LegiStorm: Transparency's Sidekick

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.

When LegiStorm launched in 2006, we shone a spotlight on congressional aides like never before and that made some staffers understandably a little nervous. After all, it's a rare exception to the rule that the aide should never be the subject of news. Even good news about a staffer can tend to hog the spotlight from the boss and that's not a good thing for lawmakers who need to hoard all the attention they can get.

But when the news about a staffer is bad, well, that's obviously no good for the elected boss. Elizabeth Becton, an aide to Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), discovered that this week when a rather unfortunate email exchange of hers made it into the hands of a reporter. In the over-the-top correspondence, she scolds a lobbying firm representative for slipping and calling her Liz.

Now, "Don't Call Me Liz" Becton finds herself a minor Internet sensation, with many thousands of people visiting her page on LegiStorm and hundreds leaving flames for her.

Senators may have reputations to some as being inexhaustible windbags but they sure like to write too.

Personal financial disclosures released today reveal numerous Senators with book contracts or royalties.

1. - Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) - The son of a noted politician has a publishing agreement with Emmis Books to write a book on fatherhood, with all proceeds to be donated to charity. 
2. - Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) - Boxer has two book publishing agreements from 2004 and 2007 with Chronicle Books LLC of San Francisco.
3. - Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) - Brown has an agreement from 2000 with New Press to donate all royalties to charities that he makes from a book about trade policy, as well an agreement to receive 10% royalties from Kent State University Press for a book called "Congress from the Inside." 
4. - Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) - Brownback has an agreement to receive $75,000 in advance from W Publishing Group for a manuscript title "From Power to Purpose."
5. - Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) - The Senate's oldest member received $10,000 in book income from Gelfman Schneider Literary Agents.
6. - Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) - DeMint listed $5,000 in royalty from Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, and a $42,500 book advance from B&H Publishers.
7. - Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.) - The North Dakota senator has a $120,000 advance agreement from the William Morris Agency for the title, "Reckless! How Debt, Deregulation and Dark Money Nearly Bankrupted America."
8. - Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) - The wealthy senator donated $22,544 in book royalties to charity.
9. - Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) - The Minnesota senator had royalties of $319 from Waveland Press.
10. - Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) - Kennedy was the clear winner in the royalty race, pulling down $2 million for his autobiography.
11. - Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) - The former vice presidential nominee has two book deals in the works.
12. - Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) - The former presidential candidate's report puzzlingly suggests he earned royalties of only $20,539, which he donated to charity. Other books are underway. McCain splits royalties with his co-author Mark Salter, and the report lists no royalites from three of his five books in print.
13. - Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) - Menendez has one book contract with a $50,000 advance, to be split with his co-author. A second with Sterling Lord Literistic gives his co-author the entire $50,000 advance, plus 100% of any additional proceeds up to $50,000, with a 50-50% author/co-author split after that.
14. - Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) - She has an agreement for two books that also promises 50% of the royalties.
15. - Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) - The Senate majority leader earned $135,903 in book royalties, which he donated to charity.
16. - Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) - Schumer has an agreement to publish a book and reported receiving an advance in an earlier report.
17. - Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) - The former Republican reported $20,000 in royalties.

But senators didn't receive royalties only from writing books. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) continued to supplement his Senate income with royalties from writing songs, having 19 separate royalty agreements involving his tunes. His total haul was $8,369. That makes him far more lucky than the lobbying firm, Greenberg Traurig, that represented him in an unspecified number of those transactions. His agreement with them is to pay a relatively stingy 5% representation fee.

We have uploaded financial disclosures for members of the House that have been made newly available since our posting of disclosures earlier this week.

They include an amendment that was just released by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), whose disclosure was featured in news reports because of her ownership, along with huband Paul, of stock in AIG. The insurance giant's financial collapse led to a massive government bailout. The amendment indicates that they have sold all their stock in the company, although the original form lists it as a partial sale.

Rep. Marion Berry (D-Ark.) has also filed two amendments to his disclosure and he's not done yet. He has said he will file yet another disclosure after a Roll Call story found that he had underreported the value of his home.

LegiStorm has now completed upload of all senator financial disclosures.

Although they were not included in the release by the Senate this morning, we have filings from Al Franken, who filed only an extension, and Norm Coleman, who filed a termination report. The two remain locked in a legal battle for the Senate seat in Minnesota, with Franken, a Democrat, holding a narrow lead.

However, we do not have the disclosure for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who filed an extension but whose disclosure was accidentally left out of the Senate's release. We will post the extension and the actual financial disclosure as they become available.

We have gathered the personal financial disclosures of all U.S. senators and are scanning them in now. They should be up on our LegiStorm site by noon or shortly thereafter.

Earlier this week we got financial disclosures up for all members of the House who had submitted them. We have now posted the House's list of 64 members who filed extension letters. We will get those additional member disclosures up on our site as soon as they become available.

Meanwhile, we have also begun putting congressional staff disclosures up online. While we have already put up hundreds of staff disclosures, we do not expect all staff disclosures to be up for at least a week due to the cumbersome process we have to go through to gather them all.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her husband lost between $100,001 and $1 million on an investment in American International Group according to her 2009 personal financial disclosure.

The revelation was the main focus of a number of news stories published after LegiStorm announced we had posted the disclosures for members of the House yesterday, two days before the schedule release.

The Washington Post, USA Today, Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal were among the outlets that looked at the files on LegiStorm and wrote about what they found.

The House of Representatives Clerk's Office has accidentally released all of the personal financial disclosures of members of the House ahead of their scheduled release on Friday.

The 2009 financial disclosures went up on the Clerk's web site. They are now all on LegiStorm's site.

The disclosures were scheduled to be released June 12, but the Clerk of the House website briefly posted them yesterday and LegiStorm was able to download the available disclosures and post them (with all the pages rotated to the correct orientation for our users' convienence - the forms are released in a sideways fashion due to the scanning process).