LegiStorm: Transparency's Sidekick

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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.

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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.

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The guilty plea this week by an aide to Rep. Danny Davis (D-Ill.) - an aide who doesn't appear in official records at times that he was working for Davis - may raise questions for the lawmaker since ethics rules prohibit maintaining slush funds and hiring unpaid staff except under strict circumstances.

Staffer Ernest B. Moore confessed to fraud charges for using multiple aliases to run up hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit card bills and student loans. On Capitol Hill, he went by the aliases Bernard Glenn-Moore and Bernard Moore. Moore came to the Hill in 2004, when he had a one-year senior policy fellowship with Davis's office through the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation (such official fellowships are permitted under ethics rules). In 2006, he transfered to Davis's office as a legislative assistant and earned a salary for a few more months. After that, no official record ties him to Davis's office, despite public evidence that Davis knew he was claiming to represent Davis as an aide.

Politico broke the story of Moore's plea and described how he maintains a working house.gov email address, has organized events on behalf of Davis and claimed in his Williams College biography, where he has taught over the past few years, to be a continuing aide to Davis.

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A confidential report of the House ethics committee, detailing inquiries into possible ethics violations by dozens of lawmakers and their staffers, has made its way into the Washington Post this morning. The leak represents a rare opportunity to look at the deliberations of a committee that has been accustomed to operating in total privacy.

According to the report, the committee has interviewed Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) and some of the people around him in regard to the ongoing investigation into information surrounding his finances and a trip he took to St. Martin. Rangel has been under fire for failing to pay taxes on assets and income, and for leaving information out of his personal financial disclosures.

According to the report, however, he isn't the only one who may have omitted information from his disclosures. Rep. Alan Mollohan (D-W.Va.) has been under scrutiny since 2006 for having failed to reveal portions of his stake in real estate. According to the Post, the ethics committee report seems to indicate that the Justice Department may have taken over that investigation. Rep. Laura Richardson (D-Calif.) may also have omitted "property, income and liabilities" from her disclosures, according to the Post.

Others named in the report include subjects of a previously-known investigation into lawmakers associated with a lobbying firm that broke up after its offices were raided by the FBI early this year. PMA Group has been the subject of a federal investigation into earmarks and "pay-to-play" activities.

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