s primary

Sorting through the data of the dead — their pots, their knives, and the rocks they cooked on — in order to reconstruct how they once lived, is not so different from tracking the Special Counsel investigation.

On a Friday in February, Adrienne Cobb, 29, lab assistant in the archaeology department at Western Washington University, was trying to do both. She was digitizing data on artifacts found on a farm in Washington state that were about 3,000 years old, and keeping track of what was happening on Capitol Hill, where the House Judiciary Committee grilled Matthew Whitaker — then, acting Attorney General — about his involvement in Robert Mueller’s investigation into the Trump campaign and its links to Russia.

Cobb’s an unlikely candidate for legal sleuthing. She’s a recovering heroin addict with no experience in journalism, and a preference for Ghost Adventures over Reliable Sources. (“I hate cable news.”) She has dyed red hair, rocks Daria-esque glasses, and tends to look at the floor when she isn’t absorbed by a screen.

She spends her free time — and some of her office time, too — tracking every update, big and small, in Mueller’s probe. She’s part of an online community of digital sleuths, amateur journalists, and statisticians, who commit hours upon hours of their lives to all things Mueller. Some have launched careers out of obsessively tracking the investigation’s twists and turns.

But for her, keeping track of Mueller’s work is about helping others feel less “helpless” in a wilderness of fast-paced, complex news that doesn’t always add up. She calls herself an “aggregator,” which seems simple enough, but it's tough work. She checks Twitter and Reddit three times an hour for new, relevant reporting, and saves links to those articles with the program, Evernote. Meanwhile, news of every White House departure goes in a separate spreadsheet that she’ll refer to in order to update her website, 45Chaos, which in granular detail, notes every staffer who’s left, whether and why they quit, resigned, or resigned under pressure (“R-UP”), and measures the length of their tenure in “mooches,” a metric born in Trump’s White House. (She goes by 10-days, not 11, though there’s a debate over how long Anthony Scaramucci really lasted as White House Communications Director.)

On the weekends, she wakes at 4:30 a.m. and never makes plans to leave the house for long — giving her just enough time for scan every article she’s saved to Evernote, for any new revelations. These get boiled down into weekly recaps that she posts every Monday to a Reddit forum called, appropriately, “Keep_Track.” Readers sometimes message her in appreciation or send tips, and her summaries have ballooned along with the news cycle to run as long as 5,000 words. On Monday, the process starts again.

“I get a lot of people who say, ‘I can't believe that all happened in one week,’” she said. “Or, ‘That feels like it was a month ago, because so much has happened.’ So I think there's value to seeing it all in one spot.”

There’s value, even for the other Mueller obsessives who, like Cobb, have become addicted to tracking the unknown-knowns.

Scott Stedman, a 23-year-old, started tracking Mueller’s probe while he was a political science major at UC Irvine. Within a year of graduation, his obsessive reporting and research has earned him bylines in major outlets and landed him a book deal (Real News, out in April). Stedman says he’s a fan of Cobb’s recaps. “I find them super useful. It’s a testament to how much information there is.”

Some of Cobb’s readers even donate — she makes about $150 a month through her Patreon account, and 76,000 people subscribe to the Reddit forum, where her work is pinned to the top, so any new members can get caught up on the fly.

“There was a New Yorker cartoon that came out this week that I think sums it up pretty well,” says A.G., the host of the popular podcast Mueller She Wrote, referring to a Julia Suits cartoon that some might see as an exaggeration but that many in this Mueller-obsessed world received with a ring of truth. The cartoon shows a conspiracist-type standing in a room, wallpapered in names ripped from Washington Post headlines, and string trying to connect them all.

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A year ago, Lori Alhadeff was a soccer mom with three kids in the Parkland, Florida public schools.

But on February 14, that simple life was shattered in a hail of bullets fired by a school shooter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high School. Lori's daughter, Alyssa, was among the 17 who died that day.

The year after has been one of pain and healing and hope for Lori. She became the face of anguish when a CNN camera captured her grief and the clip went viral. Now she's trying to become the face of school safety as an advocate and elected member of the Broward County School Board.

Across the country, schools are still trying to figure out how to prevent the next parkland. Bills have been passed, experts have weighed in. School boards like the one in Broward are still making changes. VICE News follows Lori as she tries to make school safety a public priority.

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This is the February 20. 2019, FULL EPISODE of VICE News Tonight on HBO.

2:18 At least six people have died in the past week amidst a wave of violent street protests in Haiti. VICE News dispatch from Haiti, which has been engulfed in violent protests in recent weeks.

8:55 North Carolina election officials heard evidence that in last fall's midterms, Mark Harris was involved in election fraud.

12:50 A cutting-edge satellite-based alert system is being utilized by indigenous groups in Peru to fight illegal logging. VICE News embeds with FEMA, Peru's environmental cops, to find the culprits of the newest deforestation patches recently spotted.

18:44 Jamaican phone scammer Keniel Thomas couldn’t have found a worse mark. VICE News talks to William Webster, the only man to ever head both the CIA and the FBI about what went down when Thomas targeted him and his wife Lynda for a lotto scam.

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Phone scams are big business. The FTC says Americans lose billions of dollars falling for them, and it’s estimated that at least half of all cell phone calls this year will be from scammers. Senior citizens are especially vulnerable.

William Webster and Lynda Webster are the wrong targets for a phone scammer.

In 2014, William got a call from a man who had told him he had won a grand prize. The scammer told him he had to pay a tax up front to claim the money. What the scammer didn’t know was William wasn’t your average retiree. He’s the only man who has ever served as the director of both the FBI and the CIA.

“Ultimately we were able to use the telephone number he listed on his visa application to tie him to the times of the telephone that was making the threats,” Matthew Disarno, Special Agent In Charge at the FBI’s Washington field office, told VICE News.

Last year, the FBI got a lucky break. Keniel Thomas, the Jamaican national behind the scam phone calls, boarded a flight to New York. After passing through customs, Thomas was arrested and eventually sentenced to six years in prison, after which he will be deported to Jamaica. Thomas didn’t get any money out of the Websters, but he did manage to steal an estimated $300,000 from Americans.

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Larouche never managed to have an impact on American policy but his legacy lives on, in the generation of semi-messianic conspiracy theorists

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Michael Cohen’s contentious, hours-long testimony before Congress Wednesday wasn’t necessarily rife with new details, but President Trump’s former personal attorney managed to deliver a few bombshells.

Still, most of the day was devoted to partisan bickering between members of the Democrat-led House Oversight Committee, and to the dueling descriptions offered of Cohen. To Republicans, he was a money-grabbing schemer with a history of lying. To Democrats, Cohen was a redeemable linchpin in their effort to learn more about Trump’s shady financial dealings.

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February 13, 2019, FULL EPISODE of VICE News Tonight on HBO.

2:05 VICE News meets Lori Alhadeff, who lost her daughter in the Parkland shooting last year. Lori decided to run for a seat on the school board and won. We'll be shadowing her as she goes to a meeting and talking with her about her life almost one year after the tragedy.

9:13 Acting defense secretary Patrick Shanahan is in Brussels after surprise visits in Iraq and Afghanistan. He’ll face tough questions from NATO leaders about one thing: why the Trump administration unilaterally pulled out of a 30 year old missile deal with Russia.

15:13 Orange vest farmers protest against a number of issues including loss of crops due to frost and Olive tree disease. Puglia’s 60 million olive trees are facing the prospect of complete annihilation

20:09 Brandler is seizing on the opportunity to help the small, poor, Welsh town of Port Talbot become an international street art destination. VICE News travels with Brandler to Port Talbot as he visits the mural and talks with locals about how Banksy may change their town forever.

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