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by Jessica Schreifels , The Salt Lake Tribune This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune . Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published. Josh Dallin spends his workdays talking to Utahns who raise cattle and grow crops, and knew that many were in distress. Everyone from neighbors to fertilizer dealers to equipment suppliers were telling him they were worried that a farmer or rancher they knew was at risk of suicide. Then in 2023, with money allocated by Congress, Dallin had new help to offer: As executive director of an agriculture center at Utah State University Extension, he had scores of $2,000 vouchers that Utahns working in agriculture could use to get free therapy. Dallin feared no one in the typically stoical farming community would take him up on the federally funded offer. He was wrong. Farmers and ranchers across Utah quickly accepted the money, which ran out in just f...

by Tim Golden 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 spring of 2019, as a new Mexican government shut down most of its cooperation with the United States in the fight against drug trafficking, a small group of American drug agents decided to confront the problem in a different way. Sifting through databases and court files, they compiled dossiers on Mexican officials suspected of colluding with the mafias. Months later, federal prosecutors used the evidence to indict a former security minister, Genaro García Luna, the most important Mexican figure ever convicted on U.S. drug corruption charges. The senior agent who led the team, Terrance C. Cole, was not rewarded for his efforts. He sought a promotion to run the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Mexico City office but was passed over. Frustrated with the agency’s direction and his own career trajectory, he retired in 2020 to ...

by Jake Pearson ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. A federal employee who is helping the Trump administration carry out the drastic downsizing of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau owns stock in companies that could benefit from the agency’s dismantling, a ProPublica investigation has found. Gavin Kliger, a 25-year-old Department of Government Efficiency aide , disclosed the investments earlier this year in his public financial report , which lists as much as $365,000 worth of shares in four companies that the CFPB can regulate. According to court records and government emails, he later helped oversee the layoffs of more than 1,400 employees at the bureau. Ethics experts say this constitutes a conflict of interest and that Kliger’s actions are a potential violation of federal ethics laws. Executive branch employees have long been subject to laws and rules that forbid them...

by Corey G. Johnson ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. A group representing firearms owners has asked three federal agencies to investigate how the gun industry’s main lobbying group secretly used the intimate details of weapons buyers for political purposes. In making the request, Gun Owners for Safety cited a ProPublica investigation that detailed how the National Shooting Sports Foundation turned over sensitive personal information on gun buyers to political operatives while presenting itself as a fierce advocate for the privacy of firearms owners. The letter — sent last week to the FBI, the Federal Trade Commission and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — called the NSSF’s secret program that spanned nearly two decades "underhanded.” “Gun owners’ privacy is not a partisan or ideological issue,” wrote Malcolm Smith, a Gun Owners for Safety member...

by Andy Kroll and Jeremy Kohler ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. When President Donald Trump chose Ed Martin, the Missouri lawyer and political operative , to be the top U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., the decision came as a shock to current and former federal prosecutors as well as outside legal experts. Martin had no prosecutorial experience. He was best known as a conservative activist, the former right-hand man to influential anti-feminist icon Phyllis Schlafly and a loyal Trump surrogate. Since taking charge of the office in January, Martin has launched controversial investigations, rushed to defend Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and vowed to change how his office prosecutes crime in the District of Columbia. His actions have been met with fierce pushback from Democratic lawmakers, watchdog groups and legal experts. There have been at least four dis...

by William Turton , Avi Asher-Schapiro , Christopher Bing and Andy Kroll ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. A Treasury Department inspector general is probing efforts by President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to obtain private taxpayer data and other sensitive information, internal communications reviewed by ProPublica show. The office of the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration has sought a wide swath of information from IRS employees. In particular, the office is seeking any requests for taxpayer data from the president, the Executive Office of the President, DOGE or the president’s Office of Management and Budget. The request, spelled out in a mid-April email obtained by ProPublica, comes as watchdogs and leading Democrats question whether DOGE has overstepped its bounds in seeking information about taxpayers, public employee...

by Richard A. Webster , Verite News This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Verite News . Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published. A Louisiana judge this week set aside the first-degree murder conviction and death sentence of Jimmie Chris Duncan, whose 1998 conviction for killing his girlfriend’s 23-month-old daughter was based in part on bite mark evidence that experts now say is junk science . The decision comes after a Verite News and ProPublica investigation in March examined the questions surrounding Duncan’s conviction as Gov. Jeff Landry, a staunch death penalty advocate, made moves to expedite executions after a 15-year pause. Judge Alvin Sharp, of the 4th Judicial District in Ouachita Parish, pointed to new testimony during a September appeals hearing that such bite mark analysis presented by a once-heralded forensics team is “no longer valid” and “not scientifically defensible.” T...

by Rob Davis , photography by Sarahbeth Maney This article was produced by ProPublica in partnership with The Oregonian/OregonLive. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published. They are lines in the payroll ledger of a Cambodian baby clothing factory, invisible lives near the bottom of the global economy. There is Phan Oem, 53, who says she clocked up to 76 hours a week producing clothing for Nike and other American brands, sometimes forced to work seven days a week. She says she feared being fired if she didn’t work through lunch breaks, on holidays and occasionally overnight. After 12 years spent packaging clothes, her base pay was the minimum wage: $204 a month. There is Vat Vannak, 40, who at six months pregnant traveled by bus to join hundreds of workers who protested in the streets last year after Nike pulled out and the factory went bankrupt, leaving them unpaid. The authoritarian Cambodian government warned them to stop. And there is ...