So what happens when reporters around the country investigate earmarks, digging into resources like the exhaustive compendium of fiscal year 2008 earmarks put out by Taxpayers for Common Sense and the wealth of influence data that the Center for Responsive Politics assembles on Open Secrets, and then ask members of Congress about what they’ve found? Well, they get incredibly revealing defenses of how earmarks work, like this one from Rep. Tim Holden that was reported by the Republican Herald of Pottsville, Pa:

“People you do business with contribute to your campaign,” Holden said in a phone interview Friday. “This was a constituent of mine who was having trouble doing business with the Pentagon, having trouble getting through the bureaucracy.”

So are some members of Congress in business with their earmark recipients, exchanging help getting through the bureaucracies for campaign cash? That’s what a remarkable project that the Associated Press Managing Editors, the Sunlight Foundation, scores of reporters at dozens of newspapers tried to find out.

I’m going to be highlighting some of the stories tomorrow (I’m still trying to digest them all!), but first a little background on the project: Last fall, David Ledford, APME’s president and the executive editor of the Wilmington News Journal, talked to us about doing something on earmarks, trying to engage some of APME’s member papers around the country in a reporting effort that would shine some light on the practice. There were more than 13,000 earmarks in FY2008, and the only way to really make an investigative dent in them is to distribute the reporting across a lot of local papers.

We were thrilled with the idea. Sunlight developed a training curriculum, and Larry Makinson and I traveled to 13 different cities, giving a roomful of reporters–anywhere from 12 to 20–from the host paper and others in the region about six hours of follow-the-money database training, showing them where to look for connections between campaign contributions, lobbying and earmarks.

APME deserves a tremendous amount of credit for doing this the way they did it. With the exception of the Rep. Don Young / Coconut Grove earmark, these really are local stories — members bringing the money home. Looking at them from the ground up — from the perspective of local papers in each member’s district — is a great approach.

Let’s hope, as the FY 2009 earmarks are announced, we see more reporting like this.

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Arianna Huffington is entering the world of citizen journalism with her announcement of a new project: The Wisdom of Crowds Hits the Campaign Trail. It's got the makings of a great effort: she's recruiting citizen journalists from around the country to cover the major presidential candidates and asking each of them to contribute to a candidate-specific group blog — offering written updates, campaign tidbits, on-the-scene observations, photos, or original video. The goal is to provide more sources of information, and more outside-the-mainstream voices on the upcoming presidential campaign. She's got the readership to make it happen.

She's doing this a joint project with Jay Rosen's project - NewAssignment.Net, one of our grantees. Jay recently launched his first major distributed reporting assignment in conjunction with Wired.

Some details of this project from Jay include:

Sometime this spring, then, we'll roll out twelve new pages at NewAssignment.Net with a mix of news, information, original reporting and views not-found-elsewhere. Behind each candidate page will be a contributors' network built by hand, made up of people who would like to participate in the 2008 election by claiming a campaign beat and making their own news and commentary, in collaboration with others doing the same thing (but coming from a different place.) All overseen by an editor paid to make the whole thing run, and evaluated by how good the twelves [sic]pages are. …

So there's a structure, and for the contributors substantial freedom within that structure. Some order, some chaos. There are editors, but contributors post what they want at their own mini-blogs. We don't pay you for your time if you choose to become one of our contributors. Neither do we own your work. A Creative Commons license will apply to it. There will be no ads at the NewAssignment.Net site, which is non-profit, an experiment with the power-of-many in online journalism. The Huffington Post, which does have ads, will have the right to pull content from our 12 candidate pages.

I can't help but wonder how we might apply this concept to some key Congressional campaigns in 2008.

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If you've got some time on your hands go and help TPM Muckraker comb through the 3,000 Justice Department and White House documents dumped on the Judiciary Committees last night. Head to TPM Muckraker's website to follow these instructions:

So here's what we're going to do. This comment thread will be our HQ for sorting through tonight's document dump.

And to make it efficient and comprehensible, we'll have a system. As you can see on the House Judiciary Committee's website, they've begun reproducing 50-page pdfs of the documents with a simple numbering system, 3-19-2007 DOJ-Released Documents 1-1, then 1-2, then 1-3, etc. So pick a pdf, any pdf and give it a look. If you find something interesting (or damning), then tell us about it in the comment thread below.

Please begin your comment with the pdf number and please provide the page number of the pdf.

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Obviously, there’s no shortage of things going on…Rep. John Conyers and his use of taxpayer-funded staff as babysitters, personal chauffeurs and campaign workers (read the tepid press release from the House Ethics Committee here; the Washington Examiner weighs in with a tough editorial here). House Democrats have apparently chosen to exclude Republicans from participating in the deliberations over the opening legislative agenda in the 110th Congress, according to the Washington Post–including the package of ethics reforms. I can’t say I’m surprised by this, but it seems to me that if there’s one subject that requires a lot of thought, debate and discussion, and requires some bipartisan consensus, it’s how we fix the way our special-interest-beholden, publicly denigrated Congress goes about its business. It seems to me that the goal should be to render as transparent as possible the way that, say, a Rep. John Murtha operates. I’d be willing to wait an extra 100 hours, or even 200 hours, to get there. That said, I’m not entirely persuaded that involving House Republicans would do the trick.

But, seeing how this is the beginning not only of a new Congress but also a new presidential election campaign, I thought I’d note a curious little item I saw at the bottom of the Dec. 29, 2006, “Names & Faces” feature of the Washington Post:

The sale of John Edwards’s Georgetown home closed on schedule Wednesday afternoon with a final sale price of $5.2 million — almost half a million less than the family was asking for. An insider says the four-story residence was purchased by a corporation.

There’s a little more background here, and the Post ran a lengthy feature on the house here. It seemed kind of odd to me that a corporation would buy what’s described as a “family friendly” house, and worth finding out who the buyer is. I checked the District of Columbia’s Real Property Sales Database, but didn’t the find the record of the sale–I’m guessing that there’s some delay in entering the information to make it available online.

I think it’s always wise to be curious about the financial doings of politicians–Congress’s own ethics manuals state that the purpose of financial disclosure is to keep citizens informed about potential conflicts of interest. Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to make sense of those disclosures, or to get a full picture of who a public official is in business with from the information provided…

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Michael Petrelis may be a little late to the exposing earmarks party that we at Sunlight were part of last summer, but he asks exactly the kinds of thoughtful questions that any constituent, as part of his citizen oversight duties, should get answered from a representative in Congress. Petrelis is asking them of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the soon-to-be House Speaker–it will be interesting to see how quickly, and thoroughly, she responds.

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Wow. We’re a little past the four hour mark, and we’re through 24 states and 188 members. I’ll continue to keep an eye on progress tonight, but this has once again been an incredible effort. Thanks to all who are making round two as successful as the first go round!

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It's your last chance to investigate the 109th Congress before Election Day! Who else besides Julie Doolittle has a company that works for her spouse's campaign? How many federal contractors employ spouses of members of Congress? Have nonprofits that receive part of their funding from congressional appropriations hired spouses of members? It's up to you to find out! Round Two of "Is Congress a Family Business" is now online! Thanks to our too modest Web design genius, it's still as slick and user friendly as round one. This time some of the information we're looking for will be more challenging to find, but if you follow the step-by-step instructions, you should be able to help investigate a member of Congress in less than five minutes! Once again we’re looking at the House of Representatives, this time investigating what I like to call the Sierra Dominion phenomenon—that of congressional spouses who work for a firm that in turn works for the member's campaign. Sierra Dominion Financial Resources is the name of the firm whose sole employee is the wife of Rep. John Doolittle, R-Calif., Julie Doolittle. Sierra Dominion Financial Services, has been paid more than $60,000 for “fundraising commissions” by Doolittle’s campaign since January 1, 2005. (That’s not all Sierra Dominion did, of course—it also took money from one of the lobbying firms Jack Abramoff worked for, Greenberg, Traurig, as well as fundraising commissions from a PAC associated with Doolittle—for more information, visit the authoritative Congresspedia entry here.) Our intrepid citizen journalists have already found 19 members who've paid their spouses more than $630,000 directly from campaign contributions. Now, using the excellent new financial disclosure database from the Center for Responsive Politics, we'll search CRP's campaign expenditure information for indirect payments from special interests to family budgets. As an added bonus, we’re also going to see find out whether spouses work for firms that get federal contracts or grants. Using FedSpending.org, the new database built by our friends at OMB Watch that tracks government contracts and grants, we'll see whether organizations that employ spouses of members of Congress are seeking federal funds. I’m not quite sure what we’ll find, but that’s part of the fun. Are members' spouses working for institutions that are seeking scarce federal grant dollars? Are companies with spouses of members of Congress on the payroll seeking federal contracts from executive branch agencies? This is the first step in finding out–and one of the first big research efforts using OMB Watch's cool new tool for government transparency. A quick note on the next step for this part of the project: We're going to try to find a way to open up the verification, reporting and writing process to citizen journalists as well as the front end research. We're hoping to offer new opportunities for more involved participation. So if you want to go beyond this opening round of research, we'd like to enlist your help for further research. The goal will be to take what we find, and find out more about it, and publish our findings. Remember—this is the last chance to investigate this Congress before the election. Have at it, and of course we hope you have some fun doing it!

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Some 19 current members of the House of Representatives pay their spouses out of their campaign war chests, totaling more than $636,000 in the current election cycle, a study by citizen journalists working with the Sunlight Foundation has found. Phase one of the “Is Congress A Family Business?” investigation is now complete.

Using an innovative tool developed by Sunlight Labs, about 40 volunteers investigated anywhere from one to as many as 155 members, uncovering those who, by hiring their spouses to work for their campaign, allow special interest cash to enter their family budgets.

While the federal nepotism statute prohibits members of Congress from hiring spouses to work in their Washington or district offices, there is no law preventing members from hiring family members to work for their campaign committees, provided they render bona fide services to the campaign at fair market value.

In the current election cycle, the spouse paid the most directly from campaign funds was Patricia McKeon, the wife of Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif. From January 1, 2005, through June 2006, she has been paid $78,287–which works out to an annual salary of a little more than $52,000 a year. According to the campaign, Ms. McKeon serves as the treasurer. Rep. McKeon’s 2005 financial disclosure form indicates that his campaign was his wife’s sole source of earned income.

Rep. Richard Pombo’s wife Annette has been paid $52,950 through June 2006 by the seven-term Republican’s reelection effort. When contacted by the Sunlight Foundation about the payments, a campaign spokesperson explained that Annette Pombo is not an employee of the campaign, but rather is paid fees for consulting.

Citizen researchers also found that Rep. Elton Gallegly, R-Calif., has hired his wife, Janet, to be his campaign manager, paying her $41,792 over the study period. Rep. Bob Inglis, R-S.C., gave his wife Mary Anne the same title and paid her $28,960.

The investigative tool allowed users to easily access members’ biographical information—including spouse names—compiled by the nonpartisan VoteSmart.org. They could then look up campaign expenditure information from the Center for Responsive Politics’ Web site, OpenSecrets.org, to see if an individual with that name was receiving payments from the campaign. Researchers recorded the information at the Sunlight Foundation’s site.

Citizen journalists investigated all 435 members of the House of Representatives in less than 48 hours; Sunlight Foundation researchers verified the information and contacted campaigns to confirm the identity of the individuals.

Some campaigns did not respond to queries; in those cases, personal financial disclosures of members were consulted to verify the information.

Future projects will track spouses who are paid indirectly by campaigns—that is, they work for firms that in turn work for a campaign—and spouses who work for firms that receive government contracts and grants.

Of the 19 current House members who employ their spouses on their campaigns, two are not seeking reelection in 2006. The campaign of Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, who on Sept. 13, 2006, pled guilty to multiple crimes stemming from the investigation of lobbyist Jack Abramoff, paid his wife Elizabeth $25,598 through June 2006. More recent filings by the campaign with the FEC show that she continued to receive payments even after her husband’s guilty plea: she received two payments of $851 on Sept. 15 and Sept. 30. According to the 2005 financial disclosure form filed by Rep. Ney, his campaign is his wife’s sole source of earned income.

Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y., announced on March 17, 2006, that he would not seek reelection. But even though his campaign is no longer geared to winning an election, it’s not entirely inactive: it continues to hold fundraising and other events, it makes contributions to other Republican candidates, and it still files reports with the FEC.

The campaign’s last remaining paid employee is Boehlert’s spouse, Marianne Boehlert, who first became a paid employee of the campaign in 2002, according to Sam Marchio, the communications director for Boehlert’s office. “She was an integral part of the team,” he said, adding that she was involved in fundraising, scheduling events and managing volunteers. “She really kept the trains running on time,” he said.

The campaign has paid Ms. Boehlert $35,430 through June 30, 2006; a review of more recent FEC records filed by the campaign show that she has remained on the payroll through September.

“Just because he’s not running for reelection doesn’t mean there’s no activity,” Marchio said, adding that there’s “still a lot of work to be done closing down a campaign office.”

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We’ve gotten some great feedback on planning the next round of our Congressional Family Business investigation, both from inside the office, from some of the folks who made the first round such a success, and from some smart observers (thanks to David Cohn for posting that at Digg!).

We’re starting to design phase two now (what this means in practice is that I get to keep bothering our Sunlight Labs geniuses with questions that begin with cringe-inducing phrases like, “How quickly could you…” or “How hard would it be to…” or “Would it be possible to…”). I’m really excited about round two; and even though we won’t be able to incorporate all the excellent suggestions we’ve gotten right away, this step will include some of your ideas while also giving us the building blocks to do some never-before-seen investigations, like figuring out whether spouses work for companies or organizations that have gotten federal contracts or grants (something our friends at OMB Watch have made possible through FedSpending.org), or for firms that lobby or hire lobbyists to influence Congress.

If you need a reminder as to why this is important, look no further than this USAToday story focusing on relatives of members and staff working for just two committees of Congress, the House Appropriations Committee and its Senate counterpart:

Lobbying groups employed 30 family members last year to influence spending bills that their relatives with ties to the House and Senate appropriations committees oversaw or helped write, a USA TODAY investigation found. Combined, they generated millions of dollars in fees for themselves or their firms.

The connections are so pervasive that, in 2005 alone, appropriations bills contained about $750 million for projects championed by lobbyists whose relatives were involved in writing the spending bills.

Again, that’s two committees, $750 million in one year. And that could be a low figure (I say this on the basis of what a dogged researcher with Taxpayers for Common Sense, who have as much experience as anyone else in ferreting out earmarks, once told me: Even after all their efforts, there are usually some big earmarks in Defense Appropriations or Defesne Authorization bills that they can’t tie to a member or a company). Imagine what we’ll find when we cover the rest of Congress…

Stay tuned…

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The Washington Post, and reporters R. Jeffrey Smith and Carol D. Leonnig, have more on the investigation of Rep. Curt Weldon, his daughter, and some of his close political allies. What’s interesting to me is how much of the information in the story comes from documents that federal law requires lawmakers and the lobbyists that try to influence them to disclose, and how little of that information is actually available to the public in a useful, searchable form.

For example, Smith and Leonnig report on privately funded junkets to Serbia, Russia and Jacksonville, Fla., taken by Weldon and a member of his staff; if it weren’t for the efforts of groups like the Center for Public Integrity and now the Center for Responsive Politics, those reports would be available only to researchers who trekked down to the Capitol.

Smith and Leonnig also report on filings that the Justice Department’s Foreign Agents Registration Act registration unit maintains–these filings specified, among other things, that Weldon’s daughter’s firm would be paid $300,000 a month by Itera International Energy Corp., a Russian oil and gas management firm that’s part of the investigation. Back in 2004, colleagues of mine at the Center for Public Integrity tried to get the database of these filings from the Justice Department in order to present them to a broader public; CPI even went to court to force Justice’s FARA Registration Unit to make the data available. In the course of trying to pry loose the data, they learned that the computer system that preserves this data was in less than excellent shape:

Responding to a recent Freedom of Information request from the Center for Public Integrity, the Justice Department’s Foreign Agent Registration Unit said it was unable to copy its records electronically because their computer system was “so fragile.” In a letter, the head of the unit’s Freedom of Information office said that simply attempting to make an electronic copy of the database “could result in a major loss of data, which would be devastating.”

The database details millions of dollars spent on lobbying activities by foreign governments, companies, and foundations.

Those activities include everything from wining and dining lawmakers to broadcasting issue ads on American television and radio stations.

You can only get information from the FARA Registration Unit by visiting its downtown Washington offices, between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m., looking it up on their balky computer system, and paying 50 cents a page to make copies. Not exactly robust disclosure–which makes this comment, from that same 2004 CPI story by Kevin Bogardus, surreal to say the least:

“The information itself still is very accessible,” said Bryan Sierra at the Department of Justice’s Office of Public Affairs. “The basic mandate of the office is to provide information to the public.”

They’ve got a funny way of fulfilling their mandate…

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