By Jack Kiyonaga

On the eve of the midterm elections, the Justice Department announced charges against 63 people for alleged election-related offenses across 15 states, hailing the cases as the largest surge in voter-fraud charges since President Donald Trump returned to office.

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But a review of cases announced November 2 suggests a much less sweeping story than the administration’s rhetoric. Most involve lawful permanent residents accused of voting or registering to vote despite not being U.S. citizens. The allegations span multiple elections and do not establish the kind of coordinated effort that President Donald Trump often says influences election results.

Attorney General Todd Blanche said the department would continue pursuing voter fraud to “restore confidence in our electoral system.” The announcement came as Trump continues to allege widespread voting by potentially millions of illegal voters still on the rolls.

“They will all go to jail for a long period of time!!!” wrote the president in a Truth Social post in October regarding a Department of Justice (DOJ) letter to LA County warning of prosecution for the county if non-citizens’ votes are counted. Trump also wrote there are potentially “Hundreds of Thousands and maybe even Millions” of illegal voters still out there in a Halloween post.

News of these charges from the DOJ was dropped just hours before midterm election day and came as the latest in a series of recent pushes from the DOJ to highlight examples of election crimes nationwide. In the last nine weeks, the DOJ has charged 195 noncitizens across 25 states with voting related offenses.

Just days before the DOJ announcement, however, The Washington Post published an analysis of 180 voter-fraud cases. It found no allegations of an organized effort to recruit noncitizen voters, and reported that some defendants described mistakenly registering or voting. Blanche himself acknowledged that investigators hadn’t uncovered a pattern.

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Blanche described these new charges as the “latest surge in voter-fraud arrests since President Trump returned to office.” Yet those accused remain miniscule compared to the 154 million Americans who voted in the 2024 elections.

In the Nov. 2 news release, the DOJ said that the 63 individuals were charged with a variety of election-related crimes consisting of voting by aliens in federal elections, false claims of U.S. citizenship to register to vote or to actually vote, and the fraudulent submission of a voter registration application in another state.

While Blanche asserts that these charges are evidence of a much larger network of voter fraud, analysis of these allegations doesn’t necessarily support the Attorney General’s proposed theory.

It’s difficult to connect any of these cases to each other, especially given the diverse backgrounds of the defendants, hailing from a huge swath of countries such as Canada, Israel, Bangladesh, Italy, England, Kenya, Singapore, Bermuda, Jamaica, the Netherlands, Mexico, Nigeria, France, Germany and more. Likewise, these alleged crimes took place across the country, from Tennessee to Texas, from North Carolina to New York. In fact, no federal judicial district yielded charges for more than nine individuals, with most far below nine.

Of the 63 people charged, 59 were actually in the country legally. However, legal permanent residents, commonly known as green card holders, still cannot vote or register to vote in federal elections.

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Even still, some of those charged hadn’t voted illegally. For example Dominican Republic national Rosanny Fabre Villa, 28, a lawful permanent resident, was charged with making a false statement of citizenship in order to vote. Villa allegedly submitted a voter registration application that she knew was fraudulent where she falsely claimed to be a United States citizen, according to the DOJ.

One case involved a U.S. citizen. According to the DOJ, Robert Glenn Johnson, 63, of Annapolis, Maryland, was charged with fraudulently submitting a voter registration application in New Mexico. Johnson allegedly submitted a voter registration application to the Bernalillo County Clerk’s Office Bureau of Elections in Albuquerque falsely claiming to be a New Mexico resident.

One section of the new DOJ allegations which has drawn attention is that six individuals in the Central District of California were charged not with illegal voting but rather making false statements on their naturalization applications. But while these individuals were indeed charged with falsifying naturalization statements and not fraudulent voting, all six of them did illegally vote in U.S. elections as well.

Previous investigations by state election officials have found only small numbers of suspected noncitizen voters, even after extensive reviews of voter registration records.

Jack Kiyonaga is a Washington, D.C.–based writer and journalist who began his career as editor-in-chief of the award-winning Molokai Dispatch in Hawai‘i. His reporting spans environmental issues, homelessness and education, with work featured in The Christian Science Monitor, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, National Catholic Reporter, Honolulu Civil Beat and other outlets.

By Miriam Berger

Saeed Abu Riyala, 30, craves eggs. The newlywed makes about 22 to 24 shekels ($7.15-$7.80) a day selling packaged cookies in Gaza City’s rubble-strewn streets. That’s enough to buy cheap, less nutritious foods like bread and pasta. But eggs – let alone meat – are out of his price range.

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“We haven’t brought eggs into our house in forever,” he said, referring to the tent where he lives after Israeli forces destroyed his house. “We used to buy them in the past, before the war, but I haven’t bought any in quite a while now.”

Food is more available in Gaza relative to the Famine 14 months ago, but much of it remains out of reach for people like Abu Riyala. In the first half of October, eggs cost roughly twice to four times their prewar price. Their journey to Gaza’s markets reveals how Israel’s siege shapes the cost of basic foods.

Palestinians no longer produce their own eggs: Israel’s war destroyed Gaza’s farms and fields. Instead eggs are trucked into Gaza via Israeli companies through a tightly controlled import market that, critics say, has led to sky-high prices, artificial shortages and created opportunities for corruption and profiteering.

Israeli authorities dispute responsibility for the high prices, blaming Hamas taxation. But Palestinian traders say Israel’s restrictions on imports and the fees charged by intermediaries through the Israeli-designed system are the major reasons for the increases.

From Staple to Luxury

Before the war, eggs were an affordable protein in Gaza, where local food production flourished despite a punishing Israeli blockade. They cost about 14 shekels ($3.66) per carton of 30 eggs.

But just in the first two weeks of October, the price of now-imported eggs varied widely, from a low of 27 shekels ($8.75) to 60 shekels ($19.40), according to Sourcebase interviews with traders and customers. Sourcebase’s AI system scoured World Food Program documents to identify eggs as a commodity with substantial price increases.

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Few Gaza residents today can afford to pay the prewar price, much less a doubling or quadrupling of it. Three years into a devastating war, the majority of Gaza’s 2.2 million Palestinians rely on international aid for food, shelter and other assistance. Gaza is also facing the world’s worst economic crisis on record, according to the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). A report out last month found that 92 percent of economic establishments had been damaged or destroyed, most people are unemployed, and less than 1.5 percent of the strip’s cropland remained accessible and undamaged.

Though there’s a cease fire in Gaza, the prices of eggs and other scarce goods are unlikely to decline – and could easily climb. Israel controls all crossings into the Palestinian Territory, and tightly restricts what goes in. Israeli authorities currently permit only a small number of Palestinian traders to import goods via Israeli companies in a system partly designed to deny Hamas revenue sources and keep Gaza on the brink. But with so much money to be made, cross-border smuggling networks involving Israeli soldiers and security officials have flourished, further pushing up prices through a thriving black market. And Palestinian civilians are bearing the costs.

Given Israeli regulations and unpredictable delays at the border, aid organizations generally don’t bring in eggs or other fresh meat and produce; Instead, these nutritionally vital foods that were once locally sourced are now contingent on Israel and the import market. While aid organizations consider the nutritional makeup of the food they provide, private sector traders decide based on what foods will turn a profit and what Israel will permit on any given day.

“It’s always fragile when you’re in a context like Gaza,” said Toby Fricker, Chief of Advocacy and Communication for UNICEF, the UN’s children agency, in the occupied Palestinian Territories.

Though the situation has improved compared to the summer of 2025 — when people died daily from hunger, malnutrition rates soared and eggs, when they could be found, cost up to 600 shekels ($177) — the baseline remains unbearable, Palestinians in Gaza say.

“Now there is food,” said Fricker, but the small supply of “nutritious food can be out of reach economically.”

The ‘Coordination Mafia’

Palestinians refer to the Israeli trade restrictions driving up prices as “the coordination mafia.” Under this arrangement, Israeli-sanctioned traders sell space on their trucks to smaller traders who, often through Israeli and Palestinian middlemen, pay tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per shipment in what’s known as “coordination fees,” according to six importers and wholesale traders interviewed by Sourcebase. The exact number of approved traders has fluctuated throughout the war. There is no official list, but traders say eight people are currently allowed.

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From Gaza City, Hussam Huwaiti sells clothes and dry and fresh foods, among other items. He is also a board member of the Gaza Chamber of Commerce. Before the war, Israel heavily monitored and controlled what entered Gaza, but a large number of traders like Huwaiti could import goods.

Now Huwaiti must work through one of the few permitted “coordinators.” When he imports eggs, he pays about 13 ($4.25) to 15 ($4.90) shekels per carton from a farmer in Israel, but the price effectively doubles due to coordination fees. He sells the cartons for around 30 shekels ($9.80) each to wholesale traders in Gaza.

“The fees vary depending on how the crossings are operating,” he said. “When the crossings are open, the prices go down.” The week he spoke in early October, prices had risen somewhat in Gaza due to Israeli closures for Jewish holidays and the anniversary of the Oct. 7 attack, he and other traders said.

Huwaiti said he didn’t work with a specific coordinator, but rather with whoever offered the lowest coordination fees. Depending on the item, amount and crossing conditions, Huwaiti said he can pay between 30,000 shekels ($9,740) and 100,000 shekels ($32,600) just in coordination fees. “It’s a market, so there are no fixed fees,” he said.

Sometimes he works directly with the coordinator and buys the items himself. Other times he works via a middleman in the Palestinian city of Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, whose coordination fees are all inclusive. Costs come up at all legs of the journey. If he imports goods, there are customs duties at Israel’s Ashdod port terminal, other taxes, and the cost of transportation from the port through an Israeli company. For both imported and Israeli-procured goods, there are scanning fees at various warehouses, checkpoints and crossings; a fee to move goods from one side of Kerem Shalom crossing to the other; and payment for moving his goods from the crossing to his warehouse in Gaza.

All along, everyone involved takes a cut. Huwaiti said the deals are negotiated by phone and leave no paper trail: Officially, his goods are imported in the coordinator’s name.

Eggs, which have a relatively long shelf-life, are less of an import risk than fresh produce, which can easily spoil if delayed or are not immediately sold, Huwaiti said.

Tomatoes, for example, used to be locally grown and cost between two ($0.52) and four ($1.04) shekels a kilogram, depending on the type and season. Last August in northern Gaza, the price for this staple of Palestinian cuisine reached its highest of the war: 110 shekels ($32.40) a kilogram, according to WFP’s market monitoring. These days Hussam buys tomatoes from Israel for 1.5 ($0.50) to two ($0.65) shekels a kilogram, but sells them wholesale in Gaza for seven ($2.30) to eight ($2.60) shekels after adding on coordination fees. “Sometimes some of the goods spoil, so I make up for the loss on one product with the profit from another to stay in business,” he said.

Driving Up Prices

Importer Mohammed Barqi, who said he is one of eight Israeli-approved traders, has extensive business dealings spanning Israel, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Egypt and Dubai. He told Sourcebase he did not charge coordination fees.

He said Israel permitted him to bring in more trucks than he could regularly fill, so he offered friends to import through him and added 12 to 13 percent as profit. “Everything is legal,” he said by phone from Cairo.

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Sourcebase spoke to one trader who said he had paid coordination fees to Barqi. The trader spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of jeopardizing his work opportunities. “The people most affected are the residents of Gaza,” said the trader of the Israeli-controlled system.

Barqi spoke to Sourcebase on October 8 as he tried to send two trucks of eggs into Gaza. He purchased the eggs from a major Israeli supermarket chain named Hatzi Hinam for 12 shekels ($3.91) a carton, he said. But that Thursday when the trucks arrived at Kerem Shalom crossing, the main conduit for goods to Gaza, his men found the gates closed for unclear reasons. He would have to wait until Sunday to import them, he said, because the crossing would be closed Friday and Saturday for the Jewish Sabbath. The delay cost him 8,000 shekels ($2,600) per truck in driver and storage fees, he said.

According to a breakdown of the costs Barqi sent when the eggs entered Gaza three days later on October 11, he spent 168,000 shekels ($54,600) to import them (including the added truck fees), and added on a 20,000-shekel ($6,500) profit for himself.

It was only after Sourcebase began asking questions about the shipment’s costs and profits that Barqi described a charitable discount. Barqi said his dad had decided to sell the eggs for a discounted 20 shekels ($6.50) a carton to wholesale traders, which he described as an act of charity. Barqi acknowledged that such discounts were unusual, but said he could afford to forgo a profit on this shipment because he would have other opportunities to make money.

Alongside the legal trade, cross-border smuggling rings involving Israeli soldiers, officials and businessmen have become a major conduit for goods — and have also pushed up prices. Items smuggled on trucks and through Israeli military entrances to Gaza include everything from cigarettes and tobacco to hard-to-procure medicines, solar panels, and spare parts that Israel won’t allow in under its broadly applied “dual-use” policy that restricts items with a potential military purpose.

Insufficient Aid and Trade

Last October, a U.S.-backed ceasefire began that lessened, though did not stop, Israeli bombardments and allowed for increased access to aid.

But in Gaza, practically the war never ended. Most Palestinians remain displaced and living in crowded tents or partially standing homes in the 30 percent of the small Palestinian Territory not controlled by Israeli forces. Sewage is everywhere. Electricity is scarce. While malnutrition rates have sharply dropped from unprecedented levels last summer, experts warn that gains are fragile as incomes and coping mechanisms are severely depleted. Most Palestinians can’t leave, and Israel has banned international journalists from independently entering the Strip. Gaza’s health ministry says Israeli bombs and bullets have killed more than 74,000 people and injured 175,300 others.

Allegations of Israel’s obstruction of aid and trade, starvation of Gaza’s population and destruction of its food production are among the issues in a genocide case before the International Court of Justice. Israel denies the charges and says there are no limits on the amount of goods it allows into Gaza.

Despite the still pressing needs, funding shortfalls have forced some aid groups to scale back. WFP, one of Gaza’s biggest food aid providers, recently reduced the number of people receiving food aid by 500,000 people, in addition to other cuts to cash assistance and hot meals.

Compounding donor fatigue, Israel has imposed new registration rules limiting the nongovernmental organizations that can bring aid into Gaza. Key ministers in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government have also pushed to entirely end any assistance and to settle the territory after forcing out Palestinian residents.

An official with the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), the Israeli defense ministry arm responsible for the movement of goods into Gaza, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in keeping with protocol, said authorities are not responsible for prices in Gaza. He blamed Hamas taxes, which he said could reach 50 percent, for inflating costs. Traders who imported goods or sold them wholesale told Sourcebase that Hamas authorities either did not tax or inconsistently did, and that basic food items were not taxed.

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For a few days this month, Israel briefly cut off commercial trade to Gaza after Hamas authorities proposed new fees, which were then walked back, according to Barqi. During the brief dispute, the price of eggs doubled in some parts of Gaza, if they could be found at all.

But overall, commercial shipments have increasingly outnumbered humanitarian aid deliveries to Gaza, according to the Gaza Chamber of Commerce. In the first two weeks of September, seven in ten trucks that crossed into Gaza carried commercial goods — 1,765 compared with 693 aid trucks — the highest proportion the chamber has recorded during the war.

Israel disputes those figures. An official with COGAT, the Israeli agency overseeing shipments, said roughly half the trucks entering Gaza carry humanitarian aid and that about 600 trucks enter five days a week. The official did not provide detailed figures. The COGAT official called the humanitarian situation in Gaza “stable” and said food was plentiful, citing a decline in malnutrition.

The figures are difficult to reconcile because authorities use different counting methods, recording shipments at different stages of the crossing process.

Daily Struggle

When trucks carrying eggs and other produce reach wholesale markets in Gaza City, stall owners such as Hady Eshteiwi, 23, race to buy them. “The varieties entering are scarce, and there is heavy demand for these items, so if you are late, at times you end up unable to get anything at all,” he said.

“In the fresh produce trade, fruits and vegetables, we relied entirely on local farming before the war,” he explained. “After the war broke out, that changed completely; everything began coming in as imports…. Whatever items are brought in through the crossing, we work with.”

Eshteiwi runs a stall made of stacked wooden containers draped in decorative cloth. His house was destroyed during the war. After being displaced at least eight times, he now lives with three brothers, one sister and his parents in a room at a school.

When he spoke on October 6, he said eggs sold for 34 ($11.02) to 38 ($12.32) shekels a carton, depending on the day, and tomatoes were in short supply. The week before he had sold tomatoes for 8 ($2.60) to 10 ($3.25) shekels a kilogram, turning a few shekels of profit. But that day he had bought a small amount for 17 ($5.50) shekels a kilo, and sold them for 20 shekels ($6.50) after adding on packaging and transport costs.

Like his customers, Eshteiwi has no electricity to run a refrigerator to keep his produce fresh.

Eshteiwi said representatives from Gaza’s Ministry of Economy try to impose price ceilings on goods, but ultimately market conditions determine them. He said he doesn’t pay taxes, though he pays the municipality a yearly fee for his stall, on top of rent to the owner of the land. His customers all live within walking distance, he said, because few can afford transportation to travel.

Among the day’s customers was Abu Riyala, 30, who is financially responsible for himself, his new wife, and five family members. His family home was destroyed and he now lives in a tent.

Abu Riyala gives 10 shekels of what he makes a day to his mother, 10 to his wife, and he buys bread if he can with whatever remains. When he got married last month, he didn’t have a spare change of clothes for the ceremony.

That October day he purchased two tomatoes for five shekels ($1.65). Before the war, he would have bought several kilos and cooked the tomatoes with ground meat. But now he eats meat once every week or two when it’s available at a local soup kitchen. The family has twice received money from the WFP, which they used to buy food, though the last time was four months ago.

His dinner that night would be tomato slices with processed cheese, a little oil, a toasted seasoning called dukkah, and cheap pita bread — a typical meal these days.

“I crave eggs,” he said. “I just want to buy myself nutritious food.”

Siham Shamalakh in Cairo and Salem Alrayyes in Gaza City contributed reporting.

Miriam Berger is a Madrid-based journalist writing a book about the Gaza war. She previously worked for the Washington Post covering the Middle East and other international news.

By Marilyn W. Thompson

Three weeks after Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest on federal sex trafficking charges in 2019, the FBI launched a covert investigation into online death threats against his victims, dispatching an undercover operative to a dark web chatroom after warning of an “immediate risk” to their lives, according to FBI records first identified by Sourcebase among 3.5 million pages of Epstein documents released by the Justice Department.

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The FBI said it “does not comment on the existence of investigations.” But the documents show the agency turned over records of the inquiry to the Justice Department.

The death threat records, not publicly detailed until now, offer a behind-the-scenes look at how the FBI responded as hundreds of women began to come forward to claim they were abused by Epstein or trafficked by him and his associates to other rich and powerful men.

For years, alleged victims have voiced fears for their personal safety and of possible retaliation as the Epstein case exploded into an international scandal. One of Epstein’s most prominent victims, Virginia Giuffre, posted on social media in December 2019 that the FBI had informed her of a credible death threat, and she wanted to make it “publicly known that I am in no way, shape or form suicidal.” It is unclear whether the threat she described was connected to this investigation. Giuffre was 41 when she died at a farm in Australia in 2025 in what authorities ruled a suicide. Her father has questioned the ruling.

Epstein died of apparent suicide in his federal prison cell in August 2019. Federal prosecutors later charged his former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, with sex trafficking. She was convicted in 2021 and is now serving a 20-year federal prison sentence.

Anonymous victims have sued the FBI in the Southern District of Florida, alleging their early complaints to law enforcement were ignored as Epstein built a network of political and financial influence around the globe. Lawyers for the FBI have asked a federal judge to dismiss the complaint, which now includes more than 30 plaintiffs. Epstein’s contacts over the years included his friend President Donald Trump, who says he distanced himself from Epstein in 2004 after a falling out, Prince Andrew, and powerful figures on Wall Street and at major corporations and universities.

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Until now, little has surfaced publicly about law enforcement’s actions on behalf of alleged victims, who have protested the government’s failure to protect their identities and act on their complaints.

“I don’t think the FBI took anything Epstein-related seriously enough,” said Dani Bensky, an alleged victim who testified in May before a hearing convened by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee.

The records reviewed by Sourcebase show that the FBI’s New York office began looking into a credible death threat in a chatroom known as “Deep-paste” on July 26, 2019, shortly after Epstein was arrested by federal authorities at a New Jersey airport as his private jet landed from Paris. The agency opened case file 9A-NY-3144791 to document the investigation.

Posted anonymously on July 25, the death threat threatened the “planned execution” of two Epstein victims. It also vowed to “take everyone out” and asked for help compiling a list of names and addresses. The names of victims identified in the chat were redacted by the Justice Department.

The documents raise questions about how diligently the FBI pursued the anonymous user. The file includes little information on steps the agency may have taken to inform or protect victims.

From the available documents, it appears the FBI dropped the investigation in March 2020.

They show the FBI deployed an Online Covert Employee, an agency specialist in digital intelligence gathering, to make “immediate cameo appearances” in the chat room to try to tease out the user’s identity. An FBI memo describing the assignment cited the “immediate risk to the life of the victims, both named and those unnamed,” according to the records.

The memo said the purpose of the inquiry would be “to attempt identification of the subject, identification of any co-conspirators, determine if any personal identifying information of the victims has been obtained or posted, and determine if any additional overt steps have been taken by any individuals targeting the victims.”

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The online intelligence specialist posted a first message on July 30, 2019 at 6:12 p.m.

“I can access address info easily. This shit isn’t the place for it,” the employee wrote, trying to convince the user to move to another site for a more detailed exchange. A second brief message was posted a few minutes later.

It is unclear if the FBI made additional attempts to draw out its target. Employees working in covert intelligence-gathering at the FBI are trained to regularly monitor the web, even on nights or weekends, and to approach subjects at unpredictable times, according to records in a follow-up investigation of security breaches in the FBI’s handling of Epstein files.

The records show that the FBI contacted a victim’s lawyer and shared information with its legal attache in Canberra, the capital of Australia. Some of Epstein‘s alleged victims were foreign citizens who came to the US on visas he arranged for them. Giuffre was a US citizen who moved to Australia in 2002.

A special agent reported in January 2020 there had been one additional post by the chat room user, but it was irrelevant to the death threat.

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In March, the agent said the Deep-Paste chatroom was either “temporarily or permanently” down. That month, the FBI officially closed its threat investigation. “There are no outstanding leads or evidence and no further investigative activity remains,” an internal memo said.

The Justice Department has estimated that as many as 1,000 women were harmed by Epstein’s sexual abuse and trafficking from his homes in Manhattan, Palm Beach and Paris, a ranch in New Mexico and his privately-owned Caribbean island Little Saint James, which was nicknamed “Little Saint Jeff.”

Lawyers for Epstein’s $577 million estate have said the Justice Department’s estimate of victims is too high. Thus far, the Epstein estate has funded a compensation program that paid out $121 million in settlements to about 150 alleged victims, and it reached private settlements with about 60 other women, according to court records.

In FBI interviews, alleged victims have described suspicious phone calls, frightening highway incidents and physical confrontations that have put them and their families at risk.

Giuffre was the most vocal of the alleged victims and authored a best-selling memoir about her time with Epstein. She alleged that Epstein loaned her out for sexual services to various men, including Prince Andrew, during an abusive relationship that lasted several years. Giuffre later married and moved to Australia.

Giuffre’s brother, Sky Roberts Jr., and sister-in-law Amanda Roberts, who have been prominent advocates for Epstein victims, said through a spokesperson that she never discussed details of the death threat the FBI warned her about. They have not challenged the suicide ruling. Her attorney did not respond.

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The available records do not indicate whether the FBI identified the person behind the threats or what steps, if any, it took to protect the intended victims.

“Knowing that the FBI was aware of death threats against survivors, my first question is: What was done to protect these women?” said Sharlene Rochard, a Canadian model and actress who has alleged she was abused by Epstein. “Their lives were being threatened. They were in danger.”

Marilyn W. Thompson is an award-winning investigative reporter and editor whose career has included stints in Washington, New York, Philadelphia, Kentucky and South Carolina. Her work on the Jeffrey Epstein files began in 2025 for The Post and Courier in Charleston, SC, and was recently published in The Guardian.

Some of the most important stories in journalism are hiding in plain sight. The evidence is there — in court records, government documents, financial disclosures, internal emails and congressional testimony. But finding the right piece of information, connecting it to other evidence and recognizing its significance can take weeks or months of painstaking work.

Sometimes the story never gets told.

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We are launching Sourcebase News because we believe artificial intelligence can help change that. Not by replacing reporters or the judgment they bring to their work, but by giving them the ability to investigate vast collections of information in ways that were previously impossible.

The question we have been working on is simple: What if journalists could spend less time searching for the facts and more time figuring out what they mean?

How It Works

Over several years, Ron Suskind, the renowned journalist, and teams of leading technologists developed an AI customized for the truth discovery efforts of journalism. It allows reporters to ask questions of entire archives, compare records, identify contradictions and pursue connections that might otherwise go unnoticed. Crucially, every sentence of generated response by the AI come with citations of the source from which it is drawn, allowing journalists to return to the original material and verify what the evidence actually says — and to catch the system if it gets something wrong. As the name indicated, the system is rigorously source-based.

That last point is essential. We recognize that artificial intelligence can make mistakes, misunderstand context, and produce convincing but inaccurate assertions. But documents aren’t necessarily truthful just because they are authentic, either. An official report can be misleading. A witness can lie. A financial disclosure can obscure as much as it reveals.

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Finding information is only the beginning of journalism. Establishing its credibility, understanding its significance and weaving it into a compelling, fair and accurate narrative require human judgment. Technology can make that process easier, but it cannot substitute for the reporter’s curiosity, skepticism or sense of what makes a story worth telling.

Sourcebase News is where we intend to demonstrate that in practice.

What We Want to Do

Our central mission is to publish original investigative reporting by journalists who use Sourcebase to uncover stories buried in primary documents. These investigations will be reported and written by journalists, not generated by AI. Among our first offerings is an investigation by veteran reporter Marilyn W. Thompson, who used Sourcebase to identify a little-noticed FBI inquiry into threats against Jeffrey Epstein’s victims in records that had already been made public.

We will also publish a daily morning report on what President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social after 9 p.m. the previous evening. The president often uses late-night posts to announce policy, attack opponents and move markets, and readers deserve a careful, contextualized account by morning. AI will produce an initial draft, using our extensive archive of Trump’s statements and social media posts to provide historical context. An experienced human editor will review the reporting, verify claims and determine what is newsworthy before publication. Every report will be labeled as having begun as an AI draft.

Our ambitions extend beyond the journalism we publish ourselves. At a time when newsrooms are shrinking and resources for investigative reporting are increasingly scarce, we want to give talented journalists more opportunities to pursue ambitious stories, including reporters who work independently or at other news organizations. We also intend to highlight important work produced elsewhere with the help of Sourcebase, giving credit to the journalists and institutions responsible for it. When we do, we will disclose any commercial relationship between Sourcebase and the people or organizations involved. Whether someone is a customer will not determine what we feature or how we cover it.

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This Substack, along with our website, will be a home for original investigations and overlooked evidence. And we want readers to see the material behind our reporting, rather than simply take our word for it.

Who we are

Sourcebase brings together an unusual mix of journalists and technologists. Our CEO, Ron Suskind, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author whose reporting has exposed the inner workings of government and powerful institutions. Our chief content officer, Glenn Kessler, spent almost three decades at The Washington Post, including nearly 15 years writing The Fact Checker column.

Chief operating officer Winston Chen founded Voice Dream, whose reading software won an Apple Design Award. Chief technology officer John Nguyen, a leader in AI development, co-founded Vlingo, an early developer of voice-recognition software and the virtual assistant. Adam Cheyer, Siri’s inventor, is a longtime technical consultant with Sourcebase, which has developed proprietary technology.

As to ownership, the company’s founder, Suskind, who has five technology patents, is Sourcebase’s major shareholder. Among the minority investors, each with below 10 percent ownership, the five largest – one of which is OpenAI with three percent – all together own 24 percent of the company and have no influence over editorial matters.

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We won’t always get everything right. When we make mistakes, we will acknowledge and correct them. Our use of AI doesn’t diminish our responsibility for accuracy and fairness. If anything, it makes those obligations more important.

Our ambition is not to produce more journalism with fewer journalists. It is to make more ambitious journalism possible.

— The Editors, Sourcebase News