by Ty Tagami | Aug 31, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — A Stone Mountain rapper will spend six years in federal prison after pleading guilty to charges involving the theft of thousands of checks from the mail.
Shamarri Tache Brooks, 34, pleaded guilty in May to bank fraud and aggravated identity theft, according to his record in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia.
The federal indictment filed against him in December accused him of altering purloined checks to name recruits with their own accounts as the payees.
One check from August 2024 was for more than $655,000. Another the same day was for more than $122,000. Another the next day was for more than $405,000.
In a brazen twist that displayed an instinct for business, Brooks traded on his knowledge by promoting and selling a collection of his financial fraud methods, the indictment said.
As part of his fraud-promotion business, the indictment said, Brooks sold the check images on their own or packaged with check-forgery tutorials in what he called the “Sauce Book,” accepting payment on various digital platforms.
He even sold apparel, registering Brooks Merchandise as a limited liability company with the Georgia Secretary of State and marketing balaclava-style masks with bank logos and clothing with the logo “No Free Sauce” or “NFS.”
Authorities alleged that he used his own product while working: the indictment said he wore “No Free Sauce” masks when depositing stolen, altered checks at ATMs.
It is unclear how much money Brooks made from the side hustles, but Hertzberg’s office said he went unrewarded by the underlying work of check theft.
Brooks and his associates stole checks with a combined face value of more than $6.5 million, but law enforcement recovered many of the checks from Brooks’s home, adding that there was no evidence Brooks succeeded in “negotiating” the remainder of the stolen checks.
Hertzberg said Brooks’ victims were spared from any known loss. “Thankfully, Brooks’s ineptitude matched his boldness,” he said.
After prison, Brooks, who also goes by Juney Knotzz, will serve five years of supervised release.
Authorities noted that Brooks already had a criminal history, including convictions for drug trafficking, weapon possession, obstruction of law enforcement and battery.
This case was investigated by the FBI, FDIC Office of Inspector General, the U.S. Secret Service and the U.S. Postal Service Office of Inspector General. The Dunwoody Police Department and the U.S. Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration assisted.
Neither the indictment nor Hertzberg explained how Brooks and his associates were able to obtain so many stolen checks, but authorities warned the public against leaving checks or other mail in mailboxes overnight and to use the letter slot inside a Post Office when sending mail.
by Ty Tagami | Aug 28, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — In late July, a new website popped online carrying local news stories from Georgia.
There was an article about a disgraced former Atlanta City Council member, another about President Donald Trump’s visit to Cobb County and one about Georgia coach Kirby Smart.
The stories were copied and pasted from other journalism sites, including Capitol Beat, and carried the original authors’ bylines, with links to the original publications.
But two pieces with no bylines have appeared on the Peach State Post’s website.
Both attack Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff for his votes against Republican tax initiatives.
Then, there is another new website with a shared interest in publishing local news but with a divergent take on partisan politics.
It carried articles about Flock Safety cameras and a data center proposed in Columbia County, both originally published by USA Today Network properties and shared via Reuters Connect.
The site, called Courier Georgia, launched in May with one correspondent and features her original articles. Her reporting covers topics that are priorities for Democratic politicians, such as Medicaid expansion and the social media posts by the son-in-law of U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, the Republican running to unseat Ossoff in November.
The Courier also runs unbylined videos, with one featuring Collins walking away from a news conference about his son-in-law as Collins’ guards block the videographer following him. Another shows Ossoff calling Trump a “draft-dodging crook president.”
Both news sites have something in common besides being new: they’re run by people with partisan ties.
The Peach State Post site discloses it is paid for by One Nation.
It is part of a “fake news network” and Republican dark money, according to an article on a Substack site called Popular Information.
The article, published in early August, reported that One Nation was a dark money group that had given more than $70 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Senate Republicans. And it said One Nation had started six news sites in states with key U.S. Senate races, including Georgia.
Judd Legum, the author, was a campaign researcher for Hillary Clinton who switched to independent publishing.
Legum said in an interview that in addition to tracking campaign contributions he linked One Nation to the GOP Senate fund through technical methods, such as the tracking pixels on their websites.
An article published in July by Axios quoted an anonymous source who said One Nation’s executive director had said in a conference call with GOP donors and Senate Majority Leader John Thune that the group would be spending about $100 million against Democratic Senate incumbents in Georgia and two other states.
The Peach State Post and One Nation websites do not list contact information. A request for comment left by Capitol Beat on One Nation’s web contact portal in mid-August yielded no response.
Georgia Republican Party Chairman Josh McKoon did not respond to text messages asking about Peach State Post.
“I personally doubt that they’re involved,” Legum said. “I think that this is an extension of the super PAC and One Nation spending.”
Courier Georgia is part of the Courier Newsroom, which is owned by Good Information, Inc.
The Courier sites list Tara McGowan as publisher of Courier Georgia and as publisher and CEO of Courier Newsroom. The Poynter Institute, a nonprofit journalism school and research organization, identifies McGowan as the founder of Good Information.
The news site Notus reported in 2024 that McGowan was a Democratic operative who had pitched the Courier in a 2019 memo as an answer to GOP and right-wing investment in digital media. Axios reported in 2021 that Good Information was launching with millions of dollars in seed money from wealthy left-leaning donors, including Reid Hoffman and George Soros.
The Georgia Democratic Party said it had no comment, but Courier Newsroom responded in writing to an email asking about the organization’s reported partisan links.
“Every day, our award-winning reporters, editors, and social teams tell the stories shaping people’s lives — from Medicaid cuts and ICE raids to education battles,” wrote Mariela Rosario, the Courier Newsroom state managing director.
The email touted Courier’s presence on TikTok and said the network had an audience of millions and planned to have 20 newsrooms by year’s end.
“As local news disappears in too many places, we’re proving independent, values-driven journalism can grow without sacrificing credibility,” Rosario wrote.
Courier Georgia and Peach State Post started publishing in Georgia ahead of an election that could help decide which party controls the U.S. Senate.
Both sandwich real news around what journalism expert Karin Assmann described as political advertorials.
“It’s political branded content hiding behind real news, so it’s just muddying the waters,” said Assmann, an associate professor at the University of Georgia’s journalism school.
Assmann and Burton Speakman, an associate professor at Kennesaw State University, collaborated on a research article published in June that examined websites posing as news outlets while promoting a partisan worldview.
The industry term, they wrote, is “pink slime,” a metaphor ripped from headlines over a decade ago about the food-industry term for ammonia-treated beef trimmings.
It applies to digital sites masquerading as news, they wrote, because both the meat and the sites are slippery and hard to digest.
Assmann said the two new news entrants in Georgia look more sophisticated.
“It is more subtle than obvious propaganda, like an advertorial with political messaging disguised as news to encourage people to believe it — and without disclosing whose money is behind the message,” she said. “It’s actually a political ad, and it should be marked as such.”
Speakman, when asked if he thought Peach State Post was propaganda, sighed.
“Well, yeah. Of course it is. I mean, it’s being funded by One Nation,” he said. “The Peach State Post is trying to use legitimate news sources’ articles to provide them some credibility for the other stuff that they’re trying to slide in.”
Speakman called it “an advancement of the technique” used by the 30 sites in Georgia that he and Assmann characterized as pink slime in their paper.
But Speakman said the Post and the Courier, which were too new to have made it into their paper, are also misleading readers.
“They’re trying to legitimize themselves by using mainstream sources to manipulate the public into having a worse understanding of what’s going on in politics in the world,” he said.
Both Speakman and Assmann said that mixing partisan messaging with republished reporting was a dangerous development for democracy.
But Speakman thought the new projects would be short-lived, particularly those operated by One Nation.
“Unless there’s some sort of unforeseen runoff in one of these six states, those six sites are going to disappear,” he said. “They only bought their web domains, each of the web domains, for one year.”
As for the Courier properties, Speakman said Democratic media projects have often struggled to attract sustained funding.
“The history of liberal and progressive media sticking around has not been good historically,” he said. “Air America fizzled out, most of the liberal talk radio fizzled out.”
by Ty Tagami | Aug 27, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Georgia will execute Stacey Ian Humphreys on Sept. 16 after postponing a prior execution scheduled for late last year.
Humphreys was convicted of murder and other crimes in in the 2003 deaths of Cyndi Williams and Lori Brown in Cobb County.
Georgia Department. of Corrections Commissioner Tyrone Oliver selected the new execution date after a Cobb superior court judge ordered it between Sept. 16 and Sept. 23.
Humphreys exhausted his appeals in October when the U.S. Supreme Court decided against him after twice declining to hear his earlier appeals. The Georgia Supreme Court had twice issued decisions against him.
Humphreys was born in 1973, the year Georgia reinstated capital punishment after a brief pause over litigation.
He was sentenced to death for the murders of two real estate agents during the lunch hour on Nov. 3, 2003. The women worked in a construction company’s model home at a new Cobb subdivision when Humphreys walked in and killed them.
In September 2007, a jury convicted him of murder, assault, armed robbery and kidnapping. He pleaded guilty to possession of a firearm by a felon and was sentenced to death.
by Ty Tagami | Aug 27, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — The federal government announced the delivery Thursday of the rest of a $218 million award to Georgia to support rural hospitals.
The $93.3 million completes the first fiscal year of a five-year, $50 billion national funding program approved by Republicans in Congress last year in President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said the money will pay for technical innovations at rural hospitals, such as surgical robotics and telehealth, plus medical training and recruitment, maternal and behavioral services, and newborn screening.
It will also help 87 rural Georgia hospitals prepare to provide what the federal agency is calling “value-based” care.
Dr. Dean Burke, the physician who leads Georgia’s Department of Community Health, said in a statement Thursday that the program will “have decades of positive impact” on rural healthcare.
U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, R-Jackson, thanked the Trump administration for “prioritizing rural communities.”
Collins, who is running to unseat Democratic U.S. Sen. Jon Ossoff, also attacked his opponent for voting with all other Democrats against the funding, which was part of the One Big Beautiful Bill and its budget and tax cuts.
Democrats had instead wanted to preserve funding for Medicaid, which the bill slashed by hundreds of billions of dollars.
Democrats have been attacking Collins and the GOP for their approach to healthcare, blaming it for rural hospital funding shortfalls.
For instance, the state Democratic Party asserted in late-July that Collins’ vote to pass “massive Medicaid cuts” had “solidified” St. Mary’s Sacred Heart Hospital’s decision to close its labor and delivery unit.
The Democratic Party has portrayed healthcare in Georgia as a crisis caused by Republicans and their refusal to expand Medicaid in the state.
A recent survey conducted by the University of Georgia for the Georgia Health Initiative found rising healthcare costs to be a potent political issue, especially among Democrats.
Concerns about rising costs cross party lines, according to the UGA survey, with 54% of Democrats and 38% of Republicans saying they were very or somewhat worried about being able to afford their monthly premiums over the next year.
The federal Rural Health Transformation Program that emerged from the One Big Beautiful Bill is sending $10 billion a year to the states over five years in the form of grants.
Georgia’s application last year netted the seventh-largest sum nationally.
The state Department of Community Health said less than 10% of the first year of funding will go toward administrative costs.
The state budgeted $15.6 million to help seven hospitals prepare for the new federal efficiency and accountability program, along with 80 other hospitals that were awarded money previously.
Another $6.2 million will support a “continuum of care,” such as medical transportation, school-based health services and newborn screening.
Eight hospitals will split a portion of nearly $10.4 million for a dozen “telepods” for telehealth and for pediatric “telepsychiatry” training. The money will also cover other initiatives to improve healthcare access.
The second largest amount, $23.6 million, will go toward medical workforce development efforts, including training and nurse faculty recruitment at Georgia’s public universities.
More than a third of the funding, $37.5 million is for technological innovations, such as surgical robots at 13 hospitals that will also get funding for surgeon recruitment and retention. The funding will also cover a grant to Equifax for “eligibility system enhancements” to expedite “eligibility determinations.”
by Ty Tagami | Aug 26, 2026 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — An agreement to resolve a federal lawsuit brought by Georgia and other states and U.S. jurisdictions would require Meta to impose new limits on teen accounts on its social media platforms while also giving parents the option for more control.
The operator of Facebook and Instagram also agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion to the plaintiffs as part of the settlement proposal filed Wednesday in federal district court in California.
The proceeds would be shared among 47 states, Washington, D.C. and several U.S. territories, with Georgia to receive between $100 million and $135 million, state Attorney General Chris Carr’s office said.
Carr called it a landmark agreement, suggesting in a statement that there could be future cases, “and while Meta is the first to come to the table, they shouldn’t be the last. It shouldn’t take lawsuits, legislation or investigations to do the right thing.”
The lawsuit grew from a bipartisan, nationwide investigation that alleged Meta had designed Instagram to addict children despite the resulting mental health harms the company documented but did not publicly disclose, Carr’s office said.
The settlement also would resolve claims against Meta for sharing nonpublic information about Facebook users with Cambridge Analytica and others ahead of the 2016 election.
The leader of Fairplay, a Boston-based organization that has pressured state and federal lawmakers to act, heralded the settlement as a “watershed moment” protecting children from “addictive and dangerously designed social media.”
Still, Fairplay Executive Director Josh Golin said the court agreement did not exact enough concessions from Meta.
“We are disappointed that the settlement does not turn off by default recommendation algorithms that connect kids to predators and send young people down dangerous rabbit holes,” Golin said in a statement. “In general, the settlement is too focused on offering parents tools rather than restricting harmful features.”
The agreement calls on Meta to limit teen access to its platforms to two hours per day with access restricted from midnight to 6 a.m. and to restrict notifications during school hours. It also would limit features linked to eroding mental health, such as plastic surgery filters and “like” counts.
Meta already bans accounts for those under 13. The settlement would require the company to implement better processes to identify users that young and delete their accounts.
The agreement also would require that Meta encourage parents of teens ages 13 to 17 to take supervisory control over their children’s accounts.
Parents who take that step would be notified if their child communicates with another adult on the platform or engages in repeated searches for terms related to suicide, self-harm or eating disorders.
Meta would also have to give teens a “reasonably accessible” option to turn off algorithmic feeds, something parents could also control if their child’s account was enrolled in parental supervision. The account would then be restricted to content from accounts the teen follows, in chronological order.
Child-protection advocates were disappointed that those features required parents to opt in.
“If it’s not a default, it doesn’t get picked up,” said Sharon Winkler. “That’s pretty weak.”
Winkler has testified before the Georgia General Assembly about the risks of unbridled child access to social media.
Her son, Alex Peiser, died by suicide at age 17 in 2014, and she blames the Instagram algorithm that she said sent him dark memes, such as images of corpses, after he broke up with his girlfriend.
“He didn’t want to see pro-suicide stuff,” she said. “He wanted breakup songs” and support.
Winkler was also disappointed that the protections against child-adult interactions were optional rather than automatic.
“Good start but much more work to go,” she said.
Under the terms of the agreement, the settlement funds could pay for a variety of services, including crisis intervention, after-school or summer programs, youth mental health programming, outdoor activities, and investigations and litigation to improve teen safety on social media.
A spokeswoman for Carr’s office said Georgia’s proceeds would go into the state treasury.
