Legistorm: Transparency's Sidekick

Since we started, we at LegiStorm have had a lot of things we have wanted to tell our site users. We are a site primarily of data but the data can tell stories.

Take the story by Susan Crabtree in yesterday's The Hill newspaper, which uses our data to show that the campaign of a powerful member of Congress, Rep. Jack Murtha (D-Pa.), paid more than $2,000 for a rifle and other weapons paraphernalia. What makes it more interesting is that Murtha, a close confidant to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and appropriations subcommittee chairman, may have violated both House ethics rules and federal statute in converting them to personal use by giving them as a gift to an aide. And it took us no more than a few minutes to discover that his campaign had officially - and erroneously - claimed this gun as a campaign "advertising" expense. His office described this as a "clerical error". The chief of staff said he refunded the money to the campaign committee after The Hill asked about it.

All this was available through public records which told a compelling story. In fact, it was information from two sources that, when combined, made it so interesting.

A few weeks ago, Paul Singer of Roll Call wrote a story about a member of Congress and his chief of staff who made an eye-catching investment in a China-related business with someone who paid nearly $20,000 for them to go to China on so-called "officially connected travel" and donated to the congressman's campaign. It was a total coincidence that the day before we had launched a database of the personal financial disclosures of all congressional staffers, which would have, with our comprehensive database of privately financed congressional trips, highlighted this potential conflict of interest.

We hope this blog can illuminate some of our data. While we might highlight someone on one side of the aisle or another, we plan to continue the tradition of non-partisanship.

Besides drawing attention to interesting aspects of our data, we plan to use this space to illuminate our processes in providing this data, how others have usefully employed our site, and to alert users what new information products we have released or will release.