On Monday, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and the National Security Archive won an important victory for transparency when a D.C. District Court judge upheld their challenges regarding the White House’s failure to properly store and recover millions of emails dating from March 2003 through October 2005. Rejecting the government’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, the judge ruled that the Federal Records Act permits a private plaintiff to bring suit to require the administration to notify Congress or ask the attorney general to initiate action to recover destroyed or missing e-mail records, according to the Archive.

In September 2007, both groups filed separate suits seeking the recovery and preservation of more than 5 million e-mails under the Federal Records Act and the Administrative Procedure Act. Later that year, the judge consolidated the cases. The National Security Archive has compiled a nifty chronology of the case.

The judge held that the two groups have the right to sue to force the administration to restore the deleted emails before they become unrecoverable, that the court has the authority to review the adequacy of the White House’s recordkeeping practices, and the administration has a duty to prevent the destruction of federal records, according to wallstreet.online.

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Last Friday, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed an amicus brief in support of the disclosure requirements of the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007 (HLOGA), joining the Campaign Legal Center, Democracy 21 and Public Citizen in defending the disclosure provisions. All were in response to the National Association of Manufacturers who earlier in February had filed suit in federal court challenging the disclosure provisions and saying they are "vague, overbroad and burdensome" and were in violation of the First Amendment.

HLOGA requires any organization actively participating "in the planning, supervision, or control" of lobbying efforts that ponies up more than $5,000 in a quarter to disclose their activities and expenditures. The law’s purpose is to shine a light on stealth lobbying and sham coalitions, pushing legislation such as those that are often promoted by groups like NAM. The law’s criminal penalties on groups that fail to accurately disclose their lobby efforts succeeded at getting their attention. NAM says that the clause in question is imprecise and impacts groups that it is not intended to target. They fear the law will also require it to disclose the names of its members. NAM has requested the court issue a preliminary injunction on the disclosure rules until the court decides the case.

OMB Watch’s blog reports that strong legal precedent exists on the disclosure of lobbyist activities, the 1954 United States v. Harris Supreme Court decision that upheld disclosure provisions in the Regulation of Lobbying Act. The court determined that Congress had a right to gather information about "those who for hire attempt to influence legislation or who collect or spend funds for that purpose." Federal and state courts have used this precedent to almost unanimously upholding lobbying disclosure statutes based on the state interest in informing the public of the persons and groups that are attempting to sway the legislative process, according to OMB Watch.

In announcing their filing, CREW quoted U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) from a statement he made last year explaining the necessity of HLOGA’s lobbying disclosure requirement: "(As) President Harry Truman said, ‘The buck stops here.’ But with stealth lobbying we don’t know where ‘here’ is or whose buck it is."

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Our friends at CREW are providing a fantastic resource for reporters, bloggers, citizens and government document junkies–GovernmentDocs.org: An online compendium of scanned images of documents acquired from government agencies through the Freedom of Information Act by (right now) a handful of nonprofit groups (including the correspondence logs that Anu’s been acquiring for our RealTime project). Documents that once would have been filed away can have second and third lives online, where they can be read, annotated, tagged, and otherwise scrutinized by anyone who signs up to create an account.

CREW also uses OCR technology to make the images word-searchable; the results aren’t always perfect but they do make the documents easier to navigate.

CREW’s release is online here, and, full disclosure: Sunlight Foundation supported the creation of the site.

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Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has released its third annual report on the most corrupt members of Congress, entitled Beyond DeLay: The 22 Most Corrupt Members of Congress (and two to watch). The report highlights the corrupt activities of each of the 25 on the list.

The report is clear evidence that corruption hasn’t disappeared from Capitol Hill.

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Bill Frist was found guilty of failure to disclose a $1.44 million loan taken out jointly by his 2000 campaign and his 1994 campaign committee. Kudos to CREW for being the watchdog. Wouldn’t following the disclosure rules be better for our democracy than forcing the reform community to play ‘gotcha’?

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