LegiStorm: Transparency's Sidekick

LegiStorm added more than 100 privately sponsored congressional trips to our database this week after discovering the forms had not been put online by the House of Representatives.

Since last year, the House of Representatives and Senate have posted trip forms online. Before trips were posted online, the only way to see the forms was to physically go to congressional office buildings and make paper copies. Since both chambers moved toward posting the trips online, it appeared to negate the need to manually copy the forms.

However, this week LegiStorm found that a small but significant number of 2009 trips which are available in paper form at the House never made it online. We identified 103 trips, of which 47 were taken by members, that were not electronically available. These were added to the more than 900 House trips already in our database for 2009.

The fallout from former congressional staffer Ernest B. Moore's guilty plea to fraud has continued over the past few days.

Moore, who pleaded guilty last week to charges that he'd used aliases to rack up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, was fired from his visiting professor job at Williams College, the Bershire Eagle reported today.

Williams College also had to postpone a Congressional Black Caucus symposium that Moore had organized and was scheduled to take place on the campus Monday. The college's interim president William Wagner sent a letter to the college community Friday saying the event would not happen this week because of questions regarding Moore's involvement.

A pro-Israel lobbying group has found a loophole in the rules limiting the ability of lobbying groups to pay for congressional travel - a loophole large enough that they are one of the leading sponsors of such travel.

The American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF) paid for more than 50 lawmakers and staff of both parties to travel to Israel in August, according to the trip disclosures in LegiStorm's database. Travelers included House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) and Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.).

AIEF is the fundraising arm of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, an influential lobbying group. Despite tough rules forbidding congressional travel paid for by lobbyists, AIPAC gets around the ban by having its nonprofit arm pay for the trips.

A handful of GOP congressional staffers attended a conference earlier this month organized in part by an evangelical leader who has faced controversy based on statements that he doesn't believe it is wrong to stone gay people to death.

The conference was sponsored by Faith and Law, a congressional staffer organization, as well as a group called Fieldstead and Co. - also known as the Fieldstead Institute. On its web site, Fieldstead and Co. describes its mission as managing  "various philanthropic programs as part of a Christian worldview."

The company's reclusive founder is Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson Jr., a multimillionaire philanthropist, mass transit enthusiast and hybrid car owner. In 2005, Time magazine named him one of the 25 most influential evangelicals in America. He has donated millions of dollars to organizations that promote his causes, such as seeking to disprove the theory of evolution and maintaining that climate change is not caused by humans.

Foreign governments typically can't pay for lawmakers to fly overseas - it's against the law in most circumstances. But one member of Congress, Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-N.Y.), recently discovered another way to visit a luxury resort in a Caribbean country apparently courtesy of the government there.

Clarke disclosed that she was visiting Antigua and Barbuda and paid by the New York-based PM Group, otherwise known as the Portfolio Marketing Group, to attend the renaming ceremony for the country's highest peak to be Mount Obama. But in the forms filled out as part of the new House requirements for privately financed travel, the PM Group disclosed a representative  of the Antigua and Barbuda government as a person to contact about the trip. Perhaps not surprisingly, the PM Group's web site shows Antigua and Barbuda to be a client.

So did the government of Antigua and Barbuda actually sponsor the trip?

LegiStorm has added a simple change to the way we display congressional trip reports. For all trips after November of 2008, if an amendment to the original trip form was filed we now identify the amendment and separately link to both the original form and the amended form. You can see an example here.

LegiStorm has always collected trip amendments as part of our data-gathering process and changed the trip records accordingly, but if an amendment was filed to an older trip we lumped both the original and the amendment into one PDF. Providing both PDFs now makes it easier to see if a traveler filed an amendment, compare the amendment side-by-side to the original and view the changes made to the filing.

We will identify amendments on all trips going forward and we will also note amendments to historical trips as we find them. We hope this small feature makes our trip database even more convenient for our users.

The New York Times today cites LegiStorm data in a story with more revelations about the ties between Allen Stanford, who has been charged with fraud by the SEC, and lawmakers.

In addition to the trip Stanford Financial Group sponsored for Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), Stanford has been linked to the Inter-American Economic Council, which has sponsored 85 congressional trips since 2003, for a total of $307,122.

According to the Times:

Soon after billionaire Allen Stanford was charged by the SEC with fraud yesterday, several news outlets used LegiStorm's data to see if any lawmakers were tied to the latest scandal.

The clearest piece of evidence uncovered was a 2004 trip to Antigua and sponsored by Stanford Financial Group Co. for Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas). Cornyn took the four-day trip in Nov. 2004 and filed the necessary trip form, listing costs for himself and a companion (not disclosed but reported to be his wife) valued at $7,441.

The purpose of the trip was listed by Cornyn as "Financial services industry fact-finding mission hosted by constituent company with substantial operations on site" - Stanford Financial Group had a bank arm headquartered in Antigua and also had offices in Houston.

Reports by The Hill and the New York Post explore possible ethics violations surrounding trips to the Caribbean taken by members of the Congressional Black Caucus, including Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.).

The trips, taken in early November to the island of St. Maarten, were sponsored by the New York Carib News, a nonprofit organization that puts out a newspaper focused on Caribbean issues. Carib News indicated on disclosure forms filed with the House that it had not taken donations specifically for the trip - any such donations would be a violation of a recent House Ethics rule. But reports show corporations likely shelled out most of the cash to pay for the conference which was the stated reason for the trips.

The trip was not a one-time affair; New York Carib News has sponsored congressional travel to tropical locations for their business conference every year since at least 2000, when LegiStorm started tracking such travel. But the ethics rule in question was passed two years ago, after Democrats regained control of the House.

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.