The Democrats of Rossmoor will hold their general meeting on Thursday, May 28, 2026, at the Event Center. Doors will open at 6:00pm for the Town Square Social with snacks provided by the club. Nonprofit partner White Pony Express will also attend. At 7:00pm the club will hold a brief business meeting before welcoming the evening’s featured speaker, Dr. Alexa Koenig, Faculty Director of the Human Rights Center and Director of the Investigations Lab at UC Berkeley.
Koenig will share insights from her work with the Investigations Lab. Launched in 2016, the lab is a pioneering university-based open-source research team that has collaborated with researchers, journalists, and lawyers across numerous projects. In 2025, the lab conducted essential research for a human rights project and shared their investigative findings with Human Rights Watch and the nonprofit Cristosal. This research focused on the circumstances faced by Venezuelan migrants arrested by the United States then sent to El Salvador’s CECOT mega prison.
The story resulting from the lab’s research was approved for broadcast and initially scheduled to appear on 60 Minutes on December 21, 2025. However, it was pulled from the schedule just hours before airing by CBS’s new Editor-in-Chief, Bari Weiss. Despite this, the full 60 Minutes segment was broadcast on Canadian Global television, and some viewers uploaded the footage to YouTube. Additional coverage included a Frontline short documentary, “Surviving CECOT,” produced by ProPublica, which aired on December 9, 2025.
In 2023, Koenig spoke at Rossmoor about the Investigations Lab’s use of Bellingcat methods, which leverage public data for investigating global issues. She described the lab’s role in helping a Russian opposition team identify those behind Alexy Navalny’s 2020 poisoning. This investigation was later featured by HBO MAX and CNN Films.
Koenig stresses that journalists and lawyers need basic skills to find and verify information online, “especially as facts are very much under attack, and the truth is being challenged right and left.”
Following the presentation, there will be a Q&A session. All Rossmoor residents are invited to attend. For more information, contact [email protected].