Author name: moderat ereport

by Katherine Mangan, special to ProPublica ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. When the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights notified George Mason University on July 1 that it was opening an antisemitism investigation based on a recent complaint, the university’s president, Gregory Washington, said he was “perplexed.” Compared with other campuses, where protesters had ransacked buildings and hunkered down in encampments, George Mason had been relatively quiet over the past year, he said. His administration had taken extensive steps to improve relations with the Jewish community, had enacted strict rules on protests and had communicated all of that to the OCR during a previous antisemitism investigation that remained open. By the next day, though, there were signs that the new investigation was part of a coordinated campaign to oust him. One piece of evidence: the speed with which conservative news outlets reported on the OCR’s action, which hadn’t been publicly announced. The OCR letter was embedded in a July 2 article published by a right-wing news outlet, The Washington Free Beacon. The next day, the City Journal, published by the influential and conservative Manhattan Institute, ran an opinion essay headlined “George Mason University’s Disastrous President.” The article accused Washington, the university’s first Black president and a first-generation college graduate, of backing “racially discriminatory DEI programs” — referring to diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — and failing to address campus antisemitism. It concluded that “Washington’s track record warrants his resignation or dismissal.” The similarities to recent events at another public university in Virginia were hard to ignore. The OCR’s George Mason investigation was opened just four days after the University of Virginia’s president, James E. Ryan, announced that he was resigning to help settle a federal probe into the university’s DEI commitments. That happened after a group of conservative University of Virginia alumni, the Jefferson Council, published blog entries and newspaper ads decrying the president — in part for focusing too heavily on diversity efforts — and demanding that he resign. The council’s connections to board members and Justice Department lawyers led many observers in higher education to conclude that Ryan’s forced resignation was the result of a coordinated assault. Now, Washington is feeling the same heat coming from similar sources. The temperature cranked up several degrees Thursday morning, when the Education Department notified George Mason that it’s opening a second investigation — this one alleging the university illegally considers race in hiring and promoting employees. The department said it was acting on complaints from “multiple professors” at GMU. In a press statement Thursday, Craig Trainor, the Education Department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, suggested that the agency has already reached sweeping conclusions about the university’s hiring practices. “Despite the leadership of George Mason University claiming that it does not discriminate on the basis of race, it appears that its hiring and promotion policies and practices from 2020 to the present, implemented under the guise of so-called ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,’ not only allow but champion illegal racial preferencing in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This kind of pernicious and wide-spread discrimination — packaged as ‘anti-racism’ — was allowed to flourish under the Biden Administration, but it will not be tolerated by this one,” he wrote. The university rebutted those accusations in a statement saying it is complying with all federal and state mandates and does not discriminate. The university “received a new Department of Education letter of investigation this morning as it was simultaneously released to news outlets, which is unprecedented in our experience,” the statement said. “As always, we will work in good faith to give a full and prompt response.” Meanwhile, dozens of Jewish faculty members at GMU have signed on to a statement condemning “an attack on our university community and our GMU President that is quickly intensifying under a false, racially divisive, and deeply cynical claim of combating antisemitism.” Even before Thursday’s announcement, Washington said he had detected a pattern that’s been playing out at other universities targeted by President Donald Trump’s administration: Multiple investigations are filed in quick succession and word leaks to news organizations. “It seems like this is orchestrated,” Washington said during an interview Wednesday. “The same people who are kind of aligned that got rid of Jim Ryan are aligned against me.” He finds the timing of the attacks against him and his university troubling. “Given that the Office for Civil Rights doesn’t publicly announce who is under investigation, we were wondering how these conservative outlets even got the information in the first place,” Washington said. The “almost hateful discussions of me” in the City Journal article looked like “a concerted effort to try to paint the institution in a negative light.” Washington said the piece seemed to be urging the Trump administration to take the investigation to the next level, the Department of Justice, which could levy punishments against the university. Many faculty members at George Mason agree. They worry that despite the OCR’s insistence in its letter to the university that its investigation will be unbiased, the Trump administration has already reached a verdict on the institution’s president and wants him out. As evidence, they point to a web of ties between right-wing news organizations and politicians — including Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin — as well as some George Mason board members. “The same unfounded and coordinated attacks that pushed Ryan out of UVa are now being leveled at GMU President Greg Washington,” the campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors wrote in an online post. “We think the DOJ, Governor Youngkin, and Youngkin’s appointees” to GMU’s governing board “are trying to force President Washington out so they can hire an ideological ally who will impose the Governor’s political ideologies on Mason’s governance and curriculum.” Late Wednesday, Virginia’s two Democratic U.S. senators, Mark R. Warner and Tim Kaine, doubled down on those

by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Anchorage Daily News. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week. Anchorage Mayor Suzanne LaFrance said this week that the city has hired a full roster of prosecutors and is no longer dropping criminal charges due to short staffing. The announcement comes nine months after the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica reported the mass dismissals. “Public safety begins with accountability — and we cannot hold people accountable if we don’t have prosecutors in court,” LaFrance said in a news release, announcing that Alaska’s largest city has filled all “frontline” prosecutor jobs for the first time since 2020. “This was about more than filling positions. It was about rebuilding the systems that keep Anchorage safe.” An investigation by the newsrooms, published in October, found that city prosecutors dropped hundreds of misdemeanor cases because there weren’t enough attorneys on the payroll. Between May 1 and Oct. 2 of last year, the city dropped more than 250 domestic violence assault cases and more than 270 drunken driving cases due to an inability to meet the 120-day deadline Alaska sets for upholding a defendant’s right to a speedy trial. Days after the investigation came out, the state of Alaska announced it would help prosecute city cases to avoid speedy-trial dismissals. But those state prosecutors are no longer needed. According to the city, the municipal prosecutor’s office now has a full staff of 12 “frontline” prosecutors who take cases to trial, plus a supervisor and an attorney who files motions and appeals. The only vacancy, they said, is a supervisory role: deputy municipal prosecutor. That amounts to a vacancy rate of about 7% in the prosecutor’s office. In contrast, more than 40% of city prosecutor positions were vacant as of mid-2024, according to a city spokesperson. At a Wednesday “trial call” hearing at downtown Anchorage’s Boney Courthouse, Assistant Municipal Prosecutor Andy Garbe announced the city was ready to go to trial in case after case, including a drunken driving arrest, weapons charges and domestic violence assaults. It was a far different scene from September, when prosecutors were routinely forced to drop charges in cases nearing the speedy-trial deadline. “We’re not in the position we were last fall,” Garbe said, referring to the forced dismissals. “That’s not happening anymore.” City prosecutors said they are still dismissing cases for reasons other than speedy-trial deadlines. For example, on Wednesday, Garbe moved to dismiss two cases, including a domestic violence assault, citing factors such as the weakness of the case and unavailable witnesses. A defense attorney had warned the cases were nearing the 120-day speedy-trial deadline, but Garbe said the timing was not the reason for the dismissals. In Anchorage, city prosecutors handle misdemeanor cases while state attorneys generally prosecute felonies. With the most serious felonies, the state has long dealt with problems apart from Anchorage’s mass dismissals. The newsrooms reported in January that some of those cases are delayed as long as a decade before reaching trial. In March, the Alaska Supreme Court issued a series of orders aimed at reducing delays. District Court Judge Brian Clark cited the Supreme Court orders on Wednesday when asking attorneys if they were ready to go to trial, noting the pending deadline.