Imagine if you could get a list of all the meetings with members and staffers of the House and Senate initiated by lobbyists for the likes of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, CitiGroup, American International Group, Washington Mutual, Wachovia and other parties with, shall we say, something more than an academic interest in the $700 billion financial bailout that the Senate just approved? Suppose you could see, for each meeting, the subject discussed. Suppose you could also get a list of the dates and amounts of campaign contributions those lobbyists had made, the expenses they’d incurred on behalf of their clients, even lists of calls to reporters and columnists and editorial writers that they’d made to sway public opinion for their clients?

For those clients, of course, you can’t — the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995 doesn’t require that sort of detail. But for lobbyists representing foreign governments, political parties, organizations and individuals, there is a different disclosure regime — and Sunlight’s new FARAdb prototype let’s you search and sort a sampling of these forms to get a sense of how lobbyists work the Hill.

The forms–required by the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) — are filed twice a year by firms hired to lobby Congress and the executive branch by foreign clients. The lobbying firms disclose specific details about which government officials, including members of Congress and their staffs, were contacted by lobbyists for each client, and gives details about what specific issues were discussed. The firms must also disclose all the campaign donations made by their employees who lobby for foreign clients.

The database covers two years worth of forms — January 2006 to December 2007 — filed by lobbyists representing 15 countries; they’ve reported collecting more than $67 million in fees and expenses while pushing the agendas and bolstering the images of foreign governments and organizations in the United States.

The database allows users to search by clients, government officials contacted, lobbyists and issues, making it easy to navigate the data. Using the search function, users can quickly learn that, according to FARA reports, lobbyists for these countries contributed $97,000 to the campaign of Republican presidential nominee John McCain between the latter part of 2005 to the end of 2007. His Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama, received $11,000 from lobbyists for these countries during the same period. For more details, and more digging into the disclosures, check the Real Time Investigations blog.

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On April 15, my colleague Anu–who’s been digging into foreign agent lobbyist disclosures–posted a piece noting an oddity about the lobbying firm founded by Thomas Loeffler, a national co-chairman of the McCain campaign. The Loeffler Group had been paid more than $15 million by the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia since 2003 and had had on average about 10 lobbying contacts a month (that is, meetings, phone calls, lunches, etc.) with members of Congress, their staff, and executive branch officials. After March 26, 2007, the firm stopped lobbying government officials on behalf of the Saudis. Yet the Loeffler Group continued to be paid a retainer–some $990,000 in the last six months–despite not doing very much on behalf of their client.

Over the weekend, Loeffler left the McCain campaign; as Mike Allen of the Politico noted,

It’s at least the fifth lobbying-related departure from the campaign in a week. …

The McCain campaign last week announced a restrictive “McCain Campaign Conflict Policy” that included a questionnaire to be returned to the campaign’s legal department as part of a re-vetting of all staff.

“No person working for the Campaign may be a registered lobbyist or foreign agent, or receive compensation for any such activity,” the policy says.

The L.A. Times’ Dan Morain notes that “Loeffler disclosed that on May 17, 2006, he had a ‘meeting with Sen. John McCain and Prince Turki to discuss the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and U.S.-Kingdom of Saudi Arabia relations.’ Turki was then Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the United States.”

And Josh Gerstein of the New York Sun asks, after seeing Anu’s report, whether the issue with Loeffler might be different: “The bigger problem for Mr. Loeffler may not have been the work he did for the Saudis, but the work he didn’t do.”

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Writing in the Washington Post, Paul Kane explicates the fine print on a fundraiser flier sent out by Sen. Charles Schumer and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and finds that the draw for prospective lobbyist fundraisers will be congressional staff members — not members of Congress:

Officially, lobbyists are asked to give or raise $2,000 to be a “host” or $1,000 to be a “DSCC friend” in order to meet “individuals representing” Senate Democrats. That’s code word for chiefs of staff and staff directors of committees, according to lobbyists who received the fundraising pitch. The image of the invite that was e-mailed to Capitol Briefing included the file name of “chiefs invitation”.

It’s part of what some lobbyists say is an emerging technique in fundraising by the campaign committees — gathering a group of top advisers to lawmakers rather than the principals themselves. Lobbyists say they’ve heard that later this year House Democratic chiefs of staff will be the draw at a fundraiser for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

This is an important reminder of the reasoning behind item 3 on Sunlight’s reform agenda:

3.) Meaningful lobbyist disclosure. All who are paid to engage in direct issue advocacy with lawmakers and their staff should be required to register, and all registered lobbyists should disclose all legislative contacts, all legislation and regulations discussed, all contributions they make and coordinate to Members and organizations affiliated with members, all prior government employment, and any relationship to a current Member of Congress, staff member, or executive branch employee. All lobbyist reports should be filed online within 24 hours of any meeting or contribution.

Rest assured that we would consider attendance at by a staff member at a campaign cash raising soiree to be a reportable contact. I think the disclosures filed by lobbyists for foreign governments, political parties and other government-related entitities give a hint of what this might look like (and, because the Department of Justice’s Foreign Agent Registration Unit just put a database of them online, I can point to a specific example, a supplemental form filed in February 2007 by Watts Conulting Group, which is run by former Oklahoma Congressman J.C. Watts. Starting on page 12 of the form, you can see what we’re after: they sent letters requesting an appropriation for the Institute for Liberty and Democracy to 12 House members and 9 Senators (you can read the actual letters starting on page 16 of the PDF); they had meetings with three Senators, and they list all their political contributions.

These disclosures aren’t perfect — for one thing, we tend to think that these contacts can be reported more frequently than every six months; the technology exists for these contacts to be reported in real time, which obviously would be preferable. But it does show that a more stringent disclosure regime already exists, and could serve as a model for lobbying reform.

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A while back, my colleague Anupama Narayanswamy reported on the RealTime blog that the disclosures filed under the Foreign Agent Registration Act were about to go online. Until now, these detailed disclosures–which require those paid to attempt to influence U.S. policies for foreign governments and some government-controlled entities to list their meetings with government officials, including members of Congress and their staff–were publicly available, but just barely. Only those who visited FARA’s New York Ave. office here in Washington, D.C., between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. Monday through Friday (closed Federal holidays), and looked up the records on balky, user-unfriendly interface, could get them, and only those prepared to pay 50 cents a page to copy them could get them out of that office. Now, some of those records are available online, although a FARA staffer tells us that the site isn’t officially public–they haven’t formally announced its availability.

The site, which is a work in progress, could definitely use a few improvements — one can’t link to search results, for example, and when I searched for the short form registration that Robert Torricelli filed (after his ethical flame out in Congress, the former New Jersey senator represented the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office), rather than a document, there’s a message saying that it’s “Available FARA Public Office,” meaning that trips to the New York Avenue office are not entirely a thing of the past. (Some of the filings of his firm, Rosemont Associates LLC, are available to read through, including, for example, this one, which explains that Torricelli’s firm tries to persuade current members of Congress to visit Taiwan and to adopt policies favorable to Taiwan. This one, starting on page 14, lists Torricelli’s contacts with the offices of Sens. Harry Reid, Charles Schumer, Richard Durbin and others — some 24 in all — from Sept. 2006 to Feb. 2007.)

The site offers its search results in spread sheet form (very useful for making databases), but when Anupama tried to download the entries for her Afghanistan search (the first country listed), she only got twenty of the twenty-four results. When I searched for China, I got 204 results, which seemed like a low number to me, but they all seemed to download fine into the spread sheet. The site should also offer a macro download, making it easy to get the entire database to one’s desktop. RSS feeds making interested folks aware of new filings would be nice too.

FARA is soliciting feedback on the site — the email address is embedded in a link on this page — so give the site a whirl and FARA some feedback. I know I’m going to.

Hard to believe, but a few years ago the Justice Department, citing the fragility of the database, refused to turn these records over to the Center for Public Integrity, which later went to court to obtain them (and got them in an unusable form).

Hat tip to Kevin Bogardus of the Hill, who did a fine story on these records a little more than a month ago.

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