LegiStorm: Transparency's Sidekick

LegiStorm has now completed the upload of all personal financial disclosures filed in 2008 for all House and Senate members and aides.

We uploaded the members of the House and Senate the same morning they were released but the staff have been a much bigger chore. We uploaded Senate staff last week and have now just completed the House staff.

All in all, we have 1,727 disclosures from members of Congress, including amendments. We have 4.850 disclosures for aides. All are avaiable to users who register for free.

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We at LegiStorm were fascinated to read a story in Politico this week which polled the offices of all senators to find out where they got their mortgages, especially by the answer of the former head of the Senate banking committee, Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.).

The Politico survey comes after documents reveal that two senators, Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), received preferential treatment on their mortgages from Countrywide after requesting help from the head of the company. So Politico surveyed senators to find out how others received their mortgages. So far, 15 senators have not bothered to answer the poll.

But we were particularly intrigued by the response of Shelby, who headed the Senate Banking, House and Urban Affairs Committee and is still its ranking member. According to Politico, Shelby responded that he has no mortgages on his two homes. In fact, LegiStorm's data indicates that Shelby has a $1-$5 million mortgage with Wells Fargo Bank.

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LegiStorm has now released all Personal Financial Disclosures filed by Senate aides in 2008. The disclosures include the annual reports filed by staffers by the May 15 deadline, as well as letters granting extensions to those staffers who asked for more time to file.

Only certain staffers are required to file disclosures. Generally, those required to file are the highest-paid staffers, who also tend to be the most senior ones who crafting legislation and policy. The disclosures serve as one tool to highlight any possible conflicts of interest or other financial issues involving these key legislative employees.

We have left out a handful of staffers who have filed but who are not listed in our current salary database, such as employees of special commissions. We will be adding them soon.

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LegiStorm released all of the personal financial disclosures of all members of the U.S. House of Representatives who have filed their reports on time. The Monday morning release follows on the heels of LegiStorm's Friday release of disclosures for all senators.

A list of those members of Congress who have filed for extensions is located at http://www.legistorm.com/2008HouseExtensions.pdf. Some of those who have received extensions have already turned in their reports and we have made those available.

The disclosures came to us from the Clerk of the House in sideways fashion (a result of the fact that the original documents are in landscape orientation, but scanners don't typically take documents in landscape format). LegiStorm likes to make these forms more useful to users by rotating them but because of the rush to get the files up on the web, the rotation of the files will have to wait for a little while.

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UPDATE: All of the house PFDs are now rotated for our users' convenience. As you look through the disclosures, please leave a comment if you find anything of interest.

LegiStorm has released the latest available staff salary data from the House of Representatives, covering the first quarter of 2008.

This is the first of two large data releases we expect today. We hope to have all of the financial disclosures on our site by the end of the morning. The Clerk of the House has not made it easy, however, as they have lumped many financial disclosures together in one file, meaning that we have to extract all the individual member financial disclosures from these larger files.

The Senate releases its salary data every six months. The Senate has released the data from the six months ending on March 31, 2008 but we are still busy entering it into our database and editing it. We do not yet have an exact date for our release but think it might be as soon as next week.

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The latest personal financial disclosures of U.S. senators are now available at LegiStorm, www.legistorm.com.

Several disclosures have not been released, most notably Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), who just ended her bid for the presidency. No reason was provided in the letter from the Secretary of the Senate which granted the extension.

Also filing for extensions were Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (R-R.I.)

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Each year in mid-June, reporters madly scramble to the House and Senate records rooms to get copies of the personal financial disclosures for members of Congress. This year LegiStorm hopes to make that scramble unnecessary for many reporters.

We have received word that the Senate financial disclosures are to be released Friday morning. If all goes as planned, we think we can have the records on our site by the end of the morning. The House records are to be released Monday and those too, we hope to have up by noon of that day.

Financial disclosures for congressional aides will take longer. While member disclosures are made available by the Congress in electronic form on CDs for those who pay for it, disclosures for staffers must be gathered and uploading in a much more painstaking process that involves finding them on congressional computers, then printing, scanning and uploading them. We hope to have our first staffer data available by Tuesday of next week but it will take days to get the more than 2,000 disclosures organized onto the web.

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The Wall Street Journal ($$) has a story in today's edition highlighting the importance of personal financial disclosures for members and their staff.

Russell Caso, a former chief of staff to Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), admitted his wife received payments from a group with ties to the Russian government but he did not report the payments on his personal financial disclosure as required, according to The Journal's anonymous sources with knowledge of court documents. Caso pleaded guilty to not disclosing the payments in December, but the origin of the funds wasn't known until now. The sources identified International Exchange Group as the source of a $19,000 payment for "editing work." The WSJ quotes a speech by Weldon in which he said the company had ties to senior Russian military, intelligence and political officials.

Caso's undisclosed payments are part of a larger corruption probe looking at Weldon, as well as a Justice Department inquiry into companies with Russian ties who are suspected of trying to gain improper influence in Washington.

The case points out yet again the usefulness of the personal financial disclosures of congressional staffers that we published in February to a surprising amount of controversy. The disclosures give a needed look at possible conflicts-of-interest by powerful staffers and members of Congress when everything is reported correctly. But often, the most interesting things about disclosures are what is left out.