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One of the toughest stories for any reporter to crack is a grand-jury deliberation. Jurors are sworn to secrecy, and while witnesses will sometimes blab after their appearance, it can be exceedingly difficult to confirm what goes on before an indictment is issued.

Which makes this Los Angeles Times story all the more impressive. Reporters James Queally and Brittny Mejia cite the accounts of three unnamed officials to show how the US attorney has failed to obtain some indictments over the recent immigration protests, amid grand jurors’ skepticism of prosecutors’ evidence and good faith. 

“The cases are faltering in part because of unreliable information provided by immigration agents claiming to be victims,” the Times team reported, paraphrasing a former prosecutor. One dubious case involved Andrea Velez, who was charged with assaulting a federal officer: “The criminal complaint alleged Velez, who is 4 feet 11 inches, stood in the path of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer with her arms extended, striking his head and chest when they collided.” After Velez’s attorney sought body-camera video, the feds dropped the case.

Last September, the cops in Red Bank, New Jersey, sent local media a five-page list of arrests from the previous month. At the end was this item: “Kyle Pietila, age 40 of Red Bank, was arrested on 08/31/2024 in the area of Reckless Pl. for Simple Assault by Ptl. Grace Maggiulli.”

That bit of news, along with dozens of other cases, was reported by several local outlets, including Red Bank Green, a site that has been covering the area since 2006. And sure enough, a criminal case eventually went forward. But it wasn’t against Pietila. The defendants were the editor and publisher of Red Bank Green. 

The case went haywire seven months after Pietila’s arrest, which stemmed, his lawyer said, from a dispute with his ex-wife. He got his case dismissed and also had his record expunged, meaning the assault charge would no longer show up in court records. Pietila took this to mean that the matter should also be deleted from Red Bank Green. So he contacted the site’s top brass several times to demand that the blotter item be removed from the site. 

Editor Brian Donohue wouldn’t take the item down, but they did update it to say that the arrest “was expunged on March 27, 2025 by Municipal Court Judge Frank LaRocca under an order determining the arrest ‘shall be deemed to have not occurred.’”

That didn’t satisfy Pietila, and things got testy. Donohue said in a sworn statement that when Pietila called him again last month, his “last words to me were to repeat my home address and ask if I lived there and then to ask, ‘How much money do you have?’”

Pietila then filed criminal complaints against Donohue and publisher Kenny Katzgrau. A judge initially found probable cause that the men had violated a New Jersey law stating that “any person who reveals to another the existence of an arrest, conviction, or related legal proceeding with knowledge that the records and information pertaining thereto have been expunged or sealed is a disorderly person.” 

On Thursday, the charges were withdrawn.

The site’s management deserves credit for standing on principle—especially at a time when big companies like Paramount/CBS wither in the face of bogus legal threats. It would’ve been easy for Red Bank Green to remove the item from the site, and almost no one would’ve noticed. Another laurel goes to lawyer Bruce Rosen, a former journalist who, working pro bono, spent at least twelve hours on the case.

That said, the issue (ethical, not legal) of whether to run names in blotters is murky. People get arrested, but prosecutors drop charges, judges dismiss cases, defendants are found not guilty. And the police are fallible. “As journalists, we need to question the ethics and value” of publishing names, University of California, Berkeley, journalism professor Lisa Armstrong said, responding to a LinkedIn post from Katzgrau. “An arrest is not evidence of a crime.… To publish news of someone’s arrest could mean painting them in a negative light only to find out later that they didn’t actually commit the crime with which they were charged.” And in some parts of the world, particularly Europe, citizens are empowered to demand that Google and other search engines delist links that include sensitive or unflattering information. 

Donohue agrees this isn’t an easy issue. “I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all approach,” he told me. “We have decided through a lot of internal discussion that this continues to have community value. Especially in an age where there is so much misinformation and disinformation in media that can tear communities apart.” Katzgrau told me that they are experimenting with delisting some blotters from Google search after they’re a few years old. 

And Pietila’s efforts backfired. What was once a small item about his arrest is now featured in multiple stories in New Jersey and beyond.

A dependable way to get credulous reporters to parrot dubious statistics is to assign them exactitude. So, rather than saying that many more ICE officers are being assaulted on the job, it may seem more believable if you say assaults are up 830 percent.

And in the past few days we’ve seen the New York Times, The Hill, and Fox News all dutifully report that figure as if it’s based on hard research.

And maybe it is. But if you read the Department of Homeland Security release, you’d have no idea whether that’s the case. “ICE officials are facing an 830 percent increase in assaults from January 21st to July 14th compared with the same period in 2024,” DHS announced.

Of course, we would expect a significant increase, given the heightened presence of ICE agents, the surge in arrests, and the aggressive quotas set by the White House. Moreover, we don’t even know what DHS considers an “assault”—especially because the agency’s own press release mentions threats and doxing, as well as physical assaults. (DHS did not respond to a request for comment.)

If it’s too much to put a number in context, at least reporters can instill a bit of skepticism, as Newsweek’s Billal Rahman did by noting that DHS “has provided regular updates on the percentage increase in assaults without releasing the full underlying data.”

We’ve heard a lot about Medicaid fraud in recent weeks, particularly as Congress passed a bill that will cut back on the program—either by removing worthy people from the rolls or by forcing “lazy” recipients to do an “honest day’s work” before qualifying for benefits.

There is, in fact, significant fraud, but the big numbers often come from companies, not individuals. That is the focus of stories by A.J. Lagoe, Kelly Dietz, and Gary Knox, reporters for Minneapolis’s KARE TV, as they examined firms that bill Medicaid to provide housing services to needy people. Last May, and then again last week, a three-reporter team found evidence that companies are billing the state for meetings with needy clients, even though those people say those meetings didn’t happen and they got little or no help. And often, taxpayers are on the hook for thousands of dollars per client. One company “billed Medicaid 46 different times—each time claiming to have spent two hours helping” a couple find housing. “Yeah, they didn’t do anything,” the client told KARE. 

Efforts to reach the companies were largely fruitless. At one firm, there was a “white piece of paper taped to the door, with office hours claiming to start at 9am.” The reporter “knocked, but no one answered.” At another, “reporters visited and found a vacant house with a Realtor’s lockbox on the door.” Shortly after the May story ran, the state opened an investigation.

Last week, we noted that the New York Times quoted a DHS spokesperson anonymously, without an explanation. That raises the question of why reporters would hide the identity of a government flack, unless using their name would endanger their job or personal security, which wasn’t the case in this story.

CNN did the same thing this week, breaking a terrific scoop while also providing anonymity to two government spokespeople. It was made worse as those flacks used CNN’s platform to denigrate a FEMA official who had quit amid concerns over how the agency handled the Texas floods. One unnamed spokesperson said this: “Any bureaucrat with fingers to type and two brain cells to rub together can draft an internal memo suggesting changes to niche bureaucratic process.” CNN also quoted a spokesman saying “it is laughable that a career public employee, who claims to serve the American people, would choose to resign over our refusal to hastily approve a six-figure deployment contract without basic financial oversight.” 

A twist: The latter quote appeared verbatim in the Times’ next-day follow-up to CNN. And it was attached to a name: Tricia McLaughlin, the DHS flack. 

I asked CNN spokesperson Emily Kuhn about the company’s policy (making clear I wasn’t asking her to out a source). Her response: “We don’t discuss our editorial policies externally as a general rule, so we would officially decline to comment.”

Sit down. Take a few deep breaths. Check to make sure you are near a loved one, preferably someone who has access to your healthcare proxy

Okay, ready?

We at CJR are giving a laurel to Rupert Murdoch. 

According to Donald Trump’s recent lawsuit, the president pressured Murdoch to spike the Wall Street Journal’s blockbuster about that birthday letter for Jeffrey Epstein. Murdoch and News Corp CEO Robert Thomson, the suit alleges, “authorized the publication of the Article after President Trump put them both on notice that the letter was fake and nonexistent.”

The story ran anyway, and the Journal followed that Wednesday with another scoop, about Attorney General Pam Bondi telling Trump that his name appears multiple times in the government’s files on Epstein. 

Look, I know. There are 787.5 million reasons why Murdoch has harmed the press and our democracy. But he didn’t cave to Trump this month, the way that other media executives have been doing.

“I’m ninety-four years old, and I will not be intimidated,” Murdoch told associates, according to a Washington Post account. We’ll take it. 

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