How this works

Where the stories come from

Every morning at 5am Pacific an automated pipeline reads three things: the press releases the Justice Department and the SEC publish themselves, and the headlines Google News is carrying. It is looking for people who held public office, public money, or a public trust and are now facing official consequences — charges, an indictment, a conviction, a guilty plea, a sentencing, a regulatory action, an inspector general finding.

Google News says which newsroom ran a story and gives no link that leads anywhere, so the pipeline goes to the newsroom instead and reads its own RSS feed to find the article. Headlines are never enough to write from. Every candidate is fetched in full and read, and a story whose sources cannot be retrieved is dropped.

Not every newsroom serves a feed, and some refuse the request outright. When that happens the piece says how many outlets reported the story and how many could actually be read, because those are different numbers and only one of them is about the story.

What gets published

A language model writes the piece, and it is given exactly one body of material to work from: the full text of the source articles. It is instructed that anything not in those articles does not go in the piece, including things it may believe it knows about the person.

Every factual sentence carries a marker like [S1] naming the article it came from. Those are not decoration. Before anything is published, the model must supply a quote copied word for word from the source behind each claim, and an automated check confirms that quote really appears in that article.

If a single quote fails, the piece does not run. It is held instead, with the failure written on it, and a person decides whether anything can be salvaged. A second pass then reads the finished prose back against the sources looking for anything the writer added that no article supports, and that can hold a piece too. Nothing reaches this site with a quote that could not be found.

A day with no post is a normal outcome. The pipeline would rather publish nothing than publish something it cannot stand behind.

Who this site is about

Anyone who held power over other people or other people's money, and abused it. That is read broadly and on purpose: elected officials, government employees, judges, police, school and hospital administrators, union officers, clergy, company owners and executives, financial advisers, lawyers, landlords and care operators at scale. The test is whether people had to trust this person and had no easy way to check them.

An ordinary crime by someone who merely happens to have a job is not this site. The wrongdoing has to be an abuse of the position.

Three sources, minimum — or one official document

A piece runs here on three independent sources or on one official primary document, and there is a third way in that exists because of how the web actually behaves — it is described below. Independence means three separate newsrooms: three articles off the same outlet are one account, not three. Statutes quoted in a piece do not count toward the three. The law is evidence, not a second newsroom.

The three-source rule exists because a single outlet can get it wrong. That risk is real for a local television station working fast, and close to nothing for a court filing the United States government has signed its name to. Three outlets reprinting the same press release add nothing you can check that the release did not already give you. And a complaint filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission is one document by design — there is no second SEC. Insisting on three would mean saying nothing on the day a case is actually filed.

So the exemption is narrow and it is literal. The single document has to come from the government, published by the body that took the action, on justice.gov or sec.gov. A local news writeup about an indictment is still one outlet’s account, and still needs two more.

The third way in is about newsrooms that will not serve us the article. A large publisher often refuses an automated request outright, so a story can be reported by twenty outlets and readable at two. Counting only what could be downloaded would let bot-blocking decide what this site publishes, and the biggest newsrooms block hardest. So a piece may also run when three or more outlets reported the story and at least two of them could be read — the two readable ones are what every quote is checked against, and the rest are counted, named and not cited.

Every piece records which of these it rests on, because you should not have to guess. Corroborated means independent outlets stood it up, and says how many reported it against how many could be read when those numbers differ. One official document means exactly that: no three independent accounts are behind it, and the weight it carries is the weight of a government filing and nothing else. The sources are listed on every piece either way, so you can go and read them.

Two kinds of piece, and how to tell them apart

Every piece carries two sections, and the difference between them is the whole point.

PROOF is what is documented. Charges, filings, findings, figures, dates. Every sentence in it is a statement of fact drawn from cited reporting, and checked against a verbatim quote before publication. When there is nothing documented, that section says so, and a reader should weigh the piece accordingly.

PUBLIC OPINION is what people are saying, and who is saying it. Every view is attributed to a named person or publication. You will not find “critics say” or “many believe” here, because an unattributed opinion is this site putting words in somebody’s mouth.

The stamp on the picture tells you which kind of piece you are reading. CORRUPT F**K! means official action has been taken, or documents tie the person to the conduct. CORRUPT F**K?! means nobody has charged anybody and the case rests on the weight of published opinion. The question mark is doing real work: it is the difference between this site asserting something and asking it.

A piece cannot be upgraded from the second to the first by enthusiasm. If no source reports official action, the verdict stays a question however confident the writing feels. And a piece resting on opinion needs at least three independent newsrooms saying it — two outlets repeating each other is not a preponderance of anything.

Opinion versus fact

This is an opinion site with evidence, and that is a deliberate position rather than a hedge. Opinion is worth something precisely when you can see what it is built on. So the judgements here are loud, and every fact underneath them is disclosed and linked, so you can read the same material and reach your own.

Calling someone a crook, a grifter or a disgrace is opinion, and this site has a lot of it. Saying someone took a specific sum of money on a specific date is a statement of fact, and those come only from the cited reporting.

Where a person has been accused but not convicted, the piece says accused, and names who is doing the accusing. Convictions and guilty pleas are stated plainly, because those are findings of fact by a court.

The receipts are kept

Every source is listed and linked at the foot of the piece. That is the part you can check, and it is the part that matters: go and read the same articles this was written from and see whether it says what they say.

Behind that, the full text of those articles and every quote the checker matched is kept as a private record, so a claim made here can be audited against the exact material it was written from months later. That record is not published — it is other people's copyrighted article text — and it is available to anyone with a real reason to see it. If you think something here is wrong, the link on the corrections page is the way to ask.

Credits

The network mark in the menu is “Network” by Anna Sophie, from the Noun Project. Everything else here — the stamp, the cards, the site — is original.

Getting it wrong

Automated systems make mistakes, reporting gets updated, charges get dropped and people get acquitted. If something here is wrong or has been overtaken by events, say so and it will be corrected or removed, with the change noted on the corrections page.