Paper Trail

When Ukraine urgently needed artillery, the U.S. Army contracted defense industry giant General Dynamics to set up a new plant to manufacture shell bodies, paying the company $533 million of taxpayer money. But workers inside the factory told ProPublica defense reporter Jesse Coburn that they watched piece after piece of equipment fail in spectacular ways.

Jesse takes us inside the factory fiasco and investigates what this botched project tells us about how the most expensive military budget in the world has a record filled with disappointing results. 
Read the original reporting here: https://www.propublica.org/article/general-dynamics-artillery-factory-failed
Contact Jesse Coburn here.
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President Donald Trump has claimed that hundreds of thousands of people who are not U.S. citizens have been illegally voting in our federal elections, tipping the scales for Democrats. If there was massive fraud, reporters at ProPublica wanted to uncover it. So they followed along as federal investigators set out to find and prosecute these voters. How many were there, really?

Read the original reporting here: https://www.propublica.org/article/noncitizen-voting-trump-homeland-security-investigations
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When the Trump administration shut down an elite FBI anti-corruption unit, investigations in progress got shelved. ProPublica reporters learned details of one of these: The CEO of a naval technology company alleged that he had bribed politicians, including Sen. Susan Collins. If he was telling the truth, his story provided a road map to how corruption really works in Washington, D.C. But the CEO was in prison for fraud, and Collins claimed she’d been cleared by the FBI. Could anything he said be true?
 
Read the original reporting here: https://www.propublica.org/article/fbi-susan-collins-navatek-campaign-donations-investigation
Contact the reporters here: Molly Redden, William Turton, Avi Asher-Schapiro
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Reporter Andy Kroll got his hands on secret tapes of a low-profile bureaucrat named Russell Vought. Turns out, as director of the Office of Management and Budget, he’s been quietly reshaping the federal government and commanding many of the second Trump administration’s biggest moves. 
Read the reporting here: https://www.propublica.org/article/russ-vought-trump-shadow-president-omb 
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While investigating the personal wealth of the president’s oldest son, investigative reporters Justin Elliott and Brett Murphy learned something almost too strange to be true: that a Russian oligarch closely allied with Vladimir Putin might have attended Donald Trump Jr.’s recent wedding in the Bahamas. Using a combination of social media and shoe-leather reporting, a team of ProPublica reporters soon realized that the guest list was just the tip of the iceberg.

Read the reporting here: https://www.propublica.org/article/donald-trump-jr-wedding-bankrolled-russian-oligarch-umar-kremlev-putin
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