Unfortunately, for many in North Carolina, this hurricane came with no warning and caused loss of life & property. People are still waiting for FEMA , while Trump with holds help.
In the 2 nd dispatch, If you’re in the Trump inner circle, you can benefit from insider trading. It’s against the Law! Where is enforcement?
Read ProPublica for an understanding of life in America under siege , if you’re not part of Trump’s inner circle.
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Dispatches
May 24, 2025 · View in browser
In today’s Dispatches: Engagement reporter Cassandra Garibay on how much was lost in the devastation of Hurricane Helene; our reporting on well-timed stock sales; and more from our newsroom.
Flooding from the South Toe River in Yancey County around 11 a.m. Sept. 27 (Courtesy of Zachary O’Donnell)
I’ve lived in California all my life. A few years ago I moved into an area of Santa Rosa that was leveled in 2017 by the record-breaking Tubbs Fire before being rebuilt. I’ve often watched fires creep closer to loved ones, frantically texting to ask if they’ve left or if they know when to go.
All that to say, I think about evacuations a lot.
How much warning would I need to grab my medication, my glasses, my wallet, my phone, my keys, a charger? And what about the things that I can’t replace: my dog, the rosary my late aunt kept in her purse, the handwritten letter my mom gave me when I moved to college?
What if I was taking a (much-needed) break from social media? Would the warnings reach me then?
For the past several months, I’ve been talking to people on the other side of the country about their experience with warnings for a different unprecedented and utterly devastating disaster: Hurricane Helene, the deadliest inland hurricane on record.
Read the story
Helene’s Unheard Warnings
Yancey County, North Carolina, a rural mountain expanse carved with rivers and creeks, bore the brunt of Helene’s devastation. The area experienced 30 inches of rainfall over three days and the hurricane’s highest recorded wind speeds. Yancey experienced the storm’s highest death toll per capita in North Carolina.
Despite the dire forecasts leading up to the storm, there were no evacuation orders in the county. ProPublica South reporter Jennifer Berry Hawes, research reporter Mollie Simon and I spoke to dozens of survivors and analyzed hundreds of messages from local officials to understand why.
What we learned became the storywe published earlier this week, which retraced the storm’s devastation through the people who experienced it. We summarized the story’s main takeaways in another post. Those takeaways include the fact that North Carolina does not require training for local emergency managers, that previous attempts to map areas for landslide risks were thwarted by powerful interests and that evacuation orders varied from county to county.
We learned that while some people in Yancey did receive a door knock in time to scramble up the hills before flooding, many did not. A common thread among those who were alerted to danger and those who were not was that almost no one had a chance to grab the belongings they cherished most.
One woman along Cattail Creek told us that she lost family heirlooms and it felt like losing her loved ones all over again. Another lost photos and documents of the town’s history. Another who survived the landslide along Tudy Creek lost her late husband’s ashes.
I listened to people grapple with these losses. As an engagement reporter, part of my job is to think about how our reporting can better reflect peoples’ experiences and how it can offer something of use to their lives. As we dug into the warnings and lack of clear evacuation orders, I kept wondering what might have been saved if things had gone differently and whether, after the fact, there was a way to memorialize what was lost.
Inspired by some of the recent local efforts to preserve community memory, such as a lost and found Facebook group for areas affected by Helene or local artists creating models or watercolor paintings of the landmark B.B. Wilson store, we decided it would be worthwhile to continue asking locals what the storm destroyed that they would have saved given the chance.
If you live in or near Yancey County, consider leaving us a voicemail at 828-201-2738 to share your answer. If you don’t live in the area but would like to share your experience with disasters, evacuation and preserving the physical items you love, you can reply to this email.
We’ll also continue reporting on Hurricane Helene’s aftermath to understand what lessons could better prepare these communities and others for future storms, as well as how the rebuilding effort is unfolding.
Thanks for reading,
Cassandra Garibay
Engagement reporter
Reporter Q&A
Well-Timed Trades
Over the last two weeks, we’ve published three stories about cabinet members Pam Bondiand Sean Duffy and more than a dozen other high-ranking officials and aideswho sold stocks in the days before President Donald Trump unveiled new tariffs that sent the stock market plummeting. Reporter Robert Faturechi answered three questions about these scoops.
How did you learn about these sales?
Like a lot of ProPublica stories, it was a team effort and built on past reporting. Back in 2020, during the first weeks of the pandemic, NPR reported that before shutdowns began, then-Sen. Richard Burr had given a VIP group a much more dire previewof the economic impact that the coronavirus would have than what he had told the public.
Robert Faturechi,Reporter
As a senator, he had been receiving briefings in the weeks before. I saw that story and thought, “Hmm, wonder if he traded on that information.” I looked up his trading records and discovered that before the coronavirus stock market crash, he had sold off massive amounts of stock. That ended up being a huge story.
When Trump began causing dramatic swings in the stock market with his tariffs announcements, I wondered if anyone in government was trading ahead of those announcements. To start, I needed the disclosures for executive branch officials, and I learned my soon-to-be co-reporter Brandon Roberts was already requesting those forms. We enlisted reporter Pratheek Rebala, who is based in Washington, to gather congressional trading records.
How do the people you wrote about explain the timing of the sales?
We reached out to everyone named in the stories, and they either said they had no advance knowledge of the tariffs announcements, have an investment manager who makes their trades or didn’t respond to questions. Bondi and the Justice Department have said nothing about her trades to us or other outlets. We know from her disclosures she had to sell by early May. But why she sold on April 2, the very day of Trump’s “Liberation Day” announcement, remains a mystery.
There’s a 2012 law called the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge, or STOCK, Act. It clarified that executive and legislative branch employees cannot use nonpublic government information to trade stock and requires them to promptly disclose their trades. What does enforcement of it look like?
No cases have ever been brought under the law. And some legal experts have doubts it would hold up to scrutiny from the courts, which in recent years have — not always, but generally — narrowed what constitutes illegal insider trading. That said, the law has still been impactful. It required the kinds of disclosure rules that made journalism like the kind we’re talking about here possible.
Burr has consistently denied any wrongdoing, and both the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission closed investigations into him without further action.
More from our newsroom
DOJ Abandons Effort to Address Phoenix’s Treatment of Homeless People
The “Invasion” Invention: The Far Right’s Long Legal Battle to Make Immigrants the Enemy
More Than a Dozen U.S. Officials Sold Stocks Before Trump’s Tariffs Sent the Market Plunging
Help Us Report on Sexual Assault and Misconduct by the Chicago Police Department
Chicago Police Dismissed a Recruit’s Claims That a Colleague Sexually Assaulted Her. Then He was Accused Again and Again.
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