When we met in early March, Jonathan Albright was still shrugging off a sleepless weekend. It was a few weeks after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School had killed 17 people, most of them teenagers, and promptly turned the internet into a cesspool of finger pointing and conspiracy slinging. Within days, ultraconservative YouTube […]
When the history books are written, Rod Rosenstein might just be the most interesting figure of the Russia investigation—the beleaguered deputy attorney general whose memo in his first days on the job was used to justify the firing of James Comey. After that he quickly appointed Robert Mueller as the special counsel and spent the […]
Five years ago, 25-year-old radical libertarian Cody Wilson stood on a remote central Texas gun range and pulled the trigger on the world’s first fully 3-D-printed gun. When, to his relief, his plastic invention fired a .380-caliber bullet into a berm of dirt without jamming or exploding in his hands, he drove back to Austin […]
In the midafternoon of January 11, 2007, US Air Force major general William Shelton sat at the head of a table in a command center at California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base, holding a telephone to each ear. Shelton was the commander in charge of maintaining the US military’s “situational awareness” in space—and the situation, at […]
We’re standing on the edge of a cliff on a remote Texas ranch, a long patch of rocky desert stretching out below to the verdant banks of the Rio Grande, a silver ribbon 2 miles distant. On the horizon, a light haze shrouds the mountains of northern Mexico. The whistle of a stiff and constant […]
James Clapper was eating lunch in Muscat, Oman, on November 9, 2016, when at 2:31 am EST Donald Trump was declared the winner of the presidential election. Clapper was on one of his final trips abroad at the end of a 54-year-long career in the military and intelligence, working with allies to shore up US […]
Michael Caputo’s favorite novel is Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, the story of the Devil’s visit to Moscow in the 1930s and all the oddball characters who surround him. When the future Trump campaign official was living in Moscow in the 1990s, he moved to Patriarch Pond, the novel’s setting, and scratched his apartment’s […]
One day in the summer of 1969, a young Marine lieutenant named Bob Mueller arrived in Hawaii for a rendezvous with his wife, Ann. She was flying in from the East Coast with the couple’s infant daughter, Cynthia, a child Mueller had never met. Mueller had taken a plane from Vietnam. After nine months at […]
On December 2, 2015, a man named Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, opened fire on employees of the Department of Public Health in San Bernardino, California, killing 14 people and injuring 22 during what was supposed to be a staff meeting and holiday celebration. The shooters were tracked down and killed later […]
This investigation was published in partnership with The Marshall Project and FRONTLINE (PBS). When the DNA results came back, even Lukis Anderson thought he might have committed the murder. “I drink a lot,” he remembers telling public defender Kelley Kulick as they sat in a plain interview room at the Santa Clara County, California, jail. […]