 If you're just joining us, my name is Robin Sparkman, and I'm honored to be ProPublica's president. I'm thrilled that so many of our donors could join us tonight. The chat is open, and I encourage you to let us know where you're tuning in from. Now, before I turn it over to my colleague, Charlie Ornstein, I want to take a moment to thank all of you for supporting our reporting. It's because of your generosity and your belief in our work that ProPublica is the largest investigative newsroom in the country and the winner of six Pulitzer Prizes. Our mission, as you all know, is to use the moral force of investigative journalism to spur change. And as we head into an election year, the need for accountability journalism that makes a difference is even more urgent. I'm so glad that you've joined us tonight to hear about three of our current investigations into local elections. So now I'm gonna turn things over to our managing editor for local news, Charlie Ornstein, to share more about the growth of local initiatives at ProPublica. Charlie oversees our local reporting network, as well as ProPublica offices in the Midwest, the South, the Southwest, the Northwest, and a unit operated with the Texas Tribune. As a reminder, close captioning of the program is also available and can be enabled by clicking on the closed caption option on the bar toward the bottom of your screen. Okay, so now I'm gonna let Charlie take it from here and ask him to come on camera. Thank you all. Thanks so much, Robin, and thank you all for joining us for this important discussion. A few days ago, it's hard to believe I celebrated my 15th anniversary at ProPublica, and every day I feel blessed to work here and grateful for the support of donors like you who make our work possible. As some of you may know, when ProPublica started and back when I joined, we were a national news organization. Almost all of our staff was based in New York with the exception of a couple of people who were based in D.C. We believed and continue to believe in the power of journalism to expose things that aren't working as they should with the hope that people of good faith on both sides of the aisle will work to fix problems. If you could bring the receipts showing that a problem actually exists and show how it can be fixed. Back in 2017, we began to realize that it wasn't enough to have a national footprint, that the true crisis in journalism was at the local level and that ProPublica had a role to play in that. We assigned a reporter to cover New York City, we opened an office in Illinois, and we created our local reporting network, a program in which we pay the salary and benefits of reporters in local newsrooms to work on important accountability projects. We provide them editing support and other resources that our journalists have access to and we co-publish their work. Since then, our local work has grown exponentially. As Robin mentioned, we now have five local offices with 30 staff reporters stationed in 15 states, and we have another 20 local reporting network projects. I'm really proud to say that our local team accounted for 60% of the impact generated by ProPublica last year. One of the most important topics we're covering and the one we're gonna talk about tonight is threats to democracy. This is certainly a national issue, but it's also very much a local one and we're well positioned to cover it with reporters on the ground at Wisconsin, Texas, Georgia, and Arizona, all states that play a key role in both state, obviously state and national elections. We believe that by documenting threats facing voters, efforts to undermine the will of voters and showing the consequences of laws, people can be informed, ask questions, and sometimes demand changes. Our discussion today will take us from South Carolina to Texas to Wisconsin, and as Robin said, we'll have plenty of time for questions. Now I'm gonna transition us over to today's featured investigations. We'll be looking at the small circles casting a big shadow over local elections. And I'd like to kick off our conversation with Marilyn W. Thompson's reporting in South Carolina. Marilyn, can you join us on the screen? Hi, Charlie. Hi, Marilyn. So just yesterday, we got word that a panel of federal judges had thrown out Alabama's latest congressional map because lawmakers in that state didn't create a second majority black district. The judges in fact took the power away from the legislature in order that a new map be independently drawn. And it felt so timely because your coverage of South Carolina raised many of the same issues about map-making in the Palmetto State. So tell us about what you found. Yeah, Charlie. I am from South Carolina and decided that it would make a really good story to try to look at South Carolina's redistricting process, which as you know, redistricting is something that occurs every 10 years after a new census comes out. And I didn't really know exactly what to expect. I was most interested in Congressman Jim Clyburn and what role he might be playing in the redistricting effort. He of course is a Democrat in a state that has turned overwhelmingly Republican. So I began with this sort of central question. How did it work? Well, this is an interesting story because as you know, in this case, you had a powerful Democrat who actually worked with Republicans to create a map that was in his own interest, but not necessarily in the interest of others in his party in the state. That's not something I would have expected. Is it something you expected? Oh, I didn't expect it. I mean, I knew theoretically that members of Congress have influence on the redistricting process, but Clyburn was in a very special place because he was the only Democrat in the congressional delegation, total Republican controlled legislature and state government. And the process of redistricting is a state level process. So members of Congress are not necessarily supposed to be hauling the shots on what goes down. But what I discovered through investigative work was that Clyburn was very much involved and his wishes were being communicated to the Republicans through one of his aides based in Columbia. And I love what I love about your work is that you not only sort of have this through interviews, but you really brought the receipts. One of the things we talk about for a public are doing, talk about like how you got the receipts and what those receipts were. Well, it was very challenging because I did go into it, not really knowing much about redistricting, which it's supposed to be a public open process, but it's one of the most secretive things going out there. A lot of behind the scenes, manipulations and backdoor deals are being cut as they decide how to draw these districts, whether it's House, Senate, Congress. So I began the investigative process of seeking documents, looking where I could to put in freedom of information requests. And also went through a very extensive court record because the districts were subject to a lawsuit that was brought by the NAACP charging the state with racial gerrymander. So there was a court record the size of my living room. So in many ways, this reporting brought you full circle. You mentioned being from South Carolina, you started your career as a co-reporter in Columbia, South Carolina. And just as Jim Clyburn was starting his career in government as a state bureaucrat there. And you had some early interactions with Representative Clyburn, tell us about them. Yeah, it's funny. I wrote a story about Jim Clyburn as the first black appointee of Governor John West. He was the first black to hold a state government position in a really long time in South Carolina. And I was assigned, as you said, a co-reporter and I got his state agency. So I wrote a story about him that ran in a paper that no longer exists in Columbia. And I kind of, I've written thousands of stories over the years, I sort of forgot about this one. But when I decided I wanted to interview him, it turned out that Jim Clyburn remembered it much better than I did. Well, so tell us what he remembered. Yeah, he actually through his press secretary said that he remembered the story I had written in the mid-70s and that he even remembered his favorite quote and the question I had asked which was a very simple question about what his goal was, why he was feeling that it was so important for him to be part of state government. And he remembered every word of it. It was pretty stunning. He's, you know, 80 to 83 years old at this point. So several of the kids I passed, you sit down for another interview with him. What did he tell you this time when you met with him? Yeah, it was a long and winding interview about the subject of redistricting. And he's a storyteller. He speaks in this sort of preacher's baritone voice and loves telling stories about the deep South and about his interactions with South Carolina's segregationist leadership when he first was coming to power. So he told some stories and then we got around to the subject of redistricting and he had taken some heat in the local media about the notion that he was trying to steer redistricting to get a district that was favorable to him. And he got furious talking about it, which for a reporter is often kind of a tip-off. There's more there, more than meets the eye. So you kept looking after that interview and that's where you found even more stuff, right? Yeah, after I saw his violent kind of anger over this criticism that he was meddling in the district. That's when I really launched the search and discovered that, yeah, he did. And what the Republicans were charging was essentially true. So what's super interesting to me is that Alabama, which has gotten a lot of attention, is not the only state that is getting scrutiny from the Supreme Court with respect to redistricting. After your story ran, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case involving South Carolina's map in the coming fall term. What is the case about, did that actually, and did that surprise you? Well, it surprised me because everyone assumed that the decision of the lower court was gonna stand and the lower court in the NAACP lawsuit did find that South Carolina's Republican legislature drew a map that included a racial gerrymander. What my story revealed was that it was a little more complicated than that. That in fact, Clyburn as the highest elected black representative in the state had actually asked for some of the changes that were made. And so it posed a very interesting question that I don't know how much the court will focus on this, but it's certainly what Candice is surprised to everyone that they wanted to hear oral arguments in the case because the Republicans wanna tell the story of what Jim Clyburn asked for and how it shaped the map. And so when this case, I think it's October, right, that the justices are gonna hear it, what will you be listening for, looking for during oral arguments? Well, I will certainly be listening and seeing how often, if at all, Clyburn's name is mentioned because in the lower court, it was a big part of the case and the Republicans really, the lawyers for the state lawmakers really honed their arguments to point a finger at Clyburn and say, hey, you ask for these changes that are later being described as a racial gerrymander. So we'll see what happens. I mean, you never know. The cases in the deep South States are very highly charged. Races is everything because essentially racial gerrymanders are the only thing that's still illegal in redistricting. Partisan gerrymanders, the court has ruled that those are okay. And so what we're seeing here could be a very important national precedent. You mentioned that redistricting is this once a decade process. And yet here we are in year three of the decade and we are still dealing with redistricting. Up here in New York, as you know, they may end up opening a congressional districts up again. Alabama is still a living question. In Florida, a judge sort of has taken aim at some of the maps drawn by Governor Ron DeSantis down there, the South Carolina case. Is redistricting gonna be one of these things like electioneering that actually isn't actually over until it's ready to start doing it again? I'm afraid it will be because I'm working on a spirit now that it looks closely at the legal process with these redistricting lawsuits and the tactics that are used by the party in power to drag out the case. And so we're seeing Republican legislators use all kinds of tactics, claims of privilege, refusal to give depositions because in fact they're privileged. They wanna slow these things down. The only problem is if it is a discriminatory map that's in place, the longer that drags out, the longer people have been discriminated against, which is what you're seeing in states like Alabama and other deep South states that have been challenged. Well, I'm so glad that you are continuing to report on this issue. I know our readers and the folks on this call will be looking for your future stories. So thank you so much for joining us tonight. Thank you, Charlie. All right, now I'd like to turn the conversation over to Texas editors Aira Torres for a conversation with reporter Jeremy Schwartz. They'll be discussing a ProPublica Texas Tribune report on what appeared to be recent violations of IRS rules prohibiting religious organizations from endorsing candidates. Zaira, would you like to take it from here? Bearer, thanks, Charlie. Jeremy, as Charlie mentioned, this story is quite different from the gerrymandering story that he and Marilyn just discussed, but it is one that still has the, focuses on an aspect of influencing elections that is really important. And has become one that is used quite frequently in Texas. I wonder, you've found, one of the things that you've found is that pastors have become much more prolific and brazen when it comes to endorsing candidates despite a federal law banning tax exempt organizations from doing so. And some of those examples were quite striking. One was a pastor who framed the candidate that he supported as God's choice in the election. Another was a pastor who described New Mexico's governor as the wicked witch of the North and who urged people to vote against her in his congregation. And you also ran into interesting situations and communities where you had dueling endorsements. You had one pastor who had supported a candidate and another pastor who was rallying behind their opponent. And you found this on both sides of the aisle. I wonder if you can talk and explain a little what prompted this investigation and what that reporting entailed. Yeah, absolutely. Well, this project really kind of grew out of some reporting that I had been doing in Hood County, Texas which is a rural area southwest of Dallas where a group of far right Trump supporters were in the process of trying to push out and eventually succeeding in pushing out their elections administrator as part of some of the claims regarding the 2020 election. And while reporting it was sort of surprising to me to see some of the opposition to the election administrator sort of couched in very religious terms in local churches playing a role, not just in this sort of saga but in local politics generally down there. For example, one of the pastor of the church where the Hood County GOP club met monthly had prophesied in front of her parishioners that Trump would be reelected before the 2020 election. So this was all sort of eye raising for us. And we knew that churches endorsing candidates, pastors endorsing candidates from the pulpit is not legal and the IRS prohibits that. There are some concerns about potential donor anonymity that in terms of churches becoming full-fledged endorsing entities. And so they can lose their tax exempt status if they violate this very clear prohibition by the IRS. So we set about to basically see how common this is around Texas. What we're seeing, we were sort of seeing it locally. And so my reporting partner, Jessica Priest and I sort of set out to gather and watch as many sermons as we could. And this was an effort, I think pre-COVID would have been very difficult if not impossible to do something like this. But since the pandemic, a lot of churches have put their sermons online. So we spend weeks, if not months watching sermons sort of beginning in Texas, North Texas and leading to other places. And in the end, as you mentioned, we were able to document 20 instances where experts told us pastors had crossed the line and violated what is called the Johnson Amendment, which is the IRS prohibition on endorsing candidates. And so at that point, we set about trying to look into how the IRS enforces its prohibition. And sort of the fact that the agency hasn't disclosed much in about a decade about this. Jeremy, speaking of the IRS, I think one of the startling findings in the investigation was that the number of violations you found during the two year period that you really focused on was actually greater than the total number of churches the IRS has investigated for intervening in political campaigns over the past decade. Wonder if you could talk a little bit about how that's possible? Yeah, yeah, well, I mean, I think that really does speak to the lack of enforcement action by the IRS for many years on this. And their lack of transparency and leveling with the public about how they handle a very clear prohibition in their rules. Many experts believe that the issue is so sort of politically fraught for the IRS to take on churches, to investigate churches, that they prefer to sort of put it to the side altogether. And what we saw in our reporting was churches and pastors who become quite emboldened by this and feel that the IRS may not be coming after them and so are engaged in sort of testing the IRS's will to act. And even since our project ran, we are seeing some of those same churches that were publicly revealed to have been violating this rule continue to very publicly make campaign endorsements. Yeah, I mean, I think that's an interesting point because often in investigative journalism, we think about the impact that the work has and we talk about the impact that the work has. And in this case, you have a law that clearly states that non-tax exempt organizations cannot publicly endorse candidates. And you have examples of this happening time and time again, yet it's unclear what the IRS will do if anything. I wonder how you think about as you think about these stories, which we believe are important stories and important investigations, how you think about impact. Yeah, yeah, I mean, obviously the hope going into sort of any big project, any big investigation is that you will bring about some kind of change and some kind of action. I think though, going into this, we weren't really believing that this project would convince the IRS that they're suddenly gonna wake up and start enforcing their prohibitions, although that would be amazing if they would and you never know. But I think it was important to us, especially on the ground, seeing sort of the division and polarization that these endorsements and this rhetoric brought to local communities that we saw in counties, in towns, in school districts, was really quite something to see. And the feeling that we got for several reasons was that this is probably going to be a feature in some form or another of Texas elections on the local level in some communities. And so the state and the communities deserve to have a public conversation about that and what that means to have churches play such a role in their communities. And so I think that was, really our goal was to start generating some of those conversations and discussions, especially in some of the smaller towns and counties we were covered in. I think one way in which you did that, I think it was really important and effective was you not only had the traditional kind of investigative piece that you would normally write, but you had a separate piece that took each of the 20 instances that you had mentioned in the initial piece and broke them down showing the video, showing the analysis by experts who looked at each case independently and did not speak to each other, but who came to similar conclusions. You had the place in which you showed that you reached out pretty extensively to each church. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about why it's important to show your work in this way. Yeah, yeah, and especially on something like this, which is a topic that generates a lot of opinion, a lot of emotion, a lot of attention. We didn't wanna just come to the readers and say, you know, we found 20 violations, trust us, these are violations. We wanted to show them what we found so they could see for themselves what was said, the context of what was said and hear from these long-term nonprofit tax experts and sort of draw their own conclusions. We're not trying to force feed our conclusions onto you. We want you to see what we found and see if you agree or disagree. And I think we also very much wanted to be transparent about what we were doing with the churches. And so we spent weeks or months reaching out to every single church we mentioned in the story, churches and pastors to try to get a response from them. Is there some context we're missing about what was said on this Sunday in the pulpit? Did the pastor misspeak? Did the pastor, are we, you know, hearing him wrong in some way? And so it was just really important for us to be as open and open book in terms of these moments so that, you know, the world could see what we saw and it wasn't us trying to bring our own conclusions to it. Jeremy, you talked a bit about it. You've talked several times now in this discussion about kind of these divisions that, you know, you have seen being stoked in communities by churches who are endorsing candidates. Was that surprising? And if so, why? Yeah, it really was. I think the sort of the most surprising part of this was some of the rhetoric in language we're hearing in sermons and in churches. You know, as you sort of alluded to in your introduction, really divisive language in the language of us versus them, two sides of a war. Opponents aren't just, you know, and we're talking about county commissioner candidates in small rural counties are not just, you know, your neighbors who have a different political outlook in our running for local office, but our demons, our Jezebel's, our evil spirits. And I think that was one of the things that struck me most about what we were hearing and sort of, you know, sort of set off some alarm bells of how this might even look going forward into the future. I want to wrap up so we have time for the rest of the program, but did want to ask you a bit about, you know, as we're thinking about, you know, the upcoming election, upcoming presidential election, what are you thinking we will see when it comes to, you know, the involvement of churches in political races? Yeah, well, when we published these stories, we also did a reader call out and asked readers to write in and tell us what they are seeing in their communities. And we're frankly, you know, sort of overwhelmed with how much folks came back with. So we know that this is going on across the country, you know, and obviously as we get closer to 2024 is something we are going to be keeping a close eye on. And I know for our team, you know, this intersection of faith and religion and politics is something, you know, that we consider quite important. Thanks, Jeremy. Thank you. Thank you, Dezera and Jeremy for shedding some light on how religious organizations may be involving themselves in elections. I'd now like to invite Midwest editor, George Papa John and reporter, Megan O'Match to join us on screen. They'll be discussing several investigations into the people peddling election conspiracy theories in Wisconsin and the effects they've had on the voting process leading up to 2024. George, would you like to take it from here? I sure would, thanks, Charlie. Very happy to be here with Megan O'Match from our Midwest team. She's based in Wisconsin, has been there since 2021 and I've been working with her since late 2022 over the last two years. She's spent a lot of time traveling throughout Wisconsin and writing numerous stories about the influence of billionaires and activists on elections in Wisconsin. She's explored venomous school board races, attacks on the league of voting voters and other topics. Has focused quite a bit on the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which oversees the mechanics of elections there and has basically been under attack ever since, even before the polls closed in 2020. Megan, you came to ProPublica from Florida. You had never lived in Wisconsin before, you moved to Milwaukee as an outsider, but you knew, I'm sure like most of us, that it's a key state for elections and this country a swing state. But once you started spending time there, what did you learn and what surprised you as you began studying elections there? Thanks, George. Yeah, I spent 20 years in Florida. I was covering crime and government and elections, schools and overall Florida lunacy. And I basically thought coming to Wisconsin that it would be maybe a little calmer where common sense prevails and people are pretty even handed and all, but I was wrong. There's quite lively here. The politics are every bit as surprising and as contentious and as absurd as in Florida. So I met a lot of interesting people and characters that I've written about and I felt important to really show who is spearheading the election denial efforts here in Wisconsin. They include established organizations. There's the Thomas Moore Society, which is an anti-abortion group out of Chicago that I've written about that really delved into election denial work. There are grassroots organizations, GOP lawmakers. There's some just basically misguided individuals who they're spreading conspiracy theories, including our retired hit net therapist here, a convicted fraudster I've written about, a former state Supreme Court justice and others. So it was really dizzying for me at first to jump into this new state and this new topic basically of denying the integrity of our election. So I realized it was such a vast landscape that I had to build a spreadsheet to keep track of this and to keep track of all these numerous groups and people involved. A lot of this disinformation you may know is spread on radio and podcasts. Of course, there's groups like Steve Bannon and his war room, but there's also others that I'd never heard of before or like the first right podcast, which is hosted by a failed Illinois Senate candidate. And he runs a pack that's financed by the billionaire Richard Lyne for the most part. And but there are other podcasts too with names like the Alpha Warrior show and they feature election deniers all the time. So I try to check in with them and see what they're saying, who they're having on, what their next target is or their next theory. And my spreadsheet, it has almost 200 entries and it now includes names of social media sites too that I keep learning about. It's not just Facebook or Twitter where folks congregate but also on things like Discord and Rumble and Getter, Gab and also there was something I found called givebutter.com, which is a fundraising site. Whenever I see someone mention, oh find me on like someone had me.we.com recently, then I just add it to my spreadsheet. So this is another way that we can really track what these folks are saying and doing are concerned about. Meg, one of the first things that you and I talked about, I know was something called sucker bucks, which I was not completely familiar with, actually not familiar with at all. And it turns out that in over the last two years, sucker bucks has come up a lot in your conversations with people and in your reporting. Can you explain a little bit what sucker bucks are and why they fed into sort of the conspiracy ridden climate that we have now? Yeah, sucker bucks refers to about $350 million in grants that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg gave to election offices nationwide to help carry out the elections during the pandemic and he wanted to help pay for more ballot drop boxes and hazard pay for a lot of the poll workers, they were afraid to come. They needed more ballot scanning machines for all the absentee ballots and all. So the GOP felt that this money though was unfairly going to democratic cities and was basically tilting the scales, even though the grants were given to like 2,500 municipalities nationwide, including places that added history of voting for Trump. But one helpful tool that I and a lot of other journalists use is to make a timeline so we can better understand a controversy when we plotted out. And so I could go back and look through lawsuits and complaints with the Wisconsin Elections Commission to better understand it and looking at my timeline, I saw, well, the first instance of a complaint about this Zuckerberg money was made by a Wisconsin man named Jay Stone and I thought, well, you know, who is this Jay Stone? It turns out that he's a retired hypnot therapist. His dad had been a Chicago Alderman and Jay had lost elections in Chicago and he blamed the democratic machine for working against him, which it did. But so I was able to write this really interesting story about this man, this Jay Stone, who his theories really launched this Zuckerberg controversy and it had a real snowball effect because now at least 20 states have banned these private grants to election offices. And again, this man Jay Stone that, you know, really very, very few people had heard of, he ultimately played this crucial role in making Wisconsin this hotbed of conspiracy theories. This former Supreme Court Justice Michael Gabelman, who was appointed to lead a really partisan audit of 2020, he accredited Jay Stone and his theory and he gave it a platform. He, half of his Gabelman's report ended up being about this Zuckerberg's problem. Yeah, it was really interesting when you brought up Jay and his background and being a former Chicago Tribune editor and reporter and having probably interviewed his dad and knowing a few things about how Chicago elections can sometimes not exactly be on the up and up. It was interesting to see what that Chicago stew created in this son of the alder been right now up the Wisconsin, trying to show that everything is like Chicago in 1968. One of the things I mentioned at the start of the introduction here with the Wisconsin elections commission, which you follow quite closely, you've written about. It's a bipartisan agency. So you got three Democrats, three Republicans by law who commissioners who run it. There's a seasoned professional who runs the agency then and their job, its job is to really communicate information, guide these 1800 or so clerks in towns and villages across Wisconsin. And in fact, it was set up by Republicans not so long ago as sort of an alternative to another form of election oversight that they didn't like. What you've found, what you've written about is just the intense scrutiny that this agency has faced. And eventually that led you as you wrote about the WEC the Wisconsin elections commission to knocking on the door of a woman named Margaret Bosselman. Can you tell us about that? Yeah, Marge Bosselman is a Republican member of the Wisconsin elections commission and she's a retired county clerk, meaning she ran elections for a couple of decades in Green Lake County, Wisconsin, really pretty area, almost central Wisconsin. And she did that with it without incident. She is a professional with this deep knowledge of elections and she, again, a Republican does not believe that the election was stolen in Wisconsin. So she knows the machines are tested beforehand. She knows the results are audited. Anyway, the chairman of the commission mentioned to me that in an interview that a lawsuit had just been filed against Marge that an election denier named Peter Berniger wanted her off the commission saying that she really wasn't a true Republican. So she wasn't fit to hold that slot that is slated for a Republican individual. So in Wisconsin, the dockets are online. We can look them up on our computer but you can't see the actual complaint, the document. So you have to go to the actual courthouse which meant driving an hour and a half away. I went and got the lawsuit and then because Marge lives near that courthouse she actually worked in it, the same courthouse where the lawsuit against her was filed. But I knocked on her door and she has an American flag out front. She has a weebap the badge sign in her yard and I'd never met her in person, but she ushered me in. And I told her that I was a journalist and I wanted to talk with her about the harassment that I knew that she was facing on the commission by Peter and others. And this is a basic thing that we do as reporters is knock on doors and you don't always know if you're gonna be received or not. But she said she doesn't normally talk with reporters and she invited me to sit down. And when I told her I wanted to write about Peter and what he was up to and his tactics, she started to cry and she explained to me how hard it's been for her in this small community to have her GOP friends turn against her. The local party had publicly disowned her in 2021 because she wouldn't say that the election was stolen. And she's a joiner yet she couldn't go to any GOP events anymore because she didn't think she'd be welcome and even her friends and all didn't understand her. So she basically said that she'd been hoping that somebody would expose Peter Berniger for being the bully that he is, not only against her but against the Wisconsin Elections Commission administrator another woman named Megan Wolf and against other election clerks around the county who he also had been harassing and filing lawsuits against and public record requests and all trying to prove something that isn't there that the election was stolen. Now it's not illegal of course to file lawsuits there's nothing necessarily un-American who are wrong with that but as you backgrounded Berniger just to serve your due diligence which is something we call scrubbing and journalism in our public as you looked at scrubbed as a background. You found there were some things in that background to put it mildly were a little bit interesting. What did you find out when you looked into that? Yeah, well, backgrounding again as a reporter is a central part of our job whether we have to background a gunman, a victim, a political candidate, certain journalists, right about profiles of celebrities other people so backgrounding is something that we're really trained to do and we're pretty experienced in it. ProPublica we have excellent researchers too who help us and I turned to one of our researchers Mary Melba for help and some information had already been out there about Peter. We knew his grandparents had founded the Hillshire Farm Sausage and Deli Meat Company and we knew that he'd served time in prison for fraud but we dug into court documents and we realized that some of the same tactics he used in challenging his fraud conviction were also the kinds of things that he was doing in his conspiracy theory work. We found this great quote from a judge that said, Mr. Berniger you file so many things I don't even have time to keep up with it all. So he bombarded the elections commission with emails and complaints and demands I learned from my reporting that in early August the commission had sent the police to basically warn him that if he kept doing what he was doing he was gonna be arrested for stalking but again getting back to sort of like my spreadsheet and all the way we comb over people's social media posts and listen to what they're saying on podcasts and things and he kept referring to something called Omega for America with the numeral four in between saying that this was promoting some kind of super fast computing method to identify fraud. And when you go to the site I saw that they were raising money for a nonprofit called election watch. You could go to the IRS website, look up charities. I did that, who is election watch Inc. and here enough it's true enough Berniger had set up this nonprofit called election watch that he was trying to raise his donations for. So we saw that the Texas Tribune had mentioned Omega for America in one of its stories and had said it been initially funded by my pillow fellow Mike Lindell. So I got him on the phone and he sounds just like he does on TV, he doesn't really talk as much as he does shout and he acknowledged funding Omega for America first but said he'd moved on to other grander ventures and we also found through again through Berniger's tweet city ads of association with James O'Keeffe too who has the former head of Project Barrett has that really is known for secretly recording organizations, liberal groups like Planned Parenthood. Megan, there's so much more we could talk about including what's currently happening with the Supreme Court there, with what might happen in the next election but I believe we've run out of time. And so I'm gonna thank you and I think we hand it back to Charlie at this point. Yeah, thank you Bo, thank you George. Thank you Megan for sharing that closer look into the voting processes in Wisconsin. We're now gonna turn it over to our Q and A portion, my favorite portion before we, but before doing that I'd like to share a link to our event survey in the chat box and we would appreciate your feedback. And so we're going to, I think I'm gonna invite our participants to all come back on and I think I'm gonna start with a question on my own that perhaps I will direct first at Megan and see if others want to jump in, which is, do you have, are you worried about sort of the way in which the 2024 election will be, will be conducted in your state? Do you have concerns about the integrity of the election? Megan? In Wisconsin, we thought that the threat to democracy had eased somewhat when the Democratic governor was reelected, the attorney general is a Democrat, the Supreme Court just now tilted liberal. So those have relieved some of the pressure because these folks are not election deniers, but the legislature was, which is controlled by the Republicans is doing all it can. They all it can now still to stage the election in its advantage by changing, trying to change the elections commission administrator. And also they're talking about impeaching this new Supreme Court justice. So there's still a lot going on here. I'm still, yeah, it's still very tenuous here. It's still, it's a battleground state. It's very close, gonna be hard-bought. And I don't, I think there'll still be a lot of issues to deal with here. How about in Texas, Jeremy? Yeah, I mean, Texas is not quite the battleground that Wisconsin is, although every election we hear that this year is gonna be a battleground. But we are, for sure seeing, I think a lot of pressure on election administrators across the state, we saw what happened in Harris County where the state came in and basically abolished that position, sending it back to an elected county clerk. And that's something that we are seeing in counties across the state, frankly, which is a somewhat troubling idea because these election administrators are professional administrators. They get a lot of classes and training. They are nonpartisan. And what we're seeing is this effort to abolish their offices and put them under partisan county clerks who are elected and in some cases are, among those in the state that do deny the results of the 2020 election. Just really quickly to add to what Jeremy was saying, one of the things he talked about earlier was his reporting in Hood County. And I think what we are seeing in Texas is what Jeremy described is happening not just in Democratic counties or counties where the election was closed, but in counties where Trump won with 80% of the vote. So I think it's a really interesting dynamic in the state. Marilyn, do you want to jump into that question before we move on to the next one? Yeah, I can just give you one observation from South Carolina because at the time that I was there doing my reporting, there was a hearing of the state featuring the state elections administrator. And they brought him in to ask him questions about alleged fraud in 2020 dysfunctional voting machines and he kept testifying before these members that he just wasn't seeing a problem, but the questions were unrelenting. And so I think it was a good signal of things to come. We are gonna have to really be alert to what's happening in local jurisdictions with the election process. Thank you guys, that is great answers, but definitely leave some concern hearing from the three of you on that, the four of you. So let's turn to some submitted questions through the registration form and then we'll move to take live questions. Again, if you'd like to ask a question, click the Q&A icon at the bottom of your screen to submit it to us. So a registrant submitted, I'm curious about how investigative journalism works in the trenches, so to speak. How do you know where to look, what to look for and what are some effective resources for information? How do you balance what you do with the risks or threat of retaliation? Marilyn, would you like to respond? Yeah, I would love to respond because I've been doing it for so many years and feel like I've learned every trick of the trade. Every investigative project starts with intense research because reporters have to figure out whether some instinct they have, whether there's any factual bearing to it. And so you begin with research, you pinpoint areas where there might be some sort of public record and that can range from personal record, voting registrations, driver's licenses and so on to larger bodies of public record, like court filings. And so you can literally spend weeks just getting grounded to go into an investigation and deciding whether it's worth your time or not. And I never mitigate just basic instinct. I feel like I've had those instincts at work. Since the days I was interviewing Jim Clyburn as a kid and I still have it. I mean, my hair literally raises on my head when I see a story that I think someone should look into. Great, thank you. Jeremy, is there a link between the fight against improving the budget of the IRS and the lack of investigation into churches? Where's the IRS person power supposed to come from? And is there a role for civic groups to aid an investigation of these types of flagrant law breaking? Yeah, so that's a really good question about sort of the relationship between the IRS budget and their enforcement capabilities. And without a doubt, over the last 20 or so years the agency has seen its budget dwindle to some extent. This past year, the agency got an infusion of about 80 billion, the majority of which is going to go to strengthened enforcement actions, which you might think would be good news on this front. However, the agency has basically said that that money is gonna go to three main areas, investigating corporations, investigating sort of these complex partnerships and high wealth, high earning individuals. So investigating violations by nonprofits and churches is not on the IRS's list of things to focus on going forward as of now. Is there a role then for other groups, civic groups too, to be pointing things out? Yeah, yeah. And that is actually something that citizens can do, residents can do that themselves. There is a complaint form that the IRS has. And I can look for that and try to put that on here on the chat, but that everyday citizens can make a complaint. There are groups like Freedom from Religion Foundation that sort of regularly make complaints to the IRS for things like this. The issue is that a lot of times these complaints are made and it's sort of like a black box and we don't know what happens to these complaints. And I think it's probably good that folks make the complaints, but in full disclosure, the agency has not been very active and vigorous in terms of letting the public know the outcome of their complaints. Although Jeremy, one thing I learned from you and your colleague Jessica Priest is that the Texas Ethics Commission, at least in the case of Texas, also has a process for looking at these complaints. So it's not just the IRS, right? Some states have different processes too. That's true, that's true. Yeah, in Texas, the Ethics Commission is charged. They can't yank a church's tax exempt status, which is sort of the death penalty when it comes to this, but they can issue fines and do issue fines on campaign-related violations. So we have seen some of the churches we've written about folks have simultaneously sent to the IRS and to the State Ethics Commission. And we're waiting to see the outcome of that on the state level, which should be much more sort of transparent than at the IRS level. Great, thanks. Turni B. Meaghan, how do Republican stories get seen in Wisconsin? Do we have a media partner like the Texas Tribune in Texas? Sometimes the Wisconsin Watches run our stories, Wisconsin Examiner, then Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. They can go to our website. I've been interviewed on the local public radio station. George can jump in here too, but our stories are getting more widely seen in Wisconsin and people are becoming more familiar with co-publica, which is a great thing. Right, and we're at Journal Sentinel, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, we co-published with as well. So it's a variety of places. I think one of the things philosophically about our journalism is that we try to get the story out as far and wide as we possibly can, which often means a variety of news organizations for the same story that we're not looking to only have it go to people who pay for our work, is all you all know our work is free for anybody and people can republish our stories. So we actually think the more organizations that pick up the work and mention it and republish it, the better. All right, great. Marilyn, back to you about Steve Bannon, someone you mentioned, or someone Megan mentioned, I think you didn't mention him. How involved is Steve Bannon in all of these conspiracy theories? It's a very interesting question because we did a story. I don't have the link in front of me, but it's available a couple of years ago about Steve Bannon and a strategy that he was promoting on his podcast called the precinct strategy. It was basically the idea that if you wanna get involved in changing politics as a Republican, go sign up to be a precinct officer, the absolute grunt level of politics. And this strategy has been hugely successful. There is actually a book coming out next year by one of our former ProPublica reporters that I had the opportunity to read a draft. And it establishes the success of the precinct strategy in changing the face of the Republican Party, but also really pushing conspiracy theories at the local level. And a lot of what we're seeing in places like Magans, Wisconsin, but if you go back and trace the roots of it, very well could be Steve Bannon. Fascinating, even though President Trump is not an office anymore, Steve Bannon continues to have the same, or perhaps even more influence than he had. I know even in Texas, Jeremy, Steve Bannon's podcast has weighed in on the current impeachment trial of the Attorney General, right? Yeah, the impeachment of Ken Paxton has definitely become sort of a litmus test here in Texas and nationally, with his defenders going on Bannon's show to sort of single out lawmakers, state reps who may be on the fence in terms of voting for or against impeaching Ken Paxton in sort of trying to influence the trial in that way. So yeah, there is I think a sense that Bannon and some of the national forces do see Paxton as a strong ally and somebody who they want to protect as much as they can. Let's stick with you for another question about back to the IRS though. What more is being done to influence the IRS to become more attentive to the issue that you raised today? Well, I think probably hearing from folks who submit complaints, who talk to their representatives about what they are seeing, it might be sort of the best way to influence that. As I think I mentioned before, it's not something that the agency, I think given their druthers would necessarily focus on and so may need to be sort of pulled into that. And so public pressure I think is probably one way folks can do that. And also I would encourage folks to let us know when you see things that could be violations in your local communities regarding churches, let us know. That's such a good point, Jeremy, that ProPublica relies so much on our readers to share with us tips of things that they think that we should look into. And I wanna share in our chat a link to ways in which people can reach out to us, both securely and through a lot of our forums, yet we do take tips from readers. They often point us to really important topics. I know in your church's reporting that people pointed out examples of sermons and they really did help power our reporting. So for those on this call, like you play a role in our journalism, not only supporting our journalism financially, but if you see something, say something, it is so, so important to help us do what we do. So I wanna ask one question about democracy and then one question about the future of journalism. What do you all see? And this is open to any of you as the weakest link in our democracy and what could we be doing to address it? Sorry to stump you all. I thought that was, it's so thought provoking, right? Voter participation, voter participation. Simply have to get more voters out, have to convince people that it makes a difference. I feel like a lot of what's going on is really targeted suppression efforts. And when you look at these groups want to be crowdsourcing, to challenge people's voter registrations, we just saw that there was a court ruling in Wisconsin where folks, the conservative folks won that you can't use a national voter registration form anymore and their targeting seems to be, you know, big cities, democratic strongholds. So that's cracking down on groups like the League of Women Voters who go to register folks. So this whole activity, a lot of it seems to be directed at suppressing voters, the wrong types of voters from voting. And this is the whole, it's not like, you know, that's not what democracy is. We want everyone to vote. And yet so much of what I see comes down to trying to make it harder for people to vote, make it harder. Yeah, and I can assure folks, we are keeping a close watch on that, you know, heading into next year. So that's a big issue. Zira, I want to sort of turn to you to talk about local newspapers and reporters and future business models that would make them viable. I think we've all read stories about unfortunate cutbacks of local papers and including closure of some. What's the future here? Yeah, I mean, I think this is an important question, but also one of the hardest to answer from, you know, I used to run a local newspaper in my hometown. And, you know, it was a really difficult financial experience, right? I mean, I think that the future is really thinking about different ways in which to ensure that there is local coverage. Some of that is through your traditional newspaper and part of, you know, supporting that is making sure that you're reading the stories, making sure that you subscribe, you know, larger, you know, I used to work for Gannett, larger corporations very much look at, you know, those subscriptions, that engagement from the local community to determine the resources that they allocate to those communities. But I would say beyond that, it's really thinking about how you support local journalism in different ways. You know, there are communities that are now seeing nonprofits come up that have, you know, provide close that gap to some degree, I think our news organizations are doing that, right? I mean, we're all from, you know, my team in Texas is eight people and the vast majority of them are from Texas and are from Texas communities and are very much focused on those communities from that local perspective. That said, you know, it's really difficult to cover everything happening in a state that has 254 counties. So I think that, you know, it's a good question and I think it's one that I always hope that readers are thinking about, you know, nobody has found the silver bullet. And I think part of it is continuing to innovate, continuing to think about ways in which we personally, you know, cover those local issues from a reader perspective and a funder perspective, I think really ensuring that you are supporting those models with which you can relate to and feel are providing you that service by reading, by sharing, by, you know, donating what you can by subscribing to your local newspaper. And, you know, hopefully we will find a way through for some of these smaller communities that don't have that. But I'd like to open this question up to everyone, you know, as an investigative reporter, do you have an ideal outcome in mind for a piece of your reporting in general? What does success look like to you? It's funny for this sort of body of work, Meg and I have talked about that a little bit because traditionally it's get laws changed, put people in prison, that fact some sort of really tangible change. I think what we're trying to do in some ways is add to the truth that's out there and reveal what's really happening and that is much harder to measure. And yet it is so vital because when you ask what are the biggest threats of democracy, it's, you know, one of the biggest threats is misinformation. And so I think when I see, you know, a lot of times what we don't talk about in traditional investigative reporter and reporting with you is we do want to influence the influencers, the people who make laws. And we may or may not be concerned with how many people read the story, but I think a lot of it, what we do look at the audience a lot of times, are we reaching people? Is it reprinted? Is Megan on the radio? So it's, I think when it comes to democracy, it's a whole different, it's a whole different equation for us that we're still trying to figure out. And yet I think we all really believe that we need to figure it out. If we still have a democracy, I think it's good. We still have a democracy. Well, let us hope we do. That may, that says, what depressing, but let's hope our hopeful point to end on. That is our time for today. I wanna thank all of our reporters and editors for their time with us, as well as for you, our audience, for joining us and for your thoughtful questions. Again, this event has been recorded, so you'll receive an email with the full video of today's event. We'll also post this recording on the ProPublica YouTube channel. A link to our event survey will also be added to the chat box. We do appreciate your feedback and read it and take it seriously. And from all of us at ProPublica, thank you for joining us and thank you for your generous support of our work. We appreciate it. Good night.