• Better resource on earmark requests…

  By Bill Allison on 04/15/09 @ 9:48 pm | 0 Comments

  …available here, plus a chance to do some research…

  

• Who’s seeking A Piece of the Action?

  By Bill Allison on 02/23/09 @ 5:48 pm | 1 Comment

  The bailout (the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act, the Troubled Asset Relief Program, TARP, etc.) and the stimulus (the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act) are massive pieces of legislation with lots of moving parts. Thus, the more eyeballs on them and what’s around them, the better.

  A Piece of the Action? tracks one aspect of the unfolding age of bailing and stimulating — interests hiring Washington lobbyists to at the very least monitor and likely to try to influence how the government spends its money.

  As noted immediately below, this database is an imperfect resource. But it’s what we can do with our inadequate disclosure regimen, and you can help make it better.

  Click on any line item in the database, scroll down to the bottom of the screen, and see if you can help track down information on the client — its headquarters location, a brief description, a link to information on its lobbying interests — to make this resource more useful.

  Take a look at this entry, culled from the database — it lists San Mateo County as the client. The actual form filed at the Senate tells us that San Mateo County is in California, its headquarters is in Redmond, CA, zip code 94063 — adding that information helps to make this resource more useful (I’ll start posting a map if we start getting a lot of location information). You can also find that the county lists, among its lobbying interests, TARP. It’s no secret why the county government is interested–a link that would be well worth adding to the database in the “What do they want?” field.

  I’ll keep updating the database a few times a week with new filings.

  

• Genealogy of the Stimulus Bill

  By Bill Allison on 02/09/09 @ 9:13 pm | 0 Comments

  The current economic crisis does seem to present a combination of circumstances (the housing crisis, a credit crisis, declining international trade, rising unemployment), some of which are causes, some of which are symptoms, none of which–of course–are particularly pleasant for those going through them. So how does Congress, legislatively, address new circumstances? Do members and their staffs (and the lobbyists whispering in their ears) craft bills to solve the problems at hand? Or do they go through their archives and relabel old bills as solutions to new problems?

  Using the indispensable Govtrack.us, I’m going to look for antecedents of passages in the House version of the stimuls bill, using the full text of the bill, then searching prior Congresses for similar language.

  For example, Sec. 1261 of the bill which “may be cited as the ‘Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act of 2009,’” is actually the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act of 2007, which was introduced by Rep. Henry Waxman on March 15, 2007, long before the collapse of Bear Stearns, AIG, Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. In approaching the stimulus bill, did Congress craft new provisions to meet new circumstances? If not, can we trace the sponsors of the old ideas pressed into service to meet new circumstances? (Full disclosure in the nature of a statement against our interests: Sunlight is on the record supporting strong whistleblower protections in the stimulus, and elsewhere.)

  Section 9301 of the House Bill, the “21st Century Green High-Performing Public School Facilities,” was introduced by Rep. Ben Chandler as the 21st Century Green High-Performing Public School Facilities Act on July 12, 2007, again well before the economic crisis–which the stimulus bill is supposed to mitigate–existed.

  I wonder how many other passages there are like this in the House Bill, and in the Senate version as well.

  

• NY Times: Clinton Foundation Donor got help from Hillary

  By Bill Allison on 01/05/09 @ 2:50 am | 1 Comment

  Digging down deep into the list of Clinton Foundation donors, the New York Times finds that a donor had gotten considerable help from Sen. Hillary Clinton:

  An upstate New York developer donated $100,000 to former President Bill Clinton’s foundation in November 2004, around the same time that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton helped secure millions of dollars in federal assistance for the businessman’s mall project.

  Mrs. Clinton helped enact legislation allowing the developer, Robert J. Congel, to use tax-exempt bonds to help finance the construction of the Destiny USA entertainment and shopping complex, an expansion of the Carousel Center in Syracuse.

  Mrs. Clinton also helped secure a provision in a highway bill that set aside $5 million for Destiny USA roadway construction.

  The bill with the tax-free bonds provision became law in October 2004, weeks before the donation, and the highway bill with the set-aside became law in August 2005, about nine months after the donation.

  How many other donors to the foundation also had business before the junior senator from New York?

  

• Wall Street Journal profiles donors…

  By Bill Allison on 12/18/08 @ 9:22 pm | 0 Comments

  …here. Margaret Coker filled in the blanks on some of the foreign donors from Abu Dhabi.

  I’ll put them in the database now…

  

• Clinton Foundation releases donor list; we database it

  By Bill Allison on 12/18/08 @ 8:12 pm | 4 Comments

  …and, thanks to my Sunlight colleague Larry Makinson and DabbleDB.com, we’ve got it available in a database format. The source material is here, but I couldn’t get into the first page (glad that Larry could). This view lets you see all the entries.

  It would be interesting to see what issues the donors are interested in, where they come from, what their own economic interests are, and whether these could potentially create conflicts of interest for Sen. Hillary Clinton, our next Secretary of State.

  Contributors to the foundation include governments of Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Norway, Jamaica, Oman and Brunei have contributed, as have government lobbying arms like the Taiwan Economic and Cultural Office — we should be concerned that the government of Saudi Arabia has contributed somewhere between $10 and $25 million to a foundation run by the spouse of our highest ranking foreign policy official.

  Maybe I’ll add some fields and some data if (that’s often a big if) I have a little down time today or tomorrow. And feel free to add information in comments.

  I should also note that disclosing this information isn’t required by any law (but should be); the Obama transition and the Clintons themselves deserve some marks for releasing the information. But all these donations to presidential foundations–for Bushes as well as Clinton (and Carter) should be publicly disclosed.

  

• Financial Bailout: Who does Dodd see at his fundraisers?

  By Bill Allison on 09/24/08 @ 1:56 am | 0 Comments

  Among Sen. Christopher Dodd’s top career donors are employees, their family members and PACs of the following players in the nation’s financial meltdown: Citigroup (”written off and lost $53.6 billion through the credit crunch so far, which is more than any other bank or broker,”) Bear Stearns (”Bear Stearns’s mortgage business, a big driver of profits, has been eviscerated,”), SAC Capital Partners (vehemently denies charge that they helped bring down Bear Stearns), American International Group (saved by an emergency $85 billion rescue), Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley (each of which are morphing into bank holding companies), Greenwich Capital Markets (”a top issuer of mortgage-backed securities in the subprime market), Royal Bank of Scotland (which owns Greenwich Capital Markets), Credit Suisse Group (which misled some investors about its auction rate securities), Merrill Lynch (which needed Bank of America to rescue it), J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. (which bought Bear Stearns) and Lehman Brothers (which failed).

  

• Tracking earmarks from Obama and Biden

  By Bill Allison on 09/13/08 @ 1:21 pm | 3 Comments

  Taxpayers for Commons Sense rolled out a pair of new databases on earmarks of presidential candidates, this time covering Sen. Barack Obama’s requests from 2006 to 2008, and his funded earmarks for 2008. The databases are online here.

  A list of the earmarks Sen. Joe Biden requested for fiscal year 2009 is available here. Robert Bluey at Red State is calling on Biden to disclose all his earmark requests–can’t argue with that. But for those who want to dig around in the press release archives of his site, there are plenty of releases like this one from prior years showing some of the earmarks he got funded.

  One that interests me in the above-linked release is this one:

  $6.6 million for University of Delaware-Center for Composite Materials work for the Army, including $1.6 million for work for the Army on an advanced, lighter composite armored ambulance, $3 million for a composite armored truck cab able to add various armor packages, and $2 million for work on lighter composite add-on vehicle armor.

  Take a look at the Web page of the University of Delaware-Center for Composite Materials, particularly the center’s consortium members, which include huge defense contractors like Boeing, BAE Systems and General Dynamics, as well as three icons for “Anonymous Member.”

  Somehow, I don’t think composite armored truck cabs or lighter composite armored ambulances are research subjects of disinterested academic research the results of which will be available to all, but rather projects that will benefit certain companies exclusively. So who else benefits from the earmark?

  Incidentally, here’s the google search I used to get some of Biden’s older earmark requests — dig in if you’re so inclined.

  

• Due diligence in the Biden family lawsuit

  By Bill Allison on 09/02/08 @ 2:33 am | 0 Comments

  In a comment to this post pointing to some resources for getting acquainted with the Republican vice presidential pick, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, I noted this Washington Post story on a lawsuit involving Robert Hunter Biden, the son of the Democratic vice presidential nominee, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, James Biden, the Senator’s brother, and plaintiff Anthony Lotito, who is the former business partner of the two non-elected Bidens in a deal that didn’t work out. Both sides charge one another with cheating; hence the lawsuit. It turns out the New York State Supreme Court (where the case is filed) puts most of its documents online (here’s the home page for searching).

  The documents themselves indicate that the case has little to do with Sen. Biden — whatever the truth of the allegations and counter-allegations, it appears that at most he asked his brother to call Lotito to see if he could help find something for his son to do other than being a registered lobbyist — in the original complaint, it says that Biden’s brother James was the source of this information.

  Perhaps the most interesting thing I came across in the documents is the Bidens’ claim that they never would have entered the deal — which involved buying some hedge funds in a partnership with Lotito that was called LBB Holdings USA Inc. — if they were aware of Lotito’s background and the background of the corporate counsel Lotito hired for the venture — one John Fasciana. At the time that Lotito and the two Bidens hired Fasciana, he was awaiting sentencing on a 2005 fraud conviction. All I had to do to find those two DOJ press releases was to google John Fasciana — didn’t the Bidens do any due diligence in this $21 million deal? Apparently not:

  Had we known of Fasciana’s conviction and prior criminal conduct, we would not have retained Fasciana for any purpose. We also would not have formed LBB, and would not have engaged in any further business dealings with Lotito.

  Are all Washington lobbyists with law degrees so trusting? Are they all such simple, naive folk that they don’t check out the people they’re doing business with?

  In any case, here are a few of the court documents, in case anyone wants to take a look:

  Original summons & complaint filed on behalf of Anthony Lotito;
  Answer and Counterclaim of Hunter Biden, James Biden, et al;
  Affadavit of James Biden;
  Affadavit of R. Hunter Biden.

  These more or less spell out the claims and counterclaims.

  

• Tracking Gov. Palin

  By Bill Allison on 08/29/08 @ 3:48 pm | 22 Comments

  Apparently, Republican presidential nominee John McCain has selected Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to be his running mate. For those looking for more information, her 2007 state personal financial disclosure form is online here (via the Center for Public Integrity). Via the excellent National Institute on Money in State Politics, here’s campaign finance information from her unsuccessful 2002 race for Lieutenant Governor, her 2006 primary campaign for governor, and her 2006 general election campaign for governor. I’ll update with more links as I come across them. I’m not going to dig into these myself today, but others should feel free to have at them.

  First add: Via the Anchorage Daily News, here’s a copy of the pending ethics complaint against Palin.

  Second add: Interesting to note that Palin, who bucked the Alaskan Republican Party establishment when she challenged incumbent Republican Frank Murkowski for the job in 2006, counted Republican party committees as the biggest source of her campaign cash — $75,183 out of a total of $874,042 raised — in the general election. A breakdown of those contributions is available here. Republican officials, candidates and former members kicked in another $15,394, according the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

  Third add: Via InstaPundit, I see that Michael Petrelis is looking into Palin’s financial disclosures as well. He notes this post from the Center for Public Integrity on Palin’s views on transparency.

  
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