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by Doug Bock Clark ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Heather Honey, a high-profile denier of Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, has been appointed to a senior position in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in which she’ll help oversee the nation’s election infrastructure. Honey is a protege of Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election results . In 2024, ProPublica reported that Honey had played a key role in Mitchell’s behind-the-scenes effort to change Georgia’s election rules to allow Republican officials to contest a potential Trump loss in that year’s presidential race. Honey also promoted election conspiracy theories , including one Trump cited in a speech to his followers before they stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Though states do the on-the-ground work of running elections, DHS supports them with tasks beyond their ca...

by Audrey Dutton 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. Since last year, ProPublica has been reporting on the troubled system for death investigations in Idaho , where a person’s cause of death is determined by elected coroners with no oversight or state support and, often, little training or education. The failures documented by ProPublica left parents without answers in their baby’s sudden death and let clues vanish in the death of a woman whose family suspected foul play by her husband , a man later charged with killing his next wife. The Idaho Office of Performance Evaluations in January sent the state’s coroners a formal survey about their work , drawing responses from just over half. The office told coroners that it wouldn’t attach names to their responses when it made the survey results public, and some gave unv...

by Robert T. Garrett for ProPublica and 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. On July 7, the Justice Department sent a harshly written letter threatening to sue the staunchly Republican state of Texas, notwithstanding its efforts to help elect Donald Trump and the fact that the president had singled out its leaders as key allies in his immigration crackdown. The letter decried the congressional map previously passed by the state’s Republican-led Legislature as “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.” It demanded that Gov. Greg Abbott and state Attorney General Ken Paxton respond the same day with a plan to comply. Otherwise, the Justice Depart...

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 our stories in your inbox every week. When Lloyd Gray stood trial for rape in 1980, two jurors didn’t believe he was guilty and voted to acquit. Today, a split-jury verdict would mean a mistrial and possibly Gray’s freedom. But back then, in Louisiana, it resulted in a life sentence for the 19-year-old from Tunica, a rural community nestled on the banks of the Mississippi River. Gray, who has always maintained his innocence, spent the next four decades in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. During that time he lost everything, he said. From behind bars, he learned that his mother, who for a time was a guard at the prison where he was being held, had dementia and died in 2020. Prison officials refused to allow him to attend her funeral. That same year the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that nonunanimous jury verdict...

by Wendi C. Thomas , MLK50: Justice Through Journalism This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with MLK50 . Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week. Marilyn Gooch was already skeptical about one of her newest neighbors, xAI’s supercomputing facility, when her cousin walked across the street in June with a blue mailer from the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce. Her cousin didn’t know what to make of the postcard featuring the logos of nine local, state and federal agencies and the chamber’s assurance that billionaire Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company operated “in full compliance with all applicable federal, state, and local regulations and oversight.” The facility — part of Musk’s bid to dominate the AI market — opened at a breakneck pace almost a year before, brought to Memphis, Tennessee, largely due to the efforts of the local Chamber of Commerce. Across the country, communities are grappling with t...