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Omar al Bayoumi

25 Years After 9/11, Questions Persist Over FBI Pursuit Of Saudi Suspects

Within a few days of the terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001, FBI agents identified an important possible suspect: a middle-aged Saudi graduate student who provided crucial help to two of the al-Qaida hijackers as they settled in San Diego early the year before.

The Saudi, Omar al-Bayoumi, had since moved to England, and he was arrested there at the FBI’s request. A police search of his home and office yielded a trove of evidence that quickly deepened investigators’ suspicions about Bayoumi and his dealings with the terrorists. But what happened to much of that evidence after it was delivered to the FBI remains a mystery.

Bayoumi was questioned and released by British police and later returned to Saudi Arabia. For years thereafter, the FBI would insist he wasn’t really a suspect at all — that Bayoumi had met the hijackers by chance, had helped them unwittingly and seemed nothing like a militant Islamist.

As the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks is marked Friday, questions about how the FBI handled Bayoumi’s case have only grown, driven in part by evidence that was seized from him in 2001 but not made public for years or even shared with field agents who sought to investigate his role.

That evidence and other FBI information, now filed in a federal lawsuit against the Saudi government by victims of the attacks, has undercut both Bayoumi’s claims of innocence and the FBI’s profile of him as a genial, pro-American civil servant. While he was living publicly as a student, it shows, Bayoumi worked closely with Saudi religious officials, operated as a Saudi intelligence asset and collaborated with several clerics who would later emerge as militant Islamists tied to al-Qaida.

This week, representatives of the 9/11 families are again demanding an end to what they have called the Justice Department’s silence about what happened to the Bayoumi evidence and why he and other Saudis were not more aggressively pursued. The families have also questioned whether the Trump administration — which has strengthened U.S. diplomatic and business ties to the Saudi royal family — is committed to pursuing the truth about the possible role of Saudi officials.

“We still have not been given the full picture of what happened,” said Kathleen Zapata, whose father, Joseph Coppo, was killed in the World Trade Center. “Why are we having to fight against our own government simply to get answers about the most horrible attack ever on American soil?”

A White House spokesperson said, “President Trump is leading the most transparent administration in history, and his team is working diligently on identifying records that are responsive to these families’ request.” A Justice Department spokesperson declined to comment, noting that many of the officials involved in the early 9/11 investigation no longer work for the government.

While former Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden are expected to attend a ceremony at the 9/11 memorial in New York, President Donald Trump has said he will commemorate the anniversary separately at the Pentagon.

The Saudi government has long denied any role in the attacks, often citing FBI and CIA statements that the royal family was an enemy of al-Qaida and its Saudi-born leader, Osama bin Laden. A spokesperson for the Saudi Embassy in Washington did not return messages asking for comment, including a request to speak to Bayoumi.

From San Diego to Dulles International Airport

A ProPublica examination of how the FBI handled the Bayoumi evidence shows that questions surrounding the Saudi connections to the 9/11 plot date to Jan. 15, 2000, when the first two hijackers landed in Los Angeles on a flight from Bangkok.

The CIA had followed the two men, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, as they met with other Qaida operatives in Malaysia days before. But the agency said it lost track of them when they flew to Thailand and then entered the United States using their real names and Saudi passports. (The CIA did not inform the FBI of their presence in the United States until Aug. 24, 2001, according to the report of the 9/11 Commission.)

Unlike several Qaida operatives who led the hijacking teams, Mihdhar and Hazmi spoke no English and knew almost nothing of life in a Western society. The mastermind of the plot, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, told CIA interrogators he advised them to seek help from Muslim communities in California, according to the 9/11 Commission. But the commission and many U.S. terrorism experts expressed skepticism that he would deploy such ill-equipped operatives without providing them with any contacts in the United States.

Bayoumi claimed his meeting with the hijackers was happenstance. After driving from San Diego on Feb. 1, 2000, he said, he had a meeting at the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles and then went to a nearby halal cafe. There, he later told the FBI, he overheard Hazmi and Mihdhar speaking Gulf-accented Arabic and introduced himself. Seeking to be hospitable, he said, he told them they might want to try San Diego.

Shortly after the men stepped off a bus there three days later, Bayoumi said, he happened to run into them again at a local mosque. The next day, he arranged for them to rent an apartment in the building where he lived with his family, co-signed their lease and set up a bank account for them, briefly loaning them about $1,500 for the deposit. He went on to introduce them to more than two dozen local men who helped them in various ways.

The FBI had already looked closely at Bayoumi, launching a preliminary investigation in 1998 after neighbors reported what they said were suspicious gatherings of young Arab men at his apartment. That inquiry determined that Bayoumi, who had worked for the Saudi civil aviation ministry, was still receiving a generous government stipend through an aviation company for which he did no work. The investigation found no criminal activity, however, and it was closed after six months, officials said.

Barely a week after the 9/11 attacks, the FBI asked the British authorities to arrest Bayoumi in Birmingham, England, where he had begun graduate business studies at Aston University.

David Campbell, then a young terrorism investigator, was dispatched from London by the Metropolitan Police Service, which is responsible for counterterrorism efforts across Britain. He recalled flying back down the highway in a special police vehicle with his handcuffed prisoner in the back seat, the sirens blaring. “They’d been told they had one of the 9/11 terrorists,” he said in an interview.

The FBI sent three agents from the United States to assist with Bayoumi’s interrogation at the Paddington Green police station in Central London. They were joined by a senior FBI attache, Joseph Hummell, who worked closely with the police service’s Anti-Terrorist Branch, known as SO13.

But despite those close contacts and the FBI’s considerable information about Bayoumi, very little of it was shared with Campbell and the Birmingham detective who joined him in questioning the suspect.

“We were really in the dark,” Campbell recalled. “They never even mentioned that he had been under investigation by the FBI in San Diego in 1998.”

Nor, Campbell said, were the interrogators briefed about the materials that had just been taken from Bayoumi’s Birmingham home and office, which included boxes of papers, correspondence, photographs, computer disks, videotapes and an address book. Yet some of those items had been immediately flagged as important, records show.

Among them was a diagram in Bayoumi’s handwriting that appeared to calculate the trajectory of an airplane to a point on the horizon. Another was a video of Bayoumi touring and describing the U.S. Capitol, a building that had been identified by U.S. investigators as a prospective al-Qaida target.

After questioning Bayoumi for almost a week, Campbell said, he and the Birmingham detective joined two senior SO13 officers on a conference call with Justice Department attorneys in the United States. The two interrogators were given a brief opportunity to express their view that Bayoumi’s account seemed deeply suspicious and full of falsehoods, Campbell said.

It didn’t seem to matter. The U.S. officials, who included lawyers in Washington and federal prosecutors in New York, concluded quickly that they did not have sufficient evidence to seek Bayoumi’s extradition.

“When the call ended, we just looked at each other in complete disbelief,” Campbell recalled.

FBI documents declassified in response to a 2021 executive order by Biden give a partial answer to what happened to the Bayoumi evidence.

One memorandum on Oct. 11, 2001, notes that New Scotland Yard, as the Metropolitan Police Service was often called, had provided the FBI attache’s office with “copies of all recovered exhibits, including mirror images of all computers.” A complete copy of the trove was also sent via Federal Express to the FBI’s New York Field Office, the memo noted.

By then, however, the agency’s new director, Robert Mueller, had taken the unusual step of ordering that the 9/11 case be run out of its Washington headquarters. The Penttbomteam, as it became known in the FBI’s clunky acronym for Pentagon/Twin Towers Bombing, mobilized thousands of FBI agents and analysts around the world.

One group focused on the hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77, the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, tracing the path of Hazmi and Mihdhar from Southern California to Dulles International Airport in Virginia, where they abandoned a used Toyota Corolla registered to one of their former addresses in San Diego.

How the headquarters team translated and analyzed the materials obtained from Bayoumi in Britain is unclear. But the team did not appear to share the evidence widely. In another memo, dated May 15, 2002, the San Diego FBI office noted that it was asked to review only five of the more than 80 VHS tapes seized from Bayoumi in Birmingham. Two of those were duplicates and included footage of a paintball fight and a family trip to Sea World. “Nothing of significant investigative/evidential value has been discovered,” the memo stated.

Although Bayoumi’s friends and associates helped the hijackers with everything from part-time jobs to flying lessons (they flunked out because their English was so poor), FBI leaders dismissed the idea that any of the people who helped them knew they were Qaida operatives sent on a still-evolving terrorist mission.

“As far as we know, they contacted no known terrorist sympathizers in the United States,” Mueller told a joint panel of the Senate and House intelligence committees in September 2002. “To this day, we have found no one in the United States except the actual hijackers who knew of the plot.”

The FBI’s more conclusive account of its Penttbom findings came before the bipartisan 9/11 Commission. The young agent leading the Flight 77 investigation team, Jacqueline Maguire, echoed Mueller’s earlier testimony, saying in 2004 that Bayoumi’s meeting with the California hijackers had been “a random encounter” and that he had helped them without knowing their true aim. Maguire also said the FBI had no indication the hijackers had initially sought out another figure who raised suspicions, Fahad al-Thumairy, the imam of the Saudi-built King Fahd Mosque in Culver City, California.

Michael Jacobson, a former State Department counterterrorism official who was a key commission investigator, said he knew some FBI agents in California were convinced that Bayoumi and Thumairy had helped the hijackers deliberately. But Maguire and her boss, Mary Galligan, who oversaw the Penttbom team, “were both consistently pushing back hard on any narrative of a support network,” Jacobson said in an interview.

Maguire and Galligan declined to comment.

When investigators from the 9/11 Commission interviewed Bayoumi and Thumairy in Saudi Arabia in 2003, Maguire — who had already interviewed the two Saudis for the FBI months earlier — joined them as an official escort. The interviews, which were managed by Saudi intelligence officials, were notable for Bayoumi’s efforts to ingratiate himself and Thumairy’s seemingly brazen lies, former officials said. Thumairy said he had never met the hijackers and did not even know Bayoumi, despite telephone records showing numerous calls between them. The Saudi Embassy did not respond to a request to speak to Thumairy.

In its final report, the commission said it could not confirm that Thumairy helped the two terrorists but found it was “fairly certain that Hazmi and Mihdhar spent time at the King Fahd mosque and made some acquaintances there.”

Echoing the FBI’s assessment, the commission described Bayoumi as “a devout Muslim, obliging and gregarious,” and found no evidence he “believed in violent extremism or knowingly aided extremist groups.” It would take years before those conclusions were forcefully challenged.

Daniel Gonzalez, a San Diego FBI agent who had been looking at Hazmi and Mihdhar’s circle since the day after the attacks, became the case agent for Operation Encore, a “subfile” or follow-on inquiry to the original 9/11 case. But while he and other agents made significant breakthroughs, former officials said, they faced constant skepticism from FBI headquarters and were sometimes blocked outright in their efforts to pursue the case.

In 2007, in an interview with a key source in Jordan, Gonzalez learned of two other important witnesses in Los Angeles, young Muslim immigrants who had also helped the hijackers. The two later confirmed the hijackers had gone to the King Fahd Mosque after arriving in Los Angeles and met repeatedly with Thumairy. One of the men said Thumairy also arranged for the hijackers to be driven to their first meeting with Bayoumi at the halal cafe — undercutting Bayoumi’s claim that he met them by chance.

For years, Encore agents said, they continued to press for more of the materials seized from Bayoumi in Britain. At one point, Gonzalez got a phone call from Washington asking if he wanted some old Penttbom evidence that was about to be destroyed. The materials — copies of some of Bayoumi’s long-sought papers, including the suspicious flight diagram — stunned the Encore team, Gonzalez said.

In June 2012, a small group of Encore investigators and analysts flew to London to try to review the Bayoumi search evidence more thoroughly. According to three former officials familiar with the trip, they viewed dozens of hours of videotapes and took new copies of much of the Metropolitan Police material.

For reasons that remain unclear, however, the team either did not see or did not focus on a few videotapes that would later become evidence in the 9/11 families’ lawsuit, including the tape of Bayoumi at the U.S. Capitol. While some terrorism experts have interpreted the recording as Bayoumi’s effort to “case” the site for a possible attack, lawyers for the Saudi government described it as a tourist video.

The Bayoumi videos also included extensive footage of two Saudi religious officials who not long before had commanded attention from both the FBI and CIA. The two men, Adel al-Sadhan and Mutaeb al-Sudairy, were emissaries of the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs who had traced what intelligence officials saw as a strikingly suspicious path around the United States. The Saudi Embassy did not respond to a request to speak to the men.

In addition to traveling to Washington, D.C., with Bayoumi, the two clerics visited Los Angeles and San Diego a year before the hijackers and stayed at one of the homes where Hazmi and Mihdhar later lived. Sudairy also spent several months living in Columbia, Missouri, with an American al-Qaida member, Ziyad Khaleel, who provided Osama bin Laden with the satellite phone that FBI officials said he used to orchestrate the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Just before and after the hijackers arrived in San Diego, telephone records show, Bayoumi also made a series of calls to Sudairy in Washington, Thumairy in Los Angeles and Anwar al-Aulaqi, a Yemeni American cleric. Aulaqi, who ran a San Diego mosque that Bayoumi had funded through Saudi donations, was described by FBI witnesses as a spiritual adviser to Hazmi and Mihdhar. Aulaqi later emerged as an important al-Qaida leader before he was killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2011.

Unanswered Questions

In 2014 and 2015, a panel of security experts was assembled to review the FBI’s implementation of reforms called for by the 9/11 Commission. The 9/11 Review Commission, as the second panel was called, was also tasked with looking again at questions about the 9/11 plot that remained unanswered.

Maguire, the FBI’s primary liaison to the review panel, again disputed suspicions about Bayoumi. “He came here for school and everything seems accidental with Bayoumi,” the commission was told in a 2014 briefing led by Maguire.

The review panel concluded there was not enough new information to revise the 9/11 Commission’s finding that there was no “witting assistance” to the hijackers. But Tim Roemer — a Democratic former congressman from Indiana who served on the 2002 joint intelligence inquiry, the 9/11 Commission and the Review Commission — made a point of pressing for further investigation into the Saudi question. He was struck that Maguire and other FBI officials were still pushing back.

“There was consistent feedback from some levels of the FBI that simply wanted to close the case and claim that what Bayoumi did was purely coincidence and somehow accidental,” Roemer said.

Roemer insisted that the Review Commission formally recommend that the FBI continue to examine the Saudi issue. But shortly after it did so, officials at FBI headquarters renewed their pressure to shut down Operation Encore. In 2016, the head of the agency’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces finally relented, reassigning the case and disbanding the team that had been investigating it for years.

The next year, a pair of memorandums sent by the FBI’s Washington field office confirmed something that the Encore agents had long suspected: Between the late 1990s and Sept. 11, 2001, Bayoumi was paid a monthly stipend as a co-optee, or part-time agent, of the Saudi intelligence services.

By then, Gonzalez had retired. The Encore investigators who remained were working new jobs. Along with other documents from the FBI investigation, the memos were initially withheld from the 9/11 families by the Justice Department, which classified them as state secrets during Trump’s first term. The Encore agents saw the memos for the first time when they were finally made public in 2022 under Biden’s executive order.

“Somebody needs to explain to the American people why we didn’t see this information before,” Gonzalez said in an interview.

Reprinted with permission from Pro Publica

USPS Officials Warned New Mail Voting Rules Could Mean Mass Disenfranchisement

USPS Officials Warned New Mail Voting Rules Could Mean Mass Disenfranchisement

Top U.S. Postal Service officials tasked with issuing new regulations on mail voting expressed concerns in internal meetings about how the rules they were drafting could delay or block ballots from reaching large swaths of eligible voters for the upcoming midterms, but the rules moved forward anyway, ProPublica has learned.

The revelations about the discussions, from someone familiar with the rulemaking process, come as a separate anonymous federal employee filed a whistleblower disclosure with Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), warning that the new system is untested and error-prone, and could lead to mass disenfranchisement in the upcoming election. The whistleblower described the entire process as “secretive, rushed, chaotic, and fundamentally flawed.”

In a March executive order, President Donald Trump directed the Postal Service to create the new rules, including requiring states to give USPS a list of all voters eligible to receive a ballot in the mail and requiring USPS to use those lists to determine which ballots get sent to voters. USPS officials were tasked with crafting the details of how the new system would work, including the creation of a new portal for states to upload their voters’ information and the back-end software that would allow mail delivery sites and local post offices to track, and potentially block, ballots entering into the mail on their way to voters.

Voting rights organizations, state officials and Democratic political groups filed lawsuits challenging the new rules, and a federal court has temporarily blocked the requirements for states. The merits of the new rule are expected to reach the Supreme Court before the November election. Even if the Supreme Court allows the plan, though, election officials and experts say that the new system could not be ready in time for this election, given that ballots for people who are in the military or overseas must be sent out this month.

During meetings in which top USPS officials discussed how to comply with the executive order, there was much discussion about the controversial nature of what they needed to do, according to the person familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. The focus was on limiting the impact to voters while also complying. One repeated concern regarded how to avoid invalidating an entire batch of ballots if one voter among thousands couldn’t be confirmed as eligible. Some in the meetings recommended trying to limit harm to voters by not rejecting the entire batch, according to the person familiar with the discussions.

Despite that, according to the whistleblower who contacted Blumenthal, the directive to reject entire batches if they included just one unverified ballot moved forward.

“As presently designed, if even one bar code on one single ballot in a bulk-mailing of 10,000 ballots fails to properly scan during the verification process, the entire batch is rejected and sent back to the state — effectively stopping the ballots from being mailed to voters,” the whistleblower wrote.

Election clerks raised similar concerns directly to USPS officials just days before the final rule was issued, at a mid-August National Association of Election Officials conference in Kansas City, Missouri, ProPublica has learned.

There, an example was given of Maricopa County, Arizona, which often sends out more than 2 million ballots at a time in its initial mailing. USPS officials confirmed it was possible that one ballot with a bad barcode or wrong voter information within the more than 2 million ballots could delay the entire mailing, according to two people who attended the related committee meeting.

The Postal Service has defended its final rule in court, stating that it does not intend to seize control of administration of elections and that the rule “need not and should not prevent a single voter from voting by mail.”

In a statement to ProPublica, a Postal Service spokesperson said the agency is carefully reviewing the Blumenthal whistleblower’s concerns and that USPS has spent months developing its system, in a manner consistent with court orders, and will soon provide instructions for how election officials can use it.

“Regardless of political party or perspective, we share a common goal: ensuring that Americans can have confidence that their election mail will be handled securely and delivered reliably,” the spokesperson said.

Lauren Bis, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement to ProPublica that the process of building software to carry out the new mail ballot checks “is neither complex nor unique for USPS since the Postal Service regularly uses bulk mailing and intelligent mail barcodes for a wide variety of large customers.”

“Under President Trump, the federal government is working to ensure safe, transparent, and honest elections,” Bis wrote.

Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat who received the whistleblower disclosure, asked the postmaster general for detailed info about the plan in a letter this week. He told reporters on a call Monday that the new USPS rule puts all mail voters at risk, and he accused the administration of being “hellbent on changing the framework of casting ballots in this country, clearly for political reasons.”

Election officials and printing experts have told ProPublica that errors in the system are likely, given how difficult it is to design envelopes with a clear barcode for scanning and to keep voter information up to date. Seemingly small details have yet to be worked out that could throw the entire system into chaos, they said, such as what file format to use when uploading voter lists and whether to provide mailing or residential addresses to USPS.

“These are trivial things that create massive problems,” said Jeff Ellington, CEO of Runbeck Election Services, which prints ballots and ballot envelopes for counties. Beyond that, he said, most of the counties in the country don’t have the type of barcodes needed to make the system function. And the Postal Service hasn’t told local election officials how to design new ballot envelopes and get them approved by USPS in this short of a timeframe.

The Blumenthal whistleblower said the idea that entire batches will be delayed by one mistake is especially concerning because of significant operational problems that exist with the portal that will contain information about eligible voters and the lack of testing of the system. The whistleblower is concerned about how, while systems typically have a known error rate, there has been no internal acknowledgment that errors will occur in the new mail ballot system, and instead the USPS has adopted a “zero-percent failure policy.”

The whistleblower also alleges that the administration moved forward with steps to create the new system during two initial injunctions from the court, which would have violated the court’s order. USPS had stated when issuing its final rule that it was adhering to the injunctions and would not take actions to implement the rule for the 2026 election unless the injunctions were lifted.

Both the whistleblower and the person familiar with discussions about the executive order’s implementation said that the timeline for creating a sophisticated tracking system would typically be at least nine months. The whistleblower’s disclosure says that workers began to work on the system in mid-June and had only weeks before being given a Sept. 1 deadline. The person familiar with the discussions said it was common for priority projects within USPS to have crunched timelines. The internal goal, the person said, was to try to implement the new system by that deadline or to show why it couldn’t happen — which was typical of other directives the agency had faced in the past.

The whistleblower disclosure described confusion as the staff attempted to develop the systems without enough direction, within weeks, and without proper communication, and said several employees referred to the situation as a “shit show.”

Reprinted with permission from Pro Publica

Exploiting Anti-Trans Fear, Missouri GOP Aims To Repeal Abortion Rights

Exploiting Anti-Trans Fear, Missouri GOP Aims To Repeal Abortion Rights

Two years ago, abortion opponents in Missouri tried to defeat Amendment 3, a ballot initiative to enshrine reproductive rights in the state constitution, by falsely telling voters that it would allow gender transition surgeries for minors — even though it wouldn’t.

Voters approved Amendment 3 anyway, overturning the near-total abortion ban enacted by Missouri’s GOP-dominated legislature that had taken effect after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in 2022.

Now Republican leaders in the state are trying to repeal those rights again, using the same issue. They placed a new amendment on the November ballot, also called Amendment 3, that would restore Missouri’s abortion ban while allowing limited exceptions but also constitutionally prohibit gender transition care for minors — though the state has banned surgeries and new prescriptions of puberty blockers and hormones by law since August 2023.

For the Missouri GOP, Election Day can often seem like Groundhog Day. The party holds a supermajority in the legislature and controls every statewide office, yet voters have repeatedly used the initiative petition process to enact policies Republican leaders oppose. By gathering enough signatures, citizens have placed proposals directly on the ballot, then persuaded voters to expand Medicaid, legalize marijuana, raise the minimum wage and restore abortion rights.

This month, that disconnect became an electoral humiliation for Republican leaders. More than 80% of voters rejected their attempt to make it nearly impossible for citizens to amend the state constitution. It was even worse for Gov. Mike Kehoe’s plan to phase out the state income tax: More than 83 percent voted no.

Missouri Republicans have become “drunk with power,” said Ken Warren, a professor emeritus of political science at Saint Louis University and associate director of the SLU/YouGov Poll. “Because they control everything, they think they can do what they want — and they can’t.”

The new Amendment 3 on the November ballot shows how Republicans, using misleading language, a carefully chosen distraction and even a recycled name, are trying to undo one of those defeats. In 2024, a yes vote on Amendment 3 protected abortion rights. In November, voters will again be asked to vote yes on Amendment 3 — this time to take them away.

Republican leaders say voters never intended to approve a nearly unlimited right to abortion. They argue that Missourians would prefer an abortion ban with limited exceptions for rape, incest, medical emergencies and fetal anomalies — particularly when it is paired with restrictions on gender transition care for minors.

It would not take much to reverse the 2024 result. Abortion rights passed 51.6 percent to 48.4 percent — meaning a shift of about 48,000 voters would have defeated the measure.

Critics call the inclusion of gender care “ballot candy,” a way to make an unpopular proposal easier to swallow. They say the tactic is especially cynical because it promises voters a prohibition that, in large part, Missouri already has. State law already bans gender transition surgery for minors and, through August 2027, bars minors from starting puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones for gender transition. Amendment 3 would place the restrictions in the state constitution without an expiration date.

The two provisions bundled together differ enormously in scope. Repealing reproductive rights would affect the healthcare options available to a state with about 6.3 million people. The restrictions on gender transition care concern a small number of minors receiving highly specialized treatment.

Yet supporters want voters focused on the specter of children being used as lab guinea pigs, not the abortion rights the amendment would repeal. A new billboard in the St. Louis suburbs urges them to vote yes and “ban transgender surgeries for minors.”

A website for the political action committee behind the campaign, Her Health, Her Future — whose treasurer is Missouri first lady Claudia Kehoe — declares “OUR CHILDREN are not LAB EXPERIMENTS.” It says Amendment 3 would protect children from “harmful, sterilizing medical procedures” and restore “common sense health and safety standards” for women’s health clinics.

Neither message explicitly says that the amendment would repeal the constitutional right to abortion that Missourians approved two years ago.

Claudia Kehoe did not respond to requests for comment submitted to the governor’s office and the PAC. In a written endorsement posted on the Her Health, Her Future website, she called the amendment “a critical step toward strengthening our pro-life protections and safeguarding our state’s future.”

In response to a list of questions that ProPublica submitted to the governor’s office, a spokesperson defended the amendment using much the same language that critics call deceptive. The spokesperson emphasized protecting children from “sex-change procedures,” safeguarding women and restoring the state’s power to “regulate” abortion providers. The response did not acknowledge that Amendment 3 would repeal the constitutional reproductive rights Missourians approved in 2024 and replace them with an abortion ban that contains limited exceptions.

Polling suggests the strategy could work. A survey in February of Missouri voters by the SLU/YouGov Poll found that nearly 60 percent supported legal abortion during the first eight weeks of pregnancy. But 67 percent opposed gender transition medications for minors, and 73 percent opposed gender transition surgeries. Presented with the amendment’s provisions together, voters favored it 47 to 40 percent.

Rep. Brian Seitz, a Branson Republican who guided the amendment through the House, denied that supporters were trying to trick voters. He said the gender-affirming treatment was itself a reproductive issue because some procedures could affect a minor’s ability to have children.

Seitz also disputed that Missourians knowingly approved abortion rights through fetal viability in 2024. He said voters were primarily seeking exceptions for rape, incest, medical emergencies and fetal anomalies — not what he called “abortion on demand.”

The new amendment, he said, better reflects what voters intended.

Abortion rights supporters call that argument a pretext for restoring the state’s abortion ban. A coalition of groups called Stop the Ban has raised more than $5 million to try to explain what the amendment would do and persuade voters to reject it. That total includes $1.25 million contributed on August 3 by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Bloomberg’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Republicans are always “moving a goalpost to sort of get their way, and it is my hope that actual patriots are growing tired of it,” said Rep. Raychel Proudie, a Democrat from Ferguson. “You shouldn’t have to do this if what you’re planning is righteous and in the best interest of people.”

The effort began with the ballot summary written by lawmakers. It did not tell voters that Amendment 3 would repeal the reproductive rights they had approved two years earlier. Instead, it said the measure would “guarantee access” to emergency care, “ensure women’s safety during abortions” and “protect children from gender transition.”

The summary also mentioned exceptions for rape and incest but omitted that they would apply only during the first 12 weeks of pregnancy.

Michael Wolff, a former chief justice of the Missouri Supreme Court who is advising the campaign against the amendment, said the language appeared to be “intended to deceive people into thinking that they were going to protect women having abortions.”

“If you just flat-out tell them that you’re going to repeal nearly all of the protection for reproductive health,” he said, “the people would vote no.”

A judge ruled the legislature’s summary unfair and ordered it rewritten. He later approved revised language written by Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, a former state legislator who introduced a measure that became part of the 2023 law restricting gender transition care and has publicly endorsed Amendment 3.

But a state appeals court found Hoskins’ language still failed to explain the amendment’s effects and rewrote it to lead with the fact that it would “repeal the 2024 voter-approved amendment providing reproductive healthcare rights, including abortion through fetal viability.”

In an interview, Hoskins defended his initial choice to use the word “amend,” rather than “repeal,” because he felt it was more accurate. Asked how his endorsement of the new Amendment 3 squared with his duty to write neutral ballot language, he said his anti-abortion stance was no secret among Missouri voters.

“I can’t all of a sudden erase my conservative views of the past 16 years in the Missouri Legislature,” he said.

The intervention was hardly an isolated one. During Hoskins’ first 1.5 years in office, courts have rejected or rewritten five ballot summaries from his office involving abortion, education, the initiative petition process and a referendum on the state’s newly gerrymandered congressional map.

Hoskins said in an interview that the rulings reflected differences of opinion over what constitutes fair and accurate language, noting that the appellate courts had also sometimes rejected revisions made or approved by lower courts.

But the disputes have gone beyond language. Hoskins has also unilaterally blocked two citizen-led measures from reaching the November ballot. He rejected a proposed constitutional amendment that would make it harder for lawmakers to alter measures approved by voters, saying it was unconstitutional. And he refused to certify a referendum on Missouri’s new congressional map, drawn at President Donald Trump’s urging to help Republicans gain another U.S. House seat, declaring that putting a congressional map to a public vote would be unconstitutional.

Both campaigns sued in state circuit court, where a judge on Wednesday ruled for Hoskins in both cases. In the initiative case, the judge held that Hoskins had the authority to block an amendment from the ballot because it violated Missouri’s requirements that an initiative address a single subject and amend a single constitutional article. He also found that its restrictions on lawmakers’ ability to reconsider voter-approved policies was unconstitutional. And in the redistricting case, the judge agreed with Hoskins that voters cannot use the state’s referendum power to overturn the legislature’s power to redraw congressional maps.

Both cases are expected to reach the state Supreme Court on expedited appeals.

Hoskins said he disagreed with any suggestion that he and Republican leaders were defying the will of voters, noting they, too, had been elected. He criticized the opponents of Amendment 3 as “liberal special interest groups” financed by “out-of-state sugar daddies” like Bloomberg.

State Sen. Maggie Nurrenbern, a Kansas City Democrat, said Hoskins’ actions reflected a broader pattern of interfering with voters’ ability to use the ballot box to reject the Republican agenda.

“That’s quite frankly what is maddening to me, is that politicians over and over again are trying to trick voters,” she said.

Reprinted with permission from Pro Publica

Anthony Salisbury

Inside Trump's Chaotic And Failed Attempt To Prosecute Noncitizen Voters

It was late March when Joe Teirab, the second-in-command at Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office, received an urgent email from Washington.

The federal government was scrambling to find criminal cases to back up President Donald Trump’s claims that illegal voting by noncitizens was tipping the scales in American elections. Agents from Homeland Security Investigations, a massive federal law enforcement agency, had been dispatched to work leads across the country, including hundreds in Minnesota.

Teirab was already under pressure. In an earlier missive, Nick Davis, a high-ranking Justice Department appointee helping to lead the election fraud crusade, had reminded him the cases were so high priority that Teirab and his staff couldn’t decline to move forward on them without express approval from agency higher-ups. On March 24, Davis demanded a status report — within hours.

Teirab, a former Marine and a Harvard Law graduate who’d run unsuccessfully for Congress as a Republican, responded with a blunt reality check.

“Bottom line up front,” he replied in an email reviewed by ProPublica. After subpoenaing records on about 130 people, only one had been referred for prosecution, his staff had told him. Agents had deluged local election offices with calls and demands for voting histories, demonstrating “a complete lack of understanding” of illegal voting investigations.

“The HSI task force has been disjointed and disorganized,” Teirab wrote. The entire process, he said, had been “dysfunctional.”

Since Trump regained the White House, his administration has launched a series of unprecedented initiatives to find and prosecute voting by noncitizens, which he’s long claimed, without evidence, is rampant.

He’s stepped up this push in recent weeks, saying in a nationally televised speech that the American election system was “so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it.” To support that assertion, the Department of Homeland Security, HSI’s parent agency, released documents asserting it had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on voter rolls in just four states, all led by Democrats. The documents included no explanation of how that number was calculated.

It’s well known the administration has tasked HSI — a force established to combat drug cartels, terrorism and other cross-border criminal enterprises — with leading the campaign to find election fraud cases in the United States.

But an investigation by ProPublica reveals for the first time how the Trump administration came to harness HSI’s personnel, technology and sweeping legal authority in service of its election agenda — and how meager the results have been, despite the prodigious resources sunk into the effort.

According to interviews and internal emails reviewed by ProPublica, career staffers at the Justice Department warned that transferring voter rolls to HSI to enable it to search for noncitizen voters could violate federal privacy laws. Similarly, longtime HSI insiders cautioned that using the agency’s databases and tools to search these lists would yield mismatches and wildly inflated results.

The administration plowed forward anyway.

HSI’s involvement in the hunt for election fraud traces at least to summer 2025, when agency supervisors embraced a proposal from a midlevel agent who’d publicly echoed Trump’s claims about elections. He argued the agency’s powerful databases and tools could find noncitizens even on the voter lists that states make publicly available, from which the most confidential information has been redacted. Under Trump, the Justice Department had collected many public voter rolls as part of a controversial effort to compel states to turn over the unredacted versions.

Those searches went forward, ProPublica’s reporting shows, helping to generate tens of thousands of leads regarding illegal voting across the country. But when HSI agents were sent to investigate them, the results were similar to what Teirab reported from Minnesota.

Between January 2025 and May 2026, a ProPublica analysis of Justice Department data shows, fewer than 150 alleged noncitizen voters were referred for prosecution. Even fewer — 41 — were charged with voting illegally or other election-related crimes. (More than 150 million people voted in the most recent presidential election.)

In response to questions from ProPublica, administration officials insisted the effort spearheaded by HSI was producing meaningful results.

“President Trump is committed to ensuring that Americans have full confidence in the administration of elections, and that includes totally accurate and up-to-date voter rolls free of errors and unlawfully registered non-citizen voters,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said in response to ProPublica’s request for comment. “Noncitizens voting is a crime. Anyone breaking the law will be held accountable.”

A DHS spokesperson didn’t answer questions about why so few prosecutions have resulted from HSI’s work. The agency wouldn’t specify what tools or techniques HSI had used, but confirmed it had cross-referenced “publicly available data” from state voter rolls with information on “known illegal aliens” in its systems. “It’s not rocket science,” the spokesperson wrote of this initiative in a response to ProPublica’s questions. “It’s an easy step to secure our elections.”

Teirab and the U.S. attorney’s office in Minnesota declined to comment.

There’s an array of reasons why Trump’s campaign to document claims of widespread voter fraud hasn’t succeeded. Most obviously, it’s exceedingly rare, as countless studies and state audits have found. Noncitizens often get on voter rolls by accident or when government officials make errors. Last month, New Jersey disclosed that a mistake involving its Motor Vehicle Commission caused 6,600 noncitizens to be registered (fewer than 400 voted).

The administration’s critics say its hunt for noncitizen voters aligns with Trump’s attempts to seek more federal control over elections while stoking doubt and fear about the voting process. Since taking back the Oval Office, Trump has tried to impose new restrictions on voter registration, mail-in ballots and voting machines, though judges have shut down most of these efforts.

Former officials at DHS and the Justice Department called the move to involve HSI a further escalation and questioned the propriety of aiming the agency’s muscle and technology at individual cases of illegal voting.

“It’s one thing if you’re going after Pablo Escobar,” said Steve Bunnell, a former DHS general counsel and senior intelligence adviser who handled voting fraud prosecutions during more than a decade at the Justice Department. “It’s another thing if you’re going after some cleaning lady who’s been working in the United States for 20 years and taking care of her 80-year-old mother and taking her little kids to church.”

“The Swiss Army Knife of Federal Law Enforcement”

Trump’s enlistment of HSI in his election fight is no accident. Cobbled together in the aftermath of 9/11, the agency has 7,100 armed, highly trained agents and another 800 criminal analysts, as well as access to troves of confidential data about hundreds of millions of Americans.

Though part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency has historically stayed out of immigration cases. During the first Trump administration, leaders of 19 HSI regional offices — virtually its entire top field hierarchy — signed a letter calling for HSI to become a standalone agency, arguing that ICE’s deportation work dissuaded people from cooperating with its investigations. But when Trump returned to the White House, it swiftly became clear that the agency would play a central role in investigations related to the president’s twin obsessions, illegal immigration and noncitizen voting.

Trump picked his field general for repurposing HSI even before taking the oath of office. In December 2024, he named Anthony Salisbury, a 50-year-old career agent who’d run the agency’s Miami office, as a deputy homeland security adviser, reporting to White House policy chief Stephen Miller. He was also given a dual appointment as head of HSI.

Salisbury was colorful: A mixed martial arts enthusiast, he once appeared at the agency’s headquarters with his face bruised and eye blackened from a recent bout. He’d sometimes entertain colleagues by pulling out a bridge that covers his missing front teeth.

To agency veterans, however, he was forever linked to a 2011 operation he’d overseen in Mexico in which one agent was killed and another wounded in a highway ambush by a drug cartel. An agency review submitted to Trump in April 2020 concluded that errors by HSI supervisors, including Salisbury, contributed to the outcome; it urged the administration to consider disciplinary action. None was taken against Salisbury, however.

Salisbury did not respond to requests for comment from ProPublica. A White House official called him “a critical member of the Trump administration” who was “cleared” in every review of the Mexico incident and was subsequently “promoted six times under multiple administrations.”

“It’s one thing if you’re going after Pablo Escobar. It’s another thing if you’re going after some cleaning lady who’s been working in the United States for 20 years and taking care of her 80-year-old mother and taking her little kids to church.”
Steve Bunnell, a former DHS general counsel and senior intelligence adviser

Once elevated to his new posts, Salisbury took charge of carrying out the second Trump administration’s agenda for HSI, personally issuing staffing directives, reassignments and promotions, current and former agency officials told ProPublica. (A number of them spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution.)

Starting in early 2025, Salisbury oversaw the unprecedented reassignment of more than 6,000 agents to immigration enforcement, diverting most of the agency from its normal duties. He then also pointed HSI at noncitizen voting, presiding over multiple meetings with officials at DOJ and Homeland Security focused on election fraud, according to emails reviewed by ProPublica and agency supervisors who worked with him.

“Stephen Miller has an HSI deputy for a reason,” said Eric Balliet, a high-level HSI manager who retired in 2024 after 23 years with the agency. (Like many HSI veterans, Balliet has remained in close contact with former colleagues.) “Salisbury is going to salute and execute, and he is going to make sure that from the HSI side, they fall in line, and there’s going to be no resistance or pushback. HSI has been turned into the Swiss Army knife of federal law enforcement.”

In early July 2025, Frank Quiñones, an HSI special agent who’d worked under Salisbury in Florida, approached leaders at the HSI Innovation Lab with an idea for using the agency’s technology to find noncitizen voters on state voter rolls, sources at the agency told ProPublica. Quiñones had been transferred to Washington to oversee a unit that had previously handled cases involving the theft of government benefits but that had been enlisted into voting investigations.

The lab, housed in an unmarked office in a D.C. suburb, had access to the government’s most sensitive databases, from suspicious activity reports to arrest records. Staffed by a combination of HSI experts and outside consultants, it developed software tools to comb the data for information that could help agents pursue criminal suspects.

Quiñones was a true believer in Trump’s claims about election fraud: In multiple Facebook posts and reposts, ProPublica found, he promoted claims that the 2020 presidential vote had been stolen. At a meeting with the Innovation Lab’s overseers, according to sources who worked in the lab, he pitched using the lab’s technology to identify illegal voters — even though the agency lacked voter rolls that included identifiers such as partial Social Security numbers. (Quiñones did not respond to ProPublica requests for comment.)

For proof of concept, Quiñones proposed using a February 2021 public voter list he’d obtained for New Jersey and running it through HSI’s databases. The lab staff viewed his idea as “a little insane,” one recalled — both unreliable and improper. Since the public rolls don’t include voters’ unique identifiers, people at the lab also knew linking them to HSI’s data would produce mismatches — what the staffer called an “ungodly” number of false positives. The lab team also worried about violating longstanding safeguards limiting use of private citizen data. They “didn’t want to touch this,” the staffer added. Quiñones defended his idea, repeatedly declaring: “The president wants this!”

Tom Hodge, an HSI data analyst at the meeting, proposed running the voter information through the Athena Toolbox, an analytical platform developed by the Sandia National Laboratories that had access to all of HSI’s databases. (Hodge did not respond to ProPublica requests for comment. Sandia referred ProPublica’s questions to the facilities’ parent agencies, including the Department of Energy, which did not respond to our requests.)

Hodge and the Sandia team spent the next six weeks on the project, reporting they’d found large numbers of noncitizens on Quiñones’ 2021 New Jersey list. According to one former HSI official, they said they’d found “5,000 high-confidence illegal voters” in just a single New Jersey county. (Officials at the New Jersey secretary of state’s office, which oversees the state’s voter rolls, declined to comment on the claim. Beth Thompson, head of a group for local New Jersey election officials, called the number impossibly high, even accounting for the mistake disclosed by the state.)

The apparent breakthrough couldn’t have come at a better time.

The Trump administration’s other efforts to identify noncitizens on state voter rolls were running into a variety of roadblocks.

The administration had hoped to persuade states to check their voters’ citizenship status using a system called the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, but many didn’t. Most states also refused the Justice Department’s demands to turn over their unredacted voter rolls, including partial Social Security numbers, which thwarted the agency’s plan to run them through SAVE. Courts have stymied the DOJ’s attempts to sue for the records, citing the Constitution, which gives primary control over elections to the states.

In an Aug. 21 email to a half dozen administration officials, Quiñones touted the solution he’d brought to the HSI Innovation Lab: using HSI’s platform to search voter rolls. The results, Quiñones noted, could fuel both criminal and immigration investigations.

By the end of the month, those in top election-related roles at DHS and the Justice Department were actively promoting what they dubbed the “HSI Tool” as a preferred alternative to SAVE, according to people familiar with the matter. Among them was Heather Honey, the prominent election denier appointed as a senior counselor at DHS, who is helping lead the government’s efforts to identify noncitizens on voter rolls. (Honey did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comment. In an email responding to questions to her, DHS said Honey’s “expertise in election administration” was “invaluable to the Department’s efforts to protect critical infrastructure.”)

The White House, too, got behind the idea. In a November email, J. Brian Sikma, special assistant to the president, excitedly noted that the New Jersey trial cross-checking voter rolls with DHS data appeared to have identified a “very significant number” of “potential non-citizens.” (Sikma didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

The DOJ, Sikma reported, had already obtained public voter rolls for many other states. He included a list of them, adding: “It is of paramount importance that these also be reviewed expeditiously.”

Running “Roughshod” Over Privacy

As the push to use HSI’s tech to search voter information gained momentum, a new problem emerged.

Career attorneys at the Justice Department, including specialists on privacy law, raised concerns that transferring voter rolls wholesale from the agency to DHS might not be legal, according to internal emails reviewed by ProPublica and interviews with several former officials.

The voter rolls the DOJ had collected contained sensitive information on millions of Americans. Even the public versions, which political parties and candidates routinely obtain to target ads and messages, included voters’ addresses, birth dates and party affiliations. For the 16 states that have agreed to share their unredacted voter lists, the DOJ had citizens’ partial Social Security numbers or driver’s license information, too.

Federal laws, particularly the Privacy Act, dictate what data government agencies can collect, what it can be used for, how it can be shared, and how it must be protected. Agencies have to disclose their plans in advance, gathering public comment. A person’s information can’t be released or shared without their consent, subject to limited exceptions.

From the outset, the Trump administration’s effort to combine data across federal agencies has repeatedly drawn criticism from courts and whistleblowers for failing to adhere to restrictions meant to keep data private and secure. In June, for example, a judge prohibited the government from using SAVE for mass searches, ruling the administration had violated federal privacy laws by giving DHS access to Social Security data to enhance the tool. The administration has appealed that ruling.

In July 2025, as word got around that the DOJ might hand over voter data to DHS, a half dozen career attorneys who had been reassigned into the voting section voiced their unease to supervisors, according to two former DOJ lawyers. Their concerns were disregarded, prompting most to resign.

Instead, the DOJ’s office of legal counsel pushed forward with plans to share the public voter rolls, claiming a Privacy Act exception allowed HSI to receive such data without public notice as long as it was for law enforcement purposes. DHS just needed to submit a letter officially requesting the data for those purposes, an attorney in the legal counsel’s office explained, according to internal emails.

But this exception was meant to be used to get information on individual criminal suspects, not to gain mass access to data on people suspected of no wrongdoing, according to Nikhel Sus, chief counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has sued the Trump administration on behalf of voter and pro-privacy groups, filing the case that eventually limited SAVE’s use.

“[Anthony] Salisbury is going to salute and execute, and he is going to make sure that from the HSI side, they fall in line, and there’s going to be no resistance or pushback. HSI has been turned into the Swiss Army knife of federal law enforcement.”

Eric Balliet, a former high-level HSI manager

Peter Winn, a 29-year Justice Department veteran who had served as the agency’s acting privacy chief for nearly a decade, drafted a letter to set out the data-sharing agreement between the DOJ and DHS, according to internal documents reviewed by ProPublica.

In a Feb. 12 email to two top DOJ officials, he said he’d rewritten an initial draft memo to “make the information sharing arrangement far easier to defend, if and when it is challenged in court.”

Rather than simply handing over the voter rolls, Winn proposed having DHS request “pertinent and relevant” information about specific people from the DOJ, then having technical staff at Justice and Homeland Security “coordinate” to fulfill the requests.

“Having slept on it,” Winn wrote, “I ended up deciding that our initial idea of sending a huge amount of raw unprocessed voter registration data to DHS, involved taking far too much unnecessary legal risk, given that 99% of the data would implicate the privacy and civil liberties of United States Citizens, and would risk adding to the false narrative in the establishment press of DOJ and DHS being unconcerned with the privacy and civil liberties of Americans.”

Winn attached his proposed letter, to be signed by Todd Lyons, then the acting director of ICE.

Winn’s suggested restrictions were quickly abandoned, however. A second draft of the letter, dated March 4, contained altered language providing that the voter information would be “transferred” to HSI, with one exception: Voters’ party affiliation would be redacted, if possible, it said.

The final letter, signed by Lyons and sent to the DOJ just two days later, abandoned even that limitation. Just three paragraphs long, it permitted HSI to use the voter rolls to pursue any “appropriate investigation of potential violations of federal election law.”

In response to questions from ProPublica, Winn said “I can’t really comment on internal drafts of correspondence.”

A Justice Department spokesperson defended the government’s actions, saying “no one should oppose intergovernmental data sharing and coordination that enable swift investigations and prosecution of illegal alien voting.” DHS echoed the DOJ’s view, calling such information sharing “essential to protecting America’s election process by keeping noncitizens off voter rolls” and “an easy step to secure our elections.”

Sus said that by pooling voters’ sensitive personal identifiers, along with their party and voting histories, the administration has “run roughshod” over privacy laws and is creating a “1984-style database” that could be used to surveil political participation.

CREW filed a lawsuit in April on behalf of the nonprofit advocacy group Common Cause that argues it’s illegal for the administration to use the law enforcement exception to justify mass sharing of voter information.

Balliet, the former HSI agent, expressed similar concerns, saying that handing over voter rolls to run through DHS’ systems amounted to “a mass data-collection effort by the government against its own citizens in a non-criminal setting.” On a practical level, he added, the data sharing increased the risk of breaches that can open law-abiding citizens up to identity theft.

“As a citizen, I want the government to take seriously the protection of my private data,” he said. “If it falls into the wrong hands, it’s not the government that suffers. It’s me.”

Collapsing Claims

By January 2026, scores of HSI agents were fanning out across the country to investigate thousands of leads about illegal voting.

About 25,000 of them involved people SAVE had identified as potential noncitizens on state voter rolls. Another 15,000 were given to HSI’s cross-border financial crimes unit, which was told to prioritize them over money laundering and fraud cases, a former high-level HSI official said. Quiñones’ unit led a separate effort to find additional cases by reviewing whether people who’d recently become citizens had voted before they were naturalized, then lied about it in naturalization interviews.

Still more leads came from running public voter rolls through the HSI lab’s databases, though it’s not clear how many. Agency sources told ProPublica that the rolls of New Jersey and Pennsylvania were searched using the Athena Toolbox. When DHS announced it had found more than 250,000 noncitizens on the registered voter lists of four Democrat-led states, it said that included “as many as” 35,152 in New Jersey and 14,576 in Pennsylvania. Both states have asked DHS to provide the source of the numbers.

Once federal investigators started digging into these cases, however, they often fell apart.

Through May, prosecutors had charged fewer than four dozen people with crimes related to noncitizen voting, ProPublica’s analysis of DOJ data and federal court filings shows, getting convictions or guilty pleas in 14 cases.

The largest cluster of cases was brought in the Southern District of Florida, headed by Jason Reding Quiñones (no relation to the HSI agent), a staunch Trump ally who has led investigations of the president’s political opponents. Voters have been sentenced in eight of the office’s cases; seven others are pending.

Prosecutors have initiated a total of seven noncitizen voting cases as of May in the four states where DHS claimed to have found more than a quarter million noncitizens on the rolls. Collectively, these states have more than 40 million registered voters.

Overall, the paltry numbers reflect the realities HSI investigators confronted on the ground as they tried to convert leads into cases, a ProPublica review of records obtained by voting-advocacy groups Campaign Legal Center and Democracy Forward shows.

Emails between agents and local election officials in Texas and Ohio indicate much of the federal information on purported noncitizens was inaccurate, the consequence of flawed data matching. When agents demanded voting histories and registration forms, they often discovered people weren’t registered in the counties where HSI thought they were. When voters register, they must attest that they are U.S. citizens; agents found some, however, who’d been put on voter rolls in error after disclosing they weren’t citizens. Many had never voted.

“Our initial idea of sending a huge amount of raw unprocessed voter registration data to DHS, involved taking far too much unnecessary legal risk, given that 99% of the data would implicate the privacy and civil liberties of United States Citizens.”

Peter Winn, a Justice Department veteran, in an email urging limits on data sharing that were not adopted

Most HSI agents, steeped in pursuing complex international crimes, had no experience in pursuing voting fraud. In his email to Nick Davis at the Justice Department, Teirab, the top deputy in Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office, described the chaos that ensued when the state and at least six counties got subpoenas for voters’ records. The demands “presented a host of issues,” Teirab wrote to Davis. (Davis did not respond to a request for comment.)

“An unknown number of agents are constantly arriving in Minnesota without any knowledge of the investigation, the issues already discussed and decided, and the processes they need to follow,” Teirab complained. “Instead of getting up to speed and learning, they have demanded many calls and subpoenas, most of which demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of the investigation.”

In Stearns County in central Minnesota, HSI agents subpoenaed voting histories on 13 people, county officials told ProPublica. Only six turned out to live there.

Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, a Democrat, said the effort revealed federal investigators’ ignorance about “the nuance of elections administration.” The rate of purposeful election crime is “microscopic,” he said. “The very human errors that can happen are not some sort of plot or scheme to dirty up the voting rolls, but are just everyday human beings making mistakes, not intending at all to violate any law.”

As of May, only one illegal voting case has been referred for prosecution in Minnesota. The state has more than 3.8 million registered voters.

Even Republican-led states like Ohio, which has shared its unredacted voter rolls with the DOJ and run them through the SAVE system, have struggled to meet Trump administration demands to deliver cases.

In October, the Ohio secretary of state referred more than 1,000 voters identified as possible noncitizens to the federal government, claiming 167 had voted at least once since 2018. At least nine HSI agents in Cincinnati and Cleveland began to investigate, emails obtained by Campaign Legal Center and shared with ProPublica show.

The agents bombarded local election officials with requests for voting histories and other records, some dating back decades. “Sorry again for piecemealing these to you,” one agent wrote to an official in Butler County, outside Cincinnati, after making five separate requests over two weeks. Mohamed Al-Hamdani, a Democratic member of Montgomery County’s Board of Elections, which received similar inquiries, said they amounted to “witch hunts” that ate up staff time.

In February, Davis sent an email pressing Ohio’s two U.S. attorneys’ offices for an “election integrity” update, asking: “How close are we to complaints/indictments, how many subjects, what issues you’ve run into, how many referrals have been closed and why, how helpful HSI has been.”

As of May, just two voting cases had been referred for prosecution in Ohio and no one had been charged, federal data shows. The state has nearly 8 million voters.

In the past, it was uncommon for federal prosecutors to pursue charges against noncitizen voters who didn’t understand that it was against the law for them to vote. Without evidence of a coordinated effort or plot, it didn’t make sense to put resources into such prosecutions, a former DOJ official who oversaw election cases said.

Now, however, U.S. attorneys’ offices are taking a different approach, pursuing prosecutions that could result in prison terms or deportation.

In May 2025, federal prosecutors in Florida filed illegal voting charges against a mother and daughter, both Ukrainian citizens, who’d registered after becoming permanent U.S. residents, then voted in the 2024 presidential election. They’ve pleaded not guilty, with the mother saying in an interview with investigators that she thought having a green card meant she could vote. They and their attorneys didn’t respond to requests for comment from ProPublica. The prosecutor handling the case for the Southern District of Florida also didn’t respond to questions. The mother and daughter are scheduled to go to trial in September.

“Far-Reaching Consequences”

Experts on both elections and national security warn there may be profound longer-term costs to unleashing the federal government’s investigative and prosecutorial might to try to prove the president’s claims about noncitizen voting.

Current and former HSI agents say critical investigations — including task forces aimed at drug rings, human trafficking and money laundering — have languished as the agency has pivoted to take on noncitizen voting and immigration enforcement.

In February 2026, according to court files and emails reviewed by ProPublica, an HSI agent in Ohio who’d been leading a multistate child sex abuse investigation was abruptly assigned to pursue dozens of leads on suspected noncitizen voters, work that took months. It wasn’t until May that he made an arrest in the other case. Prosecutors have filed child exploitation and pornography charges against the man, 38, in connection with acts involving at least five 14-year-old girls.

Cases like this “don’t just stop,” said Balliet, the 23-year HSI veteran. “When you pull people off them for an extended period of time, those criminal networks will adapt, and people get killed and kidnapped.”

Federal data hints at a broader slowdown in what had been HSI’s most urgent work. According to an annual government report, the number of wiretaps obtained by DHS — often to investigate drug trafficking — plummeted to 23 in 2025, from 133 the previous year. In the report, DHS attributed the decline to several factors, including “changes in administration enforcement and prosecutorial priorities.”

“It’s never been a better time to be involved in transnational organized crime,” said John Tobon, a high-ranking HSI official who retired in early 2025.

“The very human errors that can happen are not some sort of plot or scheme to dirty up the voting rolls, but are just everyday human beings making mistakes, not intending at all to violate any law.”
Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon

In its statement, DHS denied HSI has neglected its core mission, saying the agency has increased its efforts to combat criminal cartels, gangs and drug traffickers in response to multiple Trump executive orders.

Though HSI’s voting-related investigations have yielded only a small number of prosecutions, voter advocacy groups worry the Trump administration will use them to justify more extreme interventions.

Its latest tactics include threatening to withhold funds from states it says are refusing to check their voter rolls for noncitizens and saying it will prosecute state election officials who “knowingly” fail to remove noncitizens. Trump has also continued to press Congress to enact the SAVE America Act, which would require people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote, a measure advocates have criticized as a barrier to voting. Democrats are preparing for the prospect of federal troops being sent to the polls to intimidate voters.

“Those concerns are playing out in real time, with far-reaching consequences,” said Dax Goldstein, a director at the States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit group that works to build confidence in elections. “When federal agencies are misused and weaponized, people lose trust in government itself.”

Brendan Carr

FCC Commissioners Face Ethics Complaints For Taking Luxury Gifts From Paramount

Two government watchdog groups have demanded investigations into whether Federal Communications Commission members violated ethics requirements by accepting luxury gala tickets from Paramount as the company sought government approval for its $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery.

The complaints filed by Democracy Defenders Fund and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington cite a recent ProPublica investigation that detailed how CBS or its parent company, now Paramount, have for years given FCC commissioners tickets to the Kennedy Center honors gala, which the television network sponsors. The commissioners accepted the gifts even as the FCC was reviewing or about to review major Paramount business decisions, including two megamergers.

Commissioner Olivia Trusty’s most recent financial disclosure said Paramount gave her two tickets to the December 2025 honors gala that together were worth more than $12,000. Trusty was one of two commissioners who voted last year to approve Paramount’s merger with another media company, Skydance.

ProPublica’s investigation found FCC members had long enjoyed a night out at the Kennedy Center courtesy of CBS or its parent company. Seven of the 10 commissioners who served since 2016 accepted tickets worth more than $260,000, according to a ProPublica analysis of ethics disclosures.

FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s financial statements show he has reported accepting honors gala tickets from CBS or its parent company eight times since his 2017 appointment to the commission, totaling over $75,000 in gifts.

Carr, who also voted in favor of the Paramount-Skydance merger last year, sat with his wife in a private skybox at the December gala with Paramount CEO David Ellison and other executives from Paramount and CBS. Such seats sold for $125,000 a ticket, according to Kennedy Center guidelines.

Carr disclosed on his latest financial statement that he accepted tickets from Paramount for himself and a guest to the 2025 gala and reception worth $12,390. Carr did not respond to a request from ProPublica to clarify the apparent difference in value between those tickets and the skybox seats.

The FCC only released Carr’s disclosure late on Friday, more than a month after ProPublica had first requested it. The document says the agency certified it on June 22.

Federal ethics rules ban employees from taking gifts from any entity that does business with, is regulated by or seeks official action from their agency.

“The federal gift regulations and the gratuities statute exist to ensure that government decisions are made on the merits, free from the influence of private benefits,” the Democracy Defenders Fund said in its complaint. “The public must have confidence that the FCC’s merger review process is not compromised by self-dealing or the appearance of impropriety.”

Carr, Trusty and the FCC did not respond to requests for comment. The agency’s inspector general declined to comment. An FCC spokesperson previously told ProPublica that agency ethics officers have for years cleared commissioners to accept the tickets, finding it consistent with ethics law. And Paramount’s chief of communications said it was a decades-long “CBS practice to invite government officials from both parties” to the Kennedy Center show. Carr last year defended the FCC’s approval of the Paramount merger with Skydance, saying it “advances the public interest.”

The FCC’s review of the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger is one of the final federal hurdles facing a historic consolidation of two of the five largest film studios in Hollywood. The deal would unite Paramount Skydance with Warner Bros., bringing under the control of one company Paramount+ and HBO Max streaming services; CBS and CNN; and scores of other major broadcast channels, cable networks and digital platforms.

Four ethics experts told ProPublica that by accepting the tickets, Trusty and Carr had compromised the FCC’s impartiality and should not take part in any upcoming decision on Paramount’s proposed merger.

The Democracy Defenders Fund — led by Norman Eisen, former ambassador to the Czech Republic and White House ethics czar under President Barack Obama — filed its grievance on Thursday with the federal Office of Government Ethics, the FCC’s inspector general and the FCC’s ethics office.

The group said the investigation should examine whether Carr and Trusty broke rules on accepting gifts or broke criminal laws prohibiting federal officials from accepting illegal gratuities.

Carr and Trusty should be required to repay Paramount the “fair market value” of any improper gifts and the federal ethics agency should refrain from certifying Carr’s annual disclosure report until he can prove that he has complied with ethics laws, Democracy Defenders Fund wrote. Its letter to the FCC and the Office of Government Ethics also requests that Carr be disqualified from further participation in the commission’s decision on the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger.

The nonprofit organization noted that hours after last year’s honors gala ended, Paramount announced it was launching its hostile takeover bid of Warner Bros. Discovery, a move that would later result in a merger agreement that requires FCC approval. About three months later, Carr publicly endorsed the deal on CNBC, promising swift approval.

“The facts that have been reported raise serious questions about the integrity and impartiality of FCC Chairman Carr in particular matters involving Paramount,” including the attempted merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, the letter said.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the other group that filed a written protest, requested an FCC inspector general probe of the luxury gifts.

“The reported gifts to FCC officials from businesses that are not only subject to agency regulation but presently engaged in billion-dollar mergers and acquisitions that must be approved by the commissioners themselves are extremely concerning threats to the integrity of FCC operations,” the CREW letter stated.

CREW, founded in 2003 as a nonpartisan organization dedicated to government accountability and ethics, is headed by Donald K. Sherman, a former House Ethics Committee attorney and special assistant to President Joseph Biden.

“Government officials have the power to make decisions that impact huge swaths of the American people,” Sherman said in a statement about the organization’s demand for an inspector general investigation. “With this tremendous power comes a higher ethical standard that apparently wasn’t met. The IG can and must get answers for the public.”

The proposed merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery has drawn a flurry of legal opposition.

California, New York, and ten other states filed a lawsuit seeking to block the merger under federal and state antimonopoly laws. The Writers Guild of America, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and the Public Interest Project filed similar court challenges in recent weeks.

Paramount has recently agreed to pause its merger until the litigation is resolved or until June 1, 2027, whichever comes first.

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica

Brendan Carr

FCC Officials Took Paramount's Pricey Gifts While Company Sought Deal Approval

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica

The rich and famous who filed into the Kennedy Center’s opera house in December were there to enjoy one of the nation’s most exclusive celebrations of the performing arts: the center’s annual honors gala.

The black-tie event, hosted by President Donald Trump, prioritized tickets to people who donated more than $75,000 to the center. This year, it feted Hollywood icon Sylvester Stallone, the legendary glam rock band Kiss and the Grammy Award-winning disco pioneer Gloria Gaynor.

Among the attendees that evening were two lower-profile government officials whose regulatory decisions had been crucial to the future of the gala’s broadcast sponsor, CBS, and its parent company, Paramount.

Five months earlier, Federal Communications Commissioner Olivia Trusty cast a decisive vote approving Paramount’s historic $8 billion merger with Skydance Media. Now, the commissioner and a guest enjoyed the star-studded celebration thanks to tickets gifted to her by Paramount worth more than $12,000, according to ethics disclosure records obtained by ProPublica.

The other commissioner who approved the merger watched from a prized perch. FCC Chair Brendan Carr and his wife sat in a private skybox with Paramount CEO David Ellison and other executives from Paramount and CBS. Such seats sold for $125,000 a ticket, according to Kennedy Center guidelines.

It’s unclear if Paramount gifted Carr the premium seats because the FCC has yet to make public his financial disclosure for last year.

However, past disclosures show Carr and Trusty are among seven FCC commissioners who have accepted Kennedy gala tickets from CBS or its parent company over the last decade. Ethics experts told ProPublica this poses a blatant conflict of interest since the commission regulates the network. Carr’s previous financial statements show he has accepted tickets at least seven times since his 2017 appointment, totaling over $63,000 in gifts.

Last December’s ceremony attended by Trusty and Carr took place as Paramount was launching a hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, a move that would later result in a merger agreement that requires FCC approval.

Federal ethics rules ban employees from taking gifts from any entity that does business with, is regulated by or seeks official action from their agency.

Four ethics experts told ProPublica that by accepting the premium tickets Trusty and Carr compromised the FCC’s impartiality and should not take part in any upcoming decision on the merger.

“There’s no way that any top federal regulator should ever, ever accept a gift from a regulated company with interests their work will foreseeably affect,” said Walter Shaub, who led the federal Office of Government Ethics from 2013 to 2017. “The appearance of taking gifts like that is terrible. What’s at stake is nothing less than the public’s trust in government.”

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, said the commissioners who accepted tickets cannot participate in this matter without damaging the integrity of the government’s decision-making process.

“This is shocking. Pretty disturbing, that’s what I would say. I just don’t understand what they were thinking,” said Canter, who now works as chief counsel for ethics and corruption at the nonpartisan government watchdog group Democracy Defenders Fund.

The FCC’s review of the merger is one of the final hurdles facing a historic $110 billion consolidation of two of the five largest film studios in Hollywood. The deal would unite Paramount Skydance with Warner Bros., bringing under the control of one company Paramount+ and HBO Max streaming services; CBS and CNN; and scores of other major broadcast channels, cable networks, and digital platforms.

The new megacorporation, which could reshape how millions will access news, movies, sports and video games, faces fierce opposition from inside and outside Hollywood. More than 5,000 actors, producers and entertainment workers — including stars such as Robert De Niro, Javier Bardem, Joaquin Phoenix and Glenn Close — signed an open letter decrying how the consolidation would eliminate jobs and compromise “the integrity, independence, and diversity of our industry.”

On Monday, California, New York and 10 other Democratic states filed a lawsuit seeking to block the merger under federal and state anti-monopoly laws.

American and international regulators are evaluating the deal for its potential national security implications and impacts to consumers worldwide. Last week, the British government signaled it planned to investigate whether the new entertainment titan that would emerge from the union would unfairly stifle competition. The FCC’s ongoing review includes examining the Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds backing the deal, including from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi.

The FCC usually has five commissioners — all appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate to serve five-year terms — but the agency currently has only three. Any vote by the full commission would likely be decided by Republicans Carr and Trusty over Democrat Anna Gomez. Gomez was not at the December 2025 show but has accepted tickets from Paramount in the past. Because the FCC requires a three-commissioner quorum for a vote, any recusal could leave the panel unable to decide on the merger. Carr could decide to ask staff to approve the deal rather than bring it to a commission vote, but the ethics experts said he should recuse himself from any decisions affecting the Paramount merger.

The experts warned the commissioners’ gifts might become central in legal challenges and said the Justice Department should investigate potential violations of federal rules or laws.

Neither Carr nor Trusty responded to ProPublica’s requests for comment. Gomez said in a statement that she followed agency advice when she attended the event in 2023 and 2024. Her statement did not elaborate or otherwise address why taking gifts from Paramount did not pose a conflict of interest.

An FCC spokesperson said agency ethics officers have for years cleared commissioner appearances, finding it consistent with ethics law.

“FCC Chairs and officials have attended the same event, in the same ways, consistently from the Trump Administration to the Biden Administration to the Obama Administration,” the FCC said in a statement. “There has been no change in recent years.”

Shaub called the justification outrageous.

“It’s no excuse to say that you took the gift because everyone else was doing it or that your agency has had a bad habit of indulging in gift taking for a long time,” Shaub said. “That kind of explanation doesn’t work for school children, and it sure as hell doesn’t work for government officials who are supposed to have better judgment than a fifth grader.”

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Vowing To Crack Down On 'Illegal Voting,' Paxton May Have Violated Texas Election Law

Vowing To Crack Down On 'Illegal Voting,' Paxton May Have Violated Texas Election Law

"This story was originally published by ProPublica.

Two weeks before this year’s primary elections, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced the creation of a tip line for the public to report people or groups suspected of voter fraud.

“Free and fair elections are a cornerstone of a thriving republic, and with the authority granted to my office by the Legislature, we will stop at nothing to uncover and stop any illegal voting activity,” Paxton said in a February news release announcing the tip line.

The announcement linked to guidance from his office about election laws in Texas, which included a requirement to be a U.S. citizen, a prohibition on collecting mail ballots on behalf of others and a warning that “it is illegal to misrepresent your residence on election records or to establish a residence for the purpose of influencing the outcome of an election.”

“You must register to vote using the address where you reside,” the attorney general’s guidance stated.

Despite his own warnings, Paxton appears to have used an address where he did not live while voting in six elections in the past two years, including in May’s runoff that made him the Republican nominee for U.S. senator, according to records obtained by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune.

State Sen. Angela Paxton said in a 2025 divorce filing that Paxton, whom she accused of adultery, moved out of their Collin County home a year earlier. But Paxton continues to list the home’s address in the northern Dallas suburb on his voter registration. Angela Paxton declined to be interviewed. A source close to the Paxtons said the attorney general has not moved back into the home since leaving.

It is unclear where Paxton has lived for the past two years, but reporting by ProPublica and the Tribune has linked him to a home in neighboring Denton County since February.

Three election lawyers told the news organizations that Paxton may have violated the same Texas laws his office cautioned about in its news release.

ProPublica and the Tribune reached out to Paxton’s campaign on June 3, 15 and 25, asking why he remained registered to vote in Collin County when he appeared to no longer live there and about his connection to the Denton County property. A reporter also left a voicemail on his personal cellphone on June 25. The news organizations sent his government office and campaign staff an email on Monday with a detailed list of questions, including a request for Paxton’s response to election lawyers’ belief that he may be violating the law.

Paxton and his office did not reply until Monday’s email. Campaign spokesperson Madison Cercy did not answer the questions from the news organizations. Instead, she issued a statement saying that the attorney general has been “a national leader on election integrity, with a long record of defending Texas elections.” Cercy said that “attempting to insinuate otherwise and tear him down with a baseless, lie-filled tabloid story is not real reporting.”

Asked twice to provide specifics about what they believed was inaccurate, the campaign did not respond.

Voting in an election when the voter is ineligible is a second-degree felony under Texas law and is punishable by up to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000. But prosecutors rarely bring cases challenging individual voters’ residency claims because they are hard to prove, the election lawyers said.

State courts have repeatedly ruled that there is no single way to determine where someone lives, and judges must consider multiple factors, such as where a voter sleeps or stores personal belongings. Prosecuting such cases also requires proof that a voter “knowingly” or “intentionally” broke the law.

Even if it’s clear that someone doesn’t live at the address where they are registered to vote, state law allows them to remain registered if their absence is temporary and they intend to return. The provision is commonly used by college students and military service members.

“So long as you truly intend to return, I think you’re fine,” said Beth Stevens, an election lawyer who worked for the Harris County clerk and the Texas Civil Rights Project. “When you start doing things that suggest, ‘Oh, I’ve fully moved. I’m just wink-wink saying I intend to return,’ that’s when you get into questionable territory.”

Paxton’s public and contentious split from his wife could make it difficult to argue that he intended to return to the home they own and where she continues to reside, said David Becker, a former voting rights lawyer for the Justice Department.

“I think there would be questions raised about a residence where someone does not live, does not spend the night and can in no way have the intent to continue to reside. Those would probably raise red flags in any state,” Becker said.

Becker, who is now the director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that works to build public trust in elections, added that the situation is particularly problematic because Paxton’s job is to enforce election laws.

“Certainly, the chief law enforcement officer of the state of Texas, someone who has made claims about election integrity and made it a priority of his office, should be charged with knowing the laws of residencies of the state of Texas with regard to voting,” Becker said.

Paxton has advocated for strict enforcement of the state’s election fraud law, including in cases against voters his office alleged had falsified records about where they lived. In 2018, the attorney general’s voter fraud unit arrested nine people on suspicion of using residential addresses where they did not live to vote in a municipal election in Edinburg, in the state’s Rio Grande Valley. County prosecutors, acting on behalf of Paxton, later dismissed the charges after failing to secure a conviction against the mayoral candidate they alleged had encouraged those voters to register at false addresses. The candidate, Richard Molina, said he was innocent and said the prosecution was politically motivated.

Clark Birdsall was not the attorney on those cases but defended another resident whom Paxton prosecuted for illegal voting. Birdsall was stunned that the attorney general appears to have voted under an address where he does not live.

He called it “especially egregious that someone such as Ken Paxton appears he’s not conforming to the law.”

State privacy laws allow some politicians and law enforcement officials to shield their voter registration information from public view. Paxton does not do so. His opponent in the Senate race, Democratic State Rep. James Talarico, does. Talarico’s campaign said he lives and is registered at the north Austin home he purchased in 2022. ProPublica and the Tribune were not able to independently confirm this.

Paxton’s campaign did not raise any issues with Talarico’s voter registration. In her statement to ProPublica and the Tribune, however, Cercy said, “Talarico has actively campaigned against voter security measures” and has said he opposes voter identification requirements. She pointed to a 2021 Fox News interview in which the state representative said he opposed voter identification rules that would require Texans to provide their driver’s license number or partial Social Security number for mail ballots. Talarico said hundreds of thousands of Texans, who don’t drive, lack a driver’s license. He did not directly answer a question about Social Security numbers during the interview.

The Talarico campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Paxton’s living arrangements since he separated from his wife are not public, but information obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune offers some indication of where he may have been residing since February.

In mid-February, a trust bought a 5,000-square-foot home listed for $2.4 million in a gated community in Denton County, according to the appraisal district and the seller’s real estate agent. The trust did not disclose its ownership to Denton County officials. Trusts are not required to by law, a spokesperson for Travis County’s appraisal district said.

Paxton shares a separate blind trust with his wife, Angela, that they have used to purchase property and other assets. For years, the address listed for that blind trust had been an office building in Collin County. But that address was changed to the Denton County home a week after the property was purchased.

Angela Paxton said through a spokesperson that she has no connection to the Denton County home or the trust that purchased it. The trustee of the Paxtons’ trust, family friend Chip Loper, did not respond to questions about the address change.

In June, a reporter knocked on the door of the Denton County home. No one answered. When the reporter placed a letter for Paxton in the mailbox, an envelope addressed to Warren Paxton, the attorney general’s given name, was visible.

Later that week, Paxton appeared on a podcast with Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. Video from the podcast showed Paxton seated in front of a fireplace and mantle that were nearly identical to those depicted in the home’s online real estate listing. One resident also told the newsrooms that they spotted Paxton in the gated community.

Separately, the Daily Mail reported in May that Paxton had moved into the Denton County home with Tracy Duhon, whose extramarital affair with Paxton, the news outlet said, prompted his wife’s divorce filing. The Daily Mail also published a video of Paxton and Duhon that it reported was taken at an airport in Iceland in late June. The video was quickly seized upon by Talarico, who depicted Paxton as out of touch with Texans. Duhon did not respond to questions about her connection to the Denton County property or about the Daily Mail reporting.

Paxton is not registered to vote in Denton County, voter rolls show. Instead, since February, he has voted in Collin County twice: once in the March Republican primary and once in the May runoff. Each Texas county elects its own slate of local officials, which is why state law requires voters to register where they live.

Ekow Yankah, a law professor at the University of Michigan whose expertise includes election law, said Paxton’s voter registration situation should remind the attorney general of what studies have consistently shown: that intentional illegal voting is rare.

“You would think that somebody who’s going through this would learn a little bit of humility that lots of things which look on their face, like technical violations of the law, are usually explained by totally ordinary things,” Yankah said. “It’s only if you’re utterly cynical and ignore all the evidence that you make a claim that, in fact, these cases are attributable to nefarious criminal intent.”

Paxton cannot claim ignorance of the law because he enforces it, said Joshua Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas at Austin. In fact, as attorney general, Paxton should avoid even the appearance that he is not following the law, Blank said.

“We expect these laws to be understandable by ordinary citizens,” Blank said. “When our elected officials who are tasked with passing and enforcing these laws exhibit troubles in engaging with the voting process themselves, that raises serious questions.”

'No One Is Watching': How Trump Reversed Biden’s Crackdown on Gun Trafficking

'No One Is Watching': How Trump Reversed Biden’s Crackdown on Gun Trafficking

This story was originally published by ProPublica

Marianna Mitchem grew up in the Denver suburbs, where she played high school soccer. One day in April 1999, her team faced off against a nearby rival, Columbine High. The next day, two teenagers went on a shooting rampage at Columbine, killing more than a dozen people.

The massacre left an imprint on Mitchem. After graduating from Providence College, she joined the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. “Fearing for my friends and watching what was happening — you don’t forget things like that,” she told me. “I wanted to make a difference.”

She started in the ATF’s Denver office as an industry operations investigator, the bureau’s term for inspectors who ensure that firearms dealers are conducting the required background checks on buyers and maintaining sales records. When the bureau found discrepancies, it tended to settle for reprimands and improvement plans, rarely going so far as to revoke a dealer’s license.

In 2021, things started to change. The country was experiencing a surge of deadly violence, with homicides up more than a third since 2019, and the administration of President Joe Biden was desperate to reverse the trend. For years, data had shown that a large share of guns used in shootings came from a small fraction of dealers, and that guns that were trafficked — sold by stores to straw purchasers (people other than the intended users) or resold on the street — were far more likely to be used in shootings.

Acting on this data, the administration in June 2021 announced what became known as “zero tolerance”: Dealers found to be willfully violating the law would lose their licenses, period. Revocations spiked, from fewer than 50 in 2019, 2020 and 2021 to a record 181 in 2023.

Also in 2021, Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, started urging federal prosecutors to prioritize gun violence. A year later, Congress passed a law that added a firearms trafficking conspiracy charge to the federal criminal code, a crucial new tool for prosecutors.

After 2021, the homicide rate started falling, which criminologists attributed to several factors, including repair of the social fabric since the coronavirus pandemic and a closing of the breach in police-community relations that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd. One other factor got less attention: the clampdown on the illegal flow of firearms.

The Biden administration struggled to broadcast its gains on public safety, and Donald Trump won election in 2024 partly by vowing to restore order. By the time Trump reentered the White House, Mitchem had risen to associate assistant director for industry operations, overseeing inspectors across the country. “We were making incredible progress on trafficking, on violent crime,” she said late last year.

But the Trump administration, driven both by gun-lobby advocacy and its own political priorities, quickly set about undoing much of its predecessor’s moves to combat gun violence. It repealed the zero-tolerance policy, going so far as to invite revoked dealers to reapply for new licenses. It shifted hundreds of ATF agents to immigration work. And it scaled back on prosecutions for gun trafficking. The White House declined to comment, referring questions to the ATF and the Department of Justice.

The homicide rate fell further last year, but criminologists warn against complacency, because the illicit gun trade is a classic pipeline problem: The harm can take a while to make itself felt. Research has found that the typical “time to crime” for trafficked firearms ranges up to about three years, which means that any positive lag of the anti-trafficking efforts of the Biden years would still be in effect now, with any negative effects of the Trump pullback lying in the years to come.

Among those now sounding the alarm is Mitchem. Dismayed at the policy reversal, she left the ATF last spring, after 21 years, and joined Everytown, the gun-safety group founded by Michael Bloomberg.

“Just because no one is watching the trafficking pipelines right now doesn’t mean guns aren’t flowing through it. It just means they’re not being intercepted,” she told me.

“And as you walk away from that, and you don’t have your focus on that anymore,” she added, “that pipeline is going to be flowing, and we are going to start to see the violent crime impact from that over time.”

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How White House Steered $620M Pentagon Contract To Company Linked To Trump Jr.

How White House Steered $620M Pentagon Contract To Company Linked To Trump Jr.

This story was originally published by ProPublica

When the Pentagon announced a $620 million loan last year to a small North Carolina startup linked to Donald Trump Jr., defense officials and the company tried to tamp down suspicions of cronyism.

The president’s eldest son said through a spokesperson that he wasn’t involved. The Pentagon said Trump Jr. played no role in the record-setting deal. And the startup’s founder told reporters that his company, Vulcan Elements, received no political favoritism.

But interviews and Defense Department records reviewed by ProPublica show that the request to loan hundreds of millions of dollars to the firm linked to Trump Jr. was made by Peter Navarro, a White House adviser to President Donald Trump and a friend of Trump Jr.’s.

Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was considering funding at the time, Vulcan’s was the only deal initiated by a top aide to the president, said an official at the Pentagon who was not authorized to speak publicly.

After defense officials got the White House request, they asked Pentagon staff to move at an unusually rapid pace, said another person who was involved in the deal at the Pentagon but not authorized to speak about it. The staff worked late nights and with little sleep to get the loan through in a matter of weeks, the source said.

“The call came from the White House: We have to get this done,” the person said.

The deal is one of many actions by the Trump administration that have helped companies in which the Trump family holds stakes. Government contracts and other benefits have gone to various Trump-linked companies, prompting allegations of self-dealing by Democratic lawmakers and good government experts. But ProPublica’s reporting on the Vulcan loan represents the first time the awarding of a contract from a federal agency has been directly linked to White House intervention.

The loan was a massive financial commitment from the Pentagon in its effort to fund companies that could help the U.S. reduce dependence on China’s critical mineral supply chains. The deal was a dramatic win for Vulcan, a North Carolina rare-earth magnet company launched just two years earlier. Estimates of its valuation grew tenfold after the deal was announced. It was also a win for Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm, which took a stake of undisclosed size in Vulcan about three months before the Pentagon announced the deal.

And there may be more good news on the way for the president’s eldest son. Among other companies under review for a Pentagon loan was a drone parts manufacturer that Trump Jr. advises and owns a stake in, according to one of the defense officials who spoke to ProPublica.

Navarro, who served as trade adviser in Trump’s first term, and Trump Jr. have formed a close bond in recent years. The president’s son visited Navarro in prison while he served time for defying a subpoena from lawmakers investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Trump Jr. was one of the small group of people Navarro dedicated his latest book to for having “my back when it was against the wall.” And a week before the Vulcan deal was announced, Trump Jr. hosted Navarro — now the president’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing — on his streaming show, encouraging his nearly 2 million subscribers to buy Navarro’s book. That interview was not long after word came down from Navarro to Pentagon staff to make the massive loan to Vulcan, one of the defense officials involved in the deal said.

Navarro did not respond to questions from ProPublica sent to him directly. Neither did Vulcan. A White House spokesperson said in a statement that the administration is working “in the best interest of the American people,” adding, “The President’s entire team, including Senior Counselor Navarro and officials at the Department of War, is working together and with private industry to secure America’s critical mineral supply chain at Trump Speed.” Trump Jr.’s spokesperson said the president’s son does not discuss companies he has invested in with federal government officials and did not speak to Navarro about Vulcan. He “has no knowledge about how this deal came together,” the spokesperson said. A spokesperson for 1789 Capital, the venture firm where Trump Jr. is a partner, said it also played no role in Vulcan getting the loan and did not learn about the deal before it was public.

“No company receives preferential treatment,” a Pentagon spokesperson said. “Outside affiliations, investors, or political connections play absolutely no role in the Department’s funding decisions.”

Richard Painter, the chief White House ethics lawyer during the George W. Bush administration, said aides to the president should not be intervening in contracting and lending decisions by agencies, particularly in matters that financially benefit the president’s family.

“This is our money they’re spending,” Painter said. “This is corruption we pay for.”

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mike johnson and jim jordan

Big Oil Funds Project Teaching Judges 'Healthy Skepticism' of Climate Science

This story was originally published by Pro Publica

For many months, conservative lawmakers and political operatives have been targeting the scientists and lawyers behind the Climate Judiciary Project, a program meant to educate the courts about climate science, alleging that their effort constitutes a conspiracy to influence federal judges and persuade them to rule against the oil industry.

Now, just as congressional investigators are escalating a formal inquiry into the project, a separate program closely aligned with the fossil fuel industry and free-market conservatives is hosting a symposium for 150 judges in Nashville, Tennessee. The program, run by the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, also aims to educate judges, but in a way that prioritizes American business interests and questions climate science.

The dueling efforts come as a number of significant lawsuits seeking to hold fossil fuel companies accountable for climate damages are making their way through the courts and as oil-industry-aligned attacks on climate policies, and the legal arguments supporting them, have been sharply increasing.

ProPublica reported in April that political operatives connected to the conservative activist Leonard Leo were coordinating an effort across 11 states to pass laws shielding fossil fuel companies from liability for climate harm. In the past three weeks, similar liability waiver bills have been introduced federally in both the House and the Senate. Last week the Florida attorney general’s office launched an investigation into alleged judicial influence by the organization that oversees the Climate Judiciary Project, the Environmental Law Institute, a nonpartisan legal scholarship group funded until recently by the Environmental Protection Agency.

These developments come on the heels of a campaign last winter to get the Federal Judicial Center, the publishing body for the federal court system, to retract a roughly 90-page chapter devoted to climate science from the latest volume of its technical manual for judges. Twenty-two Republican attorneys general wrote to Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the Republican chair of the House Judiciary Committee, demanding that the committee investigate the center’s publication of material about how to weigh scientific evidence about climate and the weather because the chapter’s authors appeared to be biased.

In their letter, they noted the authors work for Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law and alleged the chapter was influenced by Michael Burger, the executive director of the center who works closely with the law firm Sher Edling, which represents several climate plaintiffs. The Republican attorneys general also noted that some staff at the Sabin Center work with the Environmental Law Institute and the Climate Judiciary Project. Although the chapter had been peer reviewed and approved by the Federal Judicial Center, as well as by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, the center retracted the climate chapter in February.

On April 28, Jordan went a step further, issuing letters accusing Burger, the Environmental Law Institute and Sher Edling of bias, conspiracy and collusion. Jordan demanded that the three parties produce private communications, receipts and records of funding sources, and that the recipients sit for interviews before the committee.

The Sabin Center, Jordan wrote, is “producing materials to be used to bias federal judges about novel climate-related legal theories” and coordinating to bring climate-related litigation to court. The activity raises questions about “the integrity and independence of the judicial process” and “ex parte contact with courts,” Jordan wrote, referring to the improper conduct of contacting a judge without opposing counsel present to argue issues related to a pending case.

Neither Sher Edling, the Sabin Center nor Burger responded to a request for comment. A representative for the Environmental Law Institute stated in an email that the Climate Judiciary Project “does not participate in litigation, coordinate with any parties related to any litigation, or advise judges on how they should rule on any issue or in any case. The goal of CJP is to provide judges with the tools they need to understand climate science and how it arises in the law.”

Jordan’s office replied to a request for comment by reasserting the statements in the letters it sent, and it did not respond to a detailed list of questions.

Amid the allegations of impropriety and conflicts of interest though, the program at George Mason University has scarcely been noticed.

The George Mason conference, called the “Judicial Symposium on Scientific Methodology, Expert Testimony, and the Judicial Role,” opened the day after Jordan sent out his letters and will continue through Saturday, May 2. It is run by the university’s Law and Economics Center, which oversees a project called the Judicial Education Program. The center is funded in part by ExxonMobil, which is a defendant in several of the climate lawsuits. ExxonMobil did not respond to a request for comment.

The conference includes speakers who have filed amicus briefs — filings by people who aren’t part of the case but have a strong interest in its outcome — in favor of the oil industry in several of those cases, as well as at least one lawyer who has represented fossil fuel companies in court. The reading assignments prepared for the judges include a Substack post by a notable climate contrarian accusing the authors of the retracted climate chapter in the federal court’s reference manual of including material by Burger and hiding his authorship. They also include a law journal argument that a key tenet of climate science used to identify the cause of disasters should be inadmissible in their courtrooms. One session, titled “Debates on the trustworthiness of tools to evaluate science in the courtroom,” focuses entirely on the federal courts’ reference manual.

In an emailed response to ProPublica, Donald Kochan, the executive director of George Mason’s Law and Economics Center, which organized the event, presented the symposium as a robust and objective discussion. The program’s advisory board, he wrote, is a politically and jurisprudentially diverse group including “some of the most progressive jurists in the country, including on climate issues.” Kochan, who did not respond to a list of specific questions, added that lectures are by leading academics on science and law and that he invited the authors of the judicial reference manual to speak but they declined, as did several others who he suggested would have represented more centrist viewpoints on the climate issue.

The conference is one of dozens of meetings, retreats and “intimate weeklong gatherings” that are regularly hosted by the Law and Economics Center as part of an initiative to instill free-market values and greater knowledge of the economic consequences of policy in judicial decision-making. In 2016 the law school renamed itself after the former Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and the center expanded with $30 million in gifts, adding faculty and scholarships and launching additional “colloquia.” The center today runs several parallel initiatives under the umbrella of the Judicial Education Program, each aimed at gathering judges together and educating them. The symposium on science and evidence is one of these events.

According to an internal fundraising document from 2020 obtained by ProPublica, the gatherings are often luxurious all-expenses-paid affairs, created to foster lasting relationships and opportunities to network with judges. The document included a solicitation for more than $930,000 sent by the center to the Charles Koch Foundation, a libertarian organization that provides grants to universities and scholars. At the time of the proposal, more than 5,000 judges representing all 50 states had attended at least one of the organization’s programs, the document stated.

The goal of the symposium, according to the document, is to sway judges toward a libertarian economic viewpoint in their rulings — the very sort of “biasing” that Jordan accused the Sabin Center and the Climate Judiciary Project of.

“The goal of this project is to expose judges to the intellectual history of the role of capitalism, economic freedom, and a constitutionally limited government as fundamental features of a liberal society,” the document says. It is also to establish a community of like-minded justices “with synergistic effects on the judiciary as a whole” and to influence the outcome of cases that come before the courts. Judges, the fundraising proposal continues, “urgently need to cultivate an understanding” of economic analysis and its relevance to the legal system if they “are to issue decisions that advance the rule of law and America’s free enterprise system.”

According to the George Mason University website, the Law and Economics Center’s 2025 funders include DonorsTrust, a dark money pass-through organization meant to shield the identity of contributors. DonorsTrust is often used by organizations tied to Leo, who brought George Mason a $20 million gift, in addition to $10 million from the Charles Koch Foundation, that made expansion of the law school’s program possible.

This weekend’s symposium in Nashville is one of the most significant parts of the center’s outreach to justices. According to the 2020 fundraising letter, the goal of such gatherings is to challenge the status quo on science. The conference “will give judges a rounded understanding and healthy skepticism of the invocations of ‘science’ that lurk in the background of lawsuits they are hearing,” the center’s then-director wrote, and it will help judges understand that “so much of what passes as ‘science’ for leverage purposes never has to face tests for rigor, reliability and quality in front of a neutral arbiter.”

One of the symposium’s events prominently features Philip Goldberg, a managing partner at the law firm Shook, Hardy & Bacon and the special counsel to the National Association of Manufacturers’ policy lobbying arm, the Manufacturers’ Accountability Project, which the group describes as “the leading voice of manufacturers in the courts.” MAP, as it is called, has publicly rejected the claims in a landmark case that the city of Honolulu brought against Shell, ExxonMobil and other oil companies alleging they misrepresented the risks of using their fuels and are responsible for the damages they have caused. Goldberg authored a brief for the group that was submitted to the Supreme Court on the case in 2024.

Goldberg, who did not respond to a request for comment, has also authored briefs in climate liability cases brought by the city of Baltimore against BP and other fossil fuel companies — a case won by the defendants in March — as well as a case brought by Boulder County in Colorado against Suncor Energy and ExxonMobil, which alleges the companies misrepresented the risks of using fossil fuels. Lawyers from Shook, Hardy & Bacon are also present at the conference. Other lawyers at the firm wrote a brief in favor of Chevron in a case brought by Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. (The oil companies dispute the allegations and each of these cases is ongoing.)

For its assigned reading for a session on the judicial manual, the symposium offered an article by the political scientist Roger Pielke Jr., a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. Pielke wrote that he found evidence that the true authorship of a significant part of the climate chapter in the reference manual was obscured. He used the Claude artificial intelligence program to run an analysis comparing the chapter’s text to a paper co-authored by Sabin’s Burger and said he found a correlation.

“Michael Burger did not write any of the text in the climate science chapter nor did he have any control over the content and scope,” one of the chapter’s two authors, Jessica Wentz, who has denied the chapter was biased, wrote to ProPublica. The other author did not respond, and Burger declined to comment.

The conference did not offer readings from the climate chapter of the manual itself, which is still available on the website of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. Nor did it offer readings from the United Nations climate science authorities or climate-related readings from any other peer-reviewed scientific journal.

In its final session, the symposium features attorney Matthew Wickersham of the firm Alston & Bird, which has served as counsel for Chevron in several lawsuits. Wickersham did not respond to a request for comment. The only reading assigned to justices for that session is a paper Wickersham wrote in the Rutgers Law Record in 2025 about why attribution science — the field of study that makes it possible to link climate disasters to specific amounts of pollution and their sources — should never be admitted in court.

Far-Right Pastor Runs D.C. 'Boarding House' For GOP Legislators -- Including Speaker

Far-Right Pastor Runs D.C. 'Boarding House' For GOP Legislators -- Including Speaker

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For a project explicitly designed to influence Congress, Steve Berger’s operation has left a scant paper trail. The archconservative evangelical pastor, who started a D.C. nonprofit a few years ago to shape national policy, does not file lobbying reports. His group does not show up in campaign finance records.

There is a simple way to glimpse his effort’s expanding reach in Washington, however: Pay attention to who is walking out the front door of his Capitol Hill townhouse. New evidence suggests Berger may be running what amounts to a group house for conservative lawmakers, with multiple members of Congress living with him at his organization’s headquarters.

The six-bedroom, $3.7 million home is owned by a multimillion-dollar Republican donor.

Rep. Andy Ogles, a Tennessee Republican who is among President Donald Trump’s most aggressive allies in Congress, has been at the house on multiple days over the past two weeks, according to people who live in the area. Video reviewed by ProPublica showed Ogles leaving the townhouse with bags on February 27. As he left, he locked up the front door and pocketed the keys to the house.

As ProPublica reported last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson is living in the townhouse. And Dan Bishop, a former congressman from North Carolina now nominated for a powerful post in Trump’s White House, appears to have lived there until recently as well.

Berger has said his goal is to “disciple” members of Congress so what “they learn is then translated into policy.” He has claimed to have personally spurred legislation, saying a senator privately credited him with inspiring a bill.

Berger, Bishop and Ogles did not respond to requests for comment. A spokesperson for Johnson previously said the speaker pays fair-market rent for the part of the townhouse he occupies but didn’t answer questions about the specific rate. He said Johnson has not spoken to the pastor about “any matter of public policy.”

Ogles is in only his third year in Congress, but he’s drawn attention for his bombastic displays of fealty to Trump. He recently introduced a resolution to amend the Constitution so that Trump could serve a third term as president. He’s filed articles of impeachment against multiple judges who’ve ruled against the new administration. (Last week, Elon Musk posted a video of Ogles touting his impeachment efforts, set to the beat from the rap song “Shook Ones, Pt. II.”)

Ogles’ short tenure is also notable for the pace of scandal that’s followed it. He has faced allegations that he inflated his resume, claiming alternatively to have been an economist, a member of law enforcement and an expert on international sex trafficking, NewsChannel 5 in Nashville reported. (Ogles has acknowledged at least one mistake on his resume but said that “my body of work speaks for itself.”)

Last year, the FBI seized his phone during an investigation and obtained a search warrant to review records associated with his personal email address. Federal investigators were seeking evidence related to potential campaign finance violations, according to a court filing. The scope of the FBI investigation remains unclear.

Perhaps no one is more responsible for Ogles’ rise in politics than Lee Beaman, the Tennessee businessman who owns the Capitol Hill townhouse. When Ogles announced a short-lived Senate bid in 2017, Beaman said he planned to raise $4 million to support the run. Beaman, whose wealth derives from a large car dealership chain, then served as campaign treasurer in Ogles’ successful 2022 run for the House.

Beaman and Berger have publicly advocated together for numerous specific policy changes, in areas including foreign affairs, fuel efficiency standards and removing barriers to firing federal employees. After the 2020 election, they both signed a letter declaring that Trump was the rightful winner and calling for Congress to overturn the results. (Beaman did not respond to requests for comment. ProPublica could not determine whether he and the pastor have discussed policy issues with Ogles during his time in Congress.)

In sermons, Berger has devoted long stretches to attacking the separation of church and state, as well as COVID-19 vaccines. The pastor used violent language to describe his disdain for “LGBTQ+ Pride” parades and “drag queen story hour” during an interview for a podcast in 2022, according to unpublished footage obtained by ProPublica.

“If I was left to myself, I’d take a baseball bat and beat the hell out of every single one of them. And not feel bad about it,” Berger said. “I have to go, ‘You know what? That’s probably not the will of God, is it?’ And obviously it’s not.”

Beyond his ownership of the townhouse, Beaman’s role in the pastor’s influence project is unclear. After Beaman purchased the house in 2021, a lawyer sought to change it from a single-family dwelling to a “boarding house/rooming house,” according to Washington, D.C., property records. Around that time, Berger’s nonprofit group, Ambassador Services International, registered the home as its address.

Members of Congress are allowed to live anywhere, as long as they pay fair-market rent, experts said. Discounts on rent are generally seen as improper gifts and prohibited by House ethics rules.

Beaman has said he got to know Ogles when Ogles was the Tennessee director of Americans for Prosperity, part of the Koch brothers’ political network. Beaman and Ogles joined forces to fight a mass transit project in Nashville and reportedly worked together on a successful effort to repeal the estate tax in their home state. After leaving the Koch network, Ogles served four years as the mayor of a Middle Tennessee county with a population of roughly 100,000. He held that role until 2022, when he was elected to Congress.

Ogles’ 2022 campaign was the subject of a blistering House ethics report released this year. The nonpartisan Office of Congressional Ethics concluded that there is “substantial reason to believe” that Ogles’ campaign had accepted illegally large donations and then falsely reported that the funds had come from Ogles himself. Ogles has said he is “confident that any reporting problem was at worst an honest mistake.” (Beaman was not named in the report and has not been accused of wrongdoing.)

The report said that Ogles refused to cooperate with the investigation. It recommended that the House Ethics Committee issue a subpoena to the congressman.

Reprinted with permission from Pro Publica

'A Tax Cut For Tax Cheats': DOGE's IRS Firings Burn Hundreds Of Millions In Revenue

'A Tax Cut For Tax Cheats': DOGE's IRS Firings Burn Hundreds Of Millions In Revenue

Dave Nershi was finalizing a report he’d worked on for months when an ominous email appeared in his inbox.

Nershi had worked as a general engineer for the Internal Revenue Service for about nine months. He was one of hundreds of specialists inside the IRS who used their technical expertise — Nershi’s background is in chemical and nuclear engineering — to audit byzantine tax returns filed by large corporations and wealthy individuals. Until recently, the IRS had a shortage of these experts, and many complex tax returns went unscrutinized. With the help of people like Nershi, the IRS could recoup millions and sometimes more than a billion dollars on a single tax return.

But on February 20, three months shy of finishing his probationary period and becoming a full-time employee, the IRS fired him. As a Navy veteran, Nershi loved working in public service and had hoped he might be spared from any mass firings. The unsigned email said he’d been fired for performance, even though he had received high marks from his manager.

As for the report he was finalizing, it would have probably recouped many times more than the low-six-figure salary he earned. The report would now go unfinished.

Nershi agreed that the federal government could be more lean and efficient, but he was befuddled by the decision to fire scores of highly skilled IRS specialists like him who, even by the logic of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative, were an asset to the government. “By firing us, you’re going to cut down on how much revenue the country brings in,” Nershi said in an interview. “This was not about saving money.”

Since taking office, President Donald Trump and his billionaire top adviser Musk have launched an all-out blitz to cut costs and shrink the federal government. Trump, Musk and other administration leaders not only say the U.S. government is bloated and inefficient, but they also see it as a bastion of political opposition, calling it the “deep state.”

The strategy used by the Trump administration to reduce the size of government has been indiscriminate and far-reaching, meant to oust civil servants as fast as possible in as many agencies as possible while demoralizing the workers that remain on the job. As Russell Vought, director of the Trump White House’s Office of Management and Budget and an architect of Project 2025, put it in a speech first reported by ProPublica and Documented: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains.”

One tactic used by the administration is to target probationary workers who are easier to fire because they have fewer civil service protections. Probationary, in this context, means only that the employees are new to their roles, not that they’re newbies or underperformers. ProPublica found that the latest IRS firings swept up highly skilled and experienced probationary workers who had recently joined the government or had moved to a new position from a different agency.

In late February, the Trump administration began firing more than 6,000 IRS employees. The agency has been hit especially hard, current and former employees said, because it spent 2023 preparing to hire thousands of new enforcement and customer service personnel and had only started hiring and training those workers at any scale in 2024, meaning many of those new employees were still in their probationary period. Nershi was hired as part of this wave, in the spring of last year. The boost came after Congress had underfunded the agency for much of the past decade, which led to chronic staffing shortages, dismal customer service, and plummeting audit rates, especially for taxpayers who earned $500,000 or more a year.

The administration doesn’t appear to want to stop there. It is drafting plans to cut its entire workforce in half, according to reports.

Unlike with other federal agencies, cutting the IRS means the government collects less money and finds fewer tax abuses. Economic studies have shown that for every dollar spent by the IRS, the agency returns between $5 and $12, depending on how much income the taxpayer declared. A 2024 report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office found that the IRS found savings of $13,000 for every additional hour spent auditing the tax returns of very wealthy taxpayers — a return on investment that “would leave Wall Street hedge fund managers drooling,” in the words of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

John Koskinen, who led the IRS from 2013 to 2017, said in an interview that the widespread cuts to the IRS make no sense if Trump and Musk genuinely care about fiscal responsibility and rooting out waste, fraud and abuse. “What I’ve never understood is if you’re interested in the deficit and curbing it, why would you cut back on the revenue side?” Koskinen said.

Neither the IRS nor the White House responded to requests for comment. Last month, Musk asked his followers on X, the platform he owns, whether they would “like @DOGE to audit the IRS,” referring to the U.S. DOGE Service team of lawyers and engineers led by him. DOGE employees have sought to gain access to IRS taxpayer data in an attempt to “shine a light on the fraud,” according to a White House spokesman.

For this story, ProPublica interviewed more than a dozen current and former IRS employees. Most of those people worked in the agency’s Large Business and International (LB&I) division, which audits companies with more than $10 million in assets and high-income individuals. Within the IRS, the LB&I division has the highest return on investment, and the widespread cuts there put in stark relief the human and financial cost of the Trump administration’s approach to slashing government functions in the name of saving money and combating waste and fraud.

According to current and former LB&I employees, the taxpayers they audited included pharmaceutical companies, oil and gas companies, construction firms and major technology corporations, as well as more obscure private corporations and high-net-worth individuals. None of the IRS employees who spoke to ProPublica would disclose specific taxpayer information, citing privacy laws.

With the recent influx in funding, employees said, the leadership of LB&I had pushed to hire not only more revenue agents and appraisers but also specialized employees such as petroleum engineers, computer scientists and experts in corporate partnerships. These employees, usually known internally as general engineers, consulted on complicated tax returns and helped determine whether taxpayers properly claimed certain credits or other tax breaks.

This work happened in cases where major companies claimed a hefty research tax credit, which is a legitimate avenue for seeking tax relief but can also be improperly used. Highly skilled appraisers have also recouped huge savings in cases involving notorious tax schemes, such as what’s known as a syndicated conservation easement — a break abused so often that both congressional Democrats and Republicans have criticized it, while the IRS has included it on its list of the “Dirty Dozen” tax scams.

“These are cases where revenue agents don't have the technical expertise,” said one IRS engineer who is still employed at the agency and who, like other IRS employees, wasn’t authorized to speak to the media. “That’s what we do. We are working on things where expertise is absolutely necessary.”

Current and former IRS employees told ProPublica that the agency had expended a huge amount of resources to recruit and train new specialists in recent years. Vanessa Rollins, an engineer in the IRS’ Chicago office who was recently fired, said probationary employees in LB&I outnumbered full-time staffers in her office. Much of her team’s work centered on training and mentorship for the waves of new employees — most of whom were recently fired. “The entire office had been oriented around bringing us in and getting us trained,” Rollins said.

These specialists said they earned higher salaries compared with many other IRS employees. But the money these specialists recouped as a result of their work was orders of magnitude greater than what they cost. The current engineer told ProPublica that they estimated their team of less than 10 people had brought in $5 billion in adjusted tax returns over the past four years. (By contrast, a Wall Street Journal analysis published on February 22 found that DOGE had found savings of $2.6 billion over the next year, far less than the $55 billion claimed by DOGE itself.)

A former LB&I revenue agent added that their work didn’t always lead to the IRS recouping money from a taxpayer; sometimes, they audited a return only to find that the taxpayer was owed more money than they had expected.

“The IRS’ mission is to treat taxpayers fairly so they pay the tax they legally owe, including making sure they’re not paying any more than legally required,” the former revenue agent said.

Notwithstanding its return on investment and the sense of duty espoused by its employees, LB&I was hit especially hard by the most recent wave of firings, employees said. According to the current IRS engineer, the Trump administration appears to have eliminated the jobs of about 120 LB&I engineers out of a total of roughly 260. The person said they had heard more terminations were expected soon. The acting IRS chief and a longtime agency leader, Doug O’Donnell, announced his retirement amid the firings.

Several LB&I employees told ProPublica that the mass layoffs had been ordered from a very high level and that several layers of managers had no idea they were coming or what to expect. The cuts, employees said, did not appear to distinguish between employees with certain specialties or performance levels, but instead focused solely on whether they were on probationary status. “It didn't matter the skill set. If they were under a year, they got cut,” another current LB&I employee told ProPublica.

The current and former IRS employees said the firings and the administration’s deferred resignation offer led to situations that have wiped out decades of experience and institutional knowledge that can’t easily be replaced. Jack McCumber was an LB&I senior appraiser in Seattle who got fired about six weeks before the end of his probationary status. He said not only did he lose his job, but the veteran appraiser who was his mentor took early retirement. McCumber and his mentor often worked on syndicated conservative easement cases that could recoup tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars. “They’re pushing out the experienced people, and they’re pushing out people like me,” McCumber said. “It’s a double whammy.”

The result, employees and experts said, will mean corporations and wealthy individuals face far less scrutiny when they file their tax returns, leading to more risk-taking and less money flowing into the U.S. treasury.

“Large businesses and higher-wealth individuals are where you have the most sophisticated taxpayers and the most sophisticated tax preparers and lawyers who are attuned to pushing the envelope as much as they can,” said Koskinen, the former IRS commissioner. “When those audits stop because there isn't anybody to do them, people will say, ‘Hey, I did that last year, I'll do it again this year.’”

“When you hamstring the IRS,” Koskinen added. “it’s just a tax cut for tax cheats.”

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Reprinted with permission from ProPublica

Joni Ernst’s Unethical Romances With Military Lobbyists Provoke Concern

Joni Ernst’s Unethical Romances With Military Lobbyists Provoke Concern

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Earlier this year, the Air Force revealed that the general who oversaw its lobbying before Congress had inappropriate romantic relationships with five women, including three who worked on Capitol Hill.

Maj. Gen. Christopher Finerty’s colleagues told investigators the relationships were “highly inappropriate” as they could give the Air Force undue influence in Congress. “I honestly felt sick to my stomach,” one said, according to a report about the investigation, “because it just felt so sleazy.”

The Air Force inspector general’s report redacted the names of the women who worked on the Hill.

But one of the women whose relationship with Finerty was scrutinized by the inspector general was Sen. Joni Ernst, according to two sources with knowledge of the investigation. The Iowa Republican and combat veteran is one of the most influential voices on the Hill about the military, and she sits on the Senate’s Armed Services Committee, which oversees the Pentagon and plays a crucial role in setting its annual budget.

Three other sources told ProPublica that around 2019 Ernst had a previous romantic relationship with a legislative affairs official for a different branch of the military, the Navy.

Ernst and the officials were not married at the time and Senate rules do not bar lawmakers from entering into romantic relationships with lobbyists or other legislative advocates. But ethics experts say such relationships can create a conflict of interest, and other lawmakers have been criticized for such behavior in the past.

A former legislative affairs official for the military told ProPublica that people in that role aren’t officially “lobbyists but for all intent and purposes that’s their job. ... From an ethics standpoint, it’s severely problematic.” A former Air Force officer who worked for Finerty said the perception in the office was that his relationship with Ernst “absolutely gave the Air Force undue influence.

”Six sources who worked for the Air Force or in Congress told ProPublica that they had heard about a relationship between Ernst and Finerty and there had been concerns about it for years. The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because they did not have permission to speak publicly or feared for their jobs. One source said that they were told about the relationship by one of the two participants. Two sources said they heard from witnesses interviewed by the inspector general that Ernst was a focus of the investigation.

A spokesperson for Ernst would not address whether the senator had any relationships with military legislative liaisons but said the lawmaker maintained her independence: “The fake news media is clearly too busy gossiping to report the real news that Senator Ernst is focused on cutting waste at the Pentagon. Her votes and work in the Senate are guided by the voices of Iowans who elected her and her constitutional duty alone. Any insinuation otherwise by tabloid ‘journalism’ is a slanderous lie — full stop.”

Finerty’s lawyer also declined to say whether the general had a romantic relationship with Ernst while he was advocating for the Air Force in Congress. “The IG report found no evidence suggesting anything remotely approaching either conflict of interest or undue influence involving General Finerty and anyone on Capitol Hill. Further, the IG report found no law, rule, policy or guidance prohibited any of General Finerty’s relationships. Any suggestion to the contrary would be defamatory.” (The inspector general report said Finerty “wrongfully engaged in inappropriate relationships with multiple individuals” in violation of the code of military justice.) In his interview with the inspector general, according to the report, Finerty defended relationships between people in his office and “members on the Hill” — a term used to describe members of Congress.

The 41-page report documenting the inspector general’s investigation of Finerty was completed in September 2023 but was shared with Congress, and then the public, earlier this year in response to records requests. (The investigation summary, posted on the Air Force’s website, was reported first by Politico, without any mention of Ernst’s involvement.)

At the time of the report’s release to Congress in early January, Ernst’s influence over the Pentagon was on full display, as she sat at the center of one of the Trump administration’s most contentious confirmation battles. Ernst had made statements suggesting she had reservations about President Donald Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and though she had later made encouraging statements, she had refused to formally back him.

At the time of the report’s release to Congress in early January, Ernst’s influence over the Pentagon was on full display, as she sat at the center of one of the Trump administration’s most contentious confirmation battles. Ernst had made statements suggesting she had reservations about President Donald Trump’s nominee for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and though she had later made encouraging statements, she had refused to formally back him.

Serving in the Iowa Army National Guard during the Iraq War, Ernst is the Senate’s first female combat veteran and has pushed to reform the military’s handling of sexual assault cases. Hegseth faced scrutiny over past allegations of excessive drinking and sexual assault, which he denied, as well as criticism for comments he made against allowing women in combat. Then in mid-January, Ernst reversed course under pressure from Trump allies and formally endorsed Hegseth. Her backing was considered pivotal in reviving what had appeared to be a flailing nomination.

The report about Finerty is heavily redacted but provided the following details about the inspector general’s findings. Two of the five women worked for the Pentagon. They include a civilian employee who was married to another officer and an Air Force enlisted member significantly lower down the chain of command than Finerty. Finerty interacted with the three other women on Capitol Hill as part of his legislative affairs work, “mixing his professional and personal roles, thus creating the perception of a conflict of interest.” Finerty sexted two of those women in 2021. He sexted and had an “intimate relationship” with the third, though the report does not say exactly when.

The nature of his relationship with the women varied, from suggestive messages to graphic sexting and photos to physical sex, according to the report. Sources told ProPublica that the inspector general asked witnesses about Ernst, but because of the redactions in the report, it’s unclear which sections, if any, refer to the senator.

The report includes a stark example of Finerty’s legislative advocacy overlapping with his romantic relationship with one of the women on Capitol Hill.

In June 2021, Finerty texted the woman “I was distracted by you being distracted.” Then he sent her a list of “top 5 things to protect if possible,” including a particular fighter jet, radar technology and a system to improve interoperability across the military’s branches.

“What distraction?” the woman texted back. “If I was [redacted] would it be distracting?” She followed up with a series of what the inspector general report described as pornographic pictures.

Finerty told investigators that his romantic relationships with the women on Capitol Hill were proper because all participants were unmarried.

“Those weren’t Chris Finerty’s personal interest items. Those were the five things that were in the President’s Budget that we’re charged to go up there and ensure that we get across the finish line,” he said, according to the report. “I wasn’t saying hey, do me a personal favor and protect these five things. It was, these are the five things that the Air Force has in the President’s Budget that we’re trying to do that we need your help with.”

Many of Finerty’s colleagues who were also working in military legislative affairs took a more negative view. In interviews with investigators, they expressed concerns about the relationships leading to undue influence, other military branches perceiving the Air Force as getting preferential treatment, and other congressional offices worrying they were less likely to receive sensitive information.

The inspector general’s investigation found “several exchanges between Maj Gen Finerty and the women regarding legislative matters” but “no evidence of favors or exchanging of sensitive information by either party.”

Regarding one of the Hill relationships, a colleague of Finerty’s told investigators, “Was there a perception in my office that it was unethical? Yes.” The colleague reported it affected morale and people were “talking about it all the time.”

Justin Elliott and Andy Kroll contributed reporting. Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

Reprinted with permission from Pro Publica


Texas Banned Abortion -- Then Deadly Sepsis Among Pregnant Women Soared

Texas Banned Abortion -- Then Deadly Sepsis Among Pregnant Women Soared

Reprinted with permission from ProPublica

By Lizzie Presser, Andrea Suozzo, Sophie Chou and Kavitha Surana

Pregnancy became far more dangerous in Texas after the state banned abortion in 2021, ProPublica found in a first-of-its-kind data analysis.

The rate of sepsis shot up more than 50 percent for women hospitalized when they lost their pregnancies in the second trimester, ProPublica found.

The surge in this life-threatening condition, caused by infection, was most pronounced for patients whose fetus may still have had a heartbeat when they arrived at the hospital.

ProPublica previously reported on two such cases in which miscarrying women in Texas died of sepsis after doctors delayed evacuating their uteruses. Doing so would have been considered an abortion.

The new reporting shows that, after the state banned abortion, dozens more pregnant and postpartum women died in Texas hospitals than had in pre-pandemic years, which ProPublica used as a baseline to avoid COVID-19-related distortions. As the maternal mortality rate dropped nationally, ProPublica found, it rose substantially in Texas.

ProPublica’s analysis is the most detailed look yet at a rise in life-threatening complications for women losing a pregnancy after Texas banned abortion. It raises concerns that the same pattern may be occurring in more than a dozen other states with similar bans.

To chart the scope of pregnancy-related infections, ProPublica purchased and analyzed seven years of Texas’ hospital discharge data.

When abortion was legal in Texas, the rate of sepsis for women hospitalized during second-trimester pregnancy loss was relatively steady. Then the state’s first abortion ban went into effect and the rate of sepsis spiked.


Chart via Pro Publica

“This is exactly what we predicted would happen and exactly what we were afraid would happen,” said Dr. Lorie Harper, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist in Austin.

She and a dozen other maternal health experts who reviewed ProPublica’s findings say they add to the evidence that the state’s abortion ban is leading to dangerous delays in care. Texas law threatens up to 99 years in prison for providing an abortion. Though the ban includes an exception for a “medical emergency,” the definition of what constitutes an emergency has been subject to confusion and debate.

Many said the ban is the only explanation they could see for the sudden jump in sepsis cases.

The new analysis comes as Texas legislators consider amending the abortion ban in the wake of ProPublica’s previous reporting, and as doctors, federal lawmakers and the state’s largest newspaper have urged Texas officials to review pregnancy-related deaths from the first full years after the ban was enacted; the state maternal mortality review committee has, thus far, opted not to examine the death data for 2022 and 2023.

The standard of care for miscarrying patients in the second trimester is to offer to empty the uterus, according to leading medical organizations, which can lower the risk of contracting an infection and developing sepsis. If a patient’s water breaks or her cervix opens, that risk rises with every passing hour.

Sepsis can lead to permanent kidney failure, brain damage and dangerous blood clotting. Nationally, it is one of the leading causes of deaths in hospitals.

While some Texas doctors have told ProPublica they regularly offer to empty the uterus in these cases, others say their hospitals don’t allow them to do so until the fetal heartbeat stops or they can document a life-threatening complication.

Last year, ProPublica reported on the repercussions of these kinds of delays.

Forced to wait 40 hours as her dying fetus pressed against her cervix, Josseli Barnica risked a dangerous infection. Doctors didn’t induce labor until her fetus no longer had a heartbeat.

Physicians waited, too, as Nevaeh Crain’s organs failed. Before rushing the pregnant teenager to the operating room, they ran an extra test to confirm her fetus had expired.

Both women had hoped to carry their pregnancies to term, both suffered miscarriages and both died.

In response to their stories, 111 doctors wrote a letter to the Legislature saying the abortion ban kept them from providing lifesaving care and demanding a change.

“It’s black and white in the law, but it’s very vague when you’re in the moment,” said Dr. Tony Ogburn, an OB-GYN in San Antonio. When the fetus has a heartbeat, doctors can’t simply follow the usual evidence-based guidelines, he said. Instead, there is a legal obligation to assess whether a woman’s condition is dire enough to merit an abortion under a prosecutor’s interpretation of the law.

Some prominent Texas Republicans who helped write and pass Texas’ strict abortion bans have recently said that the law should be changed to protect women’s lives — though it’s unclear if proposed amendments will receive a public hearing during the current legislative session.

ProPublica’s findings indicate that the law is getting in the way of providing abortions that can protect against life-threatening infections, said Dr. Sarah Prager, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Washington.

“We have the ability to intervene before these patients get sick,” she said. “This is evidence that we aren’t doing that.”

A New View

Health experts, specially equipped to study maternal deaths, sit on federal agencies and state-appointed review panels. But, as ProPublica previously reported, none of these bodies have systematically assessed the consequences of abortion bans.

So ProPublica set out to do so, first by investigating preventable deaths, and now by using data to take a broader view, looking at what happened in Texas hospitals after the state banned abortion, in particular as women faced miscarriages.

“It is kind of mindblowing that even before the bans researchers barely looked into complications of pregnancy loss in hospitals,” said perinatal epidemiologist Alison Gemmill, an expert on miscarriage at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

In consultation with Gemmill and more than a dozen other maternal health researchers and obstetricians, ProPublica built a framework for analyzing Texas hospital discharge data from 2017 to 2023, the most recent full year available. This billing data, kept by hospitals and collected by the state, catalogues what happens in every hospitalization. It is anonymized but remarkable in its granularity, including details such as gestational age, complications and procedures.

To study infections during pregnancy loss, ProPublica identified all hospitalizations that included miscarriages, terminations and births from the beginning of the second trimester up to 22 weeks’ gestation, before fetal viability. Since first-trimester miscarriage is often managed in an outpatient setting, ProPublica did not include those cases in this analysis.

When looking at stays for second-trimester pregnancy loss, ProPublica found a relatively steady rate of sepsis before Texas made abortion a crime. In late 2021, the state made it a civil offense to end a pregnancy after a fetus developed cardiac activity, and in the summer of 2022, the state made it a felony to terminate any pregnancy, with few exceptions.

In 2021, 67 patients who lost a pregnancy in the second trimester were diagnosed with sepsis — as in the previous years, they accounted for about three percent of the hospitalizations.

In 2022, that number jumped to 90.

The following year, it climbed to 99.

ProPublica’s analysis was conservative and likely missed some cases. It doesn’t capture what happened to miscarrying patients who were turned away from emergency rooms or those like Barnica who were made to wait, then discharged home before they returned with sepsis.

Our analysis showed that patients who were admitted while their fetus was still believed to have a heartbeat were far more likely to develop sepsis.

“What this says to me is that once a fetal death is diagnosed, doctors can appropriately take care of someone to prevent sepsis, but if the fetus still has a heartbeat, then they aren’t able to act and the risk for maternal sepsis goes way up,” said Dr. Kristina Adams Waldorf, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at UW Medicine and an expert in pregnancy complications. “This is needlessly putting a woman’s life in danger.”

Studies indicate that waiting to evacuate the uterus increases rates of sepsis for patients whose water breaks before the fetus can survive outside the womb, a condition called previable premature rupture of membranes or PPROM. Because of the risk of infection, major medical organizations like the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists advise doctors to always offer abortions.

Researchers in Dallas and Houston examined cases of previable pregnancy complications at their local hospitals after the state ban. Both studies found that when women weren’t able to end their pregnancies right away, they were significantly more likely to develop dangerous conditions than before the ban. The study of the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, not yet published, found that the rate of sepsis tripled after the ban.

Dr. Emily Fahl, a co-author of that study, recently urged professional societies and state medical boards to “explicitly clarify” that doctors need to recommend evacuating the uterus for patients with a PPROM diagnosis, even with no sign of infection, according to MedPage Today.

UTHealth Houston did not respond to several requests for comment.

ProPublica zoomed out beyond the second trimester to look at deaths of all women hospitalized in Texas while pregnant or up to six weeks postpartum. Deaths peaked amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and most patients who died then were diagnosed with the virus. But looking at the two years before the pandemic, 2018 and 2019, and the two most recent years of data, 2022 and 2023, there is a clear shift:

In the two earlier years, there were 79 maternal hospital deaths.

In the two most recent, there were 120.

Caitlin Myers, an economist at Middlebury College, said it’s crucial to examine these deaths from different angles, as ProPublica has done. Data analyses help illuminate trends but can’t reveal a patient’s history or wishes, as a detailed medical chart might. Diving deep into individual cases can reveal the timeline of treatment and how doctors behave. “When you see them together, it tells a really compelling story that people are dying as a result of the abortion restrictions.”

Texas has no plans to scrutinize those deaths. The chair of the maternal mortality review committee said the group is skipping data from 2022 and 2023 and picking up its analysis with 2024 to get a more “contemporary” view of deaths. She added that the decision had “absolutely no nefarious intent.”

“The fact that Texas is not reviewing those years does a disservice to the 120 individuals you identified who died inpatient and were pregnant,” said Dr. Jonas Swartz, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Duke University. “And that is an underestimation of the number of people who died.”

The committee is also prohibited by law from reviewing cases that include an abortion medication or procedure, which can also be used during miscarriages. In response to ProPublica’s reporting, a Democratic state representative filed a bill to overturn that prohibition and order those cases to be examined.

Because not all maternal deaths take place in hospitals and the Texas hospital data did not include cause of death, ProPublica also looked at data compiled from death certificates by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

It shows that the rate of maternal deaths in Texas rose 33% between 2019 and 2023 even as the national rate fell by 7.5%.

A New Imperative

Texas’ abortion law is under review this legislative session. Even the party that championed it and the senator who authored it say they would consider a change.

On a local television program last month, Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said the law should be amended.

“I do think we need to clarify any language,” Patrick said, “so that doctors are not in fear of being penalized if they think the life of the mother is at risk.”

State Sen. Bryan Hughes, a Republican who once argued that the abortion ban he wrote was “plenty clear,” has since reversed course, saying he is working to propose language to amend the ban. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told ProPublica, through a spokesperson, that he would “look forward to seeing any clarifying language in any proposed legislation from the Legislature.”

Patrick, Hughes and Attorney General Ken Paxton did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about what changes they would like to see made this session and did not comment on findings ProPublica shared.

In response to ProPublica’s analysis, Abbott’s office said in a statement that Texas law is clear and pointed to Texas health department data that shows 135 abortions have been performed since Roe was overturned without resulting in prosecution. The vast majority of the abortions were categorized as responses to an emergency but the data did not specify what kind. Only five were solely to “preserve [the] health of [the] woman.”

At least seven bills related to repealing or creating new exceptions to the abortion laws have been introduced in Texas.

Doctors told ProPublica they would most like to see the bans overturned so all patients could receive standard care, including the option to terminate pregnancies for health considerations, regardless of whether it’s an emergency. No list of exceptions can encompass every situation and risk a patient might face, obstetricians said.

“A list of exceptions is always going to exclude people,” said Dallas OB-GYN Dr. Allison Gilbert.

It seems unlikely a Republican-controlled Legislature would overturn the ban. Gilbert and others are advocating to at least end criminal and civil penalties for doctors. Though no doctor has been prosecuted for violating the ban, the mere threat of criminal charges continues to obstruct care, she said.

In 2023, an amendment was passed that permitted physicians to intervene when patients are diagnosed with PPROM. But it is written in such a way that still exposes physicians to prosecution; it allows them to offer an “affirmative defense,” like arguing self-defense when charged with murder.

“Anything that can reduce those severe penalties that have really chilled physicians in Texas would be helpful,” Gilbert said. “I think it will mean that we save patients’ lives.”

Rep. Mihaela Plesa, a Democrat from outside Dallas who filed a bill to create new health exceptions, said that ProPublica’s latest findings were “infuriating.”

She is urging Republicans to bring the bills to a hearing for debate and discussion.

Last session, there were no public hearings, even as women have sued the state after being denied treatment for their pregnancy complications. This year, though some Republicans appeared open to change, others have gone a different direction.

One recently filed a bill that would allow the state to charge women who get an abortion with homicide, for which they could face the death penalty.