Legistorm: Transparency's Sidekick

Sifting through personal financial disclosures of congressional staffers, we stumbled upon one disclosure of gifts from an aide's girlfriend. That romantic gesture led us down a path of inquiry that raises questions about whether the new travel rules are followed scrupulously or have major loopholes.

This all started with our routine review  of the financial disclosure of Jay Hulings, a legislative counsel for Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.). He revealed that his girlfriend, Elysia Petru, a former Miss San Antonio, had given him $675 in gifts in 2008. The gifts included a trip to Seattle and a video game console.

Our interest at first was merely amusement that a staffer might have to disclose gifts from a significant other. But our interest was piqued when we learned that Petru appears to work alongside Helen Milby, a heavy Democratic fundraiser, and that the two of them were organizers of a July 2008 fact-finding trip to Portland and Seattle - and more specifically to the campus of Microsoft,  maker of the Xbox video game console - by congressional staff.

The Washington Post reports today on the how the staff of Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii) tried to get federal regulators to provide bailout funds for a bank where the senator has invested the bulk of his personal wealth.  

After the intervention, regulators at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. reversed their earlier decision not to provide bailout funds because the institution, Central Pacific Financial, did not qualify. The bank received a $135 million injection of federal funds as part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Having been granted an extension, Inouye has not yet filed his 2009 personal financial disclosure covering last year. But his 2008 disclosure shows that at at the end of 2007 he and his wife owned between $350,000 and $700,000 worth of Central Pacific Financial stock.

LegiStorm has added the latest U.S. Senate staff salaries onto its site, completing the 2008 year that saw the end of Senate careers by Barack Obama (D-Ill.), Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Ted Stevens (R-Alaska).

The new data include the salaries of all Senate staff from Oct. 1, 2008-March 31, 2009. Unlike the House, which releases its expenditure and salary data quarterly, the Senate releases its financial records every six months. The Secretary of the Senate published two thick books of expenditures earlier this month. LegiStorm has painstakingly converted the salary records from paper form into its database.

Meanwhile, the House has also released all of its expenditure records from the first quarter of 2009 and we have begun  entering that data as well. We will make another blog post when that is complete, which we estimate to be about two weeks from now.

The personal financial disclosure of Sen. Roland Burris (D-Ill.) is attracting yet more attention to the lawmaker's short but troubled tenure.

The Chicago Tribune reported that Burris, who was appointed by disgraced Gov. Rob Blagojevich, failed to disclose un-exercised stock options for a company where he was a board member. The Tribune reports that Burris intends to amend his financial disclosure to reflect the options to buy 8,000 shares of Inland Real Estate Corp. for prices between $9 and $20. However, the company's share price was $6.72 on Wednesday, making it unlikely Burris will exercise his options anytime soon, according to the Tribune.

You can see the personal financial disclosures of all members of the House and Senate, as well as congressional staffers, at LegiStorm.

LegiStorm has uploaded and made available nearly 2,500 personal financial disclosures filed by House and Senate staffers in 2009.

Our financial disclosure database now includes the disclosures from all staffers from both houses of Congress who filed by the May 15 deadline. We will continue to add filings for those staffers who received extensions of the deadlines or who file amendments throughout the year.

LegiStorm already posted the financial disclosures of every member of Congress who filed by the deadline earlier this month.