American Oversight’s Big Stories of 2023

From exposing right-wing attacks on education in Florida to mapping out the election denial movement’s latest attacks on voting rights, American Oversight in 2023 used public records requests and litigation to investigate and inform the public about abuses of power and threats to our democracy.

Here are some of American Oversight’s biggest stories of the year.

Attacks on Education

Whitewashing History

We obtained records that provided new details about Florida’s rejection of the AP African American Studies course. The documents — released in response to our lawsuit and reported on by the Tampa Bay Times and the Miami Herald — revealed how reviewers sought to whitewash the history of slavery and racial injustice in favor of a minimized and conservative-friendly view of the realities of our nation’s struggles with race relations.

The records exposed the dangers of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ sweeping changes to public education in Florida, including by preventing students from learning history free from partisan spin thanks to his “Stop WOKE Act,” which restricted classroom discussion of systemic and historical racism.

For example, Florida Department of Education reviewers of the AP course objected to lessons about slavery or racial disparities for being “one-sided” or lacking in “opposing viewpoints.” Reviewers sought to emphasize the role of white Americans in ending slavery, and called out lessons about slavery’s legacy of racial wealth disparities for “promoting the critical race theory idea of reparations.”

Other documents released in response to our lawsuit against the Florida Department of Education, reported on by the Washington Post, revealed textbook publishers’ frustration with the state’s onslaught of restrictions for math and social studies textbooks. The records contained previously unseen examples of how publishers, in the absence of clear guidance from the state, changed lessons in math textbooks to remove references to different cultures, providing a glimpse of how far-right restrictions combined with inadequate definitions have resulted in denying students crucial information and context about the world. In one instance, a story about the global history of coffee and tea that was used to introduce adding and subtracting decimal numbers was replaced with a passage about working in an animal hospital.

The records also revealed publishers’ frustrations: One company sent a letter stating that it had learned from news reports that its book had been rejected for including so-called “Special Topics” like critical race theory and culturally responsive teaching that were “for the most part not defined.” 

“We worked really hard,” wrote a representative of another publisher in one email, “to follow the guidance we were given from the DOE every step of the way so it surprises me that someone found that we specifically mentioned culturally relevant teaching.” 

Records we obtained that were reported on by Inside Higher Ed illuminated the conservative political connections of recent hires at New College Florida, the public liberal arts school that DeSantis has overhauled to be more conservative. Many of the school’s recent top hires had little to no prior experience working in higher education — but they did have close ties to DeSantis allies or conservative politics.

Mapping Out the Election Denial Network and Threats to Voting Rights

In December, we published our in-depth report examining the push to discredit the leading tool used by states to maintain up-to-date voter rolls: the Electronic Registration Information Center. The nonpartisan system has in the last two years become a target of far-right misinformation and conspiracy theories, and our report draws upon thousands of pages of government records we obtained as well as public reporting and input from election experts to show how the attacks on ERIC are being perpetrated by many of the same people who sought to overturn the 2020 election.

As the report outlines, the slew of state departures from ERIC has opened the door from Trump allies like Cleta Mitchell and other prominent election deniers to promote their own alternatives that would make it easier for voter fraud activists to challenge the voting rights of other citizens — and make states more vulnerable to false claims of election fraud in 2024. Moreover, the records reveal that state officials privately acknowledged the importance of ERIC before withdrawing, and left ERIC without any adequate replacements in place. Read the full report here.

Four criminal indictments were filed against Donald Trump in 2023, including charges against him for his attempt to overturn his 2020 election loss. In the federal and Georgia election interference cases, more than a dozen co-defendants or unindicted co-conspirators were also named or likely referred to, illustrating a stark fact: that Trump did not operate alone when he tried to upend our democracy.

In the months and years after the failed insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, many of those same allies continued to work to cast doubt on the results of the election, from the bogus “audits” and election inquiries in states like Arizona and Wisconsin to the attacks on ERIC. We published a detailed guide to records we obtained that shed light on the work of these prominent election deniers. 

Former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark, who was named as a co-defendant in the Fulton County case and was referred to in the federal indictment as a co-conspirator, was willing to bolster Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud and help him use the DOJ to overturn his election loss.

We obtained emails Clark sent in the days after the Jan. 6 insurrection that were cited in a report by the Washington Post on how Clark has become a “rising legal star for Republicans” — despite his role in trying to overturn democracy. 

Two days after the attack on the Capitol, as Clark was preparing to leave the Trump administration, he emailed acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, apparently betraying no qualms about his part in Trump’s schemes. “On most matters, we have been in total and vigorous agreement. … But no one can agree on all things and reasonable minds can differ,” Clark wrote. Rosen wrote to another top official that he would not respond, adding that it appeared that Clark “still does not recognize how harmful his actions and proposals were.”

Abuses of Power in the States

In September, we filed a lawsuit against a secret panel convened by Wisconsin Assembly Speaker Robin Vos to advise on the potential impeachment of a state Supreme Court justice, alleging violations of the state’s Open Meetings Law. “It’s bad enough to threaten to remove an elected justice for political gain,” American Oversight Executive Director Heather Sawyer said, “but it’s an additional violation of the public trust to be making plans in secret.”

We also filed requests for records from or about the panel, later amending our lawsuit to include claims under the state’s Public Records Law. Our litigation brought the people of Wisconsin much-needed information, including the names of all three former justices on the panel, and pried loose documents revealing that two of the three members had advised Vos against pursuing impeachment.

Emails we obtained demonstrated the lengths to which the Missouri health department went to remove resources about youth and LGBTQ sexual health from its website. The records from January 2023 show a senior communications official in the department instructing employees to delete the links from an adolescent health information page; other emails show staff discussing whether other resources were too “controversial” for Missouri.

The documents further demonstrate the chilling effect of the wave of attacks on LGBTQ and reproductive rights. In reporting on the records we obtained, the Kansas City Star interviewed a former department employee who said that the deletions were “part of a larger pattern of political pressure from outside and within the health agency.”

Trump Administration Accountability and Other Investigations

The amount of taxpayer money known to have been spent at Trump businesses during the previous administration keeps increasing, even years after Trump left office. According to documents released to American Oversight this year, the Pentagon spent nearly $1 million at Trump properties from July 2017 to November 2019.

While a full accounting of how Trump used the presidency to line his pockets is essential, it’s important that information like this makes it to the public sooner. “As far as we can tell, this is the first time these specific expenses have been reported — and they are long overdue,” Sawyer told Forbes’ Zach Everson in his reporting on the documents. “While we expect to receive receipts of government spending at Trump properties for years to come, we urge the government to pick up the pace so that the American people have this information.”

We obtained several sets of documents that provide further evidence of the politicized roots of Special Counsel John Durham’s years-long, multimillion-dollar investigation into the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia inquiry. During a hearing in June, members of the House Judiciary Committee referred to records we obtained that showed Durham’s frequent meetings with former Attorney General William Barr during the course of his investigation. 

Members of the committee also pointed to texts and emails that shed light on the involvement of Seth DuCharme, then a top adviser to Barr, and we published newly unredacted versions of records that show DuCharme’s frequent attendance at meetings with Durham and Barr.

In a victory for transparency, a court in September ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement to redo its search for records we requested back in 2021 related to deaths of people in immigration custody, and to release them to the public. 

We also filed lawsuits seeking the release of documents detailing incidents of white supremacy across the U.S. armed forces. “The American people have the right to know how their military has responded to racist and extremist incidents,” Sawyer said. We’ll be publishing on our website records we receive in response.

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