In today’s newsletter: The Secret Service flaws that enabled the Trump assassination attempt, inside the secret world of the AP3 militia, the challenges of overturning a conviction and more from our newsroom.
Reporter Joshua Kaplan obtained more than 100,000 internal messages from American Patriots Three Percent, a militia that has long been one of the largest in the United States and has mostly managed to avoid scrutiny. Here are some highlights from our recent investigation:
Militias After Jan. 6: Internal messages reveal how AP3, one of the largest U.S. militias, rose even as prosecutors pursued other paramilitary groups after the assault on the Capitol.
Organized Vigilantism: AP3 has already sought to shape American life through armed vigilante operations — at the Texas border, outside ballot boxes and during Black Lives Matter protests.
Close Ties With Police: AP3 leaders have forged alliances with law enforcement around the U.S. Internal files reveal their strategies for building these ties and where they’ve claimed success.
In 2004, Russell Maze was convicted of murdering his infant son. A doctor said the baby had been violently shaken. Maze was sentenced to life in prison.
Since then, shaken baby syndrome has come under increasing scrutiny. Twenty years after Maze’s conviction, attorneys in the conviction-review unit in the Nashville, Tennessee, district attorney’s office came across the case and concluded that Maze was innocent of killing his son. But would that be enough to overturn his conviction?
ProPublica reporter and The New York Times Magazine staff writer Pamela Colloff investigated the story, which follows conviction-review unit director Sunny Eaton. Listen as Eaton breaks down what happened and what it reveals about innocence projects nationwide.
