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How Google and AI Nearly Made a Seasoned Reporter Spiral

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Collage by Alex Bandoni/ProPublica Last month, my colleagues and I published an investigation into a Texas oil refinery startup , America First Refining, that had secretly gotten investment from Donald Trump Jr. We discovered a saga involving the Trump administration’s tariff policy, sanctioned Russian oil and an Indian billionaire family’s private zoo.  At the center of the story was the CEO of the refinery company, Texas businessman John Calce. We’d spent weeks examining Calce — pulling old lawsuits, property records, corporate registry filings — and had pieced together a portrait of what appeared to be an obscure serial entrepreneur who’d for years tried and failed to secure funding for his long-shot refinery project. Then, not long before our story was set to publish, we decided to do a scrub on a separate company he had incorporated called Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals. Pulling up the company’s website , I felt a brief flash of panic: Had we somehow ...
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A Troubling Milestone: Most Supreme Court Rulings Are Secretive Votes With Little Justification

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The Supreme Court is deciding more consequential rulings than ever before in secret, issued in unsigned orders with little to no justification. Bryan Dozier/NurPhoto via AP In its term that ended last October, the Supreme Court passed an important milestone that went unnoticed: For the first time, it decided more cases by secret ballot, and with few signed opinions, than it did for cases argued in open court. These decisions, which make up the court’s “shadow docket,” are a fast-track way to get a decision from the top court. They rarely include arguments, have limited briefings and have expedited timetables, and justices infrequently provide explanation of how they voted or to cite legal precedent.  The Supreme Court’s increased willingness to bypass its regular process has empowered President Donald Trump at the same time as the administration has increased use of executive authority. The court has repeatedly green-lit policies of his that lower courts have blocked...
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To Protect Its Drinking Water, This City Has to Appeal to the Oil Regulators That Put It at Risk

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A building that houses one of Enid, Oklahoma’s public water supply wells, left, sits less than a quarter-mile from an oil field wastewater disposal operation, right. The proximity violates a state rule restricting such injection operations within a half-mile of public water wells. September Dawn Bottoms for ProPublica Down a dirt road in northwest Oklahoma, only a few hundred yards from where the city of Enid draws its drinking water, a company injects the toxic byproduct of oil production deep underground. That close proximity violates a state rule meant to protect public groundwater supplies from oil field wastewater, which can be saltier than the sea and laden with toxic metals. Injection operations are banned within a half-mile of public water wells unless regulators hold a hearing to ensure that such activity will not pollute the water.  But in 2018, without a hearing, state regulators approved this injection well, an apparatus that applies pressure to dispose...
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