In a letter sent today, more than 30 Democratic senators rebuked Education Secretary Betsy DeVos for scaling back civil rights enforcement at the Department of Education.
“You claim to support civil rights and oppose discrimination, but your actions belie your assurances,” wrote the senators, who said that the secretary’s recent moves to curtail civil rights efforts heightened their longstanding concerns about her commitment to protecting students from discrimination and harassment.
As ProPublica has reported, the Department of Education quietly laid out plans to scale back investigations into civil rights complaints in an internal staff memo earlier this month.
Under the Obama administration, the department’s civil rights investigators applied a broad approach to investigating complaints, often widening probes to look for patterns of harassment or discrimination in schools or districts. Investigators were frequently required to obtain multiple years of data to assess whether civil rights violations were systemic in nature.
In the recent memo, acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Candice Jackson instructed her staff to narrow this approach. Under the new directive, civil rights staffers will only look for systemic violations if the original complaint raises such concerns or the investigative team suggests it.
“Limiting use of the systematic approach may cause investigators to miss issues of pervasive discrimination or civil rights abuses,” wrote the senators in their letter.
The Education Department did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment.
While the department has contended that the new approach will speed up the office’s investigations into complaints, DeVos’ recent budget proposal sets out plans to cut over 40 staffers from the office for civil rights, which could limit investigations.
The senators, led by Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., join a growing chorus of critics of the new administration’s civil rights record. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights opened an investigation earlier this month into the Trump administration’s enforcement of civil rights, specifically citing concerns with the Department of Education.
The bipartisan, independent commission is chaired by Catherine Lhamon, who led the department’s civil rights office under Obama. It will conduct the probe over two years, reviewing management practices across various agencies’ civil rights offices, as well as staffing and budget levels.
For months, Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, have been pushing the Trump administration to expand the number of foreign guest-worker visas issued to help businesses in their states prepare for their summer peak. The two senators are also considered crucial votes on the health care bill currently floundering in Congress.
So career staff at the Departments of Labor and Homeland Security took note last week when senior political officials ordered them to immediately draft a rule that would increase the number of H-2B visas, specifically mentioning innkeepers and fisheries in Maine and Alaska, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions.
Paul Ray, counselor to Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta, has been pressing staffers inside the agency for a rule to come out as early as this week, the sources said. While no one in political leadership invoked the health care bill specifically, they said, the sudden urgency and apparent desire to tailor the rule to specific states has drawn concern.
Career staffers have bristled at being told to find the data to justify the rule, the sources said, and have raised questions about whether a regulation benefiting specific industries over others would hold up in a court.
As a result of the pushback, some of the specific details have been scaled back and the latest draft would target a broader set of industries that experience a late summer spike and, as a result, missed out on the first round of visas earlier this year. In addition to certifying they’ve attempted to hire American workers, businesses would also have to attest that they would likely fail or suffer serious financial harm without hiring guest workers.
As an interim final rule, what’s being drafted would take effect immediately without the long period of public comment that usually precedes new regulations.
A Labor Department spokesman referred questions about the rule to DHS, which declined to comment on whether there was any connection between the timing of the work and the health care bill.
“The administration and the department are committed to protecting American jobs and U.S. workers,” DHS spokeswoman Joanne Talbot said in a statement. “DHS is only seeking to provide visas to truly seasonal industries that would be severely/significantly harmed by not receiving H-2B visas, which would adversely impact U.S. workers employed by these seasonal businesses.”
Staff for Murkowski didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. A spokeswoman for Collins said, “There is no link — and there has been no attempt to link — this issue with the health care bill.”
On Monday evening, Collins said she wouldn’t support the health care bill as currently written. And on Tuesday, Collins and Murkowksi were part of a group of Republican senators who met with President Trump at the White House to discuss health care.
The H-2B issue has been politically incendiary for years. Even as Trump made promoting American workers the centerpiece of his presidential campaign last year, he has secured H-2B visas for foreign guest workers to serve as waiters and cooks at his Mar-a-Lago resort.
Conservative outlets such as Breitbart and the Washington Times have been hammering the Trump administration for what they see as a potential betrayal in any increase in the number of H-2B visas.
At an appropriations hearing last month, Murkowski pressed Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly on the importance of the visas for Alaska.
“For most of these communities, for most of these regions, if there is no one to process the seafood when it comes in, there is no place for the boats to deliver,” she said. “If the boats can’t deliver, there is no economy to that community at all.”
Kelly responded: “This is one of those things that I really wish I didn’t have any discretion. And for every senator or congressman that has your view, I have another one that says, ‘Don’t you dare. This about American jobs.’”
The issue came to a head in January when the agency in charge of administering the H-2B program received more than 80,000 applications for 33,000 slots available during the first half of the year. In previous years, that quota had not been filled until March. In the face of increasing demand, Congress had allowed additional workers who had received H-2B visas in the past to return without counting against the quota. But Congress failed to renew that measure this year, significantly reducing the net amount of visas available for the full year.
In March, a bipartisan group of senators sent a letter to Kelly expressing concern that the cap had been reached, freezing out many employers with a need for labor in the late spring and summer.
Since the passage of the American Health Care Act, Republican members of Congress have tried to swing public opinion to their side. ProPublica has been tracking what they’re saying. Read the story.
“In recent weeks, numerous businesses across the United States have contacted our offices expressing concern that the H-2B statutory cap will be reached soon,” the senators wrote. “As a result, small and seasonal businesses across the country, such as seafood processors and other critical hospitality and service businesses that are vital to the local economies in our states will be locked out of a necessary program that they rely on during their busiest seasons.”
For example, Maine businesses were awarded 2,500 visas last year, but received only 700 this year before the cap was hit, said Julie Rabinowitz, director of policy, operations and communication for the Maine Department of Labor.
In response to heavy lobbying, in early May, Congress included a provision in a government spending bill giving DHS the authority to roughly double the number of available H-2B visas if it decided that “the needs of American businesses cannot be satisfied in fiscal year 2017 with United States workers.”
But there was little movement, as senators continued to push for help — until last Wednesday, when DHS announced it would expand the number of seasonal worker visas available this summer. Politico reported the visas wouldn’t be available until at least late July and would only be a fraction of the amount authorized by Congress.
If the Trump administration does issue a rule tailored to certain industries or areas of the country, experts believe it could be vulnerable to legal challenge.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if industry groups sued to open up any increase in visas to other occupations and the rest of the country,” said Daniel Costa, director of immigration law at the labor-oriented Economic Policy Institute and a critic of the H-2B program.
Laurie Flanagan, who co-chairs the industry-backed H-2B Workforce Coalition, echoed that sentiment. “It’s not appropriate to pick and choose [which state or industry] should be winners and losers,” she said. “Any seasonal business that meets the criteria, they should be able to hire those H-2B workers up to the cap.”
Marcelo Rochabrun and Alec MacGillis contributed to this report.
Do you have information about the lobbying over the health care bill or H-2B visas? Contact Michael at michael.grabell@propublica.org or via Signal at 347-573-3030. Contact Justin at justin@propublica.org or via Signal at 774-826-6240.
A trove of internal documents reviewed by ProPublica sheds new light on the secret guidelines that Facebook’s censors use to distinguish between hate speech and legitimate political expression. The documents reveal the rationale behind seemingly inconsistent decisions. For instance, Higgins’ incitement to violence passed muster because it targeted a specific sub-group of Muslims — those that are “radicalized” — while Delgado’s post was deleted for attacking whites in general.
Over the past decade, the company has developed hundreds of rules, drawing elaborate distinctions between what should and shouldn’t be allowed, in an effort to make the site a safe place for its nearly 2 billion users. The issue of how Facebook monitors this content has become increasingly prominent in recent months, with the rise of “fake news” — fabricated stories that circulated on Facebook like “Pope Francis Shocks the World, Endorses Donald Trump For President, Releases Statement” — and growing concern that terrorists are using social media for recruitment.
While Facebook was credited during the 2010-2011 “Arab Spring” with facilitating uprisings against authoritarian regimes, the documents suggest that, at least in some instances, the company’s hate-speech rules tend to favor elites and governments over grassroots activists and racial minorities. In so doing, they serve the business interests of the global company, which relies on national governments not to block its service to their citizens.
Facebook trains its censors to delete hate speech against “protected categories,” including white males, but to allow attacks on “subsets” such as female drivers and black children.
One Facebook rule, which is cited in the documents but that the company said is no longer in effect, banned posts that praise the use of “violence to resist occupation of an internationally recognized state.” The company’s workforce of human censors, known as content reviewers, has deleted posts by activists and journalists in disputed territories such as Palestine, Kashmir, Crimea and Western Sahara.
One document trains content reviewers on how to apply the company’s global hate speech algorithm. The slide identifies three groups: female drivers, black children and white men. It asks: Which group is protected from hate speech? The correct answer: white men.
The reason is that Facebook deletes curses, slurs, calls for violence and several other types of attacks only when they are directed at “protected categories”—based on race, sex, gender identity, religious affiliation, national origin, ethnicity, sexual orientation and serious disability/disease. It gives users broader latitude when they write about “subsets” of protected categories. White men are considered a group because both traits are protected, while female drivers and black children, like radicalized Muslims, are subsets, because one of their characteristics is not protected. (The exact rules are in the slide show below.)
The Facebook Rules
Facebook has used these rules to train its "content reviewers" to decide whether to delete or allow posts. Facebook says the exact wording of its rules may have changed slightly in more recent versions. ProPublica recreated the slides.
Behind this seemingly arcane distinction lies a broader philosophy. Unlike American law, which permits preferences such as affirmative action for racial minorities and women for the sake of diversity or redressing discrimination, Facebook’s algorithm is designed to defend all races and genders equally.
“Sadly,” the rules are “incorporating this color-blindness idea which is not in the spirit of why we have equal protection,” said Danielle Citron, a law professor and expert on information privacy at the University of Maryland. This approach, she added, will “protect the people who least need it and take it away from those who really need it.”
But Facebook says its goal is different — to apply consistent standards worldwide. “The policies do not always lead to perfect outcomes,” said Monika Bickert, head of global policy management at Facebook. “That is the reality of having policies that apply to a global community where people around the world are going to have very different ideas about what is OK to share.”
Facebook’s rules constitute a legal world of their own. They stand in sharp contrast to the United States’ First Amendment protections of free speech, which courts have interpreted to allow exactly the sort of speech and writing censored by the company’s hate speech algorithm. But they also differ — for example, in permitting postings that deny the Holocaust — from more restrictive European standards.
The company has long had programs to remove obviously offensive material like child pornography from its stream of images and commentary. Recent articles in the Guardian and Süddeutsche Zeitung have detailed the difficult choices that Facebook faces regarding whether to delete posts containing graphic violence, child abuse, revenge porn and self-mutilation.
The challenge of policing political expression is even more complex. The documents reviewed by ProPublica indicate, for example, that Donald Trump’s posts about his campaign proposal to ban Muslim immigration to the United States violated the company’s written policies against “calls for exclusion” of a protected group. As The Wall Street Journal reported last year, Facebook exempted Trump’s statements from its policies at the order of Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s founder and chief executive.
The company recently pledged to nearly double its army of censors to 7,500, up from 4,500, in response to criticism of a video posting of a murder. Their work amounts to what may well be the most far-reaching global censorship operation in history. It is also the least accountable: Facebook does not publish the rules it uses to determine what content to allow and what to delete.
Users whose posts are removed are not usually told what rule they have broken, and they cannot generally appeal Facebook’s decision. Appeals are currently only available to people whose profile, group or page is removed.
The company has begun exploring adding an appeals process for people who have individual pieces of content deleted, according to Bickert. “I’ll be the first to say that we’re not perfect every time,” she said.
Facebook is not required by U.S. law to censor content. A 1996 federal law gave most tech companies, including Facebook, legal immunity for the content users post on their services. The law, section 230 of the Telecommunications Act, was passed after Prodigy was sued and held liable for defamation for a post written by a user on a computer message board.
The law freed up online publishers to host online forums without having to legally vet each piece of content before posting it, the way that a news outlet would evaluate an article before publishing it. But early tech companies soon realized that they still needed to supervise their chat rooms to prevent bullying and abuse that could drive away users.
America Online convinced thousands of volunteers to police its chat rooms in exchange for free access to its service. But as more of the world connected to the internet, the job of policing became more difficult and companies started hiring workers to focus on it exclusively. Thus the job of content moderator — now often called content reviewer — was born.
In 2004, attorney Nicole Wong joined Google and persuaded the company to hire its first-ever team of reviewers, who responded to complaints and reported to the legal department. Google needed “a rational set of policies and people who were trained to handle requests,” for its online forum called Groups, she said.
Google’s purchase of YouTube in 2006 made deciding what content was appropriate even more urgent. “Because it was visual, it was universal,” Wong said.
While Google wanted to be as permissive as possible, she said, it soon had to contend with controversies such as a video mocking the King of Thailand, which violated Thailand’s laws against insulting the king. Wong visited Thailand and was impressed by the nation’s reverence for its monarch, so she reluctantly agreed to block the video — but only for computers located in Thailand.
Since then, selectively banning content by geography — called “geo-blocking” — has become a more common request from governments. “I don’t love traveling this road of geo-blocking,” Wong said, but “it’s ended up being a decision that allows companies like Google to operate in a lot of different places.”
For social networks like Facebook, however, geo-blocking is difficult because of the way posts are shared with friends across national boundaries. If Facebook geo-blocks a user’s post, it would only appear in the news feeds of friends who live in countries where the geo-blocking prohibition doesn’t apply. That can make international conversations frustrating, with bits of the exchange hidden from some participants.
As a result, Facebook has long tried to avoid using geography-specific rules when possible, according to people familiar with the company’s thinking. However, it does geo-block in some instances, such as when it complied with a request from France to restrict access within its borders to a photo taken after the Nov. 13, 2015, terrorist attack at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris.
Bickert said Facebook takes into consideration the laws in countries where it operates, but doesn’t always remove content at a government’s request. “If there is something that violates a country’s law but does not violate our standards,” Bickert said, “we look at who is making that request: Is it the appropriate authority? Then we check to see if it actually violates the law. Sometimes we will make that content unavailable in that country only.”
Facebook’s goal is to create global rules. “We want to make sure that people are able to communicate in a borderless way,” Bickert said.
Founded in 2004, Facebook began as a social network for college students. As it spread beyond campus, Facebook began to use content moderation as a way to compete with the other leading social network of that era, MySpace.
MySpace had positioned itself as the nightclub of the social networking world, offering profile pages that users could decorate with online glitter, colorful layouts and streaming music. It didn’t require members to provide their real names and was home to plenty of nude and scantily clad photographs. And it was being investigated by law-enforcement agents across the country who worried it was being used by sexual predators to prey on children. (In a settlement with 49 state attorneys general, MySpace later agreed to strengthen protections for younger users.)
By comparison, Facebook was the buttoned-down Ivy League social network — all cool grays and blues. Real names and university affiliations were required. Chris Kelly, who joined Facebook in 2005 and was its first general counsel, said he wanted to make sure Facebook didn’t end up in law enforcement’s crosshairs, like MySpace.
“We were really aggressive about saying we are a no-nudity platform,” he said.
The company also began to tackle hate speech. “We drew some difficult lines while I was there — Holocaust denial being the most prominent,” Kelly said. After an internal debate, the company decided to allow Holocaust denials but reaffirmed its ban on group-based bias, which included anti-Semitism. Since Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism frequently went together, he said, the perpetrators were often suspended regardless.
“I’ve always been a pragmatist on this stuff,” said Kelly, who left Facebook in 2010. “Even if you take the most extreme First Amendment positions, there are still limits on speech.”
By 2008, the company had begun expanding internationally but its censorship rulebook was still just a single page with a list of material to be excised, such as images of nudity and Hitler. “At the bottom of the page it said, ‘Take down anything else that makes you feel uncomfortable,’” said Dave Willner, who joined Facebook’s content team that year.
Willner, who reviewed about 15,000 photos a day, soon found the rules were not rigorous enough. He and some colleagues worked to develop a coherent philosophy underpinning the rules, while refining the rules themselves. Soon he was promoted to head the content policy team.
By the time he left Facebook in 2013, Willner had shepherded a 15,000-word rulebook that remains the basis for many of Facebook’s content standards today.
“There is no path that makes people happy,” Willner said. “All the rules are mildly upsetting.” Because of the volume of decisions — many millions per day — the approach is “more utilitarian than we are used to in our justice system,” he said. “It’s fundamentally not rights-oriented.”
A swastika was added to this picture of founder Mark Zuckerberg to show that Facebook rules permit “display [of] hate symbols for political messaging.”
Willner’s then-boss, Jud Hoffman, who has since left Facebook, said that the rules were based on Facebook’s mission of “making the world more open and connected.” Openness implies a bias toward allowing people to write or post what they want, he said.
Eventually, however, Hoffman said “we found that limiting it to physical harm wasn’t sufficient, so we started exploring how free expression societies deal with this.”
The rules developed considerable nuance. There is a ban against pictures of Pepe the Frog, a cartoon character often used by “alt-right” white supremacists to perpetrate racist memes, but swastikas are allowed under a rule that permits the “display [of] hate symbols for political messaging.” In the documents examined by ProPublica, which are used to train content reviewers, this rule is illustrated with a picture of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that has been manipulated to apply a swastika to his sleeve.
The documents state that Facebook relies, in part, on the U.S. State Department’s list of designated terrorist organizations, which includes groups such as al-Qaida, the Taliban and Boko Haram. But not all groups deemed terrorist by one country or another are included: A recent investigation by the Pakistan newspaper Dawn found that 41 of the 64 terrorist groups banned in Pakistan were operational on Facebook.
There is also a secret list, referred to but not included in the documents, of groups designated as hate organizations that are banned from Facebook. That list apparently doesn’t include many Holocaust denial and white supremacist sites that are up on Facebook to this day, such as a group called “Alt-Reich Nation.” A member of that group was recently charged with murdering a black college student in Maryland.
As the rules have multiplied, so have exceptions to them. Facebook’s decision not to protect subsets of protected groups arose because some subgroups such as “female drivers” didn’t seem especially sensitive. The default position was to allow free speech, according to a person familiar with the decision-making.
After the wave of Syrian immigrants began arriving in Europe, Facebook added a special “quasi-protected” category for migrants, according to the documents. They are only protected against calls for violence and dehumanizing generalizations, but not against calls for exclusion and degrading generalizations that are not dehumanizing. So, according to one document, migrants can be referred to as “filthy” but not called “filth.” They cannot be likened to filth or disease “when the comparison is in the noun form,” the document explains.
Facebook also added an exception to its ban against advocating for anyone to be sent to a concentration camp. “Nazis should be sent to a concentration camp,” is allowed, the documents state, because Nazis themselves are a hate group.
The rule against posts that support violent resistance against a foreign occupier was developed because “we didn’t want to be in a position of deciding who is a freedom fighter,” Willner said. Facebook has since dropped the provision and revised its definition of terrorism to include nongovernmental organizations that carry out premeditated violence “to achieve a political, religious or ideological aim,” according to a person familiar with the rules.
The Facebook policy appears to have had repercussions in many of the at least two dozen disputed territories around the world. When Russia occupied Crimea in March 2014, many Ukrainians experienced a surge in Facebook banning posts and suspending profiles. Facebook’s director of policy for the region, Thomas Myrup Kristensen, acknowledged at the time that it “found a small number of accounts where we had incorrectly removed content. In each case, this was due to language that appeared to be hate speech but was being used in an ironic way. In these cases, we have restored the content.”
Katerina Zolotareva, 34, a Kiev-based Ukrainian working in communications, has been blocked so often that she runs four accounts under her name. Although she supported the “Euromaidan” protests in February 2014 that antagonized Russia, spurring its military intervention in Crimea, she doesn’t believe that Facebook took sides in the conflict. “There is war in almost every field of Ukrainian life,” she says, “and when war starts, it also starts on Facebook.”
In Western Sahara, a disputed territory occupied by Morocco, a group of journalists called Equipe Media say their account was disabled by Facebook, their primary way to reach the outside world. They had to open a new account, which remains active.
“We feel we have never posted anything against any law,” said Mohammed Mayarah, the group’s general coordinator. “We are a group of media activists. We have the aim to break the Moroccan media blockade imposed since it invaded and occupied Western Sahara.”
In Israel, which captured territory from its neighbors in a 1967 war and has occupied it since, Palestinian groups are blocked so often that they have their own hashtag, #FbCensorsPalestine, for it. Last year, for instance, Facebook blocked the accounts of several editors for two leading Palestinian media outlets from the West Bank — Quds News Network and Sheebab News Agency. After a couple of days, Facebook apologized and un-blocked the journalists’ accounts. Earlier this year, Facebook blocked the account of Fatah, the Palestinian Authority’s ruling party — then un-blocked it and apologized.
Last year India cracked down on protesters in Kashmir, shooting pellet guns at them and shutting off cellphone service. Local insurgents are seeking autonomy for Kashmir, which is also caught in a territorial tussle between India and Pakistan.
Posts of Kashmir activists were being deleted, and members of a group called the Kashmir Solidarity Network found that all of their Facebook accounts had been blocked on the same day.
Ather Zia, a member of the network and a professor of anthropology at the University of Northern Colorado, said that Facebook restored her account without explanation after two weeks. “We do not trust Facebook any more,” she said. “I use Facebook, but it’s almost this idea that we will be able to create awareness but then we might not be on it for long.”
The rules are one thing. How they’re applied is another. Bickert said Facebook conducts weekly audits of every single content reviewer’s work to ensure that its rules are being followed consistently. But critics say that reviewers, who have to decide on each post within seconds, may vary in both interpretation and vigilance.
Facebook users who don’t mince words in criticizing racism and police killings of racial minorities say that their posts are often taken down. Two years ago, Stacey Patton, a journalism professor at historically black Morgan State University in Baltimore, posed a provocative question on her Facebook page. She asked why “it’s not a crime when White freelance vigilantes and agents of ‘the state’ are serial killers of unarmed Black people, but when Black people kill each other then we are ‘animals’ or ‘criminals.’”
Although it doesn’t appear to violate Facebook’s policies against hate speech, her post was immediately removed, and her account was disabled for three days. Facebook didn’t tell her why. “My posts get deleted about once a month,” said Patton, who often writes about racial issues. She said she also is frequently put in Facebook “jail” — locked out of her account for a period of time after a posting that breaks the rules.
“It’s such emotional violence,” Patton said. “Particularly as a black person, we’re always having these discussions about mass incarceration, and then here’s this fiber-optic space where you can express yourself. Then you say something that some anonymous person doesn’t like and then you’re in ‘jail.’”
Didi Delgado, whose post stating that “white people are racist” was deleted, has been banned from Facebook so often that she has set up an account on another service called Patreon, where she posts the content that Facebook suppressed. In May, she deplored the increasingly common Facebook censorship of black activists in an article for Medium titled “Mark Zuckerberg Hates Black People.”
Facebook also locked out Leslie Mac, a Michigan resident who runs a service called SafetyPinBox where subscribers contribute financially to “the fight for black liberation,” according to her site. Her offense was writing a post stating “White folks. When racism happens in public — YOUR SILENCE IS VIOLENCE.”
The post does not appear to violate Facebook’s policies. Facebook apologized and restored her account after TechCrunch wrote an article about Mac’s punishment. Since then, Mac has written many other outspoken posts. But, “I have not had a single peep from Facebook,” she said, while “not a single one of my black female friends who write about race or social justice have not been banned.”
“My takeaway from the whole thing is: If you get publicity, they clean it right up,” Mac said. Even so, like most of her friends, she maintains a separate Facebook account in case her main account gets blocked again.
Negative publicity has spurred other Facebook turnabouts as well. Consider the example of the iconic news photograph of a young naked girl running from a napalm bomb during the Vietnam War. Kate Klonick, a Ph.D. candidate at Yale Law School who has spent two years studying censorship operations at tech companies, said the photo had likely been deleted by Facebook thousands of times for violating its ban on nudity.
But last year, Facebook reversed itself after Norway’s leading newspaper published a front-page open letter to Zuckerberg accusing him of “abusing his power” by deleting the photo from the newspaper’s Facebook account.
Klonick said that while she admires Facebook’s dedication to policing content on its website, she fears it is evolving into a place where celebrities, world leaders and other important people “are disproportionately the people who have the power to update the rules.”
In December 2015, a month after terrorist attacks in Paris killed 130 people, the European Union began pressuring tech companies to work harder to prevent the spread of violent extremism online.
After a year of negotiations, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube agreed to the European Union’s hate speech code of conduct, which commits them to review and remove the majority of valid complaints about illegal content within 24 hours and to be audited by European regulators. The first audit, in December, found that the companies were only reviewing 40 percent of hate speech within 24 hours, and only removing 28 percent of it. Since then, the tech companies have shortened their response times to reports of hate speech and increased the amount of content they are deleting, prompting criticism from free-speech advocates that too much is being censored.
Now the German government is considering legislation that would allow social networks such as Facebook to be fined up to 50 million euros if they don’t remove hate speech and fake news quickly enough. Facebook recently posted an article assuring German lawmakers that it is deleting about 15,000 hate speech posts a month. Worldwide, over the last two months, Facebook deleted about 66,000 hate speech posts per week, vice president Richard Allan said in a statement Tuesday on the company's site.
Among posts that Facebook didn’t delete were Donald Trump’s comments on Muslims. Days after the Paris attacks, Trump, then running for president, posted on Facebook “calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”
Candidate Trump’s posting — which has come back to haunt him in court decisions voiding his proposed travel ban — appeared to violate Facebook’s rules against “calls for exclusion” of a protected religious group. Zuckerberg decided to allow it because it was part of the political discourse, according to people familiar with the situation.
However, one person close to Facebook’s decision-making said Trump may also have benefited from the exception for sub-groups. A Muslim ban could be interpreted as being directed against a sub-group, Muslim immigrants, and thus might not qualify as hate speech against a protected category.
Hannes Grassegger is a reporter for Das Magazin and Reportagen Magazine based in Zurich.
In the past few years, many seniors and disabled people have eschewed traditional Medicare coverage to enroll in privately run health plans paid for by Medicare, which often come with lower out-of-pocket costs and some enhanced benefits.
These so-called Medicare Advantage plans now enroll more than a third of the 58 million beneficiaries in the Medicare program, a share that grows by the month.
But little is known about the care delivered to these people, from how many services they get to which doctors treat them to whether taxpayer money is being well-spent or misused.
The government has collected data on patients’ diagnoses and the services they receive since 2012 and began using it last year to help calculate payments to private insurers, which run the Medicare Advantage plans. But it has never made that data public.
Officials at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have been validating the accuracy of the data and, in recent months, were preparing to release it to researchers. Medicare already shares data on the 38 million patients in the traditional Medicare program, which the government runs. (ProPublica has created a tool called Treatment Tracker that enables people to compare how doctors and others use services in the traditional Medicare program.)
The grand unveiling of the new data was scheduled to take place at the annual research meeting of AcademyHealth, a festival of health wonkery, which just concluded in New Orleans.
But at the last minute, the session was canceled.
#ARM17 Session Update: "Analysis of 2014 Medicare Advantage Encounter Data” scheduled for Sunday 6/25 @ 10:30am has been cancelled
The change caught researchers — and even some former Medicare officials — off guard as the data’s release was a highly anticipated expansion of the government’s effort to share information.
In a statement, CMS said there were enough questions about the data’s accuracy that it should not be released for research use. CMS said it will examine the data for 2015 “to determine if it is robust enough to support research use.”
Niall Brennan, until January the chief data officer of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, worked on the data — known as encounter data — during his time in office. “Hugely disappointing,” he tweeted, with a photo of the sign announcing the session’s cancellation. “Hope CMS not backsliding on #opendata.”
In response to a question about whether the data had problems, he tweeted, “Like any new data source [Medicare Advantage] data had some quirks to be sure but if it was used for payment why can’t it be used for research?” he said in a tweet this week.
like any new data source MA data had some quirks to be sure but if it was used for payment why cant it be used for research
Health economist Austin Frakt, who is affiliated with a number of academic institutions, said he was disappointed by the decision to halt the data’s release. He said he wants access to the data as a researcher — and as a taxpayer. “We are paying an enormous amount of money to private insurance companies ... but we know very little about what we’re getting for that money,” he said.
Frakt notes that researchers know “vastly more” about traditional Medicare because the data has been available for decades. “The claim is that private insurers are innovating in ways that traditional program is not. We need to validate that. We need to know what they’re doing for the benefit of everyone. We can’t do that without the data.”
Frakt acknowledged that the data has limitations, “but I don’t think it justifies withholding the data. ... Researchers are highly skilled at dealing with messy data. We’ve done it before.”
In recent years, private insurers that run Medicare Advantage plans have been under fire for allegedly overcharging Medicare. The Center for Public Integrity reported last year that more than three dozen audits had found that plans overstated the severity of enrollees’ medical conditions to garner more money. (The Center had to file a Freedom of Information lawsuit to access the audits.) In 2014, the Center’s reporting suggested that insurers had collected $70 billion in improper payments from 2008 to 2013.
Explore the details of Medicare’s 2014 payments to individual doctors and other health professionals serving more than 33 million seniors and disabled in its Part B program. See the project.
The Department of Justice recently intervened in two federal lawsuits in Los Angeles (here and here) accusing UnitedHealth Group of providing “untruthful and inaccurate information about the health status of beneficiaries” to boost its revenues. The company has denied wrongdoing.
If the data on Medicare Advantage plans was made available to researchers, it could shed light on these kinds of issues.
For its part, the insurance industry has been raising questions about the accuracy of the encounter data but said it did not ask CMS administrator Seema Verma to delay its release to researchers.
“The system used to capture encounter data has numerous unresolved operational and technical issues and fails to capture a reliable, comprehensive picture of beneficiaries’ diagnoses,” a spokeswoman for America’s Health Insurance Plans said in an email. “This could put payments at risk, which could also increase premiums and decrease benefits. We look forward to working with Administrator Verma and CMS to improve the encounter data and address these issues.”
Earlier this year, the Government Accountability Office issued a report calling on CMS to do more to validate the completeness and accuracy of the encounter data before using it as a basis for paying the health plans.
In a newly obtained letter sent to Texas authorities, Genene Jones — the former nurse suspected of killing more than a dozen infants — apologized “for the damage I did to all because of my crime.” This marks the first time that Jones, who has maintained her innocence, seems to acknowledge guilt for her alleged crimes.
In March 2011, Jones authored a letter to the Texas Board of Nursing from prison. “I look back now on what I did and agree with you now that it was heinous, that I was heinous,” Jones wrote. The letter came as a surprise to prosecutors, who have brought new charges against Jones to prevent her scheduled March 2018 release from prison. Jones, who was convicted in 1984 of murdering a toddler and injuring a month-old baby, had adamantly maintained her innocence during her criminal trials and in two prison interviews in 1987. She has since left standing instructions with prison officials to decline media requests.
“My only defense is that I was not of sound mind then or any time before 1994,” Jones wrote in the letter. “That is not an excuse just a fact. God, in His infinite wisdom and mercy, granted me a sound mind upon receiving Him as Lord of my life.”
The case of Genene Jones, now 66 and once dubbed an “Angel of Death with a needle,” has dramatically resurfaced. Over the past five weeks, a Bexar County grand jury has indicted her for murder in the early 1980s deaths of four children in the pediatric intensive-care unit at San Antonio’s county hospital, where she once worked. (Two new murder charges were handed down today.) The indictments resulted from a fresh investigation into more than a dozen suspicious deaths during that period, led by new District Attorney Nicholas “Nico” LaHood.
After a jury found her guilty in 1984, Jones was sentenced to serve 99 years for the murder of 15-month-old Chelsea McClellan, who died after Jones injected her with a powerful muscle relaxant at a pediatric clinic in Kerrville. Jones had gone to work there after the San Antonio hospital — despite suspicions that she was harming children — sent her off with a good recommendation. Jones later received a second, 60-year sentence, to run concurrently, for nearly killing 1-month-old Rolando Santos with repeated overdoses of the blood thinner heparin in the pediatric ICU.
At the time, the Bexar County DA suspected her of involvement in other murders of children but declined to bring charges, reasoning that the cases would be difficult to prove and that Jones’ 99-year sentence guaranteed she’d be spending the rest of her life in prison.
That expectation proved faulty. Thanks to a Texas law aimed at reducing prison overcrowding, Jones is now due to be freed next March, after serving 34 years and eight months.
Responding to a growing public uproar, DA LaHood in late May began bringing new murder charges to prevent her release. Jones will now be transferred to Bexar County Jail ahead of March 2018 and held there until trial unless she is able to post the four $1 million appearance bonds set for the new charges.
In the new murder indictments today, the grand jury accused Jones of killing 8-month-old Ricky Nelson in July 1981 and 4-month-old Patrick Zavala in January 1982 by injecting each of the two babies with “a substance unknown.”
After learning about Jones’ letter on Wednesday, assistant DA Jason Goss, who leads the DA’s trial team, said he planned to tell the grand jury about it today in addition to presenting testimony of Zavala’s mother.
It is not clear exactly how Jones’ newly disclosed 2011 letter — which was received and quietly filed away — will affect her pending cases at trial. Jones has not yet entered a plea, and she does not explicitly discuss the deaths of any specific children in her letter. But it is not likely to help her defense.
“It’s a confession,” says assistant DA Goss. “That’s a big deal. It’s an incredibly important piece of evidence. We already knew she was guilty. The fact that she’s saying it to this nursing board just strengthens that belief. Just the fact that she’s acknowledging that means she’s not an innocent person in her own mind.”
LaHood, the Bexar DA, said Jones’ profession of faith is not relevant to the question of whether she should face additional charges. “Forgiven and exonerated are two different things,” said LaHood, who is himself a vocal Christian. “Can she be forgiven? Absolutely. Should she be exonerated? No. I can forgive her and still want her to take her last breath behind bars. It doesn’t change what we’re going to do."
Petti McClellan, the mother of the murdered Chelsea McClellan, was similarly unmoved. “It almost makes me angry that she did this but she didn’t apologize to any of us, not just me, but any of the families in San Antonio,” she said in an interview. “She must have thought it was going to benefit her. I don’t think there was anything sincere about it.”
ProPublica and Texas Monthly obtained a copy of Jones’ letter — which was summarized in an order revoking her nursing license — through a Texas public-records request. We first learned about the letter from a Texas registered nurse, who had found the order on the state nursing board’s website after becoming “fascinated” with the Jones story. She then mentioned the letter in a Facebook comment on a posting about the latest murder indictment of Jones.
It is, of course, remarkable, that Jones retained her nursing license until 2011. The Board of Vocational Nurse Examiners — which then regulated vocational nurses such as Jones — didn’t even suspend her license until January 1986, nearly two years after her murder conviction. (“If you have, as you say, investigated my case, you are already aware of my innocense (sic),” Jones wrote in protest before the decision. “) Jones lost her criminal appeal that August. Yet no further regulatory action followed over the next 25 years.
Texas is scheduled to release Genene Jones, a former nurse and suspected serial killer of children, early next year. Prosecutors moved to prevent her release, bringing a new murder charge against Jones in connection with the death of a child 35 years ago. Read the story.
The Texas prison system also struggled to make sense of Jones’ status as a nurse. In August 1984, a state prison official wrote to the Bexar County Hospital District to ask if there was any problem with inmate Jones being assigned to work in the prison hospital’s dispensary. After word of the inquiry leaked out, a prison spokesman offered a public assurance that the state would find Jones work that had nothing to do with medicine.
In February 2011, a Huffington Post story about the prospect of Jones’ future release prompted the Texas Board of Nursing, which now regulates all state nurses, to revisit the issue and initiate revocation proceedings, says board general counsel James “Dusty” Johnston. The goal, says Johnston, was “just basically putting closure to the matter.”
Notice of this proposed action went out on March 18, 2011, to Jones, then in a prison-system medical facility in South Texas, where she was being treated for health issues. In an undated four-paragraph reply the board received on April 1 of that year, Jones expressed “total bafflement” that her nursing license remained an open issue.
“What does the Board have to do with me after almost 28 years of incarceration?” she wrote. “My license was suspended … after my conviction. I have not applied for renewal in almost 30 years.” Anyone can search the internet “and find out all they wish to know, though most is untrue.” Jones then went on to offer what amounts to an unsolicited confession:
As a response, I will take this opportunity to apologize to the Board and to the nurses it represents for the damage I did to all because of my crime. My only defense is that I was not of sound mind then or any time before 1994. That is not an excuse just a fact. God, in His infinite wisdom and mercy, granted me a sound mind upon receiving Him as Lord of my life. I look back now on what I did and agree with you that it was heinous, that I was heinous. But, God’s mercy is new every morning to remind me that I am forgiven by Him. I pray that someday you will forgive me also.
I have no plans to ever renew nursing in my lifetime or a license that I am sure, if your records go back that far, was revoked somewhere down the line of time. If you need anything more of me, please let me know.”
Sincerely,
Genene Jones
The board finally revoked Jones’ license to practice nursing on June 10, 2011.
Though separated by decades, Jones’ letter was entirely at odds with her long-held insistence about her innocence. She pleaded not guilty at both her trials in 1984. In the days after her first conviction, for the McClellan murder, Jones, who had declined to testify, spoke to reporters for hours and happily posed for photographs. “I’m not afraid of jail, because I’m innocent,” she declared. “If I had to spend 99 years in solitary, I could live with myself because I didn’t do anything.”
Prior to the 2011 letter, Jones’ most recent public statements came during two conversations I had with her in 1987 at the state prison in Gatesville for a book I wrote about the case.
Furiously combative while working as a nurse and during earlier interviews, Jones had mellowed considerably by then. The four-letter epithets that once salted her conversation were gone. Once quick to rage, Jones now seemed placid and relaxed, even gentle. She attributed the change to a newfound religious faith. “I’ve been given time to sit down and understand the Lord,” she told me. Jones had replaced the cross she wore on a chain around her neck during her murder trial with a Star of David. “I’m leaning toward the Jewish religion,” she explained.
Yet Jones, in 1987, remained adamant that she’d been railroaded. “The story of my conviction is about big money,” she declared, railing about how much the state had spent to put her behind bars. I finally asked her directly: Did she still believe she bore no personal responsibility — no blame for what had happened?
“That’s not a belief,” Jones insisted. “That’s a definite fact. I know I am responsible in a way for bringing it to the public viewpoint, but as far as being responsible for any death — no, I am not.”
So I asked her another way: Did she think she could perhaps be the victim of a disease of the mind that led her to harm children without her conscious knowledge? “No, I don’t,” she replied immediately. “Not at all. I’ve had a lot of time to think. I don’t have any doubts in my innocence.”
More than half of the people who said they were the victim of a hate crime in recent years did not report the incidents to police. When victims did report to the police, their assailants were arrested in just 10 percent of the cases. The incidents reported as hate crimes were almost always violent (90 percent) and often seriously so, with nearly 30 percent involving reports of sexual assault, aggravated assault and/or robbery.
Those are some of the striking findings of a special federal Bureau of Justice Statistics report released Thursday, based on national crime victimization surveys conducted for the years 2011 to 2015. The report came as the Department of Justice convened a hate crimes conference in Washington, D.C. Attorney General Jeff Sessions spoke at the start of the conference and repeated his pledge to combat hate crimes aggressively.
“I have directed all of our federal prosecutors to make violent crime prosecution a top priority, and you can be sure this includes hate crimes. We will demand and expect results,” Sessions said. “Thomas Jefferson swore eternal hostility to any domination of the mind of man. And so let it be.”
A summary of the hate crimes report contained a mix of both familiar trends and intriguing details.
Some 48 percent of the people reporting being victimized by a hate crime said it had been motivated by racial prejudice. Thirty percent reported being targeted because of their gender. Almost equal percentages involved hostility toward religion (17 percent) and animus toward one’s disability (16 percent).
As often happens with hate crime data — many local and federal law enforcement agencies fail to file reports of such crimes to a national database — the numbers provoked a fair number of questions.
The coalition of newsrooms behind “Documenting Hate” has recorded a wide variety of violence in all corners of the country. Read the story.
The remarkable number of people who don’t report the alleged crimes to police is one phenomenon that cries out for greater understanding. The report said the most common reason given by victims for not reporting to police was that “the victimization was handled another way, such as privately or through a non-enforcement official.” How victims privately handled incidents that in 90 percent of cases involved violence is not further explained.
The number of people who do report the alleged crimes — some 46 percent of 250,000 cases — invites its own mystery. After all, the FBI, in its annual account of hate crimes reported by police departments across the country, only lists some 5,000 or 6,000 reports a year. That seems to mean more than 100,000 people a year reported to police being victimized by a hate crime only to see those reports fail to turn up in the FBI’s national reports.
Not surprisingly, Sessions, in his remarks Thursday, took note of the need to do better at collecting basic information. He also said the department was exploring improving training for prosecutors handling such cases.
“Documenting Hate,” a project on hate crimes involving ProPublica and a coalitions of scores of news organizations, has sought to collect and report on people’s claims of victimization, from serious crimes to the defacing of residences and graveyards to bullying at school.
On Wednesday, all 50 states were sent letters from Kris Kobach — vice chair for the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity — requesting information on voter fraud, election security and copies of every state’s voter roll data.
The letter asked state officials to deliver the data within two weeks, and says that all information turned over to the commission will be made public. The letter does not explain what the commission plans to do with voter roll data, which often includes the names, ages and addresses of registered voters. The commission also asked for information beyond what is typically contained in voter registration records, including Social Security numbers and military status, if the state election databases contain it.
President Donald Trump established the commission through an executive order on March 11. Its stated goal is to “promote fair and honest Federal elections” and it is chaired by Vice President Mike Pence. The commission plans to present a report to Trump that identifies vulnerabilities in the voting system that could lead to fraud and makes recommendations for enhancing voters’ confidence in election integrity. No deadline has been set for completion of the work.
A number of experts, as well as at least one state official, reacted with a mix of alarm and bafflement. Some saw political motivations behind the requests, while others said making such information public would create a national voter registration list, a move that could create new election problems.
“You’d think there would want to be a lot of thought behind security and access protocols for a national voter file, before you up and created one,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola University School of Law and former Department of Justice civil rights official. “This is asking to create a national voter file in two weeks.”
David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, also expressed serious concerns about the request. “It’s probably a good idea not to make publicly available the name, address and military status of the people who are serving our armed forces to anyone who requests it,” he said.
Kobach, the secretary of state in Kansas, has been concerned about voter fraud for years. His signature piece of legislation was a law requiring Kansans to show proof of citizenship when they register to vote, which is currently ensnarled in a fraught court battle with the American Civil Liberties Union. He has written that he believes people vote twice with “alarming regularity,” and also that non-citizens frequently vote. Multiple studies have shown neither happens with any consistency.
Kobach also runs the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, a proprietary piece of software started by Kansas Secretary of State Ron Thornburgh in 2005. Under the program, 30 states pool their voter information and attempt to identify people who are registered in more than one state.
Some expect the information Kobach has requested will be used to create a national system that would include data from all 50 states.
It is not uncommon for voters to be registered in more than one state. Many members of Trump’s inner circle — including his son-in-law Jared Kushner and daughter Tiffany Trump — were registered to vote in two states. Given the frequency with which voters move across state lines and re-register, the act of holding two registrations is not in itself fraud. There is no evidence to suggest that voting twice is a widespread problem, though experts say removing duplicate registrations are a good practice if done carefully.
“In theory, I don’t think we have a problem with that as an idea, but the devil is always in the details,” said Dale Ho, the director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project. While he believes voter registration list maintenance is important, he says Kobach’s Crosscheck program has been repeatedly shown to be ineffective and to produce false matches. A study by a group of political scientists at Stanford published earlier this year found that Crosscheck highlighted 200 false matches for every one true double vote.
“I have every reason to think that given the shoddy work that Mr. Kobach has done in this area in the past that this is going to be yet another boondoggle and a propaganda tool that tries to inflate the problem of double registration beyond what it actually is,” Ho said.
Some experts already see sloppy work in this request. On at least one occasion, the commission directed the letter to the incorrect entity. In North Carolina, it addressed and sent the letter to Secretary of State Elaine Marshall, who has no authority over elections or the voter rolls. In that state, the North Carolina Board of Elections manages both.
Charles Stewart, a professor at MIT and expert in election administration, said it was proof of “sloppy staff work,” and questioned the speed at which the letter was sent. “It seems to me that the data aren’t going anywhere. Doing database matching is hard work, and you need to plan it out carefully,” he said. “It’s a naïve first undertaking by the commission, and reflects that the commission may be getting ahead of itself.”
Connecticut Secretary of State Denise Merrill, who oversees voting in the state, said she was dismayed about the commission’s failure to be clearer about what its intentions are. In a statement, Merrill said her office would share publicly available information with the commission. But she said that “in the same spirit of transparency” her office would request the commission “share any memos, meeting minutes or additional information as state officials have not been told precisely what the Commission is looking for.”
“This lack of openness is all the more concerning, considering that the Vice Chair of the Commission, Kris Kobach, has a lengthy record of illegally disenfranchising eligible voters in Kansas,” she wrote.
Alabama’s Republican Secretary of State John Merrill (no relation) also indicated he had questions for Kobach regarding how much of the data would be made public and how Alabamans’ privacy would be protected, even while he expressed support for the commission. “Kobach is a close friend, and I have full confidence in him and his ability, but before we turn over data of this magnitude to anybody we’re going to make sure our questions are answered,” he said.
Colorado Secretary of State Republican Wayne Williams, for his part, said he was not concerned with what the commission planned to do with the data. “Just like when we get a [public-records] request, we don’t demand to know what they are going to do with the data,” he said. “There are important reasons why the voter roll is publicly available information.”
We had more than 1,000 people watching the vote on Election Day. If millions of people voted illegally, we would have seen some sign of it. Read the story.
The extent to which voter roll data is public varies across the country. While some states, like North Carolina, make their voter rolls available for free download, other states charge high fees. Alabama, for example, charges one cent per voter in the roll for a total cost of more than $30,000. The state law provides a waiver for government entities, so Merrill said the commission would receive the data for free. Other states, like Virginia, do not make this information public beyond sharing it with formal campaigns and political candidates. When ProPublica tried to purchase Illinois’ voter roll, our request was denied because they only release it to government entities for privacy reasons. Illinois did not respond to a request regarding whether they would release this information to the PCEI, which — while a government entity — intends to make the information public.
The letter from the commission also asks quite broad questions of state elections officials.
“What changes, if any, to federal election laws would you recommend to enhance the integrity of federal elections?” asks the first question. The letter also asked for all information and convictions related to any instance of voter fraud or registration fraud, and it solicited recommendations “for preventing voter intimidation or disenfranchisement.”
“The equivalent is, ‘Hey, doctors, what changes would you suggest regarding healthcare? Let us know in two weeks,’” said Levitt, the Loyola professor. “If I were a state election official, I wouldn’t know what to do with this.”
While the commission is being chaired by Vice President Mike Pence, Kobach signed the letter alone. Jon Greenbaum, chief counsel for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said this is an indication that Kobach — not Pence — “will be running the show,” which he said should be a point of concern.
“As we know with Kobach, he’s obsessed with trying to identify voter fraud and finds it in a lot of places where it doesn’t exist,” he said.
Vanita Gupta, the former acting head of the Department of Justice’s civil rights division under President Barack Obama, said the commission’s letter was an indication the commission was “laying the groundwork” to carry out changes to the National Voter Registration Act that might seek to restrict access to the polls.
The National Voter Registration Act — sometimes called the Motor Voter Act — was enacted in 1993. It allows the DOJ the authority to ensure states to keep voter registration lists, or voter rolls, accurate and up-to-date. It also requires states to offer opportunities for voter registration at all offices that provide public assistance (like the DMV).
In November, Kobach was photographed holding a paper addressing national security issues and proposing changes to the voter registration law. It is not clear what these changes were. The ACLU is involved in a lawsuit against Kansas’ state law requiring people to show proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. As part of the suit, ACLU lawyers requested access to the document reflecting the changes Kobach proposed.
Originally Kobach told the court the document was beyond the scope of the lawsuit, but last week the court found the documents were relevant and that Kobach had intentionally misled the court. He was fined $1,000 for the offense and required him to turn the document over. It has not yet been made public.
Gupta said her concern about the future of the voter registration act was deepened by the fact that, on Thursday, the DOJ sent a letter to the 44 states covered by the act requesting information on the maintenance of their voter rolls. States were given 30 days to answer a set of detailed questions about their policies for list maintenance.
“The timing of the letters being issued on the same day is curious at the very least,” she said.
The White House and the DOJ all did not respond to requests for comment about the letters.
The letter did not ask about compliance with the portions of the act that require states to attempt to expand the voter base, such as by offering voter registration forms and information in public offices.
Danielle Lang, deputy director of voting rights for The Campaign Legal Center, said the focus on list maintenance troubled her. While she said this might point to a new direction in enforcement for the DOJ’s voting rights section, it was too early to tell how this information might be used.
Levitt said he did not recall a time when the DOJ has previously requested such broad information. While the information is public and not, on its face, troubling, Levitt said the only time he recalled requesting similar information was during targeted investigations when federal officials suspected a state was not complying with the law.
The men on the mountain road in rural Guatemala looked to have averted disaster. Their truck was teetering on a mountainside, but they’d kept it from toppling over with a rig of ropes and tree branches.
Reporter Michael Grabell in Guatemala (Hector Emanuel, special to ProPublica)
When ProPublica reporter Michael Grabell came upon the scene, he saw a solution to a different sort of problem.
He had been in Guatemala for days, searching for people who had worked for an infamous North Carolina-based chicken company called Case Farms. But until then, he hadn’t had much luck. So he and his driver pulled over to ask the men if they knew of the company. The move worked.
As it turned out, many of the men had worked for Case Farms and knew others who could help Grabell with his story.
It was one of those rare breaks that can make reporting such an adventure, a gamble that can pay off with the right amount of persistence, quick thinking and, sometimes, pure luck.
Grabell wrote about the scene in his recent story for ProPublica and the New Yorker “Sold for Parts,” which shows how Case Farms took advantage of immigrant workers and used America’s laws to silence them when they pushed for better working conditions and medical care.
Today he tells us how he reported the story on The Breakthrough, the ProPublica podcast where investigative reporters reveal how they nailed their biggest stories.
Dale Schultz, a Republican, served in the Wisconsin Legislature for more than 30 years, from 1983 to 2015. His Senate district is located in south Wisconsin, much of it rural farmland. Schultz was considered a moderate, and so much of what happened in state politics near the end of his tenure dismayed him: partisan fights over the rights of unions, a gubernatorial recall election, and claims of partisan Republican gerrymandering that will now be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court.
And then there was the prolonged entanglement over voting rights in the state — who could vote, when they could vote, how they could vote. In the face of years of political combat and federal court fights, the legislature ultimately adopted a vast array of changes to election laws. Among them:
Voters would have to produce certain types of identification.
Early voting was reduced.
Restrictions on absentee balloting were implemented.
Time frames for how long people had to be residing in the state before they could vote were lengthened.
Republicans hailed the moves as overdue steps toward improving the integrity of state voting. Democrats cried foul, alleging a conspiracy to suppress votes among people of color and others inclined to vote Democratic.
Schulz was in office for the birth of the efforts to tighten voting procedures and often present for the Republican deliberations about their aims. Schultz, before leaving office, voted for the initial voting measures, a decision he came to regret. He opposed some of the subsequent measures as litigation over the issues made their way through the courts and his career wound down.
ProPublica had a rare interview with Schultz recently about the issue of voting in Wisconsin. The Q&A follows. It has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
ProPublica: You were initially in favor of Republican efforts to tighten voting and reconfigure districts. What first appealed to you about those ideas?
Dale Schultz: Well, the blunt truth is, as a partisan politician, your knee-jerk reaction is to protect the standing of your party because that solidifies your power to accomplish what you want to do. My good friend and former colleague, Tim Cullen, also served as Senate majority leader but on the Democrat side, and we’ve said we’re both guilty of voting for redistricting maps which were politically motivated. This isn’t a one party sin. It happens on both sides, and that’s why we introduced our bipartisan bill to change how we redistrict in Wisconsin. I’m happy the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to take up the issue this fall.
The Republicans pushing the voter ID effort cited voter fraud as a concern and a reason to tighten voting rules and requirements. Did anyone ever show you compelling evidence of that?
No, in fact, quite the opposite. Some of the most conservative people in our caucus actually took the time to involve themselves in election-watching and came back and told other caucus members that, “I’m sorry, I didn’t see it.”
In terms of voting laws, look, I don’t have a fundamental problem with having to show a photo ID in order to vote, but what I do have a problem with are the severe restrictions on what kind of photo ID is allowed and also using these laws to suppress the votes of specific groups.
We had more than 1,000 people watching the vote on Election Day. If millions of people voted illegally, we would have seen some sign of it. Read the story.
You need to understand, I come from the old school of the “Institution of the Senate.” When I was coming up through the ranks, and even when I was majority leader, I put great stock and respect into the chairmanship system. When you were given a chair of a committee, you were expected to put the good of the Senate above all else. So when the chair of the Senate elections committee says there’s a problem with voter fraud in the state, and the committee passes a bill out, you take them at their word.
But that’s on me.
Anyway, I ultimately ordered my staff to launch our own investigation and come up with three concrete examples of voter fraud in Wisconsin. Well, guess what? They couldn’t do it, and you need to understand the time, I had graduates from the University of Wisconsin journalism school on staff who’d worked for national publications. But we did come up with two examples. One was a Republican legislative staffer who’d voted in the Madison area as well as back in her hometown in the same election. The other was the estranged wife of a Republican. That’s it, and both examples were on the Republican side.
Did you ever raise the lack of evidence with your Republican colleagues?
Our caucuses were quite raucous. Our meetings and how we dealt with one another was blunt.
I asked my colleagues to show me three specific examples, and all I got was a bunch of hand-wringing and drama-filled speeches about the “buses of Democrats being brought up from Chicago.” I said, “Show me where that was ever prosecuted or even charges brought.” It was crickets. Nobody could give me an answer, and that was both an eye-opening and sad moment for me because I think it finally hit me that time-honored tradition of the “Institution of the Senate” was all but dead.
You know, I had, I think it’s fair to say, a reputation for challenging the thinking of our caucuses. But if you find yourself in a situation where you’re dissenting too often, pretty soon people go, “Well, he never agrees with us, he’s not really one of us. We’re not going to bother to listen.” So, you learn to pick your spots and try to make a difference where you can.
I want to be clear. I don’t want to cast myself as some sort of superhero. Look, I’m a politician. I was for 30 years. Inherently, that means that you compromise and that everybody’s hands get a little dirty as they try to work out a solution that is the best for people.
People were very frank and this is not a game for the timid. People were very emotional, but you know when it comes to casting votes, people know that once the decision is made, the team pretty much sticks together.
Talk about why you later came to regret ever voting for the measures.
I voted for the first voter law bill, and then I did what I’d done since I first got elected in 1982; I went out and did my regular scheduled district office hours. It took all of my first stop to realize I didn’t do my homework. I had town and village clerks coming up to me saying, “Dale, are you nuts? Do you realize how restricting voting hours and early voting and absentee voting is going to affect how people can vote let alone making our jobs all the harder?” They also made it clear that there was no voter fraud happening that they were aware of. Because of the feedback from my constituents, I voted no on the subsequent bills.
I enjoyed all the people I represented and it was a great honor. But there were occasions where people said, “Dale, I’ve heard your explanation on what you’ve done and why you’ve done it, but I think you got this wrong.” And I think voter ID was one of those.
A long time ago my father told me on the farm, if you happen to, when you’re out in the pasture, put your foot in a cowpie, don’t sit there and explain why you stepped in it, just take it out. And it’s been my experience politically, that when you do that, and you explain the reasons, people tend to see that as a politician evolving and thinking and listening, and I think most people are hungry for that. And they’re supportive of that, as long as it doesn’t become a daily flip-flop.
The numbers are in from the 2016 election in Wisconsin. The state surprised the pollsters by going for Trump. And now there’s likely to be a long debate and examination of whether the voter ID and other measures played a role in that outcome. Any early thoughts?
Oh, yeah, all of these things have an impact. Even just constantly keeping up a steady drumbeat of claims about election fraud has an impact. It motivates a base. How big an impact probably varies from state to state. In very close elections, even seemingly small impacts can have great consequences.
You got out of elective office after 32 years. Why?
Well, because I like to think I’m old enough and wise enough to know that there’s more to life than politics, as important as it’s been to me and as enjoyable as it has been to me for all those years. Then again, it’s not that I haven’t been bothered by the changes I’d seen around me or just the simple reality that it was less fun than it used to be as people stopped thinking and became more Pavlovian.
Related stories: Dale Schultz was prominently featured in a ProPublica article in 2014 about legislation on mining in Wisconsin.
by Derek Kravitz and Cezary Podkul, ProPublica, and Will Parker, The Real Deal,
This story was co-published with The Real Deal.
In April 2016, as Donald Trump was on the cusp of clinching the Republican nomination for the White House, he sold two luxury condos near Manhattan’s Central Park for less than half the price his company had said they were worth. The lucky buyer: Trump’s son, Eric.
Such family-friendly deals would normally incur hundreds of thousands of dollars in gift taxes.
But in this case, Trump appears unlikely to have been on the hook for anywhere near that, thanks to benefits only available to real estate developers.
Eric Trump bought the two condos on the two top floors of the Trump Parc East building at 100 Central Park South for $350,000 each. Trump Organization filings show that, as of February 2016 — two months before Trump sold the apartments to Eric — the condos were priced at $790,000 and $800,000. A similar one-bedroom condo on a lower floor at the same building sold for $690,000 in 2014.
The transactions illustrate the unique advantages that real estate developers like Trump have when passing down valuable assets between generations.
“Not everyone has the opportunity to avoid gift taxes, just developers with developer units,” said Beth Shapiro Kaufman, an estate planning attorney and president at Caplin & Drysdale in Washington, D.C. “The biggest game in gift taxes is valuation issues.”
An owner who sells real estate for less than it’s worth would typically have to pay gift tax on the difference between the sales price and the true market value. Any personal gifts that are worth more than $14,000 in a year are subject to up to 40 percent in federal taxes.
But as the building’s developer selling the units for the first time, Trump had lots of flexibility within the law to determine the value of the apartments.
“This is really, really primo real estate,” said Bob Lord, a tax attorney who reviewed the transaction records at ProPublica’s request. “Why would you show a sale at $350,000 other than to play games for tax purposes?”
The units were originally rent regulated, which would typically lower the value of the apartments significantly.
New York City records state that the condos are no longer rent regulated. It’s not clear when they were deregulated, but the result is that Eric Trump will likely be able to sell the apartments at significantly higher prices. It’s also unclear if anyone currently lives in the condos. The younger Trump bought another, much larger, apartment in the building for $2 million in 2007.
It’s ultimately unclear how much, if any, taxes Trump paid on the transactions. The Trump Organization, the White House and Eric Trump did not respond to requests for comment.
But other taxes paid on the transaction suggest gift taxes were not paid. Trump paid a total of $13,000 in city and state transfer taxes, New York City property records show. Those transfer taxes, according to a spokeswoman for the city’s Department of Finance, are not usually paid when “bona fide gifts” are involved.
Also, when a sale is reported as a gift, buyers and sellers typically disclose in transfer records that the sale is taking place between two relatives. The Trumps did not.
Trump has said that he, like many Americans, wants to keep his taxes at a minimum. “I fight like hell and pay as little as possible,” he told CBS’ “Face the Nation” in August 2015. Trump has proposed repealing the estate tax entirely.
The condo sales were disclosed in President Trump’s 2017 federal financial disclosure, which was released by the U.S. Office of Government Ethics last month. The buyers were listed as two limited liability companies. After we asked readers to help us analyze the documents, a reader flagged the deals and noted that the LLCs listed as the buyers were managed by Eric Trump.
Trump bought the Central Park South building in 1981 and later converted it into condos. The building’s 80 units were initially filled mostly with wealthy rent-regulated tenants who had the right to keep renewing their leases at below-market rates as long as they chose to remain in the building. That interfered with Trump’s plan to tear down the building and replace it with a condo project.
Under New York laws, developers who convert apartment buildings into condos must disclose to the New York state attorney general how much they’re looking to sell units for to existing tenants as well as to the public.
Trump’s 1997 disclosure to the attorney general, known as an offering plan, shows that units 13G and 14G were both rent regulated and originally listed for sale at $245,000 and $250,000, respectively. Over time, as market prices moved higher, Trump filed frequent amendments raising the listed prices, a standard practice for developers. ProPublica and The Real Deal obtained the offering plan and amendments through a public-records request.
Trump reported nearly $3.2 million in revenue in 2016 and the first half of 2017 from condo sales using the company, Trump CPS LLC. He resigned as president of that company on Jan. 19, the day before his inauguration.
As with the president’s other assets, Trump CPS LLC is held by the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust and is managed by one of Trump’s lawyers and the president’s sons. Trump put his businesses under the trust in response to criticism about conflicts. As we have reported, President Trump can take funds from the trust any time.
Do you have information about the Trump family’s businesses? Contact Derek at derek.kravitz@propublica.org or via Signal at 573-239-7440.
This story was published on May 9, 2017 and updated on July 5, 2017.
A state Supreme Court judge quashed the complaints of a New York City tenant this week, ruling that landlords in downtown Manhattan who received tax breaks to convert aging office buildings into apartments can be exempt from limits on rent increases.
Joel Roodman, a tenant at 85 John Street, was sued by his landlord, Kibel Companies, in 2015 after Roodman objected to a 31-percent rent increase, which put his rent at $9,500 per month. Roodman argued his apartment should be subject to rent stabilization because of the tax break Kibel was receiving that year.
A lawyer for Roodman said he was considering an appeal. There have been two other court rulings on how to apply the tax break, which have reached opposite conclusions.
The tax break, known as 421-g, was created in the 1990s by the state legislature with the strong support of then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The legislation required that apartments built with help from the tax break should be rent-stabilized. At the time, the posh historic office buildings of the financial district faced high vacancies as corporate tenants moved to more modern buildings in midtown. The tax break helped revitalize the neighborhood, spurring the creation of some 10,000 units. But the vast majority of them were never subject to rent stabilization, despite the specific language included in the law.
ProPublica examined the history of 421-g and found that Giuliani, then-Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno and the real-estate industry moved behind the scenes after the Assembly passed the bill — but before it was voted on by the Senate — to exempt apartments renting for more than $2,000 a month from rent stabilization. They did this without rewriting the language of the bill approved by the Assembly. Instead, Giuliani and Bruno exchanged letters declaring their intent to exempt the pricier apartment units. The letters were read into the Senate record but were never seen by the Assembly.
“This was really an attempt to undermine the democratic process, which is really poor in New York as it is,” Eric Lane, dean of the Hofstra School of Law, told ProPublica last year. “Let me assure you that these shenanigans were ways to create a legislative record without going back and amending the bill.”
Giuliani submitted testimony on behalf of the building’s owner. Marc Mukasey, a spokesperson for Giuliani, declined to comment when contacted by ProPublica last year.
In his decision, Supreme Court Judge Schlomo Hagler said there was “clear legislative intent” to exempt apartments renting for more than $2,000 a month from rent stabilization. He pointed to the Senate debate — noting there was no Assembly debate at all — and wrote that no senator objected to the content of the Giuliani-Bruno letters. Only one senator, Franz Leichter, opposed the bill, which passed 53-1.
New York’s Legislature wanted to give tax breaks in Lower Manhattan in exchange for limits on rent increases. The mayor and the real estate lobby had another idea. Read the story.
“Notwithstanding Senator Leichter’s vigorous opposition, the Legislature rejected his position and overwhelmingly voted to provide the generous tax abatements to owners to encourage the development of Lower Manhattan,” Hagler wrote. “As such, it appears that the main purpose of the Plan was to stimulate economic development, and not to primarily establish rent regulation for luxury housing.”
Joseph Burden, a lawyer for Kibel, said the decision was “comprehensive, well-reasoned and grounded upon an in-depth statutory analysis, thorough examination of legislative intent, and prior case law.”
Serge Joseph, a lawyer for Roodman, said the issue is far from decided, noting that as many as four other cases have been filed and are still pending on the 421-g question.
“We are disappointed, and disagree with Justice Hagler’s decision,” Joseph said.
As mayor, Giuliani also signed a City Council bill in 1994 — a year before the 421-g bill — allowing for hundreds of thousands of apartments to exit rent regulation if their rents topped $2,000 a month. Three years later, the state legislature adopted the Council bill, stripping the city of the possibility of repealing it. Since then, 250,000 apartments that were once stabilized have become free-market units, ProPublica found.
Update, July 5, 2017: On July 3, New York Supreme Court Justice Carol Edmead issued a ruling in another case involving a building receiving the 421-g tax break, 50 Murray Street in Tribeca. Edmead decided apartments in the building will now become subject to rent stabilization no matter how high their rents rise.
The new ruling is diametrically opposed to a previous Supreme Court decision on the same question involving a different building. Joseph Burden, who represented Clipper Equities, the landlord in Tribeca, sent Edmead the earlier decision and urged her to rule in the same way. “The court declines to do so,” Edmead wrote in her opinion, before laying out a complex procedure for how 50 Murray Street tenants should be reimbursed for overcharges.
“It’s an amazing finding,” said attorney Serge Joseph, who represented over 40 tenants in the building. “We are thrilled that she found that the apartments were regulated and that she also established a formula [for reimbursements] going forward.”
Burden said Clipper Equities would appeal the decision. “We respectfully believe Justice Edmead has overlooked substantial evidence and clear legislative history in reaching her decision,” he said.
At least two more cases are pending in New York Supreme Court regarding the question of whether 421-g apartments should be subject to rent stabilization, Joseph said.
This story was co-published with NPR’s Shots blog.
No corner of the health care system would be harder hit than Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program for the poor, if Republican leaders in Congress round up the votes to repeal major portions of the Affordable Care Act.
GOP lawmakers have proposed winding down the Medicaid expansion that added 17 million people in 31 states and the District of Columbia under the ACA, and eventually capping the program’s spending per capita.
If the current bill in the Senate becomes law, 15 million fewer people would have coverage through Medicaid by 2026, the Congressional Budget Office has predicted.
But other efforts that are garnering much less attention would further reshape Medicaid, potentially knocking millions more off the rolls. They include asking beneficiaries to verify their eligibility twice a year, instead of once under the current law.
In many ways, the current battles pit those who view Medicaid as a health insurance program, in which higher enrollment is not seen as a problem, against those who see it as a welfare program, in which lower enrollment is prized. Some states that have experimented with more frequent verification and other techniques to manage enrollment say they’ve worked well while others say they’re not cost-effective and are overly burdensome.
In addition, the Trump administration has said it wants to let states experiment more with their Medicaid programs, inviting them to ask for waivers that do not need congressional approval. In recent months, states have proposed requiring able-bodied adults on Medicaid to work, drug testing enrollees, capping the length of time some can stay on the program and limiting the number of people who can be on the program at once. The Obama administration had rebuffed some of those efforts.
“All of the bells and whistles and hoops that people have to jump through create an enormous amount of red tape and that depresses enrollment,” says Joan Alker, executive director of the Center for Children and Families, a research center at Georgetown University. “That’s a proven strategy.”
Some 74.5 million people are now enrolled in Medicaid — more than the 58 million covered by Medicare, the program for seniors and the disabled. Since the implementation of the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act in 2014, Medicaid enrollment has grown by 16.7 million. That increase alone is larger than the number of people who purchase health insurance through the marketplaces set up by the ACA.
Health policy researchers say there’s ample evidence that adding paperwork and administrative burdens on beneficiaries in Medicaid increases turnover, called churn. For the most part, it’s not because people are no longer eligible for the program, they say; it’s that poor people move frequently and often face a host of challenges that make them less likely to turn in required paperwork.
Even before the ACA passed, many states were moving to make it easier for people, particularly children, to get enrolled and stay enrolled in Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program. The Affordable Care Act only allows states to formally reassess people’s enrollment eligibility once a year. But Medicaid enrollees are required to notify authorities in the interim if they have a change in life circumstances, such as finding a job. And that can prompt another review.
The House bill to replace the Affordable Care Act, passed May 4, would require reassessments every six months for enrollees who became eligible through the Medicaid expansion. The bill pending in the Senate would allow them every six months or more frequently, but would not require them.
Proponents of the changes say too many people stay on Medicaid when they are no longer eligible. They point to Illinois, which hired a consultant a few years ago to help it improve its renewal process. During the first three quarters of fiscal year 2017, which just ended, 623,530 individuals had their Medicaid canceled during the renewal process — the vast majority for not responding to requests for information. Of those, nearly 148,000 eventually re-enrolled after submitting the requested information.
“Certainly, at least some percentage of clients who did not respond did so because their circumstances were such that they were indeed not eligible,” the state said in its most recent report. “The people who are more likely to respond are those who are eligible.”
Josh Archambault, a senior fellow at the conservative Foundation for Government Accountability who has tracked the Illinois project, says the state’s Medicaid rolls had included people who died years earlier, as well as those who no longer lived in the state.
Critics of more frequent renewals “are correct to say that it would decrease enrollment,” Archambault says. “But these are all people who would not qualify.”
He said not all checks have to be intrusive. States, for instance, can more frequently check federal and state databases to look for whether a person has a life change, has moved or has a new job. “If somebody gets a job, that’s great. They may no longer be able to qualify for the program,” he says. “If they still qualify, they can sign right back up.”
That’s what’s happened in Texas. The state regularly checks the finances of families whose children are enrolled. State data appears to show that the number of children experiencing a temporary gap in their Medicaid coverage has increased since the state instituted the new process in 2014, according to Kaiser Health News.
Avik Roy, a conservative who has advised Republican leaders on health policy, said by letting states check people’s eligibility for Medicaid more often, “you’re giving states a tool to make sure that the people who are enrolled in the Medicaid program are the people who the program is meant to help.”
That’s not how officials in California see it. They say the current system works well compared to many years ago when people had to prove their eligibility more often, up to four times a year. It was burdensome for enrollees and costly for the state and its counties, which handle the process.
In California’s experience, when people have a change in life circumstances, they generally report it right away, as required. Moreover, California has moved from a system that was dependent on paper to one that is largely electronic, easing the burden further.
“Medicaid programs have a responsibility to help ensure that those people who are eligible for the program, that they’re enrolled and they receive the services that they’re in fact eligible for,” says René Mollow, deputy director for health care benefits and eligibility at the California Department of Health Care Services.
Mollow said when people are on Medicaid, their income doesn’t change much from year to year, especially children, the elderly and the disabled.
While California has sought ways to expand access to its Medicaid program, other states have looked for ways to tighten eligibility, ensuring it is only available for those who they believe truly need it.
Since the passage of the American Health Care Act, Republican members of Congress have tried to swing public opinion to their side. ProPublica has been tracking what they’re saying. Read the story.
Have you sent a letter in support, in opposition or asking questions about the ACA to your congressperson? Did you get a response? Share them with us.
When Indiana expanded its Medicaid program, for example, it also deployed a complex system of rewards and penalties that requires enrollees to make token regular payments or get barred from the program. It did so with the help of a consultant named Seema Verma, who is now the administrator of the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency that decides whether to grant states permission to make changes to their Medicaid programs.
And more states are seeking changes to their programs. Indiana and Maine, for example, are among states that have proposed work requirements for able-bodied adults in the program. (Indiana estimates that a quarter of those required to work won’t and “will have HIP [Medicaid] eligibility suspended until compliance has been demonstrated.”) States say that by making Medicaid contingent on work, potential beneficiaries will be incentivized to find jobs that offer health insurance.
Wisconsin is asking the federal government to approve a drug testing requirement for those same adults, saying it will help get addicts into treatment and prepare them for jobs. Arizona wants to cap the amount of time certain non-disabled adults can remain on Medicaid to five years, taking a page from the welfare reform playbook of the 1990s. And Utah is proposing a limit on the number of adults without dependent children who can enroll in its Medicaid program.
Such requests are popping up all across the country, according to a recent analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit think tank.
So far, the Trump administration hasn’t approved any of these requests, but it signaled in a letter to governors in March that it would be more flexible than the Obama administration, which did not approve requests from Indiana and Arizona in the past.
“We commit to ushering in a new era for the federal and state Medicaid partnership where states have more freedom to design programs that meet the spectrum of diverse needs of their Medicaid population,” wrote Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and Verma.
Diane Rowland, executive vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation, says many of the state proposals treat Medicaid as they do welfare programs. ”You see work requirements. You see drug testing. You see things that would discourage people from enrolling,” she says. “The other side is that a lot of people on Medicaid are already working. They just don’t work in jobs that have health insurance.”
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Vice President Mike Pence’s office has confirmed the White House commission on voter fraud intends to run the state voter rolls it has requested against federal databases to check for potential fraudulent registration. Experts say the plan is certain to produce thousands of false positives that could distort the understanding of the potential for fraud, especially given the limited data states have agreed to turn over.
“This just demonstrates remarkable naivety on how this voter data can be used,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “There’s absolutely no way that incomplete data from some states — mainly consisting of names and addresses — can be used to determine anything.”
The commission’s vice chair, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, sent a letter to states last week requesting detailed information on voters. The request asked for information such as Social Security numbers and military status most states cannot legally make available. But most states will be handing over information that is public, such as names, years of birth and whether they’ve voted in previous elections.
Marc Lotter, spokesman for Pence, told ProPublica the state voter information will be run “through a number of different databases, looking for the possibility for areas where voter rolls could be strengthened.”
While Lotter would not say specifically which databases the rolls would be run against, The Washington Times reported last week the commission may seek to check the names against the federal government’s database of non-citizens. A 2012 attempt by Florida to do that resulted in many legitimate voters being falsely flagged because they had the same names as people in the federal database. Gov. Rick Scott scrapped the effort and eventually apologized.
Comparing names nationwide could result in far more false positives.
“How many Manuel Rodríguezes born in 1945 who are citizens are going to be on an immigration list? There are likely to be several,” said Charles Stewart, a professor at MIT and expert in election administration. “How will you know if he’s the immigrant, or he is one of the several people with that name who are citizens and legally registered?”
Kobach runs a matching program that appears to have its own high rate of errors. A recent study by political scientists at Stanford University found that Kobach’s Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program had 200 false positives for every actual double registration. The Kansas secretary of state’s office did not immediately return a call for comment on the program.
Other systems already exist that do rigorous matching. The Electronic Registration Information Center, or ERIC, is a voluntary, paid system operated by a nonprofit and used by 20 states and the District of Columbia. The system uses far more information than states are able to make publicly available, such as driver’s license numbers, Social Security numbers and even email addresses.
Becker, who helped create ERIC, said it took years of work to ensure careful matches. The speed at which Kobach and Pence sought information from states, which were given two weeks to hand over their voter rolls, and their plan for the limited amount of information they’ll receive “demonstrates a remarkable ignorance of the process,” said Becker.
Lotter, Pence’s spokesman, said that even if false matches were made they’d do no harm since the commission can’t remove names from states’ voter rolls. He said the commission is simply going to provide recommendations and highlight any common problems that might come up in the matching process.
“What we are trying to do is create the first national look at voter registration and the potential for fraudulent registration that could lead to fraudulent voting,” Lotter said. “At the end of the day you have to ask yourself who is not for making sure we have one person one vote?”
John Merrill, the Republican secretary of state for Alabama, said any false positive raises the likelihood a voter might be incorrectly purged.
A commission created by President Donald Trump to enhance confidence in America’s elections has asked all 50 states for copies of their voter records which often include names, addresses and ages. Read the story.
“I would be surprised if they could find a way to improve upon the methods already in place from the consortiums that already exists,” Merrill said. “Every time you remove a mechanism that more positively identifies a voter, it increases the opportunity for a false positive to match.”
President Trump created the commission after making unsupported claims that there were millions of illegal votes cast in the 2016 presidential election. Kobach, the commission’s public face, has long asserted without evidence that voter fraud is widespread.
Despite numerous academic studies to the contrary, Kobach has claimed that non-citizens regularly vote, that people vote twice with frequency and has backed Trump’s claims of illegal voting last year. Kobach, along with other members of the commission, has also supported restrictions on voter registration, including strict voter ID laws.
Lotter said the bipartisan nature of the commission — currently four of the 10 announced commissioners are Democrats — should assuage any concerns from critics. The four Democrats include Maine’s secretary of state, Matthew Dunlap, whose state has declined to provide the information the commission requested in Kobach’s letter.
Lotter also said none of the commissioners had “pre-conceived notions” about voter fraud and that they would fairly judge the results of the matches.
Dale Ho, the director of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project, disputed Lotter’s claims of neutrality.
“It’s up is down and black is white,” he said. “The idea that people who have made repeated public statements that they believe, contrary to all evidence, that there is massive fraud are not biased is ludicrous.”
The head of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit in charge of deportations has directed his officers to take action against all undocumented immigrants they may cross paths with, regardless of criminal histories. The guidance appears to go beyond the Trump administration’s publicly stated aims, and some advocates say may explain a marked increase in immigration arrests.
In a February memo, Matthew Albence, a career official who heads the Enforcement and Removal Operations division of ICE, informed his 5,700 deportation officers that, “effective immediately, ERO officers will take enforcement action against all removable aliens encountered in the course of their duties.”
The Trump administration, including Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, has been clear in promising to ramp up immigration enforcement, but has so far emphasized that its priority was deporting immigrants who posed a public safety threat. Indeed, Kelly, to whom Albence ultimately reports, had seemed to suggest a degree of discretion when he told the agencies under his command earlier this year that immigration officers “may” initiate enforcement actions against any undocumented person they encountered. That guidance was issued just a daybefore Albence sent the memo to his staff.
A spokesman with ICE said Albence’s directive did not represent a break with Kelly’s stated aims, and was consistent with current agency policies.
“The memo directly supports the directions handed down in the executive orders and mirrors the language ICE consistently uses to describe its enforcement posture,” the spokeswoman, Sarah Rodriguez, said in a statement. “As Secretary Kelly and Acting Director [of ICE] Homan have stated repeatedly, ICE prioritizes the arrest and removal of national security and public safety threats; however, no class or category of alien in the United States is exempt from arrest or removal.”
However, Sarah Saldaña, who retired in January as head of ICE for the Obama administration, said the wording in the memo would have real consequences for undocumented immigrants.
“When you use the word ‘will’ instead of ‘may’ you are taking it a step further,” said Saldaña. “This is an important directive and people at ERO are bound by this directive unless someone above Matt Albence comes back and says, ‘You went too far.’ I don’t think you are going to find that person in this administration.”
David Bier, an immigration policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, said the fallout from the memo has been evident for months. “The memo explains what we have actually been seeing on the ground,” Bier said, asserting that immigrants without criminal backgrounds were routinely being arrested and ordered deported.
Since 2008, Congress had traditionally used its annual spending bill to instruct the secretary of homeland security to prioritize the deportation of convicted immigrants based on the severity of their crimes, but that language was left out of this year’s bill, helping to pave the way for broader enforcement.
In recent months, the number of undocumented immigrants arrested who are considered to be non-criminals has risen. (Under the law, merely being here illegally is not a crime. Rather, it’s a civil violation.) Between February and May, the Trump administration arrested, on average, 108 undocumented immigrants a day with no criminal record, an uptick of some 150 percent from the same time period a year ago.
For example, an Ecuadorean high schooler was detained by ICE agents who showed up at his home in upstate New York hours before his senior prom in June. Three restaurant workers targeted for immigration violations were arrested in May in Michigan after ICE agents ate breakfast where they worked. A Salvadoran man is facing deportation in Houston after voluntarily showing up to an ICE office for a routine check-in.
The ICE memo acknowledges that space in detention facilities limits the number of undocumented immigrants who can be detained upon apprehension. Still, it says ICE officials are mandated to begin deportation proceedings against all undocumented immigrants with whom they cross paths — even if those apprehended remain free as they face an immigration judge, a process that can take years.
Others may be swiftly deported if they are found to already have final deportation orders signed by an immigration judge. As of May 2016, there were 930,000 undocumented immigrants who had been ordered deported but remained freely in the country, according to ICE statistics.
“My concern is that what you end up doing is siphoning away resources that should go to the public safety threats,” said John Sandweg, who preceded Saldaña as acting ICE director.
The case of Oscar Millan shows ICE’s renewed focus on strict immigration enforcement. Under the Obama administration, agents had discretion in cases of immigrants with gravely sick children. Read the story.
Under Obama-era guidelines, undocumented immigrants with no criminal record — but perhaps with a pending deportation order — could only be arrested if an agent’s supervisor determined their deportation “would serve an important federal interest.”
Homan has appeared to acknowledge the impact of the agency’s more aggressive approach even if he did not mention Albence’s explicit direction.
“There has been a significant increase in non-criminal arrests because we weren’t allowed to arrest them in the past administration,” Homan told a House committee. “You see more of an uptick in non-criminals because we’re going from zero to 100 under a new administration.”
Both Homan and Albence are career employees who have worked for decades helping the government enforce immigration laws. Before Homan was promoted to lead ICE, he led ERO, with Albence as his assistant director.
“I expect that the agency believes that there is no one in the White House or DHS that is going to tell them ‘No. Don’t do this,’” Bier said. “And without an effective check in the administration we are going to see arrests being made without any regard to prioritization.”
Trump has yet to nominate a political director to lead ICE. In fact, all three immigration agencies under Homeland Security — ICE, Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services — are currently implementing Trump’s agenda while being led by career staff.
Homan has so far served as a vocal supporter of Trump’s ramped up immigration enforcement. Last week, he even made an appearance at a White House press briefing.
“Why do you think we got 11 million to 12 million people in this country [illegally] now?” Homan asked White House reporters. “Because there has been this notion that if you get by the Border Patrol, if you get in the United States, if you have a U.S. citizen kid, then no one is looking for you. But those days are over.”
Help us investigate: If you have experience with or information about how ICE is conducting immigration enforcement, email marcelo.rochabrun@propublica.org.
For much of the past decade, IBM, once America’s premier technology company, has been scrambling to find its place in a world upended by newcomers such as Google, Amazon and Facebook.
In the process, it’s been upending its workforce, often with painful results for longtime employees. According to one estimate, IBM’s U.S. employment, which peaked at 230,000, had dropped to about 70,000 by mid-2015, largely the product of layoffs and retirements.
And six weeks ago, IBM told thousands of its telecommuting employees to start reporting to particular offices, which in many cases would involve long-distance moves. That, or resign.
As a result, hundreds, perhaps thousands, more IBMers are leaving the company.
IBM has long been a corporate leader in employment practices. That means the way it treats its employees speaks volumes about what lies ahead for working people everywhere.
But IBM executives won’t tell their workers or the public how many people are leaving this year. They refuse to provide the numbers for 2016, 2015, or 2014 either, to explain the logic behind who gets tapped to go, or exactly how the departures fit into a larger strategy.
We’re asking you to help us get the numbers and, with them, answers.
All information you provide on the form below will be kept confidential. The more of you who contribute – no matter your age or position – the more accurate a picture we’ll be able to get.
by Charles Ornstein, ProPublica and Katie Thomas, The New York Times,
This article was produced in partnership with The New York Times.
More than a decade ago, Italy tried a novel approach to help bring down drug costs: asking pharmaceutical companies to return money to the national health system if some of their medicines failed to work as expected. The effort largely flopped.
The Trump administration is now considering whether to encourage a similar approach. Pharmaceutical executives presented the idea to President Trump at a meeting in January, and the general concept was raised last month in a draft executive order aimed at combating rising drug prices.
A number of drug companies have recently entered into such deals, which they call outcomes-based contracts. Merck has done so for its diabetes drugs Januvia and Janumet, promising to return money if patients’ diabetes did not meet goals for control. And Novartis, which makes the heart failure treatment Entresto, is refunding money if too many patients taking the drug are hospitalized. In more typical deals, drugmakers pay rebates to insurers based on the number of drugs sold and to gain easier access for members to their products.
But there is scant evidence this new approach lowers costs. Pharmaceutical companies still set the drug’s list price and have to agree to the criteria upon which they will be measured. Some experts say such arrangements are a ploy to deflect attention from substantive changes that could hurt companies’ bottom lines, such as allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices. Moreover, the savings don’t always trickle down to consumers.
“Most of them get launched with great fanfare,” said Dr. Steve Miller, the chief medical officer at Express Scripts, which manages the drug benefits of more than 80 million Americans. “But then you never hear anything about it after the launch because most of them collapse under their own weight.”
In a recent note to investors, David Maris, an analyst at Wells Fargo, described the approach as a “carnival game” and said he did not know of any such arrangements “where a drug company did not consider it a win for them.”
Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the industry trade group, said the approach was in keeping with a trend toward paying doctors and hospitals for the quality of care they deliver rather than the number of services they provide.
“We recognize that as science is moving forward, the way we pay for medicines needs to evolve as well,” Zirkelbach said. The group has been promoting the idea in an advertising campaign.
To understand how these deals work, consider the one that the drugmaker Amgen made with Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, a nonprofit insurer in Massachusetts and one of the insurers to most aggressively test the concept. It has entered into at least eight such deals over the past two years. This spring, Amgen agreed to pay a full refund to Harvard Pilgrim if patients who took its pricey new cholesterol drug, Repatha, suffered a heart attack or stroke. Repatha is intended for patients with very high cholesterol levels, for which cheaper drugs, known as statins, do not work.
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As part of such deals, insurers eased restrictions on which patients could gain access to the drug, said Dr. Joshua J. Ofman, a senior vice president at Amgen. Sales of Repatha and similar drugs have disappointed in part because insurers have been reluctant to pay for them given their price. Repatha can cost up to $16,000 per year.
If Harvard Pilgrim patients taking Repatha have a heart attack or stroke, they share in the refund, getting back all out-of-pocket payments that they have made toward the drug, said Dr. Michael Sherman, chief medical officer at Harvard Pilgrim.
Doctors who prescribe Repatha said the deals do not affect how they treat patients. “We’re completely agnostic to it,” said Dr. Frederic S. Resnic, chairman of cardiovascular medicine at the Lahey Hospital & Medical Center in Burlington, Massachusetts, who sees patients with Harvard Pilgrim insurance. The drugs are so costly that doctors still only prescribe them when patients really need them, he said.
Dr. Peter B. Bach, director of the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, is skeptical. He said the pharmaceutical industry is conflating setting drug prices based on the value they bring to patients and the health care system, which he supports, with negotiating givebacks when patients don’t respond to drugs, which he sees as too little, too late.
The arrangements, he said, carried “bells and whistles” that made them look good in theory. “But as long as you control all the contract terms, it can be a lot of optics but no substance,” he said.
Bach and others say the pharmaceutical industry is using this approach to justify seeking major changes to federal regulations that could benefit them even more — including rolling back a requirement that Medicaid programs for the poor get the lowest drug prices, and another that bars companies from giving kickbacks to health providers. The industry says the changes are needed to allow more flexibility in the type of deals they can offer.
Drug companies and insurers touted these contracts when they were announced, but participants in several deals either declined to comment recently or provided little information about their programs.
At a conference last month in Virginia, a senior director with Prime Therapeutics, a pharmacy benefit manager, offered a blunt assessment of such contracts, saying they were not cost-effective. But in a phone interview, his boss, David Lassen, the chief clinical officer, was a bit more measured, saying that though the deals carry promise, the work to track patient outcomes is expensive and burdensome. “In their current state, where they’re falling short is where you look at the return on investment,” Lassen said.
Sherman at Harvard Pilgrim said the deals would not work for every drug and that drugmakers typically showed no interest when there were no competing brand-name drugs that worked in a similar way.
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Some pharmaceutical executives acknowledge the model should not be seen as a panacea. Leonard S. Schleifer, the chief executive of Regeneron, questioned how such pricing would work for a drug like Dupixent, an eczema drug his company makes that was approved this year.
“Are we going to start calculating the surface area of the rash that’s improved?” said Schleifer, whose company has entered into some outcomes-based deals for Praluent, a competitor to Repatha.
Other drugmakers said proof that the concept works can be seen in the interest they are getting from insurers. “No one is going to enter into these contracts if they don’t believe the prices they are paying are of good value,” Ofman, of Amgen, said.
Italy’s experience is instructive.
Beginning in 2006, the Italian National Health System negotiated deals with drugmakers for certain medicines. It required doctors to track whether their patients were meeting certain goals, and if they were not, the pharmaceutical company would reimburse a share of what it was paid.
In 2015, researchers studying Italy’s experiment concluded that the amount of money refunded by the companies was “trifling.”
“The performance of this system was very, very poor,” said Filippo Drago, director of the Department of Biomedical and Biotechnological Sciences at the University of Catania in Italy and an author of the study. He attributed the low savings to the administrative complexity of tracking the results and said drug companies fought efforts to reimburse for bad outcomes.
Italy now asks drug companies to provide some of their products for free — at first. Manufacturers are only paid once results are demonstrated.
“This system is working very well,” Drago said.
Correction, July 10, 2017: An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to deals between drugmakers and health plans for coverage of drugs like Repatha. The deals made it easier for patients to gain access to Repatha through their insurer; they did not ease restrictions on which patients were prescribed the drug.
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In February, President Trump ordered federal agencies to form task forces charged with finding regulations to weaken or eliminate. While the names of appointees to executive-agency task forces are typically made public, some agencies are refusing to reveal who is on their panels
President Trump entered office pledging to cut red tape, and within weeks, he ordered his administration to assemble teams to aggressively scale back government regulations.
But the effort — a signature theme in Trump’s populist campaign for the White House — is being conducted in large part out of public view and often by political appointees with deep industry ties and potential conflicts.
Most government agencies have declined to disclose information about their deregulation teams. But ProPublica and The New York Times identified 71 appointees, including 28 with potential conflicts, through interviews, public records and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
Some appointees are reviewing rules their previous employers sought to weaken or kill, and at least two may be positioned to profit if certain regulations are undone.
The appointees include lawyers who have represented businesses in cases against government regulators, staff members of political dark money groups, employees of industry-funded organizations opposed to environmental rules and at least three people who were registered to lobby the agencies they now work for.
At the Education Department alone, two members of the deregulation team were most recently employed by pro-charter advocacy groups or operators, and one appointee was an executive handling regulatory issues at a for-profit college operator.
So far, the process has been scattershot. Some agencies have been soliciting public feedback, while others refuse even to disclose who is in charge of the review. In many cases, responses to public records requests have been denied, delayed or severely redacted.
The Interior Department has not disclosed the correspondence and calendars for its team. But a review of more than 1,300 pages of handwritten sign-in sheets for guests visiting the agency’s headquarters in Washington found that appointees had met regularly with industry representatives.
Over a four-month period, from February through May, at least 58 representatives of the oil and gas industry signed their names on the agency’s visitor logs before meeting with appointees.
The EPA also rejected requests to release the appointment calendar of the official leading its team — a former top executive for an industry-funded political group — even as she met privately with industry representatives.
And the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security provided the titles for most appointees to their review teams, but not names.
Help Us Identify the Officials Helping Trump Roll Back Regulations
In February, President Trump ordered federal agencies to form task forces charged with finding regulations to weaken or eliminate. While the names of appointees to executive-agency task forces are typically made public, some agencies are refusing to reveal who is on their panels. See who we know about and who we don’t.
When asked for comment about the activities of the deregulation teams, the White House referred reporters to the Office of Management and Budget.
Meghan Burris, a spokeswoman there, said: “As previous administrations have recognized, it’s good government to periodically reassess existing regulations. Past regulatory review efforts, however, have not taken a consistent enough look at regulations on the books.”
With billions of dollars at stake in the push to deregulate, corporations and other industry groups are hiring lawyers, lobbyists and economists to help navigate this new avenue for influence. Getting to the front of the line is crucial, as it can take years to effect regulatory changes.
“Competition will be fierce,” the law firm Clark Hill, which represents businesses pitching the Environmental Protection Agency, said in a marketing memo. “In all likelihood, interested parties will need to develop a multi-pronged strategy to expand support and win pre-eminence over competing regulatory rollback candidates.”
Jane Luxton, a lawyer at the firm, said she advised clients to pay for economic and legal analyses that government agencies, short on staff, could use to expedite changes. She declined to identify the clients.
“You may say this is an agency’s job, but the agencies are totally overloaded,” Luxton said.
On a cloudy, humid day in March, Laura Peterson, a top lobbyist for Syngenta, arrived at the headquarters for the Interior Department. She looped the letter “L” across the agency’s sign-in sheet.
Her company, a top pesticide maker based in Switzerland, had spent eight years and millions of dollars lobbying the Obama administration on environmental rules, with limited success.
But Peterson had an in with the new administration.
Scott Cameron, newly installed at the Interior Department and a member of its deregulation team, had just left a nonprofit he had founded. He had advocated getting pesticides approved and out to market faster. His group counted Syngenta as a financial partner.
The meeting with Peterson was one of the first Cameron took as a new government official.
Neither side would reveal what was discussed. “I’m not sure that’s reporting information I have to give you,” Peterson said.
But lobbying records offered clues.
Syngenta has been one of several pesticide manufacturers pushing for changes to the Endangered Species Act. When federal agencies take actions that may jeopardize endangered animals or plants, they are generally supposed to consult with the Interior Department, which could raise objections.
For decades, the EPA largely ignored this provision when approving new pesticides. But recently, a legal challenge from environmental groups forced its hand — a change that affected Syngenta.
Pesticide lobbyists have been working behind the scenes at agencies and on Capitol Hill to change the provision. Companies have argued that they should be exempt from consulting with the Interior Department because they already undergo EPA approval.
Along with spending millions of dollars on lobbying, they have funded advocacy groups aligned with their cause. Cameron’s nonprofit, the Reduce Risks From Invasive Species Coalition, was one such group for Syngenta.
The organization says on its website that its goals include reducing “the regulatory burden of the Endangered Species Act on American society by addressing invasive species.” One way to do that is to use pesticides. The nonprofit’s mission includes creating “business opportunities for commercial products and services used to control invasive species.”
Because donations are not publicly reported, it is unclear how much Syngenta has contributed to Cameron’s organization, but his group has called the pesticide company one of its “generous sponsors.”
Cameron also served on a committee of experts and stakeholders, including Syngenta, that advised the federal government on decisions related to invasive species. At a committee event last July, he said that one of his priorities was “getting biocontrol agents to market faster,” according to meeting minutes.
Paul Minehart, a Syngenta spokesman, said: “Employees regularly engage with those in government that relate to agriculture and our business. Our purpose is to balance serving the public health and environment with enabling farmers’ access to innovation.”
A spokeswoman for the Interior Department did not respond to questions about how Cameron’s relationship with Syngenta might influence his review of regulations.
Under the law, members of the Trump administration can seek ethics waivers to work on issues that overlap with their past business careers. They can also formally recuse themselves when potential conflicts arise.
In many cases, the administration has refused to say whether appointees to Trump’s deregulation teams have done either.
One such appointee is Samantha Dravis, the chairwoman of the deregulation team at the EPA, who was a top official at the Republican Attorneys General Association. Dravis was also president of the Rule of Law Defense Fund, which brought together energy companies and Republican attorneys general to file lawsuits against the federal government over Obama-era environmental regulations.
The Republican association’s work has been criticized as a vehicle for corporate donors to gain the credibility and expertise of state attorneys general in fighting federal regulations. Donors include the American Petroleum Institute, the energy company ConocoPhillips and the coal giant Alpha Natural Resources.
The Republican association also received funding from Freedom Partners, backed by the conservative billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch. Dravis worked for that group as well, which recently identified regulations it wants eliminated. Among them are EPA rules relating to clean-water protections and restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions.
Liz Bowman, an EPA spokeswoman, declined to say whether Dravis had recused herself from issues dealing with previous employers or their backers, or had discussed regulations with any of them.
“As you will find when you receive Samantha’s calendar, she has met with a range of stakeholders, including nonprofits, industry groups and others, on a wide range of issues,” Bowman said.
Bowman said the calendar could be obtained through a public records request. ProPublica and The Times had already filed a request for records including calendars, but the agency’s response did not include those documents. (An appeal was filed, but the calendar has not yet been released.)
“We take our ethics responsibilities seriously,” Bowman said. “All political staff have had an ethics briefing and know their obligations.”
Addressing the agency’s regulatory efforts, she said, “We are here to enact a positive environmental agenda that provides real results to the American people, without unnecessarily hamstringing our economy.”
At the Agriculture Department, the only known appointee to the deregulation team is Rebeckah Adcock. She previously lobbied the department as a top executive both at CropLife America, a trade association for pesticide makers, and the American Farm Bureau Federation, a trade group for farmers.
The department deals with many issues involving farmers, including crop insurance and land conservation rules, but it would not disclose whether Adcock had recused herself from discussions affecting her past employers.
At the Energy Department, a member of the deregulation team is Brian McCormack, who formerly handled political and external affairs for Edison Electric Institute, a trade association representing investor-owned electrical utilities.
While there, McCormack worked with the American Legislative Exchange Council, an industry-funded group. Both organizations fought against rooftop solar policies in statehouses across the country. Utility companies lose money when customers generate their own power, even more so when they are required to pay consumers who send surplus energy back into the grid.
Though the Energy Department does not directly regulate electrical utilities, it does help oversee international electricity trade, the promotion of renewable energy and the security of domestic energy production. After joining the department, McCormack helped start a review of the nation’s electrical grid, according to an agency memo.
Clean-energy advocates fear the inquiry will cast solar energy, which can fluctuate, as a threat to grid reliability. Such a finding could scare off state public utility commissions considering solar policies and serve as a boon for electrical utilities, said Matt Kasper, research director at the Energy and Policy Institute, an environmental group.
Disclosure records show that while McCormack was at Edison, the trade group lobbied the federal government, including the Energy Department, on issues including grid reliability.
The department would not answer questions about McCormack’s involvement with those issues.
Across the government, at least two appointees to deregulation teams have been granted waivers from ethics rules related to prior jobs, and at least nine others have pledged to recuse themselves from issues related to former employers or clients.
Some of the recusals involve appointees at the Small Business Administration and the Education Department, including Bob Eitel, who leads the education team and was vice president for regulatory legal services at an operator of for-profit colleges.
Another recusal involves Byron Brown, an EPA appointee who is married to a senior government affairs manager for the Hess Corporation, the oil and gas company.
Hess was fined and ordered to spend more than $45 million on pollution controls by the EPA during the Obama administration because of alleged Clean Air Act violations at its refinery in Port Reading, N.J. Disclosure records show that Brown’s wife, Lesley Schaaff, lobbied the EPA last year on behalf of the company.
An EPA spokeswoman declined to say whether Brown or Schaaff owned Hess stock, though an agency ethics official said Brown had recused himself from evaluating regulations affecting the company.
The agency declined to say whether Brown would also recuse himself from issues affecting the American Petroleum Institute, where his wife’s company is a member. The association has lobbied to ease Obama-era natural gas rules, complaining in a recent letter to Brown’s team about an “unprecedented level of federal regulatory actions targeting our industry.”
Before being selected to lead the deregulation team at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Maren Kasper was a director at Roofstock, an online marketplace for investors in single-family rental properties. Financial disclosure records show Kasper owned a stake in the company worth up to $50,000.
Changes at HUD could increase investor interest in rental homes, affecting a company like Roofstock. The agency, for example, oversees the federal government’s Section 8 subsidies program for low-income renters.
Ethics officials allowed Kasper to keep her stake, but she pledged not to take actions that would affect it. (A spokesman for HUD said Kasper’s tenure on the deregulation task force has since ended.)
One by one, scientists, educators and environmental activists approached the microphone and urged government officials not to weaken regulations intended to protect children from lead.
The forum, run by the EPA in a drab basement meeting room in Washington, was part of the agency’s push to identify regulations that were excessive and burdensome to businesses.
Few businesspeople showed up. As public hearings on regulations have played out in recent weeks, many industry and corporate representatives have instead met with Trump administration officials behind closed doors.
Still, the EPA has asked for written comments and held about a dozen public meetings. The agency has received more than 467,000 comments, many of them critical of potential rollbacks, but also some from businesses large and small pleading for relief from regulatory costs or confusion.
After a quiet moment at the meeting to discuss lead regulations, the owner of a local painting company, Brian McCracken, moved to the microphone.
McCracken was frustrated by what he described as costly rules that forced him to test for lead-based paint in homes before he could begin painting. Each test kit costs about $2, and he may need six per room. If a family then declines to hire him, those costs come out of his pocket.
“I don’t think anyone is sitting here saying that lead-based dust does not hurt children,” he said. “That’s not what we are talking about. What the contractor needs is a better way to test.”
His voice quavered: “Why do I have to educate the general public about the hazards that generations before me created? It doesn’t make sense at all.”
Trump is not the first president to take on such frustrations.
President Bill Clinton declared the federal government was failing to regulate “without imposing unacceptable or unreasonable costs on society.” He assigned Vice President Al Gore to collect agencies’ suggestions for rules that should go. One rule dictated how to measure the consistency of grits.
President George W. Bush’s regulatory overhaul focused more on how new regulations were created. The administration installed a political appointee inside each agency who generally had to sign off before any significant new rule could be initiated. At the EPA for a time, that official came from an industry-funded think tank.
President Barack Obama ordered regular updates from each agency about the effectiveness of rules already on the books.
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“When you raise the profile, when it’s clearly an executive priority, it gets attention,” said Heather Krause, director of strategic issues at the Government Accountability Office, the main auditor of the federal government. According to the auditor’s analysis, the effect under Obama was mostly to clarify and streamline rules, not eliminate them.
Like Bush, Trump has empowered political appointees. Though some agencies have included career staff members on their review teams, an executive order from Trump creating the teams does not require it — nonpolitical employees are generally believed to be more wedded to existing rules. And like Obama, Trump has imposed regular reporting requirements.
But Trump, who spent his business career on the other side of government regulations, has put an emphasis on cutting old rules.
The same day he signed the executive order initiating the review, he addressed a large crowd of conservative activists at a Maryland convention center.
“We have begun a historic program to reduce the regulations that are crushing our economy — crushing,” Trump said. “We’re going to put the regulations industry out of work and out of business.”
Amit Narang, a regulatory expert at the liberal advocacy group Public Citizen, said Trump’s decision to create teams of political appointees — formally known as regulatory reform task forces — should make it easier for the White House to overcome bureaucratic resistance to his rollback plans.
“To the extent there’s a deep state effect in this administration,” Narang said, “the task force will be more effective in trying to get the agenda in place.”
The New York Times’ Kitty Bennett contributed reporting to this story.
The ongoing investigations into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia involve reams of classified material. Yet Marc Kasowitz, the New York lawyer whom President Donald Trump has hired to defend him in these inquiries, told ProPublica through a spokesman that he does not have a security clearance — the prerequisite for access to government secrets. Nor does he expect to seek one.
Several lawyers who have represented presidents and senior government officials said they could not imagine handling a case so suffused with sensitive material without a clearance.
“No question in my mind — in order to represent President Trump in this matter you would have to get a very high level of clearance because of the allegations involving Russia,” said Robert Bennett, who served as President Bill Clinton’s personal lawyer. Like many Washington lawyers, Bennett has held security clearances throughout his career.
As the spotlight on Russia intensifies with new email disclosures that his son, son-in-law, and then-campaign manager met in June 2016 with a Russian attorney who promised damaging information about Hillary Clinton, Kasowitz’s lack of a security clearance could hinder the president’s legal and political response to the scandal.
One possible explanation for Kasowitz’s decision not to pursue a clearance: He might have trouble getting one.
In recent weeks, ProPublica spoke with more than two dozen current and former employees of Kasowitz’s firm, Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP, as well as his friends and acquaintances. Past and present employees of the firm said in interviews that Kasowitz has struggled intermittently with alcohol abuse, leading to a stint in rehab in the winter of 2014-15.
Several people told ProPublica that Kasowitz has been drinking in recent months. (The vast majority of those who spoke to ProPublica for this article declined to be quoted by name, citing Kasowitz’s penchant for threatening lawsuits.)
Experts on federal security reviews told ProPublica that recent episodes of alcohol abuse are a major barrier to receiving clearance, a process that involves government agents poring over a person’s past and interviewing family, friends and colleagues. Investigators typically raise flags about behaviors that might make someone vulnerable to blackmail or suggest poor judgment.
Kasowitz’s spokesman said he doesn’t need a clearance. “No one has suggested he requires a security clearance, there has been no need for a security clearance, and we do not anticipate a need for a security clearance,” the spokesman said. “If and when a security clearance is needed, Mr. Kasowitz will apply for one with the other members of the legal team.”
Kasowitz’s spokesman did not directly respond to questions about whether he has struggled with alcohol abuse, but said the attorney is able to drink in moderation without a problem.
While not a government employee, Kasowitz has become a public face of the administration on the Russia case. Last month, he went before the cameras to deliver the president’s response to the landmark testimony of fired FBI Director James Comey. White House officials have regularly referred media inquiries about Russia-related matters, including queries about Jared Kushner and Michael Flynn, to Kasowitz.
In Washington, where every word and action of the president’s lawyer is scrutinized, Kasowitz is a neophyte. Instead of negotiating deals among the capital’s power brokers or fending off FBI investigations, Kasowitz, 65, built a lucrative practice in civil court suing banks and representing, among others, a leading tobacco company.
Kasowitz has been described by colleagues in the scrappy world of New York lawyers as the “toughest of the tough guys.” Bloomberg News called him a “Pit Bull Loyal to The Boss” while The New York Times described him as “the Donald Trump of lawyering.” His aggressive legal style has spurred rebukes from two judges.
For over 15 years, he represented Donald Trump, earning the president’s loyalty through his eager pugilism. Kasowitz has defended him in the Trump University fraud lawsuit. He fought to keep records from Trump’s 1990 divorce private, and threatened to sue The New York Times for publishing a story in which women accused Trump of unwanted touching and sexual assault. He also recently represented Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly after multiple women accused O’Reilly of sexual harassment.
Before representing Trump in the Russia inquiry, Kasowitz was informally advising the president. He has told friends he recommended firing Preet Bharara because the crusading prosecutor posed a danger to the administration. He has told people Trump wanted him to be attorney general.
Trump reportedly sought a classic Washington lawyer to represent him on Russia before choosing Kasowitz. Initially Kasowitz was reluctant to take it on. “He didn’t seek this,” said Joseph Lieberman, the former senator and Democratic vice presidential candidate who is now senior counsel at the firm. “In the end, the president said, ‘I need you. I know you and trust you.’”
Lieberman and Kasowitz grew up in the same neighborhood in New Haven, Connecticut. The future senator used to see Kasowitz’s father, who ran a scrap-metal business, walking through the neighborhood, greeting everyone as he went. Kasowitz went to Yale to study American history and then to Cornell Law School. After graduating in 1977, he started his law career in New York. In 1993, Kasowitz broke off from the prominent firm Mayer Brown to found his own firm.
As the firm met with early success, Kasowitz became wealthy. He brags to friends he makes anywhere from $10 million to $30 million per year. He owns an apartment in a white-glove building on Park Avenue and a mansion in Westchester County. He travels by private jet and, when in New York, is driven around in a black Cadillac SUV. He owns at least two horses, according to a lawsuit Kasowitz once filed against his daughter’s equestrian stable.
From the start, Kasowitz Benson had a hard-drinking culture that its leaders epitomized.
“It’s like a time warp,” said one former employee, citing the firm’s “macho, scotch-drinking, fist-fighting” ethos. Multiple former attorneys said they saw Kasowitz under the influence at the office, an accusation Kasowitz denies.
Associates would vie to join powerful partners in Kasowitz’s inner circle during the day at the Palm West Side, the steakhouse just across the street from the firm’s offices, and more recently, at another midtown steakhouse a couple of blocks away called Gallaghers. A framed magazine profile of Kasowitz hangs on the wall across from the bar at the Palm. Three former employees at the firm recall attorneys having to go across the street to the restaurant during the workday to consult Kasowitz on work matters, as he held court, drinking and eating. In response to questions, a spokesman for Kasowitz disputed that, saying he never had a drink during the day at the Palm outside of lunch and dinner and never handled firm business while at the restaurant.
Former employees pointed to reckless behavior by Kasowitz while drinking. ProPublica spoke with 10 people who attended the firm’s holiday party on Dec. 10, 2013, at the Edison Ballroom in Manhattan. Spouses and significant others were not invited.
Kasowitz, according to an attendee, was visibly inebriated, appearing to have a hard time standing on his feet without support. During the festivities, Kasowitz and a much younger woman not employed by the firm hit the dance floor. According to multiple eyewitnesses, they danced intimately in a way many employees felt was inappropriate for a work event. One person described it as “dirty dancing.” Some employees had seen Kasowitz’s dancing partner before: the then-25-year-old woman had been a hostess at the Palm. “It made women feel uncomfortable,” said one former female attorney who attended the party.
Kasowitz’s spokesman, Michael Sitrick, initially said Kasowitz “does not recall whether he danced with her at a holiday party over 3.5 years ago.” Later, he said that the descriptions of Kasowitz dancing at the party were “untrue.” Kasowitz said in a statement he never had “a romantic relationship” with the woman, “who many of us came to know (as we have many others) because she worked at the Palm Restaurant across the street from our offices.”
Kasowitz has been married for 25 years to Lori Kasowitz, a former Mayer Brown administrator and regular on the Manhattan charity circuit. The couple has one daughter.
Sitrick supplied eight statements from Kasowitz employees attesting to his character and behavior at the party and denying the allegations about the young woman. He said ProPublica could not quote the employees’ statements by name without their permission. ProPublica reached out to all of them. Two declined to be named, and six did not respond to requests to use their names.
That was not the only dramatic incident involving Kasowitz and the Palm hostess. Late one Thursday night in March 2013, the same woman was arrested for felony assault at Beauty & Essex, a lower Manhattan restaurant and club, after allegedly throwing a bottle that hit another woman in the head, according to NYPD records. A former partner in the law firm said that Kasowitz was with her and sustained an injury. Afterwards, Kasowitz walked around the office with two black eyes looking “like a raccoon,” according to the former partner.
Asked about that incident, Sitrick did not answer directly. He said Kasowitz attended a dinner at a restaurant where the woman was in attendance. As Kasowitz was leaving the restaurant, he was “assaulted by a total stranger,” Sitrick wrote in a statement. The Palm hostess was not involved in that assault and Kasowitz’s assailant was arrested, the spokesman said.
According to current and former attorneys at the firm, Kasowitz hit a low point in the winter of 2014-15. He abruptly left New York for Florida, where he owned a mansion at the Equestrian Club Estates in Wellington. Kasowitz sought alcohol treatment at the nearby Caron, a high-end rehab facility, according to two people who heard it from Kasowitz himself.
According to Sitrick, that winter had been difficult for Kasowitz because of the death of his father and that he had “sought out counseling” like “millions of Americans.” The spokesman did not answer directly whether Kasowitz was in rehab that winter but said he was not “at Caron in January 2015.”
Anyone whose job involves classified information, from White House officials to State Department diplomats to outside contractors, must get a security clearance. The applicant fills out paperwork disclosing where he or she has lived, worked and traveled abroad, as well as any contacts with foreign government officials. The form also asks about substance abuse, criminal history and mental health.
The government then undertakes an investigation that can take anywhere from weeks to over a year, depending on the position. In the case of White House positions, the FBI does the investigation. Agents comb through educational and financial records and speak to neighbors, former employers and associates. They then present a recommendation to the hiring agency, which makes the final call.
It’s not clear who currently makes decisions on clearances for White House hires. Spokeswoman Hope Hicks told ProPublica that the Trump administration does not comment on security clearance issues.
Alcohol abuse is one of many issues examined as part of the security clearance process. The standard form that those seeking clearance must fill out asks whether in the last seven years “your use of alcohol had a negative impact on your work performance, professional or personal relationships, your finances, or resulted in intervention by law enforcement.” According to the official security clearance guidelines, “Alcohol-related incidents at work, such as reporting for work in an intoxicated or impaired condition, [or] drinking on the job” can be a reason to withhold clearance.
While all clearance decisions are subjective, “You probably wouldn’t get your clearance if you had serious drinking problems in the last five years,” said Sheldon Cohen, a longtime Washington, D.C, security clearance lawyer.
The security clearance guidelines also flag personal conduct “that creates a vulnerability to exploitation, manipulation, or duress by a foreign intelligence entity.”
In 2016, over 1,100 people appealed their denial of security clearance. Alcohol and drug use were common reasons for such denials.
Attorneys representing clients in Washington frequently are required to seek security clearances in matters ranging from Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi hearings to employment disputes involving undercover CIA agents.
Already, there’s ample evidence that many aspects of the Russia case involve classified material. When former FBI Director James Comey testified about his interactions with President Trump, he said that he took notes after one classified briefing. “I wrote that on a classified device,” he said.
Adm. Michael Rogers, the head of the National Security Agency, testified last month of his interactions with Trump that could relate to the obstruction of justice issue: “Those conversations were classified.”
Meanwhile, congressional intelligence committees looking at the Russia issue have been scheduling hearings with key witnesses in classified sessions. A congressional meeting with special counsel Robert Mueller also took place in a classified setting.
In a statement, Kasowitz said that “we are unaware of and not involved in … any investigation involving ‘highly classified’ (or even classified) information.”
The firm has gone through multiple rounds of punishing layoffs. In the past six years, the number of lawyers has shrunk from around 370 to 260 today. Several major rainmakers have departed, including two of the most prominent women at the firm: Eleanor Alter, a well-known divorce lawyer, and Robin Cohen, who led Kasowitz’s insurance group.
Now its founder’s increasingly high-profile relationship with Trump has some partners worried that it could damage the firm’s brand and future business prospects.
Last year, with Election Day weeks away, Kasowitz fired off a letter threatening to sue The New York Times for a story in which women accused Trump of unwanted touching and sexual assault.
Kasowitz’s letter to the Times dismissed the women’s accounts as “false and malicious allegations” and demanded a retraction.
“People were embarrassed by the letter,” said one former attorney at Kasowitz’s firm.
The Times stood by its story. No lawsuit has been filed.
In February, several lawyers were upset when Michael Cohen, the former personal injury lawyer and real estate investor who is best known as Trump’s former in-house attorney, arrived at the office.
“I came to see him because we were working on several matters together after the inauguration,” Cohen told ProPublica regarding his multiple visits to Kasowitz. Former employees say the firm briefly converted a conference room for Cohen to use as an office, with his nameplate on it.
Cohen said the “multitude of legal matters” he and Kasowitz were discussing included working as co-counsel for a client. Asked if anything came of those talks, Cohen said yes.
Sitrick, the Kasowitz spokesman, said, “Michael Cohen never worked for the firm or occupied any office at Kasowitz Benson.” He added: “They were working together on one civil matter for President Trump.” He didn’t specify what it was.
During roughly the same period that Cohen was visiting the firm, The New York Times reported that he was under FBI scrutiny in the Russia case. Cohen has denied wrongdoing.
One Kasowitz Benson partner, Zachary Mazin, departed in May for another firm, McKool Smith. In a private Facebook post, Mazin praised many of his former colleagues, but said that he and his wife concluded their family could not be associated with the firm. “As the extent of the Firm’s support for Trump’s presidency became clear, Amanda and I concluded that we would not be living our values if I stayed,” he wrote,” adding: “Our most important consideration was the message that this choice sends to our daughters, both now and when they look back on this moment as adults.”
When Kasowitz traveled to Washington to respond to the Comey testimony, he brought at least two other lawyers from the firm with him.
In the rush to respond to the former FBI director’s testimony accusing President Trump of inappropriate meddling, a team of Kasowitz lawyers, along with another spokesman, Mark Corallo, drafted a statement that was riddled with errors. It started with the widely mocked misspelling, “Predisent Trump.”
Corallo said in an email that the statement went out to reporters with typos because of a technical glitch.
The day after the June 8 Comey hearing, sources linked to the Kasowitz team toldreporters they would file a complaint against the former FBI director for giving what they described as “privileged information” to the press. Three weeks later, that plan fizzledentirely.
In recent weeks, employees say, Kasowitz has tried to calm fears within the firm, holding a series of town hall-style meetings.
“You can work toward steering this president toward the best possible decisions whether or not you agree with his politics,” Kasowitz said at one such event, according to a person familiar with his remarks.
President Trump selected Kasowitz Benson to represent him despite high-profile instances in which judges criticized the firm for ethically questionable tactics.
In one particularly heated case, the firm sued investors on behalf of a Canadian insurer, Fairfax Financial Holdings. The company accused the hedge funds and others of conspiring to release information that would send the stock lower. Michael Bowe, Kasowitz’s deputy on the Russia case, was the firm’s lead lawyer.
In 2006, employees of Kasowitz’s in-house investigative arm, KBTF Consulting, tried to ensnare employees of Morgan Keegan, a broker-dealer whose insurance analyst was publishing critical research on Fairfax, according to a court document. They wanted to find out if Morgan Keegan gave certain clients access to its analysis before making its reports public. Kasowitz employees, including two lawyers who worked for the investigative arm, created a fake hedge fund called Blackwood Group Capital Partners. Posing as investors, the Kasowitz private investigators met with the Morgan Keegan analyst who covered Fairfax, asking if they could have advance copies of his reports. He said no.
Marc Kasowitz, President Trump’s lawyer in the Russia investigation, has bragged he was behind the firing of U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. Read the story.
Years later, Morgan Keegan hired a Rutgers law professor, John Leubsdorf, to assess whether the Kasowitz employees violated New Jersey ethical standards. The state bars attorneys from misrepresenting themselves. Leubsdorf called the firm’s conduct “inconsistent with the standards of professional responsibility.”
The Morgan Keegan attorneys tried to get Kasowitz’s firm thrown off the case, a request the judge rejected. But the judge said he was troubled by what the Kasowitz firm had done.
“I was brought up as a person and as an attorney to think you tell the truth, that that’s the only way you can deal with life. You tell the truth and, right, wrong, or indifferent, the truth will prevail. I don’t recall as an attorney ever participating in a deception such as [this] one,” Stephan Hansbury, a judge for the Superior Court of New Jersey, said at a 2011 hearing. “I don’t think that was an appropriate use of an investigator. I don’t think you’re supposed to go out and create evidence in order to justify a case. That’s not what the law allows.”
In 2007, Kasowitz had to defend his law firm from allegations of unethical conduct when another firm accused his team of violating a protective order in a legal proceeding. The order barred disclosure of bank records obtained during discovery in a federal shareholder lawsuit against Kasowitz’s client, a Canadian pharmaceutical company then known as Biovail.
But when Kasowitz’s law firm filed a separate complaint in New Jersey state court on behalf of Biovail, it used the bank records from the federal proceeding to bolster its case. Lawyers for the bank cried foul and in February 2007, Kasowitz had a testy conference call with Richard Owen, the U.S. district judge overseeing the federal case.
Owen was furious: “You get a whole bunch of the bank’s records and you’re sitting there drafting a complaint in New Jersey and you’re saying nobody ever said, ‘Where the hell did we get these records from, how come we have them?’” he asked Kasowitz, according to a court transcript of the call.
Kasowitz said his law firm did not know about the protective order and countered that the documents were not marked “confidential.” Owen did not see that as a good enough excuse and the two men went back-and-forth. Finally, Owen lost his temper.
“The record may show I hung up on Mr. Kasowitz,” said Owen, who has since died.
Kasowitz’s spokesman said the firm did nothing wrong in either case.
How Kasowitz’s aggressive style will play during the Russia inquiry is unclear — especially without a security clearance. On Monday, President Trump tweeted, “James Comey leaked CLASSIFIED INFORMATION to the media. That is so illegal!”
If that allegation were true, Trump’s own lawyer wouldn’t be able to review the material.
Annie Waldman, Jessica Huseman and Cezary Podkul contributed reporting to this story.
Do you have information about Marc Kasowitz or his firm? Contact Justin at justin@propublica.org or via Signal at 774-826-6240. Contact Jesse at jesse.eisinger@propublica.org or via Signal at 718-496-5233.
“Go home. We need Americans here!” white supremacist Jeremy Joseph Christian yelled at two black women — one wearing a hijab — on a train in Portland, Oregon, in May. According to news reports, when several commuters tried to intervene, he went on a rampage, stabbing three people. Two of them died.
Documenting Hate is an attempt to overcome the inadequate data collection on hate crimes and bias incidents in America. We’ve been compiling incident reports from civil-rights groups, as well as news reports, social media and law enforcement records. We’ve also asked people to tell us their personal stories of witnessing or being the victim of hate.
It’s been about six months since the project launched. Since then, we’ve been joined by more than 100 newsrooms around the country. Together, we’re verifying the incidents that have been reported to us — and telling people’s stories.
We’ve received thousands of reports, with more coming every day. They come from cities big and small, and from states blue and red. People have reported hate incidents from every part of their communities: in schools, on the road, at private businesses, in the workplace. ProPublica and our partners have produced more than 50 stories using the tips from the database, from New York to Seattle, Minneapolis to Phoenix. Some examples:
Several stories published by our partners focused on racial harassment on public transportation, using tips to illustrate something officials were also seeing. The New York City Commission on Human Rights observed a 480 percent increase in claims of discriminatory harassment between 2015 and 2016, according to The New York Times Opinion section. The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority recorded 24 cases of offensive graffiti through April, compared to 35 in all of last year, the Boston Globe found. Univision covered multiple incidents involving Latinos targeted in incidents on the New York City subway.
Combing through our database, Buzzfeed discovered there were dozens of reported incidents in K-12 schools in which students cited President Donald Trump’s name or slogans to harass minority classmates. This echoed a pattern Univision had reported on: In November, the Teaching Tolerance project at the Southern Poverty Law Center received more than 10,000 responses to an educator survey indicating an uptick in anti-Semitic, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant activity in schools.
We’ll spend the next six months continuing to tackle these questions and more. And we and our partners will keep working our way through the tips in our database, telling people’s stories and doing our best to understand what’s happening.
There are ways that you can help us move the project forward:
Have you been the victim or witness of a hate incident? Tell us your story.
Spread the word about the project — follow us on Facebook and Twitter.
