ProPublica

by Jessica Priest and Jeremy Schwartz, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Chris Morran, ProPublica

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

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

The endorsement of political candidates by religious leaders from the pulpit has grown increasingly brazen, aggressive and sophisticated in recent years.

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune have found 20 apparent violations in the past two years of the Johnson Amendment, a law that prohibits church leaders from intervening in political campaigns. Two occurred in the last two weeks as candidates crisscross Texas vying for votes. The number of potential violations found by the news outlets is greater than the total number of churches the IRS has investigated for intervening in political campaigns in the past decade, according to documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.

Under the law, pastors can endorse candidates in their personal capacities outside of church and weigh in on political issues from the pulpit as long as they don’t veer into support or condemnation of a particular candidate. But the law prohibits pastors from endorsing candidates during official church functions such as sermons.

Violations can lead to the revocation of a church’s tax-exempt status.

Descriptions of the 20 videos we identified are below. ProPublica and the Tribune had three experts review each of them. They agreed that the cases below violate the law. The experts were Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a tax and election law expert at the University of Notre Dame; Ellen Aprill, an emerita tax law professor at Loyola Marymount University’s law school; and Sam Brunson, a law professor at Loyola University Chicago.

We’re Not Endorsing a Candidate, but…

In these cases, pastors said they were not endorsing candidates, but their actions equated to an endorsement, according to the experts. Some acknowledged that the law did not allow them to endorse before making their statements.

Mercy Culture

Location: Fort Worth, Texas

Pastors: Landon Schott, Heather Schott and Steve Penate

Context: Pastors at Mercy Culture expressed support for political candidates in at least three sermons this year. All three instances violated the Johnson Amendment, according to the experts. During one such instance on Feb. 6, the Schotts and Penate spoke in favor of Nate Schatzline, who is running for a seat in the state House. “Now, obviously, churches don’t endorse candidates, but my name is Landon and I’m a person before I’m a pastor. And as an individual, I endorse Nate Schatzline,” Landon Schott said. Schatzline’s appearance ended with Schott stating: “We declare Mercy Culture Church is behind you. We declare Mercy Culture Church is praying for you. We declare Mercy Culture Church is supporting you.” Early voting for the March 1 primary began eight days after the church service. Schatzline qualified for a runoff, which he won on May 24. He will face Democratic nominee KC Chowdhury, a Democrat, in Tuesday’s general election.

Expert assessment:

Brunson: “If it’s part of the religious services, his disclaimer doesn’t work and it’s a clear violation of the Johnson Amendment (albeit an almost clever, and definitely self-aware, attempt to avoid that). Penate saying ‘do something with us’ is absolutely an endorsement. If they’re doing it in their capacity as pastors, this violates the Johnson Amendment.”

Church and candidate response: Mercy Culture, Landon Schott and Heather Schott did not respond to questions or requests for comment. Both Penate, a church elder who said he was not speaking on behalf of the church, and Schatzline stated in separate interviews that they did not believe any laws were broken. “Mercy Culture has never endorsed anyone,” Penate said. “Mercy Culture has never told anyone to vote a certain way. Never.”

Unite Church

Location: Anchorage, Alaska

Pastor: Josh Tanner

Context: On Jan. 16, Tanner introduced his congregation to Kelly Tshibaka, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, and let her speak about how she expressed her faith during her career in government. “OK, so I want you to know that we’re not just gonna be doing an endorsement for Kelly today, even though I am endorsing Kelly for U.S. Senate. And you can vote for whoever you want. I’m just letting you know who I’m voting for. It’s gonna be her.”

Tshibaka was among the top candidates to advance to the November general election. She will face incumbent Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Democrat Patricia Chesbro on Tuesday.

(Unite Church)

We’re not just gonna be doing an endorsement for Kelly today, even though I am endorsing Kelly for U.S. Senate. And you can vote for whoever you want. I’m just letting you know who I’m voting for. It’s gonna be her.

—Josh Tanner, pastor of Unite Church in Anchorage, Alaska

Expert assessment:

Aprill: “That the pastor says he personally endorses the candidate at an official function of the church makes the statement campaign intervention.”

Church and candidate response: Unite Church, Tanner and Tshibaka did not respond to requests for comment.

“Uncle Bill”: A New “Family”-Based Strategy

Some churches coordinated with one another to provide their congregations with a list that singled out specific candidates and omitted others.

Gateway Church

Location: Southlake, Texas, northwest of Dallas

Pastor: Robert Morris

Context: Morris is among a group of Dallas-area pastors who have coordinated to highlight certain candidates running for public office. Since 2021, Morris has shown his congregation the names of specific candidates for office at least three times. In each of those cases, Morris violated the Johnson Amendment, according to experts. (Morris also showed the names during an Oct. 23 service.) During an April 18, 2021, sermon, a day before the start of early voting, Morris displayed the names of nine candidates running in nonpartisan races for school board and City Council on a screen. “And so we’re not endorsing a candidate,” Morris said. “We’re not doing that. But we just thought because they’re a member of the family of God, that you might want to know if someone in the family and this family of churches is running.” All but one of the candidates whose names were shown either won their race or qualified for a runoff.

(Gateway Church)

We’re not endorsing a candidate. We’re not doing that. But we just thought because they’re a member of the family of God, that you might want to know if someone in the family and this family of churches is running.

—Robert Morris, pastor of Gateway Church in Southlake, Texas

Expert assessment:

Mayer: “This is a new (at least to me) technique, to join a group of like-minded churches and then identify to the congregation anyone who is a member of any of those churches who is a candidate for elected public office, as opposed to just identifying members of your congregation who are candidates. But this technique, even with the disclaimers made by the pastor here, is still a violation of the Johnson Amendment. While the pastor tries to avoid the violation by making various disclaimers and saying he is just giving the congregation the names and they can do what they want when they vote, those are not sufficient to cure the violation. But they do provide an argument that there is not a violation and so muddies the waters a bit, even though I believe that argument ultimately fails legally.”

Church response: Lawrence Swicegood, Gateway Media executive director, said in an emailed statement:

“At Gateway Church:

We DON’T:

• Support any specific political party

• Endorse political candidates

We DO:

• INFORM our church family of other church family members who are seeking office to serve our community.

• ENCOURAGE our church family to vote as God leads them.

• PRAY for our elected officials regardless of their political party, or affiliation.”

First Baptist Grapevine

Location: Grapevine, Texas, northwest of Dallas

Pastor: Doug Page

Context: On April 18, 2021, Page showed his congregation the same list of candidates as Morris. “This is not an endorsement by us. We are not endorsing anyone. However, if you’re part of a family, you’d like to know if Uncle Bill is running for office, right? And so that’s all we’re going to do is simply inform you,” Page said.

Expert assessment:

Mayer: “This is a violation of the Johnson Amendment for the same reasons as the Gateway Church violations.”

Church response: “As is clearly stated in the sermon clip you provided, these candidates were named for information only, not for endorsement. First Baptist Grapevine does not and will not endorse candidates for public office. Our primary focus is the gospel of Jesus Christ and seeking to follow His will for our lives,” Page said in an emailed statement.

Dueling Endorsements

For these nonpartisan races in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, pastors from different churches endorsed opposing candidates.

Koinonia Christian Church

Location: Arlington, Texas

Pastor: Ronnie W. Goines

Context: The first race involved candidates for the Mansfield school board. In a May 1 sermon, Goines implored his congregation to vote for Benita Reed in a local nonpartisan race on May 7. He said that Reed was the most qualified candidate in the race because she has worked in education for almost 30 years, but that scare tactics were being used against her. He then showed a mailer targeting Reed that read, “MISD put ‘woke’ politics over the safety of our children.” Then, Goines said, “All we got to do, people, is let’s go make a long line outside the polls and get this woman elected.” He later said: “Koinonia, we need, Dr. Reed needs a thousand votes. She needs a thousand votes. We got right at 10,000 members.”

Expert assessment:

Aprill: “This is a direct campaign intervention. He says, ‘She needs a thousand votes.’”

Church and candidate response: Reached by phone, Goines directed the news organizations to the church’s spokesperson, who did not respond. Reed did not respond to emailed questions.

More Church

Location: Mansfield, Texas, southwest of Dallas

Pastor: Truston Baba

Context: None of the candidates received more than 50% of the vote during the May 7 election, leading to a runoff between Reed and Craig Tipping. During a June 12 sermon, Baba encouraged his congregation to vote in the runoff election. He then praised Tipping. “And so, Craig, thank you for running. Thank you for being obedient to do what God’s called you to do. And I’m gonna support you. And I hope that people from More Church will not just complain but will actually get out and vote. You know, we go to the booth, and we go to get these little stickers. ‘I voted.’ Y’all know you get the ‘I voted’ sticker? Come on. There’s a big one. Get out. Get the sticker. Let’s vote and help make a difference locally. Come on. Give a hand for my friend Craig today.” Tipping, a physical therapist, won on June 18.

Expert Assessment:

Aprill: “Having only one candidate appear is partisan. This pastor states at an official event that he supports the candidate. As noted earlier, that violates the prohibition. Moreover, the pastor’s comments are an endorsement of the candidate generally.”

Church and candidate response: Neither More Church nor Baba responded to requests for an interview or emailed questions. Tipping did not respond to emails requesting comment.

Life-Changing Faith Christian Fellowship

Location: Frisco, Texas, north of Dallas

Pastor: Dono Pelham

Context: The second set of dueling sermons involved two candidates in a nonpartisan race for Frisco City Council. On May 2, 2021, Pelham told his congregation that his wife, Angelia Pelham, had qualified for the runoff. He encouraged them to vote in the June 5, 2021, election in which Pelham faced Jennifer White, a veterinarian who described herself as the only conservative in the race. “I’m not about to endorse, but you’ll get the message,” Pelham said.

(Life-Changing Faith Christian Fellowship)

I’m not about to endorse, but you’ll get the message.

—Dono Pelham, pastor of Life-Changing Faith Christian Fellowship in Frisco, Texas

Expert Assessment:

Brunson: “He’s basically endorsing his wife, and I think it would be hard to argue anything different.”

Church and candidate response: Dono Pelham said in an emailed statement that he did not endorse his wife in the runoff. Angelia Pelham said she and her husband were “very clear and very intentional” about not violating the Johnson Amendment.

KingdomLife Church

Location: Frisco, Texas

Pastor: Brandon Burden

Context: Six days before that runoff election for the Frisco City Council, Burden supported White from the pulpit. Burden told churchgoers that God was working through the congregation to take the country, and particularly North Texas, back to its Christian roots. He framed the race between White and Pelham as one against Frisco Mayor Jeff Cheney. Cheney had urged residents to put party politics aside and vote for Pelham because of her experience working for corporations such as PepsiCo Inc., The Walt Disney Co. and Cinemark. “I got a candidate that God wants to win,” Burden said. “I got a mayor that God wants to unseat. God wants to undo. God wants to shift the balance of power in our city. And I have jurisdiction over that this morning.” Pelham defeated White in the election.

(KingdomLife Church)

I got a candidate that God wants to win. I got a mayor that God wants to unseat. God wants to undo. God wants to shift the balance of power in our city.

—Brandon Burden, pastor of KingdomLife Church in Frisco, Texas

Expert assessment:

Brunson: “It’s pretty obvious, from the context and other things that he has said, that it is clear who he is saying God wants to win.”

Church and candidate response: Neither Burden nor KingdomLife responded to multiple interview requests or to emailed questions. White said she wasn’t in attendance during the sermon. She said she does not believe pastors should endorse candidates from the pulpit, but she welcomed churches becoming more politically active. “I think that the churches over the years have been a big pretty big disappointment to the candidates in that they won’t take a political stance,” White said. “So I would love it if churches would go ahead and come out and actually discuss things like morality. Not a specific party, but at least make sure people know where the candidates stand on those issues. And how to vote based on that.”

“Vote Her Behind Right Out of Office”: Criticizing the Incumbent, Praising the Challenger

Pulpit criticism of sitting officeholders is permitted, except during campaigns when officeholders are running as candidates. In the cases below, pastors criticized the incumbents while praising their challengers during election season.

Legacy Church

Location: Albuquerque, New Mexico

Pastor: Steve Smothermon

Context: During a July 10 sermon, Smothermon attacked New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, a Democrat who supports abortion rights, and praised Republican Mark Ronchetti for seeking to end abortion in New Mexico. “We have the Wicked Witch of the North. Or you have Mark Ronchetti,” Smotherman said. Later in the sermon, Smotherman said, “You better get registered to vote, and we better vote her behind right out of office.” Grisham and Ronchetti will face each other in Tuesday’s gubernatorial election.

Expert assessment:

Aprill: “This is a campaign intervention. The pastor is endorsing Ronchetti and opposing Ronchetti’s opponent.”

Church and candidate response: Legacy Church, Smothermon and Ronchetti did not respond to requests for comment.

Friendship-West Baptist Church

Location: Dallas

Pastor: Frederick Douglass Haynes III

Context: At the end of the church service on May 8, Haynes criticized state leaders’ response to the deadly February 2021 winter storm and praised Beto O’Rourke for donating $25,000 to the church during that time. Haynes then invited O’Rourke to speak with his congregation. “I just want to say, because I think we need to know this in a very public way, that when there was a crisis February last year and the ineptitude of our state leadership, and then you had (Ted) Cruz going to Cancun. Lord Jesus, so Cruz went to Cancun and then (Greg) Abbott’s friends got paid. And while that was going on, Beto O’Rourke was using resources from his foundation. He was on the ground, serving people, blessing people and just, just, just doing what God wants us to do.” O’Rourke, who announced in November 2021 that he would challenge Greg Abbott in the race for governor, then gave a 10-minute speech about how the faith community played a pivotal role in the passage of the Voting Rights Act. O’Rourke was identified as a gubernatorial candidate in a caption on the church’s livestream. He ended his May speech by expressing hope that people of color who were targeted by the restrictive voting laws passed by Republicans last year would provide the margin of victory on Nov. 8.

(Friendship-West Baptist Church)

So Cruz went to Cancun and then Abbott’s friends got paid. And while that was going on, Beto O’Rourke was using resources from his foundation. He was on the ground, serving people, blessing people and just, just, just doing what God wants us to do.

—Frederick Douglass Haynes III, pastor of Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas

Expert Assessment:

Mayer: “Assuming the church is responsible for the caption (that ran under O’Rourke on the church’s livestream), this is a clear violation of the Johnson Amendment because the church explicitly identifies Beto O’Rourke as a candidate and the pastor expresses support for him.”

Church and candidate response: Haynes did not respond to calls and emails requesting comment. Chris Evans, communication director for O’Rourke’s campaign, said in an emailed statement: “Beto has enjoyed worshiping alongside the congregation at Friendship-West Baptist Church for years and is proud to call Pastor Haynes his friend. Pastor Haynes has long led the on-the-ground work of bringing people together to deliver for his community that Greg Abbott has absolutely failed and to fight for equality, justice, and opportunity across Texas.”

“My Dear Friend”: Hosting a Candidate

Some pastors introduced candidates during their sermons and allowed them to speak, while others interviewed them during church functions. The Johnson Amendment allows candidates to visit churches and speak to parishioners before elections, but it requires that churches maintain a “nonpartisan atmosphere” and give all candidates the same opportunity to visit.

St. Luke "Community" United Methodist Church

Location: Dallas

Pastor: Richie Butler

Context: On Oct. 23, a day before early voting began, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke visited the church. Butler introduced him as “the next governor of Texas.” He told parishioners: “We want to encourage him as he continues to run the race that is before him, and he needs us to get him across the finish line.” O’Rourke urged parishioners to vote and then gave a brief speech calling for fixing the state’s electric grid and expressing alarm over the high rate of school shootings and gun violence.

Expert Assessment:

Mayer: “This situation is a clear violation of the Johnson Amendment. Beto O’Rourke is introduced as the ‘next governor of Texas,’ which highlights both that he is a candidate and one whom the church supports. And O’Rourke’s comments are a sales pitch for his candidacy. There is no indication that any opposing candidate has been given a similar opportunity and, even if he had been, the favorable introduction of O’Rourke would still be across the line.”

Church and candidate response: In a statement, Butler said: “Black churches have been important hubs for civic engagement and organization in the fight for social justice since Reconstruction. The mixing of faith-based congregations and electoral engagement is not a new concept.” O’Rourke did not respond to a request for comment or emailed questions.

Grace Woodlands

Location: The Woodlands, Texas, north of Houston

Pastor: Steve Riggle

Context: Also on Oct. 23, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a Republican running for reelection, visited Grace Woodlands. During the sermon, Riggle said that Texas needs leaders like Patrick who “will stand for values that are critical to the future of this nation.” Riggle praised Patrick as a “strong person” of faith whom “God has given us at the very top.” Patrick then spoke to the congregation and cast the election in stark terms. “This is not a race between Republicans and Democrats,” he said. “This is a race about darkness and light. This is a race about powers and principalities. And the devil is at full work in this country.”

Expert Assessment:

Brunson: “This is a clear endorsement of Patrick by the pastor of a church acting in his capacity as pastor in the course of ordinary church meetings. This violates the Johnson Amendment.”

Church and candidate response: Riggle said that his church did not endorse any candidate and said his introduction was focused on biblical values, not politics. He added that he believes the Johnson Amendment should be overturned.

“The government has no right at any time to, in any way, tell the church who it can have or who it cannot have to speak,” he said. “It can’t tell the church what it can preach on or not preach on. This is America, and we believe in a free church, not one controlled by the government.”

Patrick did not respond to requests for comment or emailed questions.

Sojourn Church

Location: Carrollton, Texas, north of Dallas

Pastor: Chris McRae

Context: During a May 1 sermon, McRae told parishioners that they were being lied to by an “invisible enemy” about issues of race, gender and abortion. He said they needed to “wake up” and confront the lies. McRae then invited Kevin Falconer, the mayor of Carrollton and a Republican candidate for Denton County Commissioner, to the pulpit to speak. “I can’t, as my friends will say, I can’t endorse him. But I do know that God loves Falcons,” McRae said. He also told his congregation he thought Steve Babick would win the upcoming nonpartisan mayoral election to fill the vacancy left by Falconer. Both Falconer and Babick won their elections.

(Sojourn Church)

I can’t, as my friends will say, I can’t endorse him. But I do know that God loves Falcons.

—Chris McRae, pastor of Sojourn Church in Carrollton, Texas

Expert assessment:

Aprill: “That is campaign intervention to me, even though the pastor states that he is asking Kevin to speak about communion. Context makes it an indirect campaign intervention.”

Church and candidate response: Sojourn Church, McRae and Falconer did not respond to requests for comment. Babick said he was unaware of any statements McRae made about him or his candidacy. “I’m not necessarily in favor or against it,” Babick said of the Johnson Amendment.

Woodlands Church

Location: The Woodlands, Texas, north of Houston

Pastor: Kerry Shook

Context: On Jan. 16, Shook introduced Christian Collins to his congregation. Collins was campaigning for the Republican nomination for Texas’ 8th Congressional District, which includes parts of Houston and several surrounding cities. “And so, the primaries are coming up in March, and I just wanted y’all to get to know Christian, my dear friend, and his love for Jesus Christ and pray for all of those Christ followers who are doing something that I would never do,” Shook said. The sermon occurred two and a half months before the Republican primary election. Collins lost the race.

Expert Assessment:

Aprill: “Specifically naming the primary and the candidate and saying we need Christ followers makes it campaign intervention to me.”

Church and candidate response: Woodlands Church, Kerry Shook Ministries and Kerry Shook did not respond to requests for comment. Through a spokesperson, Collins declined to comment.

Abundant Life Church

Location: Willis, Texas, north of Houston

Pastor: Dave Stovall

Context: At the end of his sermon on Dec. 5, 2021, Stovall introduced Collins as a candidate for the 8th Congressional District. He praised Collins for founding the Texas Youth Summit, a two-day conference that promotes conservative political activism among students. “Would you stand in honor of Christian Collins and the leader, servant-leader that he is and what he has done for this community?” Stovall asked. Collins had pledged to join the congressional Freedom Caucus, a voting bloc made up of some of the most conservative members of Congress, in contrast to his chief opponent, former Navy SEAL Morgan Luttrell, who won the Republican primary.

(Abundant Life Church)

Would you stand in honor of Christian Collins and the leader, servant-leader that he is and what he has done for this community?

—Dave Stovall, pastor of Abundant Life Church in Willis, Texas

Expert Assessment:

Mayer: “This is a clear violation of the Johnson Amendment for the same reasons as the previous passage from Woodlands Church. (The similarity of this passage and the one from Woodlands Church makes me wonder if the pastors had been given suggested scripts from the same source.)”

Church and candidate response: Abundant Life Church and Stovall did not respond to requests for comment, including the news organizations’ question about whether it had invited Luttrell or any other candidate to speak at the church. Through a spokesperson, Collins declined to comment.

Destiny Christian Church

Location: Rocklin, California, northwest of Sacramento

Pastor: Greg Fairrington

Context: In a conversation with California gubernatorial candidate Anthony Trimino, a Republican, during a May 15 church service, Fairrington told his congregation that the state needs a leader with a “vibrant faith in Jesus Christ.” He praised Trimino for his effort to unseat Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, and prayed for the Republican candidate. “Lord God, that you would inspire voters here in the state of California to cast their vote for the sanctity of life. Lord God, that they would get behind a conservative Christian candidate,” Fairrington said. Trimino came in sixth in an open party primary election on June 7. He did not advance to the November general election.

(Destiny Christian Church)

Lord God, that you would inspire voters here in the state of California to cast their vote for the sanctity of life. Lord God, that they would get behind a conservative Christian candidate.

—Greg Fairrington, pastor of Destiny Christian Church in Rocklin, California

Expert Assessment:

Mayer: “This passage is a clear violation of the Johnson Amendment because it implicitly identifies Anthony as a candidate, specifically mentions voting and calls on the audience to get behind a conservative, pro-life Christian candidate (implicitly, such as Anthony).”

Church and Candidate Response: Destiny Christian Church, Fairrington and Trimino did not respond to requests for comment.

Carver Park Baptist Church

Location: Waco, Texas

Pastor: Gaylon P. Foreman

Context: On April 7, Foreman livestreamed a Q&A at the church with Marlon Jones, a candidate for the Waco Independent School District school board. “Again, I endorse him fully and completely, and I wish that you would prayerfully consider helping support this mighty man of God, so he can help make kingdom impact on the Waco ISD,” Foreman said. Experts said Johnson Amendment violations can occur at any church function, not just during sermons. Jones lost the May 7 election.

Expert Assessment:

Brunson: “This pastor doesn’t even pretend not to be endorsing the candidate, which is the honest approach. He’s clearly endorsing.”

(Carver Park Baptist Church)

I endorse him fully and completely, and I wish that you would prayerfully consider helping support this mighty man of God.

—Gaylon P. Foreman, pastor of Carver Park Baptist Church in Waco, Texas

Church and candidate response: Foreman defended his discussion with Jones. “I told him about the show and he agreed to appear. I didn’t hear from or have any other contact with any other candidates or I would have gladly allowed them to appear as well,” Foreman said. “On the show, I did acknowledge that I personally supported him and that I felt that he was the best candidate. I also asked about how our community could help him. For as long as I’ve been serving as pastor, I’ve always made it clear that I never tell others who to vote for but do encourage everyone to vote.”

Jones said in an interview with the news organizations that he thought Foreman provided information and did not violate the Johnson Amendment. “I think during the broadcast Pastor Foreman was very intentional about encouraging people to vote but not necessarily saying this is who we should vote for.” Jones, who is also a pastor, added: “Saying ‘this is something I am doing’ does not necessarily mean your congregation will do that.”

Praising Trump Before the 2020 Election

In the days leading up to the 2020 election, some pastors extolled the ways in which former President Donald Trump had delivered for Christians.

Cowboy Church of Corsicana

Location: Corsicana, Texas, southeast of Dallas

Pastor: Derek Rogers

Context: On Oct. 14, 2020, Rogers told his congregation that even though pastors aren’t supposed to talk about politics, parishioners needed to support Trump’s reelection bid. “I do not understand how anybody that calls himself a Christian could vote for the agenda and the platform of Joe Biden,” he said. “President Trump, he ain’t the greatest dude in the whole world, but he’s the closest thing that we got to what we need.”

(Cowboy Church of Corsicana)

President Trump, he ain’t the greatest dude in the whole world, but he’s the closest thing that we got to what we need.

—Derek Rogers, pastor of Cowboy Church of Corsicana in Corsicana, Texas

Expert Assessment:

Mayer: “This is a clear violation of the Johnson Amendment because it identifies two candidates by name and explicitly tells the congregation for which of them they should vote.”

Church response: Rogers did not respond to requests for comment.

Beth Sar Shalom

Location: Carrollton, Texas, north of Dallas

Pastor: Steven Ger

Context: Ger explained to congregants why they should support Trump over Biden for president two days before the election. “I like what our president has done. He made his promises. And he kept his promises.” He later called Trump the “most pro-life president ever” and said, “Vice President Biden would be the most pro-abortion president ever.”

(Beth Sar Shalom)

I like what our president has done. He made his promises. And he kept his promises. He moved the embassy to Jerusalem. He made peace between Israel and three Arab nations. ‘Can’t be done.’ He did it.

—Steven Ger, Beth Sar Shalom in Carrollton, Texas

Expert Assessment:

Mayer: “The passage is a clear violation of the Johnson Amendment because it identifies two candidates, describes their positions and then says which position (and therefore candidate) should be voted for.”

Church response: Executive Pastor Don Jones initially said he was willing to be interviewed, but neither he nor Ger responded to follow-up calls and emailed questions.

Trinity Family Church

Location: Forney, Texas, east of Dallas

Pastor: Marty Reid

Context: In a sermon two days before the Nov. 3, 2020, election, Reid told his congregation that even though Trump “doesn’t know much” about Christianity, “I believe God has raised up President Trump for such a time as this".

Expert Assessment:

Aprill: “Clearly an endorsement of Trump and campaign intervention.”

Church response: Trinity Family Church and Reid did not respond to requests for comment.

by Jeremy Schwartz, Jessica Priest and Perla Trevizo

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

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

Texas gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who is seeking reelection, have been crisscrossing the state in the lead-up to Tuesday’s election, visiting megachurches and smaller houses of worship packed tight with parishioners.

The stops are part of a longstanding tradition for political candidates that often accelerates as Election Day nears.

Two Sundays ago, O’Rourke, a Democrat, and Patrick, a Republican, visited different churches where pastors praised them and allowed them to give speeches about the upcoming election. This was in violation of federal law, according to tax law experts. Known as the Johnson Amendment, the law bars tax-exempt organizations from intervening in political campaigns.

At St. Luke “Community” United Methodist Church in Dallas on the morning of Oct. 23, pastor Richie Butler introduced O’Rourke to his congregation as “the next governor of Texas.”

Texas Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke visits St. Luke “Community” Methodist Church on Oct. 23, one day before early voting began. (ProPublica/Texas Tribune screenshot from a St. Luke “Community” United Methodist Church video.)

“He needs us to get him across the finish line,” Butler told parishioners.

O’Rourke then walked to the stage, where he gave a speech that would be familiar to those who have seen him on the campaign trail. He called for fixing the state’s electric grid and expressed alarm over the high rate of school shootings and gun violence.

“If our votes were not important, they would not be trying so hard to keep us from voting in this election, and our vote is how we overcome,” O’Rourke told the crowd.

The same morning, hundreds of miles away, pastor Steve Riggle introduced Patrick to his congregation at Grace Woodlands church north of Houston by saying the lieutenant governor is someone that “God has given us at the very top.”

“If the nation is to be saved, it’s going to take some leaders who, beyond their concern about being reelected, will stand for values that are critical to the future of this nation,” Riggle said. “Dan Patrick is one of those.”

Patrick then took the stage and cast the election in stark terms. “This is not a race between Republicans and Democrats,” he told the congregation. “This is a race about darkness and light. This is a race about power and principalities. And the devil is at full work in this country.”

He later added: ”I don’t even recognize the other party. It’s been taken over by communists and socialists.”

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick speaks to congregants at Grace Woodlands church on Oct. 23. (ProPublica/Texas Tribune screenshot from a Grace Woodlands church video)

Tax law experts told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune that the pastors’ support of the candidates in their sermons violated the Johnson Amendment. The experts also raised concerns about what appeared to be the churches’ failure to give equal time to their opponents. O’Rourke is facing Republican Gov. Greg Abbott in the general election, and Patrick is being challenged by Democrat Mike Collier.

“Beto O’Rourke is introduced as the ‘next Governor of Texas,’ which highlights both that he is a candidate and one whom the church supports,” said Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a tax and election law expert at the University of Notre Dame. “And O’Rourke’s comments are a sales pitch for his candidacy. There is no indication that any opposing candidate has been given a similar opportunity, and, even if he had been, the favorable introduction of O’Rourke would still be across the line.”

St. Luke pastor Butler did not answer questions about Mayer’s assessment or whether the church had also invited Abbott to speak.

“Black churches have been important hubs for civic engagement and organization in the fight for social justice since Reconstruction,” Butler said in a statement. “The mixing of faith-based congregations and electoral engagement is not a new concept.”

O’Rourke did not respond to questions about the visit.

Sam Brunson, a law professor at Loyola University Chicago, said the language Riggle used while introducing the lieutenant governor was an “endorsement of Patrick by the pastor of a church acting in his capacity as pastor in the course of ordinary church meetings.”

Never miss the most important reporting from ProPublica’s newsroom. Subscribe to the Big Story newsletter.

Riggle said in an interview that his church did not endorse any candidate and that his introduction was focused on biblical values, not politics. He added that he believes the Johnson Amendment should be overturned.

“The government has no right, at any time, to, in any way, tell the church who it can have or who it cannot have to speak,” he said. “It can’t tell the church what it can preach on or not preach on. This is America, and we believe in a free church. Not one controlled by the government.”

Patrick did not respond to requests for comment or to emailed questions.

Last week, ProPublica and the Tribune reported about numerous apparent violations by church pastors who supported political candidates from the pulpit. A candidate endorsement is a “clear violation” under IRS rules. But the law itself is complex and can be vague, leaving gray areas that make identifying other violations more difficult. Below are answers about what it does and doesn’t do.

What is the Johnson Amendment?

In 1954, then-U.S. Sen. Lyndon Baines Johnson of Texas proposed an amendment to the U.S. tax code that prohibited nonprofits, including religious institutions, from involvement in political campaigns.

The amendment was uncontroversial at the time. It passed with bipartisan support and was signed into law by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower.

Though Johnson did not single out churches, religious organizations are subject to the law because they are nonprofit organizations. Violations can result in revocation of their tax-exempt status.

What does the Johnson Amendment prohibit?

Nonprofit organizations are barred from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, “any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.”

Contributions to political campaigns made on behalf of the tax-exempt organizations supporting or opposing a candidate also “clearly violate the prohibition against political campaign activity,” according to the IRS.

The IRS periodically produces lengthy guides that spell out the “facts and circumstances” the agency considers when determining whether political activity is allowable.

In some cases, such as pulpit endorsements, violations can be clearly identified. But violations can be harder to distinguish in other cases.

O’Rourke made another stop on Oct. 23 at The Chosen Vessel Cathedral in Fort Worth, where pastor Marvin L. Sapp introduced him to the crowd. “If y’all notice, nobody else came,” Sapp said. “But we recognize people that come to see about us.”

He then said O’Rourke would be in the lobby after the service to “meet and greet.”

“This situation is a close call,” Mayer said. He said the visit could be a violation because Sapp gave candidates a chance to meet with congregants on church property after the service.

Brunson said that if O’Rourke solicited votes or funds in the lobby it would likely be a violation.

In a statement, Sapp said he did not believe the visit was barred by the Johnson Amendment and pointed out that O’Rourke did not address parishioners during the service.

“I have been a pastor for 19 years and have never endorsed a candidate,” Sapp said. “I understand the parameters of the Johnson Amendment and do not violate them. While I believe in the inherent separation of church and state, I also believe in empowering marginalized communities, the African American community in particular, to participate in the democratic process.”

What does the Johnson Amendment allow?

Religious institutions are allowed to invite candidates to speak to their congregations.

But if one person is invited in their capacity as a candidate, everyone in the race must be given equal opportunity to address parishioners, according to IRS rules. Fundraising is also not allowed during the appearance and the church must maintain a “nonpartisan atmosphere,” the rules state.

“As long as all candidates are invited and there’s no endorsement, candidates can appear at a church and can even explain why the congregation should vote for them,” Brunson said.

While only inviting one candidate violates the law, enforcement is difficult.

“All sorts of houses of worship do this,” Ellen Aprill, an emerita tax law professor at Loyola Marymount University’s law school, said. “Think about the enormous amount of resources it would take for the IRS to enforce the ban and to do so in a way that avoids accusations of political favoritism.”

In some cases, a single politician can be invited to speak as long as they are not identified as a candidate.

On the evening of Oct. 23, Patrick attended a “Night to Honor Israel” event at Cornerstone Church in San Antonio.

Pastor John Hagee introduced Patrick. He avoided violating the prohibition on supporting a political candidate because he praised the lieutenant governor in his capacity as a current public official and did not mention his candidacy, Mayer said. The tax law expert added that Patrick also did not mention the upcoming election, voting or his candidacy.

Churches also can provide voter guides and have voter registration drives as long as they avoid showing preference for specific candidates. They can also weigh in on such issues and policies as abortion if they steer clear of targeting individual candidates. The Congressional Research Service acknowledged in 2013 that “the line between issue advocacy and campaign activity can be difficult to discern.”

Religious institutions have more flexibility in supporting or opposing ballot measures like bonds and referendums that don’t involve specific candidates.

In Michigan, Catholic churches have put up signs against a ballot measure that would enshrine the right to abortion access in the state constitution. They’ve also spoken out against the measure during sermons and sent campaign letters to parishioners urging them to oppose it.

The Detroit archdiocese told The Detroit News last month that IRS rules allow the church to participate in political activity related to the ballot proposal and that it would continue to follow the law “while remaining firm” in its advocacy efforts. Critics have accused the church of violating IRS rules.

Churches can be involved in noncandidate elections as long as such lobbying work is not “substantial,” which the tax code does not explicitly define, Mayer said.

Outside of official church functions or publications, pastors and other church leaders can endorse candidates and engage in political activity in their private capacity. A religious leader’s church affiliation can be identified in such an endorsement, as long as it’s clear that the church leader is not speaking on behalf of the institution.

How likely is the IRS to crack down on Johnson Amendment violators?

Not very.

In the 68 years since the Johnson Amendment became law, the IRS has only publicly acknowledged revoking the tax-exempt status of one church. (The Congressional Research Service said a second church lost its status, but its identity is unknown.)

In 1992, just four days before the presidential election, Branch Ministries in New York paid for ads in USA Today and the Washington Times attacking then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, a Democrat, who was challenging Republican President George H.W. Bush.

The ads started with the headline: “Christian Beware. Do not put the economy ahead of the Ten Commandments.” They claimed Clinton violated scripture by supporting “abortion on demand,” homosexuality and the distribution of condoms to teenagers in public schools. Clinton, the ads stated, was “openly promoting policies that are in rebellion to God’s laws.”

The revocation of the church’s tax-exempt status spurred a yearslong legal battle. In 2000, a U.S. appeals court ruled in favor of the IRS.

During a four-year period that started in 2004, the IRS sent dozens of churches warning letters about political activity and initiated some audits. The result of the audits is unclear.

Then, in 2013, a scandal related to nonprofits that were not churches helped further dampen the agency’s enthusiasm for politically sensitive investigations, said Philip Hackney, a University of Pittsburgh law professor and former IRS official.

Congressional Republicans accused the agency of bias against conservative groups after the Treasury Department’s inspector general found that the agency had given extra scrutiny to Tea Party nonprofits seeking tax-exempt status. Two high-ranking IRS officials stepped down.

“They got burned badly as a result of being in that space,” Hackney said, adding that the incident led IRS leaders to be particularly “careful about how they tread in those waters.”

The IRS has not released data on enforcement of church political activity over the last decade and does not publicly confirm individual investigations.

But in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from ProPublica and the Tribune last year, the agency produced a severely redacted spreadsheet indicating the agency had launched inquiries into 16 churches since 2011. IRS officials shielded the results of the probes, and they have declined to answer specific questions.

How can I contribute to reporting about political activity?

Tell us about what you’re seeing by filling out this form. This will help us pursue reporting relevant to our readers.

Tell Us How Religious Organizations in Your Area Involve Themselves in Elections

by Mick Dumke

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

For months, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has pushed a plan to turn valuable public housing land over to a soccer team owned by a billionaire. But as the deal awaits approval from the federal government, Lightfoot and the Chicago Housing Authority have kept key details hidden from the public and even other government officials.

The CHA has told city aldermen that the Chicago Fire soccer team will likely pay up to $40 million to lease the 23-acre site for 40 or more years, with the proceeds used to benefit low-income families. But CHA officials have been secretive about specifics of the deal, including how they arrived at that price for prime land in a gentrifying neighborhood.

The CHA already received City Council approval for a zoning change needed for the deal, and it has formally asked the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to back the plan as well. But agency officials have not shared a lease agreement with the council or HUD.

And they’ve been evasive about whether they have an agreement in writing at all. When ProPublica asked for a copy of the lease, the CHA’s freedom of information officer said the agency didn’t have one. “There is no responsive record, in draft form or otherwise,” he wrote in an email.

The CHA also refused to disclose records showing the appraisal and analysis used to determine the value of the land it plans to lease. The agency cited an exemption in the Illinois Freedom of Information Act that allows it to keep documents secret if they are considered “preliminary” or “draft” proposals. A CHA spokesperson said the agency will release the appraisal once the deal is finalized.

But by that point the public won’t be able to do anything about it.

“It really raises a fundamental question about whether they’re proceeding in this way to avoid anyone knowing [the details] until it’s been done,” said Joe Ferguson, the city’s former inspector general. Ferguson recently launched Re-Imagine Chicago, a nonprofit aimed at addressing flaws in the city’s governing structure.

By keeping information secret until the deal is complete, Ferguson said, the CHA is at odds with a key tenet of good government: transparency. “This is the Chicago way in its most dark form,” he said.

In response to questions, a CHA spokesperson wrote in a statement that the agreement with the Fire has not been finalized, but that the general terms of the “partnership” have the support of resident leaders.

“CHA has been negotiating with the Fire to get the best possible deal for the agency and our residents and at this point we have agreed with them on the broad terms,” the statement said. “Publicly releasing appraisal documents or the terms under discussion during the negotiations would place CHA at a competitive disadvantage.”

The CHA has not sought any other bids or alternate deals for the land. It did not respond to a question from ProPublica asking why.

And while elected resident leaders have backed the Fire proposal, other residents are opposed, including a group that has been meeting regularly near the site.

The CHA land, just west of downtown, was once part of the ABLA Homes development. But most of the buildings at ABLA were leveled after the CHA launched its citywide Plan for Transformation two decades ago. Despite plans for replacement housing on the 23-acre site, it remained vacant as the agency struggled to fulfill its commitments. The CHA has finished less than a third of the new homes it promised at ABLA.

Land in the Near West Side neighborhood has grown valuable. In 2017, a one-acre parcel two blocks away from the site designated for the Fire was appraised at $2.7 million, though the CHA ended up leasing that to a nonprofit organization for just $1 a year for 99 years.

As in that case, the CHA didn’t undertake a competitive bidding process to determine the best use or price of the land offered to the Fire, which are owned by billionaire business leader Joe Mansueto, an ally of Lightfoot’s.

Instead, team officials sent word to the city that they were looking for land to build a new practice facility. Mayoral aides worked with them for months on a plan to take over a Northwest Side park tucked between three public schools, and school officials even drafted a lease agreement, which they later released to ProPublica.

But when those talks stalled, Lightfoot aides offered the CHA land to the Fire. The team has previously said that when the city offered the site, the Fire saw it as an “opportunity” to invest in the Near West Side and its residents while building a “world-class performance center.” (Originally their plan called for using nearly 26 acres of CHA property, though they subsequently altered it to fit on 23 acres.)

In December, weeks before Lightfoot said anything publicly about the Fire deal, CHA officials launched an environmental review of the property, one of the first steps it has to take before disposing of the land. By spring, the CHA had commissioned an appraisal of the land’s value that cost the agency a little more than $35,000, records show.

On May 2, officials from the CHA and the Fire held a meeting with public housing residents. They promised that as part of the agreement, the Fire would pay money that the CHA could use to renovate sections of the ABLA development that were not dismantled in the Plan for Transformation. The officials also said the Fire would provide job opportunities and fund other neighborhood investments, including new parking and recreational space.

ABLA’s elected leaders and some other residents welcomed the deal with the Fire, according to the CHA’s records of the meeting. But others noted that they had heard promises from the CHA before. They pointed out that the CHA had failed to deliver hundreds of units of replacement housing at ABLA.

“CHA needs to build the property back that they tore down,” Mary Rush, one of the skeptical residents, said at the meeting.

More than five months later, Rush told ProPublica that she still hadn’t learned any specifics about the terms of the Fire deal and still objects to it. “That soccer field is not going to do anything for us,” she said, “and we’re going to look over there and wonder what happened to the housing.”

Later in May, the CHA board voted unanimously to seek HUD’s approval for the deal without any public discussion of lease specifics. When a board member asked how many appraisals the CHA would use to determine the deal terms, Ann McKenzie, the CHA’s director of development, said, “We are considering two and maybe a third will be necessary.”

The board’s resolution then granted agency CEO Tracey Scott the authority to “negotiate and enter into a long-term lease with the Chicago Fire Football Club” and to “perform such actions as may be necessary or appropriate” to carry out the deal once HUD signs off.

It was June before any details of the CHA’s deal with the Fire were released to the public, and even then they weren’t easy to find: They were summarized in just a few lines of a 461-page environmental report posted deep within the city’s website. The report stated that the Fire would lease the property for at least 40 years, paying an $8 million “lump sum” plus “approximately” $1 million a year in rent, adding up to $48 million total.

Over the next few months, behind closed doors, the terms apparently shifted so that the CHA would get less money.

In September, a number of aldermen had questions when a City Council committee considered a zoning change needed for the proposed soccer facility. The aldermen had not received any information about the terms of the lease, according to several who attended.

McKenzie told them that the agency had commissioned an appraisal and analysis to determine the value of the lease. None of the aldermen asked to see it, and McKenzie didn’t offer to share it.

She told aldermen the lease would be for 40 or more years and the Fire would pay $8 million upfront — just as the environmental report had stated. But McKenzie said the team’s annual payments would be as much as $800,000 a year — compared with the $1 million a year outlined before. That adds up to at least $8 million less over 40 years.

McKenzie indicated that the “reduction” was due to the costs of environmental cleanup, which were estimated to be $4 million.

A number of aldermen weren’t convinced that the deal was good for the CHA or its residents. The committee voted 7-5 against the zoning change for the facility. The next morning, though, Lightfoot’s allies called for another vote and were able to advance the measure.

When the full council took it up a few hours later, two aldermen moved to delay the vote at least a month so they could have more time to review the deal. Lightfoot, wielding the gavel, declared them out of order. The zoning change was approved.

That afternoon, the CHA submitted an application asking for HUD’s formal approval of the Fire deal. The materials included illustrations of the Fire’s proposed facility, records of meetings with residents and a copy of a letter of support from Lightfoot. It did not include details about the proposed lease agreement.

The application to HUD did include a copy of the appraisal the CHA said it is using to determine the lease terms. But in the records provided to ProPublica, the pages with the financial analysis are missing because the CHA considers the information “preliminary.” The public will be able to see the full appraisal, the agency said, but only after the Fire deal is finalized.

It was the only appraisal the CHA commissioned for the property. The CHA says the Fire also conducted an appraisal, which produced results similar to the agency’s own.

Alderman Byron Sigcho Lopez, who represents part of ABLA, said it’s outrageous that the CHA hasn’t disclosed the details of the deal with residents or elected officials.

“Imagine such a big deal, such a big agreement like this, and they don’t have all the documents available,” he said. “There has to be a cost-benefit analysis. Is this in the best interest of the ABLA residents? Is this in the best interest of the city of Chicago? How can you answer that when you don’t even know what the agreement is?”

by Cassandra Jaramillo and Joshua Kaplan

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

In the wake of the 2020 presidential election, Republican officials around the country have been giving increasing attention and resources to investigating election crimes. Most have focused on the alleged wrongdoing of voters.

But Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is also working a different angle: His office has been criminally investigating the people who help run elections.

Over the past two years, Paxton’s office opened at least 10 investigations into alleged crimes by election workers, a more extensive effort than previously known, according to records obtained by ProPublica. One of his probes was spurred by a complaint from a county GOP chair, who lost her reelection bid in a landslide. She then refused to certify the results, citing “an active investigation” by the attorney general.

In at least two of the cases, Paxton’s office unsuccessfully tried to indict election workers, attempts that were first reported by the Austin American-Statesman. In the remaining eight investigations identified by ProPublica, it is unclear just how far the probes went. As of mid-October, none of the cases resulted in criminal charges.

The attorney general’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Most of Paxton’s investigations of election workers center on allegations of obstructing a poll watcher, which is banned by a controversial and recently expanded law that experts fear could open the door for turmoil in the election process. Texas is one of the few states where blocking the view or limiting the movements of poll watchers — partisan volunteers who monitor election sites — can bring criminal penalties. Obstruction is a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail.

Experts worry such investigations could exact a stiff price, chilling participation in the process, slowing down elections and fostering misinformation and distrust in the vote. These probes may be a harbinger of potential chaos in the midterms.

“To have law enforcement policing around and creating the perception that these elections are not secure is doing enormous damage to democracy,” said Lorraine Minnite, a political scientist at Rutgers University, Camden who has studied voter fraud allegations.

Paxton, who has been under a securities fraud indictment for seven years, has touted his eagerness to pursue election-related crimes. He created a unit dedicated to doing so five years ago, long before so-called election integrity units became a trend in Republican-controlled states. (He’s denied wrongdoing in the ongoing securities fraud case.)

Between January 2020 and September 2022, records show, the office opened at least 390 cases looking into potential election crimes. That includes criminal investigations of both voters and election workers. It’s not clear how many cases Paxton’s office attempted to prosecute. But the records show that, like other prosecutors’ efforts around the country, Paxton often comes up empty. His office secured five election-related convictions during that period.

A skeptic of the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s election, Paxton has been soliciting tips from the public about the upcoming midterms, during which he will be operating with broad new powers. Last year, the Texas Legislature dramatically expanded the state’s ability to pursue criminal sanctions against election officials. This year’s midterms will be the first general election where law enforcement could use the new criminal statutes to prosecute.

Paxton will also be sending a “task force” to Harris County, which contains Houston, a Democratic stronghold, to respond to “legal issues” with the election, according to a letter from the Texas secretary of state. Paxton is up for reelection in the midterms, in a race that polls indicate could be close.

America’s voting system depends on the thousands of public employees and volunteers, often retirees, who do the tedious job of managing elections. Officials have long reported challenges in recruiting enough poll workers to run elections efficiently. Now, prospective poll workers may find themselves wrestling with the possibility of facing criminal charges.

This growing scrutiny and animosity have taken a toll. Officials have resigned en masse, as conspiracy theories and physical threats have increasingly become a part of the job. Over the last two years, roughly a third of Texas’ election administrators have left their posts, according to the Texas secretary of state.

Paxton’s election worker investigations span large, heavily Democratic cities and deep-red rural counties alike. Some officials learned they were under scrutiny when they were contacted by sergeants in Paxton’s office. Others told ProPublica they were unaware an investigation had occurred. At least five suspects were in their 60s or 70s. Several cases were prompted by a referral from the Texas secretary of state. Others stemmed from complaints made by small-town sheriffs or voters.

Sam Taylor, a spokesperson for the secretary of state, said the office is required to refer complaints to the attorney general if there is reasonable cause to believe a crime occurred.

Dana DeBeauvoir said she has already seen the impact of Paxton’s efforts on the ground — and in her own life. She told ProPublica that in her 36 years as the top election official in Travis County, where Austin is located, nothing compared to the disruption she saw in the 2020 election.

When an unmasked poll watcher named Jennifer Fleck began photographing the counting of ballots, which was against the rules, a volunteer asked her to leave. Fleck refused, then began screaming and banging on the window of the room where votes were being counted, DeBeauvoir said. Ultimately, the police arrived, arrested Fleck and charged her with criminal trespass.

Officers allegedly found that Fleck had a “button camera on her shirt” connected to a “recording device that had been secreted in Fleck’s pants,” according to police records. Fleck also faces a perjury charge because she swore in an affidavit that she would not use recording devices. The case is pending.

Weeks later, DeBeauvoir said, the county attorney informed her that Paxton’s office had a different view of the incident: DeBeauvoir herself was now the subject of a criminal investigation. Attorneys advised her to not speak about the case.

“I never felt more alone,” DeBeauvoir said. “Everything that was being said was completely untrue. And I could not defend myself.”

The next year, Paxton attempted to prosecute DeBeauvoir for obstructing a poll watcher, court records show. In an unusual move, when his office brought her case before a grand jury, prosecutors didn’t do it in Travis County — where DeBeauvoir lives and the incident took place — but in a suburban county that is more conservative.

Yet, in a rarity for the criminal justice system, the grand jury in April 2021 declined to indict her.

“I was completely terrified” by the investigation, DeBeauvoir said.

Fleck did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Among the new powers Paxton will now be able to wield: The Legislature made it a felony for an election official to send a mail-in voting application to a person who didn’t request one. It gave new authority to poll watchers, allowing them “free movement” around voting facilities. And it broadened the obstruction statute Paxton had used to try to prosecute officials like DeBeauvoir.

“We’ve seen this kind of onslaught of laws that are essentially treating voting booths like crime scenes,” said Liz Avore, senior policy adviser at Voting Rights Lab, a nonprofit that analyzes election legislation. She said Texas’ new poll-watching provisions could hamstring election officials who witness partisan volunteers harassing voters and make it hard to keep polling places “a safe place for voters to cast their ballots.”

Even when investigations don’t result in criminal charges, they can be used as a pretext to disrupt the election process.

In 2020, Cynthia Brehm was running for reelection as chair of the Bexar County Republican Party. She secured more votes than any other candidate in the March primary, but it was a close race and she’d have to go through a runoff to retain her seat. In June, Brehm made a Facebook post suggesting George Floyd’s death was staged. Sen. Ted Cruz and other top Texas Republicans called for her to resign. Her chances were starting to look bleak.

Then Brehm made a move that would have surprising consequences. She filed a complaint with Paxton’s office about the election, records show, prompting the attorney general to open a criminal investigation into the county elections administrator.

A police report details what the official stood accused of. First, that the primary results were incorrect. Second, that there were “several other” allegations “that include obstructing poll watchers.”

In July, Brehm lost in the runoff by 32 points. But as party chair, she held the authority to certify the results. She refused to do so — pointing to the fruits of her complaint.

“The Texas Attorney General has an active investigation ongoing into the results of the Primary Election,” Brehm wrote in a press release justifying her decision. “I Cynthia Brehm, have determined that every aspect of this election has been severely compromised.”

In response to a public records request, Paxton’s office said the investigation into the elections administrator, Jacquelyn Callanen, is now closed. Brehm and Callanen did not respond to requests for comment. The winning candidate ultimately took over Brehm’s post.

At least three suspects in Paxton’s investigations were the top election officials in their counties, but his probes have also ensnared volunteers. In 2020, Robert Icsezen, a Houston-based attorney and self-described “election nerd,” volunteered to serve on his county’s signature verification committee, which is responsible for checking the signatures on mail-in ballots. On Oct. 14, a poll watcher asked Icsezen to let her into the area where ballots were being processed, he said. He thought that wasn’t permitted and turned her away. Later that morning, he received a call from a local official, who told him the secretary of state’s office said he needed to let the poll watcher in. The woman never returned, Icsezen said.

Shortly thereafter, an officer in Paxton’s election police unit contacted Icsezen. Assuming it was all a misunderstanding, Icsezen agreed to speak with him, he said.

Eight months later, Paxton’s office brought the case before a grand jury and unsuccessfully tried to indict Icsezen for obstructing a poll watcher, records show.

“I have four kids,” Icsezen told ProPublica. “There could have been cops coming to my door to cuff me and take me away.”

He will not volunteer to help in another election, he said.

Do you have information about “election integrity” units that we should know? Reporters Cassandra Jaramillo and Josh Kaplan can be reached via email at cassandra.jaramillo@propublica.org or joshua.kaplan@propublica.org, or via Signal at 469-606-9665 or 734-834-9383.

Lynn Dombek contributed research.

by Jeremy Kohler

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Ohio lawmakers this fall will consider adding consumer protections to “clean energy” lending programs, responding to concerns they can burden vulnerable homeowners.

In testimony during state House committee hearings this year, some proponents of the bill pointed to reporting by ProPublica as evidence that Ohio should closely regulate the lending. That reporting showed that Property Assessed Clean Energy, or PACE, loans often left low-income borrowers in Missouri at risk of losing their homes.

Two Republican state House members from eastern Ohio are pursuing rules for PACE, though such a lending program has only been offered through a pilot program in Toledo. But lawmakers Bill Roemer, from Richfield, and Al Cutrona, from Canfield, said they want to make sure that, if companies try to bring a statewide program to Ohio, they comply with stricter rules.

PACE offers financing for energy-saving home improvements that borrowers pay back in their property taxes. Unlike with some other types of financing, defaulting on a PACE loan can result in a home being sold in a tax sale.

Missouri, California and Florida are the only states with active statewide residential PACE programs. Ohio last year came close to becoming the fourth, after California-based Ygrene Energy Fund announced it would offer loans to homeowners in partnership with the Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority.

But the program never got started. Ygrene has since suspended all lending nationwide and last week agreed to settle a complaint by the federal government and the state of California that the company had harmed consumers through deceptive practices.

Roemer said in an interview that he co-sponsored the measure after talking to a coalition that included mortgage lenders, real estate agents and advocates for affordable housing and the homeless.

“You never really see all those people come together on a bill,” he said. “I did my research, and I said, ‘This is really a bad program that takes advantage of the most vulnerable people.’”

The legislative session ends on Dec. 31, leaving little time to pass the bill.

“It’s going to be a lot of work,” Roemer said, “but I think it’s very important that we do it.”

Ben Holbrook, an aide to Cutrona, said that after Ygrene’s withdrawal, the bill is “less of a reactive piece of legislation and more proactive.”

ProPublica found that state and local officials in Missouri exercised little oversight over the two entities that have run the clean-energy loan programs in that state. Ygrene and the Missouri Clean Energy District charged high interest rates and fees over terms as long as 20 years, collecting loan payments through tax bills and enforcing debts by placing liens on property — all of which left some borrowers vulnerable to losing their homes if they defaulted.

Reporters analyzed about 2,700 loans recorded in the five counties with Missouri’s most active PACE programs. They found that borrowers, particularly in predominantly Black neighborhoods, sometimes were paying more in interest and fees than their homes were worth.

PACE lenders said that their programs provided much-needed financing for home upgrades, particularly in predominantly Black neighborhoods where traditional lenders typically don’t do much business. They said their interest rates were lower than payday lenders and some credit cards.

Weeks after ProPublica’s investigation, the Missouri legislature passed and Gov. Mike Parson signed a law mandating more consumer protections and oversight of PACE. In Ohio, following our reporting, leaders in the state’s two most populous cities, Columbus and Cleveland, said they would not participate in any residential PACE plan.

Ohio’s bill would cap the annual interest rate on PACE loans at 8% and prohibit lenders from charging interest on fees. Lenders must verify that a borrower can repay a loan by confirming that the borrowers’ monthly debt does not exceed 43% of their monthly income and that they have sufficient income to meet basic living expenses.

The measure would also change how PACE lenders secure their loans. In states where PACE has thrived in residential markets, PACE liens are paid first if a home goes into foreclosure. And a homeowner can borrow without the consent of the bank holding the mortgage. Ohio’s bill would pay off PACE liens after the mortgage and any other liens on the property. In addition, the mortgage lender would have to agree to adding a PACE loan.

Ygrene officials did not respond to requests for comment. But a company official told the legislative committee that the bill would “unequivocally kill residential PACE.” Crystal Crawford, then a Ygrene vice president, told the committee in May that the bill was “not a consumer protection bill — it is a bank protection bill.”

Ohio’s limited experience with PACE illustrated how the program, with sufficient oversight, could be a low-cost option for borrowers. The Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority operated a pilot program allowing residents to borrow money for energy-saving projects without paying high interest or fees. A local nonprofit, the Lucas County Land Bank, made sure borrowers had the means to repay the loans, matched homeowners with contractors and made sure home improvements were completed correctly before releasing the loans.

Ygrene announced in August it had suspended making residential PACE loans in Missouri and California but was continuing to make residential PACE loans in Florida and commercial PACE loans in more than two dozen states. Commercial loans have not attracted as much attention from regulators because they tend to involve borrowers with more experience and access to capital who aren’t as likely as residential borrowers to default.

More recently, Ygrene’s website suggests that instead of making loans directly, Ygrene now operates as an online lending marketplace where consumers seeking personal loans for home improvements can enter personal information and receive offers from third-party lenders.

The complaint by the Federal Trade Commission and the California Department of Justice alleges the company deceived consumers about the potential financial impact of its financing and recorded liens on borrowers’ homes without their consent. To resolve the case, Ygrene agreed to provide monetary relief to some borrowers, end allegedly deceptive practices and meaningfully oversee the contractors who act as its sales force. The settlement must be approved by a judge.

Ygrene said in an email that the complaints date back to the “earliest days” of the company’s marketing of PACE loans in 2015 and that it had since taken “considerable action” to safeguard consumers.

“We deeply regret any negative consequences any customer may have experienced, as even one unhappy customer is too much,” the company said.

by Lomi Kriel, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Zach Despart, Alejandro Serrano and Roxanna Asgarian, The Texas Tribune

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

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

This story contains audio of people calling 911 during a mass shooting incident.

The first two 911 calls came in at 11:29 a.m.

A man had crashed his truck into a ditch by Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and he was rushing toward the school with a gun.

“​​He’s inside the school shooting at the kids!” a third caller yelled at 11:33 a.m.

The gunman fired more than 100 rounds by the time police dispatchers received another call two minutes later. An adult voice could be heard making “shh” sounds for nearly 44 seconds before the phone abruptly cut out.

Monica Martinez, a STEM teacher who was hiding in a closet at the school, was among several callers from inside the school who followed.

“There’s somebody banging at my school,” Martinez said, her voice muffled as she continued speaking. “I’m so scared,” she said at 11:36 a.m.

What happened on May 24 in Uvalde is well documented. Hundreds of law enforcement officers from nearly two dozen local, state and federal agencies rushed to the scene. It took more than an hour before they entered the rooms where the gunman was located. They treated the crisis as one of a barricaded suspect who was no longer an active threat. Ultimately, 19 children and two teachers were killed in the worst school shooting in Texas history.

In the ensuing five months, the delayed law enforcement response has spurred state and federal investigations. The school district’s police chief was fired. He has publicly contested his termination, saying he was unfairly blamed. The acting Uvalde police chief has also been suspended and a state trooper fired. The chief of the Texas Rangers, the Department of Public Safety unit that is leading the state investigation, retired abruptly in September, as did his deputy in August. Several state police troopers remain under investigation. Officers facing punishment either could not immediately be reached for comment or declined to respond.

The Texas Tribune and ProPublica have for the first time obtained recordings of more than 20 emergency calls and dozens of hours of conversations between police and dispatchers that lay bare the increasing sense of urgency and desperation conveyed by children and teachers. In chilling, muffled 911 calls, they begged for help from inside the school.

Although the existence of some 911 calls and body camera footage has been reported publicly, the totality of the recordings show the pervasiveness of the miscommunication that unfolded that day.

During some calls, dispatchers and officers warned that class was supposed to be in session in rooms where the gunman had been shooting. On others, law enforcement officers said they were unaware that anyone aside from the gunman was in the classrooms, even as dispatchers received calls from children seeking help.

Never miss the most important reporting from ProPublica’s newsroom. Subscribe to the Big Story newsletter.

Ten-year-old Khloie Torres was one of those children. While state officials previously released a transcript with excerpts from one of Khloie’s phone calls, the news organizations obtained additional recordings of her pleading for help that had not been made public. Khloie survived that day.

In an interview, her father, Ruben Torres Jr., said he is “disgusted” that police did not quickly intervene. The fact that his daughter had to wait so long to get help is “mind-boggling,” Torres said.

“There was no control. That dude had control the entire 77 minutes,” said Torres, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran. “They didn’t have him barricaded. He had the police barricaded outside. It’s plain and simple. The police didn’t go in. That’s your job: to go in.”

DPS officials did not respond to questions from ProPublica and the Tribune about the recordings. A spokesperson for the city of Uvalde, the police chief, the Uvalde mayor and the county’s chief executive declined to comment.

Communication was a key failure throughout the response. Many officers assumed the school police chief, Pete Arredondo, was in command. He did not have his radios with him, issued few orders and later said he never viewed himself as the officer in charge. County officials said emergency communications were overwhelmed in the rural community, which typically has only two dispatchers answering 911 calls and juggling the transmission of key information to emergency responders.

The emergency radio system has two 911 lines and three emergency channels. Its frequency is designed for the vast, 15,000-square-mile stretch of scrubby desert terrain, rather than for high-density urban areas where equipment must work inside buildings, said Forrest Anderson, the county’s emergency management coordinator who oversaw the radio system’s implementation two decades ago. A legislative committee that later examined the response noted that city police radios worked only intermittently inside the school.

Radio traffic and footage obtained by the news organizations show that some police knew about the 911 calls, but just how many officers remains unclear.

High-stakes emergency responses always have some communications gaps, but skilled incident commanders should be prepared to overcome such challenges, said Bob Harrison, a former California police chief and homeland security researcher at the Rand Corp., a national think tank.

Harrison noted that many of the radios used by Border Patrol agents also did not work during the Uvalde shooting response, but the agency’s SWAT team, which does not typically lead the response in school shootings because it is a federal agency focused on immigration and national security, mobilized to breach the classroom once it arrived and determined no one was in control.

“If a strong unifying command scene was set up quickly, these discrepancies wouldn’t have been necessarily relevant, and there would have been one voice and one command,” Harrison said of the problems with 911 and radio communication.

The state legislative committee reached a similar conclusion in its July investigative report, which stated that a capable incident commander would have realized that the radios were “mostly ineffective” and that responders needed other means of communication to transmit key details such as calls from victims inside the classrooms. The report highlighted that law enforcement is trained to be “prepared to respond effectively without reliable radio communications” and could employ a series of strategies including using “runners” to deliver messages in person.

But that day, children and teachers, including Martinez, waited to be rescued.

In the dark closet of room 116, Martinez stayed on the phone with a dispatcher and tried to practice a key tenet of the school’s active-shooter protocol: Be quiet.

Class Should Be in Session

When a new round of gunshots rang out from behind the closed door of the two adjoining classrooms, Uvalde police Sgt. Daniel Coronado sprinted outside, panting heavily as he relayed an urgent message on his radio to city police dispatchers.

“He’s inside the building,” Coronado said of the shooter at 11:38 a.m. “We have him contained.”

He asked for ballistic shields and requested that someone call DPS.

Then he repeated: “He’s contained. We’ve got multiple officers inside the building at this time. We believe he’s barricaded in one of the offices. Male subject is still shooting.”

Four minutes later, an unidentified male official asked that someone check the classroom of fourth-grade teacher Eva Mireles, a 44-year-old educator and the wife of Ruben Ruiz, a Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District police officer. Mireles was assigned to room 112, one of two adjoining rooms where the shots were coming from.

“See if the class is in there right now or if they’re somewhere else,” the official said.

Then a Uvalde school district police officer came on the radio with a critical announcement: “The classroom should be in session right now. The class should be in session, Ms. Mireles.”

Another officer gasped.

“That’s going to be Ruben’s girl,” he said, referring to Mireles.

“Oh no, oh no,” Coronado muttered under his breath.

The exchange demonstrates some officers knew early on that the gunman was not barricaded alone in the classroom. More indicators, and clear confirmations, would come soon after — yet for much of the response, they would not be heard.

At 11:48 a.m., Ruiz, who was standing in the hallway outside of the classroom, told officers that his wife had been shot. Ruiz said his wife had called him and said she was “dying.” Mireles later died in an ambulance.

Officers escorted Ruiz outside, taking away his weapon for his safety, according to interviews officers at the scene later gave to the Texas Rangers. But they did not attempt to enter the classroom. One of the police lieutenants who heard Ruiz’s announcement told investigators that they were waiting for DPS and Border Patrol to arrive “with better equipment like rifle-rated shields.”

By that time, Martinez, the teacher, had been on the phone with 911 for more than 10 minutes. She had told the dispatcher that she could hear people in the hallway. The dispatcher urged her to stay quiet and remain barricaded in the closet.

“You still there with me?” the dispatcher asked at about 11:47 a.m.

“I’m still here,” Martinez whispered.

Misinformation spread as Martinez and other 911 callers waited to be rescued. At 11:50 a.m., a Uvalde police dispatcher wrongly reported that the school chief was “in the room with the shooter,” referring to Arredondo by his call sign.

Seven minutes later, an officer asked if any children were inside with the gunman.

“No, we don’t know anything about that,” another officer replied on the radio.

“Everything is closed, like the kids are not in there,” a third responded.

About a minute later, an officer asked for the shooter’s location.

“The school chief of police is in there with him,” another officer replied.

As the back-and-forth continued, law enforcement officers rescued people from other classrooms. At 11:58 a.m., Martinez told the dispatcher that she again heard someone knocking. She said the person had identified themselves as a police officer.

“Open the door,” the dispatcher said, confirming that the person on the other side was law enforcement. “Stay on the line with me until you make contact with him.”

“I’m coming,” the teacher whispered.

Her sobs carried through the phone.

The teacher did not return calls and emails seeking comment.

Confusion Marks Response

Some children in classrooms 111 and 112 with the gunman kept calling 911, seeking help even when they suspected it was not safe to speak. One of the first calls from a trapped student, at 12:03 p.m., was barely audible.

“There’s a school …” a muffled child’s voice reported, breaking up in the recording, “at Robb Elementary.”

The call lasted a minute and 24 seconds. The child was silent as the dispatcher asked their name and what room they were in.

“Hello, ma’am? Can you hear me?” the dispatcher asked.

Then at 12:10 p.m., Khloie called.

“There is a lot of bodies,” The New York Times previously reported that she told a dispatcher, adding that her teacher had been shot but was still alive.

Khloie stayed on the phone for more than 17 minutes. While she spoke, another city police dispatcher answered a call from DPS and erroneously reported that the school police chief was inside the classroom with the gunman.

“I have the school chief of the PD in room 111 or 112 with the active shooter, and they’re still standing by,” she said when the DPS dispatcher asked for an update. “We have multiple agencies on scene. I don’t know if you have anybody else to send out to help out?”

“We’re sending everybody that we can, um, heading out there, but do you have any injuries, fatals, anything?” the DPS dispatcher responded.

Only one female was shot, and perhaps an officer was injured, the Uvalde dispatcher replied.

A dispatcher’s voice crackled through the Uvalde police and Border Patrol radio traffic, notifying that she had a child on the line.

“The child is advising he is in the room full of victims, full of victims at this moment,” the dispatcher said.

Hallway surveillance video from inside the school at the time shows at least four law enforcement officials, one with a shield, kneeling outside the classroom door with their guns drawn.

It is not clear if the officers heard that message.

At 12:14 p.m., a state trooper’s body camera captured someone saying, “There’s victims in there, dude.” The trooper was standing outside a door to the school, with at least eight officers from different agencies visible from that camera angle.

“We need to get in there,” one responded.

No one did.

Five minutes later, another girl in room 111 called 911. The recording of the call, which lasted a minute and 17 seconds, is mostly inaudible.

In the hallway, Uvalde County Constable Emmanuel Zamora wrongly suggested that the gunman may have already shot himself.

“One shot at the end was self-inflicted, maybe,” Zamora said in the recording, referring to an earlier burst of gunfire.

Zamora did not respond to texts and emails about his comments, which had not been previously reported.

Arredondo, the school chief, can be heard on a state trooper’s body camera at 12:20 p.m. telling another officer: “We have victims in there. I don’t want to have any more. You know what I’m saying?”

It was the first time he acknowledged to other responders that anyone was wounded inside the two classrooms, according to new footage obtained by the news organizations. The legislative report noted only that he acknowledged “some casualties” 14 minutes later. Arredondo did not return a message seeking comment shared with him by his former attorney.

A minute later, the gunman fired again.

Officers in the hallway flinched, formed a line and started walking down the hall, then suddenly stopped, a state trooper’s body camera footage reveals.

Just after the shots were fired at 12:21 p.m., the school chief began trying to talk to the shooter for the first time, according to communications and records.

“If you can hear me, sir, please put your firearm down, sir,” Arredondo said. “We don’t want anyone else hurt.”

Just after 12:30 p.m., three troopers again advanced toward the classrooms before an unidentified person said “no, no, no,” according to body camera footage.

Once again, they stopped.

A DPS trooper who made his way into the hallway around that time asked another officer if there were children in the classroom. The response was, “We don’t know.”

By then, more than 20 minutes had lapsed since Khloie first begged a dispatcher for help. She ended the initial call when she feared the gunman, who she felt taunted the children, was getting close, her father later recalled.

She called 911 again at 12:36 p.m.

“There’s a school shooting,” Khloie said. “Yes, I’m aware,” the dispatcher responded. “I was talking to you earlier. You’re still there in your room? You’re still in room 112?” “Yeah,” Khloie replied. “OK. You stay on the line with me. Do not disconnect,” the dispatcher said.

“Can you tell the police to come to my room?” Khloie whispered. The dispatcher said: “I’ve already told them to go to the room. We’re trying to get someone to you.”

About two minutes later, Khloie once more asked for police.

Yet again, a dispatcher tried to reassure her.

“I have someone that is trying to get to you, OK,” she said.

Khloie whispered that she thought she heard the police next door.

“If you hear anyone come in, but they’re not supposed to be there, and they don’t say that they’re police, y’all pretend that you are asleep, OK?” the dispatcher replied.

“That Was You?”

As the Border Patrol strike team was almost ready to breach, DPS Capt. Joel Betancourt went on the radio and ordered the agents to wait.

“The team that’s gonna breach needs to stand by,” Betancourt said at 12:50 p.m.

The captain did not respond to requests for comment left for him through DPS.

The team ignored the order and entered the classroom, quickly killing the shooter. The previously silent hallway filled with officers waiting to act.

Someone yelled, “Make a hole!” as police carried out wounded children. Law enforcement officers motioned for those who were not as severely injured to walk out on their own.

“Oh man, I guess there was more kids in that room,” a DPS special agent said, according to his body camera footage. “Yeah, he must have had some hostages,” another law enforcement officer replied.

As the onsite paramedics focused on the most critically injured, officers began taking other hurt children to the hospital. Khloie was among them.

“I was on the phone with a police officer,” she told the trooper examining her as the screams of other wounded children reverberated in the background.

The officer, whose body camera had earlier picked up a dispatcher describing that call, seemed surprised.

“Oh, that was you?” the trooper asked.

Uriel J. Garcia of The Texas Tribune contributed reporting.

Correction

Nov. 3, 2022: A previous version of this story included incorrect details of a request to check the classroom of teacher Eva Mireles early in the police response. The request was to check Mireles' room, 112, not the adjoining 111. It was made by an unidentified male official, not a dispatcher. And class was reported to be in session by a school district police officer, not a Uvalde officer. That same officer, not a dispatcher, also wrongly reported over the radio at 11:50 a.m. that the school chief was "in the room with the shooter."

by Heather Vogell

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

The chair of a U.S. Senate committee asked the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday to review whether a Texas-based property tech company’s rent-setting software violates antitrust laws.

The move comes after ProPublica published an investigation Oct. 15 into RealPage’s pricing software, which suggests new rents daily to landlords for all available units in a building. Critics say the software may be helping big landlords operate as a cartel to push rents above competitive levels in some markets.

“Alarmingly, recent reporting by ProPublica highlighted that RealPage’s algorithm-based price optimization software, YieldStar, is being used by a growing number of property managers and landlords, potentially impacting pricing and the supply of homes in the rental market,” said the letter signed by U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, the Ohio Democrat who chairs the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs. “Renters should have the power to negotiate fairly priced housing, free from illicit collusion and deceptive pricing techniques.”

RealPage’s software applies a complex set of mathematical rules to a vast trove of data collected by the company from landlords who are its clients. That data includes the otherwise private data of nearby competitors.

“Troublingly, ProPublica reported that a former RealPage executive stated that the data could give insight into how competitors within a half-mile or mile radius are pricing their units,” said the letter, which was addressed to FTC chair Lina Khan.

RealPage has said the data fed into its pricing tool is anonymized and aggregated. It said the company “uses aggregated market data from a variety of sources in a legally compliant manner.”

In a statement Tuesday, the company said it had not seen the letter, “but we are always willing to engage with policy stakeholders to ensure they have the facts about the competitive dynamics of the housing market and the value and benefits that RealPage creates for renters and housing providers.”

Critics say the use of private data is one of the reasons the software invites scrutiny from antitrust enforcers such as the FTC. RealPage also claims its analytics “balance supply and demand to maximize revenue growth.” And the company organizes forums for competitors to meet and discuss aspects of its software, including its pricing algorithms. One legal expert told ProPublica that such collaborations “could raise an antitrust red flag.”

In one neighborhood in Seattle, ProPublica found, 70% of apartments were overseen by just 10 property managers, all of which used pricing software sold by RealPage in at least some of their buildings.

The Senate letter said the recent reporting on RealPage “raises serious concerns about collusion in the rental market.” It said “the FTC should review whether rent setting algorithms that analyze rent prices through the use of competitors’ private data, such as YieldStar, violate antitrust laws.”

RealPage said previously that its revenue management software prioritizes a property’s own internal supply and demand dynamics over external factors such as competitors’ rents. The software helps eliminate the risk of collusion that could occur with manual pricing, which often relies on phone surveys of competitor prices, the company said.

An FTC spokesperson said the agency does not comment on letters or requests from Congress.

The letter also raised concerns that the pricing software is potentially restricting the supply of apartments. It said that the national rental vacancy rate was just 5.6% at the end of 2021, the lowest since 1984. Even in the tight market, however, it said, there are reports that RealPage’s algorithm sometimes encourages property owners to keep units vacant or push tenants out to increase profits.

The letter cited ProPublica’s story, which quoted from a 2017 earnings call with RealPage’s then-CEO, Steve Winn. He explained how one large property company found it could increase profits by raising rents and leaving more apartments vacant.

Winn has not responded to requests for comment.

“Intentionally holding units vacant, when there are so few homes available, decreases a consumer’s negotiating power and exacerbates the housing shortage,” the letter said.

RealPage’s influence over apartment pricing has grown substantially in recent years, following its 2017 acquisition of its biggest pricing competitor, software called Lease RentOptions, or LRO, from The Rainmaker Group. RealPage was pricing 1.5 million units at the time, and the purchase allowed it to double that number. The Department of Justice’s antitrust division took a close look at the merger, but allowed it to proceed.

By 2020, RealPage had expanded its number of clients to 31,700 across all its products, which also include accounting, lease management and other software. Private equity firm Thoma Bravo bought RealPage last year for $10.2 billion. It now calls its pricing software AI Revenue Management.

After ProPublica published its investigation, a group of tenants filed a lawsuit against RealPage and nine of the country’s biggest landlords, alleging they were colluding to artificially inflate rents.

A RealPage spokesperson has denied the allegations and said the company “will vigorously defend against the lawsuit.” She declined to comment further, saying the company does not comment on pending litigation.

by Karim Doumar and Cynthia Gordy Giwa

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

There’s a phrase that pops up a lot when investigative journalists talk about politics: Follow the money.

For journalists, that often means looking at how political campaigns are funded and who’s paying for lobbyists. Today we’re going to talk about some of the methods we use to dig into those subjects.

This advice may not lead to you uncovering large-scale corruption — let us know if you do, though — but we hope to better acquaint you with which industries are donating to races you care about, how your candidates spend the money they raise and the oversized influence the ultrawealthy can have.

Campaign Finance Laws Are Meant to Increase Transparency

After the Watergate scandal (which, in addition to a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, involved campaign funds used toward the scheme), Congress strengthened laws requiring federal campaigns to report their political contributions and spending to the Federal Election Commission. This was designed as a check against corruption, but also as a way to keep voters reasonably informed about money in politics.

So, let’s take a look at what money does in a campaign. Seeing where a candidate’s money comes from, as well as which groups are spending on behalf of (or against) their campaign, helps you understand their beliefs, the advice they’re getting and the kinds of policies they’re likely to support.

What a Donation Gets Candidates:

Money can help someone win an election, though it’s not the only factor. By and large, donations get spent on the day-to-day expenses of running a campaign. You can use FEC data to research how candidates are spending their funds this election.

It’s probably garden-variety stuff: lunch, plane tickets, campaign ads, fundraising software, venue rentals for campaign events. In some cases, you might even see donations to the campaigns of other candidates they support. The choices candidates make tell you something about their priorities: where they’re spending their time, which voters they’re trying hardest to win over (older voters with TV ads or younger folks online) and how much they pay their staff.

Of course, sometimes candidates try to hide the true purpose of their campaign expenses. U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter of California was sentenced to 11 months in prison in 2020 for spending 2018 campaign donations on family trips to Hawaii and Italy and private school for his children.

What a Donation Gets Campaign Donors:

Individuals are allowed to contribute up to $2,900 per election to each candidate’s campaign. (A primary and a general election count as separate elections; so do runoffs.)

Campaign donations are not supposed to be transactional — that’s considered bribery, and it’s a crime. But they are a way of establishing a relationship and opening the door to conversations between the donor and the government. One example of this: In January 2021, The Intercept obtained a recording of a Zoom call Sen. Joe Manchin had with billionaire donors that shed light on the kind of access major funders get.

Most of the time these donors don’t see a direct “return” on their investment. If you donate to a candidate, chances are you’re getting one of two things:

1. The satisfaction of backing a potential winner who shares your values or goals.
2. Access. Academic research has shown that elected officials are more responsive to requests for meetings that come from donors to their campaigns. When you give money, the recipients know it, and while they may not agree with all your positions, they’re more likely to hear you out.

I know: It’s murky.

But, thanks to regulations in the ‘70s, we can at least see what’s behind the curtain. If you give $200 or more to a candidate, the campaign is required to report your name, address and employer or occupation to the FEC. Based on these FEC filings, along with similar disclosures from political action committees, the Center for Responsive Politics (through its site OpenSecrets.org) determines which industries are funding the candidates in your race, and you can look it up.

Take a close look at the types of sectors and interest groups donating to your candidates. These can signal who has their ear.

What a Donation Gets Super PAC Donors:

Some of the biggest players in the campaign landscape are super PACs. These are political action committees that don’t give directly to a candidate but spend independently in support of (or in opposition to) them. This outside spending is completely uncapped, freeing super PACs to raise any amount of money to influence any given race — and typically what super PACs spend money on are negative campaign ads. (You may balk at this, but, even if people claim to hate them, attack ads work.)

Think about the negative ads you’ve seen lately. Chances are they were funded by a super PAC that believe certain voters can be activated based on its message. Knowing who these groups are can help you better understand their motives and better assess whether you buy what they’re selling. You can browse our FEC Itemizer database to learn more about outside spending in specific races.

Super PACs tend to represent three main categories:

• Single-issue groups: Think advocacy groups that focus on abortion, the environment or taxes.

• Partisan groups: These are super PACs linked to key House and Senate leaders, like the Congressional Leadership Fund (affiliated with House Republican leaders) and the Senate Majority PAC (connected with Senate Democratic leadership). While lawmakers themselves are restricted from soliciting unlimited donations to the super PACs they’re tied to, the people running these groups can do so on their behalf.

• Family interests: Basically, this is when a wealthy family member donates money to a campaign or supportive PAC. For example, New Jersey congressional candidate Bob Healey’s campaign is supported by a Super PAC mostly funded by a $2 million donation from his mother.

Outside spending from super PACs can have a big impact on an election. For example, the Saving Arizona PAC, which is connected to tech mogul Peter Thiel, is pouring millions into ads supporting Republican Blake Masters, who is running to unseat Sen. Mark Kelly in Arizona. This comes after the Washington Post reported that Mitch McConnell asked Thiel to intervene in the race after he funded the Masters in the primary.

How Companies and Industries Grapple with Politicized Donations

A total of 147 members of Congress voted against certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 election win. Pro-Trump Republicans had planned the vote for weeks, riding baseless claims of election fraud that had already been debunked in lawsuits, recounts and more. Until that moment, the certification vote had been symbolic. There was no procedural or democratic reason to vote against certifying election results, which were real, or state electors, who had already been sent by the states. A violent mob broke into and ransacked the U.S. Capitol, calling for Mike Pence’s hanging and other blood. In the aftermath, dozens of companies released statements that they’d no longer be donating to candidates who voted against certifying the election.

ProPublica focuses on accountability, so, naturally, we wanted to know whether they’d stuck to their word.

Sergio Hernandez, a news apps developer here, looked into it. Using publicly available campaign finance information, he found that Fortune 500 companies have given millions of dollars to election deniers who voted against certifying the 2020 election. You can look up each company’s top beneficiaries, individual contributions and whether they kept their promises.

What About Dark Money?

Transparency laws as they are written only bring us so much information. Since the 2010 Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, dark money (money spent by political nonprofits or super PACs, which are not legally obligated to disclose donors) has been flowing fast. That’s one reason ProPublica is busy. Sometimes it takes intrepid journalists who investigate as their full-time jobs to unearth just some of the ways the ultrawealthy influence how the government operates.

In August, ProPublica and its partner The Lever exposed how an elderly, ultrasecretive business owner named Barre Seid gave the largest known political donation, worth $1.6 billion, to an advocacy organization run by Leonard Leo, one of the prime architects of the conservative effort to reshape the Supreme Court.

Seid, a later investigation found, has been quietly funding right-wing causes using a strategy he called “attack philanthropy.” Seid did much of his political funding while trying to remain below radar. That’s one reason you may have never heard of him. But the donors who help shape this country deserve as much scrutiny and publicity as the politicians they support. After all, this country belongs to all of us.

by Alec MacGillis and Sergio Hernandez

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

Last week, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the reliably provocative Georgia Republican, declared on Steve Bannon’s podcast, “War Room,” that if her party wins back a House majority next week, as is quite likely, it will seek revenge on the corporations that curtailed contributions to the 147 congressional Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 election results. “That’s not going to be forgotten by a whole bunch of my Republican colleagues,” she said.

It is not clear exactly what form such punishment would take. But there’s another complicating factor in this revenge scenario: Many of the corporations that announced with great fanfare their cutoff in contributions after the certification vote and storming of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, have since resumed giving to some of those 147 Republicans. In other words, if Greene leads a quest for revenge on those companies, she’ll be taking aim at the very corporations that have funded many of her allies.

For some of the companies, the resumption of giving to the 147 Republicans (139 in the House, eight in the Senate) started only a few months after they vowed to stop. But ProPublica has now created a tool to track and assess this remarkable shift: an app that has collected all of the campaign contributions that Fortune 500 corporations made to the 147 over the past two years. All told, at least 228 of the Fortune 500 — representing more than two-thirds of the 300-odd companies that have political action committees — have given to the 147, for a total of more than $13 million. (This does not include millions in contributions made to Republican campaign committees for the House and Senate, much of which is making its way to those who voted against certifying the election results.)

That $13 million sum is a stark testament to business as usual in Washington. These members — more than half of the Republicans in Congress — decided to side with the baseless claim to victory by then-President Donald Trump, thereby exacerbating an unprecedented transition-of-power crisis that threatened to upend the political order. And yet those members have managed to resume receiving substantial contributions from the companies that depend on the stability of that political order, including companies that garnered public relations points after the Jan. 6 riots by saying they were cutting the 147 off.

Take, for instance, General Electric, which issued a particularly strong clarion call in announcing a new post-Jan. 6 policy for its GE Employee Political Action Committee. “The GEPAC board has voted to suspend donations to those who voted to oppose the Electoral College results,” said Meghan Thurlow, GE’s global director of public affairs. “This is not a decision we made lightly, but is one we believe is important to ensure that our future contributions continue to reflect our company’s values and commitment to democracy.”

Less than two years later, GE has made contributions to 11 of the Republicans who voted against certifying the results. The company’s explanation of the shift? “The GEPAC board’s broad suspension of donations to those who voted to oppose the Electoral College results remains in place,” said a company spokesperson. “However, like many other PACs, it will consider individual exceptions on a case-by-case basis.”

Among the lucky beneficiaries of those exceptions: Rep. Ken Calvert of California, who said after the 2020 election that Trump “has the right to ensure vote counts are complete, accurate and legal”; Rep. Sam Graves of Missouri, who tweeted, “I stand with President Trump. Every legal vote must be counted in complete transparency”; and Rep. Ron Estes of Kansas, who decried the FBI search for classified records in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home as an outrage that “undermines the credibility of the FBI.” All voted against certifying the election. All are also on committees of importance to GE: Calvert is on the appropriations subcommittees for defense and energy spending, Graves is the top Republican on the committee overseeing transportation and infrastructure, and Estes is on the ways and means subcommittee overseeing taxation.

Also among the companies jumping on the bandwagon was Home Depot. “We are pausing to take time to carefully review and reevaluate each of the members who voted to object to the election results before considering further contributions to them,” said Sara Gorman, the company’s senior director of corporate communications, on Jan. 27, 2021.

That pause, it turned out, lasted only a year, less than many home appliance warranties. Home Depot has given a total of $475,000 to 65 of the 147, making it the top donor to 2020 election deniers. Asked about this, Gorman said, “Our associate-funded PAC is bipartisan. It supports candidates and organizations on both sides of the aisle who champion pro-business, pro-retail positions that create jobs and economic growth.” No more mention of the 2020 election or the denial of such.

Standing in contrast are big companies that have not given to any of the 147 through their corporate PACs during this election cycle, which include tech giants like Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft and Wall Street powerhouses like JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and BlackRock.

But then there is Boeing, which in the idealistic days of early 2021 announced, through then-spokesperson Bradley Akubuiro, “Boeing strongly condemns the violence, lawlessness and destruction that took place in the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Given the current environment, we are not making political contributions at this time. We will continue to carefully evaluate future contributions to ensure that we support those who not only support our company, but also uphold our country’s most fundamental principles.”

Among those now apparently upholding the country’s most fundamental principles, in Boeing’s estimations, are 74 of the Republicans who voted against certifying the 2020 election results, who have received more than $390,000. Asked about the contributions, company spokesperson Connor Greenwood said, “We do not have anything to add to the story.”

Joining Boeing in announcing a hiatus in political giving in early 2021 were its competitors in the defense contracting realm: Northrop Grumman, which was “evaluating the way forward”; Lockheed Martin, which was updating its strategy to “reflect our core values”; and Raytheon, which needed to “reflect on the current environment.” All that evaluating and reflecting seems to have gotten old fast: Northrop has given $175,000 to 26 of the 147; Lockheed donated more than $366,000 to 90 of them; and Raytheon has given $309,000 to 66. None of the three companies responded to questions.

One other defense contractor did respond: General Dynamics, which has given more than $324,000 to 67 of the 147 Republicans. In response to questions about the contributions, spokesperson Jeff Davis noted that the company’s recent investor report stated: “Our employee PAC will not support members of Congress who provoke or incite violence or similar unlawful conduct.”

Asked to elaborate on how the company determined whether a member had provoked or incited violence, Davis said, “Sorry, I’m not able to help beyond what is already written there.”

American Airlines, meanwhile, had put an explicit three-month duration on its own pause in political giving after Jan. 6, but had said that when it resumed making contributions, it would make sure to focus its support on lawmakers who “support U.S. aviation, airline workers and our values, including bringing people together.” Those whom it deems to have “brought people together” now include 42 of the 147 Republicans, for a total of more than $128,000. The company had no comment.

Regions Financial, the bank holding company, also had strong feelings about national togetherness as it announced a halt to political giving in January 2021. “This is a time for us, as a nation, to come together and identify a united path forward,” said media and public relations manager Jeremy King in that halcyon moment.

That united path forward led Regions to give to 74 of the 147 Republicans, for a total of more than $258,000. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

ProPublica also reached out to more than a half dozen other companies that were either among the top 15 donors overall to the 147 or among the top 10 donors on the list of companies that had announced a halt to contributions after Jan. 6: AT&T, Comcast, Honeywell, L3Harris, Marathon Petroleum, Williams and UPS.

None responded to requests for comment, with the exception of L3Harris, where spokesperson Paul Swiergosz wrote back, “We will politely decline comment regarding this story.”

Politeness is certainly appreciated in this uncivil age. So are “commitment to democracy,” “a united path forward,” and concern for “our country’s fundamental principles,” especially if they endure for more than a news cycle or two.

by Sergio Hernandez, with additional reporting by Nat Lash

In the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, more than 100 major companies pledged to suspend political giving to the members of Congress who voted to invalidate Joe Biden’s presidential victory. Since then, many have resumed funding this group of lawmakers, often with little to no explanation.

ProPublica wanted to gauge corporate America’s continued support for these officials by tallying donations from a recognizable group: companies in the Fortune 500, whose political arms have sent these lawmakers nearly $13.2 million during the 2021-2022 election cycle.

Drill down to see each company’s top beneficiaries and individual contributions and how long companies kept their promises.

by Andrea Bernstein and Ilya Marritz

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

On his first full day in office, President Joe Biden directed his national security team to make a plan to confront domestic terrorism. In their ensuing report, Biden’s advisers homed in on “a crisis of disinformation and misinformation.” The new administration, they pledged, would work to “counter the influence and impact of dangerous conspiracy theories that can provide a gateway to terrorist violence.”

But the reality of the administration’s efforts has been less robust than its rhetoric. Instead, a ProPublica review found, the Biden administration has backed away from a comprehensive effort to address disinformation after accusations from Republicans and right-wing influencers that the administration was trying to stifle dissent.

In May, one Department of Homeland Security office instructed staffers that work on “sensitive” topics including disinformation should be put on “immediate hold,” according to material reviewed by ProPublica. In the months that followed, DHS canceled a series of planned contracts that would have tracked and studied the proliferation of disinformation and its connection with violent attacks. And after issuing six nationwide warnings about domestic terrorism fueled by disinformation in the first 13 months of the Biden administration, DHS has only issued one in the eight months since.

The government’s retreat comes ahead of midterms in which election officials throughout the country are being inundated with false rumors about their work. After talks on a project to help election officials monitor and respond to threats stalled, election officials from Colorado and Florida wrote a private letter in August to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas pleading for help.

“Threats and harassment of election officials has become an extremely serious concern and terribly frequent experience for election workers,” they warned, adding, “We are ourselves a crucial part of the nation’s critical infrastructure, in need of and deserving of protection.”

“Time is of the essence,” the officials wrote.

Weeks later, DHS scrapped the project.

DHS’ change of course began after a storm erupted in May in reaction to the administration’s creation of a Disinformation Governance Board. Congressional Republicans called it a “Ministry of Truth.” The board was terminated just months later.

Aspects of the administration’s retreat on disinformation have been reported, including a CNN story about the DHS’ rejection of a project to protect election workers from harassment. But the extent of the turnabout has not been fully examined.

“They paused all the work on disinformation, not just the board,” Nina Jankowicz, the former executive director of the DHS Disinformation Governance Board, told ProPublica. “The administration kowtowed to the disinformation rather than fighting it.”

It is not clear whether DHS’ initiatives would have made a significant difference in combating the tsunami of false rumors. But the current and former employees are frustrated that the agency’s efforts have been hobbled in response to political pressure.

DHS maintains it has not retreated on its disinformation efforts. “We have worked for over a decade to address disinformation that poses a threat to that security. This critical work continues today across several DHS components, consistent with the law and in a manner that is transparent and upholds the privacy, civil rights and civil liberties of the American people,” a DHS spokesperson said.

The agency has stepped up some activity in recent weeks, increasing alerts and training for election workers. On Friday, DHS, along with the FBI, the Capitol Police and the National Counterterrorism Center, issued a bulletin warning that “election-related perceptions of fraud” will “likely” drive some extremists to attempt acts of violence.

But, despite the initiatives, election administrators remain deeply concerned.

“States need more support. It is clear that threats to election officials and workers are not dissipating and may only escalate around the 2022 and 2024 elections,” Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat, said in an email to ProPublica. “Election offices need immediate meaningful support from federal partners.”

The new administration moved quickly after Biden’s inauguration. Experts welcomed the increased pace of domestic terrorism warnings and their focus on false rumors that could be weaponized for violent ends. In September 2021, Mayorkas’ top aides suggested creating the disinformation board after identifying the problem as a “serious homeland security risk.”

In early 2022, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, which is part of DHS, was in talks to deploy a federally funded nonprofit to protect election workers from harassment and violence.

The effort would have allowed elections officials to sign up for a service to protect them from having their identities and personal information exposed on the internet, known as doxxing. It also would have created a system to track and alert elections officials who were subject to serious threats on social media, including from foreign actors.

Around the same time, as lies about elections were becoming a central plank of GOP candidates, Republicans also began to attack the administration’s efforts. Some free-speech advocates also expressed concerns about government overreach.

An early Republican critic was Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn. DHS had sent out an alert about “false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud.” Blackburn objected in a February letter to Mayorkas, writing, “The Department comes dangerously close to suggesting that publicly disagreeing with the current administration is akin to domestic terrorism.” Blackburn did not respond to a request for comment.

At that time, DHS was establishing the Disinformation Governance Board. It hired Jankowicz, an expert on disinformation, as its executive director. The board was tasked with coordinating all the efforts to confront the problem across the sprawling agency. The board’s charter was careful to note that the government needed to respect privacy and free speech.

Nevertheless, just hours after word leaked of its formation, right-wing media influencer Jack Posobiec issued a series of tweets slamming the board. Soon, Republican lawmakers like Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., were calling the board a “Ministry of Truth,” an apparent reference to a fictional government body that feeds people lies in George Orwell’s “1984.” Clyde did not respond to a request for comment. About 70% of Fox News’ one-hour segments over the next week contained a reference to the board, according to a report by Advance Democracy, a nonprofit media research group. The New York Post ran a cover with an image of Jankowicz and the headline: “Big Sister Is Watching You.” Jankowicz was subject to an outpouring of degrading comments and death threats.

A senior DHS official who spoke for the administration said to ProPublica that the board had become “a distraction that was making it harder for us to do the work we thought was essential.” In May, DHS “paused” the board and Jankowicz resigned, just 10 weeks after she had begun work.

That’s when the word went out to DHS staffers that work on “sensitive” topics like disinformation should be put on hold. DHS had been negotiating with a security firm called Moonshot, which specializes in monitoring online threats for governments and social media platforms. After the criticism of the board, discussions were halted and the contract was not signed. Eventually, DHS also froze millions of dollars for disinformation research contracts with two universities and the Rand Corporation, according to three people familiar with the matter. And a CISA “Rumor Control” webpage for election workers issued no updates from May to October.

DHS’ rollback in an election year alarmed former senior officials in homeland security. One of them, Bob Kolasky, a former top CISA official under Trump and Biden, warned in an opinion piece in a professional journal, “Many of our foreign allies, notably the Swedes and the French, have been much more aggressive in organizing to deal with the disinformation risk.” Without the board, “the country remains at risk.”

The pausing of the board and Jankowicz’s exit did not placate critics on the right. On the House floor, Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Ariz., accused the Biden administration of trying “to target and silence citizens who disagree with government actions.” Biggs did not respond to a request for comment.

In August, with the disinformation board still leaderless and frozen, Mayorkas killed it for good. The agency also canceled the CISA project with the nonprofit that would have tracked online death threats to election workers and offered them enhanced protection of their personal information.

The DHS is not the only federal agency confronting the problem. The FBI, which is under the Department of Justice, also monitors such threats, but it is focused on gathering evidence of crimes. In 2021, the DOJ formed a task force to investigate threats to election workers, inviting them to submit tips to the FBI. So far, more than 1,000 have come in, and the DOJ has filed eight cases against people who allegedly threatened workers with violence.

But experts say prosecutors and the FBI alone cannot effectively deal with the problem. DHS’ mission — to gather and share information with partners in government and law enforcement before crimes occur — is critical to prevention.

Today inside the department “scrutiny is over the top on anything to do with terrorism, extremism, violence prevention — especially domestic terrorism,” a current DHS official said.

“The answer is not how do we do it better; in the face of criticism, it’s to shut it all down,” one former high-level DHS official told ProPublica. The officials were granted anonymity so that they didn’t suffer reprisals.

The bitter irony is not lost on experts in the field, who say that the attacks can have a chilling effect on outside researchers, too.

“The very thing we are studying is being used against us because the tactics work,” said University of Washington’s Kate Starbird, who advises DHS on disinformation and who herself has recently been subject to harassment based on rumors. “They undermine trust in institutions and in government and tie our hands when we try to protect ourselves.”

With DHS stymied, election officials report it’s up to them to keep abreast of the false information and respond. Julie Slomski, clerk of Erie County, Pennsylvania, said she now spends about half of her workday explaining how elections work to angry or suspicious constituents. She gives out her cellphone number and tells people to call or text with questions. “Here in Erie County, we’re an open book,” she said. But she’s taking precautions. Slomski now wears a bulletproof backpack her sister bought her.

In lieu of a robust official government effort, the nonprofit Center for Internet Security, which had once hoped for government resources and sponsorship, is briefing election workers on how to keep track of false information and respond effectively.

“I was surprised at the number of people who came up to me afterwards saying, no one had told us about any of this,” said John Cohen, a former top DHS official in the Biden administration and currently in leadership at the Center for Internet Security.

Some elections officials, however, question whether the federal government should be involved in this effort at all. Michael Adams, Kentucky’s Republican secretary of state, said the election denialism he encounters is so disconnected from facts that “sometimes I’m at a loss to even know how to reason with these people.” Adams has called out election conspiracies, but he believes his constituents are more likely to accept information about elections as trustworthy if it comes from local officials.

“I don’t think that the federal government, the so-called deep state, putting out information and saying ‘trust us’ is an effective strategy for persuasion,” he said.

But others say the federal government is doing too little, too late.

“We’re getting help, but much more is needed in certain areas,” Wesley Wilcox, supervisor of elections in Marion County, Florida, and one of the authors of the August letter to DHS pleading for help, said in a recent email to ProPublica. “I am NOT a proponent of a massive Federal Government intrusion. But, there are some very specialized areas that are a ‘best fit’ for the Federal Government.”

Help ProPublica Investigate Threats to U.S. Democracy

Update, Nov. 1, 2022: This story was updated to include a reference to a CNN story about the DHS’ rejection of a project to protect election workers from harassment.

by Hannah Dreyfus

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

The Colorado courts have suspended a well-known custody evaluator and launched a review of the entire state-approved roster, following a ProPublica investigation that found some evaluators had continued to work after being disciplined by state regulators and accused of domestic violence.

Jaime Watman, of the State Court Administrator’s Office, confirmed the audit of all custody evaluators and said that Mark Kilmer, who has served for decades as an evaluator in Colorado family courts, has been suspended while his “continued suitability” is reviewed. Kilmer was arrested and charged with assault in 2006 after his then-wife said he pushed her to the bathroom floor, according to police reports.

Kilmer pleaded guilty to harassment in 2007; the charge was dismissed by the court after Kilmer successfully completed domestic violence counseling and 24 months of probation.

In an interview with ProPublica, Kilmer denied the allegations and said his guilty plea was a result of poor legal representation.

Watman noted that because judges appoint evaluators to the cases they preside over, her office “has no authority to terminate an appointment” that is currently underway. Any action on “current appointments,” she said, will be determined by “the judicial officer presiding over the case.”

Kilmer, who was suspended last week, did not respond to a request for comment on the suspension.

In an interview with ProPublica, Kilmer said he does not believe 90% of the abuse allegations he hears during the course of his work.

ProPublica found that Kilmer is one of four parental responsibility evaluators, or PREs, on the state roster who have been charged with harassment or domestic violence. In one case, the charges were dismissed. In the two others, it is unclear how the charges were resolved.

ProPublica also found that 1 in 5 PREs, including Kilmer, has been publicly sanctioned by the Colorado State Board of Psychologist Examiners, six times the rate of discipline for all psychologists with active licenses in the state. Evaluators were sanctioned for misrepresenting their credentials, failing to keep client’s information confidential and, in one case detailed by the Gazette, of Colorado Springs, failing to disclose a conflict of interest that is alleged to have contributed to the death of a 10-year-old, according to a complaint filed by the child’s mother with the state board. (In his response to the complaint, the PRE said he never perceived threats to the child’s safety.)

None of the sanctioned or arrested PREs lost their licenses or had them suspended.

ProPublica spoke to 45 Colorado parents who were involved in custody disputes with allegations of child and domestic abuse. In cases evaluated by a PRE with a criminal or disciplinary record, the parents said they only learned about their evaluator’s background after the court had appointed them.

Multiple parents who alleged they had experienced abuse in their relationships said evaluators downplayed or omitted the abuse from their reports to the court.

Judges are not obligated to follow evaluators’ recommendations, but PREs acknowledge their opinions are very influential. “At this point in my career, sometimes the judge just cuts and pastes all my recommendations and puts it into the court order,” Kilmer told ProPublica.

The State Court Administrator’s Office, which is responsible for vetting PREs and other court-appointed custody evaluators, said a criminal misdemeanor conviction older than 15 years does not disqualify a custody evaluator from family court appointments. The office also said that discipline by the State Board of Psychologist Examiners does not disqualify an evaluator unless it currently affects their license.

A Colorado law that took effect in January placed court evaluators under the supervision of the State Court Administrator’s Office. Before then, evaluators were not formally vetted by the court and operated with little to no supervision. Watman said the court does not have authority “to consider complaints arising in cases filed prior to” Jan. 1.

The new law also requires court evaluators to receive additional training on how to identify domestic violence and child abuse and on how abuse should be weighed in custody recommendations.

Rep. Meg Froelich, the bill’s sponsor, told ProPublica she will push for additional family court reforms in the next legislative session, including requiring additional education for family court judges.

Froelich said she will model legislation after a Pennsylvania measure, known as Kayden’s Law, that mandates judges and court personnel receive training about child abuse and domestic violence and adds to the evidence judges must consider in custody decisions.

In March, President Joe Biden signed a law that adds language from Kayden’s Law to the reauthorized federal Violence Against Women Act, allocating additional federal funds to states that update their child custody laws to better protect at-risk children.

by Doug Bock Clark

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

On a Saturday in late March, the woman who runs elections in the rural hills of Surry County, North Carolina, was pulling another weekend shift preparing for the upcoming primary, when she began to hear on the other side of her wall the thunder of impassioned speeches. She was dismayed that the voices were questioning the election she’d overseen in 2020 and implying that corrupted voting machines had helped steal it. She also believed it was no coincidence that the Surry County GOP convention — the highlight of which was a lecture from a nationally prominent proponent of the stolen-election myth — was taking place in a public meeting room right next to her office.

The elections director, 47-year-old Michella Huff, who’d lived in the county since high school and knew many voters by name, considered it ludicrous that anyone could think the election had been rigged in Surry County. Donald Trump had received upward of 70% of the roughly 36,000 votes cast. Huff, a registered Republican for most of her adult life, had personally certified the vote.

Yet people had begun approaching Huff in church recently, saying things like, “I know you didn’t do anything, but that election was stolen.” In February, a longtime acquaintance of Huff’s cornered her in a bluegrass music store and berated her with complaints rooted in conspiracy theories. Huff started limiting her trips to town, even doing her grocery order online. “I didn’t want to have to deal with that,” she said of the election backlash. But it was hard to live in partial hiding. “I’m not that kind of person. I’m a people person.”

Unbeknownst to Huff, a national network of election deniers had been making inroads in Surry County, on the fringe of Appalachia. In early 2022, several members of the Surry County GOP had attended a training, put on by North Carolina Audit Force, which describes itself as a group that forms grassroots coalitions to “reveal election irregularities.” There, they were taught to “canvass” for election fraud by door-knocking to check for inaccuracies in public records, such as if a different person lived at an address than was listed on voter rolls. Discrepancies, canvassers claim, can indicate fraud — though experts say that canvassers often misinterpret normal imperfections in difficult-to-maintain voter lists, such as someone failing to update their address when moving. By early March, canvassers were crisscrossing Surry County, following “walk books” put together by data analysts associated with North Carolina Audit Force, who mapped routes for efficiency.

The featured lecturer at the Surry County GOP convention, Douglas Frank, is the face of the nationwide canvassing movement and claims to have established campaigns with the help of “supermoms” in at least 40 states. Frank and other speakers spent hours at the convention blaming corrupted voting machines and collusion among Democrats, Big Tech and nefarious forces for stealing the election. The assembly ultimately passed resolutions to create an election integrity task force and push for an audit, tactics espoused by Trump supporters.

The following Monday morning, Frank showed up at the service window of Huff’s office with William Keith Senter, the new chair of the Surry County GOP, and a woman who signed the guestbook as “NC Audit Force.” Huff believed that the group wanted to get inside her office — where voting equipment was kept — so she stepped into the cramped lobby with them, letting the door to her office automatically lock behind her.

The bowtie-wearing Frank began complaining to Huff about “phantom voters” discovered through canvassing and declaring that if he could just take an electromagnetic field meter tool to her DS200 ballot tabulators, he could reveal a minuscule modem that had helped switch votes from Trump to Joe Biden. It wasn’t the first time that Frank had encouraged an election official to let outsiders access election equipment. About 11 months before, he’d offered to help bring in a “team” to “audit” machines for Colorado officials, according to an affidavit for an arrest warrant of an official charged in the incident and to Frank himself. In September, Frank posted on Telegram that his phone had been seized by FBI agents investigating the incident, according to The Washington Post. Frank has not been charged.

“My objective is to help the clerk understand how they’re being hacked and what they need to do to fix it,” Frank said when asked about Colorado, using another term for election officials. In reference to Huff, he said: “I was there trying to offer a service to the clerk. I always assume clerks want to have clean elections, which is why I offered to help her find out if her machines were online or not.” Frank claimed to have convinced “dozens” of other election and county-level officials of the need to probe voting machines, “and that’s why counties all across the country are taking the machines out of the election process.”

It was not Frank who most concerned Huff, however, but Senter — a high school auto shop teacher and cattle farmer with a mechanic’s callused hands and baseball hat declaring “Pray for America” atop his silvering hair. The new GOP chair — who, according to three members of the Surry County GOP, replaced a predecessor who hadn’t sufficiently backed claims of election fraud — would remain in Huff’s orbit long after the barnstorming Frank left town. Indeed, Senter was only at the beginning of a campaign that would include efforts to drastically cut Huff’s pay and call into question even the most mundane functions of her office.

Huff told ProPublica that, as the men pressured her for more than an hour, Senter threatened that she should comply with their demands or the county commission would fire her. (She initially described this incident in an article by Reuters.) She feared that her reddening face and neck gave away her fear. (The commission has no authority to fire Huff; she is appointed by and answers to the county and state boards of elections. Senter denied threatening Huff’s job and wrote to ProPublica that “I speak loudly because I do not hear well. I drove a loud race car for years and have shot high powered rifles all of my life, so I have high frequency hearing loss.” Frank said that descriptions of Senter as threatening were “overblown,” and that “he might have been emphatic, but never, like, threatening.”)

But Huff refused to give in.

Huff is hardly the only election official struggling to stand up to those who believe the voting system is rigged; such confrontations have dramatically unfolded across the country, from Hood County, Texas, to Floyd County, Georgia, to Nye County, Nevada. Her circumstances illustrate how the efforts to target her are part of a larger playbook, with tactics that are replicated throughout the country.

“Election officials in small rural offices are absolutely more vulnerable,” said Paul Manson, who studies the demography of election officials and serves as the research director for the Elections & Voting Information Center at Reed College. Because such offices have fewer resources, Manson said, they have a harder time adapting to the increasingly controversial nature of election administration in the United States. These types of offices also represent the vast majority of the nation’s roughly 10,000 election jurisdictions, according to Manson’s research, with 48% of offices staffed by only one or two people and an additional 40% having between two and five. (Huff’s office has four full-time staff members, including her.)

As she juggled budget challenges and harassment, Huff has sought help from the North Carolina State Board of Elections, but that agency has faced struggles of its own. The GOP-dominant legislature has deprived the board of federal funding it had intended to use to hire and retain staff, instead sending it directly to counties. Moreover, groups claiming election fraud have organized campaigns against the agency, leaving it straining to support the 100 far-flung county boards of elections it oversees, officials say.

Laws and regulations were not written for the hostile environment of today, said Richard L. Hasen, a professor and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at the University of California, Los Angeles. Many of the individuals challenging election officials are even using the law itself, such as overwhelming those offices with public records requests, a practice that Senter would soon take up in Surry County and that “election integrity” groups would employ against the North Carolina State Board of Elections.

Hasen warned: “The country’s election infrastructure isn’t designed to stand up to one of its two major parties turning against it.”

When Michella Huff accepted the job as Surry County’s elections director in 2019, she thought she knew what she was getting into. On her first day, in October, she parked at a strip mall neighbored by corn fields, a hunting supply store and a chicken processing plant, and walked into a former grocery store, which had closed as the region bled jobs and had been renovated to house the county’s tax, agricultural and elections divisions. After more than two decades as the head of groundskeeping for Mount Airy, population roughly 10,500 and the largest town in the county, located about 100 miles north of Charlotte, she was giving her aching back a rest and working in an air-conditioned office.

Each fall, for most of her adult life, she’d taken a few weeks off from mowing and planting to be a poll worker during early voting and then run a polling site as a chief precinct judge on Election Day. Though the days could be long and the pay little, she loved how some people kept their “I Voted” stickers pristine to add to lifetime collections and how others brought in homemade grape jelly for poll workers. Most of all, she was motivated by the certainty that she was making American democracy function.

After the 2020 presidential election went off smoothly, Huff was aware of the “Stop the Steal” movement promoted by Trump, but, given her knowledge of how election security worked, she knew that its claims of Venezuelan software flipping votes from Trump to Biden were baseless. In the aftermath of Jan. 6, she assured herself that that kind of chaos would never come to sleepy Surry County.

Mount Airy, population roughly 10,500, is the largest town in Surry County. (Cornell Watson for ProPublica)

But instead of the conspiracy theories dying down, they intensified. Soon after taking the job, she had switched her party status to independent “to reflect the way that this office must be portrayed in a nonpartisan manner.” It wasn’t until Biden took office that people in the community began to ask her about this. Huff recalls that one afternoon in early March 2021, she was surprised by a visitor at her office: Kevin Shinault, her former elementary school teacher and a GOP precinct chair, who she said accused her of participating in a debunked conspiracy theory known as “Zuckerbucks.”

In 2020, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had provided grants to election officials through the Center for Tech and Civic Life to help with unexpected pandemic expenses, and critics held that this had been part of a plot to throw the election to Joe Biden. Huff happily explained that the $48,584 she’d received from the group had been used for straightforward expenses, like hiring a Spanish-language interpreter. Nearly every election office in North Carolina had accepted such grants. Shinault, however, argued that hiring a Spanish-language interpreter had nefariously boosted Hispanic participation to the Democrats’ advantage. Huff assured him that helping Spanish-speaking voters wasn’t partisan. (Shinault did not respond to requests for comment.)

That night, Huff attended the biweekly county commissioners meeting, at which the chair of the county Elections Board asked the five county commissioners to split $20,000 left over from the previous year’s federal grants between Huff and her staff as belated hazard pay for their efforts during the pandemic. Huff figured it was a routine request. Numerous other counties had used the money this way; Surry’s bipartisan Elections Board had already signed off on it; and records show that about two months earlier, commissioners had reviewed the grants without comment.

The county commissioners, however, sharply questioned the chair of the Elections Board for nearly an hour, implying that unless more county employees got such pay, it wasn’t fair. Eddie Harris, a commissioner who works at a luxury saddle-making company his family owns, declared, “I will never take one penny from Mark Zuckerberg or any of his ilk,” calling the Meta CEO “a left-wing radical extremist bigot.” (Senter wrote to ProPublica, “As a party, we approached the commissioners and ask [sic] them to send the Zuckerbucks back, and they agreed.” Harris did not respond to requests for comment.)

Huff realized that her decadeslong relationships with people wouldn’t prevent them from envisioning her as part of some dark conspiracy. The next month, the commissioners unanimously voted to return nearly $100,000 in pandemic grant money, including the Center for Tech and Civic Life grant and around $60,000 from the USC Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy, named for the former Republican governor of California. They also returned the $20,000 in federal funding, rather than divvying it up among the elections staff.

Huff felt that returning the money was “very unfair,” but she resolved not to let it affect her performance. The best way to rebut conspiracy theories was to run her elections perfectly. She hoped the election conspiracy theories “would be a dead issue after the money was sent back.”

But once Senter and Frank confronted her in March 2022, she realized the target on her back was permanent.

After that heated visit, Senter kept showing up at the elections office. With the service window between them, Huff helped him file public records requests, which he insisted on scrawling by hand. (He explained to ProPublica that the handwritten requests were necessary, “so they could not be doctored by anyone else.”) Huff politely did her duty, but whenever she saw him, “My gut flipped. It makes me angry that he has that power — I can’t help how my body reacts.” When Huff and her staff finished work late in the evening, police escorted them to their cars, past campaign-style signs that Senter had put up reading “The People’s Trust is SHATTERED” and “We DEMAND a Full FORENSIC Audit.” Huff repeatedly took them down, until the sheriff decided the signs should stay up, as they were legal political expression on public property.

In March and April, Senter sent numerous emails and texts to the county commissioners, which ProPublica obtained through public records requests. On March 31, he emailed the commissioners asking them to “please consider our recommendations that are in the attachment,” which included a suggestion to reduce her pay and stated that “there is NO requirement to fund any additional election support staff.” Though Huff answers to the county and state elections boards, the county commissioners set her budget and salary.

Later that day, Senter texted the commissioners, “Y’all might better get Michella in check,” complaining about her charging 5 cents per copy for public records. “It’s gonna get ugly if she don’t jump on board. Cut her salary to 12 bucks an hour like the law says you can do.” (Senter told ProPublica: “The ugly part is in reference to the phone calls, text, threats and pressure I was receiving due to her lies and deceit that she reported to the media”; but his message to the commissioners made no reference to those things, and Huff said she had not spoken to the media about Senter as of the end of March.)

North Carolina law does specify that elections directors can be paid a minimum of $12 an hour (less than $25,000 annually), but two lawyers specializing in elections told ProPublica that any attempt to drastically reduce Huff’s salary, which was $71,000 as of March, would almost certainly be struck down, as courts have found that elections director salaries must be in line with those of their peers; a ProPublica review of elections director salaries in North Carolina found that the average is about $61,000.

Commissioners responded only occasionally to Senter’s messages about Huff, according to the documents ProPublica received from public records requests, such as the commission chair texting Senter instructions for how to avoid paying for public information requests to Huff’s office. (Only one of the county commissioners responded to a request for comment. Mark Marion said, “We have signified that we are behind our elections department.” When pressed for specific instances, he pointed to “our day-to-day conversations and visits” with elections staff.)

At an April 18 commissioners meeting, Senter asked the panel during the public comment period to consider not using the county’s voting machines in the upcoming May primary because of his and others’ suspicions that they had been corrupted. He was backed by a parade of speakers, among them Shinault.

At a commissioners meeting the following month, the room was filled, with the overflow watching on a livestream. Essentially, the whole meeting was given over to election deniers, some of whom traveled from elsewhere in North Carolina and the nation and presented slideshows on the vulnerabilities of voting machines and the so-called evidence from canvassing efforts.

Near the end of the meeting, a commissioner read prewritten remarks explaining that the requests to discard the voting machines were outside their power.

Afterward, the crowd assembled on the courthouse lawn, alongside a memorial to Confederate soldiers. People chanted, “Hell no, the machines gotta go!” A succession of speakers promised to fight on, with one declaiming so vehemently that he tore his lips on the microphone mesh, spotting it with blood.

In late August, Senter traveled to Missouri for a weekendlong gathering of hundreds of election deniers put on by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow CEO who claims to have spent at least $35 million of his fortune on efforts to prove the 2020 election was fraudulent. At Lindell’s event, activists from all 50 states touted their campaigns, which often involved pressuring county and state election officials. “We’ve had a few victories,” Senter told the crowd when he presented as the representative for North Carolina. “We feel like if you’ve got a committed group of patriots, and some county commissioners that are not afraid to face the establishment and do their job, and local law enforcement that will hear the evidence that you produce to them, we can actually get something done in your county. So if you’d like that strategy, hit us up in North Carolina, and we’ll help you out with it.”

After returning home, Senter submitted to Huff’s office a time-consuming public records request similar to one that Lindell had promoted, which required one of Huff’s three full-time staff members to spend 60 hours at a scanner uploading 2020 “poll tapes,” the physical receipts from tabulators. Across North Carolina and nationwide, short-staffed offices reported being overwhelmed with often identical requests. Senter’s requests to Huff came atop dozens of others from different sources, including a sweeping request from a lawyer for the Republican National Committee. Before 2020, Surry County’s elections office had received an estimated half-dozen public records requests a year; in the first 10 months of 2022, it received 81.

An ally of Senter’s filed requests for court-ordered mediation and a lawsuit against Huff, seeking the same records that Lindell’s campaign has recommended asking for. While none of the legal actions have so far been successful, shortly before Surry County’s 2020 elections-related paper records were to be routinely discarded, the county Board of Elections agreed to preserve them for three more years. Huff said that each legal action resulted in her and her staff having to spend significant time with lawyers and on paperwork, rather than on actual elections administration.

Most laws and regulations that govern public records requests and elections do little to ease the disruptions that Huff and others were enduring — and offer few means to hold anyone accountable. “I don’t think there’s a silver bullet solution, unfortunately,” said Lawrence Norden, the senior director of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonprofit law and public policy institute. He noted that public records laws are necessary tools to ensure government transparency. “In a lot of cases, if election officials had more resources available to them, it would be easier to push back on some of these things.” He said that officials in smaller jurisdictions often need to turn to professional associations, nonprofits or their state election agencies for help.

The organization most responsible for supporting Huff is the North Carolina State Board of Elections, which is responsible for statewide election infrastructure, such as its voter registration database, and which provides oversight and help for county offices. It had dispatched staff to back up Huff when election deniers were holding rallies in the county and offered legal advice and support over the phone.

But the state board, too, was being overwhelmed by public information requests. Before 2020, only several dozen requests would come in per year, said Patrick Gannon, its public information director. In 2021, there were 380, with some coming from the same people who submitted requests to Huff. Meanwhile, the number of people on the communications team had dwindled from four to two, in large part due to reductions in federal funding and the GOP-led legislature not meeting budgeting requests, according to board officials. By late October, the officials said, five employees had accepted buyout offers. To make payroll, the agency also let two people go and did not fill 17 positions — reducing its staff by more than 20% during its busiest time and limiting the services it could provide counties.

Huff helps election workers test voting machines to ensure each is functioning properly. (Cornell Watson for ProPublica)

Huff’s experiences with so-called election integrity activists were more intense than what other North Carolina election workers were facing, though many of them were also enduring their own challenges. After the May primary, at least 14 counties reported complaints to the state board about aggressive poll observers, according to an internal survey obtained through a public records request. The complaints and additional documentation from one of the counties described two instances in which observers tailed election workers in their cars, among other examples of observers “intimidating poll workers.” This led the agency to pass rules to ensure that observers — the individuals assigned by political parties to monitor election officials — didn’t do things like stand so close to voting equipment that they could see confidential information. However, these rules were nullified when they were sent for approval to a board appointed by the GOP-controlled state legislature.

Even states considered to be on the forefront of election administration — such as Colorado, where legislators have passed laws addressing rising security risks, and Kentucky, where the Republican secretary of state has pushed back against conspiracy theories — have experienced significant disruptions as a result of the organized campaigns by 2020 election deniers. “It’s the new normal, until we have our political leaders in both parties pushing back strongly against it,” Norden said.

One of the individuals helping Senter in his Surry County campaign is Carol Snow, the North Carolina Audit Force leader who accompanied Senter and Frank to the elections office during their March confrontation with Huff. In a May email from Snow to Senter with the subject line “Surry Co Dirt,” which ProPublica obtained through public records requests, she provides him with a PowerPoint presentation. Its 61 slides outline supposed errors in North Carolina’s voter registration database. In an August email Snow sent to the county commissioners, copying Senter, she presented them with supposed evidence of voter-registration fraud in Surry County assembled through canvassing. She also suggested that law enforcement could subpoena information inaccessible through public records requests, which she claimed might reveal “individual voter fraud” or systemwide “election fraud.” She concluded, “We will get to the bottom of this or die (or be imprisoned for) trying.” The commissioners did not respond to the email.

(Snow declined to comment on the emails; in response to earlier questions about North Carolina Audit Force’s efforts in Surry County, Snow wrote: “Americans have every right to oversee our election process. That’s what should happen in a free society.”)

Until recently, Snow was also a leader in the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, a statewide affiliate of the nationwide Election Integrity Network, which has trained thousands of activists in the battleground states to scrutinize election officials. The network’s goal is to make sure there are “local election integrity task forces organized at every local election office in America,” according to its training manual, and it lays out how to aggressively scrutinize officials in ways that are similar to what Huff has experienced, such as through filing public records requests and investigating voting machines and voter lists. “The goal is for the task force members to be ever-present at the election office and board meetings,” it reads.

Jim Womack, the head of the North Carolina Election Integrity Team, told ProPublica that the group had nothing to do with the events in Surry County and that Snow’s actions there were “her business.” He and Snow said she had recently left the organization.

Womack estimated that as of August, the North Carolina Election Integrity Team had trained more than 1,000 volunteers, who would be present in most major North Carolina counties in November, including Surry. “As long as” election officials are “doing things in accordance with the law and the books, they shouldn’t have anything to worry about,” Womack said. “And if that causes stress, I'm sorry.”

In the months before the November 2022 midterm election, Huff decided to go on the offensive against misinformation, giving speeches to various civic groups about how elections actually work, like the local real estate agents association.

One afternoon toward the end of the summer, she showed up at a country club for what she had believed was a concerned citizens meeting — and found waiting for her eight local conservative leaders, including county commissioner Harris, who had fiercely criticized the Center for Tech and Civic Life money. For two and a half hours, Huff answered the Republicans’ questions, largely about election security, explaining the safeguards that kept voting tabulators from being hacked. The discussion was tense but civil, and while Huff kept her hands clasped atop a table, her feet compulsively kicked an orange golf tee beneath it. As Huff headed for the door, she reminded her hosts, “The people who work in the elections office, we’re real people who love our community too.”

Afterward, a ProPublica reporter asked an attendee, Earl Blackburn, a Republican candidate for a local school board, if Huff’s presentation had made him feel better about election security. Though Huff had taken more than 15 minutes to explain directly to Blackburn how the voting machines couldn’t be hacked, he said, “I don’t know that she has satisfactorily answered my question.” To explain how the machines could be hacked anyway, Blackburn referenced a badly reviewed Sean Connery heist movie that hinges on thieves dodging a laser beam alarm system to break into a global bank.

Huff speaks during a September training for election workers at the Surry County Board of Elections. (Cornell Watson for ProPublica)

On Sept. 19, Huff hosted a watch party in the public meeting room next to the elections office for a livestream of speeches in which experts and North Carolina State Board of Elections members explained election security, hoping that some of the Surry County GOP might attend — or at the very least some skeptical citizens. But the only people who came were longtime poll workers who already understood how elections worked.

As September turned to October, she and her staff hosted another event at which they publicly tested the dozens of voting machines that would be used in November to prove their accuracy. She hoped some of the election deniers might assuage their fears at the event, but none showed up.

No matter how many questions she answered or how many times she proved the soundness of the voting machines, it wasn’t clear that she was convincing anyone.

When Huff had taken the job in 2019, she had told the Board of Elections that she expected to stay 20 years. But recently there had been many nights she had wondered how she could continue. She said, “If this is what every day and every night looks like, how could anyone keep this up for 17 more years?” She wasn’t just thinking of herself but also about how the stress she brought home and the controversies surrounding her would affect her children, who are in high school and college, and her husband.

Coming home late from work each night, Huff parked beside a plot that was normally filled with heirloom tomatoes, cucumbers, herbs and peppers, but which was now just dirt. Instead of tending her garden, she was trapped all day in the halogen-lit office. Still, in her most hopeful moods, she could imagine that instead of cultivating the land she was cultivating democracy. “It’s a seed. You plant it. It grows. It flowers. It fruits,” she said. “It takes careful tending to make sure that it survives and becomes something beautiful.”

Help ProPublica Investigate Threats to U.S. Democracy

by Jeremy Schwartz and Jessica Priest

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

This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

Six days before a local runoff election last year in Frisco, a prosperous and growing suburb of Dallas, Brandon Burden paced the stage of KingdomLife Church. The pastor told congregants that demonic spirits were operating through members of the City Council.

Grasping his Bible with both hands, Burden said God was working through his North Texas congregation to take the country back to its Christian roots. He lamented that he lacked jurisdiction over the state Capitol, where he had gone during the 2021 Texas legislative session to lobby for conservative priorities like expanded gun rights and a ban on abortion.

“But you know what I got jurisdiction over this morning is an election coming up on Saturday,” Burden told parishioners. “I got a candidate that God wants to win. I got a mayor that God wants to unseat. God wants to undo. God wants to shift the balance of power in our city. And I have jurisdiction over that this morning.”

What Burden said that day in May 2021 was a violation of a long-standing federal law barring churches and nonprofits from directly or indirectly participating in political campaigns, tax law experts told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. Although the provision was mostly uncontroversial for decades after it passed in 1954, it has become a target for both evangelical churches and former President Donald Trump, who vowed to eliminate it.

Burden’s sermon is among those at 18 churches identified by the news organizations over the past two years that appeared to violate the Johnson Amendment, a measure named after its author, former President Lyndon B. Johnson. Some pastors have gone so far as to paint candidates they oppose as demonic.

At one point, churches fretted over losing their tax-exempt status for even unintentional missteps. But the IRS has largely abdicated its enforcement responsibilities as churches have become more brazen. In fact, the number of apparent violations found by ProPublica and the Tribune, and confirmed by three nonprofit tax law experts, are greater than the total number of churches the federal agency has investigated for intervening in political campaigns over the past decade, according to records obtained by the news organizations.

In response to questions, an IRS spokesperson said that the agency “cannot comment on, neither confirm nor deny, investigations in progress, completed in the past nor contemplated.” Asked about enforcement efforts over the past decade, the IRS pointed the news organizations to annual reports that do not contain such information.

Neither Burden nor KingdomLife responded to multiple interview requests or to emailed questions.

(Video editing by Todd Wiseman/Texas Tribune and Justin Dehn/Texas Tribune. Source videos: Shelby Tauber for ProPublica/Texas Tribune, KingdomLife Church.)

Trump’s opposition to the law banning political activity by nonprofits “has given some politically-minded evangelical leaders a sense that the Johnson Amendment just isn’t really an issue anymore, and that they can go ahead and campaign for or against candidates or positions from the pulpit,” said David Brockman, a scholar in religion and public policy at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.

Among the violations the newsrooms identified: In January, an Alaska pastor told his congregation that he was voting for a GOP candidate who is aiming to unseat Republican U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, saying the challenger was the “only candidate for Senate that can flat-out preach.” During a May 15 sermon, a pastor in Rocklin, California, asked voters to get behind “a Christian conservative candidate” challenging Gov. Gavin Newsom. And in July, a New Mexico pastor called Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham “beyond evil” and “demonic” for supporting abortion access. He urged congregants to “vote her behind right out of office” and challenged the media to call him out for violating the Johnson Amendment.

Andrew Whitehead, a sociologist at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, who studies Christian nationalism, said the ramping up of political activity by churches could further polarize the country. “It creates hurdles for a healthy, functioning, pluralistic democratic society,” he said. “It’s really hard to overcome.”

The Johnson Amendment does not prohibit churches from inviting political speakers or discussing positions that may seem partisan nor does it restrict voters from making faith-based decisions on who should represent them. But because donations to churches are tax-deductible and because churches don’t have to file financial disclosures with the IRS, without such a rule donors seeking to influence elections could go undetected, said Andrew Seidel, vice president of strategic communications for the advocacy group Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

“If you pair the ability to wade into partisan politics with a total absence of financial oversight and transparency, you’re essentially creating super PACs that are black holes,” Seidel said.

Churches have long balanced the tightrope of political involvement, and blatant violations have previously been rare. In the 1960s, the IRS investigated complaints that some churches abused their tax-exempt status by distributing literature that was hostile to the election of John F. Kennedy, the country’s first Catholic president. And in 2004, the federal agency audited All Saints Episcopal Church in California after a pastor gave an anti-war speech that imagined Jesus talking to presidential candidates George W. Bush and John Kerry. The pastor did not endorse a candidate but criticized the Iraq war.

Some conservative groups have argued that Black churches are more politically active than their white evangelical counterparts but are not as heavily scrutinized. During the 1984 presidential campaign, Democratic candidate Rev. Jesse L. Jackson was accused of turning Sunday sermons into campaign rallies and using Black churches to raise funds. In response to allegations of illegal campaigning, Jackson said at the time that strict guidelines were followed and denied violating the law.

While some Black churches have crossed the line into political endorsements, the long legacy of political activism in these churches stands in sharp contrast to white evangelical churches, where some pastors argue devout Christians must take control of government positions, said Robert Wuthnow, the former director of the Princeton University Center for the Study of Religion.

Wuthnow said long-standing voter outreach efforts inside Black churches, such as Souls to the Polls, which encourages voting on Sundays after church services, largely stay within the boundaries of the law.

“The Black church has been so keenly aware of its marginalized position,” Wuthnow said. “The Black church, historically, was the one place where Black people could mobilize, could organize, could feel that they had some power at the local level. The white evangelical church has power. It’s in office. It’s always had power.”

At the end of his two-hour sermon that May, Burden asserted that his church had a God-given power to choose lawmakers, and he asked others to join him onstage to “secure the gate over the city.”

Burden and a handful of church members crouched down and held on to a rod, at times speaking in tongues. The pastor said intruders such as the mayor, who was not up for reelection last year but who supported one of the candidates in the race for City Council, would be denied access to the gates of the city.

“Now this is bold, but I’m going to say it because I felt it from the Lord. I felt the Lord say, ‘Revoke the mayor’s keys to this gate,’” Burden said. “No more do you have the key to the city. We revoke your key this morning, Mr. Mayor.

“We shut you out of the place of power,” Burden added. “The place of authority and influence.”

Johnson Amendment’s Cold War Roots

Questions about the political involvement of tax-exempt organizations were swirling when Congress ordered an investigation in April 1952 to determine if some foundations were using their money “for un-American and subversive activities.”

Leading the probe was Rep. Gene Cox, a Georgia Democrat who had accused the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, among others, of helping alleged Communists or Communist fronts. Cox died during the investigation, and the final report cleared the foundations of wrongdoing.

But a Republican member of the committee argued for additional scrutiny, and in July 1953, Congress established the House Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations. The committee focused heavily on liberal organizations, but it also investigated nonprofits such as the Facts Forum foundation, which was headed by Texas oilman H.L. Hunt, an ardent supporter of then-Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, a Republican who was best known for holding hearings to investigate suspected Communists.

In July 1954, Johnson, who was then a senator, proposed an amendment to the U.S. tax code that would strip nonprofits of their tax-exempt status for “intervening” in political campaigns. The amendment sailed through Congress with bipartisan support and was signed into law by Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Johnson never explained his intent. Opponents of the amendment, as well as some academics, say Johnson was motivated by a desire to undercut conservative foundations such as the National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government, founded by newspaper magnate Frank Gannett, which painted the Democrat as soft on communism and supported his opponent in the primary election. Others have hypothesized that Johnson was hoping to head off a wider crackdown on nonprofit foundations.

Over the next 40 years, the IRS stripped a handful of religious nonprofits of their tax-exempt status. None were churches.

Then, just four days before the 1992 presidential election, Branch Ministries in New York ran two full-page ads in USA Today and The Washington Times urging voters to reject then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, a Democrat, in his challenge to Republican President George H.W. Bush.

The ads proclaimed: “Christian Beware. Do not put the economy ahead of the Ten Commandments.” They asserted that Clinton violated scripture by supporting “abortion on demand,” homosexuality and the distribution of condoms to teenagers in public schools. Clinton, the ads said, was “openly promoting policies that are in rebellion to God’s laws.”

The IRS revoked the church’s tax-exempt status, leading to a long legal battle that ended with a U.S. appeals court siding with the federal agency.

The case remains the only publicly known example of the IRS revoking the tax-exempt status of a church because of its political activity in nearly 70 years. The Congressional Research Service said in 2012 that a second church had lost its tax-exempt status, but that its identity “is not clear.”

Citing an increase in allegations of church political activity leading up to the 2004 presidential election between incumbent Bush and Kerry, IRS officials created the Political Activities Compliance Initiative to fast-track investigations.

Over the next four years, the committee investigated scores of churches, including 80 for endorsing candidates from the pulpit, according to IRS reports. But it did not revoke the tax-exempt status of any. Instead, the IRS mostly sent warning letters that agency officials said were effective in dissuading churches from continuing their political activity, asserting that there were no repeat offenders in that period.

In some cases, the IRS initiated audits of churches that could have led to financial penalties. It’s unclear how many did.

In January 2009, a federal court dismissed an audit into alleged financial improprieties at a Minnesota church whose pastor had supported the congressional campaign of former U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann, a Republican from Minnesota.

The court found that the IRS had not been following its own rules for a decade because it was tasked with notifying churches of their legal rights before any pending audits and was required to have an appropriately high-level official sign off on them. But a 1998 agency reorganization had eliminated the position, leaving lower IRS employees to initiate church investigations.

Following the ruling, the IRS suspended its investigations into church political activity for five years, according to a 2015 Government Accountability Office report.

During the hiatus, a conservative Christian initiative called Pulpit Freedom Sunday flourished. Pastors recorded themselves endorsing candidates or giving political sermons that they believed violated the Johnson Amendment and sent them to the IRS. The goal, according to participants, was to trigger a lawsuit that would lead to the prohibition being ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.

The IRS never challenged participating churches, and the effort wound down without achieving its aim.

In response to a Freedom of Information Act request from ProPublica and the Tribune last year, the IRS produced a severely redacted spreadsheet indicating the agency had launched inquiries into 16 churches since 2011. IRS officials shielded the results of the probes, and they have declined to answer specific questions.

Despite the agency’s limited enforcement, Trump promised shortly after he took office that he would “totally destroy the Johnson Amendment and allow our representatives of faith to speak freely and without fear of retribution.”

As president, Trump tried unsuccessfully to remove the restrictions on church politicking through a 2017 executive order. The move was largely symbolic because it simply ordered the government not to punish churches differently than it would any other nonprofit, according to a legal filing by the Justice Department.

Eliminating the Johnson Amendment would require congressional or judicial action.

Although the IRS has not discussed its plans, it has taken procedural steps that would enable it to ramp up audits again if it chooses to.

In 2019, more than two decades after eliminating the high-level position needed to sign off on action against churches, the IRS designated the commissioner of the agency’s tax-exempt and government entities division as the “appropriate high-level Treasury official” with the power to initiate a church audit.

But Philip Hackney, a former IRS attorney and University of Pittsburgh tax law professor, said he doesn’t read too much into that. “I don’t see any reason to believe that the operation of the IRS has changed significantly.”

The Pulpit and Politics

There is no uniform way to monitor church sermons across the country. But with the COVID-19 pandemic, many churches now post their services online, and ProPublica and the Tribune reviewed dozens of them. Many readers shared sermons with us. (You can do so here.)

Texas’ large evangelical population and history of activism in Black churches makes the state a focal point for debates over political activity, said Matthew Wilson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

“Combine all of that with the increasing competitiveness of Texas elections, and it’s no surprise that more and more Texas churches are taking on a political role,” he said. “Texas is a perfect arena for widespread, religiously motivated political activism.”

The state also has a long history of politically minded pastors, Wuthnow said. Texas evangelical church leaders joined the fight in support of alcohol prohibition a century ago and spearheaded efforts to defeat Democrat Al Smith, the first Catholic to be nominated for president by a major party, in 1928. In the 1940s, evangelical fundamentalism began to grow in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

Today, North Texas remains home to influential pastors such as Robert Jeffress, who leads the First Baptist megachurch in Dallas. Jeffress was one of Trump’s most fervent supporters, appearing at campaign events, defending him on television news shows and stating that he “absolutely” did not regret supporting the former president after the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.

Burden went a step further, urging followers to stock up on food and keep their guns loaded ahead of President Joe Biden’s inauguration. He told parishioners that “prophetic voices” had told him in 2016 that Trump would have eight consecutive years in office.

The Frisco Conservative Coalition board voted to suspend Burden as chair for 30 days after criticism about his remarks.

Burden called his comments “inartful” but claimed he was unfairly targeted for his views. “The establishment media is coming after me,” he said at the time. “But it is not just about me. People of faith are under attack in this country.”

Since then, Burden has repeatedly preached that the church has been designated by the Lord to decide who should serve in public office and “take dominion” over Frisco.

As the runoff for the Frisco City Council approached last year, Burden supported Jennifer White, a local veterinarian. White had positioned herself as the conservative candidate in the nonpartisan race against Angelia Pelham, a Black human resources executive who had the backing of the Frisco mayor.

White said she wasn’t in attendance during the May 2021 sermon in which Burden called her the “candidate that God wants to win.” She said she does not believe pastors should endorse candidates from the pulpit, but she welcomed churches becoming more politically active.

“I think that the churches over the years have been a big pretty big disappointment to the candidates in that they won't take a political stance,” White said in an interview. “So I would love it if churches would go ahead and come out and actually discuss things like morality. Not a specific party, but at least make sure people know where the candidates stand on those issues. And how to vote based on that.”

Pelham’s husband, local pastor Dono Pelham, also made a statement that violated the Johnson Amendment by “indirectly intervening” in the campaign, said Ellen Aprill, an emerita tax law professor at Loyola Marymount Law School in Los Angeles

In May 2021, Pelham told his church that the race for a seat on the City Council had resulted in a runoff. He acknowledged that his church’s tax-exempt status prevented him from supporting candidates from the pulpit. Then, he added, “but you’ll get the message.”

“It’s been declared for the two candidates who received the most votes, one of which is my wife,” Pelham said. “That’s just facts. That’s just facts. That’s just facts. And so a runoff is coming and every vote counts. Be sure to vote.”

Pelham then asked the congregation: “How did I do? I did all right, didn’t I? You know I wanted to go a little further, but I didn’t do it.”

Angelia Pelham, who co-founded Life-Changing Faith Christian Fellowship in 2008 with her husband, said the couple tried to avoid violating the Johnson Amendment. Both disagreed that her husband’s mention of her candidacy was a violation.

“I think church and state should remain separate,” Angelia Pelham said in an interview, adding: “But I think there’s a lot of folks in the religious setting that just completely didn’t even consider the line. They erased it completely and lost sight of the Johnson Amendment.”

She declined to discuss Burden’s endorsement of her opponent.

In his sermon the morning after Pelham defeated his chosen candidate, Burden told parishioners that the church’s political involvement would continue.

“So you’re like, but you lost last night? No, we set the stage for the future,” he said, adding “God is uncovering the demonic structure that is in this region.”

“Demonic” Candidate

Most Americans don’t want pastors making endorsements from the pulpit, according to a 2017 survey by the Program for Public Consultation, which is part of the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland.

Of the nearly 2,500 registered voters who were surveyed, 79% opposed getting rid of the Johnson Amendment. Only among Republican evangelical voters did a slight majority — 52% — favor loosening restrictions on church political activity.

But such endorsements are taking place across the country, with some pastors calling for a debate about the Johnson Amendment.

After the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, New Mexico became an island of abortion access for women in Texas and other neighboring states.

The issue raised the stakes in the upcoming Nov. 8 New Mexico governor’s race between incumbent Lujan Grisham, a supporter of abortion rights, and Republican challenger Mark Ronchetti, who advocates limiting access.

“We’re going to fast become the No. 1 abortion place in all of America,” a pastor, Steve Smothermon, said during a July 10 sermon at Legacy Church in Albuquerque, which has an average weekly attendance of more than 10,000 people. Smotherman said the governor was “wicked and evil” and called her “a narcissist.”

“And people think, ‘Why do you say that?’ Because I truly believe it. In fact, she’s beyond evil. It’s demonic,” Smothermon said.

He later added: “Folks, when are we going to get appalled? When are we going to say, ‘Enough is enough’? When are we going to stop saying, ‘Well, you know, it’s a woman’s right to choose’? That’s such a lie.”

Church attendees had a stark choice in the upcoming election, Smothermon said. “We have the Wicked Witch of the North. Or you have Mark Ronchetti.”

The governor’s campaign declined to comment. Neither Legacy Church, Smothermon nor Ronchetti responded to requests for comment.

(Video Editing by Todd Wiseman/Texas Tribune and Justin Dehn/Texas Tribune. Source videos: Adria Malcolm for ProPublica/Texas Tribune, Legacy Church.)

The sermon was a “clear violation” of the Johnson Amendment, said Sam Brunson, a Loyola University Chicago law professor. But Smothermon showed no fear of IRS enforcement.

Those who thought he crossed the line were “so stupid,” Smothermon said during the sermon. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

In another example, pastors at a Fort Worth church named Mercy Culture have repeatedly endorsed candidates for local and statewide offices since its founding in 2019.

“Now, obviously, churches don’t endorse candidates, but my name is Landon and I’m a person before I’m a pastor. And as an individual, I endorse Nate Schatzline,” the lead pastor, Landon Schott, said in a February sermon about a church member who was running to fill an open state representative seat.

Johnson Amendment rules allow pastors to endorse in their individual capacity, as long as they are not at an official church function, which Schott was.

In other services, Schott challenged critics to complain to the IRS about the church’s support of political candidates and said he wasn’t worried about losing the church’s tax-exempt status.

“If you want it that bad, come and take it. And if you think that we will stop preaching the gospel, speaking truth over taxes, you got another thing coming for you,” Schott said in May.

Schatzline, a member of Mercy Culture, received 65% of the vote in a May 24 runoff against the former mayor of the Dallas suburb of Southlake. He works for a separate nonprofit founded by Heather Schott, a pastor at Mercy Culture and the wife of Landon Schott.

Schatzline said in an interview with ProPublica and the Tribune that Landon Schott, not the church, endorsed him. He added that the church sought legal advice on how to ensure that it was complying with the Johnson Amendment.

“I think prayers can manifest into anything that God wants them to, but I would say that the community rallying behind me as individuals definitely manifested into votes,” Schatzline said.

Mercy Culture also supported Tim O’Hare, a Republican running for Tarrant County judge, this year after he came out against the shutdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. His opponent in the primary had ordered churches and businesses to temporarily close when she was mayor of Fort Worth.

O’Hare came to prominence as the mayor of suburban Farmers Branch, where he championed a city ordinance to prohibit landlords from renting to immigrants without legal status. A federal court declared the ordinance unconstitutional in 2010 after a legal battle that cost the city $6.6 million.

O’Hare has pledged to hire an election integrity officer to oversee voting and “uncover election fraud.”

“The Lord spoke to me and said, ‘Begin to pray for righteous judges in our city,’” Heather Schott said during a Feb. 13 service. “I am believing that Mr. Tim O’Hare is an answered prayer of what we have been petitioning heaven for for the last year and a half.”

Neither Mercy Culture, Landon Schott nor Heather Schott responded to requests for comment. O’Hare also did not respond to a phone call and email seeking comment.

Schott’s comments were a prohibited endorsement, said Aprill, the emerita tax law professor at Loyola Marymount Law School in Los Angeles.

“It doesn’t say ‘vote for him’ but is still an endorsement,” she said. “There’s no other way to understand the statement that O’Hare has answered prayers for righteous judges.”

Two weeks later, O’Hare won his primary. He faces Deborah Peoples, a Democrat, on Nov. 8.

A New Tactic

On April 18, 2021, a day before early voting began for city council and school board elections across Texas, pastors at churches just miles apart flashed the names of candidates on overhead screens. They told their congregations that local church leaders had gathered to discuss upcoming city and school elections and realized that their members were among those seeking office.

“We’re not endorsing a candidate. We’re not doing that. But we just thought because they’re a member of the family of God, that you might want to know if someone in the family and this family of churches is running,” said Robert Morris, who leads the Gateway megachurch in Southlake and served as a member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board.

On the same day, Doug Page gave a similar message less than 5 miles away at First Baptist Grapevine.

“And so what we decided to do is look within our church families and say, ‘Who do we know that’s running for office?’ Now, let me clarify with you. This is not an endorsement by us. We are not endorsing anyone. However, if you’re part of a family, you’d like to know if Uncle Bill is running for office, right? And so that’s all we’re going to do is simply inform you.”

Saying that you are not endorsing a candidate “isn’t like a magic silver bullet that makes it so that you’re not endorsing them,” Brunson said.

(Video editing by Todd Wiseman/Texas Tribune and Justin Dehn/Texas Tribune. Source videos: Shelby Tauber for ProPublica/Texas Tribune, Gateway Church, First Baptist Grapevine.)

The churches’ coordination on messaging across the area is notable, according to University of Notre Dame tax law professor Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, who said he hadn’t before seen churches organizing to share lists of candidates.

“I do think this strategy is new,” said Mayer, who has studied the Johnson Amendment for more than a decade. “I hadn’t heard of that before. It’s quite a sophisticated tactic.”

Eight of the nine candidates mentioned by the pastors won their races.

Mindy McClure, who ran for reelection to the Grapevine-Colleyville school board, said she thought church involvement contributed to her defeat in a June 5, 2021, runoff by about 4 percentage points. Her opponent campaigned on removing critical race theory from district curriculum, while McClure said students “weren’t being indoctrinated in any way, shape or form.” Critical race theory is a college-level academic theory that racism is embedded in legal systems.

McClure said pastors endorsing from the pulpit creates “divisiveness” in the community.

“Just because you attend a different church doesn’t mean that you’re more connected with God,” she said.

Lawrence Swicegood, executive director of Gateway Media, said this month that the church doesn’t endorse candidates but “inform(s) our church family of other church family members who are seeking office to serve our community.” Page told ProPublica and the Tribune that “these candidates were named for information only.”

Eleven days after responding to ProPublica and the Tribune in October, Morris once again told his church that he was not endorsing any candidates during the last Sunday sermon before early voting. Then, he again displayed the names of specific candidates on a screen and told parishioners to take screenshots with their cellphones.

“We must vote,” he said. “I think we have figured that out in America, that the Christians sat on the sidelines for too long. And then all of a sudden they started teaching our children some pretty mixed up things in the schools. And we had no one to blame but ourselves. So let’s not let that happen. Especially at midterms.”

Help Us Report: How Do Religious Institutions in Your Area Involve Themselves in Elections?

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune want to understand how the Johnson Amendment is enforced — or isn’t. Please send us examples of any political activity you see at churches or other religious institutions, and we’ll look into whether or not it breaks the rules. We want to hear about examples across the political spectrum.

window.jQuery || document.write('') This form requires JavaScript to complete. Powered by CityBase Screendoor. // Uncomment this line and set it to the CSS class that your website uses for buttons: // FormRenderer.BUTTON_CLASS = ''; new FormRenderer({"project_id":"rQgK0UYeIC54u1gm"}); Correction

Oct. 31, 2022: This story originally misstated the name of the university where Andrew Whitehead, a sociologist, works. It is Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, not University of Indiana-Purdue.

by Jessica Priest and Jeremy Schwartz

Under federal law, churches and other nonprofit organizations are prohibited from electioneering.

The Johnson Amendment, a 1954 congressional measure, bans tax-exempt organizations from interfering directly or indirectly in a political campaign on behalf of or in opposition to a candidate. Violators risk having their tax-exempt status revoked by the IRS.

ProPublica and the Texas Tribune want to understand how the amendment is enforced — or isn’t. That’s where you come in: We can’t be everywhere, so we need your help identifying violations and understanding the government’s response to them.

What does a Johnson Amendment violation look like? The IRS says pastors endorsing candidates from the pulpit is “clearly prohibited,” but other situations are less clear. Please send us examples of any political activity you see at churches or other religious organizations, and we’ll look into whether it breaks the rules. These could include, but are not limited to:

• Criticizing or praising candidates, politicians or political parties during a religious sermon or function.
• Helping a candidate raise funds.
• Sharing campaign literature or posting signs.
• Publishing a voter guide.
• Hosting candidates.

We know that some people think religious institutions should be more involved in politics. No matter what you believe, we want to hear about examples across the political spectrum.

You don’t have to belong to a congregation to participate. If you’re a ProPublica or Texas Tribune reader, we’d love your help.

A note about our commitment to your privacy: We appreciate you sharing your story, and we take your privacy seriously. We are gathering this information for the purposes of our reporting, and we will not publish your name or information without your consent.

by Craig Silverman, Ruth Talbot, Jeff Kao and Anna Klühspies

Google is funneling revenue to some of the web’s most prolific purveyors of false information in Europe, Latin America and Africa, a ProPublica investigation has found.

The company has publicly committed to fighting disinformation around the world, but a ProPublica analysis, the first ever conducted at this scale, documented how Google’s sprawling automated digital ad operation placed ads from major brands on global websites that spread false claims on such topics as vaccines, COVID-19, climate change and elections.

In one instance, Google continued to place ads on a publication in Bosnia and Herzegovina for months after the U.S. government officially imposed sanctions on the site. Google stopped doing business with the site, which the U.S. Treasury Department described as the “personal media station” of a prominent Bosnian Serb separatist politician, only after being contacted by ProPublica.

Google ads are a major source of revenue for sites that spread election disinformation in Brazil, notably false claims about the integrity of the voting system that have been advanced by the incumbent president, Jair Bolsonaro. Voters in Brazil are going to the polls on Sunday with the outcome in doubt after Bolsonaro’s unexpectedly strong showing in the first round of voting.

The investigation also revealed that Google routinely places ads on sites pushing falsehoods about COVID-19 and climate change in French-, German- and Spanish-speaking countries.

The resulting ad revenue is potentially worth millions of dollars to the people and groups running these and other unreliable sites — while also making money for Google.

Platforms such as Facebook have faced stark criticism for failures to crack down on disinformation spread by people and governments on their platforms around the world. But Google hasn’t faced the same scrutiny for how its roughly $200 billion in annual ad sales provides essential funding for non-English-language websites that misinform and harm the public.

Google’s publicly announced policies bar the placement of ads on content that makes unreliable or harmful claims on a range of issues, including health, climate, elections and democracy. Yet the investigation found Google regularly places ads, including those from major brands, on articles that appear to violate its own policy.

ProPublica’s examination showed that ads from Google are more likely to appear on misleading articles and websites that are in languages other than English, and that Google profits from advertising that appears next to false stories on subjects not explicitly addressed in its policy, including crime, politics, and such conspiracy theories as chemtrails.

A former Google leader who worked on trust and safety issues acknowledged that the company focuses heavily on English-language enforcement and is weaker across other languages and smaller markets. They told ProPublica it’s because Google invests in oversight based on three key concerns.

“The number one is bad PR — they are very sensitive to that. The second one is trying to avoid regulatory scrutiny or potentially regulatory action that could impact their business. And number three is revenue,” said the former leader, who agreed to speak on the condition that their name not be used in order not to hurt their business and career prospects. “For all these three, English-speaking markets primarily have the biggest impact. And that’s why most of the efforts are going into those.”

ProPublica used data provided by fact-checking newsrooms, researchers and website monitoring organizations to scan more than 13,000 active article pages from thousands of websites in more than half a dozen languages to determine whether they were currently earning ad revenue with Google. (To read a detailed breakdown of how ProPublica obtained and analyzed the data, see this accompanying article.)

The analysis found that Google placed ads on 41% of roughly 800 active online articles rated by members of the Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network as publishing false claims about COVID-19. The company also served ads on 20% of articles about climate change that Science Feedback, an IFCN-accredited fact-checking organization, has rated false.

A number of Google ads viewed by ProPublica appeared on articles published months or years ago, suggesting that the company’s failure to block ads on content that appears to violate its rules is a long-standing and ongoing problem.

In one example, Google recently placed ads for clothing brand St. John on a two-year-old Serbian article falsely claiming that cat owners don’t catch COVID-19. Google placed an ad for the American Red Cross on a May 2021 article from a far-right German site that claimed COVID-19 is comparable in danger to the flu. An ad for luxury retailer Coach was recently attached to an April article in Serbian that repeated the false claim that the COVID-19 vaccines change people’s DNA.

Last August, the Greek edition of the Epoch Times, a far-right U.S. publication connected to the Falun Gong spiritual movement, published an article that falsely claimed the sun, and not increased levels of carbon dioxide, could be responsible for global warming. That story had multiple Google ads when ProPublica viewed it, even though it appears to clearly violate Google’s policy against climate disinformation.

A spokesperson for the Red Cross said its ad appeared on the far-right German site due to an automated placement it did not directly control.

“Please note that based upon our Fundamental Principles of impartiality and neutrality, the Red Cross does not take sides in issues of a political, racial, religious or ideological nature, so we would purposefully not advertise on a story or site such as the one you shared with us,” said a statement from the organization.

Coach and St. John did not respond to requests for comment.

Google’s policy is to remove ads from individual articles that violate its rules, and to take sitewide action if violations reach a specific undisclosed threshold. Google removed ads from at least 14 websites identified in the investigation after being contacted by ProPublica.

Google spokesperson Michael Aciman said the company has put more money into non-English-language enforcement and oversight, which has led to an increase in the number of ads blocked on pages that violate its rules. He declined to provide figures or to say how many people Google has working on non-English-language content and ad review.

“We’ve developed extensive measures to tackle misinformation on our platform, including policies that cover elections, COVID-19 and climate change, and work to enforce our policies in over 50 languages,” Aciman said. “In 2021, we removed ads from more than 1.7 billion publisher pages and 63,000 sites globally. We know that our work is not done, and we will continue to invest in our enforcement systems to better detect unreliable claims and protect users around the world.”

Google continues to review the sites and pages ProPublica shared with it and is "taking appropriate action on any content that violates our policies," Aciman said.

The data about ad removals comes from Google's most recent Ads Safety report, which emphasized the removal of ads from more than half a million pages that violated policies against harmful claims about COVID-19 and false claims that could undermine elections. But Google does not release a list of pages or publishers it took action against, the countries and languages they operate in or other data related to its Ads Safety report.

Google has been vocal about its $300 million commitment, announced in 2018, to fight misinformation, support fact-checkers and “help journalism thrive in the digital age.” But the investigation shows that as one arm of Google helps support fact-checkers, its core ad business provides critical revenue that ensures the publication of falsehoods remains profitable.

Laura Zommer, the general director of the Argentina-based Chequeado, founded in 2010 as the first fact-checking organization in Latin America, said Google’s failure to invest in oversight of sites in languages other than English causes serious harm in emerging democracies.

“The problem is that disinformation that takes hold in less developed democracies can cause even more damage than the disinformation circulating in countries with more developed democracies,” said Zommer, who is also the co-founder of Factchequeado, an initiative to counter Spanish-language disinformation in the U.S.

In Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia, three Balkan countries where democracy is fragile, 26 of the 30 most prolific publishers of false and misleading claims in the region earn money from Google, according to data from local fact-checkers.

“If the world’s largest online advertising platform doesn’t care that it has made false information, hate speech and toxic propaganda profitable in societies like ours, and has no intention to do anything to change because it wouldn’t financially pay off, that is devastating,” said Tijana Cvjetićanin, a member of the editorial board of Bosnian fact-checking site Raskrinkavanje, which shared data with ProPublica.

A comparison with English-language outlets suggests Google is more rigorous in choosing its publisher partners in that language. ProPublica found Google placed ads on 13% of English-language websites that NewsGuard deemed unreliable for having repeatedly published false content or deceptive headlines and failing to meet transparency standards. In contrast, ProPublica’s analysis found anywhere from 30% to 90% of the sites most often flagged for false claims by fact-checkers in the non-English languages examined were monetizing with Google.

Along with unequal enforcement across languages, ProPublica found disparity across and within regions.

Africa Check shared a list of 68 active English-language URLs that had been fact- checked as false by teams in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya since 2019, as well as 45 French-language articles that had been debunked by its French-language checkers. ProPublica’s analysis found that 57% of debunked English-language articles in Africa had ads from Google, while the percentage was higher, 66%, for French-language articles.

Alexandre Alaphilippe, executive director of the EU Disinfo Lab, a non-profit organization that researches disinformation, said Google should be required to equally enforce its policies across languages and regions and to be transparent about its oversight decisions.

“These companies have decided to go global in their services, and that was their own decision for growth and to make revenue,” he said. “It’s not possible to make this choice and not face the accountability needed to be in all of these countries at the same time.”

Google’s Global Ad Dominance

Google is the world’s biggest digital advertising business. Last year it generated a record $257 billion in revenue. Most of that money comes from companies paying to place ads on Google products such as search and YouTube. But in 2021 Google earned $31 billion by placing its customers’ ads on more than 2 million websites around the world. They’re part of what the company calls the Google Display Network.

These publishing partners range from major news outlets such as The New York Times to small sites run by individuals. In order to join the Google Display Network, a publisher must meet requirements that include publishing original content and adhering to policies against unreliable and harmful claims and sexually explicit content, among others. Once accepted, Google says, publishers in the network receive 68% of the money spent on each ad placed on their site.

Google’s ad systems are also used to place ads on websites that are not necessarily members of its Display Network. These publishers work with ad technology companies that have partnered with Google, and which use its technology to buy and sell ads. As with ads placed on sites in the Display Network, Google and the publisher both earn money.

Google places ads on publisher sites using an automated auction system called programmatic advertising. The process starts when a person visits a webpage or opens an app. As the page loads, the site or app owner collects information about the ad space available along with data about the user, which can include location, age range, browsing history and interests.

The data is sent to an ad exchange like the one operated by Google, where ad buyers — ranging from major brands like Spotify to smaller local businesses — can place a bid to show an ad to the specific user visiting the website or app. Bids are placed, or not, based on the user and publisher data shared with potential advertisers and the price an advertiser is willing to pay to reach that person.

In the blink of an eye, the top bidder wins the auction and the ad loads on the page. Money flows from the ad buyer to the ad exchange (and any other intermediaries involved in the transaction), eventually making its way to the website or app publisher.

In 2019, the Global Disinformation Index, a nonprofit that analyzes websites for false and misleading content, estimated that disinformation websites earned $250 million per year in revenue, of which Google was responsible for 40% and the rest came from other ad tech companies. NewsGuard, which employs human reviewers to evaluate and rate websites based on a set of criteria including accuracy, estimated in 2021 the annual ad revenue earned by sites spreading false or misleading claims is $2.6 billion. The report did not say how much of that Google might be responsible for.

How much of Google’s revenue comes from monetizing false and misleading content is difficult to estimate. Each of the billions of digital display ads placed every day by Google has a different price point that fluctuates based on the combination of advertiser, target website and the users the ad will be shown to. It’s all part of a complex, opaque and largely automated digital ad buying and selling process dominated by Google. This means advertisers have to rely in part on the mix of automation and human review Google uses to ensure its publisher partners don’t violate its rules.

The findings of fact-checkers could be used by Google to enforce its policy against placing ads next to content that makes unreliable and harmful claims. There are more than 350 fact-checking projects around the world that employ journalists, and in some cases scientists, to identify and investigate claims spreading on the web, on social media and in traditional media. Their articles and associated ratings are used by platforms including Meta to help enforce policies around false and harmful content. Google already highlights fact-checks in search and Google News results to direct people to trustworthy information. But the company does not use fact-checks to keep ads off of pages with unreliable or harmful claims. And unlike Meta and TikTok, it does not pay fact-checkers for the results of their research.

“When it comes to ads, they obviously monetize disinformation. Whether it’s without knowing or knowing, it doesn’t matter,” said Baybars Örsek, director of the International Fact-Checking Network. “There has never been a public announcement from Google’s side that has acknowledged fact-checking as a signal for their ads monetization business.”

Google’s Aciman declined to comment on Google’s relationship with fact-checkers.

Failed Enforcement in Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia

On Sept. 20, as he prepared to mobilize part of the country’s population to fight in Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin met with Milorad Dodik, a member of Bosnia’s three-person presidency and Bosnian Serb separatist leader who has expressed strong support for the invasion.

The Putin meeting was a propaganda coup for Dodik. Even better for him, Google helped ensure it was lucrative.

After the meeting, the homepage of the Serbian media site ATV featured articles praising the meeting and quoting Dodik about plans for greater economic cooperation with Russia, while sowing doubt about genocide committed during the Bosnian war, a frequent Dodik talking point. A ProPublica reporter viewing those stories was served ads for Saks Fifth Avenue department store, New Balance shoes and eBay that were placed via Google’s ad systems. ProPublica also documented ads from brands such as Guess on false ATV articles claiming that Serbia had found a cure for COVID-19 and NATO was planning to deploy troops to Ukraine.

A Saks spokesperson said its ads were not supposed to have appeared on ATV, and that the company would block the site from future campaigns.

“It was not our intention to advertise on this site as it violates the brand safety guidelines we have in place with our ad partner,” said a statement from the company.

An eBay spokesperson also said its ad was not placed “intentionally” on ATV. Guess and New Balance did not respond to requests for comment.

Ads for Guess appeared recently on an ATV article from 2020 that falsely claimed Serbia had a cure for COVID-19. (ProPublica screenshot)

Google is helping the site earn money by placing ads on false and divisive content in spite of the ATV website and its related TV station being sanctioned in January by the U.S. Treasury Department due to Dodik’s “corrupt activities and continued threats to the stability and territorial integrity” of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Dodik “exerts personal control over ATV,” approves content and corruptly funnels government contracts to the outlet, according to the Treasury Department’s sanctions announcement.

Google removed ads from the ATV website after being contacted by ProPublica, but declined to comment on its relationship with the site. “Google is committed to complying with all applicable sanctions,” Aciman said. ATV and representatives from Dodik’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

ATV is one of the 30 most frequent sources of false and misleading content published in the Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian language, according to data provided to ProPublica by Raskrinkavanje. Of the 30 sites most flagged by Raskrinkavanje for false claims, 26 made money with Google. The list included popular sites in the region, such as the websites of tabloid newspapers, as well as smaller operations that in some cases don’t disclose their owners or are run by fringe figures.

ProPublica also scanned close to 10,000 active articles that fact checkers in the three Balkan countries flagged for false claims since 2019. Just over 60% were earning money with Google. The articles included a range of falsehoods about national politics, the pandemic, vaccines, the war in Ukraine and other topics.

“It might just be a financial matter for Google, but for us it’s a corrosive influence on our already very fragile democracies,” Cvjetićanin said.

Ads for Amazon Prime Video, Spotify, BetMGM and a women’s clothing site were placed via Google’s systems on a Srbin.info article falsely claiming COVID-19 vaccines can change people’s DNA. (ProPublica screenshot)

Dejan Petar Zlatanovic operates Srbin.info, a Serbian website that publishes pro-Kremlin propaganda copied from Russian state media, election conspiracies about the U.S. and anti-LGBTQ content. Its homepage features a prominent hyperlink directly to the official Kremlin website. Google ads abound there and on article pages.

Zlatanovic said in an email that Srbin.info earns between $5,000 and $7,000 per month, with Google ads providing a key portion of the revenue.

"The editorial policy of Srbin.info from the beginning was to offer relevant alternative news, not to brainwash people or to determine how they should live,” Zlatanovic wrote in Serbian. “All our lives we have lived in a communist and post-communist society based on single-mindedness and we got sick of single-mindedness.”

In April, Srbin.info published an article claiming that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines could change the genetic makeup of people and alter “human genetics forever.” The story cited debunked claims by an American doctor who falsely claimed children’s DNA could be altered by the vaccines.

Ads from Amazon Prime, BetMGM, Spotify, and StyleWe were shown to a ProPublica reporter who viewed the story. The companies did not respond to requests for comment. Google declined to comment on the Balkan sites and articles identified by ProPublica in the analysis.

Zlatanovic told ProPublica in an email that the vaccines article contained information he felt was “relevant for the public” because it came from a medical professional.

Google also placed ads on an article making a similar false claim when it spread across a set of sites in the region in late 2020, according to local fact-checkers. The false claim that mRNA vaccines can change “the genetic structure of a person” was reported by B92, which is among the 30 sites in the region most often flagged by fact-checkers. It eventually corrected its story, but has a history of publishing false claims and potentially harmful health content.

B92 has published articles claiming that baking soda can save your life; that watermelon can cure cancer but could be poisonous if the fruit is cracked (it later corrected this story); and that there’s a juice that can kill cancer cells in 42 days, to name some of the stories local fact-checkers have had to debunk. All had ads from Google when viewed by ProPublica, except for the cancer cure story, which was deleted by the site at some point after publication.

B92 did not respond to a request for comment.

The rampant anti-vaccine and COVID-19 disinformation appears to have contributed to low vaccination rates in the region. Just 25% of people are fully vaccinated in Bosnia, while 47% are vaccinated in Serbia and 55% in Croatia, among the lowest rates in Europe. A survey of unvaccinated Bosnians published in April by Raskrinkavanje’s parent company suggests conspiracy theories have taken hold among the population. Almost half of respondents agreed with the false claim that vaccines contain “dangerous nanoparticles,” and 38% believe the mRNA vaccines “alter DNA.”

Brazil’s Disinfo Boom

For at least four years, Brazilian president Bolsonaro has sowed doubt and spread disinformation about the country’s electoral process and the reliability of the country’s electronic voting system, leading to a 2021 Supreme Court investigation that documented his false claims.

Aiding his efforts are pro-Bolsonaro websites with big audiences — and a slew of ads courtesy of Google.

One of the largest is Terra Brasil Notícias, a two-year-old site run by a couple based in one of Brazil’s northeastern provinces. This summer, it published a story containing a clip from “Last Week Tonight” where host John Oliver explained the risks of electronic voting machines. The site used this to undermine confidence in Brazil's electronic voting system. Brazil’s electronic voting machines do not use paper audits, but have repeatedly been proven secure, and there is no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud in the country.

On Oct. 2, the day Brazilians voted in the first round of the presidential elections, Terra Brasil Notícias was one of several pro-Bolsonaro websites threatened with a fine by the head of the country’s Superior Electoral Court for publishing a falsehood about Bolsonaro’s opponent, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Terra Brasil Notícias and other sites spread the false claim that the leader of a criminal organization had said he’d vote for Lula.

Marie Santini, director of the Netlab at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, said the number of junk news and disinformation sites like Terra Brasil Notícias, as well as their audience, exploded in Brazil in part because Google ads make it easy for people to earn money from this type of content. She likened it to people who might drive for Uber to earn extra cash.

“You don’t need to make quality content or really work with journalists. You can copy things, you can use bots, you can recycle news, and you do it from your house and you receive some money,” she said. “It’s a way to make money for people that are without opportunity. But who is making money on a large scale? Of course, it’s the platform, Google.”

In response to the court’s finding, Terra Brasil Notícias took down the story that repeated the false claim about Lula. It also deleted its article about U.S. voting machines after Brazilian fact-checking organization Aos Fatos contacted the site last month. In an email, Aos Fatos listed eight recent articles from the site that it rated as false, and asked Terra Brasil Notícias to comment on its relationship with Google. In response, the site published the email from Aos Fatos and defended the articles. It later deleted all of them. As of this writing, it still earns money with Google.

Terra Brasil Notícias did not respond to requests for comment. Google declined to comment.

Santini’s Netlab team monitors thousands of right-wing and left-wing messaging groups and websites. They shared a list of 262 active Portuguese-language websites in Brazil that circulated in messaging groups and were labeled by researchers as publishing false or misleading information. ProPublica found that 46% of the more than 250 sites flagged for disinformation earn money with Google. When that list was compressed to the 30 most shared sites in WhatsApp and Telegram groups, ProPublica found that 80% of them earn money with ads placed via Google.

“This ecosystem of sites is very important for politics in Brazil,” said Santini. “They are very powerful because people consume this thinking that it’s journalism, but it’s only propaganda. And it’s paid by Google ads.”

Ads are also funding COVID-19 disinformation in Brazil. Google placed ads on a false October 2021 story from Stylo Urbano that claimed people could develop AIDS as the result of COVID-19 vaccinations; a false December 2020 story on the same site claiming that COVID-19 PCR tests have a 97% false positive rate; and a false February 2021 article on the site that said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “deliberately violated several federal laws” by inflating the number of deaths due to COVID-19.

After being contacted by ProPublica, Google removed its ads from the site. Stylo Urbano did not respond to a request for comment.

Brazil is one of several countries in Latin America where false claims are funded by Google ads. A coalition of fact-checking organizations in Latin America provided ProPublica with a list of websites they said are frequent sources of false and misleading claims. Of the 49 active sites on the list, 19 (or 39%) currently earn money with Google.

The coalition was led by Chequeado, the Argentinian nonprofit fact-checking organization. Zommer, its founder, said Chequeado has received support from Google over the years in the form of grants and training. But it and other platforms’ ongoing failure to enforce their policies in Spanish and other languages outside of English make their work more difficult, according to her.

"The fight against disinformation is unequal, as is the world,” Zommer said.

An Anonymous Network in Spain

Google’s enforcement failures in Spanish, a language spoken by roughly 550 million people, extend beyond Latin America.

On Sept. 22, the site Euskal News, based in the autonomous Basque region of Spain, published an article that suggested excess deaths in the Netherlands and other countries were the result of COVID-19 vaccines. The article, which was reprinted from another site, said the vaccines are possibly “causing deaths in a figure well above the average. The failure could not be more resounding.”

There is no evidence to support claims that COVID-19 vaccines are causing excess mortality. But the story is standard fare for Euskal News, a Google publishing partner that mixes anti-immigrant content and vaccine disinformation with warnings of an impending globalist and EU takeover.

A EuskalNews story with Google ads that falsely linked excess death figures in the Netherlands to vaccines. (ProPublica screenshot)

Google placed ads on a May 6 article that falsely linked the presence of microplastic fibers in people’s lungs to mask wearing, even though the study in question was conducted pre-pandemic. Google also placed ads on a page on the site that falsely says Pfizer’s vaccine resulted in thousands of adverse effects. That claim, and the internal Pfizer documents it’s based on, has repeatedly been debunked by fact-checkers. Though it placed ads on that article, Google blocked them from another on the same site that falsely claims the Pfizer vaccine had 160,000 adverse effects.

ProPublica documented additional pages on Euskal News with vaccine disinformation where Google appears to have blocked ads. Google declined to say how many pages it blocks before examining its overall relationship with a site, but it did remove ads from the site after being contacted by ProPublica.

Euskal News, launched in the spring of 2019, does not list an owner, and its articles do not have bylines. However, research by a Spanish digital security and investigations firm identified connections between the site and a far-right Basque politician named David Pasarin-Gegunde. In a 2020 interview, he declined to say who runs Euskal News but said it’s a person from his “ideological environment.” The site lists its webmaster as Eneko Eastresana, but he and Pasarin-Gegunde did not respond to requests for comment.

Euskal News was one of 32 active Spanish sites flagged by the Brussels-based EU DisinfoLab as frequent sources of false and misleading claims. ProPublica found that 14 of the sites, or 44%, earn money with Google.

Alaphilippe, who runs the DisinfoLab, said the sites on the list “regularly publish misleading, deceptive or incorrect information and often lack credible or transparent sources.”

Google declined to comment on the Spanish sites and articles identified in ProPublica’s analysis.

Media Capture and False Content in Turkey

Over the past two decades, Turkey’s media environment has transformed dramatically.

National newspapers and TV stations have been taken over by people aligned with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, leading Reporters Without Borders to assess that 90% of Turkey’s national media is under government control. The outlets adhere to “a tight chain of command of government-approved headlines, front pages and topics of TV debate,” according to a recent Reuters investigation.

One byproduct of Turkey’s increasingly authoritarian information environment — RSF says there are currently nine journalists in jail in the country — is that once-reliable publications publish false articles about politics, the pandemic and a range of clickbait meant to attract and earn money from traffic coming via Google search, according to Emre Kızılkaya, chair of the International Press Institute’s National Committee in Turkey. He cited a study he produced for IPI revealing how Google search rewards pro-government outlets and the at times false information they publish.

“President Tayyip Erdoğan and his cronies used multiple tactics for media capture in the past two decades, enabling them to control most of the largest news outlets today. These outlets owe most of their digital traffic — and revenue — to Google Search,” Kızılkaya, who also edits a nonprofit news site that reports on Turkish media, told ProPublica.

ProPublica analyzed over 1,000 articles rated false by Turkish fact-checking operation Teyit since 2019, and found that 73% are earning money from Google ads. Of the 50 outlets contained in that data that were most frequently flagged by fact-checkers, 45 earn money with Google. That’s the highest of any country analyzed in the investigation.

“In Turkey, disinformation pays and propaganda works. Google is still a part of this problem, despite its promises to help solve it,” Kızılkaya said. “The ProPublica data confirm the findings in our recent studies that demonstrated Google's algorithmic bias towards Turkey's pro-government media outlets at the expense of endangering fragile communities here.”

Google declined to comment on its search and ad efforts in Turkey.

Monetizing the German Far Right

In Germany, the right-wing, anti-immigration website Freie Welt is run by the husband of Beatrix von Storch, the former deputy leader of Germany’s major far-right AfD party.

One of the website’s articles, which had Google ads on it, falsely argues that the shortage of wheat in Ukraine was a result of U.S. companies buying one-third of Ukrainian land suitable for cultivation. Another article with ads claimed that 44% of pregnant women in Pfizer’s vaccine trial miscarried, a lie that has been debunked by fact-checkers.

Freie Welt is one of 30 German-language sites the EU DisinfoLab identified as consistent sources of false and misleading content. A third of them earn money with Google.

An ad for the American Red Cross was placed on a Journalistenwatch article that claimed COVID-19 was like the flu. Image has been blurred by ProPublica to conceal other ads on the page. (ProPublica screenshot)

The list includes Journalistenwatch, a leading platform of the “Neue Rechte,” a far-right political movement in Germany. Google placed an ad from the American Red Cross on an article falsely claiming that COVID-19 is like the flu. Another article falsely linking the decline in the birth rate in Germany to COVID-19 vaccines also earned money from Google.

Journalistenwatch and Freie Welt did not respond to requests for comment.

Google placed ads on a Report24 article that falsely claimed the World Health Organization warned against kids getting the COVID-19 vaccines. (ProPublica screenshot)

Some of the German-language sites identified by the EU DisinfoLab are based in neighboring Austria and Switzerland. One is Report24, an Austrian website that regularly spreads false information about COVID-19 measures and vaccination, according to fact-checkers. A ProPublica reporter was shown an ad for Hydeline, an American furniture retailer, on an article from June 2021 that falsely claims that the World Health Organization advises against children and teenagers getting COVID-19 vaccines.

Hydeline did not respond to a request for comment.

In response to questions from ProPublica, a spokesperson from Report24 who did not provide their name said the above articles were “carefully researched and contain all necessary sources — as every article on our website does.” They said ProPublica’s questions and findings are similar to “the biased, fake news producing, pharma industry funded fact-checkers.”

The site claimed that no Google ads appeared on the articles in question, and there hadn’t been any “for a long time.” The site did not respond after being sent screenshots showing Google ads on the article pages.

After being contacted by ProPublica, Google removed ads from Report24. The company declined to comment about the German sites and articles identified in the analysis.

Money for Falsehoods in French

Last October, just ahead of the United Nations global climate summit, Google announced it would no longer place ads on content that “contradicts authoritative scientific consensus” on climate change.

“Advertisers simply don’t want their ads to appear next to this content,” read a notice attributed to the Google Ads team.

But as with its policy about COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation, Google often fails to enforce its climate policy across languages. Science Feedback, a French nonprofit fact-checking organization that employs journalists and scientists, provided ProPublica with 427 active URLs of articles about climate change in French and other languages it has rated false since 2021. A fifth of them were earning money with Google, according to the analysis.

A story with false claims about climate change had ads for eyewear company Caddis and furniture maker Rove and a health PSA from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Medical Association and the Ad Council, an ad industry association. (ProPublica screenshot)

In just one example, the French site 1 Scandal published an article in January falsely stating that global warming is “statistically insignificant” and “the climate emergency is imaginary.” Google had placed multiple ads on the page when ProPublica reporters visited it, including for Caddis eyewear and Rove furniture, as well as a public service announcement about diabetes supported by the CDC, the American Medical Association and the Ad Council, an ad industry body.

Kathy Kayse, chief media strategy and partnerships officer for the Ad Council, said in a statement that the organization relies on donated media space to place ads for its public service campaigns. This means the organization did not pay to place its ad on 1 Scandal.

“Because of this model, we cannot always predict or control where our content will be placed,” Kayse said, noting that they were responding on behalf of the Ad Council and the American Media Association.

Caddis, Rove, the CDC and 1 Scandal did not respond to requests for comment. Google appears to have removed ads from the site in response to questions from ProPublica.

ProPublica also analyzed two sets of French-language articles rated false by IFCN-accredited fact-checkers in France and Senegal.

Among the recent fact-checked French links earning money with Google is a May article from InfoDuJour that falsely claimed people vaccinated against COVID-19 were experiencing an “increase in adverse effects.” The story cited other false claims, which have been the subject of multiple fact-checks, that warned people against receiving doses of the “harmful” vaccines.

The same site also recently published an article that claims athletes are dying in greater numbers and that the cause “most likely lies in the introduction of an experimental injection that was supposed to protect against Covid-19 disease, but which, on the contrary, caused untold damage to the immune system and cardiovascular problems.”

On Aug. 1, InfoDuJour published an article headlined “Anti-Covid vaccines finally recognized as dangerous!” The page currently brings up a notice from the site that says Google found the article violated its policy about harmful COVID-19 misinformation. “To meet the digital giant’s conditions and avoid penalty, we have decided to delete the article,” the page says.

Marcel Gay runs InfoDuJour from Nancy, a city in the northeast of France. He told ProPublica that his site’s coverage of the pandemic and vaccines provided it with unprecedented traffic.

“Our media has gained a lot of visibility,” he said in an online message sent via the site’s customer support tool. “Last July we recorded 3.2 million unique visitors. And the advertising earnings from Google, about €3,000!” — roughly $2,979 at current exchange rates.

Gay defended his site’s pandemic content, saying it is “taking care to balance the information and to give divergent opinions.” He complained that traffic has since fallen since Google and Twitter took action against his site, noting that it was removed from Google News and Google Discover, the latter of which highlights news stories in the Google app. He said he deleted some anti-vaccine articles in order to keep earning money with Google.

“This planetary censorship is unique in the history of humanity,” Gay said. “It is reminiscent of the Inquisition that prevailed in the Middle Ages.”

Google declined to comment on InfoDuJour and 1 Scandal.

Another French-language site earning money with Google, this time in Africa, is 24Jours.com. Two years ago, it was the subject of separate investigations by the EU DisinfoLab and fact-checkers at Les Observateurs that revealed it was part of a network of more than 10 sites publishing false information, reprinting Russian propaganda and stealing content from other outlets.

In the ensuing years the site continued to earn money from Google on articles with false claims that cunnilingus can help prevent cancer, a man killed over 20 pizza delivery men, and a woman named her children Corona and Virus. Ads from Google also appear on content that 24Jours.com copies word-for-word from other sites — even articles stolen from fact-checkers such as Les Observateurs.

The operator of 24Jours.com, who on WhatsApp identified himself as Kennedy and said he was in Cameroon, told ProPublica that he stopped posting “fake news” in 2019, and that many sites copy content from sources such as Reuters. After being informed that sites pay to license content from Reuters and other sources, Kennedy said he would remove the infringing content.

“Less than 10% of the content on my website are copied from other websites,” he said.

Kennedy estimated Google is currently blocking ads from 26 articles on his site. When told that ProPublica was reaching out to Google to ask about his site, he said he would disable Google ads.

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.

Update, Oct. 31, 2022: This story was updated with Google’s comment that it continues to review sites and pages shared with it by ProPublica.

Correction

Oct. 29, 2022: An animation with this story originally misattributed the location of an article on climate change. It is from France, not Africa.

by Ruth Talbot, Jeff Kao, Craig Silverman and Anna Klühspies

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

Our story “How Google’s Ad Business Funds Disinformation Around the World” found that, despite Google’s public commitments to fight disinformation, it continues to allow websites to use Google’s ad systems to profit from false and misleading content. Our reporting identified websites that were allowed to continue to collect revenue from Google ads, even on stories that appeared to be in violation of the company’s policies against unreliable and harmful claims related to COVID-19, health, elections and climate change. We also found that websites containing misinformation in languages other than English and smaller markets were more likely to be allowed to continue to profit from Google ads than similar English-language websites.

We analyzed datasets of articles and websites containing false claims to determine what proportion of them made money using Google’s ad platforms. We obtained these datasets from organizations that track online disinformation around the world and wrote software to determine whether a web address was currently earning money from Google ads. Between Aug. 23 and Sept. 13, 2022, we ran the datasets through this software system to calculate the proportion of web addresses monetizing with Google ads for each dataset. We include our detailed findings in Appendix A.

Data Sources

We analyzed 17 article and website datasets, totaling more than 13,000 active articles and over 8,000 domains, obtained from nine fact-checking and news quality monitoring organizations. Some of the datasets cover articles and websites from a particular country or region, while others cover subject matter, such as COVID-19 misinformation or climate change misinformation. In Appendix B we include a description of each dataset and the organizations that provided them.

Data Cleaning

The datasets varied in size, types of content and level of curation. We filtered all URL datasets to include only articles published after 2019 to keep the datasets recent and roughly within the same time frame. If the dataset provided information on the type of fact-checked content, we limited it to the most serious forms of disinformation or disinformation purveyors. For example, Brazil’s Netlab provided a column distinguishing between suspected and confirmed purveyors of disinformation, allowing us to select confirmed purveyors.

Some datasets included links to social media platforms, such as Facebook or Twitter. We excluded these links from our analysis. Some datasets also had links to images or pdfs, which we similarly excluded. See Appendix C for a full list of exclusions.

The datasets from the International Fact-Checking Network and Raskrinkavanje included articles that had been archived using a webpage archiving service such as archive.today. In these cases, we wrote programs to extract the original web addresses of the false or misleading articles. For the IFCN dataset, we extracted by hand any addresses that we could not extract by code. For Raskrinkavanje, we excluded from our final analysis any remaining links that could not be extracted. Links that could not be extracted accounted for less than 1% of the total webpages from the datasets. We do not have reason to believe these excluded links biased our results. See Appendix C for more detailed information.

Analyzing a Web Address

Our system to determine whether a web address was currently earning money with Google’s ad systems consists of two components: a web scraper and a data analysis script.

Web Scraper

A web scraper is software that can systematically extract and save data from a visited web page. ProPublica’s scraper uses a library called Playwright, which can mimic human behavior when visiting a site and is often used for automated website testing.

When our web scraper visits any web address, URL or base domain, it collects and saves the following information:

1. All network requests initiated by the webpage. Network requests are used to retrieve web content such as images, text and ads or to provide information such as user actions or profile information back to the web servers.
2. The response for each network request, if those requests went out to Google servers (a handful of servers we identified as serving or related to Google’s ad content). When successful, these responses contain ad content that the website loads onto the page.
3. The webpage content. Once the webpage loads, the scraper captures its HTML, the code that defines what a visitor to that page would see.

When our web scraper visits a base domain, the location at which an entire site resides, it also saves the following information:

4. The ads.txt file: The ads.txt file lists all of a website’s advertising partners. Not all websites make this file available to visitors, but it is highly recommended by Google and the IAB Tech Lab as a web advertising transparency best practice.
5. A random subpage: When visiting a website, the scraper will select an arbitrary subpage link found on the base domain (e.g. for test.com, test.com/morecontent) and also scrape the same information for that page. This is done to capture cases where the homepage for a website does not run ads, but sections of the website do.

Analysis Script

Our analysis tool processes the above data from each URL to determine whether the address is valid, and if so whether it is monetizing with Google’s ad systems.

We manually identified 10 separate network request and response pairs that indicate a webpage is making a request to a Google server for one or multiple ads. If the response did not contain advertising content, then we did not count the website as monetizing with Google. (This may occur, for example, if the webpage makes an ad request, but Google has demonetized the specific page or website.) We then wrote software that would look for these request-response pairs in the data collected by our web scraper.

We also identified scenarios where a scraper visit did not result in valid webpage content. These invalid visits can mean the scraper was redirected to a different page from the original page, the content at the web address is no longer available, or the server is no longer reachable.

Thus, for a single web address, there are three possible outcomes of the analysis:

1. The web address is valid, and it is monetizing with Google’s ad systems.
2. The web address is valid, but it is not monetizing with Google’s ad systems.
3. The web address is not valid or the content has been removed.

We scraped and analyzed each web address in our 17 datasets to determine which of the three categories it fell under. We then compiled the results in a spreadsheet. Appendix A provides the detailed results of this analysis.

Verifying the Results

We hand-checked the results of all of the smaller domain datasets by visiting each page and determining the validity of its web address and whether the webpage was monetizing via Google’s ad systems. For the larger datasets containing individual webpages, we extracted and checked a random sample of web addresses by hand, using a 90% confidence level and 10% margin of error.

The scraper and analysis tools were designed to make false positives (where we falsely flag a web address as monetizing with Google) very rare. In fact, we never identified a false positive during our audit. There were some instances where ads were displayed at the time of the scrape but not when we manually visited the page later on (or vice versa). In these cases, we manually examined the scraped data to confirm ad content was served at the time of the scrape. There were a few rare instances where content returned from the ad server was never loaded on the page, possibly because of coding errors on the webpage. We still counted these cases as positives, since they are indications of an active monetization relationship with Google.

False negatives (where the scraper did not find ads on the page but ads were present) were more common due to several scenarios: For example, the scraper was sometimes blocked from accessing a page or failed to bypass page pop-ups such as consent forms. In our audits we saw false negative rates of between 0% and 13%.

Because we found false negatives more often than false positives, the true proportion of these web addresses monetizing with Google’s ad systems is likely slightly higher than what we reported.

Dataset name

Data source

Languages covered

Regions covered

Domains or Web Pages

Number of valid web addresses analyzed

Number of valid web addresses monetizing Google ads

% of valid web addresses monetizing Google  ads

Africa Check

Misinformation

Web Pages

Africa Check

English

Nigeria, South Africa, and Kenya

Web pages

66

38

57.6

Africa Check

Misinformation

Web Pages

Senegal

Africa Check

French

Senegal, Guinea, Mali, Côte d'Ivoire, and Cameroon

Web pages

44

29

65.9

Balkans

MisinformationWeb Pages

Raskrinkavanje

Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian

Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Web pages

9,973

6,216

62.3

Balkans Publishers

​​Raskrinkavanje

Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian

Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Domains

30

26

86.7

Brazil Publishers

Netlab

Portuguese

Brazil

Domains

30

24

80

Latin American Publishers

Chequeado

Spanish, Portuguese

Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Venezuela, Peru and Mexico

Domains

49

19

38.8

Covid Disinformation Pages

International Fact-Checking Network

Various

Global

Web pages

814

338

41.5

NewsGuard Publisher list

NewsGuard

Various

Global

Domains

7,739

4,186

54.1

Turkey Disinformation Pages

Teyit

Turkish

Turkey

Web pages

1,035

756

73

Turkey Publishers

Teyit

Turkish

Turkey

Domains

50

45

90

Spanish Language Publishers

EU DisinfoLab

Spanish

Spain

Domains

32

14

43.8

German Language Publishers

EU DisinfoLab

German

Germany, Austria and Switzerland

Domains

30

10

33.3

EU

Disinformation Pages

EU DisinfoLab

Various

EU

Web pages

235

57

24.3

Climate

Disinformation Pages

Science Feedback

Various

Global

Web pages

427

86

20.1

Appendix B: Organization and Dataset details

All datasets were filtered to remove duplicates, archived URLs that could not be successfully unarchived, data before 2019 and URLs from social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Weibo, Pinterest, Telegram and WhatsApp (see full list in Appendix C).

Africa Check

Website: https://africacheck.org/

Description: Africa Check is an African nonprofit fact-checking organization founded in South Africa in 2012.

Datasets analyzed:

• Articles in French from Senegal, Guinea, Mali, Côte d’Ivoire and Cameroon between 2019 and 2022 fact-checked and determined to be misinformation.
• Articles in English from Nigeria, South Africa and Kenya between 2019 and 2022 fact-checked and determined to be misinformation.Raskrinkavanje

Website: https://raskrinkavanje.ba/

Description: Raskrinkavanje is a fact-checking program for media organizations in the Balkans. It was founded in 2017 by Zašto ne, a civil society organization based in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Datasets analyzed:

• Articles from the region between 2019 and July 2022 that were fact-checked by Raskrinkavanje and determined to be misinformation.
• Thirty websites that were most frequently identified as publishing misinformation by Raskrinkavanje in the region from 2019 to July 2022.Netlab

Website: http://www.netlab.eco.ufrj.br/

Description: Netlab is a research laboratory of the School of Communication of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) that uses network analysis to study online misinformation.

Datasets analyzed:

• A list of websites shared within Brazilian right wing and left wing WhatsApp and Telegram groups and channels in August 2022 and flagged by researchers as a source of disinformation in Portuguese.Chequeado

Website: https://chequeado.com/

Description: Chequeado is a nonpartisan, nonprofit news monitoring and fact-checking organization founded in Argentina in 2010.

Datasets analyzed:

• Websites determined by LatamChequea, Chequado’s fact-checking partners in Latin America, to be spreading false information.International Fact-Checking Network

Website: https://www.poynter.org/ifcn/

Description: The International Fact-Checking Network is a network of 100 fact-checking organizations around the world. It was launched in 2015 by the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism institute based in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Datasets analyzed:

• COVID: links to social media and news content spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic.NewsGuard

Website: https://www.newsguardtech.com/

Description: NewsGuard is a company that provides trust ratings for the most visited websites in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Germany, France and Italy.

Datasets analyzed:

• Domains for news websites around the world rated by NewGuard. Reliability ratings range from 0 to 100 (0 being completely untrustworthy).Teyit

Website: https://teyit.org/

Description: Teyit is a Turkish nonprofit fact-checking and media literacy social enterprise founded in 2016.

Datasets analyzed:

• Articles that were published in 2019 or later that contained claims categorized as “incorrect association,” “manipulation,” or “distortion” and which the fact-checkers had not seen subsequently corrected. (Fact-checkers provided access to a database containing a wide range of thousands of fact-checks which ProPublica filtered based on the previous criteria.)EU DisinfoLab

Website: https://www.disinfo.eu/

Description: EU DisinfoLab is a Brussels-based nonprofit organization that studies misinformation in the EU.

Datasets analyzed:

• Articles from the region between 2019 and present that were fact-checked by EU DisinfoLab and determined to be misinformation.
• Websites from Spain and German-speaking countries that were identified as sources of false and misleading claims in the regions.Science Feedback

Website: https://sciencefeedback.co/

Description: Science Feedback is a nonprofit based in France that produces scientist-expert fact-checks for health and climate news articles.

Datasets analyzed:

• Articles related to climate and climate change published in 2019 or later that Science Feedback rated their lowest rating, “False.”

Appendix C: Dataset Cleaning Criteria

All datasets were cleaned with the intention of removing invalid links, social media traffic, archived content and images/PDFs.

Any links originating from the below social media or content hosting sites were removed from the final analysis.

• Google Drive
• Facebook
• Instagram
• Pinterest
• Telegram
• TikTok
• Twitter
• Vimeo
• Weibo
• WhatsApp
• YouTube

Any links ending in any of the below were automatically excluded from the final analysis:

• .png
• .jpg
• .jpeg
• .pdf
• ?type=image

Any of the archiving sites below were visited and an attempt was made to extract the archived URL. If the extraction failed or the extracted link was of a type that should be excluded from the final analysis anyway, the URL was discarded.

• Web.archive.org
• Webcache.googleusercontent.com
• Archive.today
• google.com/url?
• perma.cc

by Katherine Eban, Vanity Fair, and Jeff Kao, ProPublica

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

This article was produced in partnership with Vanity Fair.

“A Secret Language of Chinese Officialdom”

Toy Reid has always had a gift for languages — one that would carry him far from what he calls his “very blue-collar” roots in Greenville, South Carolina. In high school, Spanish came easily. At nearby Furman University, where he became the first person in his family to attend college, he studied Japanese. Then, “clueless but curious,” as he puts it, he channeled his fascination with the Dalai Lama into a master’s degree in East Asian philosophy and religion at Harvard. Along the way, he picked up Khmer, the national language of Cambodia, and achieved fluency in Chinese.

But it was his career as a China specialist for the Rand Corporation and as a political officer in East Asia for the U.S. State Department that taught him how to interpret a notoriously opaque language: the “party speak” practiced by Chinese Communist officials.

Party speak is “its own lexicon,” explains Reid, now 44 years old. Even a native Mandarin speaker “can’t really follow it,” he says. “It’s not meant to be easily understood. It’s almost like a secret language of Chinese officialdom. When they’re talking about anything potentially embarrassing, they speak of it in innuendo and hushed tones, and there’s a certain acceptable way to allude to something.”

For 15 months, Reid loaned this unusual skill to a nine-person team dedicated to investigating the mystery of COVID-19’s origins. Commissioned by Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., the team examined voluminous evidence, most of it open source but some classified, and weighed the major credible theories for how the novel coronavirus first made the leap to humans. An interim report, released on Thursday by the minority oversight staff of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor & Pensions (HELP), concludes that the COVID-19 pandemic was “more likely than not, the result of a research-related incident.”

As part of his investigation, Reid took an approach that was artful in its simplicity. Working out of the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington and a family home in Florida, he used a virtual private network, or VPN, to access dispatches archived on the website of the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). These dispatches remain on the internet, but their meaning can’t be unlocked by just anyone. Using his hard-earned expertise, Reid believes he unearthed secrets that were hiding in plain sight.

On Nov. 12, 2019, a dispatch by party branch members at the BSL-4 laboratory appeared to reference a biosecurity breach: "These viruses come without a shadow and leave without a trace."

Ever since the Chinese city of Wuhan was identified as ground zero for the COVID-19 pandemic, a contingent of scientists have suspected that the virus could have leaked from one of the WIV’s complex of laboratories. The WIV is, after all, the venue for some of China’s riskiest coronavirus research. Scientists there have mixed components of different coronaviruses and created new strains, in an effort to predict the risks of human infection and to develop vaccines and treatments. Critics argue that creating viruses that don’t exist in nature runs the risk of unleashing them.

The WIV has two campuses and performed coronavirus research on both. Its older Xiaohongshan campus is just 8 miles from the crowded seafood market where COVID-19 first burst into public view. Its newer Zhengdian campus, about 18 miles to the south, is home to the institute’s most prestigious laboratory, a biosafety level 4 (BSL-4) facility, designed to enable safe research on the world’s most lethal pathogens. The WIV triumphantly announced its completion in February 2015, and it was cleared to begin full research by early 2018.

Like many scientific institutes in China, the WIV is state-run and funded. The research carried out there must advance the goals of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As one way to ensure compliance, the CCP operates 16 party branches inside of the WIV, where members including scientists meet regularly and demonstrate their loyalty.

Week after week, scientists from those branches chronicled their party-building exploits in reports uploaded to the WIV’s website. These dispatches, intended for watchful higher-ups, generally consist of upbeat recitations of recruitment efforts and meeting summaries that emphasize the fulfillment of Beijing’s political goals. “The headlines and initial paragraphs seem completely innocuous,” Reid says. “If you didn’t take a close look, you’d probably think there’s nothing in here.”

But much like imperfect propaganda, the dispatches hold glimmers of real life: tension among colleagues, abuse from bosses, reprimands from party superiors. The grievances are often couched in a narrative of heroism — a focus on problems overcome and challenges met, against daunting odds.

As Reid burrowed into the party branch dispatches, he became riveted by the unfolding picture. They described intense pressure to produce scientific breakthroughs that would elevate China’s standing on the world stage, despite a dire lack of essential resources. Even at the BSL-4 lab, they repeatedly lamented the problem of “the three ‘nos’: no equipment and technology standards, no design and construction teams, and no experience operating or maintaining [a lab of this caliber].”

And then, in the fall of 2019, the dispatches took a darker turn. They referenced inhumane working conditions and “hidden safety dangers.” On Nov. 12 of that year, a dispatch by party branch members at the BSL-4 laboratory appeared to reference a biosecurity breach.

once you have opened the stored test tubes, it is just as if having opened Pandora’s Box. These viruses come without a shadow and leave without a trace. Although [we have] various preventive and protective measures, it is nevertheless necessary for lab personnel to operate very cautiously to avoid operational errors that give rise to dangers. Every time this has happened, the members of the Zhengdian Lab [BSL4] Party Branch have always run to the frontline, and they have taken real action to mobilize and motivate other research personnel.

Reid studied the words intently. Was this a reference to past accidents? An admission of an ongoing crisis? A general recognition of hazardous practices? Or all of the above? Reading between the lines, Reid concluded, “They are almost saying they know Beijing is about to come down and scream at them.”

And that, in fact, is exactly what happened next, according to a meeting summary uploaded nine days later.

The dozens of pages of WIV dispatches that Reid unearthed, particularly those from November 2019, helped shape the conclusion of the interim report. Working out of a small, windowless room in the Hart building that they nicknamed “the Bat Cave,” the researchers cross-referenced Reid’s analysis with myriad clues, from procurement notices and patent filings to records of ongoing scientific experiments at the WIV. As their investigation grew, so did a timeline that unfolded across the walls like a giant checkerboard.

A sign on the door of the Senate team’s office, nicknamed “the Bat Cave.” (Mark Peterson/Redux for Vanity Fair)

Given advance access to hundreds of pages of the Senate researchers’ findings and analysis, Vanity Fair, in partnership with ProPublica, spent five months investigating their underlying evidence. We analyzed WIV documents, consulted with experts in CCP communications, asked biocontainment experts to help analyze documents and reviewed with independent scientists the possible evidence that certain vaccine research may have begun far earlier than acknowledged.

We also traced the hazards that arose as the WIV built a lab to research the world’s most dangerous pathogens. Taken together, our reporting provides critical context that is not included in the pared-down 35-page interim report. It offers the most detailed picture to date of the months leading up to the COVID-19 outbreak, including new details on the intense pressure the lab faced to produce breakthrough research, its struggles to grapple with mounting safety issues and a previously unreported series of references to a mysterious incident shortly before the virus began infecting its first victims.

The Senate HELP minority committee did not release a detailed 236-page analysis that Reid drafted as a companion report. Nor did the interim report provide context for the documents he unearthed. These omissions came as hundreds of pages were whittled down to 35 in the days before the report was released. Though some members of the Senate team reviewed a small number of classified documents, the interim report relied only on publicly available material. A spokesperson for the Senate HELP minority committee told Vanity Fair and ProPublica: “What has been included in the interim report are the facts the Committee has determined are ready for, and worthy of, publication at this time. The Committee’s bipartisan oversight investigation is still ongoing, and what is worthy of inclusion will find its way into the final report.”

Vanity Fair and ProPublica downloaded more than 500 documents from the WIV website, including party branch dispatches from 2017 to the present. To assess Reid’s interpretation, we sent key documents to experts on CCP communications. They told us that the WIV dispatches did indeed signal that the institute faced an acute safety emergency in November 2019; that officials at the highest levels of the Chinese government weighed in; and that urgent action was taken in an effort to address ongoing safety issues. The documents do not make clear who was responsible for the crisis, which laboratory it affected specifically or what the exact nature of the biosafety emergency was.

The interim report also raises questions about how quickly vaccines were developed in China by some teams, including one led by a military virologist named Zhou Yusen. The report called it “unusual” that two military COVID-19 vaccine development teams were able to reach early milestones even faster than the major drug companies who were part of the U.S. government’s Operation Warp Speed program.

Vanity Fair and ProPublica spoke to experts who said that the timeline of Zhou’s vaccine development seemed unrealistic, if not impossible. Two of the three experts said it strongly suggested that his team must have had access to the genomic sequence of the virus no later than in November 2019, weeks before China’s official recognition that the virus was circulating.

The authors of the interim report do not claim to have definitively solved the mystery of COVID-19’s origin. “The lack of transparency from government and public health officials in the [People’s Republic of China] with respect to the origins of SARS-CoV-2 prevents reaching a more definitive conclusion,” the report says, adding that its conclusion could change if more independently verifiable information becomes available.

Throughout the pandemic, the WIV has largely remained a black box, owing to the Chinese government’s refusal to cooperate with international probes. By mining the WIV’s own records, Toy Reid and Senate researchers unearthed new clues that support the interim report’s assessment that a lab accident was “most likely” responsible for the pandemic.

In response to detailed questions, a Chinese Embassy spokesperson, Liu Pengyu, dismissed allegations of a lab leak and said that an international team convened by the World Health Organization concluded that “the allegation of lab leaking is extremely unlikely. The conclusion should be respected. … From the very beginning, China has taken a scientific, professional, serious and responsible attitude in origins tracing.” Some American politicians and journalists “distort facts and truth,” he said, adding that the U.S. should “stop using the epidemic for political manipulation and blame games.”

“Open the Aperture of Your Mind”

More than two years after the COVID-19 pandemic’s onset, the question of its origin has remained a scientific whodunit for the ages. Did the virus come from a caged infected animal, languishing in the warren of stalls at a Wuhan wholesale market? Or did it come from the nearby Wuhan Institute of Virology, where China’s top coronavirus researchers, some partly funded by the U.S. government, were splicing together coronavirus strains to gauge how they might become most infectious to humans?

A bitter battle has ensued between a group of virologists who assert their research points to a market origin and an alternate group of academics and online sleuths who argue there’s been an attempted cover-up of a more likely lab origin. Four months ago, the World Health Organization’s Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens revised an earlier conclusion and said that both scenarios remain on the table, due to insufficient evidence, and require further investigation.

In June 2021, with efforts to learn the truth at a virtual standstill, Burr drafted Dr. Robert Kadlec, the former Health and Human Services assistant secretary for preparedness and response under President Donald Trump, to assemble a team to examine the leading hypotheses. Burr, the ranking member of the Senate HELP committee, is retiring at year’s end. A spokesperson for Burr declined to make him available for an interview.

In the foreword of the interim report, Burr wrote, “My ultimate goal with this report is to provide a clearer picture of what we know, so far, about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 so that we can continue to work together to be better prepared to respond to future public health threats.”

Burr has served in the U.S. Congress for 28 years, first as a congressman and then, since 2005, as a senator. By today’s standards, he is a moderate Republican, having voted to convict Trump in the Jan. 6 impeachment. Long known for his work on biodefense issues, he helped lead passage of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act in 2006 and also worked to speed up the FDA’s approval of drugs for rare diseases.

The pandemic also immersed him in scandal, as ProPublica has previously reported. In February 2020, after receiving Senate intelligence committee briefings on the health threat of COVID-19, he sold up to $1.7 million in stock holdings before the market tanked, sparking a Justice Department investigation into insider trading. Burr said he relied on public news reports to guide his decision to sell stocks. He stepped aside as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee after the FBI seized his cellphone. In January 2021, the DOJ closed its investigation without charging him.

Dr. Robert Kadlec examines evidence assembled by the Senate researchers. (Mark Peterson/Redux for Vanity Fair)

The Senate HELP committee paid the salaries of seven researchers, but little more, so Kadlec cobbled together the best team he could. From the State Department, he borrowed a veterinary epidemiologist as well as Reid, whom he’d met just weeks earlier through a mutual friend who was a Dalai Lama aficionado. At the time, Reid was detailed to the office of Sen. Marco Rubio to work on China policy issues. Kadlec also leaned on scientific advisers with expertise in virology, epidemiology and biodefense.

Kadlec, a former Air Force officer who worked with Burr years earlier on bioterrorism issues, has served under both Republican and Democratic presidents. In 2003, he deployed to Iraq for the Department of Defense and played a critical role in debunking the false claims that trailers there doubled as mobile bioweapons labs. That experience, he says, equipped him to navigate the murky world of“dual-use research,” where civilian scientific work sometimes has a clandestine military purpose.

In February 2020, in his role at HHS, Kadlec allowed sick Americans on a cruise ship to return to the U.S. Angry that the move added to the domestic COVID-19 case count, Trump threatened to fire him. And when Rick Bright, a senior HHS official turned whistleblower, accused the Trump administration of politicizing the pandemic response, he also alleged that Kadlec demoted him in retaliation and used federal funds to bestow contracts on favored drugmakers. The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis investigated. While it did not issue formal findings against Kadlec, it noted in a press release that an HHS division under Kadlec’s control awarded a lucrative contract to a drugmaker, despite regulators’ warnings about its troubled manufacturing plants. Calling the experience “very hurtful,” Kadlec says, “I got slimed in the press.” He adds, “I still carry that with me today.”

Kadlec says the investigation of the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster, in which seven astronauts died, inspired his approach to the inquiry. It showed that “in complex disasters and events, there is always a political side, an engineering side, a human error side,” he says. “These things happen for a variety of reasons, so you have to open the aperture of your mind.”

In recruiting Reid, Kadlec found an analyst who would look for clues in places a typical scientist wouldn’t. “The things that I’ve been researching and translating are not really science,” Reid says. “It’s the party speaking to the world of science and trying to manage it.”

“Complex and Grave Situation”

Even the authors of the relentlessly cheerful party branch dispatches and meeting summaries in the WIV archive found it hard to sugarcoat the events of Nov. 19, 2019, Toy Reid discovered as he delved into the WIV’s archives.

Seven days after the Zhengdian party branch members wrote their memo about rushing to the front line to defend against viral dangers, fallout arrived in the form of an official visitor from Beijing. That visitor, Dr. Ji Changzheng, is the technology safety and security director for the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the sprawling state agency that oversees more than 100 research institutions in China, including the WIV. His visit was billed as a senior safety-training seminar for a small high-level audience, including the WIV’s research department heads and top biosafety officials.

But the meeting, chronicled in a one and a half page summary uploaded to the WIV website on Nov. 21, was no pro forma seminar. According to Reid, it appears to have been “out of the ordinary and event driven,” and distinct from the annual safety training, which had been held in April.

For Reid, the import of Ji’s opening remarks practically leapt off the page. Ji told the assembled group that he had come bearing “important oral remarks and written instructions” from General Secretary Xi Jinping and China’s premier, Li Keqiang, to address a “complex and grave situation.”

Though the summary’s language is characteristically vague, Ji described:

many large-scale cases of domestic and foreign safety incidents in recent years, and from the perspective of shouldering responsibility, standardizing operations, emergency planning, and inspecting hidden dangers one-by-one, [he] laid out a deep analysis, with many layers and taken from many angles, which vividly revealed the complex and grave situation currently facing [bio]security work.

The WIV’s deputy director of safety and security spoke next, summarizing “several general problems that were found over the course of the last year during safety and security investigations, and [he] pointed to the severe consequences that could result from hidden safety dangers.”

But what drew Reid’s full attention was the word Ji used to describe the important “written instructions” he was relaying from Beijing: “pishi.” When China’s senior leaders receive written reports on a worrying or important issue, they will write instructions in the margins, known as pishi, to be carried out swiftly by lower-level officials. As Reid interpreted it, the pishi that Ji arrived with that day appeared to have come directly from Xi, arguably China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong. To Reid, it suggested that Xi himself had been briefed on an ongoing crisis at the WIV.

Is it possible that Ji meant to invoke the authority of China’s supreme leader in a general way? As Reid acknowledges, “When Chinese officials want to be taken seriously by whoever their audience is, they invoke more senior officials.” To assess whether Ji had simply been dropping Xi’s name, as a way to underscore the importance of his message, Reid researched nine of Ji’s visits to different facilities prior to the pandemic. All were characterized as annual or routine. None mentioned a pishi. “There wasn’t this bandying about of Xi,” Reid says.

Further, when Chinese officials are invoking a higher authority in general terms, they will typically cite an important speech, says Reid. For example, Ji could have referenced the one Xi gave at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ plenary session in May 2018. As Reid puts it, “If he just wanted to invoke the authority of Xi, the natural way to do that is to say, ‘Remember when he came to speak to all of us?’” Invoking the pishi, Reid believes, was “taking it to another level.”

Ji did not respond to questions and a request for comment sent to the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The director general at the WIV and the head of the WIV party committee did not respond to emails seeking comment.

Vanity Fair and ProPublica examined research from Chinese academics on pishi and separately got three experts on CCP communications to review the WIV meeting summary. All agreed that it appeared to be urgent, nonroutine and related to some sort of biosafety emergency. Two also agreed that it appeared Xi himself had issued a pishi.

A former senior U.S. intelligence official said that, while the pishi in the dispatch is not necessarily a smoking gun, he reads it as saying that “there is some issue related to lab security, which doesn’t come up very often, that needed to be seen by Xi Jinping.” He added, “Something signed off on by the General Secretary (Xi) and Premier (Li) is high priority.”

Another longtime CCP analyst said it was not possible to conclude from the document that Xi and Li had actually issued a pishi related to a specific incident, or even that they had been informed of one. Ji, in her view, might well have been invoking their names without their knowledge to underscore the importance of his message. However, she said that, given the party’s preference for positive communications, the acknowledgment of a “‘complex and grave situation’ means ‘We are facing something really bad.’” She also said that the language of the summary implied that the situation in question was happening at that time.

Reading between the lines is essential to understanding what the WIV dispatches really mean. As Geremie Barmé, an emeritus professor of Chinese history at the Australian National University, who analyzed key documents at our request, said of CCP communications, “The style of self-protection, of rounding things out, of avoiding the truth, is a highly developed, bureaucratic art form.”

Without more evidence, it is impossible to know the details of what the assembled group knew and discussed that day. But at least one news report supports the notion that the virus may have been circulating at that time. In March 2020, a veteran journalist with the South China Morning Post reported that she reviewed internal Chinese government data on early cases of COVID-19 that included a 55-year-old in Hubei province, where Wuhan is located, who contracted COVID-19 on Nov. 17, 2019.

That was just two days before Ji arrived at the WIV, bearing urgent instructions from the highest levels of China’s government.

“Black Swans and Gray Rhinos”

A virologist and former Army officer, James LeDuc spent half a century studying how infectious diseases impact public health and national security. Over the course of his career, he witnessed China’s rise from a “not well-developed country” to a biotechnology superpower, he told Vanity Fair and ProPublica.

In December 1985, LeDuc, then a supervisor at the U.S. Army medical research center, Fort Detrick, arrived at the Wuhan Institute of Virology to help work on a trial of drug efficacy for the hantavirus, a life-threatening disease transmitted by rodents. “China was emerging from the Cultural Revolution. Everyone was on bicycles,” he recalls. “I can remember giving a talk — the screen was a sheet one of us had to hold. The windows were broken out.”

China "didn’t have the background of how to run [advanced laboratories] safely," says James LeDuc. "They were trying to do their best."

Two and a half decades later, with help from French scientists and engineers, the WIV laid the cornerstone for China’s first BSL-4 laboratory. That facility, the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory, would become synonymous with the country’s lofty biotech ambitions. “China has said repeatedly and forcefully — and they’re backing up their words with actions — that they intend to own the bio-revolution,” the biodefense expert Dr. Tara J. O’Toole testified in November 2019 before a U.S. Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities. O’Toole served as one of Kadlec’s scientific advisers for the report.

Today, China operates three BSL-4 laboratories and plans to build at least five more. (Biolabs are rated 1-4, from least to most secure, according to standards set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and international public health agencies.)

China’s progress has been fast — arguably too fast for its infrastructure to keep pace. It remains dependent on other countries for critical technology and supplies, leading to chronic procurement hurdles that party branch members refer to as the “stranglehold problem.” It has a thin bench of experts to run the most advanced laboratories. China “didn’t have the background of how to run [advanced laboratories] safely,” says LeDuc. “They were trying to do their best.”

From 2010 until his retirement in 2021, LeDuc served as director of the Galveston National Laboratory, one of eight BSL-4 facilities in the U.S. During that time, he went out of his way to help improve standards at the WIV. He brought several of the WIV’s scientists to Galveston for training and invited its officials to attend an international conference he hosted.

In 2016, LeDuc returned to the WIV for a scientific meeting in which he shared a new set of recommendations. The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity had urged the U.S. government to more intensively screen proposals for what it called “gain-of-function research of concern” in which scientists manipulate dangerous pathogens to gauge their likelihood of sparking a pandemic.

LeDuc says his presentation was “not necessarily well received. Most of the folks were scientists and could care less about policy.” But he felt he had a responsibility to warn them all the same. “It’s enlightened self-interest that we are doing everything to ensure [China’s] success,” he says. “We want to make sure they have the best practices. If someone screws up, we all suffer.”

Poring through publicly available documents, Kadlec’s researchers saw that China’s top scientists had been sounding the alarm too. “The biosafety laboratory is a double-edged sword; it can be used for the benefit of humanity but can also lead to a ‘disaster,’” warned a March 2019 article co-written by Yuan Zhiming, director of the WIV’s BSL-4 laboratory. “With increasing numbers of high-level biosafety laboratories constructed in China, it is urgent to establish and implement standardized management measures.”

That same month, the director of China’s CDC cautioned that bioengineering technologies would “also be available to the ambitious, careless, inept and outright malcontents, who may misuse them in ways that endanger our safety.” Writing in the journal Biosafety and Health, the director at the time, George Fu Gao, also urged that “modifying the genomes of animals (including humans), plants, and microbes (including pathogens) must be highly regulated.”

Meanwhile, reports of sloppy practices, hazardous conditions and inadequate oversight reverberated across China’s laboratories, according to documents unearthed by Reid and reviewed by Vanity Fair and ProPublica. A 2018 study by a municipal agency in Zhangjiajie, which canvassed 37 laboratories in the area, came to a scorching conclusion. “Our findings allow for no optimism about biosafety conditions,” the study said. “There are many hidden safety dangers, including occupational exposure, hospital acquired infections, environmental hazard, lack of training, those without credentials taking posts, management systems that do not operate effectively, leadership that does not place enough importance [on lab safety], deficient supervision and management by relevant health departments, etc.”

On Nov. 7, 2018, an official with the Municipal Health Inspection Bureau of Guangzhou, China’s largest manufacturing hub, identified a litany of hazards found during laboratory biosafety inspections: improper use of disinfectants, substandard management of samples, personnel with inadequate training and protective gear, and laboratory wastewater released directly into sewage systems.

The WIV was by no means exempt from such problems, according to reports in its own archives. In 2011 and 2018, inspections of WIV laboratories turned up lapses including improper storage of viral samples and management failings.

Then, on Dec. 24, 2018, an incident that was impossible to conceal helped catapult lab safety to the top of China’s policy agenda. Three students at Beijing Jiaotong University burned to death after improperly stored chemicals exploded inside the school’s laboratory.

On Jan. 21, 2019, Xi Jinping gave a speech to the CCP’s Central Party School, where budding young cadres receive their higher education. Conveying a sense of “anxious urgency,” according to The New York Times, he stressed the need to prepare for two kinds of risks: “black swans and gray rhinos.” He was referring to two concepts popularized in bestselling books: A black swan is a rare and unpredictable event, while a gray rhino is an obvious risk that is ignored until it poses an immediate threat. Xi proceeded to describe potential security problems in China’s state laboratories, leaving no doubt that he was concerned about the issue.

With Xi himself calling for action, a biosecurity bill that had been on the back burner became a top priority and later passed. In October 2019, Gao Hucheng, chairman of a National People’s Congress committee responsible for environmental protection, argued for its importance before the Congress’ standing committee.

In the fall of that year, according to declassified intelligence in a U.S. State Department fact sheet, several researchers inside the WIV became sick “with symptoms consistent with both COVID-19 and common seasonal illnesses.” The fact sheet did not say who the researchers were or how the US government learned of their illnesses.

As the Chinese government raced to overhaul biosafety regulations, scientists at the WIV faced a conflicting imperative: Beijing’s demand for scientific breakthroughs, which created pressure to perform cutting-edge experiments that could be published in prestigious journals. A party branch dispatch noted that Tong Xiao, a member of the WIV’s CCP committee, often told scientists there: “Don’t look at your work duties as pressure. Every task is an opportunity and a ladder for continuous self-improvement. Our team’s belief is that suffering losses is good fortune.”

“They’ve got this really aggressive regime breathing down their neck,” says Reid. “These guys are in a political pressure cooker.”

“A Doom Loop of Pressure”

In 2002, an outbreak of the SARS coronavirus that originated in China spread around the world, killing 774 people and infecting more than 8,000. At first, China tried to conceal the problem. When that became impossible, it played down the severity, falsely claiming the epidemic was under control. Meanwhile, in two separate incidents in 2004, SARS accidentally leaked from a top laboratory in Beijing and led to mini outbreaks.

In the wake of the debacle, China committed to a long-term project to not only repair its public-health reputation but also achieve the cutting-edge scientific prowess worthy of a true global superpower.

In 2004, French president Jacques Chirac flew to Beijing to sign a scientific cooperation agreement that would help catapult China into the big leagues. Welcomed with lavish ceremony, amid Champagne and strutting soldiers, Chirac pledged that France would sell China four mobile BSL-3 laboratories, help build a world-class BSL-4 lab and partner on essential research.

Eleven years and $44 million later, construction of the BSL-4 lab was complete. Set high above a flood plain, the four-story concrete laboratory was designed to withstand a magnitude 7 earthquake. By early 2018, it had been accredited to research the world’s most dangerous pathogens, including Ebola, Marburg and Nipah viruses. Xi Jinping himself hailed it as “of vital importance to Chinese public health.”

"My gut feeling is that the WIV was not ready to go hot when they turned everything on [at the BSL-4] and started doing experiments in early 2018," says Larry Kerr.

From the outside, the WIV appeared to be a transparent hub for top-caliber international collaborations. That ethos was best embodied by a fearless scientist named Shi Zhengli. She had risen through the ranks at the WIV to become director of its Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases and deputy director of its BSL-4 lab. Fluent in French, she had trained at the BSL-4 Jean Mérieux-Inserm Laboratory in Lyon and was well known in China as “bat woman” for her intrepid exploration of their caves to collect samples. “Shi Zhengli was totally aware of how to handle viruses,” Gabriel Gras, a French biosafety and biocontainment technology expert who helped train the WIV’s BSL-4 staff, told Vanity Fair and ProPublica. “She has handled these all her life.”

As the BSL-4 lab there became one of the nation’s most exalted scientific showpieces, Shi’s research grew in importance and scope. In a 2015 research paper, Shi and a University of North Carolina virologist named Ralph Baric proved that the spike protein of a novel coronavirus could be used to infect human cells. Using mice as subjects, they spliced the spike of a novel SARS-like virus from a bat into a version of the 2003 SARS virus, creating a new infectious pathogen. The virus manipulation was completed at Baric’s BSL-3 lab in North Carolina. This gain-of-function experiment was so fraught that the authors essentially put a warning label on it, writing, “scientific review panels may deem similar studies … too risky to pursue.”

In March 2018, Shi partnered with Baric and a longtime collaborator, Peter Daszak, on a $14 million grant proposal to genetically manipulate bat coronaviruses to see how they might cause pandemics. The proposal called for possibly enhancing the viruses with something called a furin cleavage site to boost their entry into human cells. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) rejected the grant proposal for not adequately assessing the risks posed by a supercharged virus.

It is not clear whether WIV scientists continued the research on their own. Shi and Baric did not offer comment. In his response to our request for comment, Daszak did not address the DARPA grant. He said that he had not reviewed the Senate report and instead pointed to another report, which he recently co-authored in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, that “strongly indicates” a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2.

Though Shi was most often pictured in the Chinese press in her white, pressurized oxygen suit, required for BSL-4 research, published papers show that she and the researchers she supervised did much of their work in BSL-3 and even BSL-2 facilities, which the WIV allowed prior to the pandemic. The interim report enumerates several types of risky research conducted at the WIV at BSL-3 and BSL-2 levels. Animal experiments to test the efficacy of vaccines generated highly infectious aerosols that are “difficult to detect,” the interim report says, adding that “there were concerns about conducting this type of research in a BSL2 laboratory.”

In early 2017, the collaboration with the French fizzled and Gras, the last French expert there, departed. The French had served as designers and contractors but never became partners. “I think the French did not really have a strong interest in working with Wuhan,” in part due to diverging research interests, Gras said. He added that Yuan Zhiming, the BSL-4 director, “was not an easy person. He can put pressure on people.” Yuan did not respond to emails seeking comment.

Long before the lab began its riskiest work, there were alarming signs of trouble ahead. In 2016, during severe flooding, the waters rose so high that nearby streets were impassable, and researchers had to hike through a forested area to reach the laboratory and ensure its safety, Zhengdian lab party branch members recounted in a WIV dispatch that Toy Reid unearthed.

The decision to build the walls out of stainless steel caused a considerable challenge. Stainless steel is “very vulnerable to corrosion” from disinfectants, Bob Hawley, the former chief of safety and radiation protection at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease, told Vanity Fair and ProPublica. Hawley is an expert adviser to the interim report.

Even in 2016, Chinese technicians were already struggling with how to properly disinfect laboratory surfaces and other items, according to emails obtained in a FOIA lawsuit. That July, Yuan emailed an NIH staffer he’d met the previous year under the subject line “ask for help.” He wrote that he was seeking “some suggestion for the choice of disinfectants” used in the BSL-4 laboratory. “I am sorry to disturb you and I really hope you could give us some suggestion,” he wrote.

As LeDuc observed, “They were looking for expertise wherever they could find it.”

Yuan himself identified the shortage of expertise as one of many problems that imperiled safe operations in China’s laboratories. In the September 2019 issue of the Journal of Biosafety and Security, he described a threadbare system where maintenance costs were “generally neglected” and “several high-level BSLs have insufficient operational funds for routine yet vital processes. Due to the limited resources, some BSL-3 laboratories run on extremely minimal operational costs or in some cases none at all.”

Gerald Parker, associate dean for Global One Health at Texas A&M University’s School of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and an expert adviser to the interim report, told Vanity Fair and ProPublica that he found Yuan’s revelations “jaw-dropping.” The combination of biosafety problems and limited maintenance funds is “a recipe for disaster,” he said. “You further couple that with an authoritarian regime where you could be penalized for reporting safety issues. You are in a doom loop of pressure to produce, and if something goes wrong you may not be incentivized to report.”

As the Zhengdian lab party branch members noted in their dispatch of Nov. 12, 2019, which the interim report includes: “In the laboratory, they often need to work for four consecutive hours, even extending to six hours. During this time, they cannot eat, drink or relieve themselves. This is an extreme test of a person’s will and physical endurance.”

A four- to six-hour shift in a positive pressure suit would be “unusually lengthy,” said Hawley, given the stress of dehydration, lack of mobility and noise from oxygen that is so loud it requires hearing protection. “Usually, it’s only a couple of hours at the maximum.”

Larry Kerr, a virologist who recently retired as HHS’s director of the Office of Pandemics and Emerging Threats and served as an expert adviser to the Senate report, told Vanity Fair and ProPublica, “My gut feeling is that the WIV was not ready to go hot when they turned everything on [at the BSL-4] and started doing experiments in early 2018.” He added: “Even the WIV’s people are saying, ‘We don’t have the resources and capabilities to keep this up and running.’ It’s like, holy crap, if you are working in a lab like that, I don’t understand why people don’t shut it down.”

But the showpiece laboratory remained as busy as ever. As Reid said of the WIV dispatches he analyzed, “The feel you get from all these documents is: It’s just produce, produce, produce, like an actor preparing to take the stage before they’re ready.”

Newspaper clippings on a cork board in the Bat Cave. (Mark Peterson/Redux for Vanity Fair) “The CCP’s Version of ‘Cover Your Ass’”

By the fall of 2019, trouble was brewing at the WIV, according to documents turned up by Toy Reid.

On Sept. 11, 2019, the CCP’s No. 15 Inspection Patrol Group arrived at the Beijing headquarters of the WIV’s parent organization, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), to conduct a two-month political inspection. The inspection was part of a larger routine sweep of 37 state organizations. According to the inspection team’s leader, its purpose was to sniff out any “violations of political discipline, party organizational discipline, [financial] ethics discipline, discipline with regard to the masses, work discipline, and discipline in one’s personal life.” They were also on the lookout for instances of insufficient loyalty to the CCP’s mission.

The Beijing inspectors identified more than a dozen “principal problems” at CAS, among them a “‘persistent gap’ between Xi Jinping’s important instructions on pursuing ‘leap frog development in science and technology’ and CAS’s implementation of Xi’s instructions.” In short: not enough progress, despite all the pressure.

A week earlier, on Sept. 3, more than 50 managers and staffers at the WIV had met to discuss a looming internal audit that would evaluate political discipline, according to a party branch dispatch. The scientists and their overseers were facing scrutiny at every level.

A trail of evidence from that fall appears to show the WIV trying to address a crisis. “That’s when you start to see emergency response activity,” says Larry Kerr, the former director of the HHS pandemic office.

It began within 24 hours of the start of the CAS inspection. On Sept. 12 between 2 and 3 a.m., the interim report says, the WIV took down its Wildlife-Borne Viral Pathogen Database, which contained more than 15,000 samples from bats. The database had been a resource for researchers globally. A password-protected section only accessible to WIV personnel contained unpublished sequences of bat beta-coronaviruses — the family of coronaviruses to which SARS-CoV-2 belongs. Public access to the database has not yet been restored.

On Dec. 11, a team of WIV researchers submitted a patent application for a device to filter and contain hazardous gases inside a biological chamber, like the ones it used to transport infected animals.

The Senate researchers analyzed a trail of procurements and patent applications, which, the interim report notes, suggest that “the WIV struggled to maintain key biosafety capabilities at its high-containment BSL3 and BSL4 laboratories.” On Dec. 11, a team of WIV researchers submitted a patent application in China for a device to filter and contain hazardous gases inside a biological chamber, like the ones it used to transport infected animals. The application, which Vanity Fair and ProPublica reviewed, noted that defective air hoses on animal carriers can lead to “multi-stage” risks when airborne pathogens are involved, and warned that a “stable high-efficiency filtering device” and corrosion-resistant frame were “urgently needed.” The following year, in November 2020, the WIV applied for a patent for a new disinfectant compound that it argued would reduce “the corrosion effect to metal, especially stainless steel material,” the interim report says.

The patent application, which listed seven inventors, including Yuan Zhiming, vividly describes concerns related to its prior disinfectant:

Long-term use will lead to corrosion of metal components such as stainless steel, thereby reducing the protection of … facilities and equipment. It can not only shorten its service life and cause economic losses, but also lead to the escape of highly pathogenic microorganisms into the external environment of the laboratory, resulting in loss of life and property and serious social problems.

In the words of one China analyst who serves as an adviser to Western companies, when Chinese officials “describe the solution to a problem, that’s how you find out what went wrong.”

Vanity Fair and ProPublica analyzed the WIV website and found that there may have been an after-the-fact attempt to reframe the events of November 2019. On Nov. 11, the WIV appeared to republish the entire section of its website containing institutional and party branch news. Every dispatch from prior dates, even those from several years earlier, contains underlying data that indicates that it was changed on that day.

While this could have resulted from routine site maintenance, it raises another possibility: that WIV officials removed or revised documents in an effort to insulate themselves from blame ahead of the Nov. 19 visit from Ji Changzheng, the CAS biosecurity official.

The first dispatch to be posted after Nov. 11 was the one from the Zhengdian lab party branch enumerating how its members had rushed to the front lines every time there had been a biocontainment lapse. The dispatch was dated Nov. 12, but the underlying data suggested the file was actually uploaded on Nov. 19, the day of Ji’s urgent visit.

Matthew Pottinger, who researches China-related issues at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and was President Trump’s former deputy national security adviser, told Vanity Fair and ProPublica, “This is the CCP’s version of ‘cover your ass.’”

“Scientifically, Technically Not Possible”

As Senate researchers explored the question of when the outbreak began, they and their scientific advisers examined the surprisingly fast vaccine development by several Chinese research teams.

The work of one military vaccinologist caught their attention: Zhou Yusen, director of the State Key Laboratory of Pathogen and Biosecurity at the Academy of Military Medical Sciences Institute of Microbiology and Epidemiology, in Beijing. Zhou had spent years working to develop vaccines for pathogens including SARS and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), a novel coronavirus first identified in Saudi Arabia in 2012. A 2016 report by the WIV featured Zhou as a key partner on its MERS vaccine research. And in November 2019, he collaborated on a paper with a team of WIV scientists that included Shi Zhengli.

On Feb. 24, 2020, Zhou became the first researcher in the world to apply for a patent for a SARS-CoV-2 vaccine. His proposed vaccine worked by reproducing a part of the virus’s spike protein known as the receptor binding domain. In order to start vaccine development, researchers would have needed the entire SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequence, the interim report says.

Shi Zhengli has said that her lab was the first to sequence the virus and completed that work on the morning of Jan. 2, 2020. That sequence is the one Zhou said he worked with in his Chinese patent application, which Vanity Fair and ProPublica reviewed.

According to the interim report, there are limits to how fast a vaccine can be developed. In particular, it said that “animal studies are designed to last a specific length of time and cannot be curtailed without compromising the resulting data.”

In his patent application and in subsequently published papers, Zhou documented a robust research and development process that included both adapting the virus to wild-type mice and infecting genetically modified ones with humanized lungs.

Vanity Fair and ProPublica consulted two independent experts and one expert adviser to the interim report to get their assessment of when Zhou’s research was likely to have begun. Two of the three said that he had to have started no later than November 2019, in order to complete the mouse research spelled out in his patent and subsequent papers.

Larry Kerr, who advised on the interim report, called the timeline laid out in Zhou’s patent and research papers “scientifically, technically not possible.” He added, “I don’t think any molecular biology lab in the world, no matter how sophisticated, could pull that off.”

Rick Bright, the former HHS official who helped oversee vaccine development for the U.S. government, told Vanity Fair and ProPublica that even a four-month timetable would be “aggressive,” especially when the virus in question is new. “Things aren’t usually that perfect,” he said.

Jesse Bloom, a virologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, told us the timetable was very fast but “feasible for a group with substantial existing expertise and ongoing work” on developing similar SARS-related coronavirus vaccines, but only if “everything went right.”

Zhou and his colleagues described their COVID-19 vaccine research in a preprint posted on May 2, 2020. When it was published in a peer-reviewed journal three months later, Reid found, Zhou was listed as “deceased.” The circumstances of his death have not been disclosed.

A chart tabulating early cases of COVID-19 in Wuhan. (Mark Peterson/Redux for Vanity Fair) Battle Lines

In the early hours of Jan. 1, 2020, Wuhan officials closed the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market after identifying it as the site of the world’s first cluster of SARS-CoV-2 infections. Animals for sale were carted away, stalls were sanitized and an epidemiology team spent days collecting environmental samples.

How did the virus arrive in Wuhan, a metropolis of 11 million people hundreds of miles north of China’s teeming bat caves? It was such an unlikely place for a coronavirus outbreak that WIV scientists had in the past used Wuhan residents as a control group when screening people in the countryside of Yunnan Province for exposure to bat-borne viruses. The assumption was that urbanites in Wuhan would have little contact with bats.

To many scientists, the answer was clear: The wildlife trade in China had brought live animals, an obvious source of disease, into dangerously close proximity with people. Years earlier, something similar had happened with SARS, which spilled over into multiple different markets that sold live animals across Guangdong Province over the course of months.

But the interim report also highlights questions that soon arose regarding the market theory. If the wildlife trade was the culprit, where was the trail of infected animals? And where was the animal host?

The question of where COVID-19 came from has never been a purely scientific one. From the start, in both China and the U.S., it has been politicized almost beyond recognition.

In April 2020, Trump declared at a press conference that COVID-19 — or “kung flu,” as he soon began calling it — had come from a lab in China. When pressed on the evidence for this claim, he declared: “I can’t tell you that. I’m not allowed to tell you that.”

As a conspiratorial rabble trained its sights on the WIV generally, and Shi Zhengli specifically, Western scientists rushed to their defense. “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin,” read a statement signed by 27 scientists and published by the Lancet medical journal on Feb. 19, 2020. It would later emerge that one of the scientists who’d signed that statement had sought to conceal his own role in orchestrating it and creating the impression of a consensus, as Vanity Fair has reported previously. That scientist didn’t address this issue when he replied to our request for comment for this article.

By then, however, the battle lines had been drawn. If you backed the lab-leak theory, you were with Trump. If you believed in science, you supported the natural-origin theory generally and the market-spillover theory in particular.

On Feb. 25, 2022, a team of researchers from China’s CDC published a preprint revealing that of the 457 swabs taken from 18 species of animals in the market, none contained any evidence of the virus. Rather, the virus was found in 73 swabs taken from around the market’s environment, all linked to human infections. And although some seafood and vegetable vendors in the market tested positive, no vendors from animal stalls did.

The next day, a team of scientists including Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, published a preprint identifying the Huanan market as the “unambiguous epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic.” Using mapping software, they analyzed the locations of 155 of the earliest known cases reported by the Chinese authorities to the World Health Organization and found them to be centered on the market. A companion analysis led by Jonathan Pekar, a bioinformatics graduate student at the University of California San Diego, said there had been not one but “at least two” spillover events at the market.

The Worobey paper described its findings as “dispositive evidence” for a market origin. The New York Times catapulted the preprints to international attention. When the peer-reviewed version was published in Science in July, the “dispositive evidence” language was gone. In a detailed response to our request for comment, Worobey said that the removal of those words was the authors’ editorial choice and that the language in Science was “no less definitive” than the preprint: “It was replaced with similar language: ‘our analyses indicate that the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 occurred through the live wildlife trade in China.’”

By contrast, the interim Senate report concludes that “the hypothesis of a natural zoonotic origin no longer deserves the benefit of the doubt, or the presumption of accuracy.” The available evidence doesn’t fit the patterns of previous outbreaks, it states, including outbreaks of SARS in 2003 and avian influenza in 2013. Those outbreaks saw many independent spillover events in multiple locations, and those viruses “exhibited much greater genetic diversity than early SARS-CoV-2 strains.” And within six months of the first known case of SARS, the report says, Chinese health officials found evidence of the virus in palm civets and raccoon dogs.

The interim report also points out that, “almost three years after the COVID-19 pandemic began, there is still no evidence of an animal infected with SARS-CoV-2, or a closely related virus, before the first publicly reported human COVID-19 cases in Wuhan in December 2019.”

Worobey said, “Our two recent papers establish that a natural zoonotic origin is the only plausible scenario for the origin of the pandemic.” Before this story ran, Worobey posted his comments to us, as well as additional ones, on Twitter, so they would not be “ignored or filtered,” and stated he had not been given sufficient time to respond.

While the China CDC found no evidence of the virus in animals in the market, Pekar told Vanity Fair and ProPublica that the removal of animals from the market by the start of 2020 made it difficult to “actually sample the correct animals for SARS-CoV-2.”

The Senate’s interim report is no likelier than the Worobey and Pekar studies to close the book on the origins debate, nor does it attempt to. If anything, it seems destined to escalate the battle just as Republicans in Congress hope to retake the majority in the midterm elections. They aim to haul Dr. Anthony Fauci, the outgoing director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, into Benghazi-style hearings.

The dispute over COVID-19’s origins, fought in the halls of Congress and on the web pages of scientific preprints, has become more toxic and divisive as time has passed. On Twitter, what should be scientific debate has devolved into a mosh pit of poop emojis and middle school insults. It is unclear what is driving the animus, but political advantage, egos, scientific reputations and research dollars all hang in the balance.

“Under the Thumb of the Party State”

In early February 2020, as COVID-19 was spreading beyond China, James LeDuc of the Galveston National Laboratory began fielding calls from journalists asking if SARS-CoV-2 could have originated from a lab.

He didn’t think so. Nonetheless, on Feb. 9, he emailed his longtime colleague and mentee at the WIV, Yuan Zhiming. LeDuc encouraged him to “conduct a thorough review of the laboratory activities associated with research on coronaviruses so that you are fully prepared to answer questions dealing with the origin of the virus.” He included a three-page list of “some areas where you may wish to investigate.”

Included in LeDuc’s proposed review were the following questions: “Is there any evidence to suggest a mechanical failure in biocontainment during the time in question? -were biological safety cabinets used and appropriately certified? -Exhaust air filtration systems working correctly?”

The questions were apt. Two and a half months earlier, according to the interim report, procurement officials at the WIV posted a call for bids on a government website seeking a costly air incinerator. The post was dated Nov. 19, 2019, the very day that the visiting CAS safety official arrived to address a “complex and grave” situation there.

"The WIV is under the thumb of the party state," says Toy Reid. "American scientists have been slow to realize that."

Prior to the wider adoption of HEPA filters in the 1950s, air incinerators were used to “superheat air coming from one place and going to another, in order to render them free of any microbial agent,” said Bob Hawley, the former safety chief at the Army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease. “If somehow the HEPA filter system failed, because there was a tear or breach … then your quick fix would be to bring in an air incinerator.”

LeDuc says he never heard back from Yuan.

Toy Reid, who is now in Jakarta, Indonesia, resuming his work for the State Department, says that WIV scientists are not “free agents” who can candidly share what occurred in their laboratories. “The WIV is under the thumb of the party state,” he says. “Just because you can’t see the political pressures they’re under doesn’t mean they’re not under them. American scientists have been slow to realize that.”

Without the cooperation of China’s government, we can’t know exactly what did or didn’t happen at the WIV, or what precise set of circumstances unleashed SARS-CoV-2. But the dispatches that Reid unearthed, when overlaid with additional evidence the Senate team compiled, point to a catastrophe in the making: political pressure to excel, inadequate resources to safeguard risky work and an effort to skirt blame once a crisis hit.

As Reid sees it, the international community must continue to demand answers. “If you just throw your hands in the air and say, ‘We’ll never know because it’s China,’ and just move on — if you take that defeatist approach to things — you can’t prepare yourself to prevent something like this from happening in the future.”

We Want to Talk to People Working, Living and Grieving on the Front Lines of the Coronavirus. Help Us Report.

Clarification, Oct. 28, 2022: This story has been updated to clarify that Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona, said two recent papers by him and his colleagues established that “a natural zoonotic origin is the only plausible scenario for the origin of the pandemic.”

by Sophia Kovatch

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

Nationwide, rent was up by 9% in September compared to the previous year. That’s the first time in 2022 that rent increases were in the single digits, down from an 18% increase in March, according to an analysis by the real estate company Redfin.

While supply and demand, high mortgage interest rates and other economic factors are certainly at play in rising rents, an investigation by ProPublica found another key factor: a rental pricing software owned by real estate tech firm RealPage. Here’s what we learned.

How RealPage’s Rent-Setting Algorithm Works

The software collects tons of data from its clients, many of whom price tens of thousands of units. All together, RealPage says its rent-setting algorithm holds lease transaction data for more than 13 million units across the country.

Each day, the software recommends a new price for every available unit. To determine the new rate, it draws from competitor data on the actual rent tenants paid, as opposed to the publicly advertised rent.

The use of private competitor data — though it is aggregated and anonymized — to set prices is one of the concerns experts raised. The practice could allow RealPage to stifle rental competition, they said, driving up rents across the country and, potentially, even violating antitrust laws. Experts said that RealPage also sponsors meetings that gather competitors together to talk about pricing, which could also be a warning sign of collusion.

What You Need to Know About RealPage

1. Landlords use RealPage to make more money. RealPage boasts that it helps landlords outperform the market by up to 7% — that is, its software users can expect better-than-market-average revenues, even in weak markets. Greystar, the largest property manager in the U.S., outperformed its markets by 4.8% in one downturn, according to RealPage materials.

RealPage promises streamlined apartment pricing and flexible options for renters, but the true benefit for landlords is just how far the software will push rents up — far beyond what most property managers are willing to do manually.

2. RealPage believes it is driving rents higher across the country. A now-deleted video showed a RealPage executive saying in 2021 that the company’s software was a driver of double-digit rent increases across the country. Another executive said most property managers would be hesitant to raise rents by double digits without the assistance of the software.

Take this example from Seattle: In a RealPage-priced building in a downtown Seattle ZIP code, rent rose by 33% in one year for a couple living in a one-bedroom apartment. In a non-algorithm-priced building in the same ZIP code, rent for another tenant’s studio rose by just 3.9% over a similar period.

Property managers don’t have to accept the software’s recommendations — they are free to reject the algorithm’s price if they feel it’s too high or low. But overall, about 90% of recommendations are implemented, former employees said.

3. RealPage discourages landlords from bargaining with tenants over rents. One of the developers of RealPage’s price-setting software said leasing agents have “too much empathy” with renters, which can lead them to hesitate to seek the highest rents. The software automates rent-setting calculations, leading to more revenue for landlords and property management companies.

This may be why RealPage discourages bargaining with tenants about rent. When you take the human element out of the equation, profits seem to soar.

4. Critics say RealPage may encourage pricing collusion among landlords. When RealPage acquired LRO, its main pricing competitor, in 2017, the Department of Justice’s antitrust division investigated the deal. The merger ultimately proceeded, doubling the number of units RealPage priced — and expanding its cache of data.

Legal experts have raised concerns that RealPage’s software could be facilitating collusion among clients in places where many of them use it to set rents. In particular, the company’s User Group — a forum for clients to work together and suggest software improvements — could be an “antitrust red flag,” they said. The group has more than 1,000 members and two subcommittees on pricing, which meet in private at annual conferences.

Days after ProPublica released its investigation into RealPage, a group of renters filed a lawsuit alleging that nine of the largest property management firms in the U.S. are working together to artificially inflate rents, violating federal law.

5. RealPage says it uses data in a “legally compliant” way. The company told ProPublica that it “uses aggregated market data from a variety of sources in a legally compliant manner.”

RealPage noted that landlords who use employees to manually set prices “typically” conduct phone surveys to check competitors’ rents, which the company says could result in anti-competitive behavior.

“RealPage’s revenue management solutions prioritize a property’s own internal supply/demand dynamics over external factors such as competitors’ rents,” a company statement said, “and therefore help eliminate the risk of collusion that could occur with manual pricing.”

The statement said RealPage’s software also helps prevent rents from reaching unaffordable levels because it detects drops in demand, like those that happen seasonally, and can respond to them by lowering rents.

Other Reasons Rent Is So High

Although RealPage’s software is affecting rental prices in markets across the country, it’s far from the only factor in increasing rents. Here are some other things that help explain why rent is so high.

1. Private equity-owned rentals: Since 2011, there’s been a steady increase in the number of rental units owned by private equity-backed firms, according to reporting by ProPublica. These property management firms aim to increase short-term profits by increasing rents, cutting costs, or both. By 2021, more than half of the top 35 apartment building owners were backed by private equity, likely contributing to higher rents around the country.

2. High cost of homebuying: Property values in many markets escalated steeply in the years after the Great Recession. More recently, average interest rates on 30-year fixed-rate mortgages in the U.S. have soared, now surpassing 7% — nearly double what they were this time last year. Both trends have slowed homebuying, pushing rental demand and prices higher.

3. Slow, expensive construction: Supply chain issues have slowed housing construction, reducing the rental supply as demand increases. As inflation affects every sector of the economy, the costs of labor and materials go up, making it hard to build housing people can afford. The nation has lagged in constructing the new housing units needed in most years since the Great Recession.

4. Supply and demand: With more people forced to rent, there simply aren’t enough rental units to go around — especially in some markets that saw an influx of new renters during the pandemic. Higher competition for rentals drives prices up.

Heather Vogell contributed reporting.

by Anjeanette Damon

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

A politically connected COVID-19-testing company with a stunningly high error rate in Nevada has become a key issue in the state’s closely fought governor’s race.

In May, a ProPublica investigation detailed how Gov. Steve Sisolak’s administration fast-tracked the license for Northshore Clinical Labs, a company with ties to a family that has donated nearly $50,000 to his political campaigns since 2011, including $40,000 to his gubernatorial races. The investigation also revealed that the company missed 96% of COVID-19 cases in a sample of 51 PCR tests from the University of Nevada Reno campus, used questionable billing practices and had widespread problems with the testing it provided to five government agencies. The article also noted how the lab was allowed to continue operating in the state despite repeated warnings from public health scientists.

Now, as Sisolak, a Democrat, seeks a second term, he is fending off relentless Republican attacks labeling him “corrupt” and pointing out that he failed to notify the public of the problematic tests. His opponent, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo, as well as the Republican Governors Association and an independent political action committee, have spent millions of dollars on mailers and television, radio and digital ads hyping the issue. Lombardo’s Republican allies in the Legislature have unsuccessfully asked for audits and investigations into Northshore’s dealings. And the two candidates for governor spent nearly 10 minutes arguing the issue this month in their only debate.

“Gov. Sisolak covered up a public health crisis for five months,” Lombardo’s spokesperson, Elizabeth Ray, said. “Sisolak knew about this crisis back in January, and he failed to alert the public. His inaction in this ‘pay-to-plague’ scandal could have cost Nevadans their lives.”

In response, Sisolak’s campaign has accused Republicans of exaggerating the nature of the testing problems and the governor’s role in it.

“Joe Lombardo and national Republicans have spent tens of millions of dollars spreading lies, misconstruing the truth and misleading Nevadans,” Molly Forgey, Sisolak’s campaign spokesperson, said. “Plain and simple: Republicans are desperate. Lombardo doesn’t have any real plans or vision so instead, he’s scraping the bottom of the barrel in an attempt to shift the narrative away from his pattern of corruption and his out-of-touch stances.”

Shortly after ProPublica published its investigation, a government spokesperson for the Sisolak administration said his office was exploring legal avenues to hold the company accountable for botched testing services that put its customers’ health at risk. This week, however, the spokesperson confirmed the administration has yet to take action beyond assisting federal investigators looking into Northshore’s practices.

“I don’t have many updates for you,” spokesperson Meghin Delaney said.

Northshore and its representatives have consistently declined to comment on ProPublica’s reporting.

As the debate has raged, both sides have bent the facts in making their cases to the voters. According to ProPublica’s extensive reporting on the issue, which included a review of more than 3,000 pages of internal emails, here is what both sides have gotten wrong.

Misleading: “Steve Sisolak’s administration fast-tracked a contract for a shady company tied to a campaign donor.” — A Republican Governors Association ad

Among Republicans’ most repeated errors is the claim that Sisolak handed a state contract to the testing company. In some cases, Republicans have accused Sisolak of giving Northshore a $165 million contract.

In reality, the state did not sign a contract with Northshore, nor did it pay the company $165 million. That figure is the total amount of money the company, which says it operated in more than 20 states at the height of the pandemic, billed the federal government for COVID-19 tests it said it provided to people with no health insurance.

The Sisolak administration, however, did let Northshore jump ahead of other companies waiting for inspections so it could more quickly obtain its state laboratory license.

Northshore had contracted with brothers Gregory and Angelo Palivos to build clientele and manage its operations in Nevada. Their parents, Peter and Vicky Palivos, have donated heavily to Sisolak’s campaign and are personal friends of the governor’s. The Palivos brothers worked with an influential lobbyist who used his ties to the administration to help Northshore with its state laboratory license.

After the lobbyist emailed Sisolak’s chief of staff, the head of the licensing bureau urged the health inspectors to move up Northshore’s inspection.

“I want to let you know how frustrating it is to have my staff schedule their inspections only to have labs use previous directors to influence or pressure us into having businesses that they represent, jump ahead of others that are patiently waiting for their inspections,” the state’s lead inspector wrote to his boss in an email obtained by ProPublica.

In a written statement earlier this year, a spokesperson for the Palivos brothers said they were unaware of Northshore’s problems when they were hired to manage its Nevada operations. The spokesperson said they were driven by their desire to help Nevada in the middle of a testing crisis and that they relied on Northshore “for standard operating procedures, licensing, compliance, test supplies, molecular lab work, reporting of test results, and billing.” She also said the Palivos brothers pushed the company to fix the problems with its tests before the state became involved.

Sisolak has repeatedly said he had no conversations about Northshore with Palivos family members. The Palivos brothers also said they never spoke with the governor about their testing business.

“This guy — on my life, on my mother, my children, my wife’s life — never asked me about this testing company,” Sisolak said during the Oct. 2 gubernatorial debate, referring to Peter Palivos. “Never talked to me. Never sent me an email. Never made a phone call. Never sent me a text. Never did anything. They followed the procedures. That’s what happened.”

The Palivos family’s political donations didn’t stop amid the Northshore debacle. On Jan. 17, three days after the state scheduled its investigation into complaints about Northshore’s operations, a limited liability company operated by Peter and Vicky Palivos donated $10,000 to Sisolak’s campaign.

Incorrect: “Now, Sisolak is under federal investigation.” — Better Nevada PAC ad

Both the Lombardo campaign and the Better Nevada PAC, which said it has spent more than $1 million on ads about Northshore, have claimed Sisolak is being investigated by the federal government.

ProPublica confirmed that the Inspector General’s Office of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services expanded its investigation into Northshore to Nevada after the initial story ran in May. An email from the OIG investigator did not indicate that Sisolak or his administration were under investigation.

“Myself and other law enforcement agencies have had a case opened regarding Northshore Clinical Lab for quite some time,” wrote Special Agent Peter Theiler, who is based in Chicago. “After reading the ProPublica article on Northshore Clinical Lab regarding Nevada patients, we are interested in obtaining records related to testing for COVID-19 for Northshore Clinical Lab rapid test results and PCR test results for Nevada.”

Spokespeople for both Lombardo’s campaign and the Better Nevada PAC point to the Sisolak administration’s comments about the OIG investigation as evidence Sisolak himself is under investigation.

But that’s not supported by public records. The OIG has declined to comment on the investigation.

Incorrect: “As soon as we found out, their license was revoked.” — Sisolak during his Oct. 2 debate with Lombardo

The state never revoked Northshore’s license. Instead, it tried working with the company to bring it into compliance before ultimately closing the license at the company’s request.

Delaney declined to address this inaccuracy when ProPublica asked about it. His campaign spokesperson also did not explain the inaccuracy.

That’s not to say Sisolak’s administration ignored the problem. The Nevada Bureau of Health Care Quality and Compliance immediately began investigating after the Washoe County Health District filed a complaint detailing errors with the company’s PCR tests.

Northshore had been conducting both rapid and PCR tests. In “several hundred”cases, the rapid test came back positive, but the PCR test came back negative, according to a Jan. 10 email from Washoe County Health District’s epidemiology manager. At state and local health officials’ urging, Northshore voluntarily stopped using PCR tests. However, state officials allowed the company to continue conducting rapid tests across the state despite it not having the proper licensing to do that.

In their investigation, state inspectors noted deficiencies with Northshore’s operations and were working with the company to correct them. During that process, Northshore abruptly announced it was pulling out of the state and asked for its license to be closed.

State officials closed the license but also reported their findings to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the State Board of Nursing and the company itself.

Incorrect: “We were cooperating in a federal investigation.” — Sisolak during the debate

During the debate, moderator Jon Ralston asked Sisolak why he never alerted the public to the problems with Northshore’s tests when he became aware of them in January 2022.

“We were cooperating in a federal investigation into the company, which we’re still cooperating with,” Sisolak answered.

According to documents obtained by ProPublica, however, the federal investigation into Northshore didn’t include its Nevada operations until May, after the ProPublica story ran.

The governor may have misspoken. (Delaney and Forgey also refused to address this inaccuracy.) At the time, Nevada health officials had launched a state investigation into the reported testing inaccuracies and told local media they could not comment on the ongoing investigation.

Sisolak’s answer drew an attack from Lombardo, who said the governor had owed the public a warning for their personal safety.

“You should have, front-facing as the leader of this state, said, ‘Hey, if you took this test, come in and get another test because we have determined they are all false, or the percentage of them, the majority of them were false,’” Lombardo said during the debate.

Do You Have a Tip for ProPublica? Help Us Do Journalism.