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      New Details Suggest Senior Trump Aides Knew Jan. 6 Rally Could Get Chaotic

      pubsub.do.nohost.me / ProPublica · Friday, 25 June, 2021 - 09:00 · 23 minutes

    On Dec. 19, President Donald Trump blasted out a tweet to his 88 million followers, inviting supporters to Washington for a “wild” protest.

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    Earlier that week, one of his senior advisers had released a 36-page report alleging significant evidence of election fraud that could reverse Joe Biden’s victory. “A great report,” Trump wrote. “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”

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    The tweet worked like a starter’s pistol, with two pro-Trump factions competing to take control of the “big protest.”

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    On one side stood Women for America First, led by Amy Kremer, a Republican operative who helped found the tea party movement. The group initially wanted to hold a kind of extended oral argument, with multiple speakers making their case for how the election had been stolen.

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    On the other was Stop the Steal, a new, more radical group that had recruited avowed racists to swell its ranks and wanted the President to share the podium with Alex Jones, the radio host banned from the world’s major social media platforms for hate speech, misinformation and glorifying violence. Stop the Steal organizers say their plan was to march on the Capitol and demand that lawmakers give Trump a second term.

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    ProPublica has obtained new details about the Trump White House’s knowledge of the gathering storm, after interviewing more than 50 people involved in the events of Jan. 6 and reviewing months of private correspondence. Taken together, these accounts suggest that senior Trump aides had been warned the Jan. 6 events could turn chaotic, with tens of thousands of people potentially overwhelming ill-prepared law enforcement officials.

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    Rather than trying to halt the march, Trump and his allies accommodated its leaders, according to text messages and interviews with Republican operatives and officials.

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    Katrina Pierson, a former Trump campaign official assigned by the White House to take charge of the rally planning, helped arrange a deal where those organizers deemed too extreme to speak at the Ellipse could do so on the night of Jan. 5. That event ended up including incendiary speeches from Jones and Ali Alexander, the leader of Stop the Steal, who fired up his followers with a chant of “Victory or death!”

    The record of what White House officials knew about Jan. 6 and when they knew it remains incomplete. Key officials, including White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, declined to be interviewed for this story.

    The second impeachment of President Trump focused mostly on his public statements, including his Jan. 6 exhortation that the crowd march on the Capitol and “fight like hell.” Trump was acquitted by the Senate, and his lawyers insisted that the attack on the Capitol was both regrettable and unforeseeable.

    Rally organizers interviewed by ProPublica said they did not expect Jan. 6 to culminate with the violent sacking of the Capitol. But they acknowledged they were worried about plans by the Stop the Steal movement to organize an unpermitted march that would reach the steps of the building as Congress gathered to certify the election results.

    One of the Women for America First organizers told ProPublica he and his group felt they needed to urgently warn the White House of the possible danger.

    “A last-minute march, without a permit, without all the metro police that’d usually be there to fortify the perimeter, felt unsafe,” Dustin Stockton said in a recent interview.

    “And these people aren’t there for a fucking flower contest,” added Jennifer Lynn Lawrence, Stockton’s fiancee and co-organizer. “They’re there because they’re angry.”

    Stockton said he and Kremer initially took their concerns to Pierson. Feeling that they weren’t gaining enough traction, Stockton said, he and Kremer agreed to call Meadows directly.

    Kremer, who has a personal relationship with Meadows dating back to his early days in Congress, said she would handle the matter herself. Soon after, Kremer told Stockton “the White House would take care of it,” which he interpreted to mean she had contacted top officials about the march.

    Kremer denied that she ever spoke with Meadows or any other White House official about her Jan. 6 concerns. “Also, no one on my team was talking to them that I was aware of,” she said in an email to ProPublica. Meadows declined to comment on whether he’d been contacted.

    A Dec. 27 text from Kremer obtained by ProPublica casts doubt on her assertion. Written at a time when her group was pressing to control the upcoming Jan. 6 rally, it refers to Alexander and Cindy Chafian, an activist who worked closely with Alex Jones. “The WH and team Trump are aware of the situation with Ali and Cindy,” Kremer wrote. “I need to be the one to handle both.” Kremer did not answer questions from ProPublica about the text.

    So far, congressional and law enforcement reconstructions of Jan. 6 have established failures of preparedness and intelligence sharing by the U.S. Capitol Police, the FBI and the Pentagon, which is responsible for deploying the D.C. National Guard.

    But those reports have not addressed the role of White House officials in the unfolding events and whether officials took appropriate action before or during the rally. Legislation that would have authorized an independent commission to investigate further was quashed by Senate Republicans.

    Yesterday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced she would create a select committee to investigate Jan. 6 that would not require Republican support. It’s not certain whether Meadows and other aides would be willing to testify. Internal White House dealings have historically been subject to claims of “executive privilege” by both Democratic and Republican administrations.

    Our reporting raises new questions that will not be answered unless Trump insiders tell the story of that day. It remains unclear, for example, precisely what Meadows and other White House officials learned of safety concerns about the march and whether they took those reports seriously.

    The former president has a well-established pattern of bolstering far-right groups while he and his aides attempt to maintain some distance. Following the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump at first appeared to tacitly support torch-bearing white supremacists, later backing off. And in one presidential debate, he appeared to offer encouragement to the Proud Boys, a group of street brawlers who claim to protect Trump supporters, his statement triggering a dramatic spike in their recruitment. Trump later disavowed his support.

    ProPublica has learned that White House officials worked behind the scenes to prevent the leaders of the march from appearing on stage and embarrassing the president. But Trump then undid those efforts with his speech, urging the crowd to join the march on the Capitol organized by the very people who had been blocked from speaking.

    “And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” he said.


    One Nation Under God

    Ali Alexander during the Conservative Political Action Conference at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, on Feb. 28, 2019. (Mark Peterson/Redux)

    On Nov. 5, as Joe Biden began to emerge as the likely winner of the 2020 presidential election, a far-right provocateur named Ali Alexander assembled a loose collection of right-wing activists to help Trump maintain the presidency.

    Alexander approached the cause of overturning the election with an almost messianic fervor. In private text messages, he obsessed over gaining attention from Trump and strategized about how to draw large, angry crowds in support of him.

    On Nov. 7, the group held simultaneous protests in all 50 states.

    Seven days later, its members traveled to Washington for the Million MAGA March, which drew tens of thousands. The event is now considered by many to be a precursor of Jan. 6.

    Alexander united them under the battle cry “Stop the Steal,” a phrase originally coined by former Trump adviser Roger Stone, whom Alexander has called a friend. (Stone launched a short-lived organization of the same name in 2016.) To draw such crowds, Alexander made clear Stop the Steal would collaborate with anyone who supported its cause, no matter how extreme their views.

    “We’re willing to work with racists,” he said on one livestream in December. Alexander did not return requests for comment made by email, by voicemail, to his recent attorney or to Stop the Steal PAC’s designated agent.

    As he worked to expand his influence, Alexander found a valuable ally in Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist at the helm of the popular far-right website InfoWars. Jones, who first gained notoriety for spreading a lie that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax, had once counted more than 2 million YouTube subscribers and 800,000 Twitter followers before being banned from both platforms.

    Alexander also collaborated with Nick Fuentes, the 22-year-old leader of the white nationalist “Groyper” movement.

    “Thirty percent of that crowd was Alex Jones’ crowd,” Alexander said on another livestream, referring to the Million MAGA March on Nov. 14. “And there were thousands and thousands of Groypers — America First young white men. … Even if you thought these were bad people, why can’t bad people do good tasks? Why can’t bad people fight for their country?”

    Nick Fuentes and Alex Jones during a Stop the Steal rally at the Georgia governor’s mansion on Nov. 19, 2020. (Zach Roberts/NurPhoto/Getty Images)

    Alexander’s willingness to work with such people sparked conflict even within his inner circle.

    “Is Nick Fuentes now a prominent figure in Stop the Steal?” asked Brandon Straka, an openly gay conservative activist, in a November text message, obtained exclusively by ProPublica. “I find him disgusting,” Straka said, pointing to Fuentes’ vehemently anti-LGBT views.

    Alexander saw more people and more power. He wrote that Fuentes was “very valuable” at “putting bodies in places,” and that both Jones and Fuentes were “willing to push bodies … where we point.”

    Straka, Fuentes and Jones did not respond to requests for comment.

    Right-wing leaders who had once known each other only peripherally were now feeling a deeper sense of camaraderie. In an interview, Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio described how he felt as he walked alongside Jones through the crowds assembled in Washington on Nov. 14, after Jones had asked the Proud Boys to act as his informal bodyguards.

    “That was the moment we really united everybody under one banner,” he said. “That everyone thought, ‘Fuck you, this is what we can do.’” According to Tarrio, the Proud Boys nearly tripled in numbers around this time, bringing in over 20,000 new members. “November was the seed that sparked that flower on Jan. 6,” he said.

    Enrique Tarrio, leader of the Proud Boys, stands outside Harry’s bar in Washington, D.C., during a protest on Dec. 12, 2020. (Stephanie Keith/Getty Images)

    The crowds impressed people like Tom Van Flein, chief of staff for Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz. Van Flein told ProPublica he kept in regular contact with Alexander while Gosar led the effort in Congress to shoot down the election certification. “Ali was very talented and put on some very good rallies on short notice," Van Flein said. “Great turnout.”

    But as Jan. 6 drew nearer, the Capitol Police became increasingly concerned by the disparate elements that formed the rank and file of the organization.

    “Stop the Steal’s propensity to attract white supremacists, militia members, and others who actively promote violence, may lead to a significantly dangerous situation for law enforcement and the general public alike,” the Capitol Police wrote in a Jan. 3 intelligence assessment.

    Yet the police force, for all its concern, wound up effectively blindsided by what happened on Jan. 6.

    An intelligence report from that day obtained by ProPublica shows that the Capitol Police expected a handful of rallies on Capitol grounds, the largest of which would be hosted by a group called One Nation Under God.

    Law enforcement anticipated between 50 and 500 people at the gathering, assigning it the lowest possible threat score and predicting a 1% to 5% chance of arrests. The police gave much higher threat scores to two small anti-Trump demonstrations planned elsewhere in the city.

    However, One Nation Under God was a fake name used to trick the Capitol Police into giving Stop the Steal a permit, according to Stop the Steal organizer Kimberly Fletcher. Fletcher is president of Moms for America, a grassroots organization founded to combat “radical feminism.”

    “Everybody was using different names because they didn’t want us to be there,” Fletcher said, adding that Alexander and his allies experimented with a variety of aliases to secure permits for the east front of the Capitol. Laughing, Fletcher recalled how the police repeatedly called her “trying to find out who was who.”

    A Senate report on security failures during the Capitol riot released earlier this month suggests that at least one Capitol Police intelligence officer had suspicions about this deceptive strategy, but that leadership failed to appreciate it — yet another example of an intelligence breakdown.

    On Dec. 31, the officer sent an email expressing her concerns that the permit requests were “being used as proxies for Stop the Steal” and that those requesting permits “may also be involved with organizations that may be planning trouble” on Jan. 6.

    A Capitol Police spokesperson told ProPublica on April 2, “Our intelligence suggested one or more groups were affiliated with Stop the Steal,” after we asked for a copy of the One Nation Under God permit, which they declined to provide.

    Yet 18 days later, Capitol Police Acting Chief Yogananda Pittman told congressional investigators that she believed the permit requests had been properly vetted and that they were not granted to anyone affiliated with Stop the Steal. Pittman did not respond to ProPublica requests for comment.

    Last week, a Capitol Police spokesperson told ProPublica, “The Department knew that Stop the Steal and One Nation Under God organizers were likely associated,” but added that the police believed denying a permit based on “assumed associations” would be a First Amendment violation. “The Department did, however, take the likely association into account when making decisions to enhance its security posture.”

    Kenneth Harrelson, an Oath Keeper who allegedly ran the far-right group’s “ground team” in D.C. on Jan. 6, went to Washington to provide security for Alexander, according to Harrelson’s wife. Harrelson has pleaded not guilty to felony charges in connection with the riot and is one of the Oath Keepers at the center of a major Department of Justice conspiracy case.

    Harrelson’s wife, Angel Harrelson, said in an interview with ProPublica that her husband was excited to visit Washington for the first time, especially to provide security for an important person, but that he lost Alexander in the chaos that consumed the Capitol and decided to join the crowd inside.

    Men belonging to the Oath Keepers wearing military tactical gear attend the Stop the Steal rally on Jan. 6 in Washington, D.C. (Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

    “Historic Day!”

    As the movement hurtled toward Jan. 6, what started as a loosely united coalition quickly splintered, dividing into two competing groups that vied for power and credit.

    On one side, Alexander and Jones had emerged as a new, more extreme element within the Republican grassroots ecosystem.

    Their chief opposition was the organization Women for America First, helmed by Kremer and other veterans of the tea party movement, itself once viewed as the Republican fringe. Kremer was an early backer of Trump, and her tea party work helped get Mark Meadows elected to the House of Representatives in 2012.

    The schism was rooted in an ideological dispute. Kremer felt Alexander’s agenda and tactics were too extreme; Alexander wanted to distinguish Stop the Steal by being more directly confrontational than Kremer’s group and the tea party. “Our movement is masculine in nature,” he said in a livestream.

    Trump promoted both groups’ events online at various times.

    Stop the Steal, through its alias One Nation Under God, obtained a Capitol Police permit to rally on Capitol grounds, while Kremer and Women for America First controlled the National Park Service permit for a large gathering on the White House Ellipse.

    Alexander and Jones wanted to speak at the Ellipse rally, but Kremer was opposed. The provocateurs found a powerful ally in Caroline Wren, an elite Republican fundraiser with connections to the Trump family, particularly Donald Trump Jr. and his partner, Kimberly Guilfoyle. Wren had raised money for the Ellipse rally and pushed to get Alexander and Jones on stage, according to six people involved in the Jan. 6 rally and emails reviewed by ProPublica.

    Pierson, the Trump campaign official, had initially been asked by Wren to help mediate the conflict. But Pierson shared Kremer’s concern that Jones and Alexander were too unpredictable. Pierson and Wren declined to comment.

    On Jan. 2, the fighting became so intense that Pierson asked senior White House officials how she should handle the situation, according to a person familiar with White House communications. The officials agreed that Alexander and Jones should not be on the stage and told Pierson to take charge of the event.

    The next morning, Trump announced to the world that he would attend the rally at the Ellipse. “I will be there. Historic day!” he tweeted. This came as a surprise to both rally organizers and White House staff, each of whom told ProPublica they hadn’t been informed he intended to speak at the rally.

    That same day, a website went live promoting a march on Jan. 6. It instructed demonstrators to meet at the Ellipse, then march to the Capitol at 1 p.m. to “let the establishment know we will fight back against this fraudulent election. … The fate of our nation depends on it.”

    Alexander and his allies fired off these instructions across social media.

    While Kremer and her group had held legally permitted marches at previous D.C. rallies and promoted all their events with the hashtag #marchfortrump, this time their permit specifically barred them from holding an “organized march.” Rally organizers were concerned that violating their permit could create a legal liability for themselves and pose significant danger to the public, said Stockton, a political consultant with tea party roots who spent weeks with Kremer as they held rallies across the country in support of the president.

    Lawrence and Stockton’s fellow organizers contacted Pierson to inform her that the march was unpermitted, according to Stockton and three other people familiar with the situation.

    While ProPublica has independently confirmed that senior White House officials, including Meadows, were involved in the broader effort to limit Alexander’s role on Jan. 6, it remains unclear just how far the rally organizers went to warn officials of their specific fears about the march.

    Another source present for communications between Amy Kremer and her daughter and fellow organizer, Kylie Kremer, told ProPublica that on Jan. 3, Kylie Kremer called her mother in desperation about the march.

    Amy Kremer, chair of Women for America First, speaks at the “Save America Rally.” in Washington on Jan. 6. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP)

    Kylie Kremer asked her mom to escalate the situation to higher levels of the White House, and her mother said she would work on it, according to the source, who could hear the conversation on speakerphone. “You need to call right now,” the source remembered the younger Kremer saying.

    The source said that Kylie Kremer suggested Meadows as a person to contact around that time.

    The source said that in a subsequent conversation, Amy Kremer told her daughter she would take the matter to Eric Trump’s wife, Lara Trump. The source said that Kremer was in frequent contact with Lara Trump at the time.

    Stockton said that he was not aware of Kremer talking to the family about Jan. 6, but added that Kremer regularly communicates with the Trump family, including Lara Trump. He also said that Kremer gave him the distinct impression that she had contacted Meadows about the march.

    Through his adviser Ben Williamson, Meadows declined to comment on whether the organizers contacted him regarding the march.

    Lara Trump, who spoke at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, did not immediately respond to a voicemail and text message asking for comment or to an inquiry left on her website. Eric Trump did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

    Lara and Eric Trump greet the crowd on the stage during the “Save America Rally” on Jan. 6. (Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

    Kremer did not answer questions from ProPublica about communications with Lara Trump. Donald Trump’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    The White House, at the time, was scrambling from one crisis to the next. On Jan. 2, Trump and Meadows called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Trump pressed Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes” that would swing the state tally his way. On Jan. 3, the president met with Acting Secretary of Defense Christopher Miller and urged him to do what he could to protect Trump’s supporters on the 6th.

    Meanwhile, Wren, the Republican fundraiser, was continuing to advocate for Jones and Alexander to play a prominent role at the Ellipse rally, according to emails and multiple sources.

    A senior White House official suggested to Pierson that she resolve the dispute by going to the president himself, according to a source familiar with the matter.

    On Jan. 4, Pierson met with Trump in the Oval Office. Trump expressed surprise that other people wanted to speak at the Ellipse at all. His request for the day was simple: He wanted lots of music and to limit the speakers to himself, some family members and a few others, according to the source and emails reviewed by ProPublica. The president asked if there was another venue where people like Alexander and Roger Stone could speak.

    Pierson assured him there was. She informed the president that there was another rally scheduled the night before the election certification where those who lost their opportunity to speak at the Ellipse could still do so. It was meant as an olive branch extended between the competing factions, according to Stockton and two other sources.

    Chafian, a reiki practitioner who’d been working closely with Alex Jones, was put in charge of the evening portion of the Jan. 5 event.

    The speakers included Jones, Alexander, Stone, Michael Flynn and Three Percenter militia member Jeremy Liggett, who wore a flak jacket and led a “Fuck antifa!” chant. (Liggett is now running for Congress.) Chafian had invited Proud Boy leader Tarrio to speak as well, but Tarrio was arrested the day before on charges that he had brought prohibited gun magazines to Washington and burned a Black Lives Matter banner stolen from a church.

    Former Trump campaign adviser Roger Stone, who was convicted of lying to Congress but later had his sentence commuted by President Trump, speaks at a pro-Trump rally at Washington’s Freedom Plaza on Jan. 5. (Photo by Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

    Tarrio told ProPublica that he did not know the flag was taken from a church and that the gun magazines were a custom-engraved gift for a friend. He has pleaded not guilty to a misdemeanor charge of property destruction; the gun magazine charge is still pending indictment before a grand jury.

    “Thank you, Proud Boys!” Chafian shouted at the end of her speech. “The Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters — all of those guys keep you safe.”

    Wren, however, would not back down. On the morning of Jan. 6, she arrived at the Ellipse before dawn and began arranging the seats. Jones and Alexander moved toward the front. Organizers were so worried that Jones and Alexander might try to rush the stage that Pierson contacted a senior White House official to see how aggressive she could get in her effort to contain Wren.

    After discussing several options, the official suggested she call the United States Park Police and have Wren escorted off the premises.

    Pierson relayed this to Kylie Kremer, who contacted the police. Officers arrived, but ultimately took no action.

    By 9 a.m.,Trump supporters had arrived in droves: nuns and bikers, men in American flag suits, a line of Oath Keepers. Signs welcomed the crowd with the words “Save America March.”

    Kylie Kremer greeted them gleefully. “What’s up, deplorables!” she said from the stage.

    Wren escorted Jones and Alexander out of the event early, as they prepared to lead their march on the Capitol.

    At 11:57 a.m, Trump got on stage and, after a rambling speech, gave his now infamous directive. “You’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong,” he said. “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”

    Lawrence, Dustin Stockton’s fiancee and co-organizer, remembers her shock.

    “What the fuck is this motherfucker talking about?” Lawrence, an ardent Trump supporter, said of the former president.

    In the coming hours, an angry mob would force its way into the building. Protesters smashed windows with riot shields stolen from cops, ransacked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s chambers, and inflicted an estimated $1.5 million of damage. Roughly 140 police officers were injured. One was stabbed with a metal fence stake and another had spinal discs smashed, according to union officials.

    The Stop the Steal group chat shows a reckoning with these events in real time.

    “They stormed the capital,” wrote Stop the Steal national coordinator Michael Coudrey in a text message at 2:33 p.m. “Our event is on delay.”

    “I’m at the Capitol and just joined the breach!!!” texted Straka, who months earlier had raised concerns about allying with white nationalists. “I just got gassed! Never felt so fucking alive in my life!!!”

    Alexander and Coudrey advised the group to leave.

    “Everyone get out of there,” Alexander wrote. “The FBI is coming hunting.”

    In the months since, the Department of Justice has charged more than 400 people for their actions at the Capitol, including more than 20 alleged Proud Boys, over a dozen alleged Oath Keepers, and Straka. It’s unclear from court records whether Straka has yet entered a plea.

    In emails to ProPublica, Coudrey declined to answer questions about Stop the Steal. “I just really don’t care about politics anymore,” he said. “It’s boring.”

    Meadows, now a senior partner at the Conservative Partnership Institute, a think tank in Washington, appeared on Fox News on Jan. 27, delivering one of the first public remarks on the riot from a former Trump White House official. He encouraged the GOP to “get on” from Jan. 6 and focus on “what’s important to the American people.” Neither Meadows nor anyone else who worked in the Trump White House at the time has had to answer questions as part of the various inquiries currently proceeding in Congress.

    Alexander has kept a low profile since Jan. 6. But in private, texts show, he has encouraged his allies to prepare for “civil war.”

    “Don’t denounce anything,” he messaged his inner circle in January regarding the Capitol riot. “You don’t want to be on the opposite side of freedom fighters in the coming conflict. Veterans will be looking for civilian political leaders.”

    Kirsten Berg and Lynn Dombek contributed additional reporting.

    Correction

    June 28, 2021: A caption with this story originally misstated the action President Donald Trump took to prevent Roger Stone from serving prison time. Trump commuted Stone’s sentence, not his conviction.

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      The U.S. Is Closing a Loophole That Lured Mexicans Over the Border to Donate Blood Plasma for Cash

      pubsub.do.nohost.me / ProPublica · Thursday, 24 June, 2021 - 12:30 · 4 minutes

    A federal agency is closing a legal loophole that allowed U.S.-based blood plasma companies to harvest plasma from thousands of Mexicans a day, who were lured by bonus payments and hefty cash rewards, as a 2019 ProPublica and ARD German TV investigation showed.

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    U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced on June 15 that effective immediately, it would no longer permit Mexican citizens to cross into the U.S. on temporary visas to sell their blood plasma. A statement provided to ProPublica and ARD said that donating plasma is now considered “labor for hire,” which is illegal under the visitor visa most border residents use to cross into the United States to make donations.

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    The U.S.-Mexico border is still mostly closed to “nonessential travel” due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Biden administration has said those restrictions will remain in place through at least July 21 . The travel restrictions have greatly reduced the cross-border plasma business. However, Paul del Rincon, a customs chief based in Eagle Pass, Texas, estimated in an interview posted to Facebook with broadcaster La Rancherita del Aire that even during the pandemic, 300 to 400 people crossed daily to donate plasma. In other border cities, like El Paso, Texas, donors have not been allowed to cross since the restrictions went into effect.

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    Before the pandemic, donors could make up to $40 a donation and over $4,000 a year for those who donated as often as possible. U.S. law caps donations at 104 a year, compared to Europe’s recommended frequency of 33 times per year. In Mexico, selling plasma is entirely illegal.

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    However, with COVID-19 causing a 20% decrease in plasma donations in 2020, according to the industry group the Plasma Protein Therapeutic Association, prices have soared. Plasma centers in El Paso offered as much as $700 a month for twice-weekly donations in summer 2020, according to the El Paso Times . At the beginning of June, Facebook posts by plasma centers showed offers of up to $1,000 a month.

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    “We know a lot of people depend on what they receive from selling plasma to support themselves in Mexico,” del Rincon said. “And we know the plasma centers also count on them. And this is going to hurt them.”

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    The U.S. is the biggest global exporter of blood plasma — a market that reached $21 billion in 2019 — and plasma centers openly relied on cross-border donations to keep their supplies up. The industry group told ProPublica and ARD that they plan to lobby against the new restriction: “The Plasma Protein Therapeutics Association looks forward to working with CBP and the Biden administration to quickly reverse this policy,” a spokesperson wrote.

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    However, as ProPublica and ARD found , frequent plasma donation was also hurting the Mexican citizens who relied on the system for money. Frequent donors were underweight and showed low levels of antibodies.

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    The B1/B2 visitor visa used most often by Mexican border residents permits some business activity, but it does not permit Mexican citizens to work in the U.S. Before the new announcement, plasma donation fell into a legal gray area, with some CBP agents refusing to let people cross for donations but others allowing it.

    Del Rincon told La Rancherita del Aire that in most cases people with appointments to donate plasma would just be asked to return to Mexico. However, he said, they risked losing their visas if they heard about the new instructions and went ahead with plasma donations anyway. “What’s important is that people not put their visas at risk,” del Rincon said.

    It’s not clear how CBP will enforce the new policy beyond simply asking people why they’re crossing. Even before the guidance was issued, regular plasma donors often lied to agents about the purpose of their visits, claiming they were going shopping or visiting relatives.

    Mexican residents are required to present their B1/B2 visa Border Crossing Cards at the plasma center when they donate, so plasma centers will know when donors are violating the new policy. Grifols, a company that operates several border plasma centers, answered what it said were “hundreds” of messages from donors on its Spanish-language Facebook page last week: “The answer is that for the moment (indefinitely) you can’t donate plasma,” the company wrote. But if any plasma centers do continue to accept cross-border donations in violation of the new policy, it’s not clear whether the U.S. would crack down.

    U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services told ProPublica and ARD in 2019 that companies could face criminal charges if they engaged in a “pattern or practice of knowingly hiring” people who aren’t authorized to work in the U.S. — including B1/B2 visa holders. However, the CBP statement doesn’t mention any consequences for plasma centers if they violate the new policy.

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      To Get a Shot at Justice, They Were Forced to Prove Their Disabled Daughter’s Intelligence

      pubsub.do.nohost.me / ProPublica · Thursday, 24 June, 2021 - 11:30 · 16 minutes

    This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Miami Herald . Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

    COCOA, Florida — It is homework time at Ashley Grant’s house on a tidy, tree-lined street here. Grant places six crayons on a countertop. Her daughter, Brooklyn, still wearing her red school polo, sits in her wheelchair. She looks directly at a video camera and smiles.

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    “Four plus one is five,” says Kyle Stromquist, Grant’s boyfriend. “What about four plus two? How many is that?”

    Brooklyn stares with purpose at a computer tablet displaying words and images and letters. As her hazel eyes gaze at the screen, the device gives voice to her answers.

    Six , says the tinny, computer-generated voice.

    “Bam!” Stromquist shouts. “Good!”

    Brooklyn straightens in her chair and beams.

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    Brooklyn’s determination to learn is no surprise to the teachers who have observed her grit and resolve. They have come to embrace what her mom fought long to prove: that inside that broken body is a nimble mind.

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    “She’s smart,” Karen Rush, Brooklyn’s former special education teacher, said during videotaped testimony. “Never lets anything stop her.”

    Not her disability. Not the expectations of strangers. And not the lawyers for a state-created program who fought for two years to persuade a judge that Brooklyn’s mind was as damaged as her body.

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    What Brooklyn’s mother sought was the chance to file a malpractice lawsuit against the medical providers who she believes made serious errors during Brooklyn’s birth. Such suits are severely curtailed in Florida under the 1988 law that created the Birth-Related Neurological Injury Compensation Association, or NICA.

    NICA uses money from assessments paid by doctors and hospitals to offer parents like Grant an upfront payment and the promise of “medically necessary” care for the rest of a child’s life.

    Grant believed her daughter had not suffered the severe cognitive disabilities necessary to qualify for the program.

    To get her day in court, Grant would have to prove her daughter’s intelligence.

    The legal battle over whether NICA could shield Brooklyn’s doctor and hospital from all liability would last 836 days.

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    There is a perverse irony at the root of NICA. Hundreds of parents facing financial ruin desperately want to get into the program but can’t because the circumstances of their child’s birth don’t fit the precise parameters. Maybe their son or daughter weighed 5 pounds, 4 ounces, instead of the minimum 5 pounds, 5 ounces. Others, mostly those whose children have the most severe disabilities, want out so they can try to impose a measure of accountability on their doctor by pursuing a lawsuit.

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    Those who want out of NICA sometimes meet M. Mark Bajalia, a lawyer for NICA and part of the legal and emotional gantlet they must successfully navigate. He has represented NICA in administrative court dozens of times, making him one of the program’s most prolific attorneys.

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    On Dec. 3, 2018, Bajalia came to Cambridge Elementary School — then Brooklyn’s school — to depose her teachers and therapists, who had reported that she was, as Rush said, “smart.” Under the law, Brooklyn’s neurological injuries at birth had to “substantially” harm both body and mind in order for her to be accepted by NICA.

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    Bajalia had never laid eyes on Brooklyn. And yet to the staff and teachers he interviewed, it seemed he was suggesting that they were embroidering her mental abilities.

    “It’s your testimony as you sit here today that [Brooklyn] does not have any cognitive or intellectual impairment?” the lawyer asked Rush.

    He was seeking to judge Brooklyn by standardized test scores, not by what her family and teachers knew by being with Brooklyn and watching her develop alongside her peers.

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    As Bajalia fired off pointed questions, the teacher had an epiphany: While Rush and the other educators, therapists and aides marveled at Brooklyn’s resilience, Bajalia seemed to her to see only the child’s flaws.

    “You just want me to say what you want me to say,” she snapped.

    Bajalia did not respond to phone calls and an email from the Miami Herald. Reporters also asked a NICA administrator to pass along a request for comment.

    NICA was Florida’s answer to obstetricians’ complaints about the cost of malpractice insurance. Only one other state, Virginia, has a similar program.

    Since NICA’s inception, families received a one-time $100,000 payment and a promise of lifelong care that was “medically necessary” and “reasonable,” as determined by the program.

    In exchange, families could not sue the doctor or hospital. Aside from annual premiums — obstetricians paid $5,000 and hospitals contributed $50 per live birth — the medical providers paid nothing; the costs were borne by the fund.

    NICA accumulated nearly $1.5 billion in assets.

    Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law this week to increase the one-time payment to $250,000 after a series of reports by the Miami Herald and ProPublica documented how some parents felt NICA was hoarding money while depriving them and their children of services and support — from wheelchairs to modified vans to therapies that could improve their children’s lives. The law, designed to reform the program, significantly improves benefits for families.

    Ashley Grant could escape NICA and sue the doctor, potentially for much more than what NICA would pay, but only if she could prove that Brooklyn was cognitively whole. When cases involving major birth injuries go to court, they can and often do generate millions.

    “Brooklyn on paper is not who she is. She is very intelligent,” Grant said of her daughter, who turned 8 in April. “She shows you who she is by getting to know her. And you’re never going to see that on paper.”

    Grant said it hurt to see the grilling over her daughter’s disabilities by a man who appeared to know little of Brooklyn’s struggles and triumphs.

    “Obviously, it is devastating,” she said. “It didn’t matter to NICA. ... They don’t know who your child is. You can argue until you’re blue in the face. But they want to hear what they want to hear, and that’s it. They didn’t hear us telling them how intelligent she is.”

    So, she had to prove it.


    The quiet is pierced by giggles and a high-pitched primal scream. Brooklyn doesn’t like physical therapy.

    She is wearing high-top sneakers in her trademark hot pink. Stromquist, Grant’s boyfriend, fastens orthotic braces on top with velcro. The braces — pink, of course — have been customized, decorated with ice cream cones, donuts, stars and unicorns.

    Precious as they may be, the braces leave marks on her legs, especially after therapy.

    Brooklyn wobbles on rubbery knees, gamely trying to stand upright, even for 10 seconds.

    Stromquist, a Cape Canaveral firefighter and a father figure for Brooklyn, grips her tiny hands in his to steady her and speaks tenderly as he puts her through the grueling routine:

    “Look at me. Look at me. Look at me. Look at me.”

    “Lean forward like you’re giving Daddy a hug. ... If you want to walk one day, this is how you’re going to have to do it.”


    Brooklyn betrays no bitterness that her vibrant mind is trapped inside an uncooperative body. As digitized voice technology advances, perhaps she will someday be able to discuss “hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy” — one of her diagnoses — even if she cannot physically overcome it.

    The sight of her in her wheelchair is jarring: That little body in a big person’s machine.

    Brooklyn recently arrived home from school, her bright hair pulled back in a ponytail. Her hazel eyes danced over the computer screen. Juice , said the artificial voice. Brooklyn was thirsty.

    She asked to sit on her mom’s lap.

    It shouldn’t have been this way, her mother said. It didn’t have to be.

    Grant was 23 and healthy, working full time as a sales associate for Bath and Body Works. Her pregnancy had been uneventful.

    She expected to deliver at Wuesthoff Medical, now called Rockledge Regional Medical Center, a 298-bed hospital just southwest of the Kennedy Space Center. Dr. Hae Soo Lim — a 1993 graduate of the University of Florida’s medical school, whose obstetrics residency was at the University of Miami — handled the delivery when Grant’s water broke about 4 a.m. on April 1, 2013.

    Doctors estimated Grant had been pregnant for about 39 weeks, making it a full-term delivery. She was given a drug commonly used to speed up contractions and hooked up to a fetal heart monitor to measure and record her baby’s vital signs, Grant alleged in court papers.

    At about 8:35 that night, the monitor showed signs that Brooklyn was in trouble, the family alleged in court filings. By 9:57, the family said, the monitor had recorded three decelerations of Brooklyn’s heart rate — indicating the baby was in distress. The nurses overseeing Grant’s delivery failed to appreciate and act on the warnings, Grant’s court papers said.

    Grant remembers a hospital staff surrounded and badly distracted by a major, messy renovation. “The hospital was under complete construction,” she said. “It was chaos. And I feel like they shouldn’t be able to have such chaos going on in a hospital when people’s lives are at stake.”

    Eighteen hours in, Grant was told she was no longer dilating, her daughter was “sunny side up” — head down, facing inward — and unable to transition through the birth canal, she said. Brooklyn was delivered via an emergency C-section. But by then, Grant said, Brooklyn had sustained catastrophic neurological damage. Brooklyn had to be revived. She began to have seizures almost immediately.

    At some point during labor, Grant said, the hospital and the doctor had thrust a stack of papers in front of her to sign. Buried among them was an acknowledgement of NICA. Grant said she signed it without understanding what it meant.

    Grant did not see her daughter for three hours, she said. She could not hold her for seven days. While Grant recovered at Wuesthoff, her daughter was driven in a mobile intensive care unit to Florida Hospital, then to Winnie Palmer Hospital for Women & Babies in Orlando, the latter better equipped to handle a newborn with extensive neurological damage.

    Within an hour or two, Grant said her obstetrician came into her recovery room and apologized. “She did say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ But that was it.”

    Attorneys for the hospital declined to comment, adding that, “We can say that the health and well-being of our patients is our top priority.”

    In court pleadings, Wuesthoff’s lawyers said the hospital bore no responsibility for any injuries Brooklyn sustained. “The injuries and damages alleged to be suffered by [Brooklyn] were caused by persons and/or entities over whom [the hospital] had no control or duty to control,” lawyers wrote, specifically mentioning Lim and a nurse, who did not work for the facility.

    An attorney representing Lim, who works for the Florida Department of Health, said in an email that his client will not comment “on pending legal matters or individual patient cases.”

    In court records, the Health Department, speaking for Lim, wrote that “it is not guilty of any negligence which was the legal cause of [Brooklyn’s] injuries.” DOH blamed Brooklyn’s brain damage on “acts or omissions by other persons, independent contractors, corporations, or professional associations or entities other than” the department.

    To this day, no one from the hospital has expressed regret, Grant said. As for the doctor’s apology: “It’s not going to give my daughter the life that she deserved.”

    Anyway, Grant said, she wants answers, not remorse.

    Despite the restrictions placed by the NICA law, Grant began her quest to hold the hospital responsible. She sued the hospital and Lim in 2015. As happens in the NICA process, the judge suspended the lawsuit and required Grant to start all over, this time in front of an administrative judge, the kind that adjudicates NICA cases.

    After 10 months, NICA made its standard offer: Drop the litigation. Collect $100,000 now and get Brooklyn lifelong medical care, provided it is “medically necessary.” The care would mainly come through Medicaid — Florida’s safety-net insurer for indigent and disabled people, which has frequently been accused of relegating patients to an inferior health care system.

    NICA says it is responsible for anything Medicaid declines to cover.

    But Brooklyn was already in Medicaid, and Grant had no desire to stay there. She already had grown weary of Medicaid’s denials of care and equipment — and she wanted her daughter to be treated by “the best” doctors, not just the ones willing to accept Medicaid’s low reimbursement rates.

    Grant indicated she would reject the offer. Two months later, Bajalia was brought in to represent NICA’s interests. That largely involved trying to prove that Brooklyn was intellectually impaired, a finding that would force the family to accept NICA compensation.

    Bajalia went to Cambridge to depose four of Brooklyn’s teachers, therapists and aides. They all marveled at Brooklyn’s mental abilities. Bajalia was not having it. He seemed to dismiss their testimony, Grant said, as the magical thinking of supporters who were personally and heavily invested in Brooklyn’s success.

    The friction between Bajalia and Brooklyn’s teachers showed in the language they chose, including Bajalia’s use of the word exceptionality, as in “exceptional education.” “Exceptionality,” Bajalia said, is “just a politically correct way of saying because of her physically handicapped limitations.”

    He asked Sheila Burkhardt, Brooklyn’s former speech pathologist: “Now, [Brooklyn] is in a normal classroom, correct?”

    “A general education classroom, yes,” Burkhardt answered, emphasizing the words.

    “I mean no disrespect,” Bajalia continued, “just because she’s in a normal classroom doesn’t mean that [Brooklyn] is normal, correct?” Normal is another term that parents of children with disabilities and their advocates find objectionable.

    He asked about testing. Brooklyn had been tested well over two years before — when she was 35 months old — and that testing showed her significantly behind her peers. Why not judge Brooklyn based upon the tests? he asked.

    “It’s considered old data,” Burkhardt said.

    “It’s your testimony, as you sit here today, that [Brooklyn] does not have any cognitive or intellectual impairment?” Bajalia demanded of Rush, Brooklyn’s former teacher.

    “I do not see her having any cognitive or intellectual impairment.”

    Bajalia then asked Rush about Brooklyn’s physical disabilities: “You didn’t feel the need to test her motor abilities?”

    “Obvious,” Rush interrupted. “She’s not going to stand on one foot. I’m not going to ask her to stand on one foot.”


    “Come on up Brooklyn.”

    An aide pushes Brooklyn’s wheelchair to the front of an auditorium on awards day. The other children fidget in their seats and whisper. One little boy raises his hand.

    “Perseverance is the ability and self-control that forces you to work through challenges,” the speaker says. “Having perseverance means that, when you are facing a challenge, you use your mind and your body to overcome it. Perseverance means you are able to wait and to work through difficulties.”

    “Brooklyn shows perseverance every day. She overcomes obstacles with grace and never gives up. She has taught the class what perseverance looks like. I am blessed to be her teacher, and her classmates have learned incredible things from her. She is an amazing little girl and I am so proud of her.”

    The classroom erupts into applause.


    The sparring with Bajalia, unpleasant as it was for Brooklyn’s teachers, helped determine the outcome. NICA had hired a neurologist, Laufey Sigurdardottir, to review the case, which eventually included the teachers’ observations. Her final report, dated Dec. 29, 2018, concluded that Brooklyn was not substantially mentally impaired.

    She was, therefore, ineligible for NICA. An administrative law judge issued a final order dismissing the administrative law case in February 2019.

    In an email, NICA administrators said the legal process in Brooklyn’s case worked exactly as intended: Two medical experts reported that Brooklyn met criteria for NICA participation. When Brooklyn’s mother disagreed, Bajalia elicited testimony “for fact-finding purposes, asking questions of each witness to better understand the circumstances of the case.”

    “The initial medical review produced a determination that the child met NICA qualifications, information during deposition to explore that determination indicated otherwise, and, as a result, the medical experts changed their determination.”

    Although it did not comment specifically on Bajalia, NICA said that the program’s lawyers question family members and other witnesses to gain information only, and that “sometimes those questions challenge the witnesses’ positions in order to draw out a full picture of the case.”

    The statement added: “NICA expects all of its attorneys to act in a professional and respectful manner while representing NICA. NICA does not instruct its attorneys to portray children in any specific manner during these depositions, although we certainly hope and expect that children and their families will be treated with courtesy and respect.”

    Michelle DeLong, one of Brooklyn’s lawyers, said Bajalia kept insisting that Brooklyn be evaluated by standardized intelligence tests, though Brooklyn was simply not capable of wielding a pencil — let alone filling in little bubbles for answers. “He got caught up in standardized testing to prove she was cognitively impaired.”

    As to Bajalia’s language, “tone deaf is the right word,” DeLong added. “I think he really believed he was doing a good thing by offering these NICA benefits to Brooklyn, and he just couldn’t understand why the family wouldn’t take them,” she said, adding that the $100,000 NICA proffered fell far short of Brooklyn’s needs.

    “It was a battle, because he could not put himself in the shoes of the family and understand their perspective,” DeLong said.

    After more than two years, Ashley Grant had won the right to pursue her lawsuit, to try to hold to account the medical providers whose negligence she believes harmed her daughter. And though Grant’s exit from NICA was a victory for the 31-year-old, her quest is far from over. Her medical malpractice claim in Brevard County Circuit Court has been set for trial in June 2022.

    She’s deeply in debt with Brooklyn’s medical bills, some already in the hands of collectors.

    At least, she said, they have a chance. If she had stayed with NICA, “there’d be no justice for Brooklyn.”

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    • Pr chevron_right

      Lord of the Roths: How Tech Mogul Peter Thiel Turned a Retirement Account for the Middle Class Into a $5 Billion Tax-Free Piggy Bank

      pubsub.do.nohost.me / ProPublica · Thursday, 24 June, 2021 - 09:00 · 30 minutes

    ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. The Secret IRS Files is an ongoing reporting project. Sign up to be notified Also: do you have expertise in tax law, accounting or wealth management? We'd love to hear from you.

    Billionaire Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, has publicly condemned “confiscatory taxes.” He’s been a major funder of one of the most prominent anti-tax political action committees in the country. And he’s bankrolled a group that promotes building floating nations that would impose no compulsory income taxes.

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    But Thiel doesn’t need a man-made island to avoid paying taxes. He has something just as effective: a Roth individual retirement account.

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    Over the last 20 years, Thiel has quietly turned his Roth IRA — a humdrum retirement vehicle intended to spur Americans to save for their golden years — into a gargantuan tax-exempt piggy bank, confidential Internal Revenue Service data shows. Using stock deals unavailable to most people, Thiel has taken a retirement account worth less than $2,000 in 1999 and spun it into a $5 billion windfall.

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    To put that into perspective, here’s how much the average Roth was worth at the end of 2018: $39,108.

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    And here’s how much $5 billion is: If every one of the 2.3 million people in Houston, Texas, were to deposit $2,000 into a bank today, those accounts still wouldn’t equal what Thiel has in his Roth IRA.

    What’s more, as long as Thiel waits to withdraw his money until April 2027, when he is six months shy of his 60th birthday, he will never have to pay a penny of tax on those billions.

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    ProPublica has obtained a trove of IRS tax return data on thousands of the country’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years. This data provides, for the first time, an inside look at the financial lives of the richest Americans, those whose stratospheric fortunes put them among history’s wealthiest individuals.

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    What this secret information reveals is that while most Americans are dutifully paying taxes — chipping in their part to fund the military, highways and safety-net programs — the country’s richest citizens are finding ways to sidestep the tax system.

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    One of the most surprising of these techniques involves the Roth IRA, which limits most people to contributing just $6,000 each year.

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    The late Sen. William Roth Jr., a Delaware Republican, pushed through a law establishing the Roth IRA in 1997 to allow “hard-working, middle-class Americans” to stow money away, tax-free, for retirement. The Clinton administration didn’t want to give a fat tax break to wealthy people who were likely to save anyway, so it blocked Americans making more than $110,000 ($160,000 for a couple) per year from using them and capped annual contributions back then at $2,000.

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    Yet, from the start, a small number of entrepreneurs, like Thiel, made an end run around the rules: Open a Roth with $2,000 or less. Get a sweetheart deal to buy a stake in a startup that has a good chance of one day exploding in value. Pay just fractions of a penny per share, a price low enough to buy huge numbers of shares. Watch as all the gains on that stock — no matter how giant — are shielded from taxes forever, as long as the IRA remains untouched until age 59 and a half. Then use the proceeds, still inside the Roth, to make other investments.

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    About a decade after the creation of the Roth, Congress made it even easier to turn the accounts into mammoth tax shelters. It allowed everyone — including the very richest Americans — to take money they’d stowed in less favorable traditional retirement accounts and, after paying a one-time tax, shift them to a Roth where their money could grow unchecked by Uncle Sam — a Bermuda-style tax haven right here in the U.S.

    From $2,000 to $5 Billion: How the .001% Use Retirement Accounts as Tax-Free Piggy Banks

    To identify those who have amassed fortunes in retirement accounts, ProPublica scoured the tax return data of the ultrawealthy for IRA accounts valued at more than $20 million. Reporters also examined Securities and Exchange Commission filings, court documents and other records, including a memo detailing Thiel’s wealth that was included in his 2005 application for residency in New Zealand.

    Among this rarefied group, ProPublica found, the term “individual retirement account” has become a misnomer. Rather than a way to build a nest egg for old age, the accounts have morphed into supercharged investment vehicles subsidized by American taxpayers. Ted Weschler, a deputy of Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway, had $264.4 million in his Roth account at the end of 2018. Hedge fund manager Randall Smith, whose Alden Global Capital has gutted newspapers around the country, had $252.6 million in his.

    Buffett, one of the richest men in the world and a vocal supporter of higher taxes on the rich, also is making use of a Roth. At the end of 2018, Buffett had $20.2 million in it. Former Renaissance Technologies hedge fund manager Robert Mercer had $31.5 million in his Roth, the records show.

    Buffett didn’t respond to questions sent by email. Mercer couldn’t be reached for comment, and his accountants and attorneys didn’t respond to requests to accept questions on his behalf. Smith also couldn’t be reached for comment, and an employee at his hedge fund repeatedly hung up when ProPublica reporters identified themselves. Other representatives for Smith and his hedge fund didn’t respond.

    In a written statement , Weschler said his retirement account relied on publicly traded investments and strategies available to all taxpayers. Nevertheless, he said he supports reforming the system.

    “Although I have been an enormous beneficiary of the IRA mechanism, I personally do not feel the tax shield afforded me by my IRA is necessarily good tax policy,” he wrote. “To this end, I am openly supportive of modifying the benefit afforded to retirement accounts once they exceed a certain threshold.”

    A spokesman for Thiel accepted detailed questions on Thiel’s behalf, then never responded to phone calls or emails. Messages left at Thiel’s venture capital fund were not returned.

    While the scope and scale of such accounts has never been publicly documented, Congress has long been aware of their existence — and the ballooning tax breaks they were garnering for the ultrawealthy. The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, for years has warned that the wealthiest Americans were accumulating massive retirement accounts in ways federal lawmakers never intended.

    At the same time, Congress has slashed the IRS’ budget so severely that the agency’s ability to ferret out abuses has been stymied. Money was so tight that at one point in 2015 the agency couldn’t afford to enter critical data about IRAs from paper tax filings into its computer system.

    Over the years, a few politicians have tried, and failed, to crack down on the tax breaks the ultrarich receive from their giant IRAs.

    In 2016, Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, floated a detailed reform plan and said, “It’s time to face the fact that our tax code needs a dose of fairness when it comes to retirement savings, and that starts with cracking down on massive Roth IRA accounts built on assets from sweetheart, inside deals.”

    “Tax incentives for retirement savings,” he added at the time, “are designed to help people build a nest egg, not a golden egg.”

    But Wyden soon abandoned his proposal; there was no chance the Republican-controlled Senate would pass it.

    Meanwhile, Thiel’s Roth grew.

    And grew.

    At the end of 2019, it hit the $5 billion mark, jumping more than $3 billion in just three years’ time — all of it tax-free.

    Thiel, a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien, by then had brought his Roth under the auspices of a family trust company called Rivendell Trust. In “The Lord of the Rings,” Rivendell is a secret valley populated by elves, a misty sanctuary against forces of darkness. Thiel’s earthly version resides in a suburban Las Vegas office complex, across from a Cheesecake Factory, and is staffed by a small group of corporate lawyers.

    And thanks to the Roth, Thiel’s fortune is far more vast than even experts in tallying the wealth of the rich believed. In 2019, Forbes put Thiel’s total net worth at just $2.3 billion. That was less than half of what his Roth alone was worth.

    How Humdrum Retirement Accounts Become Mega Tax Shelters for the Rich

    Contributions to a Roth IRA are capped at $6,000 per year for most people. But some of the wealthiest Americans found ways to grow their Roth IRAs to millions — or even billions — of dollars, tax-free. Here’s how.

    (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

    The ultrawealthy’s hijacking of a tool meant for the middle class becomes especially striking when you consider what the retirement future looks like for many Americans.

    There isn’t one.

    One in four working-age Americans has nothing saved for retirement, a 2020 Federal Reserve study found.

    Individual retirement accounts emerged from the ruins of corporate pensions. The traditional IRA had existed since the 1970s for workers who didn’t have pensions, but as corporations shifted the burden of saving for retirement to workers, too few Americans were setting up these accounts, condemning many to scrape by on Social Security in old age. By the 1990s, politicians on both sides of the aisle were fretting over the declining savings rates in the U.S.

    It was against this backdrop that an idea Sen. Roth had been pushing for years finally found its moment.

    One of the fathers of Reaganomics, Roth was determined to slash the federal budget, cut taxes and rein in the IRS. Starting in 1997, as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Roth held a series of hearings that portrayed IRS agents as menacing thugs. Roth’s investigations sparked legislation that gutted the IRS’ collection powers for more than a decade.

    But it was his championing of the Roth IRA that would earn the senator posthumous fame and a mention in the American Heritage dictionary. Roth’s obsession was a new kind of IRA, which he said would “be a blessing to countless Americans as they prepare for the future.”

    It would also create an escape hatch from the entire income tax system.

    Run-of-the-mill retirement plans — a traditional IRA or 401(k), for instance — defer taxes to a later date. The money that people put into their accounts is deducted from their income, so they aren’t taxed up front, nor are the dividends, interest or gains on investments along the way. But when retirees withdraw money, they have to pay income tax on it.

    A Roth, by contrast, eliminates tax liability rather than deferring it. People who open a Roth don’t get the tax break on the money they initially put in. But once they deposit that money, their investments grow tax-free forever and retirees don’t pay a penny of taxes on withdrawals. Even better, unlike a traditional IRA, the Roth doesn’t require retirees to deplete the account as they age.

    Sen. Roth promised that his new IRA would “provide relief to hard-working, middle-class Americans.”

    The law creating the Roth IRA passed in 1997 with overwhelming bipartisan support. A few tax wonks predicted that workers who were most likely to struggle financially in old age wouldn’t open the accounts because they couldn’t afford to save. Roths, they warned, would become a giveaway to mostly well-off taxpayers who would have saved anyway. Investing in a Roth was like locking in a rate on a mortgage when interest rates were low, an attractive proposition for wealthy Americans worried that Congress would raise tax rates in future years.

    That’s why the Clinton administration insisted on barring people who made too much from stashing money in a Roth. Surely, that would prevent the superrich from gaming the system to use Roths as tax shelters.


    One day in early 1999, a deputy of Thiel’s at the company that would become PayPal walked into the San Francisco office of Pensco Pension Services. It could have been an uneventful appointment. Instead, it changed Thiel’s life.

    Thiel, a Stanford law graduate, ran a small hedge fund and hadn’t yet joined the ranks of the ultrawealthy. But he had outsized ambitions for his months-old tech venture, where he served as both chairman and CEO. He envisioned his company creating “a new world currency, free from all government control.”

    Influenced by libertarian Ayn Rand and Tolkien’s fantasy trilogy, Thiel, then in his early 30s, carried himself like a contrarian philosopher king. A few years earlier, he had co-authored a jeremiad against multiculturalism that accused the administration of then-President Bill Clinton of waging class warfare. “Taxing the rich seems to have become an end in itself,” he and his co-author wrote.

    Pensco was a small firm that allowed its customers to put nearly any investment they wanted into a tax-advantaged retirement account. Thiel was about to become Pensco’s whale.

    In an interview with ProPublica, Pensco founder Tom Anderson recalled how Thiel and other PayPal executives had wanted to put startup shares of the company into traditional IRAs.

    Anderson dangled something sweeter.

    “I said, ‘If you really think this is going to be big, you know, you might want to consider this new Roth,’” recalled Anderson, who is now retired. If the investment ballooned, he remembered saying, “‘you’re not going to pay tax on it when you take it out.’ It’s a no-brainer."

    The math was compelling. Thiel wouldn’t get a tax break up front, but he’d avoid an immense tax bill later on if the investment surged in value.

    “They immediately grasped that,” Anderson said. “And they did it.”

    What happened next deprived the U.S. government of untold millions in tax revenue. Perhaps billions. Thiel used his new Roth IRA to purchase shares of his startup.

    In 1999, single taxpayers were only allowed to contribute to a Roth if they made less than $110,000. Like many startups, PayPal offered its top executives low initial salaries and large stock grants. Thiel’s income that year was $73,263, the IRS records show.

    Thiel also had an advantage over most Americans with IRAs, who typically use them to purchase publicly traded stocks, bonds, mutual funds and certificates of deposit. Since Thiel used his Roth to buy shares of a private company, the value wasn’t set on a public stock exchange.

    Although the details of such purchases are not usually public, Thiel’s financial assistant later disclosed them in a letter included in the entrepreneur’s application for residency in New Zealand: “Mr. Thiel purchased his founders’ shares in PayPal through his Roth IRA during PayPal’s formation.”

    While SEC filings describing that time don’t mention Thiel’s Roth, they show that he bought his first slice of the company in January 1999. Thiel paid $0.001 per share — yes, just a tenth of a penny — for 1.7 million shares. At that price, he was able to buy a large stake for just $1,700.

    In 1999, $2,000 was the maximum amount you could put into a Roth in a year.

    Thiel’s unusual stock purchase risked running afoul of rules designed to prevent IRAs from becoming illegal tax shelters. Investors aren’t allowed to buy assets for less than their true value through an IRA. The practice is sometimes known as “stuffing” because it gets around the strict limits imposed by Congress on how much money can be put in a Roth.

    PayPal later disclosed details about the early history of the company in an SEC filing before its initial public offering. The filing reveals that Thiel’s founders’ shares were among those the company sold to employees at “below fair value.”

    Victor Fleischer, a tax law professor at the University of California, Irvine who has written about the valuation of founders’ shares, read the PayPal filings at ProPublica’s request. Buying startup shares at a discounted $0.001 price with a Roth, he asserts, would be indefensible.

    “That’s a huge scandal,” Fleischer said, adding, “How greedy can you get?”

    Warren Baker, a Seattle tax attorney who specializes in IRAs, said he would advise clients who are top executives working at a startup not to purchase founders’ shares with a Roth to avoid accusations by the IRS that they got a special deal and undervalued the shares. Baker was speaking generally, not about Thiel.

    “I would be concerned about the fact that you can’t support the valuation number as being reasonable,” he said.

    At the time Thiel bought his founders’ shares, his own hedge fund had already loaned the new startup $100,000, California and SEC records show.

    And soon after the company sold him the shares, millions of dollars poured in from investors, securities filings show. In just a month’s time, the company sold a slice of itself to investors for $500,000. That June and August, another $4.5 million poured in from the venture fund arm of telecom giant Nokia and other investors, those records show.

    The dot-com boom was in full swing. “We’re definitely on to something big,” Thiel told employees in late 1999, predicting that PayPal would become “the Microsoft of payments,” according to “The PayPal Wars,” a book by a former employee recounting those heady early years.

    But when it came time for Pensco, the custodian of Thiel’s Roth, to report the value of the account to the IRS at the close of 1999, none of the investor enthusiasm was apparent. Pensco told the IRS that Thiel’s Roth was worth just $1,664 at the end of 1999, tax records show.

    In an interview, Anderson said Pensco relied on the companies whose shares were in a Roth to say what they were worth. He didn’t know how PayPal came up with its market value, but he said Thiel’s purchase of those shares was “very legitimate.”

    From there, nothing would stop Thiel’s Roth. In a Silicon Valley equivalent of Tolkien alchemy, his Roth would transform those PayPal shares into a tax-free fortune — one that would be safer than all the gems, gold and silver in the dragon Smaug’s mountain.

    Thiel’s Roth IRA Balloons Into Billions of Tax-Free Dollars

    Congress created the Roth IRA as a tax-free account for ordinary Americans to save for retirement. Peter Thiel has turned his Roth into a behemoth investment vehicle that grew to $5 billion in 20 years.

    Source: ProPublica analysis of tax records, SEC filings and court documents. (Agnes Chang/ProPublica)

    After 1999, Thiel would never again contribute money to his Roth, tax records show.

    He didn’t need to. In just a year’s time, the value of his Roth jumped from $1,664 to $3.8 million — a 227,490% increase.

    Then in 2002, eBay purchased PayPal. That same year, Thiel sold the shares, still inside his Roth, his financial assistant later told New Zealand officials. The tax-free proceeds poured into his account. By the end of 2002, Thiel’s Roth was worth $28.5 million, tax records show.

    If he had held his shares outside of the Roth in a normal investment account, Thiel would have owed the IRS 20% of his gains and owed another 9% to California tax authorities. Because the shares were in a Roth, he had no tax bill when he sold them, saving him millions.

    Suddenly, Thiel had an advantage few investors could claim: His own personal investment bank that wasn’t subject to taxation. He could now use the cash inside the Roth to buy and sell nearly any investment he wanted. Thiel used the millions in proceeds from his PayPal windfall to invest in other Silicon Valley startups as well as his own hedge fund, according to his financial assistant’s memo. Once again, Thiel’s Roth scooped up startup shares at bargain-basement prices.

    For instance, Thiel and colleagues in 2003 founded Palantir, a data analytics company, helped by an early investment from a CIA-backed venture fund. The company was named after the “seeing stones” made by elves in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, used to detect danger near and far.

    Thiel used his Roth to buy shares of Palantir when it was still a private company, years before it was listed on the New York Stock Exchange, according to a ProPublica analysis of tax records, an SEC filing and shareholder records included in a civil suit.

    Over the years, Palantir has won federal contracts from the military to hunt terrorists and from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to find undocumented immigrants. Even the IRS has a $99 million contract with Palantir to comb through data to identify tax cheats.

    Then, in 2004, Thiel met Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard undergraduate who had come to Silicon Valley for the summer to work on growing the company that would become Facebook. Thiel invested $500,000, Facebook’s first large outside infusion of cash. Those Facebook shares ended up — where else? — in Thiel’s Roth IRA, an attorney for Facebook later disclosed in a letter filed in federal court. That ensured that Thiel wouldn’t owe taxes on his early investment in the company.

    As Thiel’s Roth and fortune ballooned, he scolded Americans for their financial imprudence. In a 2006 Forbes column, headlined “Warning: Save, Save, Save,” Thiel lamented the low household savings in the U.S. and called for most Americans to live within their means.

    “Forgo the new kitchen and sundeck,” he wrote. “Shoot to put away 15% of the paycheck.” His closing advice: “Living modestly and saving well is better than dying broke.”

    In an interview on the website Big Think, Thiel said the U.S. tax system has “fairness problems” in which “you have super rich people paying a lower rate than people in the middle or upper middle class.”

    The answer wasn’t taxing the rich more, he said, but “taxing the middle class and the upper middle class a lot less” and cutting their dependence on expensive programs such as Medicare and Social Security.

    By then, Thiel had purchased a Ferrari and had bought and sold a penthouse in the San Francisco Four Seasons. In 2005, he sought residency in New Zealand, which had become a destination for some ultrawealthy people who saw it as a safe haven should civilization collapse.

    “I have long admired the people, culture, business environment and government of New Zealand, as well as the encouragement which is given to investment, business and trade in New Zealand,” Thiel later wrote in a letter to the country’s government.

    Thiel applied as an investor. His application, prepared by his then-financial assistant, Jason Portnoy, touted the size of his Roth. Thiel transferred $749,967 to a bank in New Zealand, keeping it under the umbrella of the Roth.

    The country, where the “Lord of the Rings” movies were filmed, approved Thiel’s application. The New Zealand Herald later revealed that the country had secretly granted Thiel full citizenship. The newspaper obtained Thiel’s application through a public records request, and those documents included Portnoy’s letter.

    In the next two years, Thiel’s Roth reached new heights, reflecting Facebook’s meteoric rise. In his bestselling book on startups, “Zero to One,” Thiel wrote: “Money makes money.” By the end of 2008, the Roth was worth $870 million.


    Up to this point, Thiel was one of the few Americans who had managed to amass prodigious Roth accounts. Among the others were at least three additional PayPal alums who eventually built Roths worth more than $80 million each, according to tax records and SEC filings.

    Even so, the existing income limits managed to keep most of the superrich out.

    Then, in the latter years of the George W. Bush administration, Congress took a wrecking ball to those defenses, and the wealthy stormed in.

    The change centered on an unsexy-sounding maneuver known as a Roth conversion. It works like this: If you have money in a traditional IRA, you can transform it into a Roth as long as you pay one-time income tax on the money. By converting the account to a Roth, no additional income taxes are ever due.

    Conversions had existed since the Roth’s conception, but they had been restricted to Americans making below $100,000 per year.

    In 2006, Bush and the Republican-controlled Congress were seeking to slash taxes on capital gains, the type of income that can be generated when stocks or other assets are sold. But they faced a problem. Budget rules required them to find a way to make up for the lost revenue.

    Their solution was widely viewed as a gimmick: using one tax cut to pay for another tax cut. A provision was included in the Bush bill that lifted the ban on the wealthy making Roth conversions. Since the maneuver requires a payment of tax up front, it counted in short-term congressional budget models as actually raising revenue. The tax breaks didn’t come until later. “It will have large and damaging effects on the federal budget for decades to come,” wrote budget expert Len Burman in the specialty publication Tax Notes.

    The new backdoor into the Roth opened in 2010 and set off a frenzy of conversions among hedge fund managers, industrialists and heirs, the tax records reviewed by ProPublica show.

    Weschler, the Berkshire Hathaway executive, amassed a giant traditional IRA in his years as a private equity partner and hedge fund manager. He converted a whopping $130 million. His boss, Warren Buffett, converted $11.6 million. After paying the one-time tax, both men saw their Roth accounts soar.

    In his statement, Weschler said he opened a retirement account as a 22-year-old junior financial analyst in 1983 and began contributing the maximum amount allowed, along with a generous match from his employer. Weschler said his Roth is so large because he chose investments carefully, had “exceptional luck” and had nearly four decades for it to grow.

    Weschler said he could envision the late Sen. Roth holding up his experience as “an aspirational example of the power of deferred consumption” that could “hopefully help motivate generations of future savers.”

    He added that he paid more than $28 million in federal taxes to convert his account to a Roth.

    Some of the wealthy managed to avoid even that one-time tax bill.

    Three members of the Ebrahimi family, whose patriarch made a fortune at the software firm Quark, collectively converted $65 million into Roths in 2010 and 2011. Farhad Ebrahimi, one of the heirs of the fortune, has supported left-wing causes and became known for walking around the Occupy Boston protest in 2011 wearing a hand-lettered T-shirt that declared he was a member of the 1% and said: “Tax me, I’m good for it.”

    Kind of.

    He converted $19.4 million into a Roth, which would have triggered $6.8 million in income tax. But thanks to losses generated by other investments, he wiped out the tax bill on the conversion. Ebrahimi declined to comment.


    In 2009, word of Thiel’s secret weapon leaked for the first time.

    In a story headlined, “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Taxpayer Money,” Gawker Media, citing anonymous sources, revealed that Thiel held his Facebook investment in a tax-free Roth.

    The Great Recession, though, caught up with Thiel. His hedge fund racked up big losses.

    Thiel then did something unusual: For five years starting in 2010, he dipped into his Roth for at least $254 million, the IRS tax return data obtained by ProPublica shows. That is almost unheard of among the wealthy, tax advisers say, because it shrinks the pot of money that can be invested tax-free. Because Thiel was still in his 40s, he was too young to pull money from a Roth without paying income tax plus a 10% penalty on these withdrawals.

    During the life of his Roth, Thiel also has made money outside it. He took in an additional $687 million of income from 1999 to 2018, largely from gains on investments, tax records show. All told, over that period he paid $206 million in federal taxes, including the taxes on the early Roth withdrawals.

    In four of those years, however, Thiel managed to cut his federal income tax bill to zero.

    In 2011, Thiel caught the attention of the IRS. The agency launched an audit, tax records show. The records don’t spell out what the IRS was looking at or if it involved Thiel’s Roth. Whatever the case, the audit was closed years later and Thiel didn’t owe any more taxes, tax records show.

    By 2012, large IRAs began to attract scrutiny, falling under the klieg lights of presidential politics.

    That January, The Wall Street Journal reported that Mitt Romney, the former private equity executive running for the GOP nomination, had listed on a financial disclosure form that he had amassed an IRA worth between $20 million and $102 million. The story ran on the front page and launched waves of coverage in other publications. Romney had a traditional IRA, not a Roth. But how, people wondered, could the account have grown so large, given that the government imposed strict limits on how much money could be put into one of the tax-deferred accounts?

    Citing former company insiders and documents, the Journal reported that during Romney’s time as CEO at investment giant Bain Capital, executives there had effectively bypassed the contribution limits by putting extremely low-valued shares from private equity deals into their IRAs, then watching them balloon.

    ProPublica’s analysis of the tax records show that by the end of 2018, at least seven other current or former Bain executives had amassed IRAs worth $25 million or more, with three exceeding $90 million.

    Other financiers also found ways to supersize their retirement accounts. Michael Milken, for example, the 1980s junk bond king who went to prison for fraud and was later pardoned by President Donald Trump, had traditional IRAs valued at $509 million.

    A senior adviser to Milken declined to answer questions, “since it’s not our practice to publish or discuss Mike Milken’s private financial information, I can’t help you on this one.”

    Romney lost the 2012 election, but the IRA revelation provoked a lasting backlash. Wyden asked the investigative arm of Congress to look into the matter. In a landmark report issued in 2014, the Government Accountability Office sounded the alarm, finding the mega IRAs stood “in contrast to Congress’s aim.”

    IRS officials told investigators that the federal government was losing more and more money to “IRA abuses.” The GAO investigators flagged “aggressive” valuation tactics by private equity. And while it didn’t mention Thiel or his PayPal co-founders, the report laid out how startup founders’ shares could be used to render IRA contribution limits irrelevant. “Individuals can manipulate contribution limits by grossly undervaluing investments at the time the individual uses an IRA to purchase them,” the congressional investigators wrote.

    The report estimated that, as of 2011, there were around 300 taxpayers with IRAs worth more than $25 million. That detail reverberated around the media and Capitol Hill. Few knew that most of those accounts were minuscule compared to Thiel’s, which that year was valued at nearly $1.6 billion.

    A series of reform proposals followed. Wyden, who now holds Roth’s old position as chair of the Senate Finance Committee, has become the leading proponent of rolling back what he calls “unfair strategies used by the privileged to rake in subsidies and dodge tax bills with so-called ‘mega Roth IRAs.’” In 2016, he released a plan that would require owners of Roth IRAs worth more than $5 million to take money out of the accounts. Amid howls of protest from the retirement industry and a Senate and House controlled by Republicans, Wyden’s proposal went nowhere.

    The IRS, meanwhile, was floundering in its efforts to police retirement accounts. At one point the agency recommended Congress prohibit IRA accounts from buying investments that aren’t traded on a public market, such as founders’ shares. That went nowhere, too. Instead, Congress began slashing the IRS’ budget , kneecapping the agency for more than a decade.

    In 2009, an internal team had recommended the agency at least collect data on unorthodox assets held in IRAs. But it took more than five years for the agency to mandate disclosure of those investments. Even then, the agency simply required tax forms to say whether an IRA held stock in a private company, not the name of the company or the price per share.

    By 2015, the agency was struggling to handle the paper forms sent in by the companies that administer IRAs. The agency couldn’t afford to digitize them. Another two years went by before the IRS started electronically transcribing the forms.

    After years of plodding, the agency said it was finally ready in 2019 to use the data to target potential abusers for audits. And that’s before the real fighting begins over hotly contested issues such as how to value shares in a startup that aren’t publicly traded. IRS officials have complained to congressional investigators that challenging such valuations is costly and time-consuming, and that it requires a small army of experts to go up against deep-pocketed taxpayers.

    The IRS did not respond to detailed questions. But as ProPublica has reported, in tax disputes with the superrich, the IRS is completely outmatched .


    In his book “Zero to One,” Thiel argues that fortunes are built not by luck or unfair advantage, but by discerning investors and founders who are more courageous than their peers, leaders who zig when the crowd zags. Thiel devotes an entire chapter to the importance of keeping secrets, writing that “every great business is built around a secret that’s hidden from the outside.”

    A secret of Thiel’s is that his fortune was built not just with brains but also with massive tax breaks. By 2019, Thiel’s holdings had grown so vast and diverse that his $5 billion was spread across 96 subaccounts inside his Roth.

    As his wealth grew, Thiel showered millions of dollars on Republican politicians and groups with an anti-tax agenda, including Club for Growth Action. In 2016, he became the rare Silicon Valley titan to endorse Donald Trump.

    The Trump years, which fueled a market boom, were good for Thiel and his Roth. In 2018, he moved his Roth from Pensco to Rivendell, the family trust company named after Tolkien’s elven sanctuary.

    In Tolkien’s fantasy world, elves can be killed in battle or succumb to grief, but they don’t die of old age or disease. Thiel has told people he hopes to live to be 120 years old. That might be a bit optimistic, but he is not taking any chances and is investing in anti-aging technology companies. He’s even tucked some of those shares into his Roth, SEC and tax records show.

    Assuming a modest 6% annual return and no withdrawals, his tax-free golden egg could be worth about $263 billion in 2087, when Thiel plans to celebrate his 120th birthday. That’s larger than the current gross domestic product of New Zealand, his adopted homeland.

    “There is good news and bad news,” Thiel told The Washington Post when asked about living more than a century. “The bad news is: If you don’t believe in the good news, you’re not saving enough for retirement and likely to spend much of your old age in poverty.”

    “The financial planning,” Thiel said, “takes on a very different character.”

    Help Us Report on Taxes and the Ultrawealthy

    Do you have expertise in tax law, accounting or wealth management? Do you have tips to share? Here’s how to get in touch. We are looking for both specific tips and broader expertise.

    Paul Kiel, Jeff Ernsthausen and Doris Burke contributed reporting.

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      How China Spreads Its Propaganda Version of Life for Uyghurs

      pubsub.do.nohost.me / ProPublica · Wednesday, 23 June, 2021 - 09:00 · 15 minutes

    阅读简体中文版。

    Recently, the owner of a small store in western China came across some remarks by Mike Pompeo, the former U.S. secretary of state. What he heard made him angry.

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

    A Uyghur store owner criticizes the U.S. State Department’s declaration of genocide in Xinjiang. He says his experience in an “education and training center” removed his “religious extremist thoughts.”

    Watch video ➜

    A worker in a textile company had the same reaction. So did a retiree in her 80s. And a taxi driver.

    Pompeo had routinely accused China of committing human rights abuses in the Xinjiang region, and these four people made videos to express their outrage. They did so in oddly similar ways.

    “Pompeo said that we Uyghurs are locked up and have no freedom,” the store owner said.

    “There’s nothing like that at all in our Xinjiang,” said the taxi driver.

    “We are very free,” the retiree said.

    “We are very free now,” the store owner said.

    “We are very, very free here,” the taxi driver said.

    “Our lives are very happy and very free now,” the textile company worker said.

    ProPublica and The New York Times analyzed propaganda videos featuring Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities from across Xinjiang.

    Watch video ➜

    These and thousands of other videos are meant to look like unfiltered glimpses of life in Xinjiang, the western Chinese region where the Communist Party has carried out repressive policies against Uyghurs and other predominantly Muslim ethnic minorities.

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

    Most of the clips carry no logos or other signs that they are official propaganda.

    But taken together, the videos begin to reveal clues of broader coordination — such as the English subtitles in clips posted to YouTube and other Western platforms.

    A monthslong analysis of more than 3,000 of the videos by ProPublica and The New York Times found evidence of an influence campaign orchestrated by the Chinese government.

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

    The operation has produced and spread thousands of videos in which Chinese citizens deny abuses against their own communities and scold foreign officials and multinational corporations who dare question the Chinese government’s human rights record in Xinjiang.

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

    It all amounts to one of China’s most elaborate efforts to shape global opinion.

    Beijing is trying to use savvier and more forceful methods to broadcast its political messages to a worldwide audience. And Western internet platforms like Twitter and YouTube are playing a key part.

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

    Many of these videos of people in Xinjiang first appeared on a regional Communist Party news app. Then they showed up on YouTube and other global sites, with English subtitles added. (The excerpts of dialogue in this article are translated from the original spoken Chinese or Uyghur by ProPublica and The Times. They are not taken from the English subtitles in the original videos.)

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

    On Twitter, a network of connected accounts shared the videos in ways that seemed designed to avoid the platform’s systems for detecting influence campaigns.

    China’s increasingly social-media-fluent diplomats and state-run news outlets have since spread the testimonials to audiences of millions worldwide.

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

    Western platforms like Twitter and YouTube are banned in China out of fear they might be used to spread political messaging — which is exactly how Chinese officials are using these platforms in the rest of the world.

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

    They are, in essence, high-speed propaganda pipelines for Beijing. In just a few days, videos establishing the Communist Party’s version of reality can be shot, edited and amplified across the global internet.

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

    How the Videos Work

    The dialogue in hundreds of the Xinjiang videos contains strikingly similar, and often identical, phrases and structures.

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

    Most videos are in Chinese or Uyghur and follow the same basic script. The subject introduces themselves, then explains how their own happy, prosperous life means there couldn’t possibly be repressive policies in Xinjiang.

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

    Here’s a typical clip, shot as a selfie.

    Many people in the videos use the expression tusheng-tuzhang (土生土长), meaning “born and raised.” They claim that, as native Xinjiangers, they know best how their community is treated.

    Watch video ➜

    A four-character Chinese phrase meaning “born and raised” appears in more than 280 of the more than 2,000 videos attacking Pompeo that ProPublica and the Times found on YouTube and Twitter.

    The people in more than 1,000 of the videos say they have recently come across Pompeo’s remarks, most of them “on the internet” or on specific platforms such as Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok.

    Many of those who appear in the videos claim to have recently seen former U.S. secretary of state Mike Pompeo’s declaration of genocide in Xinjiang.

    Watch video ➜

    An expression meaning “complete nonsense” and close variations of it appear in more than 600 of the videos.

    People in the videos frequently use the expression hushuo-badao (胡说八道), meaning “complete nonsense” or “hogwash,” to dismiss Pompeo’s accusations.

    Watch video ➜

    Establishing that government officials had a hand in making these testimonials is sometimes just a matter of asking.

    In one clip, the owner of a used car dealership in Xinjiang says: “Pompeo, shut your mouth.”

    A video featuring a man who later acknowledged that his video was made by local propaganda officials.

    Watch video ➜

    When reached by phone, the man said local propaganda authorities had produced the clip. When asked for details, he gave the number of an official he called Mr. He, saying, “Why don’t you ask the head of the propaganda department?”

    Multiple calls to Mr. He’s number were not answered. Seven other people in the videos whose contact information could be found either declined to be interviewed or couldn’t be reached. (The name of the car dealership’s owner is being withheld to protect him from retribution by Chinese officials.)

    In another sign of government coordination, language in the videos echoes written denunciations of Pompeo that Chinese state agencies issued around the same time.

    Beginning in late January, government workers across Xinjiang held meetings to “speak out and show the sword” against “Pompeo’s anti-China lies,” according to statements on official websites.

    The clips’ effectiveness as propaganda comes in part because they will probably be most people’s only glimpse into Xinjiang, a remote desert region closer to Kabul than to Beijing.

    The Chinese authorities have thwarted efforts by journalists and others to gain unfettered access to the indoctrination camps where hundreds of thousands of Muslims have been sent for reeducation.

    On government-led tours of the region, foreign diplomats and reporters have been allowed to speak with locals only under Chinese officials’ watchful eyes, often in settings that seem staged and scripted .

    For Western platforms hosting the Xinjiang testimonials, the fact that they are not immediately obvious as state propaganda poses a challenge.

    To promote transparency, sites like YouTube and Twitter label accounts and posts that are associated with governments. The Xinjiang videos, however, carry no such tags.

    YouTube said the clips did not violate its community guidelines. Twitter declined to comment on the videos, adding that it routinely releases data on campaigns that it can “reliably attribute to state-linked activity.”

    How the Videos Spread

    The video campaign started this year after the State Department declared on Jan. 19, the final full day of the Trump presidency, that China was committing genocide in Xinjiang.

    Pompeo appears in a Jan. 19 interview about the State Department’s declaration of genocide in Xinjiang earlier that day.

    Watch video ➜

    “I’ve referred to this over time as the stain of the century — it is truly that,” Pompeo said.

    Within days, videos criticizing Pompeo began appearing on an app called Pomegranate Cloud, which is owned by the regional arm of the official Communist Party newspaper, People’s Daily. The name of the app is a reference to a propaganda slogan that calls on people of all ethnic groups in China to be as closely united as pomegranate seeds.

    From there, the videos often jumped onto other Chinese platforms before making their way onto global social media sites like Twitter and YouTube.

    On Twitter, ProPublica and The Times found, the clips were shared by more than 300 accounts whose posts strongly suggested they were no ordinary users. The accounts often posted messages that were identical but for a random string of characters at the end with no obvious meaning, either four Roman letters, five Chinese characters or three symbols such as percentage signs or parentheses.

    Some of the posts by the coordinated Twitter accounts shared the same video with nearly identical messages.

    Watch video ➜

    Such strings were found in about three-quarters of the accounts’ tweets. They caused the text of the posts to vary slightly, in an apparent attempt to bypass Twitter’s automated anti-spam filters.

    There were other signs that the Twitter accounts were part of a coordinated operation.

    All of the accounts had been registered only in recent months. Many of them followed zero other users. Nearly all had fewer than five followers. The bulk of their tweeting took place between 10 a.m. and 8 p.m. Beijing time.

    The text of several of the accounts’ tweets contained traces of computer code, indicating that they had been posted, sloppily, by software.

    Posts by the coordinated Twitter accounts sometimes contain traces of computer code.

    Watch video ➜

    Twitter suspended many of these accounts in March and April, before ProPublica and The Times inquired about them. Twitter said the accounts had violated its policies against platform manipulation and spam.

    The accounts did not upload Xinjiang clips directly to Twitter. Rather, they tweeted links to videos on YouTube or retweeted videos that had been originally posted by other Twitter accounts.

    Those YouTube and Twitter accounts often posted copies of the same Xinjiang videos at roughly the same time, according to analysis by ProPublica and The Times. Nearly three-quarters of the copied clips were posted by different accounts within 30 minutes of one another. This suggests the posts were coordinated, even though the accounts had no obvious connection.

    Most of these accounts — seven on Twitter and nearly two dozen on YouTube — posted dozens of videos that originally appeared on Pomegranate Cloud. The accounts seem to have served solely as warehouses to store the clips, making it easier for other accounts in the network to share them.

    How the Campaign Is Evolving

    The effort continues to evolve. In some cases, state media and government officials have begun to openly spread the clips attacking Pompeo. Other videos have found new issues and people to target.

    In one clip, a woman denies accusations of forced labor. “I have five greenhouses, and no one forces me to work,” she says.

    In a widely reposted propaganda video, farmworkers deny accusations of forced labor.

    Watch video ➜

    She turns the camera toward several other women behind her.

    “Friends, is anyone forcing you to work?” she asks. “No!” they cry in unison.

    The clip was posted by Global Times, a state-controlled newspaper, on the Chinese platform Kuaishou on Jan. 25. Two days later, the video was posted on Twitter and YouTube by the warehouse accounts within 30 minutes of one another. Just over a week later, two representatives for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs posted the clip on Twitter as well.

    The greenhouse video has been tweeted by officials from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

    The ministry did not respond to a faxed request for comment, nor did the Xinjiang offices of the Communist Party propaganda department.

    Two months later, another wave of videos, shot in the same style and distributed in a similar way, raged against H&M and other international clothing brands that have expressed concern about possible labor abuses in Xinjiang’s cotton and textile industries.

    In one video, a Uyghur woman sits on a couch with her husband and young son.

    A separate ongoing video propaganda campaign denies reports of forced labor in Xinjiang’s cotton industry.

    Watch video ➜

    “Mom, what’s H&M?” the boy asks.

    “H&M is a foreign company that uses our Xinjiang cotton and speaks ill of our Xinjiang,” she says. “Tell me, is H&M bad or what?”

    “Very bad,” the boy says stiffly.

    The clip was posted on Pomegranate Cloud on March 29. Six days later, it was posted on Twitter and YouTube, 20 minutes apart, by two warehouse accounts. As with all of the other clips that appeared on those platforms, English subtitles were added somewhere along the way, seemingly for the benefit of international audiences.

    The anti-H&M campaign continues. By June 21, more than 800 cotton-related videos had been posted to Pomegranate Cloud, a large share of which were later reposted on YouTube or Twitter.

    New videos are being uploaded to Pomegranate Cloud nearly every day. That means the campaign, which has already enlisted thousands of people in Xinjiang — teachers, shopkeepers, farmhands — could keep growing.

    The audience outside China for the videos could also keep expanding.

    The warehouse accounts on YouTube have attracted more than 480,000 views in total. People on YouTube, TikTok and other platforms have cited the testimonials to argue that all is well in Xinjiang — and received hundreds of thousands of additional views.

    In a phone interview, Pompeo said friends, and occasionally his son, had come across the Xinjiang testimonials online and sent them to him.

    As clumsy as the videos seem, he said, their influence should not be dismissed: “In places that don’t have access to a great deal of media, that repetition, those storylines have an ability to take hold.”

    China’s propaganda efforts will keep getting better, Pompeo added. “They’ll continue to revise and become quicker, more authentic in their capacity to deliver this message,” he said.

    How the Videos Divided a Family

    For one Uyghur activist living in exile in the United States since 2005, the videos have had a more personal impact.

    Several of the Xinjiang videos feature family members of Rebiya Kadeer, 74, whom the Chinese government has accused of abetting terrorism. In one clip, two of Kadeer’s granddaughters lash out at Pompeo while out shopping for a wedding.

    The campaign contains several different videos that feature Rebiya Kadeer’s granddaughters.

    Watch video ➜

    “Grandma, I recently saw online that Pompeo’s making reckless claims and talking nonsense about our Xinjiang,” one granddaughter says. “I hope you won’t be fooled again by those bad foreigners.”

    Left: Rebiya Kadeer outside her home in Fairfax, Virginia. Right: Framed photos of Kadeer’s imprisoned son and other members of her family. (Jared Soares for The New York Times)

    Kadeer said the videos were the first time she had heard her relatives’ voices in years.

    “I have been crying in my heart about my children,” she said in a phone interview.

    Kadeer said the videos had given her a chance to see what had become of her granddaughters. The last time she saw them, they were infants.

    “Some people will believe these videos and believe Uyghurs are living a happy life,” she said. “We can’t say they have locked up everyone. But what they’re saying in these videos — it’s not true. They know they’re not speaking the truth. But they have to say what the Chinese government wants them to say.”

    Update, June 25, 2021: After this article was published, YouTube took down several but not all of the accounts ProPublica and The New York Times identified. YouTube determined that some of them had “behaved in a coordinated manner” in uploading Xinjiang videos and removed them as part of its efforts to combat influence operations, said a spokesperson, Ivy Choi. Other accounts, she said, were removed for violating the platform’s policy against spam and deceptive practices.

    Methodology

    The data analyzed for this article includes videos, metadata and social media posts collected from Twitter, YouTube and Pomegranate Cloud between Feb. 18 and June 2. We downloaded more than 5,000 videos posted to these platforms between Jan. 23 (the date of the first campaign video following the State Department’s Jan. 19 declaration of genocide in Xinjiang) and May 31. On Pomegranate Cloud, we collected clips targeting Pompeo by searching for posts mentioning him after Jan. 19 that contained video. We collected videos denying forced labor in Xinjiang’s cotton industry from a section dedicated to them in the app.

    On Twitter and YouTube, the campaign videos were collected from what we call “warehouse accounts,” those whose videos were shared by a network of more than 300 coordinated Twitter accounts. This network appeared to work in coordination to like and retweet content that supported Chinese government policies, such as the campaign videos, as well as news articles and editorials from state media. To define the network, we manually identified a small group of accounts and their indicators of automation, specifically posts containing identical content followed by strings of random characters. We then identified additional network accounts by programmatically searching for other accounts that boosted the same content and had the same indicators.

    We cataloged more than 3,000 unique campaign videos out of the more than 5,000 collected. To pinpoint duplicates among videos containing various compression rates, visual artifacts and subtitle languages, we calculated a fingerprint for each video by running a sample of its frames through the Google Cloud Vision image labeler. We determined videos with similar fingerprints and durations to be duplicates. We manually sampled and reviewed the results from this process to minimize false positives and false negatives.

    To identify non-campaign videos on YouTube and Twitter, we first obtained their subtitles by using optical character recognition on frames taken from them at regular intervals. We considered videos that did not mention Pompeo or cotton to be non-campaign videos. Videos on Twitter and YouTube always had subtitles in English and Chinese. Videos from Pomegranate Cloud had subtitles in Chinese only when Uyghur was spoken. We considered all videos collected from Pomegranate Cloud to be campaign videos, but did not review each manually. We also used the subtitles of the YouTube and Twitter videos to analyze their content.

    Sophie Chou reviewed the code and analysis.

    Design and layout by Allen Tan, Lucas Waldron and Andrea Wise

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      Florida Governor Signs Law Reforming Program for Brain-Damaged Infants

      pubsub.do.nohost.me / ProPublica · Tuesday, 22 June, 2021 - 22:35 · 6 minutes

    This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Miami Herald . Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has signed legislation overhauling a controversial state program that provides lifelong care for children born with catastrophic brain damage, approving the most far-reaching reform in the program’s 33-year history.

    With DeSantis’ signature Monday night, parents who participate in the Birth-Related Neurological Injury Compensation Association, or NICA, will get an immediate $150,000 cash benefit and the pledge of Florida lawmakers that they will no longer have to fight with administrators for wheelchairs, medication, therapy and other services for their severely disabled children.

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    That’s on top of the $100,000 the law previously provided, which had not been increased since the program’s inception. Families said that original amount fell far short of providing for a severely disabled child.

    The law, which takes effect immediately, follows an investigation by the Miami Herald, in conjunction with the investigative newsroom ProPublica, that found NICA had generated nearly $1.5 billion in assets — largely through the investment of assessments paid by doctors and hospitals. At the same time, families complained, administrators frequently delayed or denied claims for medication, therapy, equipment and nursing services to parents struggling to pay their bills.

    The legislation is, in many ways, a rebuke of NICA’s leadership, which had for decades run the program with little transparency. Parents said the program denied claims and made it difficult for them to access care for their children with severe and permanent brain damage. In one 2013 email obtained by the Herald , NICA’s director wrote that the program was “not here or funded to ‘promote the best interest’ of the children.”

    The new law, passed unanimously by both chambers of the Legislature, says otherwise: One provision requires that “the association shall administer the plan in a manner that promotes and protects the health and best interests of children with birth-related neurological injuries.”

    Parents and guardians of children in NICA said they were glad to see the governor approve the changes, but some also wondered why it took years for the state to address the program’s inadequacies.

    “It feels good to be acknowledged, not just acknowledged but that they’re trying to make things right,” said Jennifer Pham, whose younger brother, Justin Nguyen, was accepted into NICA in 1998.

    Pham, whose family’s story was reported by the Herald, said her family had reached the point of desperation after years of fighting with program administrators to get what Justin had been promised.

    “Why do families have to go through so much to get change?” said Pham, 31, whose family lives in Jacksonville. “I feel like anytime anything good happened with NICA was because my family was at the edge. We were at rock bottom, and then they wanted to help out.”

    NICA administrators said in a prepared statement that the organization “wholeheartedly supports and appreciates” the legislative reforms.

    “We are eager to provide these new benefits and have already begun implementing the new language and protocols envisioned in the legislation,” administrators said, noting that the program recently launched a revamped website and updated the benefits handbook. “Our 17-person team is committed to meeting all statutory deadlines and will do everything we can to give NICA families the support they need in navigating the claims process.”

    For most of its history, NICA operated in obscurity. Lawmakers created the program to manage the care of children born with severe physical and cognitive disabilities as the result of oxygen deprivation or spinal cord injury at birth.

    Families were steered into the program by a 1988 law — one of only two in the nation — that severely restricts the parents of certain brain-damaged children from suing their obstetrician or the hospital where their child was born. NICA was created to protect obstetricians from ruinous legal judgments for some of the most expensive medical mistakes, thereby lowering malpractice liability insurance premiums.

    Parents said they were often treated with indifference and contempt by administrators who, they believe, cared more about their investment portfolios than the lives of frail and disabled children. Administrators hired a private investigator to tail one boy’s parents after they appealed NICA’s refusal to pay for therapy.

    Yamile “Jamie” Acebo of Pembroke Pines — whose hardship was detailed in a Herald story — said the help her daughter, Jasmine, received from NICA often was delivered grudgingly, and late, if at all.

    “They were just trying to nickel-and-dime me,” Acebo said of her experience with NICA. “It’s like it was their savings account — like it was theirs and they were not really doing anything to help people.”

    But Acebo said she’s happy that future NICA families will get more freely what she had to fight for. “Finally something is going to get done,” said Acebo. “They are finally going to do the right thing. A lot of these families are struggling and should not have to struggle.”

    Among other provisions, the new law will give families the means to fully cover funeral and burial expenses if a child in NICA dies. Acebo said she couldn’t afford both a coffin and funeral when 27-year-old Jasmine died in 2017. She said she had had to cremate her daughter, though her faith frowns upon the practice. “Let me tell you,” she said, “I had to scrape and scrounge, and people had to give me money for my daughter’s funeral.”

    With DeSantis’ signature, “on top of grieving a child, they won’t have to worry, ‘Where am I going to get money to bury my child?’” Acebo said of parents still in the program. Because her involvement in NICA ended with the death of her daughter, Acebo will not receive the added $150,000. But she will receive an enhanced death benefit, $50,000 for death expenses, not the $10,000 the law previously allowed.

    Florida Chief Financial Officer Jimmy Patronis, whose agency oversees NICA, said in a prepared statement Monday night that the legislation “fundamentally reforms” the program.

    “This law represents a major paradigm shift,” Patronis said. “As of now, NICA must be fully engaged in the overall well-being of these families and children. Overall, these families are going to get more relief, and it is our job to ensure the board is holding NICA accountable and seeing these reforms are implemented.”

    In addition to the increase in the one-time payment and the extra allotment for parents of deceased children, the law provides:

    • A $10,000 annual mental health benefit for families.
    • Representation on the board of directors by a NICA parent and an advocate for disabled children, and a six-year term limit for all board members.
    • An increase in the lifetime housing assistance and home modification benefit from $30,000 to $100,000.
    • Money for wheelchair-accessible vans and a “reliable method of transportation” for the life of children in care.
    • A code of ethics for administrators and board members.
    • An appeal process at the Division of Administrative Hearings, where NICA petitions are filed, for families to dispute NICA denials.

    In a prepared statement, one of its legislative sponsors said the law “will help ensure so many struggling families get the help and care they deserve.”

    “As a mother of two, I know there is nothing more important than ensuring your child has the proper care they need to live a long healthy life,” said state Rep. Traci Koster, a Safety Harbor Republican and the law’s House sponsor. “This legislation brings needed changes to the NICA program and improves services that they provide.”

    Sen. Lauren Book, a Plantation Democrat who co-sponsored the legislation in the upper chamber, said, “No family should have to beg for the treatment and supplies their children need while a quasi-governmental agency puts up roadblock after roadblock.”

    Sen. Danny Burgess, a Zephyrhills Republican who also co-sponsored the legislation, said: “On behalf of all of the NICA families who have struggled, this is a light at the end of a very dark tunnel.”

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      New Records Show the NYPD’s Favored Punishment: Less Vacation Time

      pubsub.do.nohost.me / ProPublica · Tuesday, 22 June, 2021 - 17:15

    After the repeal of a state law shielding New York police officers’ disciplinary histories from disclosure, the New York Police Department in March released several years’ worth of disciplinary records for its officers. However, the agency published the records in a way that made it difficult to see which officers had been disciplined and how.

    To understand how the NYPD has been holding its own accountable, ProPublica downloaded profile information for all of the agency’s 34,000 officers and pulled out disciplinary information for the more than 1,300 officers for whom that information was listed. The department limited disclosure to cases where officers were judged guilty or pleaded no contest in its trial process — some of the most severe cases.

    What those records show is that the most common form of punishment was docking vacation time. In some 89% of the cases made public, reduced vacation time was one of the penalties levied, and in more than 60% of the cases it was the only punishment. Officers in the database can have multiple cases filed against them.

    See the interactive database .

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      Robin Sparkman Named President and co-CEO of ProPublica

      pubsub.do.nohost.me / ProPublica · Tuesday, 22 June, 2021 - 15:00 · 2 minutes

    ProPublica announced today that Robin Sparkman, founding CEO of StoryCorps, has been elected by its Board of Directors as president and co-CEO of ProPublica. Her appointment, succeeding Richard Tofel, whose retirement from ProPublica was announced in February, will be effective September 8.

    Sparkman, 52, has been CEO of StoryCorps since 2014, having more than doubled the organization’s annual revenues to $20 million and adding $6.5 million to its reserves during that time. Sparkman came to the nonprofit media organization after more than two decades as a reporter and editor. She served as editor-in-chief of The American Lawyer from 2010-2014, and earlier as executive editor, as well as deputy editorial director of parent company American Lawyer Media. Previous work included stints at MSNBC.com and Newsweek. Sparkman is a graduate of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and Wellesley College, where she is a member of the Business Leadership Council. She holds a certificate in nonprofit management from Harvard Business School and serves on the executive committee of the board of Union Settlement of East Harlem.

    Paul Sagan, chairman of the Board of ProPublica, said, “After a thorough national search, our Board search committee and full Board unanimously concluded that Robin Sparkman was the right business leader to take ProPublica to even greater success. Robin combines business savvy, deep editorial understanding, a fundamental commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion and a passion for journalism that spurs change.”

    Sparkman said, “I am thrilled and humbled to be ProPublica’s next president. No one is doing the deep, transformative reporting in the same way that ProPublica does. It will be an honor to work with such an extraordinary team.”

    Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica’s editor-in-chief and co-CEO, who along with Sparkman reports to its Board, said, "I can't wait to start working with Robin. Her career as a reporter, editor, and nonprofit executive makes her the ideal partner to help us plan the next steps in ProPublica's evolution as a national news organization.''

    Richard Tofel, who was ProPublica’s first employee and founding general manager, and has served as its president since 2013, said, “I’m delighted with our Board’s choice of Robin Sparkman, a trusted leader in our field. I know she and my friend and longtime business partner Steve Engelberg will make a great team in building the next exciting phase of ProPublica.”

    Blinkhorn LLC guided ProPublica’s search, with Ann Blinkhorn as lead recruiter.

    ProPublica has a staff of more than 160 and a budget of nearly $36 million this year. ProPublica had more than 43,000 donors in 2020, while recording record traffic to its content, and record revenues; traffic this year through May is up 3%. It employs the largest staff in the nation devoted to investigative reporting at both the national and state and local levels, as well as coordinating its pioneering Local Reporting Network.

    ProPublica is an independent, nonprofit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. With a team of more than 135 dedicated journalists, ProPublica covers a range of topics, focusing on stories with the potential to spur real-world impact. Its reporting has contributed to the passage of new laws; reversals of harmful policies and practices; and accountability for leaders at local, state and national levels. Since it began publishing in 2008, ProPublica has received six Pulitzer Prizes, seven National Magazine Awards, five Peabody Awards, three Emmy Awards and nine George Polk Awards, among other honors.

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      How Our Investigation Into Untested DNA Evidence Helped Solve a 1983 Murder

      pubsub.do.nohost.me / ProPublica · Friday, 18 June, 2021 - 15:50 · 8 minutes

    ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. This story was originally published in the Cold Justice newsletter, which goes behind the scenes of our investigation into the outrage and promise of untested DNA from rape victims. This is the final installment in the series (for now), but you can sign up to get ProPublica’s biggest stories delivered to your inbox.

    Hi everyone,

    I had intended to write this dispatch about the survivors I met while investigating DNA evidence that had gone untested for decades in Baltimore. A few of their cases were solved through unbelievable twists of fate. For many others, their cases are still open and they’re actively searching for answers.

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

    But then last week I learned of a major development that underscores one of the main takeaways from the series: Investigating rapes can help solve other crimes.

    Now, the Baltimore County Police Department says that Alphonso Hill, the serial perpetrator police had connected to nearly a dozen rapes via DNA evidence after a detective saw him in a “48 Hours” episode and noticed his resemblance to a police sketch, has just confessed to raping and murdering a 21-year-old college student in 1983. He has also apparently confessed to other crimes, including other rapes.

    While reporting the Cold Justice series, I tried to interview Hill, but he declined. I attempted again this week after reading the police summary of his recorded confession and the related police report, but the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services declined access due to COVID-19 restrictions.

    Many detectives in Baltimore believed he was already the most prolific serial rapist in the state. Now he is also a confessed murderer. And there could be more cases to come.

    “I thought I knew the extent of violence of this man when we got nine rape convictions,” said Scott Shellenberger, the Baltimore County state’s attorney. “Now it seems we’re not even close.”

    Alicia Ann Carter was entering her senior year, an economics major and president-elect of a campus Christian group. She loved to play tennis, she was close to her three brothers and sister, and she called her mother every week. She was last seen at 4:30 p.m. on July 29, 1983, at the Baltimore County Public Library in Towson. She was found stabbed to death five days later in woods on the Goucher College campus, where she worked and attended school.

    Her older brothers, Alfred and Wendell Carter, describe her as “sweet, kind, gentle, capable, courageous, and someone you could always rely upon.”

    Hill confessed to raping and murdering her after two Baltimore County police detectives interrogated him in May, informing him they had DNA evidence in the case and offering him immunity from prosecution in exchange for his confession.

    Hill also confessed to several other crimes, including rapes, according to police, after he learned they had forensic evidence. Police said they are not able to share more detail because they are still notifying the victims.

    In February, as I was reporting this series, I had requested Alicia Carter’s case file from police through Maryland’s open records act after I came across a 1983 Baltimore Sun story about her murder.

    What I saw in the article made me gasp. I had spent a lot of time studying offenses linked to Hill by modus operandi, DNA or arrest. I built a timeline and a map of more than 35 crimes he was convicted of or suspected of and read through all of his arrest reports.

    The 1983 story revealed that Carter’s body was found in the same wooded area of the Goucher campus where I knew Hill had raped another student in 1979. In 2008, Hill was convicted of a 1984 rape in woods less than two miles away on the same thoroughfare. After Baltimore County police tested several DNA slides preserved from decades-old rape examinations at a local hospital, he would be convicted or suspected of numerous other attacks against women in the area, including two on the Goucher campus in 1980 and 1982.

    I had begun checking archived news articles for unsolved murders after an interview with a retired police officer who was on the force in 1983. He told me that he wondered at the time whether the same man raping women in nearby apartment complexes had also raped and murdered Carter. Nobody knew who the serial rapist was at the time. They wouldn’t find out for another quarter of a century.

    Police ended up developing a major suspect in the weeks following Carter’s murder and sent a drawing of the suspect around to media, but the man looked nothing like Hill. The leads went nowhere, and the case eventually fizzled.

    A 1983 poster offering a reward for information about Alicia Ann Carter’s murder.

    Although Hill had never been charged with murder, one notable aspect of his M.O. was his tendency to cluster crimes. For example, Hill raped three women in one apartment complex between October 1978 and January 1979. A similar cluster appeared at another apartment complex a decade later. The same could be said of Goucher College.

    There was another detail in the article that screamed out to me.

    Police never learned how Carter got from the library to the college campus. I knew Hill was a “hack,” or an unofficial taxi driver in the area. He could have offered her a ride. That is one way he stalked women, and it could explain why nobody saw her walking back to campus or home from the library.

    Police denied my request for the Carter file when I made it in February, saying the case was still unsolved. I hit the same dead end with the medical examiner’s office. They would not release autopsies from open cases.

    So I inquired with the police. Had they ever looked at Hill as a suspect in the Carter case? Her murder was not on a list I had seen before of crimes linked to Hill. I asked police whether there was still DNA from her case that could be tested, and whether they knew Hill was a hack who had raped women in and around campus.

    In early June, more than three months after I requested the Carter case file, I was told that I could come in to read it. The case had just been closed.

    I sat in the police headquarters law library and opened the hefty case file. I saw the Baltimore County state’s attorney’s letterhead with Alphonso Hill’s name on the front page.

    Shellenberger explained that he had offered Hill immunity for the murder and other rapes he admitted to that day because Hill’s release date was already not until 2084 and it was unlikely he would ever set foot outside prison. He would be 95 by 2047, when he’d be up for parole, which Shellenberger said he would oppose.

    “Closure was more important than a conviction, which will not really add any time,” Shellenberger said. “He’s going to be in jail for the rest of his life.”

    Shellenberger added that knowing that the perpetrator is locked up is especially important for families’ and survivors’ sense of security. Wendell Carter, Alicia’s older brother, said that for years, he worried about the perpetrator finding and killing him as well. Now he knows that the man who killed his sister is behind bars.

    According to his confession, Hill told police he had offered Carter a ride from the library. Carter fought him as he made advances in his car. He doesn’t remember what he did with the knife. He moved her body to a place he was familiar with on the Goucher campus.

    As I looked through the Carter case file, it was clear how extensive and frustrating the police investigation had been.

    They had multiple suspects and conducted hundreds of interviews. The Baltimore Colts (Maryland’s professional football team at the time) had been training on campus. Police checked their whereabouts, the whereabouts of those working with them and those of all of Carter’s acquaintances. Nothing panned out.

    How many other victims could there be?

    A historic trove of evidence at the Greater Baltimore Medical Center could yield more crucial clues. Several DNA slides from that collection, which was saved by Dr. Rudiger Breitenecker, had proved Hill was a serial rapist. Most of the slides from more than 2,200 rape examinations remain untested, though police said they intend to test and investigate everything.

    However, that evidence does not include DNA from murder victims in unsolved cases.

    Three months after Hill killed Carter, he raped Laura Neuman, the survivor featured in the “48 Hours” episode, in her apartment at gunpoint. She lived three miles away in the city. Police didn’t process a latent fingerprint obtained that night until nearly 20 years later. When they did, it matched Hill, who had continued to terrorize women across Baltimore.

    Confronted with the evidence in 2002, Hill confessed and said at the time that it was an aberration. He had never done anything like it before or after. Neuman never believed him, and she later helped other survivors as they sought justice against him. Today, she said she is “completely sure” that there are other slides at GBMC that contain Hill’s DNA.

    The Carter family is glad that the case was finally solved.

    “I think we all had long given up any hope of her murder being solved,” said Alfred Carter. “I only wish our mother were still alive to hear.”

    This is my last dispatch … for now. I will be following this story as police continue testing the evidence. Please don’t hesitate to reach out with any tips, questions or thoughts through ProPublica or directly to me through my Twitter account, @cdrentz .

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