Sunlight Foundation Reporting Group

1. Campaign disclosure foe James Bopp forms Super PAC

   By Bill Allison May 13, 2011 11:21 a.m.

   Attorney James Bopp, who's a key architect of the legal battle that's led to a flood of outside spending in elections, has registered a new independent expenditure only committee with the Federal Election Commission called the Republican Super PAC Inc.

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2. 2012 Presidential winner...

   By Bill Allison Apr 25, 2011 3:52 p.m.

   ...in the category of "Most incomprehensible FEC filing, exploratory committee division"

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3. Wal-Mart, international taxes feature in latest lobbying registrations

   By Bill Allison Apr 20, 2011 10:16 a.m.

   Wal-Mart, the nation's largest private employer, has hired Capitol Counsel, a firm that includes former Ways and Means chairman Jim McCrery, to monitor corporate tax issues. McCrery was also among the lobbyists hired by Renco Group, which hired a slew of lobbyists in its battle with the government of Peru. We reported on Renco here.

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4. Virginia Thomas' paperless, pixel-less trail

   By Bill Allison Feb 4, 2011 11:15 a.m.

   We'd love to look closer at Liberty Consulting, the new firm started by Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas that Politico reported on today. But as of now (as Politico notes), the consultancy has not registered as a lobbying firm or disclosed any clients, though the firm says it "gives voice to principled citizens and the tea party movement in the halls of Congress through governmental affairs efforts," and whose founder claims, according to Politico, that she "has met with nearly half of the 99 GOP freshmen in the House and Senate." Whether those meetings were on behalf of clients, or occurred before or after those freshmen were elected, is not clear. 

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5. New lobbying tracker makes it easier to follow the revolving door

   By Bill Allison Feb 2, 2011 2:36 p.m.

    

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6. Egypt's Washington lobby helped country's military and U.S. defense firms

   By Bill Allison Jan 28, 2011 1:34 p.m.

   At the Atlantic, Chris Good identifies some of the U.S. lobbyists who have registered to work for the Egyptian government. Filings required by the Foreign Agent Registration Act, and digitized and made searchable by Sunlight's joint project with ProPublica, the Foreign Lobbyist Influence Tracker, show that among foreign governments, Egypt has been one of the most prolific spenders. FARA filings show that the U.S.-Egyptian bilateral relation benefits American military contractors. The United States ships aid dollars to the Egyptian government, which in turn buys pricey items from American contractors, with deals often arranged with the help of U.S. lobbyists--who sometimes represent both the seller and the buyer. That's what PLM Group, a joint venture of the Podesta Group and the Livingston Group, did, as we reported with ProPublica in our initial release:

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7. Wall Street Journal sues for access to Medicare records

   By Bill Allison Jan 25, 2011 2:56 p.m.

   The Wall Street Journal announced today that it's suing for access to data on payments that doctors receive from Medicare, which has been exempt from public disclosure thanks to a 1979 court case won by the American Medical Association. The Journal argues that absent data on the payments, it's impossible for journalists or members of the public to tell which doctors are billing the system improperly. "It's time to overturn an injunction that, for decades, has allowed some doctors to defraud Medicare free from public scrutiny," Mark Jackson, the counsel for Dow Jones, the Journal's immediate parent, said. 

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8. Last Super PAC of 2010 started by wife of congressional challenger

   By Bill Allison Jan 10, 2011 3:31 p.m.

   We missed it between Christmas and New Years, but Heartland Revolution registered as an independent expenditure only committee with the Federal Election Commission. Such committees, also known as Super PACs, can take contributions in any amount from any source, and spend that money influencing federal elections.

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9. New tool tracks new lobbyists and their clients

   By Bill Allison Jan 6, 2011 1:52 p.m.

   After the Nov. 2, 2010 election, lobbyists filed more than 350 new registration forms, disclosing their hiring by clients seeking to influence everything from the federal budget to Kyrgyz government negotiations with the United States to supply jet fuel to airbases in Manas, Kyrgyzstan and Bagram, Afghanistan. 

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10. Some tools that might help the Pajamas Media's Transparency Project

    By Bill Allison Jan 5, 2011 9:01 a.m.

    Roger L. Simon, writing at Pajamas Media, announces a new transparency project, soliciting suggestions from readers on what the blogosphere-bloomed news organization should dig into. I wouldn't presume to play assigning editor for the effort, but hope I can help by pointing to some resources (full disclosure--many, but not all, are built by or supported by the Sunlight Foundation) that might help Pajamas Media readers do some digging on their own and get the ball the rolling.

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11. Looking back at 2010

    By Bill Allison Dec 23, 2010 4:27 p.m.

    Hard to believe that a year that began with the Reporting Team analyzing and critiquing federal data released under the administration's Open Government Initiative ended with our pursuit of political organizations that do not disclose campaign donors. In between, we continued to publish the only resource for tracking congressional campaign fundraising, Party Time, updated our Foreign Lobbying Influence Tracker, delved into Recovery.gov data and earmark disclosures, and, with the help of our friends at the Center for Public Integrity, identified dozens of high value federal data sets that government agencies have not released.

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12. Senate discloses earmarks...poorly

    By Bill Allison Dec 14, 2010 6:13 p.m.

    Senate Appropriations chairman Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii, packed more than $130 million worth of defense earmarks into the $1.1. trillion Omnibus Act that the Senate released yesterday. Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., the committee's top Republican, larded the bill with more than $167 million defense earmarks. To find that out, one has to download the earmark table--in PDF--then convert the PDF to a tab delimited format, then plug them into a database (we've done so for Defense earmarks in a Socrata database below).

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13. Senate releases Omnibus spending bill

    By Bill Allison Dec 14, 2010 5:24 p.m.

    The full text of the Senate's 2011 $1.1 trillion Omnibus bill is here; supporting documents--including tables featuring pages and pages of earmarks--are here. Among the Senate's priorities--$10 million to the John P. Murtha Foundation (in the Defense earmarks, here, and note that the funds were requested by five house members--Rep. Jim Moran, Va., Rep. Mark Critz, D-Pa., Rep. Chaka Fattah, D-Pa. and Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio).

14. Firms severing ties with Wikileaks have multiple interests before feds

    By Bill Allison Dec 7, 2010 3:52 p.m.

     

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Investigations by Sunlight Foundation reporter Bill Allison