s public records law — first published by the Animal Welfare Institute and reported on by the Salt Lake Tribune — show Utah officials took pains to protect the farm’s privacy amid the outbreak. The state did not declare an emergency, because doing so, officials said, “may alert animal rights groups,” according to the messages.

Willy Lanier, a public health veterinarian with the state health department, told colleagues to keep the outbreak under “closer hold” than outbreaks of bird flu on poultry and dairy farms. Keeping the information confidential was consistent with state protocol, a spokesperson in his department said, adding that it was still shared with local health officials. But when ProPublica reached out to the spokesperson for the Utah County Health Department about a possible bird flu outbreak, she said, “That would be news to me.”

Price is so deferential to the family that owns the farm that she has not set foot on the property. 

“I’m really the only one here at this facility that’s been dealing with the producer. They’re a very private bunch,” Price said. “A lot of what I’m going off of is what I’ve seen from Google Maps, what I’ve talked to the producer about, what I’ve talked to the vet about. I haven’t felt the need to go out there based on those conversations.”

She said she “became very comfortable” in conversations with the owner that the virus wouldn’t spread off the farm. It doesn’t have animals moving on and off over the course of the year like on a dairy or poultry farm; mink leave only when they’re slaughtered and skinned for pelts at the end of the year. She also said that she was confident the owner would recapture any escaped mink.

Short of a formal quarantine, Price gave the farm a “verbal hold” to not move any mink, or manure or carcasses, off the farm. “We haven’t seen spread off of this farm. We have not had additional cases in Utah that are linked to this, so thus far the verbal hold orders and the measures that have been taken look to be successful: There is not spread happening from this farm from this case.”

Price’s assertion didn’t allay the concerns of experts that ProPublica spoke with. When poultry test positive for this strain of bird flu, all nearby farms are quarantined and tested for the virus. But the approach in Utah relies on farms reporting cases or the public calling in reports of dead birds in the area. 

“If you’re not looking for something, you won’t find it,” Sorrell said. “Unless you’re doing active surveillance, you can’t claim that you haven’t had cases.”

Fenn told ProPublica his conversations with state officials made him less worried about any kind of spread. When the outbreak started, Fenn said, he asked whether the bird flu could infect people. 

“Right off the bat, the state people we reported to, they said you don’t need to worry too much,” Fenn said. “My guys wear masks every day. They have glasses they can wear,” Fenn said. “ Me? I don’t wear it at all. Never have, never will, because I’ve been doing it for 40 years.”

Fenn said he wished he could vaccinate the mink for bird flu to keep the rest of his animals from catching it and dying; Price asked the USDA about a vaccine that had been used to save endangered wild species but said she got nowhere with that request. The USDA told ProPublica its division responsible for protecting animal health has no “species-specific regulatory authority or dedicated programs” for vaccinating mink, depopulating them or paying owners back for such a culling.

Fenn told ProPublica he thinks concerns about mink as a particularly risky bird flu host are trumped up by anti-fur activists, the same forces that he believed were behind the reactions in Spain and Finland, which depopulated mink farms hit with bird flu. “Europeans are a little scared of everything,” he said. “They’re going to do what they’re going to do, and here in the United States, we’re going to do what we’re going to do.”

Price said she was aware that Finland and Spain had depopulated their fur farms when the same strain infected them. “I didn’t really look much further into it,” she said, explaining that she was interested in those cases only for lessons about how to handle the outbreak, but not the particular reasons those countries chose to depopulate the farms. 

A USDA spokesperson said Congress would have to specifically fund a program to depopulate mink. (The program to cull poultry to stop the spread of bird flu has cost well over $1 billion since 2022.)

The events in Utah are a “clear warning sign” about the dangers of mink farms, said Neil Vora, executive director for the Preventing Pandemics at the Source Coalition.

“Fur farms are to produce pelts purely for luxury goods, to make fancy coats,” he said. “It’s absurd that we’re willing to gamble with the lives of millions of people just to keep an industry alive.”

The industry has struggled as American consumers increasingly reject fur. Though domestic farms peaked about a decade ago, selling luxury pelts that often ended up in China, foreign farms have sprung up, threatening the business. 

While animal rights advocates have pushed for Congress to adopt legislation that would phase out the fur industry, buying out farmers over the course of a year to end the practice once and for all, winds in Congress are blowing the other direction. The Senate will soon weigh in on the latest Farm Bill, which now seeks to expand market opportunities for mink farmers by undoing a prohibition in federal law on subsidizing the fur trade. 

The virus continues to spread on the Utah farm, said Fenn, though at a slower pace. Experts told ProPublica it still poses a risk.

“I would want a full on hazmat suit if I were on that farm,” Peacock said. “Or, preferably, I’d rather not to be on that farm.”

The post Bird Flu Is Raging on a Mink Farm. It Could Spark a Human Pandemic, Experts Say, but Officials Won’t Act. appeared first on ProPublica.

Lonnie Rouse shuffled into a wood-paneled conference room at the Washington state Capitol in March 2018. It had been nearly a decade since medical experts diagnosed him with a neurological disease they attributed to his exposure to chemicals at work. In the time since, he had acquired a stutter, begun limping and lost several teeth biting into a banana.

For nearly 20 years, Rouse had packaged plutonium and monitored radioactive waste at the Hanford Site, a now-decommissioned Department of Energy nuclear weapons production plant in south-central Washington and one of the most contaminated nuclear sites in the country. Tanks full of radioactive sludge exposed him to at least 48 potentially hazardous chemicals. The worksite was so toxic, he said, that the floor once melted the rubber off his boots. 

Rouse was among the thousands of workers responsible for the ongoing environmental cleanup at Hanford, which has been underway since the DOE shut down the last reactor in the late 1980s. Congress has acknowledged, based on voluminous studies, that radiation at DOE sites poses health risks to workers.

Over time, some people at Hanford became so sick they could no longer work. Like Rouse, they filed for workers’ compensation. The DOE consistently challenged their claims and tried to shift the blame onto the workers themselves. 

By the time Rouse took his place behind then-Gov. Jay Inslee, he was desperate. His 2009 workers’ compensation claim had been denied. He had burned through his retirement savings and declared bankruptcy. 

As he watched, the governor signed a bill that was supposed to change his life.

For years, Hanford employees filing workers’ compensation claims had to prove the chemicals they were exposed to on the job made them sick. The new law Inslee signed flipped that burden of proof. Under the law, agencies were instructed to presume that working at Hanford had caused certain cancers, neurological diseases and respiratory illnesses. Now the Department of Energy would have to prove to the state that something other than the job had made the workers sick if it wanted to deny their claims. 

Rouse thought the presumption law would speed up his claim for benefits. State lawmakers and the former governor thought it would force the DOE to take responsibility for the harm Hanford workers were experiencing. 

But despite the law, the DOE continues to fight new and existing claims, Cascade PBS and ProPublica found. We asked the state for claims records going back to the presumption law’s passage in 2018, but the state only provided records going back three and a half years, to 2023. In that period, workers filed 102 new claims for benefits, state data shows. The DOE did not recommend approving a single one. 

The state, which has final say, overruled the DOE and approved 75% of those claims. The DOE appealed all but seven of those approvals.

Cascade PBS and ProPublica spoke to workers, surviving family members, lawyers representing workers and state officials. They all pointed to a pattern: The DOE systematically challenges and then drags out workers’ compensation claims for years with recommended denials and subsequent legal appeals. Along the way, it has spent millions on outside lawyers and expert testimony, including doctor evaluations that point to other causes for workers’ illnesses. 

The DOE has paid out benefits to Hanford workers in some cases, lawyers and families said, but it has done so while still actively appealing the claims. It warns workers that they may have to pay the money back.  

Our reporting found that not even death ends the cycle of appeals. About 152 workers’ claims remain stranded in this legal limbo — approved by the state but still under appeal by the DOE. Half of those workers are dead. The DOE continues to fight to deny their families survivors’ benefits.

“It seems pretty coldhearted, calculated, that they’re trying to save money on the back of sick workers who they made sick,” said Gerry Pollet, one of the Washington state representatives who sponsored the 2018 presumption law, who is also a co-founder of the Hanford cleanup watchdog group Heart of America Northwest. “That’s why we needed a state law.”

After Cascade PBS and ProPublica raised questions about the DOE’s pattern of litigating claims, regulators at the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries met twice with DOE staff, state agency spokesperson Carrie McCausland said. But she could not point to any other actions the agency has taken beyond the two meetings.

“Agency staff are concerned and are right now assessing the severity of patterns we’ve seen,” McCausland wrote in an email.

The DOE did not answer detailed questions or respond to the newsrooms’ findings. In a statement, a spokesperson wrote that the DOE is following “all applicable local, state, and federal laws” and “has a long and successful record of accomplishment of protecting human health and the environment.”

The DOE has the right to file multiple appeals against a claim. According to court records, its appeals have sought to overturn claims approved by the state, narrow the period of back wages, or block survivors’ benefits, among other things. In appeals filings, the DOE’s lawyers have argued that factors other than work at Hanford played a role in the workers’ illnesses, including smoking, drinking, obesity or genetics.

In Rouse’s case, the energy department blamed alcoholism and family conflicts. The state agency that handles appeals did not find those arguments persuasive. DOE awarded Rouse most of his back pay in 2024, his lawyer said. Rouse declined to say how much that was, but said he is not touching the money until the legal process concludes.

In the nearly eight years it has been fighting his claim, the DOE has filed more than 20 appeals contesting different aspects of his claim. 

“We were always told that nothing is out here that’s going to harm you — you do what you are supposed to do, and you do what you are trained to do, and you’re going to be fine,” said Rouse, who now receives 24-hour care.

“But that’s not what happens.” 

“Depleted and Disgusted”  

The smell of ammonia serves as a warning, workers say, that the underground tanks holding a mix of radioactive sludge have burped chemical vapors into the air above. From 1998 to 2008, it was Rouse’s job to monitor the toxic waste held in the “tank farms.” The containers together hold more than 50 million gallons of liquid waste. Rouse says he lost count of how many times tanks released toxic vapor that took his breath away, sometimes knocking him to the ground and making him vomit and bleed from his nose. According to a 2014 report funded by the federal government, tank farm workers exposed to chemical vapors commonly reported nausea, headaches and nosebleeds.

The liquid sloshing around in those tanks represented the radioactive byproducts of the Cold War. Hanford produced two-thirds of the plutonium for the nation’s nuclear arsenal and fueled the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945. 

The end of production in the late 1980s launched a cleanup effort that is expected to continue until at least 2086. As of January 2025, more than 13,000 people were working at Hanford, nearly all of them for private companies contracted by the DOE. It is one of the largest and most expensive efforts to remediate toxic waste in the nation’s history. 

In 2000, Congress passed the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act, which provides medical care and one-time payouts to workers at DOE sites across the country. It was an acknowledgement that the nation’s nuclear weapons workers had been exposed to radioactive substances known to cause cancer. In it, lawmakers referred to a DOE policy “to litigate occupational illness claims, which has deterred workers from filing workers’ compensation claims and has imposed major financial burdens for such employees who have sought compensation.”

But the benefits of the federal program were limited: It capped payouts at $400,000. 

Washington’s workers’ compensation system, by contrast, can provide steady wage replacement or a pension benefit, in some cases, for the rest of an injured employee’s life. It’s a program that can easily surpass the maximum federal benefit. 

The state went further with its 2018 presumption law. Such laws generally protect firefighters who are regularly exposed to smoke, burned plastics and extreme heat. The National Council on Compensation Insurance, the Washington state attorney general and Pollet all said they were unaware of any other state that has extended that protection for radiological workers.

The federal government challenged Washington’s state law later that year in court, arguing it was discriminatory because it only applied to Hanford and the DOE.

Anticipating a Supreme Court decision that ultimately agreed, lawmakers passed an expanded version that covered all workers at “radiological hazardous waste facilities” in the state, including the state’s only functioning nuclear power plant and a French-owned facility that manufactures nuclear fuel rods. Nonetheless, roughly 75% of the 428 claims filed since 2018 have come from the DOE’s Hanford workers, according to the state Department of Labor and Industries. 

Kathleen Kersey spent 10 years at Hanford, during both the production and cleanup stages. Much of her work involved measuring radiation around the site and making sure levels were safe. She says her safety training covered radiation, but not other hazards like chemical vapors burping from the waste tanks.

Kersey struggles to walk, has short-term memory problems and at one point lost vision in her right eye for three months. A doctor diagnosed her with multiple sclerosis, which is a neurological disorder, one of the categories of illnesses the state’s presumption law recognizes as related to chemical exposure at Hanford. In 2019 she filed a claim, which the state approved. 

The DOE has appealed, arguing that something other than her time at Hanford caused her multiple sclerosis.

Kersey is one of the 152 workers still awaiting a resolution on her workers’ compensation claim. The DOE has not paid her any back wages, she said. The DOE declined to comment on her case. 

“I feel depleted and disgusted,” Kersey said of the appeals process. “It makes me feel like I’m worthless. I have no value.” 

“When Does This End?”

State records show that the DOE has filed more than 500 appeals since the presumption law passed in 2018. In 20 cases, as it did with Rouse, the DOE has appealed a single worker’s claim half a dozen times or more.

“We have seen tremendous pushback from DOE on essentially almost every single case that’s been brought,” said Washington State Attorney General Nick Brown. 

Rouse’s wife, Melinda, said she knew something was wrong when he could not remember how to cut an orange. His vision started to blur, he stumbled often, and suddenly he felt irritable all the time. His primary care physician first thought he might have had a brain tumor. The physician referred him to a neurologist who noted cognitive impairment, possibly due to exposure to multiple toxins at the Hanford Site. The neurologist then referred him to a neuropsychologist, who diagnosed him with “toxic encephalopathy” in 2009, saying it was “more likely than not” that chemical exposure damaged his brain, according to court records.

The U.S. Department of Labor agreed too, approving him in 2010 for benefits under the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act, saying it was “at least as likely as not” that Hanford contributed to his illness. A federal medical consultant even praised the neuropsychologist who assessed Rouse for his “unusually thorough analysis of causation.” 

Rouse refiled his 2009 state workers’ compensation claim under the new law in 2018. Washington state approved it later that year. 

The DOE appealed. It hired a medical toxicologist, who reviewed Rouse’s medical records and testified that he did not have the disease he claimed, and brought in an industrial hygienist, who downplayed the exposure risks at Hanford. The DOE’s toxicologist testified that Rouse’s drinking was “the most significant, what we might term, ‘toxic exposure’ that’s described in the medical record.”

A group of three physicians and an industrial hygienist have collectively earned over $1.7 million testifying against Hanford workers since the presumption law’s passage, according to DOE invoices the newsrooms obtained by a federal records request. One of the DOE’s go-to expert witness doctors earned more than $200,000 from the DOE last year alone. He did not respond to multiple emails seeking comment. 

A single law firm, Wallace, Mann, Capener, Bishop & Debney, handles all of the DOE’s appeals. In addition to the fees paid to expert witnesses, the department paid the firm nearly $10 million between 2018 and 2025. The law firm did not reply to multiple requests for comment. 

In cases where the DOE has appealed the state’s approval of a claim since 2018, the agency that handles appeals has sided with workers nearly 9 times out of 10, according to state data. 

Pollet, the state representative who sponsored the 2018 presumption bill, acknowledged that the law has fallen short of his expectation. 

“This was supposed to have ended a decade ago,” he said about sick Hanford workers still awaiting back wages and medical care. “It’s even worse than it was 10 years ago.”

“I think their actions are not only despicable, but they are criminal,” he said of the DOE. 

The state Department of Labor and Industries said it expected “to engage further with the DOE,” which could include putting the department on an improvement plan and monitoring its progress. 

Another option state regulators have is to revoke the DOE’s ability to accept and pay out claims directly. According to the state Department of Labor and Industries, the contractors that employ Hanford workers on behalf of the DOE would then decide whether to join the state-managed fund or seek state approval to manage claims themselves. Doing so could limit the DOE’s power to appeal, but contractors would still have that right. 

Brown, the state attorney general, said he wants to wait and see how the DOE’s appeals of claims play out in higher courts. He hopes that once the DOE’s losses start stacking up, it will slow the volume of its litigation. 

Attorney Charlynn Hull said she thought the DOE’s approach might soften during the Biden administration. But Hull said she observed no change in the DOE’s behavior. Her firm, Smart Law, represents the majority of Hanford workers’ compensation claimants, including Rouse and Kersey.

One of the hardest things about the DOE’s appeals, Hull said, is the testifying that the children and spouses of dead workers must do. 

“I think that it’s just, it’s tormenting to them, in many ways, to relive how awful that experience was, especially with the cancer-related death,” Hull said. “When does this end?”

Dying While Under Appeal

For Isidoro Mata Jr., it ended with his children draining fluid from his lungs through a tube doctors had surgically inserted into his chest.

Mata demolished buildings at Hanford for nearly 30 years. Court records show he was diagnosed in 2015 with thyroid cancer, one of the illnesses that Washington’s law ties to work at Hanford. Sara Chilcoat, his daughter, said he kept working as long as he could.

State claims managers approved Mata’s claim in 2019. The DOE appealed, arguing that “medical opinion supports denial of this claim as not related to the distinctive conditions of employment.” The appeal did not elaborate further. The state forced the DOE to pay his wages and the cost of his medications, Chilcoat said. But the DOE filed a separate motion to stop his benefits while the appeal was adjudicated. 

In its motion, the DOE argued that it was likely to prevail in its appeal because a doctor who examined Mata in 2019 believed his cancer was unrelated to his work at Hanford, according to court records. The state found the doctor’s examination “lacking in objective findings.” 

“He was fighting for his life while they were trying to do that,” Chilcoat said. “That makes me mad.” 

Mata’s case file notes that he missed three meetings with DOE lawyers in 2020. The state attorney general’s office sent the appeals judge a letter in July explaining that Mata was unable to participate because of his chemotherapy treatments. The DOE, which did not respond to questions about Mata’s case, dropped its appeal in December.

Less than three months later, Mata died.

The post Nuclear Weapons Waste Made Workers Sick. Despite a Law Meant to Help, the DOE Keeps Fighting Their Claims. appeared first on ProPublica.

In early August, election workers north of Spokane, Washington, went across the street to the post office to check for late mail-in ballots. It was three days after the primary and they were expecting no more than a few dozen.

Instead, their mailbox was brimming with envelopes — more than 500 of them, each a vote that wouldn’t count. The sight was “jarring,” said Auditor Lori Larsen, a Republican who oversees voting in Stevens County.

Across the region, other election officials were getting similar jolts. In the 11 predominately rural counties in eastern Washington, nearly 2,000 ballots came in late, compared to about 600 in 2022, the previous midterm primary.

In recent weeks, concerns about mail-in voting disruptions have focused almost entirely on President Donald Trump’s now-shelved plan to sharply restrict who can vote by mail. 

But a ProPublica data analysis shows that delays resulting from the U.S. Postal Service’s cost-cutting measures have endangered the validity of ballots cast in rural areas, not only in Washington, but across the country.

Over the past three years, as mail volume continued to plummet and annual deficits ballooned, the Postal Service started consolidating the processing of first-class mail at larger regional plants instead of at smaller hubs closer to local post offices. Then, in a little-noted switch that mostly took effect after the 2024 election, the agency cut the frequency of mail pickups in half at many post offices 50 miles or more from these processing plants, from twice daily to once.

The changes often added a day or more to delivery time and, most importantly for ballots, pushed back postmarking, which doesn’t happen until mail reaches the regional centers. 

In this year’s primary, the effects of the cuts were clearest in five states that make detailed data on mail-in ballots available: Washington, California, Ohio, North Carolina and Oregon. All have or recently had grace periods allowing ballots to count if they come in after Election Day as long as they’re postmarked by the deadline.

In these states, the number of ballots rejected for arriving late soared in counties affected by the service changes compared to 2022, ProPublica’s analysis showed. 

Rejection rates in counties where services were cut doubled or tripled from what they were four years ago, dwarfing any increases in counties where postal pickups remained as they were, our analysis showed. In urban Spokane, for example, the number of ballots rejected for being late actually dropped this year.

Across the five states, the delays have had the most substantial effect in areas that voted for Trump in 2024, ProPublica’s analysis shows. In Washington, Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, a Democrat, said he sees the service changes directed by Republican appointees leading the Postal Service as a way to undermine mail-in voting. 

“I don’t think they realized how much it was going to affect their voter base,” he said, adding that Washington has “a lot of rural Republican voters.”

Postal Service leaders say such delays are less likely in the Nov. 3 general election because of “extraordinary measures” the agency puts into place for these votes, when there’s typically far more turnout. They have circulated a memo to the nation’s more than 30,000 post offices saying that for the 10 days before the election, managers should separate completed ballots from other first-class mail and deliver those intended for local election offices the day they come in.

At an Oct. 15 news conference, Postal Service leaders emphasized the agency’s longstanding recommendation that voters mail ballots back at least a week before their states’ deadlines, while defending the agency’s ability to fast-track ballots through the system. 

“We work to identify and address issues quickly,” said Amber McReynolds, chair of the Postal Service board of governors, “so ballots can continue to move swiftly from election offices to voters and from voters back to election offices.”

Election consultants, researchers and former Postal Service officials told ProPublica that the guidance for the upcoming vote gave more detailed directions on how to expedite ballots. They said they hoped the agency’s special measures would limit delays, but some said mistakes were likely. 

“I don’t think we can say with any kind of conviction that there will be no ballots rejected,” said Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer of the National Association of Election Officials. “It isn’t a question of ‘if,’ but a question of ‘how many.'”

A pilot program instituting the delivery changes in 18 regions before the 2024 election ran into problems. An audit by the Postal Service’s inspector general found that agency staff in these areas sometimes didn’t handle ballots correctly, mainly because instructions weren’t clearly communicated. (A Postal Service spokesperson said “learnings from the pilot” have been applied as the program has expanded.)

After this year’s primary, reports by media outlets noted that mail-in ballot rejection rates were higher than in the past, but ProPublica’s analysis shows these increases were directly connected to Postal Service changes. Research published in September by the Brookings Institution also found this connection, projecting that if the pattern held in the general election, tens of thousands of mail-in ballots could be rejected.

At least seven closely contested congressional districts — including Washington’s 3rd, California’s 22nd and North Carolina’s 11th — are in areas that were affected by service changes in the primary, ProPublica found.

Elena Patel, who conducted the Brookings analysis, said service changes may still imperil mail-in votes in the general election.

“I think there remain risks to ballots,” she said, adding that the Postal Service’s plan for the general election “depends on flawless execution.”

Mail-in voting has become more popular over the last decade, with many states broadening access to it during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Nearly 1 in 3 Americans voted this way in 2022 and 2024. Trump himself frequently votes by mail, and in recent weeks has started to encourage his supporters to do so as well, though he has claimed without evidence that the process is rife with fraud.

The Postal Service has mostly ensured the timely delivery of hundreds of millions of ballots, even as mail volume overall has dropped 50% from its high in 2006. 

When Louis DeJoy was appointed postmaster general in spring 2020, he inherited an $81 billion operating deficit and rapidly took steps such as eliminating overtime to reduce costs, under pressure from Trump and others in his administration. (DeJoy did not respond to questions from ProPublica.)

The NAACP sued that August, alleging the measures could affect mail-in votes in that year’s general election. Courts ordered DeJoy to reverse some of the cuts and the Postal Service agreed to implement special procedures to ensure ballots weren’t delayed. The Postal Service has continued following those procedures since. 

Still, DeJoy went forward with a 10-year restructuring plan designed to save the agency billions. It ended evening pickups from some post offices, often in rural areas. Trucks serving these places travel long distances and at times were mostly empty. This part of the plan — called regional transportation optimization, or RTO — was projected to eventually save the Postal Service $4 billion a year.

The agency announced the national rollout of the RTO plan in 2024, but DeJoy agreed to pause it leading up to that year’s November election, leaving only about 4,000 ZIP codes in the pilot project affected by the service changes.

In January 2025, the Postal Regulatory Commission, which oversees the Postal Service, warned that moving forward with the plan would be disruptive to rural communities and might not save as much money as expected. The Postal Service rolled out the reductions anyway, extending the changes to almost 20,000 ZIP codes to date. Officials said they expect the system to be fully implemented within two years.

This January, the agency put out a statement saying the transportation cuts would mean it took longer for mail, including ballots, to be postmarked and delivered. But the Postal Service didn’t specify which voters would be affected by the slowdowns and which wouldn’t.

Though the delay from RTO is often only a day, mail can be delayed longer if it’s deposited in a mailbox after the daily pickup time, or just before Sunday or a holiday.

A Postal Service spokesperson said the agency told election officials that RTO would change schedules and reemphasized the need for voters to get their ballots in the mail at least a week ahead of time. Election officials in Washington said the Postal Service wasn’t direct enough about the fact that the changes would lead to delays in delivering and postmarking ballots.

“What they said was, ‘We are going to change the way we do postmarks,'” said Hobbs, Washington’s secretary of state. “That was it.”

Patel, the Brookings analyst and a former Postal Regulatory Commission employee, said that more direct communication to voters could have helped change their behavior. “That’s the part that I think has not been super transparent about the whole process,” she said.

Many of the areas that saw a spike in late ballots were in Western states, which were the earliest and most enthusiastic adopters of expanded mail-in voting.

In 2004, Washington became the second state to start conducting all-mail elections, in which every eligible voter automatically receives a mail-in ballot. Most residents vote by putting their ballots in drop boxes. Still, in 2024, about 33% put them in the mail.

In the 30 mostly rural Washington counties most affected by RTO, the percentage of ballots postmarked late more than tripled compared to the 2022 primary, ProPublica found.

 Is your ZIP code subject to reduced mail service? Use our lookup tool to find out.

In Garfield County, in southeastern Washington, 19 ballots — nearly 1 in 10 cast — had late postmarks this year. In 2022, only a single ballot was postmarked late. In Pend Oreille County, in northeast Washington along the Idaho panhandle, 6% of ballots were rejected for arriving late, compared to 1% in the 2022 primary.

“It was pretty awful telling people we couldn’t count their votes,” said Marianne Nichols, Pend Oreille’s longtime auditor. “They were quite upset because they felt like, ‘Why? This was in the mailbox on election day, the post office picked it up and had it.’ They felt like it should have counted.”

In Stevens County, the percentage of ballots rejected for having a late postmark jumped to 8%, from 1% in 2022.

Steve Hutkins, a retired professor who analyzes the effect of Postal Service changes on Savethepostoffice.com, also found that places in Washington with RTO had more ballot rejections during local elections earlier this year for school board and other measures. The patterns “set off the alarm bells,” he said.

Stuart Holmes, the state’s director of elections, said he reached out to Postal Service officials to find out what had happened, but got few answers and no specifics on delays related to RTO, which were a “total surprise,” he said.

Election officials in California and Oregon also reported thousands more ballots rejected for arriving late during their primaries. Counties affected by RTO, including Kern County, California, had substantially higher rates of ballots rejected for mail-related reasons, ProPublica found.

Kern County’s assistant registrar of voters, Laura Cantu, said election officials are urging rural voters to use drop boxes to cast their ballots in the general election.

The expansion of RTO had a similar effect in North Carolina and Ohio, where the rates of late ballots were about twice as high in counties affected by the restructuring as rates in counties that weren’t. Since 2022, these states have also eliminated grace periods in which ballots postmarked by Election Day could count even if they arrived later. Voters unused to the tighter deadlines also could have contributed to an increase in late ballots.

ProPublica didn’t find any association between RTO and higher rates of late ballots in Wisconsin, even though clerks reported delays involving mail-in ballots cast in its state election, held this spring. (Other Postal Service changes may have contributed to the delays.) 

Wisconsin’s data does not distinguish ballots sent by mail from those cast in drop boxes or in person, making it impossible to definitively measure rejection rates just for ballots returned by mail. Election researchers said Wisconsin’s deadline for mail ballots, which must come into election offices by 8 p.m. on Election Day, also probably had an effect. 

“If you know that you don’t have a grace period, it probably affects voter behavior,” said Patel, the Brookings researcher. 

Recent Postal Service audits have found that RTO-related changes had saved the agency about $2.8 billion by the end of fiscal year 2025 — less money than expected — and are slowing down all first-class mail, not just ballots. Residents of rural areas are waiting longer for everything from prescriptions to bills, a report published in September by the Postal Service’s inspector general said.

A Postal Service spokesperson still defended the plan, both for financial reasons and to adjust to the changing marketplace. “These savings are both significant and necessary,” he said.

In the lead-up to Nov. 3, the agency’s plan is to route ballots meant for local election offices to a nearby postal facility or directly to their destination. They shouldn’t go to regional plants, which the Postal Service says should minimize delays.

Larsen, the Stevens County auditor, is encouraging Washington voters to deposit their ballots in drop boxes rather than relying on the mail. Since the primary, she’s increased the number of red, white and blue drop boxes that sit outside government buildings from seven to 12. Near each box, there’s a large sign encouraging people to take selfies when they vote and send the photos to Larsen. 

In prior years, Larsen said, she avoided telling voters how or when to vote, concerned they might regret choices they made if critical information later emerged about the candidates. That’s no longer uppermost in her mind.

“Now we are more concerned that we get your ballot,” she said.

The post Ballot Rejections Soared in Rural Counties After USPS Reduced Mail Service appeared first on ProPublica.

The civil rights arm of the U.S. Department of Education has dramatically scaled back investigations involving schools and colleges since the second Trump administration began, even as complaints continue to pour in, a ProPublica analysis of newly obtained records found.

The analysis shows how severely the department’s Office for Civil Rights has retracted from its mission, launching an average of about 100 new investigations a month — 1,839 total from Inauguration Day in 2025 through July 2026. The OCR launched an average of 310 new investigations each month in 2024 during the Biden administration, according to data previously obtained by ProPublica.

Under President Donald Trump, the OCR abandoned the public-facing list of schools it was investigating and the reasons for those investigations, including claims of discrimination based on race, sex and disability. ProPublica sued the department to obtain internal case data. The government subsequently provided records of the OCR’s actions in the first 18 months of Trump’s return to power, and we are publishing the data so the public can search the cases.

The decline in investigations is especially dramatic for cases involving sex discrimination. More than 200 new complaints were filed with the office related to schools’ handling of sexual violence — rape, assault and abuse. But the Trump administration launched investigations in only 29 of them, finding fault with a school district only once, according to the newly obtained data. It’s typical for there to be at least 60 sexual violence investigations opened each year.

The department addressed fewer of these cases despite continued concerns about the persistence of the problem — as demonstrated by the intense public scrutiny over how Cornell University addressed a student’s report of a 2024 gang rape.

Beyond that, the OCR launched only two investigations into discrimination based on sexual orientation.

“They’re barely doing anything to protect women and girls, including survivors of sexual violence,” said Shiwali Patel, an attorney who previously worked at the OCR and is now with the National Women’s Law Center. “They just don’t care about women and girls.”

The organization and more than 120 other advocacy, civil rights and education groups sent a letter on Tuesday to Congress’ ranking education committee leaders urging them to hold the OCR accountable for “its failure to enforce civil rights law and protect students from sexual violence.”

With OCR’s online database idle since Trump took office, the only way to know where the agency has launched investigations has been through selective department press releases, when OCR employees provided internal data to reporters or from schools and colleges that acknowledged that their institutions had become targets of the investigations.

The data ProPublica received as a result of our lawsuit can now fill that gap on the more than 1,800 civil rights investigations that the department initiated from Jan. 20, 2025, to July 29 of this year. The database also reflects the 24,000 new complaints logged through May and the nearly 17,000 new and old cases the department closed — almost always by dismissing them. 

The agency is dismissing complaints more frequently than in prior years, the records show. And fewer than 700 cases opened by the administration were resolved with a finding of wrongdoing.

The data does not include investigations that had been opened before Trump retook power but that are pending decisions by OCR — a backlog of more than 10,000 cases.

In response to questions from ProPublica, an Education Department spokesperson blamed the Biden administration for leaving office with 19,000 unresolved cases, which the Trump administration has worked to address.

“Spare us the crocodile tears as the Trump Administration is working to restore OCR to its original purpose: enforcing the law to ensure all students can receive an education free from discrimination,” spokesperson Sabin Sidney wrote.

He added that the administration “treats any form of discrimination on the basis of race or sex as illegal.” And he criticized the prior administration for endorsing policies that allowed transgender girls and women to compete in women’s athletics and use women's restrooms.

The data disclosure comes as the administration is moving forward with efforts to shut down the department and move the OCR under the Department of Justice. Disability rights advocates and others have been critical of the move, while the administration says it will lead to more efficiency and do a better job protecting students’ rights. The majority of cases before the OCR involve students with disabilities, as has been the case historically.

In the early months of Trump’s second term, Education Secretary Linda McMahon fired hundreds of employees and closed seven regional OCR offices, leaving the department severely diminished. Its remaining civil rights workers have described untenable case loads and pressure to dismiss complaints.

The remaining attorneys “are navigating pure chaos,” said Rachel Gittleman, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, the union that represents OCR staff. “They are being asked to use the tools they have used for their entire careers not for good, not to protect students, but to harm students. You see it in the case dismissals, the cases that target trans students or people of color.”

In examining the new records, ProPublica found the extent to which the agency has shifted its focus, as the OCR places a new emphasis on complaints that men faced discrimination. The agency launched 172 investigations into alleged “discrimination against males,” compared with 104 cases of alleged “discrimination against females” in the period examined.

It also has investigated allegations that campus programs or scholarships excluded men. For example, it investigated a complaint against Skyline College in California that had been filed in 2023 but that President Joe Biden’s administration had not acted on, according to records from the university. The complaint alleged that Skyline discriminated against men by listing scholarships on its website that are exclusively for women and for promoting a program for women.

The civil rights office opened the investigation in mid-April, and two weeks later the community college agreed that it would remove the scholarships from its website and add language that the program was open to all students. A Skyline College spokesperson did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

At the same time, the agency chose to open fewer than 370 new investigations involving racial discrimination, even though about 5,000 complaints were filed.

Of those new investigations, about 11% involved allegations of discrimination against white students. Over the summer, the department announced investigations into five medical schools’ admissions policies.

“They are not allocating their resources to racial discrimination complaints, to sexual assault complaints, to the types of complaints that really often speak to systematic discrimination and problems,” said Johnathan Smith, managing director of education at the nonprofit National Center for Youth Law.

That organization also has sued the Education Department for similar information obtained by ProPublica; the lawsuit is pending.

The post Sexual Assaults on Campus No Longer Scrutinized as Closely Under Trump’s Education Department appeared first on ProPublica.

The agency charged with regulating Colorado’s first-in-the-nation legal recreational marijuana market potentially put consumers at risk of using contaminated products, a new state audit found.

The report pointed to inconsistent oversight by the Marijuana Enforcement Division and loose state rules around testing marijuana products or contaminants. As a result, it found, nearly 75% of marijuana processed for eventual sale from 2023 through 2025 evaded testing for pesticides.

The audit, released Monday, identified a host of issues, including regulators’ failure to meet regular inspection schedules or to conduct sufficient random checks at dispensaries for contaminated products. It also found that delayed agency warnings to the public allowed potentially contaminated products to remain on shelves for months, sometimes years.

The audit’s conclusions echo several findings of an investigation this year by The Denver Gazette and ProPublica into the Marijuana Enforcement Division’s lapses in policing contaminants entering the legal marketplace.  

In one case highlighted by the newsrooms, it took 15 months for a manufacturer to discontinue production of a marijuana sleep aid pill despite consumers warning regulators that the product was harming their livers. The pills had herbal extracts that researchers say can cause liver damage.

Auditors said they did not identify evidence of “widespread health and safety issues” but did find that deficient regulations still left consumers vulnerable.

The audit found that unsafe products had remained on the market for as long as three years before the Marijuana Enforcement Division issued a public warning. The auditor’s review of the agency’s health and safety advisories found that, on average, from 2023 through 2025, contaminated products that were the subject of an advisory remained on shelves for more than seven months. That’s the same number of months the news organizations found contaminated products stayed on shelves before warnings were issued.

The audit also found that it took the agency three and a half months, on average, in 2025 to issue an advisory once it launched an investigation into potential contamination. Even after investigators determined an advisory was needed, it still took the agency a month on average to issue one. 

“These issues limit MED’s ability to meet its core objective to identify product safety risks and to help ensure that licensed marijuana businesses meet product safety requirements,” the audit stated. “As a result, there is an increased risk that marijuana products sold in Colorado may have contaminants or that the potency listed on the labels is inaccurate.”

Colorado allows marijuana businesses to test far less frequently than required by state guidelines if they can show consistent compliance with testing rules. The reduced testing program results “in a significant portion of the marijuana product being sold in Colorado not undergoing testing to ensure it is safe,” the audit stated. Manufacturers also can rely on other testing exemptions, such as for certain marijuana-derived skin and body products, but there is “limited MED oversight” of how manufacturers determine they qualify for an exemption.

Auditors reported that a survey of MED investigators found that more than half said there are or may be widespread marijuana product safety issues in Colorado’s regulated market. 

In a statement released Monday night, the Marijuana Enforcement Division emphasized that state auditors found no evidence “to support claims of widespread health and safety issues” with marijuana products for sale in Colorado, but the agency agreed the audit identified areas for improvement. It said that among other things, it would be assessing exemptions to tests currently allowed under state laws and regulations.

The state auditor’s review “allows us to take a critical look at how we can continue to carry out our work, consistent with our commitment to integrity, safety, and continuous operational improvement,” Dominique Mendiola, senior director of the MED, said in a statement.

The auditor’s report highlighted a criticism her agency has repeatedly sidestepped: the absence of independent collection of samples for safety testing. The Denver Gazette and ProPublica found that more than half of states with regulated marijuana markets rely on private labs or an independent third party to collect samples. Colorado marijuana businesses are free to collect their own samples submitted for testing.

The enforcement division’s own investigators told auditors that, as a result, Colorado relies largely on an honor code to ensure the safety of marijuana sold in the state’s dispensaries.

Auditors said that allowing businesses to select their own samples “increases the risk that businesses do not pick samples that are representative of the overall quality of their marijuana product.” 

MED regulators at the start of the year said they planned to pursue an overhaul that would have required private lab personnel to collect samples, but they abandoned that effort after manufacturers said it would increase their costs. On Monday, Kyle Lambert, the enforcement division’s deputy senior director, told legislators that the agency opted against an overhaul this year, chiefly because he said it would be a geographic challenge to do away with self-sampling for rural businesses. 

“It was decided now wasn’t the right time to propose that as a policy change,” Lambert said, adding that the agency still might revisit the issue.

State Sen. Byron Pelton, a Republican from Sterling, pushed back, saying it was a loophole he thinks the agency should consider closing.

“If I’m a shady character, I know which products I’m going to go sampling and which ones I’m not,” he said. “That’s a pretty gray area to me.”

The audit also questioned the agency’s reliance on businesses voluntarily recalling contaminated marijuana products, saying that “some of these recalls did not succeed at stopping the businesses from selling potentially unsafe product.”

Just last month, The Denver Gazette and ProPublica reported that a Colorado manufacturer voluntarily flagged 49 of its popular marijuana vapes for recall, nearly six weeks after a third-party lab notified the company and regulators that it detected methylene chloride, a chemical the Environmental Protection Agency has sought to ban for most uses because it can cause cancer. The MED issued a health and safety advisory a day after the publications first reported the manufacturer had warned dispensaries to stop selling the vapes, which consumers had been purchasing for over a year.

The post Colorado Marijuana Regulators Failed to Protect Consumers From Potential Contamination, Audit Finds appeared first on ProPublica.

Peak tourist season had arrived in Ruidoso, New Mexico, and Mayor Lynn Crawford was campaigning to convince the public that the village was safe. A Republican with white hair and a Texas drawl, Crawford said he was frustrated with residents who were sharing warnings of flooding on social media. “They spout stuff off,” he said in a radio address on June 30, 2025. “And I don’t know why they’re so afraid. I do not understand it.” 

The community had experienced severe flooding the previous summer, after two wildfires burned 25,000 acres above town, in the Sacramento Mountains. The fires and floods had destroyed about 1,000 homes. Together, the Village of Ruidoso and its smaller neighbor, Ruidoso Downs, are home to some 10,000 residents, but that number more than doubles during the summer.

Since then, residents had been on edge. A new monsoon season had arrived, bringing sporadic flooding that jeopardized the town’s economic engine of horse racing. At stake were big crowds to celebrate the Fourth of July, watch quarter horse racing and enjoy cool weather that’d lured Texans here for generations.

“We have flooding temporarily,” Crawford had told a Texas news anchor in an interview. “And just almost as fast as it came to town, and went through town, it’s gone.” Crawford, who is 64, managed an exclusive club at the Ruidoso Downs Race Track & Casino and once called that his “real job.” He made less than $26,000 as mayor.

But if the town’s economy was precarious, so was its geography. The South Fork and Salt fires charred the landscape, leaving soils that didn’t easily absorb water. Imagine spilling hot wax on a carpet, letting it cool and repeatedly pouring water over it. Now place the wax on steep hills above a river lined with log homes, tourist shops selling wooden bears and an iconic racetrack. 

Officials were aware of the threat but clung to Ruidoso’s animating idea: that nature could be subdued for the enjoyment of tourists and profit of the community. Nowhere was this more apparent than at the track, where the Rio Ruidoso, channeled through culverts, crossed the infield. After the 2024 flooding damaged the track, the culverts had been rebuilt with a $16 million public investment authorized by New Mexico’s Democratic governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham.

The track had only recently reopened, and flooding was again threatening to derail the racing season. On June 26, internal records show, Ruidoso’s emergency management department was at a heightened threat awareness level. Flooding had destroyed a bridge upstream of the town, and the forecast called for more rain. 

But publicly, the village maintained it was prepared and the community was safe. The next day, the emergency manager reduced the threat level a notch, and the communications department chided residents for sharing warnings of catastrophic flooding on social media, noting that some posts featured old videos. “Protect our community from fear-based falsehoods,” the village implored in a public service announcement.

On July 4, and one state over, violent flooding killed more than 130 people in central Texas. But multiple tourists who were arriving in Ruidoso said they had no idea the town was in danger. At the racetrack, the horses ran, and Crawford hosted members at the Ruidoso Jockey Club, where private tables cost as much as six figures.

That weekend, Sebastian Trotter and his family traveled to Ruidoso from El Paso, Texas. Trotter was an Army helicopter pilot stationed at Fort Bliss; his wife, Stephanie, was a nursing student. They thought the place looked family friendly; they saw no warnings online. They brought their two children and three dogs. On Sunday, July 6, they parked their trailer in a desirable spot on the water’s edge at the Riverview RV Park. In online photos, the river appeared gentle. “You could go put your toes in,” said Sebastian.

That day, the Rio Ruidoso — “noisy river,” in Spanish — briefly flooded and firefighters rescued at least four people. The Trotters saw the water rise, but the campground host said it was a regular occurrence. Then the river receded.

In the park, the Trotters’ children, Sebastian Rowan, 7, and Charlotte, 4, biked under the tall pines. The boy was a soccer player who was enchanted by the idea of camping in the woods; Charlotte was bright and cheery, sometimes applying glitter to her father’s mustache. Later, the family walked through the village, where elk and wild horses occasionally graze near tourists.

On Tuesday, July 8, the Trotters were visiting a lake when they saw clouds form. They decided to head into town, ordering pizza before allowing the children to pick out souvenirs. The younger Sebastian selected a rainbow gemstone, Charlotte a bracelet and a ring. Then they returned to the RV park, where they relaxed by the river. 

At 1 p.m., Crawford presided over a council meeting at Village Hall. He began by recognizing the Texas flood victims and nodding to Ruidoso’s relative success. “We want to keep all of central Texas in our thoughts and prayers and see how bad it was and how fortunate we’ve been,” he said. “The goal of the village is to protect the village.” That meant balancing public safety with tourism, he said.

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Town Leaders Said They Were Prepared for Floods. First Responders Disagree.

At almost the same moment, storm clouds gathered in the mountains. Even short periods of moderate rain on severe burn scars can unleash post-fire floods. By 1:30 p.m., radar indicated storms might douse both scars simultaneously. A little before 2 p.m., firefighters texted images of the radar to one another. “It could be interesting,” wrote one. Only about a third of the department was on duty at the time and the chief, Cade Hall, had for weeks declined to preposition additional flood specialists near low-lying areas.

Hall disputed ProPublica’s reporting about the emergency response but declined to comment with specifics.

Less than an hour later, another flood arrived, carrying debris that backed up behind bridges. The water kept coming, fanning onto roads until the normal course of the river disappeared. What the wall of brown water carried told residents it was time to panic.

Jason Fulcher, an owner of the Riverview RV Park, saw a tree-size log in the waterway. Two miles downstream, a maintenance worker at a mobile home park saw a car float past and lodge against a bridge.

Farther downstream, the track’s executives did not need physical signs of danger; they knew what was coming because they’d been alerted.

But the Trotters were caught unprepared. Around 3 p.m., they retreated to their trailer to escape the rain. Then the flood tore through a wall and took their children.

The wildfire crisis engulfing the West presents a secondary threat that has received less attention: Entire neighborhoods could wash away in debris flows and floods that often follow.

Scientists say there’s a direct correlation between fire intensity and flood risk. Research shows that if more than 20% of the ground burns at moderate to high severity, especially on steep slopes, there’s an increased danger of debris flows and post-fire flooding during storms. The fires that burned above the Rio Ruidoso watershed far exceeded that threshold.

Before the 2025 tourist season, local and state officials had an opportunity to safeguard Ruidoso and adapt to the realities of a warming climate that is exacerbating wildfires and flooding. The state and village each commissioned experts to model flooding scenarios. The engineers’ reports predicted serious flooding. “They told us exactly where it was going to come and what it was going to do,” said Hall, the fire chief. Federal emergency officials suggested that significant parts of the town should relocate away from the river.

Instead, leaders from the mayor to the governor recommitted to tourism and the racetrack.

Ruidoso Is Surrounded on Three Sides by Thousands of Acres of Burn Scars

Since the July 8, 2025, flood, officials have insisted they performed admirably against a historic disaster. Michael Martinez, the village’s former deputy manager, who helped direct the response, said, “We’re lucky we didn’t have a Texas.”

But according to five first responders, the tragedy could have been avoided. All of the first responders spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal. Their accounts are supported by public records, including emails, internal reports and hydrologic assessments. Before July 8, Crawford, Hall and others made decisions that left residents and tourists vulnerable, even though they knew a damaging flood was likely, first responders and officials say. 

Some of those choices, such as the village’s promotion of tourism to visitors largely unaware of the threat, appeared to be financially motivated, according to current and former officials who worked on flood response. “Money was the driver,” said Thora Walsh Padilla, the former president of the Mescalero Apache Tribe, which is based south and west of town. “You’re taking a chance with people who aren’t even from this area and don’t know how to get around enough.” She added, “You’re putting them in jeopardy.”

Other missteps were caused by inaction: the failure to relocate vulnerable residents and to replace infrastructure damaged during previous flooding, even as the governor drove the state’s $16 million investment in the track. And just before the flood arrived, at least one of the RV park’s owners received emergency alerts but did not evacuate campers.

Village officials including Crawford did not respond to more than 70 questions from ProPublica, including about whether they had emphasized tourism at the track over public safety. But in an interview last year, Crawford said: “Who’s to blame? I didn’t start the fire.”

Reached by phone, Kerry Gladden, the village’s public information officer, referred questions to an attorney, who did not answer them. Village officials have said that their emergency department sent text-message warnings before the flood through a system that the public had to sign up for.

A spokesperson for Lujan Grisham said the state’s investments in the track were necessary to protect life and safety. The track’s general manager, Rick Baugh, did not respond to multiple inquiries about ProPublica’s reporting, and one of the racing operation’s owners didn’t answer questions sent by email.

The lapses and missed opportunities in Ruidoso offer challenging lessons about the harsh reality facing communities throughout the American West. This summer, post-fire flooding and debris flows killed one person and prompted more than a dozen rescues in Colorado. In August, flash floods in the Grand Canyon killed three; some of those floodwaters had coursed over burned areas. And in Utah, Gov. Spencer Cox declared a state of emergency following post-fire flooding in three counties.

The West is not yet prepared for the spreading threat. While federal scientists have created a national model to assess the likelihood of post-fire debris flows, communities don’t have an easily accessible tool to gauge their risk of post-fire flooding.  

Ruidoso still looks like a tourist hub, but it survives on disaster aid from the state and federal governments. Since 2024, the state and federal governments have spent over half a billion dollars on disasters in Ruidoso — nine times the village’s annual budget.

Even as funding pours in, first responders say the village remains inadequately prepared to protect residents and tourists.

Ruidoso is not a glitzy escape of vast alpine vistas. Homes are close together, built into riverbanks and overhung with trees. Cabins abut RV parks. Located in Lincoln County, it has long been an escape for working families from Texas and soldiers stationed at Fort Bliss, 130 miles to the south. “Our kids deserved this small trip,” Stephanie Trotter wrote on social media after the July 8 flood.

The place they booked sat across from a 19th-century mill that’s recognized as the village’s birthplace. One of the RV park’s owners, Fulcher, said that if you looked hard enough, you might find bullet holes in the trees from old Western battles.

The village’s colonial founders were unwise to set their community on the river. The Mescalero Apache traditionally lived on hills above the creeks and wetlands to avoid rising water and mosquitoes, Walsh Padilla said. Over and over, the river flooded, including in 2008 and 2022. Randall Camp, the former Lincoln County manager and public works director for Ruidoso, said, “The river can’t be trusted.”

Many new residents did not understand the danger. Fulcher and his wife, Lindsey, moved to Ruidoso from the Houston area in 2022, seeking a quiet life near family. Jason was leaving a high-income, high-stress career in gas sales. The 1.5 acre property they purchased sat just below confluences of the Rio Ruidoso and two tributaries. Lindsey’s sister and brother-in-law had their own RV park upriver.

The Fulchers arrived as the threat reached a new extreme. A decade ago, researchers from Northern Arizona University studied tree rings on the Mescalero Apache reservation, finding that fires had occurred regularly — every six to 18 years, in many cases — until the turn of the 20th century. Then they declined in frequency as the government started suppressing fires. With fewer fires, the forests grew thick. The shade drew tourists. But, Walsh Padilla said: “This isn’t natural. It’s not natural anymore.”

The Forest Service’s policy of quickly extinguishing fires was symbolically tied to Lincoln County, where in 1950, firefighters found a singed bear cub in the mountains northeast of Ruidoso. The injured cub was named Smokey and flown to the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., where it became the living icon for the agency’s ongoing messaging campaign.

As the climate warmed, the government’s policy of putting out fires fundamentally altered the landscape. Between 1950 and 2010, wildfires in the Rio Ruidoso watershed burned just under 11,000 acres, according to a ProPublica analysis of data from the National Interagency Fire Center. Since then, nearly 54,000 acres have burned — an area nearly five times larger than in the previous 60 years. And scientists say those fires are hotter than ever, as heavy fuels like Douglas firs and ponderosa pines lose moisture in the warming climate.

In June 2024, two major fires ignited, and monsoon rains soon followed. A 16-foot flood tore through town on July 20, 2024.

The Fulchers’ house, which was located in their park, sustained minor damage, but their relatives’ property, a couple hundred yards upstream, was destroyed. The Federal Emergency Management Agency deemed Chelsey Jarvis and Darrel McKay’s house uninhabitable and prohibited them from building even temporary housing on the land. The couple closed the park for the season. “I wasn’t going to put people in harm’s way because I wanted their money,” Jarvis said during an October 2024 village meeting, as she begged the council to buy their property. “It’s just going to be Groundhog Day. Next year it’s going to wash away.”

Jarvis proposed they turn the park into a retention pond to slow floodwaters and protect downstream businesses. Officials were considering such drastic measures. The Natural Resources Conservation Service, a subagency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, had raised the idea of a large-scale buyout. It had recently committed $106 million to move more than 600 homes following 2022 flooding in Kentucky.

The project in Ruidoso would be even more costly. Martinez, the village’s former deputy manager, and Camp, who was then the county manager, estimated they needed $650 million to move about 1,000 properties. But the NRCS would only pay if a local partner provided a 25% match, meaning the county, village or state would have to raise vast sums. While Jarvis and McKay immediately said they wanted a buyout, Jason Fulcher was torn. He loved his property. But he and his wife worried that the village’s infrastructure didn’t adequately protect their home. In December 2024, they submitted a form saying they wanted to be relocated. 

During New Mexico’s 2025 legislative session, no lawmaker proposed funding a buyout for Ruidoso. By spring, with the opportunity fading for a mass relocation of homes and businesses, optimism crept back into public discourse.

According to Jarvis and McKay, Crawford encouraged them to reopen their park, saying the village needed affordable rentals. (Neither Crawford nor the village answered a question about the interaction.) As tourist season approached, the families adopted different strategies. Jarvis said she was never comfortable with reopening, but McKay felt the family had little choice given how much they’d invested. They resolved to keep their property open but only to book half the camp sites. 

Fulcher, on the other hand, wanted a full park from June to September, when the most tourists arrived and so did the monsoons. He said he’d withdrawn all his retirement savings to cover the down payment and improvements on the $645,000 property, and he was so attached to the place that he’d rebuffed multiple potential buyers. The park needed to be fully operational, he said, “because at 50% operational, we’re losing money every month.”

On March 31, 2025, the village released a new map of the floodplain online, which allowed viewers to zoom in on their properties. The map was based on flood models created by a company called Cobb, Fendley & Associates, which had months earlier outlined a dire scenario to village officials.

The Trotter Family’s Campsite Sat on the Edge of the River

The Village of Ruidoso’s floodplain and floodway maps show that most of the RV park was at risk prior to the July 2025 flood.

The company had been hired to model what might happen in a 100-year storm — a term that reflects the anticipated depth and intensity of rainfall. In January 2025, a Cobb Fendley engineer sent an email to the village saying that the company thought a 100-year storm would bring six times the volume of the July 2024 flood that destroyed Jarvis and McKay’s home. In a separate report, Cobb Fendley identified more than 200 at-risk addresses. The list included their property, as well as the Fulchers’ RV park.

But the village didn’t make clear the threat to existing properties. When officials discussed the map, they often focused on its impact on development and building permits. “There was never a time where we specifically said, ‘Someone can die,’” Martinez, the village’s former deputy manager, said in an interview. “Never have I ever stated those words. Everything I’ve ever shared with somebody has been: ‘This is the floodplain. This is what was adopted. These are the new high-water marks. If we ever get a flood that is a 100-year flood, the waters will get this high.’”

Both RV parks were in the floodplain. But both Fulcher and McKay said they’d internalized the government’s optimism. “The leadership dang sure makes you feel like it’s gonna be OK,” said McKay. “All they kept saying was build back better. We’re stronger.”

On May 25, 2025, Lujan Grisham celebrated the reopening of the track, aided by the funds she secured. “Ruidoso Downs has reopened for its first races since those disasters in record time,” read a post on the governor’s official Instagram page. “Ruidoso Strong!”

New Mexico’s constitution prohibits the use of public funds on private businesses in most cases, but there are exceptions for certain public and economic development projects. Records show that starting in September 2024, New Mexico’s then-transportation secretary, Ricky Serna, directed a team of engineers to prioritize work at the track, even as his subordinates raised concerns that FEMA might not reimburse the costs because the project hadn’t yet met the agency’s standards.

Crews excavated an 8-acre basin in the infield to serve as a holding pond, while contractors rebuilt the culverts under the track and reinforced the road leading into it. These efforts were designed to slow floodwater, but the project also allowed the track to reopen.

The track was best known for hosting the world’s richest quarter horse race, the All American Futurity, which awarded $3 million annually, with half going to the contest’s winner.

Horses at the track were cared for by grooms, many of whom were immigrants. The grooms worked for horse trainers rather than the track itself. But the track provided space for them to sleep in barns and storage rooms, in what one executive called industry-standard conditions. Baugh, the general manager, did not answer questions about living conditions at the track. Izzy Trejo, executive director of the New Mexico Racing Commission, said in an email that the commission had no authority over the matter. “The living conditions for the grooms is the responsibility of each individual trainer,” said Trejo. 

But there was little scrutiny of such issues at “our beloved racetrack,” as Crawford has called it. In addition to the mayor, the village’s public information officer previously handled publicity for the track and the mayor of Ruidoso Downs previously oversaw its security. 

The racetrack’s various businesses and their owners, Jana and Johnny Trotter — they are not related to Sebastian and Stephanie — contributed more than $35,000 to Lujan Grisham’s gubernatorial campaigns. Michael Coleman, a spokesperson for the governor, said in an email, “The infrastructure improvement projects at Ruidoso Downs and the surrounding area were undertaken because of the life-safety risk the site posed to the surrounding community.” Coleman said the project was “not solely for economic development reasons.”

But the track framed the project differently. “The clock’s ticking,” said Tim Keithley, the track’s former marketing director, in a February report by KRQE, a New Mexico outlet. “We need to race so that the community can have tourism and bring those Texans over to spend some money with us.” 

As work at the track progressed, one urgent mitigation project upriver lagged. Officials were concerned about old and damaged bridges and culverts on the Rio Ruidoso. During floods they could act like dams, forcing rising water onto roads and increasing the threat downstream. “If you have a bunch of debris that comes in and clogs bridges, at some point that’s going to release,” said Eric Queller, Ruidoso’s emergency manager.

In the year leading up to the 2025 tourist season, bridge repairs and replacements once again fell by the wayside as village and state officials argued over who was responsible for them. The work at the track, meanwhile, was completed by Memorial Day.

On Sunday, July 6, when firefighters made at least four flooding rescues, the Ruidoso News posted a video about the track repair on its Facebook page. In the video, which was produced by the newspaper’s general manager, Eugene Heathman, Crawford said the infrastructure was holding.

The next day, an executive at the paper’s parent company, El Rito Media, told Heathman his journalism, which had included footage of severe flood damage, was bad for business. The executive has since left the company and told ProPublica he was acting on the orders of El Rito’s publisher, Richard Connor. In a statement, Connor denied attempting to influence coverage. “We have dug, investigated, and sought out all angles in our flood and racetrack coverage,” he said.

Heathman soon resigned. The video of Crawford at the track has disappeared from the internet, and Heathman’s footage showing flood damage has been removed from the Ruidoso News’ Facebook account.

Just before 2 p.m. on July 8, a fierce rain began to fall near the headwaters of one of the Rio Ruidoso’s upper forks. Within 10 minutes, nearly three-quarters of an inch of rain pelted the charred ground. At 2:12 p.m., the National Weather Service sent out a flash flood warning, which it upgraded to an emergency 35 minutes later, after debris slid down steep slopes and into the river. 

At Village Hall, Crawford adjourned the council meeting just before 3:10 p.m., saying: “We’ve had a wall of water come over. It’s predicted this is the big one.” Shortly after, he called the track’s general manager, Rick Baugh.   

Josh Gibson, a track executive, was with Baugh when the call arrived. He said Crawford “told him he had 45 minutes or so before the water got there.” (Baugh did not respond to repeated inquiries, and Crawford and Gladden, the public information officer, did not answer a question about the call.) 

The advance notice allowed Baugh and his colleagues to alert dozens of grooms living in the barns to evacuate before the flood reached them.

Three miles upstream, at the Riverview RV Park, Jason Fulcher, the Trotters and other campers stood by the river. They talked about the weather. They talked about which trailers they preferred. They talked about whether there were any reports of ghosts in the area. The Trotters’ children played in the shade.

Multiple people who were in the park received text alerts warning of flooding. But all of them, including one of the park’s owners, said the alerts seemed routine. “We received watch and warning alerts daily, sometimes multiple times in the same day,” Fulcher said in an email. He also told ProPublica in an interview that he’d followed the village’s advice: “Just be vigilant. Watch the skies, stay out of low-lying areas, watch the river.” But he didn’t stay out of low-lying areas, because his property sat in one. 

The Trotters said that although their phones were on, they didn’t receive any alerts from the National Weather Service. They did not know about the village’s alerts. “There was nothing,” Sebastian said.

Residents had “alert fatigue.” So officials wanted first responders to drive into threatened areas on dangerous flood days to ensure that people evacuated. In parts of the community, including much of Ruidoso Downs, first responders showed up with loudspeakers, telling people to seek high ground just before the flood arrived.

But at the Riverview RV Park, no one came, even though the park sat just about a third of a mile from the fire department’s headquarters.

After receiving the alerts, Fulcher began his monsoon season routine: He went to the riverbank to ask guests to move back. Fulcher said the Trotters were among those he asked to step slightly away from the river; the Trotters dispute this. 

When it started to rain, the children retreated to their trailer, which had an extending compartment known as a slide-out. The river rose, carrying branches and rocks. The Trotters joined the kids, preparing to drive to higher ground. Then they heard a noise that Sebastian likened to television static through noise canceling headphones.

According to the Trotters, the trailer door was open and blocked by debris. Sebastian stuck his leg out and was temporarily caught, but he managed to get back inside. He was reaching for a mattress when the flood ripped off the slide-out. Stephanie, holding both children, was sucked into the water. “Once I was in the water, I only had Charlotte in my arms,” she said. Sebastian dove in after his son.

Fulcher had steered out of the park in a truck. At the road he was met by brown, sediment-laden floodwaters carrying vehicles and a dumpster. The flood was remarkable for both its scale — a river gauge showed twice the volume of the July 2024 flood — and its bulk. One survivor said it felt like liquid cement. Fulcher left his truck and sprinted to a high point from which he could see his house. His two children were trapped inside. He stepped onto a building, planning to swim to them, but the structure collapsed. Fulcher climbed a wall and tried to swim but was pushed back. In the house, his children clung to a ceiling fan as rising water pushed their mattress toward the ceiling.

The campground host, Jere Stark, had made his way to a pavilion, where he used a post to shield his body from the water. Stark, who is 71, was trying to help another camper, Benjamin Timothy Feagin, from the bed of a truck. The flood pulled them in.

Near their camp site, the younger Sebastian held onto a tree. His father repeatedly tried to reach him but struggled to move in the water. He was hit by a boulder and a floating truck, he said. The boy could not hold on any longer and lost his grip.

By about 3:30 p.m., there were at least eight firefighters at Riverview, including two swiftwater technicians in a vehicle capable of navigating floodwaters. Across the waterway, they saw a man 20 feet up a tree. The elder Sebastian Trotter was in the water below him, grabbing a tree trunk, wounded and barely able to speak.

The two swiftwater technicians waded to the Fulchers’ house and retrieved the Fulcher children, who were huddled together on the mattress.

There were still more children to rescue, but not all the first responders knew that.

The Trotters had been separated. Firefighters found the older Sebastian alone. A few hundred yards downstream, first responders helped rescue Stephanie Trotter and Stark. Stephanie said she’d been with her daughter, but the girl was now gone.

Later, when the water receded, Fulcher and McKay pried open the Trotters’ crumpled trailer. Inside, they found the Trotters’ surviving dog.

The first body was found under a bridge around 5:20 p.m. It was Feagin, who had been in the pavilion with Stark. 

Firefighters split up to scour the riverside for the children. One group walked downstream. It passed Paradise Canyon, where Stephanie Trotter had been rescued, searching the corners of the floodplain where waters had receded.

Another group moved upriver. The light faded, trees casting long shadows. “Couldn’t see much,” said a firefighter. “Everything’s different and washed out, and all you could see was really the little spotlight on your flashlight.” He came to a softball field full of scattered furniture. He passed a bridge and paused. “I looked back. Something told me, ‘Look back.’”

He saw the shape of a child’s body. It was Sebastian Rowan Trotter. Charlotte’s body had been found not far away.

In their private correspondence on July 8 and 9, state officials said they were worried about the racetrack. While firefighters were searching for the Trotters’ children, a senior disaster recovery official named Jeremy Klass sent a message asking if horses needed evacuation. They didn’t.

The next morning, an official notified Klass and other colleagues about the racetrack. “Village is concerned,” he wrote.

“This should be a priority,” responded Heath Dobrovolny, the state floodplain coordinator.

Dobrovolny said he didn’t recall the text exchange, but he was likely focused on preventing casualties downstream from the track. He also disputed that, as state floodplain coordinator, he had favored the track over the village. Regina Chacon, the New Mexico Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management’s deputy cabinet secretary, said in an email that the agency was concerned that debris buildup “would apply pressure on the dam between the infield” and a downstream community.

At a news conference on the morning of July 9, Crawford repeatedly noted how high the water had crested: “This is historic.” Since then, officials have said they did everything in their power to protect the village.

“We pretty much did everything we possibly could and everything worked out, I guess, as best it could for the situation that we had,” Hall, Ruidoso’s fire chief, said. “I don’t know that I would have done anything differently.”

“Will I tell you it’s successful when we lost three lives? No,” said Ali Rye, the state homeland security director. But, she said, “We put out every bit of messaging we possibly could. I don’t know, from the state’s perspective, what more we could have done.”

And a month after the flood, in a video interview published by a horse racing website, Lujan Grisham said, “No governor, no state, no president, no one at the federal level can sort of predict what happens with the weather and emergencies.”

In truth, the disaster had been all but predicted in the reports created for the state and village. “Unfortunately, it’s stuff that was modeled,” said Joseph Loverich, a civil engineer with the firm JE Fuller, which in 2024 created multiple flood models for the state. And Cobb Fendley’s model had told the village that even worse flooding could be coming. The July 8 flood carried a third of the volume the company anticipated for a 100-year flood. (Cobb Fendley did not respond to detailed questions about how it arrived at its conclusions.) 

On Oct. 8, three months after the flood, Lincoln County held another meeting about a potential buyout for property owners at risk. Martinez, Ruidoso’s deputy village manager, said: “That wasn’t even a big one. I mean, that was half of what we expected, of the max.” July 8 had been a 50-year flood, he said. “It could be twice as much. That’s the honest-to-God truth.”

“So you guys knew?” interjected Fulcher.

“We had campers,” said Jarvis.

Lincoln County’s new manager, Jason Burns, cut her off: “Hold on. Listen to us. That’s not what he’s saying.”

Within weeks, Martinez adjusted his language. In an interview on Oct. 21, he said: “Did I do enough? I ask myself that question every day, and I come to the same realization every day: I don’t know what more I could have done. I honestly don’t.”

Months later, he left Ruidoso for a job in El Paso. He was soon replaced by Dobrovolny, the former state floodplain coordinator who had helped direct work at the track. In July, Dobrovolny emailed village employees, emphasizing a policy prohibiting them from talking to journalists. A video of the contentious October meeting originally posted by the county has been removed from the internet. In an email, Burns said the video’s disappearance was “not intentional.”

The Trotters held a celebration of life for their children on Aug. 15. Sebastian was still recovering from a broken bone in a foot, nerve damage in his legs, and wounds on his legs and arms. Tattoos on his forearms had been partially removed due to the injuries.

A few weeks later, the All American Futurity was held in Albuquerque for a second consecutive season. In Ruidoso, Crawford arranged a viewing party at the Jockey Club. When a bank of televisions showed horses bursting through the starting gate, feet stomped on the club’s carpet. The track outside was empty and quiet. Still, multiple people in the club said they anticipated racing would return. A woman from Texas named Dusty Milanes said the dangers in Ruidoso were being overblown. “There’s parts of the community that are totally normal,” said Milanes, who wore pink cowboy boots. Asked where that was, she said, “High ground.”

The Jockey Club was surviving on restaurant sales and catering contracts, and Crawford had to lay off most of his employees. In private, state officials discussed distancing themselves from their $16 million rehabilitation effort at the track. “We have to keep in mind and project to the public NMDOT had minimal involvement in this,” a district engineer for the Department of Transportation wrote in an email in August 2025.

By spring, green shoots sprouted on the hills above the Rio Ruidoso. New growth on burn scars can slow the worst effects of flooding, but scientists say it’s important to not become complacent. “This is not a one-and-done kind of thing,” said Belize Lane, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at Utah State University. “There is still an opportunity for many, many more events that may not look like that, but may still be hugely destructive.”

But in Ruidoso, people started to say that the worst had passed. “Everybody always goes back to sleep,” said Camp, the former county manager.

In July, the Ruidoso News published a story about the village government’s performance during the flooding, which largely relied on the mayor’s analysis. “The legacy is one of resilience, not giving up, fortitude, rugged individualism, the ability for you to be all you can be and not give up,” said Crawford.

The track was closed, and weeds soon grew 6 feet high in the holding pond. The All American Futurity was moved to Texas. Still, the Jockey Club continued to collect dues from members and Crawford promised that hooves would again thunder in Ruidoso. “The track deal isn’t over yet,” he said during a council meeting.

The Fulchers mostly avoided their old RV park. The state had finally secured $249 million for a buyout program, with more than three-quarters of the funds coming from the federal government. But the Fulchers, who now run a mountain-man themed store, selling antlers and rifles, hadn’t yet received an appraisal for their property.

They had settled a wrongful death lawsuit brought by the Trotters and Feagin’s family, with an insurance company paying an undisclosed amount. “Accountability is at the forefront of my mind,” Sebastian said during a March television interview. He said he would not “just let us be forgotten — let our kids be forgotten.” An attorney for the Trotters also sent the village a letter notifying officials that they intended to sue.

Crawford said that he anticipated the Trotters would sue but declined to discuss potential litigation.

The park now sat empty and taped off. The roof of the Fulchers’ house sagged, and a child’s handprints were still visible on the ceiling.

Out front, on a towering tree, there was a white cross and, beneath it, a plaque.

In loving memory of Benjamin “Tim” Feagin,
Sebastian Rowan Trotter,
Charlotte Emery Trotter,
And their two dogs Zeus & Ellie.

The Fulchers put the memorial up on the anniversary of the flood. A firefighter who had helped find one of the Trotters’ children attended. “We carry a lot of guilt for things that we weren’t able to do,” he said. “We feel like we could have done more.”

The village continued to advertise tourism in West Texas. During the summer, a digital billboard near the Trotters’ house flashed a Ruidoso promotion. Sebastian saw it when he filled up on gas.

Just upstream of the closed race track, a mobile home park was mostly full. Children played in the street, and occupied trailers sat above the river. The park’s managers said they were following local rules. “I don’t think it’ll ever flood again like that,” said one. The Rio Ruidoso babbled. It looked welcoming. On a summer day, you could go put your toes in.

The post “The River Can’t Be Trusted” appeared first on ProPublica.

The man was nearly to his waist in a flooded river and couldn’t get out. A firefighter and a police officer didn’t have enough rope or manpower to lift him onto the temporary flood barrier that separated them from the debris-strewn water. The man, Jere Stark, had just been carried a quarter mile by a torrential flood and was covered in mud and extremely cold.

It was around 3:30 p.m. on July 8, 2025, and a flood in Ruidoso, New Mexico, had unleashed chaos at Paradise Canyon Drive, just a couple hundred yards from the headquarters of the village fire department.

Not far from Stark, a woman huddled on the ground, shielded from the floodwaters by the temporary barrier. It was Stephanie Trotter, a tourist from El Paso, Texas, who had been washed away with her young daughter. A civilian tended to her while a second firefighter hauled in a rope he had used to rescue her. “Is somebody coming for her?” asked the civilian.

By that time, at least eight other firefighters were trying to save people upstream at the Riverview RV Park, where Trotter and Stark had been staying. But at the barrier where Stark was waiting for help, the two firefighters and one police officer were the only first responders. One of the firefighters wasn’t even wearing a personal flotation device — a basic safety measure for flood rescues.

They soon got help from civilians, including a property owner in shorts and flip-flops and a second passerby who both helped one of the firefighters haul Stark from the water with another rope.

Trotter and two civilians told the police officer, Jimmy Hernandez, that her family was missing. Lost in the flood were her 4-year-old daughter, her 7-year-old son and her husband. 

Hearing this, Hernandez radioed, “We need swiftwater rescue here.” But no additional swiftwater teams arrived for at least 25 minutes. Both children died, along with an adult man. Trotter’s husband, Sebastian, survived.

The shortage of firefighters at Paradise Canyon Drive illustrates larger problems with Ruidoso’s emergency response that day. Five rescuers involved in the effort said the village’s leadership had not given them enough training or dispatched enough of them in advance of the flooding to protect the community. Because of the flood’s strength, rescuers said, the best chance to save the Trotters’ children was before the water arrived, when they could have evacuated the area where the family was camping.

But they said the fire chief, Cade Hall, had for weeks resisted calls to station additional flood experts in low-lying areas when there was a threat of storms. Doing so would have required paying firefighters overtime. “The village’s mentality is, ‘We’ll have to pay for that, and what if nothing happens?’” said one rescuer in an interview earlier this year.

ProPublica reported that village leaders knew dangerous floods were likely because two intense 2024 wildfires had scarred the hillsides above town. Even moderate rain on severe burn scars can trigger post-fire floods and debris flows. But leaders seeking to encourage tourism scolded residents who warned of the danger on social media. We also examined what went wrong with the rescue itself, consulting with seven experts outside Ruidoso who have experience in emergency response including floods.

The Village of Ruidoso did not respond to detailed written questions about its emergency response, and it has not publicly released a report on rescue efforts during the flood. Reached by phone, Hall disputed ProPublica’s reporting but declined to provide specifics. Mayor Lynn Crawford has said protecting the village includes balancing public safety with tourism, the lifeblood of its economy.

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“The River Can’t Be Trusted”

The fire department employed nine swiftwater technicians trained to perform rescues in floodwater. But when forecasters issued a flash flood warning due to heavy rain, only a handful were working, along with four New Mexico National Guard technicians in vehicles capable of navigating floods. According to a spokesperson for the Guard, its members helped rescue nine people from the flood.

Two additional swiftwater teams had recently been in Ruidoso. But when the weather forecast for the area showed a slightly decreased chance of flash flooding in late June, the state’s Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management issued an order to send home the team from Las Cruces. One member of that team, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their employment, said, “We didn’t understand why we were being sent home.” The other swiftwater team, which was from Texas, left after deadly flooding hit Kerr County and surrounding regions in its home state. 

A former incident commander for Cal Fire, California’s fire agency, said that the state shared responsibility for the inadequate emergency response on July 8 because of its decision to send home the Las Cruces team. “This should be a clarion call as to reevaluating their resource availability.”

Asked about the decision, a DHSEM spokesperson said in an email, “New Mexico was experiencing multiple flooding threats,” adding that the team needed to be available to respond elsewhere. According to the spokesperson, there are only about eight swiftwater teams in the state.

But the Las Cruces team was not deployed to another flood. Rather, it went home. “I could understand if we were sent somewhere else,” said the frustrated swiftwater technician.

This left Ruidoso’s firefighters to lead rescue operations in the village. But Hall had for weeks declined requests from off-duty swiftwater technicians who wanted to be stationed in flood-prone areas before the waters hit. One of those areas was close to the Riverview RV Park, where Stark and the Trotter family were staying.

Forty-five minutes before the downpour started, Crawford had stated in a council meeting that whenever the village was alerted to flooding, firefighters and public works employees would be at the ready: “Everybody is in position.” 

Over the coming two hours, these words would prove false. 

At 2:12 p.m. the National Weather Service sent out a flash flood warning. About 20 minutes later, Hall summoned all off-duty swiftwater technicians. At 2:38 p.m., a weather service hydrologist wrote in a message to emergency managers, “Water is Out of the Banks in the Rio Ruidoso at the County Line.” At 2:47 p.m., the warning was upgraded to a flash flood emergency. Still, internal fire department records show that Hall didn’t call in his full department until 3:10 p.m., 45 minutes after Ruidoso dispatchers recorded the first call for rescue related to the flood. It was too late for some: Before any firefighters could access the Riverview RV Park, Stephanie Trotter and her daughter were swept downstream.

Trotter and her husband, Sebastian, said they had no idea the town was in danger and didn’t receive the automated alerts sent by the National Weather Service. (They said they had not known about, or signed up for, text-message alerts created by the village.) During the hour before the flood reached them, first responders with loudspeakers drove through other parts of the community, telling people to seek high ground. But no officials with loudspeakers went to the Riverview RV Park, even though the area was known to flood and even though it sat just down the road from the primary fire station.

The village had another warning tool it did not use that day: sirens. During the 2024 fires, Ruidoso’s emergency manager, Eric Queller, had overseen the evacuation of thousands using the siren system. Since the flood, the village has claimed that using it could have put people in harm’s way by sending them onto roads covered with water.

The village had long planned to install additional sirens, including three that could instruct people to seek high ground during flooding, allowing a more orderly evacuation. But the new sirens were not yet operational by July 8. In an interview last year, Queller said that the disasters the community faced since 2024 had delayed the project.

According to firefighters, the department’s flood response was also limited by an antiquated dispatch system. Fire departments typically use computer-aided dispatch systems. Ruidoso’s department didn’t have one. Firefighters say this shortfall preceded Hall, and that he had been in favor of acquiring a computer-aided dispatch system.

Experts say that without computer-aided dispatch, chiefs often rely on memory or notes. Radio channels can become clogged, adding to confusion. According to Ruidoso firefighters, the effect was acutely felt during chaotic situations.

Following Stark’s rescue, the first responders at Paradise Canyon Drive were overwhelmed, according to two civilians who were present and Hernandez’s body-camera footage. Trotter told Hernandez that her daughter was in the water, and that they had been in an RV. According to the property owner, Corey Sexton, he saw a child float past and alerted first responders. Hernandez told crews downstream to look for a child, but he also radioed that he thought the children were in an upstream trailer. (Hernandez and the police department did not respond to emailed questions. Reached by phone, the department’s deputy chief did not answer questions about the response.)

The two firefighters, listening to their radios, hustled to the upstream bridge, prepared rope and watched the water. Minutes later, a call came on the radio: two children were trapped in a house at the upstream RV park. Swiftwater technicians at the park waded in and saved them.

During the crucial minutes immediately after the Trotters’ children were swept downstream, no one had clear information. According to multiple firefighters, the department briefly thought it had found all the missing children. Experts told ProPublica that such chaos and misinformation is common during disaster response. But the experts also said it can be mitigated by having good dispatch systems and adequate staffing.

Records show that Ruidoso firefighters fielded 34 emergency calls on July 8 once flooding started, and the department has stated it made more than 60 rescues.

Despite the deaths, first responders say the village’s leadership has not learned needed lessons and has continued to prioritize tourism at the expense of public safety. 

By this summer the village had finally installed its voice-activated sirens and reversed its position on the standard ones: The village would now use them during floods.

Hall had planned for all firefighters to be trained as swiftwater technicians. But in February, the firefighters, many of whom worked second jobs to make ends meet, unionized. The department’s plans changed, with Hall sending firefighters to get a lower-level certification that limited their ability to perform rescues in rushing water.

In April, senior Ruidoso Fire Department officers held a meeting during which they discussed Hall’s leadership. ProPublica reviewed a recording of the gathering. An officer said Hall, who did not attend the meeting, still wouldn’t pre-position extra firefighters. “How many people are going to die?” the officer wondered aloud during the meeting.

Hall declined to respond to questions about the meeting and the allegation that he hadn’t pre-positioned enough firefighters to avoid paying overtime. 

Once monsoons arrived this year, multiple rescuers say, Hall rarely stationed off-duty firefighters in vulnerable areas. Sometimes in the afternoons, when it was most likely to rain, multiple firefighters weren’t in town. To promote tourism, Ruidoso had signed a contract with Contour Airlines to provide flights between Denver and the village. During takeoffs and landings emergency medical workers had to be present at the airport, 17 miles from where Trotter and Stark were rescued.

The post Town Leaders Said They Were Prepared for Floods. First Responders Disagree. appeared first on ProPublica.

In late August, President Donald Trump announced what he called the “biggest oil deal in world history.” Since then, the full text of the accord — which grants the U.S. sweeping access to Venezuela’s oil reserves — has been one of the most sought-after secrets in Washington, D.C. 

ProPublica has reviewed a copy of the 18-page strategic partnership agreement signed for the United States by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The document reveals carefully constructed terms that favor U.S. interests at every turn and cements the power of a small group of people handpicked by the Trump administration to govern and profit from the deal. The role of the Venezuelan government and the potential benefits to its people are largely absent from the text.

One of the most criticized aspects of Trump’s announcement has been his choice of a partner: Alejandro Betancourt, a globe-trotting Venezuelan oligarch who has faced money-laundering investigations in three countries. 

The Trump administration is taking a 35% stake in Betancourt’s firm, North American Blue Energy Partners, by acquiring shares in a Barbados-registered parent company. The deal document provides little information about the owners and investors behind the parent company, who could receive enormous wealth from the arrangement. 

The agreement also safeguards Betancourt’s position as chief executive of NABEP and says the U.S. government will work with the parent company to appoint a powerful seven-member board to govern the venture for an initial 15-year term. Those aspects of the deal, according to people with knowledge of how it came together, were designed to prevent future U.S. and Venezuelan leaders from dismantling the enterprise. 

Orlando Alvarado, a name not disclosed by the Trump administration as a party to the accord, signed the agreement on behalf of the parent company, alongside Betancourt, Hegseth and Rubio. Alvarado has held senior roles in multiple Betancourt businesses, including as chief financial officer of an energy firm that became embroiled in scandals a decade ago. According to the Miami Herald, federal prosecutors identified Alvarado as an unindicted co-conspirator in a scheme to embezzle money from Venezuela’s national oil company.

NABEP spokesperson Terry Wade said that “neither Mr. Betancourt nor Mr. Alvarado has ever been charged with any crime in any country, and any claims against them are baseless.” 

Key aspects of the plan differ from the Trump administration’s public pronouncements. Trump has said the deal will secure America’s energy dominance for the next century. But the text indicates that U.S. purchasing rights expire in half that time and that the underlying operating rights appear to run afoul of Venezuelan laws limiting oil concessions to 25 years.

The agreement does ensure the United States a deep discount from fair-market value on 20% of NABEP’s oil, as Trump has said. It does not, however, explicitly guarantee that Betancourt’s company is obligated to pay the estimated $200 billion in royalties and tax payments to Venezuela that the White House has said would benefit the country. 

There are also significant caveats related to Trump’s central selling point to Americans — that the deal will bring a gusher of low-cost oil imports. 

The agreement gives the U.S. the right to purchase 20% of NABEP’s oil at a discounted rate of $30 a barrel, or less than a third of what oil has sold for in recent months, according to one of three supporting documents reviewed by ProPublica. 

But this fee does not account for the cost of getting Venezuela’s oil out of the country. Much of Venezuela’s raw crude is so thick that it won’t flow through pipelines unless it is first blended with 20% or more of oil thinner products. Under the deal, the potentially significant cost of importing millions of barrels of those blending materials is not included in the price.

The White House, the State Department, the Pentagon and the energy company NABEP all defended the agreement, saying in statements that their new public-private venture will provide meaningful and lasting economic benefits to both countries that cannot be captured in a legal document. 

“This historic deal marks a major step toward stabilizing Venezuela’s economy after years of hyperinflation and almost no new investment, while more than doubling the United States’ oil reserves,” said White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers.

Wade emphasized that NABEP was chosen because of its track record of expanding oil production in Venezuela in recent years and that the agreement was between the company and the U.S. government, not Venezuela.

“Thanks in large part to the agreement,” Wade said, “there is a surge in confidence about the future of Venezuela’s oil industry and, as a direct result, substantial new investments are flowing into the country.”

He added that much of NABEP’s oil comes from fields that require little or no blending materials and that blending costs would not meaningfully impact the price of production. “Our barrel economics are strong.”

The newly revealed details of the agreement are nonetheless likely to raise more questions about whether the unorthodox marriage of the United States and a foreign energy baron can bring lasting benefits to either country — and which private parties might benefit along the way. Trump’s oil deal is likely to face scrutiny in both the United States and Venezuela, especially if Democrats win one or both chambers in the midterm elections, according to former U.S. diplomats and congressional staff.

“Question number one in a new U.S. Congress will be: Why Betancourt?” said former Ambassador James Story, who served as the top U.S. diplomat in Caracas from 2018 to 2023, in an interview. “Why did he get this deal? And was he involved in criminality? It seems reasonable to have a congressional hearing about those questions.”

In public comments, Delcy Rodríguez, who won the backing of the Trump administration to serve as Venezuela’s interim president, praised the accord as “historic.” She has asserted that Venezuela will retain sovereignty over its natural resources and defended the choice of Betancourt. 

People with knowledge of the Trump administration’s behind-the-scenes decision-making and negotiations with Betancourt spoke to ProPublica on condition of anonymity because they were either not authorized to do so or were fearful of retribution. 

One reason that the precise terms of the deal have remained hidden until now is that the signed agreement is marked as a “sensitive” government document. That classification is commonly used to shield a variety of federal records from public release, including those containing personnel information, details about ongoing law enforcement operations and matters protected by attorney-client privilege. The document also contains a confidentiality clause barring Betancourt’s company from disclosing the “existence and terms” of the U.S. government agreement.

One person familiar with the deliberations said that people close to the Trump administration  seemed keen to partner with Betancourt’s company because of the privacy and flexibility it offered. That appeared to give NABEP an advantage over publicly traded oil companies, which would be obligated to shareholder reporting requirements. 

“For example,” the person said, “Chevron couldn’t give 35% of their shares to the Pentagon.”

The Deal

The oil deal is sensitive partly because of likely resistance in Venezuela, where critics have already described it as a U.S. takeover of the country’s precious natural resources.

A ProPublica analysis shows that its terms favor American interests at nearly every turn and try to enshrine the Trump administration’s imprint indefinitely. 

The document states that a majority of the seven-member board must be U.S. citizens at all times, and the U.S. government can appoint one “non-voting observer” to join the group. Betancourt, who will serve as the chief executive, is the only board member named by the agreement. The initial board will establish the process for choosing new members. 

“Throughout the evolution of the deal, it was clear that the governing structure was intended to ensure maximum control by the people making the deal and to insulate them from future administrations seeking to reverse the agreement or call it into question,” a person familiar with the negotiations said.

There is no requirement for any Venezuelan government participation in the board.

The agreement also offers long-lasting protections for Betancourt and unnamed investors. It requires a supermajority vote of five to oust Betancourt as CEO, change the board composition or execute any transactions with a shareholder that isn’t the U.S. government, an indirect equity holder, director, affiliate or “immediate family members.”

The board will determine compensation for Betancourt in his role as chief executive, the document says. As structured, the deal does not appear to require any public disclosures about pay or distribution of shares to executives.

The agreement does not say which shareholders, affiliates or family members have been approved to transact with Betancourt’s company. Under Barbados corporate law, there is almost nothing that can force those interests to be revealed publicly. 

The agreement does, however, require the company to maintain “anti-money laundering controls,” submit to external audits and inspections of its records by the U.S. government, and provide the U.S. government with an annual budget and quarterly unaudited financial statements. It is unclear if these reports will ever be made public. 

It could be some time before the company produces enough oil to fulfill a significant share of U.S. demand. Betancourt’s company currently produces about 200,000 barrels per day — or about as much over the course of a year as the United States uses in three days. 

NABEP aims to increase its production to 500,000 barrels per day by the end of 2028, according to recent reports.

In addition to securing a discount on 20% of NABEP’s oil, Washington also has “first priority” to purchase all of the company’s remaining oil production for the next 50 years, including an irrevocable right to buy its entire oil supply in the event the U.S. declares a national emergency. 

The U.S. also receives a “most favored nation” status that requires Betancourt’s firm to disclose any other business agreements it signs, and, if they are favorable, to grant Washington matching terms.

One person who reviewed parts of the contract was surprised at the tangible benefits for the U.S. compared with the lack of binding commitments to Venezuela: “I gave you 20% of my production at ‘cost plus,’ fine. I gave you all of my production if there’s a national emergency, OK. … So what do I get in exchange?”

A U.S. official said Rodriguez had granted NABEP 100-year oil concessions to operate there, although this figure is not referenced in the accord and appears to contradict Venezuelan law. 

In the event of a dispute, Venezuela can’t challenge the deal in its own courts. The agreement dictates that any conflict between the company and the United States must be settled under U.S. law, not Venezuela’s. The two sides even spelled out that any civil case or arbitration must be argued before the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, where Trump’s Justice Department has turned, time and again, for favorable rulings. 

Where U.S. law does not apply, Texas state law governs, the agreement states. 

A Pentagon office has been tasked with someday executing the financial transaction to capitalize on the U.S. government’s 35% share in the venture. The document shows that the U.S. will pay nothing upfront but plans to acquire its stake in Betancourt’s company by paying $0.01 per warrant share. Those terms are set to expire on the 75th anniversary of the closing date.

In a White House statement last month, Trump touted those shares as potentially worth “hundreds of billions,” plus dividends. But Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee said they believe the Pentagon office does not have the legal authority to execute an agreement with a foreign entity operating in a country under U.S. sanctions.

Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson said that the Defense Department conducts “extensive due diligence” before extending capital assistance. Wilson declined to comment on any of the legal considerations or further technical aspects of the deal “to protect the integrity of the process.”

Several other detailed aspects of how the company will operate are currently under negotiation among the Trump administration, Betancourt and the parent company, the partnership documents show. The agreement repeatedly cites a set of “Implementation Documents” that will finalize the U.S. ownership stake and the rights of unnamed investors. 

The full force of the deal will not take effect until both parties have complied with its closing conditions, which the agreement indicates could happen within months.

Last month, Senate Democrats blasted what was known of the oil accord and demanded details in a letter to Rubio, Hegseth and Secretary of Energy Chris Wright.

“It is unclear why the American public should support this attempt to entangle the United States with a relatively unknown foreign oil company that lacks the capacity or credibility to develop oil fields of the magnitude described and whose leadership has faced international criminal investigations,” four ranking senators said in the letter. 

They asserted that most of the “oil fields are nowhere near ready for production” and that it could “take up to a decade before global oil markets are meaningfully impacted and the American people see any tangible benefit.”

A Willing Partner

Almost immediately after U.S. special operations forces seized President Nicolás Maduro in January and airlifted him out of Venezuela, Trump left little doubt that his larger goal was to restore American access to Venezuela’s oil reserves two decades after most U.S. firms had been ejected from the country. 

By early spring, an obscure cast of energy officials, lawyers and lobbyists had started to craft plans to deliver on Trump’s America First energy agenda. One person familiar with the deliberations said that U.S. officials had considered backing an idea for publicly held American oil companies like Chevron, Exxon and Conoco to carve up and rehabilitate Venezuela’s aging oil sector. Another potential route went through Betancourt’s company, which is the second largest private oil firm operating in Venezuela. Working with the Venezuelan state company, Petróleos de Venezuela, SA, was never really an option due to its underlying debt and history of corruption, the person said.

The option of turning to large multinational oil companies quickly stalled. In some cases, oil executives balked at jumping back into the complexity of the Venezuelan market; in others, firms struggled to get more than “lip service” meetings in Washington and Caracas, according to media reports and people familiar with the deal. 

“NABEP was given priority,” one person said. “Exxon, Conoco and the others were treated as second class.” 

Betancourt’s star was rising in the Trump administration. He had served as an interlocutor for Washington with the Maduro government and had ties to some leaders of the Venezuelan opposition, according to current and former U.S. officials. He had also provided information that helped the U.S. forces seize Venezuelan oil tankers and that aided strategy and planning before the capture of Maduro, Reuters reported. 

In addition, Betancourt had developed a good relationship with Rodríguez, whom Trump had backed as the country’s interim president. And Betancourt had done so despite the fact that her influential brother, National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez, had accused him of corruption in a televised speech in 2020, according to former U.S. officials and press reports.

U.S. officials also saw practical reasons to partner with Betancourt, several people said. He and his then-business partner in the U.S., Harry Sargeant, a Trump supporter, appeared to be a rare success story in a battered industry, operating some of the only active oil fields in the country.

“The main thing I found promising is that the fields are producing in Venezuela,” said a former State Department official who analyzed the company’s activities. “I think it’s particularly important that you buy into fields that are producing. … If your policy goal is to raise production quickly, this makes sense.”  

But partnering with Betancourt posed major challenges. 

For starters, the 46-year-old billionaire was confined to house arrest on his 300-acre Oxfordshire estate in England, fighting off a Swiss extradition request tied to an international money-laundering probe. Betancourt could fly to his $46 million London residence by private helicopter — but his Venezuelan and Italian passports were locked down, and British authorities had barred him from driving on public roads, according to media reports about the special bail arrangement.

Betancourt’s legal problems stemmed from his role in troubled Venezuelan energy projects during the corrupt rule of former President Hugo Chávez. Several of Betancourt’s known or alleged associates were charged or convicted in a major U.S. money-laundering investigation known as Operation Money Flight. Betancourt surfaced as a suspect in the U.S. case and is still under investigation for suspected money laundering by authorities in Spain, according to former U.S. and European officials and press reports. 

The most popular leader of the Venezuelan opposition in exile, María Corina Machado, recently described Betancourt as having been involved in “obscene corruption” that caused great suffering for the Venezuelan people, according to a recent New York Times interview. 

Betancourt has not been charged in any country. His lawyer has maintained his client’s innocence, saying Betancourt has been unfairly maligned because people associate him with a group of wealthy young Venezuelans, some of whom have been accused of wrongdoing, according to press reports.

Many Venezuelans see Betancourt as a “totemic, emblematic, corrupt figure,” said Brian Naranjo, a former senior U.S. diplomat in Venezuela, in an interview.

“He is not really an oil man,” Naranjo said. “The talent he brings is that he’s a new person in a long line of Venezuelan businesspeople who deal in influence. Their big lever is connections and influence. It is know-who, not know-how.”

In a recent interview with Spanish language media, Rubio defended Betancourt, praising his oil company’s work in Venezuela and his support for factions of the Venezuelan opposition in exile.

Rubio downplayed the legal scrutiny Betancourt has faced, saying a review conducted with U.S. law enforcement agencies indicated “there were no investigations of him in our system.”

It remains unclear exactly how Betancourt shed the travel restrictions imposed by European authorities. But The Washington Post reported that senior Trump administration officials, including Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, former Attorney General Pam Bondi and then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, petitioned their foreign counterparts to allow Betancourt to travel freely and to close their investigations into him and his business ventures. 

The Trump administration’s next hurdle to working with Betancourt was figuring out how to legally invest. The government’s $200 billion investment agency, the International Development Finance Corporation, was created to do just that but is currently barred by U.S. law from operating in Venezuela.

At different points through the summer, aides to Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought stepped in, pressing Defense and State department officials to consider alternate financing paths, according to one person familiar with the deal’s progression.

By July, the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital, headed by David Lorch, emerged as a potential solution.

Lorch, who had moved to the Pentagon from Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg’s private equity firm, Cerberus Capital, quickly embraced the idea, according to people familiar with the deal. Lorch and other Pentagon and State Department officials flew to Caracas in the final days of that month and agreed in principle to a deal. The details would be hammered out back in Washington, the people said.

A Pentagon spokesperson said Lorch declined to comment.

On Aug. 5, Betancourt strode into a conference room behind the art deco facade of the old Greyhound Bus Terminal in downtown Washington that houses an auxiliary Pentagon office. The assembled Defense Department officials gave the Venezuelan billionaire the red carpet treatment, lining up to shake his hand, according to people familiar with the meeting. But some in the room were stunned to discover that the U.S. government was preparing to do business with Betancourt, the people familiar with the meeting said. 

Betancourt was accompanied by Jacob Hirshman, the chief executive and co-founder of Erebor Bank, the first new bank chartered after Trump returned to office, according to people familiar with the meeting. The bank, backed by Trump supporters and investors Peter Thiel and Palmer Luckey, has vowed to reconnect Venezuela to the world economy.

Hirshman did not respond to a request for comment.

Lorch told the group, which included dozens of former Wall Street associates he’d hired into the office, that the alliance with Betancourt was a major “opportunity” to fulfill one of the Trump administration’s top goals, securing benefits to the United States and Venezuela for decades to come. 

The meeting touched off a month of around-the-clock calls and video conferences.

People familiar with the deal’s progression said Lorch soon became involved in structuring key aspects of the deal beyond its financing, including how the board would sit for 15 years and choose its successors. One said he put an explicit premium on setting up the venture in a way that it could not be undone by Trump’s successor.

The months of work on the deal burst into public view on Aug. 28 with a Trump announcement on Truth Social.

“The United States of America has just entered into an Agreement with the Country of Venezuela on, THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY!” Trump posted on a Friday night.

Two days later, Hegseth, Rubio, Betancourt and Alvarado signed the deal.

The post The Secret Terms of Trump’s Venezuelan Oil Deal appeared first on ProPublica.

On March 3, 2020, Sen. Lindsey Graham walked into a private dining room at Charlie Palmer Steak in Washington, D.C. Graham’s time was expensive. He was meeting with two executives and a lobbyist from a Hawaiian naval defense contractor called Navatek. And he had required them to commit to $40,000 in campaign contributions for a 45-minute meeting.

Navatek’s CEO, Martin Kao, was confident that was all the time he needed.

“Shoot all he has to really do is stop by and say ‘yes,’” Kao wrote to a Navatek lobbyist and a fellow executive the day before, in an email seen by ProPublica. “That should only take a minute and he’s on his way. We don’t need to pretend we give a shit about each other.”

At the dinner, Graham ate little and talked a lot. But Kao got the “yes” he was hoping for: Graham agreed to steer a $10 million government contract Navatek’s way in his native South Carolina, Kao later recounted to the FBI. In exchange, he said, Graham asked Kao to pledge a total of $100,000 to his reelection campaign.

In early 2025, the FBI opened a sweeping investigation into bribery on Capitol Hill with Graham’s steakhouse dinner at the center. Kao confessed to federal agents that his business model consisted of bribing public officials in exchange for government contracts, and that the research Navatek was providing to the government was often worthless.

The scheme involved some of the most powerful figures in Congress, he said — in both parties. In South Carolina, Kao told agents, Navatek made a campaign cash-for-contracts deal not only with Graham, but also with the state’s top Democrat, Rep. James Clyburn, and another influential Republican, Rep. Joe Wilson.

Kao told agents that Graham in particular left little room for ambiguity: “This is how much I want, and how much I am going to give you,” Kao remembered Graham saying, according to notes one agent took during their debrief in late 2024.

Kao’s admissions would constitute a vast criminal bribery scheme if they could be proved in court — a challenge, given recent Supreme Court rulings that have made it more difficult to win corruption cases. Kao himself posed another hurdle. He was facing prison for fraud and campaign finance violations and was speaking to the FBI in the hopes of reducing his sentence.

But the FBI agents who took Kao’s confession — two experienced anti-corruption investigators — could see that much of it lined up with a trove of records they had seized from Navatek. They forged ahead. The FBI took the formal step of naming two former Navatek executives who had worked with Kao as subjects of a bribery investigation. The agency did not designate Graham, Clyburn and Wilson that way, but the agents were actively investigating their interactions with Kao. The agents indicated to their superiors that the lawmakers could become subjects in the future, according to records viewed by ProPublica.

The details of this investigation have not previously been reported.

President Donald Trump returned to the White House and almost immediately gutted the specialized FBI and Department of Justice teams dedicated to taking on public corruption — an act of revenge for having previously investigated him. The two experienced agents on the case were swept up in the purge, and the career prosecutor assisting them quit after Trump appointees forbade the DOJ’s anti-corruption section from filing any new cases. Today, there is no one left to look into Kao’s explosive allegations, as the Trump administration has abandoned any pretense of prosecuting public corruption. The case is dead.

ProPublica has unearthed the investigation by reviewing thousands of pages of legal documents, internal company emails, evidence the FBI used to vet Kao’s claims and dozens of interviews with people who saw how Navatek operated, including an eyewitness to Graham and Kao’s secret steakhouse dinner.

This story is part of a series based on our reporting. Last month, ProPublica reported that the FBI had probed the conduct of Maine Sen. Susan Collins, who steered millions in government funding toward Navatek while Kao gave her illegal campaign donations. Collins denied wrongdoing and dismissed Kao as a “convicted liar.”

Kao is indeed the only person involved to serve prison time. He pleaded guilty to making illegal campaign donations and a loan fraud scheme in 2022. In 2025, he was sentenced to 87 months in prison.

Graham died at 71 earlier this year. His sister, Darline Graham, who was appointed to fill his seat, retained most of his senior staff, including those who dealt with Navatek. She even took up some of his committee assignments, including appropriations. Darline Graham is running for a full term in office this November.

Clyburn, 86, is one of the most powerful Democrats in Washington. He is widely credited with tipping the scales for Joe Biden during the 2020 Democratic presidential primary. Wilson remains influential on national defense spending from his senior perch on the Armed Services Committee.

“Whatever a donor may think or say, a donation would never cause Congressman Clyburn to increase his support for the donor’s request,” Jami LaRue, Clyburn’s communications director, wrote in response to detailed questions. “The Congressman has always striven to assist the University of South Carolina and all of the colleges and universities in his district when called upon to further their important missions. The crimes and lies of an imprisoned fraudster will not cause the Congressman to waver in his support for these fine institutions.”

David Snider, Wilson’s communications director, did not address a detailed list of questions sent by ProPublica. “Congressman Wilson does and has always abided by campaign donation regulations set forth by the Federal Election Commission,” Snider said in an email.

In an emailed statement, Taylor Reidy, who was Lindsey Graham’s communications director and now holds the same post for his sister, wrote that “any allegations of quid-pro-quo behavior or wrongdoing by the late Senator Lindsey Graham or his staff are simply false.” She said the accusations were the “ravings of a convicted felon” and that her office was never contacted by the FBI about the matter. After Kao’s arrest, they disgorged his donations, she added.

The two executives who were subjects of the FBI investigation, Duke Hartman and Joshua Knight, were never charged. Hartman, the other executive at the dinner meeting with Graham, is now the CEO of a new naval research company called Integer Technologies that he co-founded with Knight after Kao’s arrest. Integer was recently recognized as one of the fastest-growing government contractors in the country. It also became the ultimate beneficiary of the Graham dinner meeting, picking up the contract Graham allegedly agreed to facilitate that night.

Hartman and Knight did not respond to detailed requests for comment.

“[It’s] corruption at its best,” Kao wrote to ProPublica from federal detention in South Dakota, before cutting off contact. “But I am the only one rotting in prison.”

Small Company, Big Ambitions

Kao’s dinner with Graham was part of his grandiose plan to make Navatek a major defense contractor.

He had become the CEO at an uncertain moment in the company’s history. Founded in Hawaii in the 1970s, the company originally thrived on a close relationship with the state’s powerful senior senator, Daniel Inouye. When Kao assumed ownership in 2019, it had been several years since Inouye had died, and Navatek was in need of a new patron in Washington.

At times, Kao hardly seemed the person to pull this off. He had started out as the company’s CFO and was openly uninterested in its technology. He told bombastic lies about his personal life. Former employees said he regaled them with tales of selling newspapers for members of the Bloods and Crips street gangs as a youth. In a deposition, Kao later admitted that wasn’t true.

But what he lacked in engineering chops he made up with ambition. Once, Kao held a company town hall using a map of the U.S. dotted with future Navatek offices as his backdrop, a former employee recalled. “He would talk about how we’re a $10 million company, and in the next three years, we’re going to be a billion-dollar company,” said a former engineer. “He was an absolute megalomaniac.”

Kao hatched a plan to expand Navatek’s presence across the country, making new friends in Congress along the way. He courted politicians using something he called “the method,” as ProPublica detailed in September.

Navatek would open an office in the state or district of a powerful member of Congress and partner with a local university to concoct a proposal for federally funded research. Then, aided by a well-connected lobbyist and the sheen of credibility from its association with the university, Navatek would approach the member for federal research funding.

Kao told the FBI he would strike deals in small, face-to-face meetings with the members or their trusted staff. Navatek — through executives, family members and lobbyists — would make generous campaign donations. In exchange, the member would add detailed language to the defense budget to fund the company’s work.

That legislative language would not name the company. But it would describe specific work that Navatek was already planning to do behind the scenes, making it the only logical choice for the eventual government contract. The lawmakers’ staff would also backchannel with the Navy after the bill was passed to make sure contracting offices knew to direct the money to Navatek, emails seen by ProPublica show — even though the contracts were in theory competitive.

Kao “wanted to build a company as big as he could as fast as he could,” a former executive later testified in court. For a while, he succeeded. Under Kao, Navatek went from having to “rebuild,” as the executive put it, to winning $40.7 million in new government contracts in 2020.

Hartman, the other Navatek executive who went to dinner with Graham, was in charge of maintaining friendly ties in Congress while tracking the millions of dollars the company had requested in research funds. He kept careful tabs on the company’s progress using dozens of color-coded spreadsheets. “If anyone knows the impropriety of the business model, it’s him,” Kao told the FBI, referring to Hartman.

Later, these spreadsheets provided the FBI a detailed picture of which congressional offices worked closest with Navatek. In the tables devoted to South Carolina, Navatek denoted Graham as a “key supporter.”

The company primarily targeted lawmakers from smaller states who sat on appropriations committees, like Collins, Kao explained to the FBI, because they wielded huge power over the budget while having fewer “constituents to ‘feed.’”

The senior senator from South Carolina was another prime target. “You can get access to Lindsey Graham,” Eric Schiff, a former Navatek executive, said in an interview.

Kao, Hartman and other Navatek executives approached the offices of Graham, Clyburn and Wilson — all powerful members of the South Carolina delegation — in the beginning of 2019. The company had recruited the University of South Carolina for a joint research project, and together they asked the lawmakers to find $9.5 million to fund the work. If it succeeded, Navatek planned to ask Congress to re-up the funding for two more years as well as green-light two more projects, internal company records show, for a total of up to $90 million in South Carolina alone.

Yet Navatek had “zero people” capable of doing the research it was pitching, said a former executive with direct knowledge of the work.

Its $9.5 million “power and energy” proposal promised cutting-edge research on how to distribute the limited power on board a ship between multiple energy-intense systems, like radars, lasers and rail guns. Graham’s office later boasted that the work would lead to new technology that would “ensure that our fleet is ready for the fights of the future.”

In reality, Navatek’s initial research “looked like a college senior’s graduation project,” the executive said. “Something you go get from RadioShack.” Graham’s office referred questions about the quality of the work to the Navy and the university. The Office of Naval Research, which awarded the contract, did not respond to questions.

But for Congress, that lack of expertise wasn’t a problem. Throughout 2019, the FBI noted, as the ensuing year’s budget came together, both Graham’s and Clyburn’s offices took steps to make sure it included Navatek’s funding.

In May 2019, Willie Lyles III, Clyburn’s legislative director, alerted Navatek that the House Appropriations Committee would endorse new funding for a “modular and scalable integrated power and thermal system capable of powering a directed energy weapon system of 100 or more kilowatts,” according to an email flagged by the FBI. Three days later, that exact language appeared in the House Appropriations Committee report. Lyles did not reply to a request for comment.

In September, the Senate Appropriations Committee — Graham’s committee — released a budget report that set aside $9.5 million in funding for “Talent and Technology for Navy Power and Energy Systems.” Agents noted that Navatek may have ghostwritten the technical description that accompanied this line item because “an almost identical paragraph” appeared in Hartman’s internal spreadsheets two months before the Senate report became public.

After the Senate advanced its version of the budget in the fall, Navatek dropped $4,799 to send bourbon to a handful of lawmakers, including Graham and Collins, the FBI found in company records — a likely violation of Senate gift rules. Both Collins’ and Graham’s offices denied receiving bourbon. Navatek later sent Clyburn a fruit basket from Edible Arrangements for $102.60.

Congress passed the final spending bill containing $9.5 million for Navatek’s pet project on Dec. 19, 2019.

At that point, Kao and other Navatek executives had not made any donations to Clyburn, Wilson or even Graham.

That would change within days of Congress passing the budget, when an executive pledged $750 to Wilson’s campaign at a fundraiser held at Bullfeathers, a Capitol Hill watering hole for lobbyists and Hill staffers, emails show. In the following weeks, Kao and his lobbyist gave Wilson’s campaign $3,500.

And bigger checks were imminent. Kao kicked off 2020 by making plans to spend $300,000 at a slew of political fundraisers, according to text messages filed in court and a recent deposition. Navatek’s lobbyists at that time were seeking private meetings with Graham, Wilson and Clyburn, where Kao planned to ask for significantly more federal funding. Kao eventually met with all three, and each asked for $100,000, he told the FBI.

During that same period, Kao and Hartman met a top fundraiser for Collins at a Corner Bakery in Washington, D.C. As ProPublica reported, that meeting led Kao to donate $150,000 to the pro-Collins super PAC. Kao told the FBI that the money was a bribe in exchange for the senator’s support for more Navatek funding. The head of the super PAC and Collins have denied Kao’s version of events.

Kao told the FBI it was not unusual for donations to come after the favor: “We became clever in our own right and figured out how to dangle the carrot,” he wrote in a memo seen by ProPublica, “until we saw some assurance that the Ask was in the budget.”

To secure a meeting with Graham, Kao hired Michael Tongour, a veteran South Carolina lobbyist who was old law school friends with the senator and family friends with Clyburn and Wilson. Graham was up for reelection against a well-funded challenger, Jaime Harrison, and had a crowded fundraising schedule, said Tongour, but they eventually found a time.

“The Graham fundraiser says that it [sic] you want to reserve a date for Senator Graham to attend a private dinner, the campaign wants to get $40,000 in contributions,” Tongour wrote to Kao, Hartman and lobbyist Andy Winer, in an undated email seen by ProPublica. Winer, whom Kao described as Navatek’s chief lobbyist, chimed in to say that Graham could stay only 45 minutes, and Kao replied that all they needed to hear was “yes.”

“These discussions are very frank and oddly not at all awkward,” Kao told the FBI. “I suppose once we got that far, everyone knows the deal.”

A Dinner With Graham

Graham showed up late to his March 3, 2020, dinner with Kao, Hartman and Tongour. A fundraiser working for Graham appeared first and accepted an envelope from Kao containing checks made out to Graham’s campaign, Kao said. Kao did not know the fundraiser’s name; in an FBI debrief, he simply referred to the person as the “money man.” After that person departed, Graham entered.

Graham, Kao recalled to the FBI, was “very abrupt” and “straight to the point”: He asked how much Navatek wanted, to which they said $10 million a year for three years. Graham asked Kao to pledge $100,000 in donations in exchange for his support, Kao told the FBI.

Navatek was juggling multiple proposals in South Carolina worth around $10 million, and it’s not clear which one Kao was describing.

Congress had just approved the $9.5 million for the power and energy project, but Navatek still needed the Navy to award the money in the form of a contract. The company was also about to ask Congress to fund the same project for a second year at $10.5 million. On top of that, Navatek was planning to pitch a new research proposal, at $10 million, to study the transport of supplies inland from ships using autonomous vehicles. It was another area where Navatek had “zero past performance,” the former executive said.

The same week of the steakhouse dinner, Graham’s office was working behind the scenes with Navatek and the University of South Carolina to make sure the Navy sent the first $9.5 million to the right company.

A day before the dinner, an official with the Office of Naval Research emailed Graham’s office to ask about the money, which “the Senator may have an interest in.” Craig Abele, Graham’s national security adviser, called her a few days later to confirm that Graham’s office had intended the money to be awarded to the Navatek partnership, emails show. “Spoke to ONR this morning,” Abele wrote March 6. “Should be set.”

The company received the contract, which it split with the university, in July 2020. 

Abele became Graham’s deputy chief of staff and still holds the position for Darline. He did not reply to an email requesting comment. A Graham spokesperson confirmed to ProPublica that their office had indeed added the $9.5 million to the budget at the request of the university and Navatek. The spokesperson said the research was supported by the Navy and rejected the notion that Graham was motivated by campaign cash.

Graham’s spokesperson said requiring a fundraising minimum for a dinner was normal practice.

The checks Kao handed over at the dinner added up to about half of the $40,000 he had agreed to raise for the dinner, according to Tongour. The rest came in May, campaign records show.

“My understanding at the time was that the contributions associated with the event were lawful political contributions,” Winer said. “I never advised Kao to make a political contribution in exchange for official action. I never participated in, witnessed or had knowledge of any illegal political contribution.”

After Kao’s 2020 indictment, the University of South Carolina broke off the partnership. “University officials were not aware of any political contributions from Navatek,” Jeff Stensland, a university spokesperson, wrote in an email. “Our sole objective in partnering with them was to expand our research enterprise.”

One week after the dinner, on March 10, a University of South Carolina lobbyist sent written requests to Graham’s office for $20.5 million in appropriations: $10.5 million to continue Navatek’s power and energy research and $10 million for its new autonomous vehicle research.

Tongour confirmed many elements of Kao’s story. In a recent interview with ProPublica and subsequent emails, he remembered Kao giving the envelope full of checks to Graham’s fundraiser and even agreed that Graham kept the meeting short. “I don’t recall that he stayed more than 30 minutes,” Tongour said in an email. “Certainly not for appetizers, entrée, and dessert.”

But he denied Kao’s most significant claim: that Graham and Navatek struck an explicit, potentially illegal deal for contracts.

“I would remember that forever,” Tongour said. Graham supported Navatek’s requests, he said, because they were good for the state. “If I had seen that kind of quid pro quo, I would have quit earlier.” Tongour fired Navatek as a client later that year, immediately after Kao’s arrest.

Navatek considered Graham its chief patron in South Carolina, internal records show, just as it viewed Collins in Maine. But the company also wanted support in the House.

For that, Navatek turned to Clyburn, a member of Democratic party leadership and one of the most powerful figures in Congress. Agents found Navatek emails setting a meeting with Clyburn for early March. The goal, Kao said, was to make sure that the House draft of the budget “mirrored” whatever Graham inserted in the Senate version.

Over a meal, Clyburn asked Kao how much he was donating to Graham and then asked for the same amount, $100,000, Kao told the FBI.

The FBI tallied $20,000 in contributions that Kao and his family members made to Clyburn a few days after their scheduled meeting. A month later, Hartman arranged for a $10,000 gift to Clyburn’s alma mater, South Carolina State University, according to an email seen by ProPublica. Hartman noted it was “Congressman Clyburn’s favorite school.”

The spokesperson for Clyburn confirmed the dinner occurred but did not respond to questions about what was discussed.

Kao and Hartman struck a similar bargain with Wilson, Kao told the FBI, at a private lunch he secured by donating to his campaign. The FBI pulled records of $3,500 in donations Kao and Tongour made in late 2019 and early 2020.

Wilson has an influential role on the House Armed Services Committee, which authorizes defense spending. Wilson was “very clear and knew what the ask was,” Kao told the FBI. He wanted however much Clyburn was getting in campaign contributions in exchange for his support, Kao said.

Tongour denied this. “There was no ‘pay to play’ with Joe Wilson or his staff either,” he wrote in an email, adding that he donated because Wilson “is a friend and I want to see him re-elected.”

Kao claimed to the FBI that he paid for meals with all three politicians, but campaign finance records appear to show the lawmakers’ campaigns picked up the check.

By August 2020, Hartman had gotten word that Graham’s and Wilson’s committees would each support part of the company’s requests, internal company records show. Clyburn was not on key committees while he was a party leader. In one of his myriad spreadsheets, Hartman projected that the final budget could include up to $15.5 million of the $20.5 million the company had lobbied for.

Kao told agents he was gearing up to make more significant donations to Graham, Clyburn and Wilson by the end of the year. Instead, on Sept. 30, 2020, he was arrested.

Kao reflected on his time at Navatek in a deposition taken last month inside a federal prison. The company’s founder has sued Kao, saying his stewardship defrauded Navatek of millions.

“It’s nothing more than government contracting done through placating senior appropriation members for contracts,” Kao said. “The whole thing is a grand lie.”

An Arrest, a Lifeboat

Kao’s arrest plunged Navatek into disarray. Federal prosecutors charged him with defrauding a federal loan program; not long after, he was also charged with making illegal donations to the Collins campaign and super PAC. Lobbyists, universities and congressional offices abruptly cut off contact. “Don’t call us,” one congressional office told an executive, he later testified.

The Collins campaign said it disgorged Kao’s contribution. Yet the senator, facing a tight reelection bid, has had to field questions following the ProPublica report about her support for Navatek and why the super PAC supporting her accepted the $150,000 donation from the shell company in the first place.

As Navatek sank, Hartman began building himself a lifeboat. In 2021, he and Knight started a new military research company headquartered in South Carolina called Integer Technologies. Integer’s first project was one that Navatek had brokered with Graham.

Hartman didn’t face any criminal charges at the time and left Navatek largely unscathed. He would later settle a civil lawsuit brought by his former employer, which contended he played a role in Kao’s campaign finance and loan fraud schemes, for $425,000. He admitted no wrongdoing.

In September 2024, FBI agents flew to Hawaii for what would be their final interview with Kao. They pressed him for details about what happened in South Carolina, quizzing him on his dinner with Graham and a second in-person meeting he said he had with Clyburn. Agents wanted Kao to help them find more records that would back up his account and asked him to point them toward lobbyists in D.C. who he said facilitated the pay-for-play scheme.

As the year came to a close, FBI agent Michelle Ball felt she had enough material to move forward. The FBI had “uncovered a lengthy history” of a government contractor making donations “in exchange for government contracts,” she wrote in a Dec. 9, 2024, memo viewed by ProPublica.

In federal corruption probes, agents often begin by focusing on lower-level targets with a goal of working their way up to more prominent figures. Ball named Hartman; his business partner, Knight; and their company, Integer, as the formal subjects of the probe, as they prepared to potentially issue subpoenas and gather more evidence. They had Graham, Clyburn and Wilson in their sights. Ball devoted entire sections of the memo to detailing the lawmakers’ conduct. And she flagged the case as a sensitive matter that might implicate politicians in the future.

In the summer of 2024, Kate Fifield, a prosecutor in the Justice Department’s anti-corruption section, had been assigned to join the case. Fifield was wrapping up a high-profile prosecution of a retired Navy admiral who traded a government contract for a future job. Turning her attention to Kao, she and the FBI agents weighed their options. They considered getting high-level approval to deploy undercover agents. Proving an exchange of cash for favors often requires the kind of inconvertible evidence that undercover recordings can provide.

But before the investigation took flight, the new Trump administration began to demolish the Justice Department. The president’s handpicked leaders ordered prosecutors to drop a corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams, triggering a wave of resignations in the Public Integrity Section where Fifield worked, and revoked the section’s authority to bring new cases.

Then Trump’s FBI director, Kash Patel, began to purge the anti-corruption unit in the Washington D.C., field office, where many agents had investigated Trump.

Ball was fired in October 2025. Kevin Gounaud, another agent who had been working with her on the investigation, was pushed out in early 2026. Through their lawyer, the agents declined to comment.

The corruption investigation, just launched, suddenly went dark.

Read More

The FBI Anti-Corruption Squad Was Circling Susan Collins — Until Trump Got in the Way

The White House referred ProPublica’s questions to the FBI and DOJ. 

The Department of Justice didn’t respond to detailed questions about the investigation. 

“Under President Trump, the Justice Department is rooting out the weaponization, corruption, and institutional rot that ran rampant under Joe Biden’s two-tiered system of justice,” DOJ spokesperson Audrey Cook said.

Kao’s claims are “half baked” and “misleading,” FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson said. “Additionally, as we have said repeatedly, personnel are only removed at this FBI if they have been found to have acted unethically, undermined the mission, or engaged in weaponization of law enforcement.”

Meanwhile, Integer has rapidly expanded. Last year, it reported $81 million in contracts and announced that number would climb to $375 million by 2030. The company inked partnership deals with universities in New Hampshire, Louisiana and Mississippi. The University of South Carolina called its partnership with the firm a “model for public-private success.”

The company continues to forge ties with powerful politicians. In late 2024, Hartman posted a photo of himself with Speaker of the House Mike Johnson on his LinkedIn. “It was great to visit with the Speaker of the House today,” he wrote. “It’s good to know there are people in positions of power who seem to really care for the people they serve.” Johnson’s office did not reply to an email requesting comment. 

The occasion was a new research partnership in Louisiana. Hartman thanked his lobbyist for making it happen.

The post How Trump’s FBI Purge Saved Lindsey Graham and James Clyburn From a Bribery Investigation appeared first on ProPublica.