Raw Story hires two award-winning investigative reporters, new night editor

Raw Story hires two award-winning investigative reporters, new night editor
Raw Story investigative reporters Alexandria Jacobson and Mark Alesia.

Raw Story, America’s largest independently-owned political news site, has hired award-winning investigative reporters Mark Alesia and Alexandria Jacobson as it embarks on an expansion of its original journalism.

Raw Story has also hired David McAfee as night editor to manage the newsroom's expanded coverage during evenings and weekends.

"At a time when many news organizations are cutting back and laying journalists off, Raw Story is expanding our newsroom and our reporting ambitions," said Editor-in-Chief Dave Levinthal, who joined Raw Story in January. "Expect us to bring you a lot of news this year that you won't find elsewhere."

Alesia is an Indiana-based reporter who spent 16 years at the Indianapolis Star as an investigative news reporter, sports enterprise reporter and assistant sports editor. He is one of the three Indianapolis Star reporters who broke the Larry Nassar/USA Gymnastics story, which revealed how Nassar serially raped and assaulted child athletes while serving as the gymnastics team's doctor. The reporting, chronicled in books and the Netflix documentary "Athlete A", won numerous awards, including the University of Missouri’s Honor Medal and the Tom Renner Award from Investigative Reporters & Editors.

His reporting on a wide variety of other subjects has won 15 national and 20 first-place state awards, including Indiana Journalist of the Year as selected by the Society of Professional Journalists. A graduate of Indiana University, Alesia most recently worked as communications director for Indiana State University. Earlier in his reporting career, Alesia worked at CBS SportsLine, the Daily Herald of suburban Chicago, the Los Angeles Daily News and Riverside (Calif.) Press-Enterprise. He's frequently appeared on TV and radio, including CNN, ESPN and NPR.

Jacobson brings to Raw Story an extensive track record of social justice, education, consumer affairs, health care, tech and data science reporting. Her reporting has been published by numerous national outlets including ABC News, Chicago Sun-Times and The Chicago Reporter.

Jacobson's investigative work has been recognized with a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award and Peter Lisagor Award, and she recently earned first place prizes from the Chicago Journalists Association and Illinois Woman's Press Association. She earned her master’s and bachelor’s degrees in journalism from Northwestern University and has taught journalism classes at Northwestern University and DePaul University. She's also a skilled multimedia journalist, particularly in the realm of news and documentary video reporting and editing.

McAfee comes to the Raw Story after nearly a decade of writing about the legal industry for Bloomberg Law. He is also a co-founder and a commissioning editor at Hypatia Press, a publisher that specializes in philosophical works that challenge religion or spirituality.

Raw Story's focus on original and investigative journalism in 2023 has already yielded notable results.

In recent weeks, Raw Story has exclusively revealed that:

Contact: Editor-in-Chief Dave Levinthal, levinthal@rawstory.com

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The FBI conducted what a legal analyst described as a "highly unusual" search of an election office in the Georgia county where President Donald Trump and his allies were indicted for their efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.

Fulton County commissioner Mo Ivory challenged the warrant as “incorrect legally” seeking all ballots from that election and other evidence, and the FBI then obtained a corrected warrant listing Thomas Albus, an interim U.S. attorney in Missouri, as the government attorney, and CNN's Joey Jackson listed other details about the probe that stood out as odd.

"It's rather unusual," said Jackson, a former prosecutor, "inasmuch as this has been investigated and litigated and there have been a determination, there's been determinations as to no fraud. There's been three recounts, one of them manually. There's been inspections. The Trump [Department of Justice] itself has given the indication that there's no fraud here."

"Why is that relevant to your question?" he added. "It's relevant because when you're looking at a criminal warrant, you're looking at evidence of criminality. You're looking at making a determination as to whether there was voter fraud in terms of people who voted that should not have voted or any other type of deception, and so this magistrate would have had to draw some conclusions, and the reason I say that it's somewhat interesting is because if you have this previous litigation, this is not new, this is from 2020, and you have massive investigations and you have no determination as to criminality. What are we doing here?"

Trump's DOJ had sued Fulton County last year seeking ballot stubs, signature envelopes and other evidence from the 2020 election, but that case appeared to be going nowhere before federal investigators seized that evidence themselves.

"The civil suit is moot, and just backing up on that, this past October, as in 2025, there was a demand served by DOJ," Jackson explained. "They were relying upon the Civil Rights Act of 1960, and that act required that you retain records in terms of voting and that you produce them on demand. However, the issue is relating to discrimination. This was a law that was passed in terms of the Jim Crow South people who were excluded from voting, and so what ended up happening is, is that the the state said, no, we're not producing those records, and they were in civil litigation, and guess what records they were looking to get produced? The same records that when the state said, we're not giving them to you and filed a motion to dismiss three weeks ago saying, we're not giving you boxes of our voting records."

"Those are the same boxes that were just taken out, 700 of them," Jackson added. "So they did an end-around [on] the lawsuit. The lawsuit, in all measures, is now moot because the records DOJ was seeking in the civil lawsuit, not criminal, has just been gotten by the FBI."

The FBI currently has custody of that evidence, which the state has argued should be held under seal to preserve their integrity, but a judge had not yet issued a ruling about whether Georgia had to turn over those records to the DOJ.

"State officials are now saying, well, wait a second, if the narrative of the federal government is that there was fraud here, if the issue of the federal government is you did nothing right, state officials and everyone was rampantly going to vote if they're in the custody of the feds," Jackson said. "Now, who's to know that they're not going to be manipulated or otherwise used for the narrative of the federal government? That's the concern."

FBI Deputy Director Andrew Bailey, the former Missouri attorney general who has stated the 2020 election "absolutely stolen" from Trump, was present during the search, in addition to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Jackson was shocked to see them at the scene.

"It's so highly unusual, I'm just saying, what are we talking about now?" Jackson said. "First of all, taking a step back from that, the deputy director of the FBI, generally, they stay at headquarters. To give you some context, when Mar-a-Lago was raided in 2022, that was done by field operatives. The head of the agency and other important, right, everyone is important, but in terms of the people who run the agency, we're back at headquarters, the field-level supervisors were there executing that warrant here, right. You have a situation where the deputy director of the FBI is there, and the person who runs national security, who is in charge of foreign affairs, is here"

"It's unbelievable and it's unprecedented and we are in another world," he added, "and the major concern here, I'll just say very quickly, they're they're trying, the federal government, to do this in other jurisdictions. In fact, in Oregon, a judge made a ruling that, no, you're not getting these records. So I think more of this is to come in other areas."

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MAGA loyalists were furious Thursday after Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) announced that the Trump administration has pulled Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from its surge in Maine.

Collins said that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem informed her the administration was backing off its enforcement operation amid bipartisan backlash against aggressive ICE actions after the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minnesota and the arrests of legal immigrants in Maine.

"While the Department of Homeland Security does not confirm law enforcement operations, I can report that Secretary Noem has informed me that ICE has ended its enhanced activities in the State of Maine," Collins wrote on X.

MAGA followers on social media had a sharp response to the update and unleashed their responses at Collins.

"You’re a disgrace to the Republican Party! A real traitor," user George G., who has described himself as "MAGA all the way!" wrote on X.

"This is a betrayal of your voters if true," Jared Howe, HVAC specialist, wrote on X.

"Treasonous traitor," pro-MAGA user MJTruthUltra wrote on X.

"You are a communist scumbag," user Banjew George wrote on X.

"They should've stayed long enough to investigate you," user Chicago1Ray, who has described himself as "MAGA 100%" wrote on X.

"Resign," user Charlie Heidel wrote on X.

"You should resign immediately!! You are failing the people of Maine!!" User Roy Wimbish wrote on X.

President Donald Trump used Sen. Elizabeth Warren's (D-MA) tribute to Alex Pretti in an attempt to smear the slain 37-year-old nurse.

In a Truth Social post on Thursday, Trump shared a video of what was thought to be Pretti getting into an altercation with DHS agents days before his death.

"Caring for people was at the core of who he was," Warren says in the video. "He was incapable of causing harm. Alex carried patience, compassion, and calm as a steady light within him."

As Warren speaks, Pretti appears engaged in a scuffle with law enforcement days before he was killed.

"Even at the very end, that light was there. I recognized his familiar stillness and signature calm composure," the senator notes.

Trump also shared remarks from one of his fans, calling the video "The Story of Alex Pretti."

Asked about Pretti earlier this week, Trump replied, "I love everybody. I love all of our people. I love his family. And it's a very sad situation."

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