Three days ago, I was introduced to a man claiming to be U.S. President Rudolfo “Rudy” Ruiz, who was killed in a plane crash on July 4th. In exchange for this exclusive scoop — what my source called “the biggest story in human history” — I was provided with what my source asserted was documentation confirming the “President’s” identity, and was asked to keep our meeting under wraps until 11 a.m. this Sunday, July 30th.

I have obviously decided to run with this story — or more likely, this stunt — well before the weekend. This is a career first for me. I have never burned a source, deliberately broken an embargo, or reneged on an even tentative agreement with a source, but I can’t see a way around it here that also maintains my professional integrity. I have protected plenty of sources whose politics I found repulsive, and withheld information about acts I found shocking or even knew to be criminal in the service of uncovering greater truths. But I refuse to be used as an outright pawn or patsy.

I can find no other explanation for why biotech billionaire Carron Nielsberg — famous for his tech-bro hyperbole and outrageous marketing antics — spent last Sunday night trying to convince me that he has raised a President of the United States from the dead. I’ve entertained Nielsberg’s outsized personality quirks in the past — it’s how I landed the 2020 Forbes profile — and even found him charming, but curfews have now been imposed in six major cities from coast to coast due to the ongoing unrest following Ruiz’s death. Conspiracy theories have flourished following the subsequent release of the Ruiz autopsy report and the “black box” flight recorder data.

I’ve tried to keep the tone of this newsletter relatively light, all things considered, and embrace an opportunity to put more of my own voice and perspective in to my writing — something I wasn’t able to do in most of my previous staff positions. But this country is a tinderbox. So forgive me for being both very serious and getting deeply personal when I say: I will not legitimize more delusional chicanery that could further destabilize a nation on the edge.

Whatever Nielsberg is up to, he has certainly committed to the bit and even roped in some high-level players to help sell the song and dance. I hope that by telling you what I know, I can pull back the curtain before the show starts in earnest.

Last Sunday evening, this exchange kicked off what I can only describe as one of the most bizarre experiences of my career, and indeed of my life:

The “car” turned out to be a van — white, printed with the “RevTech” logo, like the ones spotted by a Redditor that I wrote about a couple weeks ago — and Nielsberg himself was inside. The location of the meeting remains unknown to me. There were no windows on the back of the vehicle, the interior of which featured leather reclining seats and a miniature juice bar. All I can say for certain is that it took a half-hour to arrive at our destination. Once we arrived, Nielsberg and three guards armed with automatic rifles escorted me from a small garage through a series of office-like hallways (the “backrooms” of urban legend came to mind — popcorn ceilings, gray low-pile carpet), and into a nondescript conference room furnished with a long table and a water cooler.

There, I was greeted by a sallow-faced, middle-aged Latino man in a dark suit and grey striped tie who introduced himself as “Rudy.” The man had some trouble rising from his chair, moving gingerly as if pained by arthritis or perhaps fever, and offered me a clammy handshake. Nielsberg addressed the man as “Mr. President” and invited me to take a seat next to “POTUS.”

When we were settled, Nielsberg told me he’d “like to give [me] the opportunity to break the biggest story in human history.” He’s known for grand pronouncements, but this seemed extreme even for the “Savior of Silicon Valley.” I almost laughed out loud, but I couldn’t manage it in the presence of the armed guards flanking the doorway. (I suspect my seat placement was deliberately orchestrated to keep the muscle in my direct line of sight, and vice versa.)

I told the man in the suit that he was looking well for someone three weeks deceased, which prompted him to chuckle and nod. He said he felt “pretty good for a dead guy.” Nielsberg then slid a thick envelope across the table, saying I would have time to review the documents inside later, but he was “excited” to offer me an overview of their contents. I was welcome to take notes, but Nielsberg asked me not to record what followed. (Of course I recorded it anyway — more on that in a second.)

They did allow me to take a photo of “Rudy.” The picture I took Sunday night is on the left; an official White House file photo of President Ruiz from 2021 is on the right.

I won’t deny that the two men look remarkably alike, though the supposedly revived “Rudy” has thinner hair and is appears easily twenty pounds lighter than the President Ruiz who got on that doomed Learjet three weeks ago. There’s something going on with “Rudy’s” right eye — he told me it was damaged in the plane crash, and Nielsberg reassurred him that it’ll be “good as new” in 72 hours.

In a tight three-minute pitch, Nielsberg laid out the gist: RevTech is an abbreviation of “revival technology,” a revolutionary (and of course, proprietary) advancement in regenerative (read: stem cell) medicine that reverses “the effects of a mortal event” in “highly qualified candidates.” For the right “mortally affected individual,” RevTech can “turn back the clock,” and with a little “light biomedical maintenance,” extend the individual’s life indefinitely. He stressed that — indefinitely.

At this point, I was unable to stifle a laugh, armed guards be damned. I told Nielsberg this was his best stunt yet, and congratulated him on finding a dead ringer — pun intended — for the posthumous president. It occurred to me to look around for a hidden camera; as if reading my mind, “Rudy” spoke up: “This isn’t a prank.”

Nielsberg urged me to open the packet, which contained a number of documents he claimed were bona fide lab tests, medical records, DNA reports, and affidavits certifying that the man sitting at the table with us was indeed Rudolfo Ruiz, the 46th President of the United States, and brochures and digital mock-ups showing that RevTech would be launching to the public in a week. As I thumbed through the paperwork, the guards opened the conference room door for a grinning, exquisitely coiffed Pastor Kathy Donaldson — who I know personally, having attended school with her daughter Natalie back before New Life Church was a household name. Donaldson swept into the room, twanging an enthusiastic “Rudy! By the grace of God, you’re looking better by the day!” and planted a kiss on “Rudy’s” cheek.

When she turned to me — “Miss Rebuke, welcome home!” — Donaldson pulled the papers from my hand and found a pink-tabbed document titled “AFFIDAVIT” and placed it on the top of the pile with a clickety-tap of her fire-engine-red acrylics.

Here’s a scan of the notarized doc, which contains a sworn statement from Donaldson asserting not only that the man in the room with us was Rudy Ruiz, but that she witnessed him being resurrected from the dead three weeks ago:

I’m acquainted with the notary, Tamara Haynes, too — Turner Falls is a small town after all, and her younger brother Matt was a drama club star who graduated a year behind me. Between Nielsberg, Donaldson, and (apparently) Haynes, this looked to me like a pretty involved charade.

I said as much. I also asked why — why bring me here (wherever “here” was), for this (whatever “this” was)? Nielsberg nodded at Donaldson; they’d apparently expected this question. She began an explanation involving my reputation as a member of the “liberal” media, but I stopped her, saying I wanted to hear it from “Rudy.” I wanted to know how deeply they’d read this stooge into the play.

“I’m going to bring a miraculous truth to the American people this Sunday,” he told me, straight-faced. To my eye and ear, the guy could probably give SNL’s Bobby Moynihan a run for his money on the Ruiz impression. “The faithful are ready for this country’s next chapter, but others may reject my resurrection. We hope you’ll be the bridge that helps them understand.”

By “be the bridge,” Nielsberg clarified that they were asking me to release what they had shared with me at this meeting, along with whatever else I could gather from a week’s worth of reporting, to the public at 11 a.m. CT this Sunday, July 30th. At that same time, President Ruiz would appear at the altar with Pastor Donaldson on the New Life Church’s weekly broadcast. In effect, I — a Pulitzer-nominated left-wing reporter, hated by the LibertyNow! movement — would serve to confirm what would likely otherwise be dismissed outright as a hoax. I told them I didn’t think their plan would work even with me on board; they’d need a lot more than a laid-off liberal journalist’s word to sell a science fiction story to the public. And anyway, why not bring the New York Times down here? The Atlantic? Hell, the local Fox affiliate?

“You have the right credentials, and it cannot be argued that you are acting at the direction of some conglomerate, or that you have been bought out by big media beholden to Ruiz, the White House, or the New Life Church,” Nielsberg said, to which I responded that it certainly would be said that I had at least been bought by a tech billionaire; my Forbes profile of Nielsberg had generated weeks of goofy speculation that we were sleeping together. (I still get trolled to this effect on Twitter.) He seemed unbothered by this possibility: “Minne, I like you. I do not want to give this story to an empty head of hair at the Fox News.”

I spent another half-hour talking to “Rudy,” grilling him on local trivia. He did well, but Kathy Donaldson, who began working for the Ruiz family as Rudy’s babysitter when the future president was in elementary school, would have been able to coach him on anything I could have come up with on the fly and more. He had a thorough knowledge of the layout and history of Turner Falls, of Ruiz’s early career as a football star (very early career — he could name members of his Pop Warner squad). He talked emotionally about his last days with Phoebe Harrison Ruiz, who passed away from breast cancer just after the Ruizes moved into the White House in 2021. Of course, I have no way of confirming those details. He said he hadn’t yet been reunited with his children, Rudy Jr. and Rachel, but would be meeting them this weekend. He even used the kids as a means of imploring me to stick to their offer and keep the “good news” of his resurrection quiet until Sunday.

I couldn’t resist a final question: What happened between the time “Rudy” died in the plane crash and the moment he was resurrected by RevTech?

“I enjoyed those glorious hours in the arms of the Lord Jesus, surrounded by His loving embrace and the welcoming joy of my aforepassed loved ones,” he said, eyes glassy. “It was indeed Heaven — but it wasn’t America. And I’m glad to be back. I have a lot of work to do here.”

On the ride home, I mulled over the question I always ask when I get an unusually strange or juicy tip: “Why would this person tell me this, and why now?” The first, best skill any reporter needs is a healthy sense of skepticism. Especially when journalists develop relationships with powerful sources in government, policymaking, lobbying, and other influential spheres over many months and years — decades, if you’re lucky enough to stay in the business that long, and fewer and fewer of us these days are. We may use the information sources give us immediately, or we may withhold it to build a bigger story, or we may never run with it at all. We love scoops, but we dislike being used. (This doesn’t stop it from happening to us, anyway.)

We may loathe, like, or even love our sources. We may treat some as friends or even come to think of them genuinely as such. We’re humans, after all. But we understand that all information given to us is a kind of political currency, and it is rarely doled out altruistically. I am sure Nielsberg has a moneymaking motive behind whatever his end game is here, and I suspect Donaldson, who has grown accustomed to a certain lifestyle in the last decade or so, is working from a similar playbook. She likely fears losing her influence in the wake of Ruiz’s death — she has never had a cozy relationship with President Grantham — and scaling up from faith healer to resurrectionist would certainly help preserve, if not accelerate, it.

When the RevTech van dropped me off, I declined Nielsberg’s offer of a freshly pressed guava juice and told him I would consider, but not confirm, the embargo offer — and that I would be looking into every piece of documentation they’d provided. He encouraged me to do so, and said he knew I’d do the “smart thing.”

Over the past few days, I’ve showed the RevTech/Ruiz DNA records, lab tests, and medical documents to several trusted sources in the fields of bioengineering, med-tech, and forensic pathology (with the “patient’s” name removed). The documents don’t detail what happened during Ruiz’s so-called “revival,” but do show “Ruiz” having been examined by the official presidential physician at Walter Reed in January of this year (the results of the president’s annual exam are usually made public) and again by a general practitioner in Gallum County last week. It is of course curious that Nielsberg only offered this “proof” to me after Ruiz’s autopsy was released — giving the RevTech team access to certain details about the president’s (supposedly) current physical condition and crash-related injuries that surely wouldn’t have been available prior to July 14th.

The expert sources who examined the docs gave me practically the same answers across the board: the paperwork is either real or an excellent collection of fakes. The documents show what experts would expect to see from one individual’s complete medical history. They also show what experts would expect to see if someone had attempted to forge that medical history. I’m presently circulating the recording I made of the RevTech/”Rudy” meeting with a couple of forensic audiologists; I’ll post an update here or on social media when I hear more. But I couldn’t let this story go another day eating away at me and letting Nielsberg think he can get away with, I suppose, whatever the opposite of murder is.

No one on earth has more money to blow on an elaborate hoax than Carron Nielsberg, and no one on earth is more motivated to drag out the life and legacy of President Rudy Ruiz than Kathy Donaldson.

They say some men just want to watch the world burn. I think Nielsberg might be one of them. For me, and I think for America writ large, the “smart thing” right now is to refuse to strike the match for him.

What else I’m reading right now:

• “Longest-running southern California newspaper closes after 168 years” (The Guardian)

• “Facing sex discrimination claims, Texas begins jailing migrant women under border crackdown” (Texas Tribune)

• “Forever Chemicals Are in Nearly Half of America’s Tap Water. Here’s How to Reduce Your Exposure.” (NYT)

• “Texas A&M suspended professor accused of criticizing Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick in lecture” (Texas Tribune)

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