On Thursday, June 11, our Spotlight Speaker event centered on COURIER Newsroom’s ongoing reporting into Jeffrey Epstein’s network and the launch of an AI-powered database designed to make thousands of pages of public records more accessible to journalists, researchers, advocates, and the public. COURIER Journalist Cameron Stevenson and CEO of Thorian AI, Josh Levine, demonstrated how technology can help uncover connections, identify patterns, and accelerate the search for facts hidden within massive volumes of documents.
Panelists Nina Burleigh of COURIER and Ambassador Norm Eisen, co-founder of Democracy Defenders Action, emphasized that transparency, accountability, and persistence remain essential to protecting democracy. They discussed the critical role of investigative journalism, litigation, and public engagement in exposing corruption, combating disinformation, and ensuring abuses of power do not go unchecked.
A consistent theme emerged throughout the discussion: meaningful change requires informed citizens who stay engaged, support independent journalism, and demand accountability.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS:
Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, best-selling author, documentary producer, and publisher of a Substack on politics called American Freakshow. A contributing editor at The New Republic and frequent contributor to The New York Times and New York Magazine, her journalism has been published widely including in translation in the Norwegian and Italian press. She’s the author of eight books on an array of topics including archaeological forgery, scientists in 18th Century Egypt, James Smithson, Amanda Knox in Italy, and the Trump women, which were reviewed, excerpted or covered in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, New York Magazine, BBC, ABC, MSNBC, and other media outlets.
Ambassador (ret.) Norman Eisen is a co-founder and board member of Democracy Defenders Action, which has been helping lead the successful national court fights against the Trump Administration, helping secure multiple landmark orders against its authoritarian moves. His work in the courts of law is matched by his efforts in the court of public opinion as the co-founder and publisher of The Contrarian. He is also the co-founder and former chair of other major non-profits including CREW and States United.
Camaron Stevenson is a national correspondent for COURIER Newsroom and publisher of the Below The Beltway newsletter on Substack. A veteran political journalist, he spent more than a decade reporting in Phoenix and served as the Founding Editor and Chief Political Correspondent of The Copper Courier. His reporting focuses on politics, policy, and the forces shaping American democracy at the national and local levels.
Josh Levine is a multi-time entrepreneur (1x exit) building at the nexus of AI, public policy, and the future of data. After an initial career in public finance, Josh founded companies in the education technology and small business M&A spaces. He is now building Thorian AI, which specializes in data processing, extraction, and automation-building across massive, multi-modal datasets. Thorian serves as a data backbone for local government permitting processes, state and federal compliance processes, and complex grant applications/management while keeping costs low through the use of data methods that allow us to use the smallest possible language models for the job. For his efforts, Josh was recently named one of Austin’s top five technologists under 40 for the second time in 2026. A native of Texas, he holds a Master of Public Affairs from the LBJ School of Public Affairs and an undergraduate degree from Vanderbilt University.
