It's official: The 2016 presidential election is already a 10-figure affair.

Household names such as Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz account for much of this spending. But a gaggle of obscure and moneyed super PACs have likewise helped rocket campaign expenditures to mesospheric levels — ones unthinkable even four years ago.

Here’s a rundown of the more telling — and curious — statistics to emerge from a new round of political campaign disclosures:

$1 billion: Amount spent by presidential candidates and affiliated groups in the 2016 presidential race through March, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of federal campaign finance filings. Nearly two-thirds of this figure has been spent in the contentious GOP primary, which saw more than a dozen candidates vie for the party’s nomination. The top-spending Republican? Cruz, who has spent more than $70 million. Meanwhile, Democrats Clinton and Sanders have combined to spend about $326 million, with each spending about half that sum.

$118 million: Amount Sanders raised, through March 31, from small-dollar donors giving $200 or less. That sum represents nearly two-thirds of his overall haul. Sanders’ unexpected fundraising prowess — he’s raised about $186 million, just $870,000 less than Clinton — has helped him stay competitive in the presidential primary. Small-dollar donors giving $200 or less only account for about 20 percent of Clinton’s receipts through March. She’s relied far more heavily on donors giving the legal maximum of $2,700. However, Clinton has a much wider lead in the delegate race than the fundraising race. She’s won about 25 percent more pledged delegates to date than Sanders and needs only about 450 more delegates to secure the nomination, according to the Associated Press.

$36.2 million: Amount Republican front-runner Trump has either donated or loaned to his presidential campaign from his own funds. A billionaire real estate tycoon and reality TV star, Trump has said he would spend up to $1 billion to win the White House “if necessary.” All the while, he’s also raised more than $12 million from people not named Trump. About three-fourths of that sum has come from small-dollar donors giving $200 or less.

$2.1 million: Amount Qualcomm Inc. executive Mark Epstein has donated to Maryland USA, the super PAC supporting his wife Amie Hoeber’s congressional bid. Hoeber, a Republican running in Maryland’s 6th Congressional District, has raised $480,000 for her race, including $350,000 that she’s loaned her campaign. Epstein’s contributions represent 99.95 percent of the money Maryland USA has raised.

$2 million: Amount spent by retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson’s campaign in March, even though Carson ended his presidential bid on March 4. It’s far less than the campaign spent in previous months, but some top campaign consultants (including Eleventy Marketing and Precision Data Management) still took in six-figure payments.

$1,055,100: What Democrat Willie Wilson is owed by his own presidential campaign, for which he filed termination paperwork Wednesday. Willie who, you say? Wilson is a Chicago businessman and gospel music show host who last year launched the longest of longshot presidential bids. His self-funded campaign didn’t go so well, as Williams failed to qualify for most primary and caucus contests. He did get on the South Carolina primary ballot, winning 0.35 percent of the Democratic vote.

$1 million: What oil giant Chevron Corp. donated in March to a super PAC called the Congressional Leadership Fund, which supports Republican candidates. Chevron, the second-largest oil company in the United States, is currently ranked as No. 3 on the Fortune 500 list, making it the largest known corporate super PAC donor. It’s rare for large, publicly traded companies to donate to super PACs, but Chevron has now donated $4.5 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund since 2012, plus an additional $2 million to the Senate Leadership Fund since last year.

$402,000: Amount former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign reported making from the sale of his donor information following Bush’s February withdrawal from the presidential race. The buyer: direct response marketing firm the Lukens Company.

$131,679: How much the Trump campaign spent on hats during March with headwear manufacturer Cali Fame. A single red cap dubbed "5 Panel Patriot" retails for $15.50 on Cali Fame's website. The seemingly same hat, with Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan embroidered on its front panel, sells for $25 on Trump's website.

$100,000: Amount super PAC Freedom Partners Action Fundcontributed to Accelerate West Virginia, a super PAC created to boost the gubernatorial bid of Republican state Senate President Bill Cole. The contribution is Accelerate West Virginia’s largest received so far. Freedom Partners Action Fund is one of a network of groups linked to billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch. Accelerate West Virginia describes itself as “a group of local West Virginians dedicated to moving our state forward.”

$72,290: Money Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s defunct presidential campaign owes Jones Day, a Washington, D.C., law firm, for “legal consulting.” It’s part of $952,256 in debt still on the Walker campaign’s books. Curiously, Jones Day employs former Federal Election Commission Chairman Don McGahn, who now serves as Trump’s general counsel. Walker last month endorsed Trump rival Cruz.

$72,000: Amount the Democratic National Committee paid pro-Clinton super PAC American Bridge 21st Century in March for “research services.” American Bridge 21st Century, which specializes in opposition research, raised about $3.1 million during the first three months of 2016, with major donors including billionaires George Soros and Phillip “Terry” Ragon. The super PAC has also collected $210,000 from its sister 501(c)(4) nonprofit — known as the American Bridge 21st Century Foundation, which doesn’t disclose its donors — in the form of “overhead and staff expenses.”

$50,000: Amount Laura Ricketts, a co-owner of the Chicago Cubs baseball team, donated in February to LPAC, a hybrid super PAC she helped launched in 2012 that seeks to “builds the political power of lesbians and queer women by electing candidates who champion LGBTQ rights, women’s equality and social justice.” Ricketts’ contribution accounted for about 20 percent of the LPAC’s receipts this year through March. The group has endorsed Clinton in the 2016 presidential race and also directly donated to Democratic U.S. Senate candidates Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and Donna Edwards of Maryland.

$44,000: Cash super PAC Pursuing America’s Greatness spent on legal and compliance costs in March. The group, which supported former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s unsuccessful bid for the Republican nomination, is engaged in a lawsuit challenging FEC regulations that prohibit the use of a candidate’s name by unauthorized committees such as super PACs.

7,194: Orders of hand-breaded onion ring towers one could buy for $50,000 at the Hard Rock Rocksino, an entertainment facility in suburban Cleveland featuring horse racing, casino gaming and eponymous chain restaurant fare. Fifty grand is also what the Hard Rock Rocksino contributed last month to New Day for America, a super PAC supporting Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s long-shot presidential bid. It clearly takes a gambler to place such a political bet: Bookmaker Paddy Power pegs Kasich’s odds of winning the Republican nomination at 14-to-1.

$2,500: How much Facebook’s political action committee friended Sen. Cory Gardner with on March 31. The contribution isn’t itself particularly odd. But Gardner, a Republican from Colorado, isn’t running for re-election in 2016. Or in 2018. He’ll likely face his next political contest in June 2020 — 50 months from now — when Colorado conducts a congressional primary ahead of elections for the 117th Congress. (The 114th Congress is currently seated.) Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., also received a four-years-early contribution from Facebook’s PAC.

$35: Price of getting “your name permanently displayed next to mine in the chairman’s lobby at GOP Headquarters,” writes former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in a fundraising message sent Wednesday on behalf of the Republican National Committee. If anyone needs cash, it’s Gingrich: As of March 31, his 2012 presidential campaign remained more than $4.6 million in debt, with more than 100 vendors among Newt 2012’s creditors — including Twitter, Comcast and a consulting company led by fellow 2012 presidential also-ran Herman Cain.

1: The number of things on which “Donald and Ted” say they stand together, according to a fundraising email from Stop Hillary PAC. That thing? Stopping Clinton from becoming president. How did Stop Hillary PAC, a scrappy conservative outfit perhaps best known for defying FEC orders to change its name, ever get Trump and Cruz to join forces? Simple: it didn’t. “Donald” is Donald Ferguson, the PAC’s political director, and “Ted” is Ted Harvey, its chairman. Might sending fundraising messages from a Ted and Donald — sans last names — cause potential donors to be misled, even a teeny, tiny bit? “Not to my knowledge, and that's pretty far-fetched,” treasurer Dan Backer told the Center for Public Integrity, noting that both men have been signing Stop Hillary PAC missives since 2013. The PAC raised more than $130,000 during the first three months of 2016, mostly from small-dollar donors.

Alexander Cohen and Chris Zubak-Skees contributed to this report

This story was co-published with the Huffington Post and TIME.

In a statement on Thursday, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists made it clear that while it welcomed interest from the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's office in its Panama Papers project, it would not be taking part in any official investigation.

Preet Bharara, who heads the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, wrote to ICIJ that his office had “opened a criminal investigation regarding matters to which the Panama Papers are relevant.”

On Thursday, in a brief phone conversation, ICIJ's counsel told prosecutors in Bharara's office that the organization would not turn over unpublished data.

"We certainly welcome the U.S. Attorney's Office reviewing all of the information from the Panama Papers series that we have made available to our readers and conducting its own investigation,” said ICIJ Director Gerard Ryle, in a statement. “However, ICIJ does not intend to play a role in that investigation. Our focus is journalism.”

“ICIJ, and its parent organization the Center for Public Integrity, are media organizations shielded by the First Amendment and other legal protections from becoming an arm of law enforcement," he said.

The U.S. investigation is just one of multiple investigations around the world that have been touched off by the Panama Papers revelations published by ICIJ, German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and more than 100 other news organizations.

Earlier this month, what had been expected to be a meeting of tax officials from 28 countries drew officials from 35 nations — including the United States, who have agreed to work jointly to develop a plan to tackle any tax crimes revealed by Panama Papers data.

“All 35 jurisdictions represented at the meeting signed up to take joint compliance actins where appropriate,” said Australian commissioner of taxation Chris Jordan who called the meeting and who heads the Organization on Economic Cooperation and Development’s Joint International Tax Shelter Information and Collaboration network. “The network is also exploring the use of taskforces and smaller working groups to make faster inroads,” he said, according to the Australian Financial Review.

Meanwhile, though, a Hong Kong journalist has been fired following the publication of his newspaper’s front page devoted to the Panama Papers, which included information about some of Hong Kong’s prominent citizens.

The influential newspaper Ming Pao didn’t mention fired second-in-command editor Keung Kwok-yuen by name when it issued a statement blaming a reduction in staff on a “difficult business environment.” But it was the second time that a top editor at the paper lost his job shortly after publishing a collaboration with the ICIJ. 

Former chief editor Kevin Lau Chun-to, was removed from that job in January 2014, leading to fears that the Chinese Communist Party was asserting control over the newspaper.  Lau was removed after Ming Pao cooperated with ICIJ on an earlier leak of offshore documents.

Keung’s coworkers protested over his dismissal as did Hong Kong politicians and others who viewed it as further erosion of the former British colony’s independence from mainland China.

Uruguayan prosecutors are seeking to bring to trial at least five individuals detained on suspicion of laundering money for a powerful Mexican drug cartel, including at least one suspect allegedly linked to a company named in the Panama Papers.

The five were among 11 initially detained in Montevideo on Friday by more than 30 law enforcement officials. The officials were already investigating, but decided to move quickly to preempt any attempt at flight after the weekly online magazine Busqueda reported that Gerardo González Valencia had used shell companies incorporated in Panama to buy real estate in Uruguay, including a chalet in Punta del Este.

The story was part of the Panama Papers investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and more than 100 other news organizations that dug through 11.5 million files containing information on decades of operations by Panama law firm and offshore company incorporator Mossack Fonseca and Co.

González Valencia is linked to the rapidly expanding New Generation Cartel of Jalisco (CJNG) in Mexico. His brother Abigael González Valencia, now imprisoned in Mexico, headed the powerful “Los Cuinos” cartel. Abigael González Valencia has been designated a drug king pin in the United States along with his brother-in-law Nemesis Oseguera Cervantes, who leads CJNG.

The U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control said when it named the two kingpins that the two organization “have rapidly expanded their criminal empire in recent years through the use of violence and corruption.” Acting director of OFAC John E. Smith said then that they “now rank among the most powerful drug trafficking organizations in Mexico.”

Meanwhile, a story by ICIJ partner the McClatchy Company news chain reported that Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa and his brother had been mentioned in a Mossack Fonseca email to a law firm for which it provided shell corporations for its customers.

Sara Montenegro, a lawyer for Mossack Fonseca, sent an email in May 2012 to a Guayaquil firm “to notify you of an investigation being undertaken by the office of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor of Panama, in reference to Misters FABRICIO CORREA and RAFAEL CORREA DELGADO for the crime of embezzlement against the Ecuadoran state, an investigation which involves a Panamanian corporation that was sold to you in 2006 called ORLION GROUP S.A.” The email was sent to a lawyer working for the Legalsa & Asociados firm, which had opened the offshore on behalf of an unidentified customer.

The prosecutor wanted shareholder information “which we did not give since we don’t have it,” Montenegro added. She asked Legalsa & Asociados for information on the true owners of the Orlion Group S.A. because an official demand was likely.

A few days later Mossack Fonseca’s head of compliance, Sandra de Cornejo, had recommended that her firm drop services to the Orlion Group S.A. “Although we have not found anything that ties the Correas and the entity,” she said, “I suggest resigning … because of the scant cooperation received from the client,” which Mossack Fonseca had asked for “know your customer” information two years before. Mossack Fonseca resigned as Orlion Group's agent in July 2012.

In an unrelated incident, Panamanian officials seized bags of shredded paperwork during a search of another of the law firm’s premises late last week.

The search was conducted as part of an ongoing investigation into the law firm’s activities. Mossack Fonseca’s Panama City headquarters was raided by police earlier in April.

Mossack Fonseca said the shredded paperwork seized in the latest search were documents that had been digitized and were to be recycled. The firm said authorities had already obtained copies of these files during their initial search of the firm’s headquarters.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) will release on May 9 a searchable database with information on more than 200,000 offshore entities that are part of the Panama Papers investigation.

The database will likely be the largest-ever release of secret offshore companies and the people behind them.

The data comes from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, one of the top players in the offshore world, and includes information about companies, trusts, foundations and funds incorporated in 21 tax havens, from Hong Kong to Nevada in the United States. It links to people in more than 200 countries and territories.

When the data is released, users will be able to search and visualize the networks around thousands of offshore entities, including, when possible, Mossack Fonseca’s internal records of the company’s true owners. The interactive database will also include information about more than 100,000 additional companies that were part of the 2013 ICIJ Offshore Leaks investigation.

While the database opens up a world that has never been revealed on such a massive scale, the application will not be a “data dump” of the original documents — it will be a careful release of basic corporate information.

ICIJ won’t release personal data en masse; the database will not include records of bank accounts and financial transactions, emails and other correspondence, passports and telephone numbers. The selected and limited information is being published in the public interest …Meanwhile ICIJ, the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung which received the leak and its media partners, including several new outlets in countries where ICIJ has not yet been able to report, will continue to investigate and publish stories in the weeks and months to come.

The Panama Papers investigation revealed the secret offshore dealings of world leaders and other politicians as well as criminals and celebrities. It exposed the role of big banks in facilitating secrecy and tax evasion and avoidance. And it showed how companies and individuals blacklisted in the U.S. and elsewhere for their links to terrorism, drug trafficking and other crimes were able to do business through offshore jurisdictions.

Since its release, the Panama Papers investigation has led to high profile resignations, including the prime minister of Iceland; triggered official inquiries in multiple countries; and put pressure on world leaders and other politicians, such as Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron, to explain their connections to offshore companies. It sparked a new sense of urgency among lawmakers and regulators to close loopholes and make information about the owners of shell companies public.  

In the U.S., where several states act as tax havens for people from all over the world, President Barack Obama commented on the Panama Papers revelations and said global tax avoidance facilitated by secrecy jurisdictions is “a huge problem.” The president added that “a lot of it is legal, but that’s exactly the problem. It’s not that they’re breaking the laws, it’s that the laws are so poorly designed."

The database will be published at https://offshoreleaks.icij.org on May 9 at 2 p.m. EDT (1800 UTC).

About 60,000 TV ads — roughly one-fifth of all ads aired in the Republican presidential primary — have been critical of Donald Trump in some fashion, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of data from Kantar Media/CMAG.

Despite the outpouring of hostility from his opponents, the bombastic billionaire businessman continues to roll toward the GOP presidential nomination, having swept five more states on Tuesday.

"I've had negative ads all throughout, and I've won races in a landslide," Trump said in his victory speech Tuesday night. “Most of these people who have been fighting me are gone."

This massive figure includes about 800 TV ads so far aired in Indiana, a state that holds its primary Tuesday and has emerged as the next major battleground between Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Trump’s chief adversary.

The bulk of these ads aired after Trump already solidified his front-runner status. Now, Trump continues to surge. To date, he’s earned more than 950 delegates, according to the Associated Press. That’s less than 300 short of the 1,237 he needs to clinch the GOP nomination — and avoid a contested Republican National Convention in July.

Nevertheless, many anti-Trump forces won’t relent.

“We are convinced that Trump can be stopped short of 1,237,” Club for Growth spokesman Doug Sachtleben told the Center for Public Integrity.

Sachtleben said the conservative organization, which was the first group to start airing attack ads against Trump last fall, will be targeting Indiana, where polls show a close race. The group is also eyeing delegate-rich California, which holds its primary on June 7.

California, Sachtleben added, “is ultimately where we believe this race will come down to.”

To date, the Club for Growth has spent more than $9.7 million attacking Trump, according to federal campaign finance filings. Both its super PAC and 501(c)(4) “social welfare” nonprofit arm have participated in the barrage.

In addition to the Club for Growth, a host of other conservative groups have joined the anti-Trump chorus. Some of these organizations have spent millions of dollars opposing Trump while others have made relatively token expenditures.

Among them are super PACs devoted to other GOP candidates, as well as a solely anti-Trump super PAC. Known as Our Principles PAC, this anti-Trump group was founded by veteran Republican strategist Katie Packer, who helped run Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign.

Our Principles PAC alone has spent more than $16 million opposing Trump — more than any other group. Its largest donors are Marlene and Joe Ricketts, co-owners of the Chicago Cubs baseball team, who have combined to give $5.5 million. Republican megadonor and hedge fund magnate Paul Singer has also so far given $1.5 million to Our Principles PAC.

For their parts, the three pro-Cruz super PACs — Keep the Promise I, Stand for Truth and Trusted Leadership PAC— have combined to spend about $2.6 million against Trump, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission. Meanwhile, two super PACs supporting Ohio Gov. John Kasich— New Day for America and New Day Independent Media— have combined to spend about $287,000 so far attacking Trump.

Some of these ads, which featured a hippopotamus, alleged that Trump is a “hippo-crit” who “repeatedly says one thing [and] does another.” Others criticized Trump’s online education company as a “scam” and argued that Trump will “scam America too.” Still others called Trump “too reckless and dangerous” to be president.

“If Republicans want to win, we have to nominate someone who can actually defeat [Democratic Party presidential front-runner] Hillary [Clinton],” New Day for America spokeswoman Connie Wehrkamp told the Center for Public Integrity. “If Trump is the GOP nominee, we will lose the White House, the Supreme Court, the U.S. Senate and countless down-ticket races, not to mention Trump is entirely unprepared to hold the highest office in the world.”

Sustained anti-Trump advertising didn’t begin until February, a month during which roughly one-quarter of the ads in the GOP presidential race were critical of Trump, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of Kantar Media/CMAG data, a firm that monitors advertising on broadcast television and national — but not local — cable.

Anti-Trump TV ads represented nearly half the ads in the GOP race during March. The figure currently hovers near 30 percent so far in April.

Prior to February, blasting Trump wasn’t many conservatives’ top priority.

As of Jan. 31, the day before the Iowa caucuses, which Trump narrowly lost to Cruz, just 6.5 percent of TV ads in the GOP presidential race had criticized Trump. At that juncture, more than a dozen candidates were still competing in the Republican field, including well-funded former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon who briefly led Trump in national polls late last year.

“Early on, most campaigns were more focused on building up their own candidate in a crowded field than taking down Trump, whose popularity they likely did not fully understand,” said Jay Goodliffe, a professor of political science at Brigham Young University in Utah. “Before February, there were no elections, so the Republican campaigns and allied groups could hope that Trump’s support would be less strong once his supporters had to go to the polls.”

Elizabeth Wilner, the Kantar Media executive who oversees the firm’s political ad tracking project, added that the delay in anti-Trump advertising seemed to come from “a combination of denial and fear — denial that he could become the nominee and fear of messing with the bull.”

Trump often delights in prodding his political opponents, both in word and tweet. That includes big-money bankrollers who dare oppose him.

For example, he tweeted out an admonition to the Ricketts family that they “better be careful” once media outlets reported the Ricketts were funding an anti-Trump super PAC.

Amid the contentious primary, one presidential contender — more than any other candidate, including Republicans — has attacked Trump in campaign ads: Democrat Hillary Clinton.

To date, Clinton has sponsored nearly 8,000 ads that criticize Trump, including dozens of Spanish-language ads that aired as recently as this week in Connecticut and Pennsylvania, which both conducted primaries on Tuesday.

Such activity closely aligns with Clinton’s rhetorical pivot Tuesday away from Democratic primary opponent Bernie Sanders— he almost certainly can’t catch Clinton, but isn’t quitting— and toward the general election.

“Let’s go forward. Let’s win the nomination, and in July, let’s return as a unified party,” Clinton said during her victory speech Tuesday night in Philadelphia, which will also host the Democratic National Convention this summer.

Clinton campaign spokesman Jesse Ferguson told the Center for Public Integrity it was important to criticize Trump for his “divisive rhetoric and dangerous agenda.”

Ferguson added: “We will continue to make the case about the damage his agenda would do and how Hillary Clinton is the toughest candidate to take him on and stop him.”

Dave Levinthal contributed to this report.

This story was co-published with NBC News, PRI and TIME.

The Center for Public Integrity will ask the Virginia Supreme Court to make public auto title lending reports that show financial details such as how much interest the businesses charge on loans and how often they repossess cars.

Last month, the Virginia State Corporation Commission, which oversees financial institutions in the commonwealth, ruled that the annual reports lenders file with the state should be released to the public. The commission said it’s not clear under state law if corporations enjoy the same privacy rights as people when it comes to the disclosure of financial information and directed its staff to seek clarification of the law from the General Assembly next year.

Three giant auto title lenders — TitleMax of Virginia Inc.; Anderson Financial Services LLC, doing business as Loan Max; and Fast Auto Loans Inc. — had asked Virginia officials to prevent the reports from being disclosed to the Center for Public Integrity.  

Erin Witte, who is representing the Center for Public Integrity pro bono, filed a notice of appeal on Wednesday. The appeal goes to the Virginia Supreme Court. No date has been set for oral arguments.

Witte is an associate at the Fairfax, Virginia law firm Surovell Isaacs Petersen & Levy, PLC. Democratic State Sen. Scott Surovell, a longtime critic of Virginia title lenders, is a founding member of the firm.

The title-lender reports include detailed sales figures, volume of loans, interest rates charged on loans and defaults, as well as details on how often the lenders are cited by state and federal regulators. The reports don’t include any financial information about borrowers.

TitleMax, Loan Max and Fast Auto Loans submitted heavily redacted versions of reports earlier this year at the request of the commission. In its brief at the time, TitleMax argued the reports contain “trade secrets,” whose release could cause it “irreparable damage.” The others lenders also argue that disclosure would hurt their businesses.

The commission’s staff had recommended that the reports be released last year. But the three-member commission ruled on March 31 that state law is “ambiguous” on whether privacy rights for “personal financial information” should apply to national corporations.

The commission staff will continue to release aggregate summaries of the annual reports as it has done in the past. Doing that “strikes a fair balance,” the commission order said.

In Missouri, where all three of the Virginia title lenders also operate, financial reports are public records and anyone can request copies.

The Center for Public Integrity requested the annual reports from Virginia officials in November as part of an investigation into the costs of title loans nationwide. In Virginia, where nearly 500 title loan shops are operating, average interest rates were 222 percent in 2014, according to aggregate figures that Virginia releases.

Dear Colleagues,

Our U.S political team finds nuggets in a plain weird presidential campaign where the winds of advertising spending have blown from fruitless big spending by Jeb Bush to a concerted attack on Donald Trump from what looks like the entire Republican apparatus. The fallout from the ICIJ’s huge Panama Papers rolls on through the halls of government and finance globally and there’s another big phase coming. I’ve also collected a few rather depressing perspectives on the current state of the media which calls for reflection from those of us in the non-profit sector.

No stopping Trump

"The federal politics team continues to make news in the incredibly crowded field of political journalism with astute analysis of advertising spending,” writes deputy executive editor John Dunbar. “

Our most recent story — “Donald Trump steamrolling toward nomination despite negative ad blitz: Opponents vow to fight on after late start to messaging campaign”— ran in four major national outlets:
- NBC News: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/donald-trump-steamrolls-despite-negative-ad-blitz-n563531
- TIME: http://time.com/4309674/donald-trump-campaign-ads-attacks-kantar/
- Public Radio International: http://www.pri.org/stories/2016-04-27/despite-barrage-negative-ads-donald-trump-poised-win-gop-nomination
- Huffington Post is also directly linking to our story off its politics page.

Kudos to authors Michael Beckel and Cady Zuvich as well as editor Dave Levinthal and John, for producing and marketing a compelling, insightful and original news story on the primaries the morning after the polls closed. The timing of these data releases has also demanded some long and late hours  from all of these folks in order to produce articles that are timely. Personally, I like the way our use of the data on advertising fleshes out the more anecdotal coverage from others.

Dave, something of the “face” of the Center on political TV out of Washington, is also a loyal Buffalo person and described this week’s primaries on WBEN in that city. Dave is also on this Variety PopPolitics podcast.

Those packages are an illustrative example of our multiple approach to audiences: on-network on our own sites, on partner sites and on different media. The team also drove the story strongly on social media. Michael Beckel also noted the power of our archive with a 1992 report on Paul Manafort, now allegedly making Trump more presidential, cited in this report from the libertarian Cato Institute. 

Dave Levinthal adds that a December 2015 investigation by Cady Zuvich about a Florida man who has created hundreds of super PACs was cited in an MTV.com article about joke super PACs and the headaches they create for federal regulators.

Panama Papers

Impact from the revelations of tax avoidance and evasion from the tens of thousands of Russian doll offshore corporations inside the Panama Papers leak rolls on around the world.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which is coordinating the network with access to the leak from the German newspaperSuddeutsche Zeitung, announced this week that we’ll publish the information on companies contained within the leak next month. To understand how that data will be searchable and get an idea of what it will reveal and equally what it won’t, it’s worth looking at the Offshore Leaks where it will live.

We can expect another huge surge of interest in the data and the story, all of which will require careful management. The ICIJ team, in partnership with SZ, is working on bringing additional partners into the project to ensure that the  depth of what is in the enormous leak is fully explored by experts from relevant countries. It remains a vast undertaking.

The right environment

Jim Morris, the Center’s managing editor for environment and labor, spoke about the sorry state of worker protections in America at the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine’s annual conference in Chicago on April 12.

Reporter Talia Buford fielded more interview requests to discuss her very personal commentary on the Flint water situation, which appeared in the Washington Post online April 15 and in the Sunday Outlook section on April 17.

Standing up for ordinary folks

In the wake of its December 2015 story on predatory lending by tile-loan companies, the Center filed – and subsequently lost – an appeal to the Virginia regulatory agency overseeing financial institutions to release financial reports for the nation’s three largest title loan companies, says Allan Holmes, head of our business-in-politics unit. The Center filed Thursday with the Virginia Supreme Court a notice to appeal the ruling by the State Corporation Commission to keep the records private. No word on when the court will hear the case.

Partners and perils

Reveal, the podcast and radio show produced weekly by the Center for Investigative Reporting, is one of our most important and consistent partners for Public Integrity. I value the quality of the work and projects like the recent hour-long show on politics with John Dunbar and his team drove that home. The CIR is taking big risks with Reveal as a forceful and expensive innovation as this lengthy analysis in the Columbia Journalism Review showed. 

A welter of news and commentary this week about the tough climate in the media business, particularly those that rely on display advertising which is being vacuumed up on a gigantic scale by Facebook, hence its powerful quarterly results.

The Bay Area News said it was doing away with much of its copyediting. This piece on Gawker about BuzzFeed is a good reminder that valuations can get ahead of reality. Then there’s Michael Wolff on the “suicide mission” at The Guardian.

Former Bloomberg editorial leader and co-founder of The Verge and Vox Media, Joshua Topolsky had a gloomy view of the search for the “new, new thing” to save the media in this worthwhile piece on Medium.

For me the lesson again and again is that we have to do the things we are good at well and repeatedly and get better and better at doing them: great execution on platforms we control (our own site), great partnerships which get more and more strategic (for us this could be Gannett/HuffingtonPost and others) and a much stronger drive on social media, primarily Facebook. That core is great journalism, data journalism and now what the ICIJ calls distributed journalism.

Public Integrity founder Chuck Lewis wrote a strong piece on The Guardian about what the Panama Papers can teach us about the future of journalism which he says is all about collaboration.

Awards count

On the awards front the photographers who worked with the ICIJ on its multi-award-winning project with the Huffington Post“Evicted & Abandoned” won aSigma Delta Chiaward from the Society of Professional Journalists. The same project and also Fatal Extraction have won Overseas Press Club awards to be announced tonight.

I welcome feedback on this note.

Regards,

Peter
CEO, The Center for Public Integrity

On April 22, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour asked Iceland President Olafur Grimsson: “Do you have any offshore accounts? Does your wife have any offshore accounts? Is there anything that’s going to be discovered about you and your family?”

“No, no, no, no, no,” Grimsson replied. “That’s not going to be the case.”

But secret records obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and other media partners show that Grimsson’s spouse, First Lady Dorrit Moussaieff, has had extensive links to the offshore world.

While Grimsson himself doesn't have an offshore account in the records, First Lady Moussaieff was listed as a beneficiary of five companies and trusts that have held Swiss banks accounts, according to documents obtained from whistleblowers by Le Monde, Suddeutsche Zeitung and ICIJ in the Swiss Leaks and Panama Papers investigations. Her family, including her two sisters, had accounts that together held as much as $80 million in HSBC’s Swiss Private Bank in 2006 and 2007. Dorrit Moussaieff herself appears not to have played a role in most of the holdings.

The documents don’t show any wrongdoing by Dorrit Moussaieff, and it is not necessarily illegal to have offshore companies or Swiss bank accounts. But the documents raise questions about whether Iceland’s first lady benefited from the offshore tax strategies of her parents and whether her interests have been fully disclosed.

Earlier revelations about the offshore holdings of Prime Minister Sigmundur David Gunnlaugsson had forced the prime minister’s resignation. Grimsson explained his about-face on running for his sixth term as president by saying he wanted to bring some stability to a country that suffered a financial collapse in 2008 and is now going through a political crisis.

Later in the CNN interview, Grimsson called the Panama Papers “a great public service” and “a wakeup call” about problems in the global economy that need to be addressed.

In a statement to ICIJ, a spokesman for Grimsson said: “President Grimsson does not have, nor has he at any time had, any information about the financial affairs of his wife or other members of the Moussaieff family. He and his wife lead independent lives.”

In a statement to The Guardian, another ICIJ media partner, Grimsson noted that he has “always been very critical of tax-driven offshore structures and for decades advocated a fair and balanced tax system.”

In a letter to ICIJ, the first lady’s law firm wrote: “Ms. Moussaieff and her husband have always and continue to conduct their financial affairs entirely separately from each other and neither has knowledge of the other’s financial circumstances. Ms. Moussaieff’s private financial affairs are conducted in compliance with all relevant tax and legal regimes. Any insinuation to the contrary would be defamatory.”

“There is no public interest in the disclosure of private financial information,” the letter said.

Moussaieff, the daughter of a wealthy Israeli who made his fortune in jewelry, married Icelandic President Olafur Grimsson in 2003. She moved her legal residence to London in 2012 to help run the family business. That came months after news reports that Moussaieff didn’t pay wealth taxes in Iceland because her assets were abroad.

Several of the structures set up through HSBC and Mossack Fonseca by members of her family are trusts. For instance, HSBC listed the first lady as the both the settlor and beneficiary, along with her two sisters, of Jaywick Properties Inc. and the Moussaieff Sharon Trust. The first lady was also a secondary beneficiary of Elyakeen Limited, the Moussaieff Life Interest Trust and Easton Investments Inc.

Elyakeen Limited was registered with Mossack Fonseca in the British Virgin Islands in 1995. Its stock was in bearer shares, certificates that allow whoever holds the paper to anonymously transfer or claim their value. Today they are banned in many countries because of their usefulness in aiding money laundering and tax evasion.

A settlor is the person who transfers control of assets to a trustee, who manages them on behalf of the beneficiaries, which, in some trusts, may include the settlor. Trusts can make it easier to transfer assets after death, eliminate probate costs and reduce estate taxes.

Both of Dorrit Moussaieff’s sisters — but not the first lady — had large trusts in their names at HSBC’s Swiss bank. The Tamara Moussaieff Trust held $29.5 million at one point in 2006 and 2007, while one owned by Sharon Levontin, called Levontin 2002 Discret Sett, held $27.6 million in the same period. HSBC documents also include the Mrs S Levontin Trust, which at one point in 2006 and 2007 held $2 million in six accounts at the bank.

The Elyakeen bearer shares were held for the Moussaieffs by a Zurich trust management company.  In 1999, the directors opened bank accounts in Elyakeen’s name at Deutsche Bank and at the Royal Bank of Scotland. Elyakeen was dissolved in 2003. Elyakeen’s HSBC profile was created in 1997.

It is unclear how much money was in Elyakeen’s accounts, but one Mossack Fonseca document dated April 4, 2002, shows significant sums. “The Directors had been approached by the trustees to consider waiving the loan of ($18.8 million) repayable by them, following tax advice from KPMG,” according to the minutes of the board meeting. Elyakeen also paid out a $1.6 million dividend at that meeting.

Reykjavik Grapevine reported on April 25 that the Moussaieff family had another company registered with Mossack Fonseca in the British Virgin Islands. That company, Lasca Finance Limited, was disclosed in public filings of Moussaieff Jewellers Limited, the family firm.

“Neither the President nor his wife, Dorrit Moussaieff, has any knowledge of this company or had heard about it before,” Grimsson’s spokesman said in a statement. “Dorrit's father is no longer alive, and her mother, who is 86, has no recollection of this company.”

Alisa and Tamara Moussaieff and Sharon Levontin did not respond to requests for comment.

At eleven o’clock most mornings in the city of McAlester, Oklahoma, residents feel the ground shake as bombs go off at an army ammunition depot nearby. Smoke sometimes billows from the depot’s 52 detonation pits as the army destroys unused ammunition daily, part of a regular practice that in 2015 cost the Pentagon roughly $118 million.

The problem is: Some of the ammunition may be usable by other federal agencies, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which has criticized the Pentagon for not trying hard enough to assess who else wanted it.

The wanton ammo destruction is one of seven instances of alleged Defense Department mismanagement cited in the GAO’s annual summary of wasteful and duplicate programs across the federal government, released on April 13, 2016. Examples at the Pentagon include overpaying for satellite communications, giving away property that could be used by other agencies, and mishandling vital pollution information.

Although some reforms have been undertaken in response to the GAO’s suggestions, “there are tens of billions of dollars in additional savings to be had,” Comptroller General Gene Dodaro told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform at a hearing on April 13.  

For example, if the Pentagon gave some of its usable bullets and explosives to other federal agencies, the 298-page GAO report said, it would save the cost of blowing it up and help other agencies meet their needs on the cheap. While the Defense Department has successfully transferred some of this ammunition to other agencies, Pentagon officials told the GAO that at least 3,533 tons of serviceable ammo sits in the army’s stockpile of excess ammunition at plants like the one in McAlester, waiting for disposal. 

The federal government could save millions of dollars if the Defense Department transferred its extra property and ammunition to other agencies so “we, ya know, don’t have to buy it twice,” Dodaro told the committee.

Ammo is not the only Pentagon commodity that winds up getting wasted or misused, Dodaro noted. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has repeatedly purchased new excavation equipment it could have gotten from the Pentagon, according to a January 2016 GAO report summarized in Dodaro’s presentation. DHS was one of nine federal agencies that collectively spent $28 million on such machines in 2013 and 2014, even though the Defense Department had them on hand and didn’t need them, the report said. The Pentagon instead sent $25 million worth of excavation machines to 150 different local law enforcement groups across the country, because the Defense Department favored local entities that promised to work on counterdrug and counterterrorism missions.

The GAO also said the military has wasted funds by failing to coordinate its purchases of commercial satellite time, needed for controlling drone aircraft, urgent military or humanitarian relief operations, and new weapons or intelligence systems. The Defense Department spent more than $1 billion to lease commercial satellite time in 2011, but its needs have increased since then. All purchases were supposed to go through a central Pentagon agency set up to save money through bulk purchasing, but the military services frequently flouted the requirement and used their own funds – provided under “supplemental” portions of the annual defense spending bills – to buy the time on their own, at costs that were 16 percent higher, on average, the GAO said.

The Defense Department has had difficulty getting its arms around the problem, the GAO said, and lacks a good tally of all the commercial satellite time its components are buying now. But the Pentagon has roughly estimated that better leasing could save well over a billion dollars during the next 15 years in its Middle East operations alone.

The GAO also asserted that the Pentagon mismanages environmental data collected to help protect soldiers when they are deployed overseas. Since the late 1990s, the Pentagon has gathered air, soil, and water samples, but stored the resulting information haphazardly in two incompatible databases. This means the Pentagon can’t effectively determine if pollution on or near military army bases is causing ill health, a gap that makes it hard for soldiers to get needed compensation, the GAO said.

Moreover, the Pentagon doesn’t know if all the data is correct because the military services don’t have rigorous sampling standards, the GAO said.

The Army Public Health Command, which manages one of the databases, told the GAO it would be too time-consuming and costly to move all the data to a single database. At the April 13 hearing, Defense Department Assistant Deputy Chief Management Officer David Tillotson said he was unsure why it was taking so long to fix the problem. “I can tell you we are working on it, and we are looking to resolve the issue,” Mr. Tillotson said.

The report notes that over the past six years, the GAO has made 152 major proposals for policy changes and improvements at the Pentagon to avoid waste from duplication. The Defense Department so far has implemented only 37.5 percent of these, the GAO said.

But Congress is not exactly setting a good example, having only implemented 32 percent of GAO suggestions, according to the GAO report. Representative Elijah Cummings (MD), the committee’s senior Democrat, noted at the April 13 hearing that Congress itself “could be doing much more to foster a more efficient, effective and accountable government.”

Update, 8:44 p.m., May 3, 2016: Ted Cruz suspended his presidential campaign after losing to Donald Trump in the Indiana primary.

A victory in Tuesday’s Indiana primary is Sen. Ted Cruz’s strongest hope for staying alive in the race for president, and one super PAC is leading the charge to keep his campaign afloat.

Meet Trusted Leadership PAC.

The pro-Cruz super PAC is focusing on the Hoosier State, where it has spent $2.4 million in Indiana, half of the total it has reported spending to support Cruz’s candidacy so far, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission.

That’s translated into more than 1,800 broadcast ads, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of data from Kantar Media/CMAG.

And for good reason: Cruz lost five states last Tuesday to Republican front-runner Donald Trump. Cruz now trails Trump by more than 400 delegates, according to the Associated Press, and Indiana’s delegates could put Trump even closer to the magic number needed to clinch the Republican nomination and shut out Cruz.

Or, as the most-aired Trusted Leadership PAC ad says in a voice-over set against videos of Cruz and newly named running mate Carly Fiorina: “The time for big talk has passed.”

The ad’s sponsor

Trusted Leadership PAC was created in mid-March, when it was launched as the latest addition to a network of pro-Cruz super PACs. Each pro-Cruz super PAC in the network had been named a variant of “Keep the Promise” and is funded by a small group of rich megadonors.

One important distinction: While the Keep the Promise PACs are largely controlled and funded by individual families, Trusted Leadership PAC is actively soliciting contributions from multiple big-dollar donors.

But like the Keep the Promise PACs, the newest pro-Cruz super PAC can raise and spend in unlimited amounts, opening the door for it to rake in massive sums during the Republican primary’s waning months.

Who’s behind it?

The treasurer of Trusted Leadership PAC is Alice Hanley, according to Federal Communication Commission filings.

A former vice president of an investment bank, the Florida-based Hanley is married to oil tycoon and investor Lee Hanley, who in June contributed $5,000 to Keep the Promise I. He also contributed $15,000 to a pro-Fiorina super PAC in March 2015.

Alice Hanley donated $5,400 to Fiorina’s campaign and $2,700 to Cruz’s.

Trusted Leadership PAC is also controlled by organizers from five other pro-Cruz super PACs: four Keep the Promise groups and Stand for Truth Inc., said Kellyanne Conway, head of Keep the Promise I.

“Trusted Leadership harnesses the strength and resources of that broad support to consolidate fundraising efforts and deploy resources strategically,” Conway said in an emailed statement.

Money in

Since forming in March, Trusted Leadership PAC has brought in $4.7 million. Together, eight super PACs in the pro-Cruz constellation have raised a whopping $62.4 million through March 31, according to FEC filings.

That’s more than the super PACs supporting any other still-active Republican candidate. Groups supporting Democrat Hillary Clinton have raised $76 million to boost her presidential bid.

Trusted Leadership PAC has so far reported receiving two seven-figure donations, a $1 million contribution from businessman Richard Uihlein and another from Missouri-based Herzog Contracting Corp. The company's owner, Stan Herzog, is a major Republican donor who also gave a seven-figure contribution to a super PAC supporting former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2012.

Herzog Contracting Corporation, Herzog Railroad Services and Stan Herzog have collectively contributed about $1.5 million to pro-Cruz super PACs. In addition, the Cruz campaign has paid Herzog Contracting Corporation $430,000 for travel expenses, as first reported by Mother Jones.

Trusted Leadership PAC also in late March received $800,000 from Keep the Promise I and $100,000 Stand for Truth.

Money out

Trusted Leadership PAC has poured roughly $4.9 million into ads, mailers and voter calls advocating for Cruz in the weeks since it was first formed, according to FEC filings.

Much of the $2.4 million it has spent in Indiana has gone into a mix of ads that take jabs at Republican opponents Trump and John Kasich, as well as positive, pro-Cruz ads.

Conservative group Club for Growth also aired ads supportive of Cruz. The two groups have been responsible for 24 percent of TV ads aired in Indiana’s Republican primary, according to the Center for Public Integrity’s analysis of data from Kantar Media/CMAG, a firm that monitors advertising on broadcast television and national — but not local — cable. The Trusted Leadership PAC spot featuring Cruz and Fiorina aired more than 1,000 times.

Trusted Leadership PAC has narrowly outspent the Cruz campaign in Indiana, according to data provided by The Tracking Firm, a nonpartisan media tracking company.

Why watch this group

Much of the recent pro-Cruz messaging has been outsourced to Trusted Leadership PAC.

In fact, no other pro-Cruz super PAC aired a single TV ad since March 15. Since then, Trusted Leadership PAC has sponsored roughly 3,200 ads, according to the Center for Public Integrity’s review of data tracked by Kantar Media/CMAG.

While the super PAC has received $900,000 from some of the Keep the Promise groups, it’s also given about $1.3 million to other ones, including Keep the Promise III and Keep the Promise PAC.

So at least for now, Trusted Leadership PAC appears to be the central node in the pro-Cruz efforts.

This story was co-published with TIME and the Texas Tribune.

Update, 8:44 p.m., May 3, 2016: Sen. Ted Cruz suspended his presidential campaign after losing to Donald Trump in the Indiana primary.

How much are some Republicans still willing to spend to stop Donald Trump from becoming president?

In Indiana, which conducts its primary today, they’ve poured more than $5.5 million into television and radio ads attacking Trump or touting his chief rival, Ted Cruz, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of data provided by The Tracking Firm, a nonpartisan media tracking company headquartered in Washington, D.C.

Many of these ads prominently featured former presidential candidate and Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, who Cruz has selected to be his running mate should he win the Republican presidential nomination.

Trump’s own campaign, meanwhile, has spent about $870,000 on ads in the Hoosier State.

Indiana’s 57 available delegates are crucial: Cruz’s chances of winning enough delegates to keep Trump from clinching the GOP presidential nomination fall dramatically if the senator from Texas fails to beat the billionaire real estate tycoon Tuesday.

Heading into Indiana’s contest, Trump needed about 240 more delegates— or roughly half of those remaining — to win the nomination outright, according to the Associated Press. Nine more states are slated to conduct their nominating contests after Tuesday, including delegate-rich California and New Jersey.

Given this, Indiana’s primary represents “a desperate last stand for Ted Cruz and the #NeverTrump movement,” political analyst David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report wrote on FiveThirtyEight.com on Monday.

To be sure, paid advertising is not the only way for candidates to reach voters. Both Trump and Cruz have been campaigning hard in Indiana, as well.

Fellow Republican presidential candidate John Kasich, governor of neighboring Ohio, has not campaigned actively in Indiana. The Kasich and Cruz campaigns last month struck a tenuous agreement in which Kasich would give Cruz “a clear path” to take on Trump in Indiana, while Cruz would defer to Kasich in Oregon and New Mexico.

In Indiana, Cruz’s own campaign has spent about $1.2 million on TV, cable and radio ads, according to The Tracking Firm.

But a handful of other conservative groups have spent millions more, including $1.6 million from a pro-Cruz super PAC called Trusted Leadership PAC, $1.3 million from the super PAC of the anti-tax Club for Growth and $1.2 million from an anti-Trump super PAC called Our Principles PAC.

An Iowa-based nonprofit called the American Future Fund has also about $200,000 on anti-Trump TV ads, while National Right to Life, an anti-abortion group that has endorsed Cruz, has spent about $40,000 on radio ads.

Combined, Cruz, his allies and other anti-Trump forces aired about 8,600 ads in Indiana since April 21, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis data from Kantar Media/CMAG, a firm that monitors advertising on broadcast television and national — but not local — cable.

That represented about three-fourths of all TV ads in Indiana’s GOP presidential primary.

One ad from the Trusted Leadership PAC showcased Indiana Gov. Mike Pence’s endorsement of Cruz, while noting that Trump was “one of the leaders” of the effort to keep boxer Mike Tyson out of prison after Tyson was convicted of rape in 1992.

Others ads, sponsored by Our Principles PAC, criticized Trump’s online education company as a “scam” and argued that Trump “isn’t fit for the most important job in the word.”

The top donors to Our Principles PAC are Marlene and Joe Ricketts, co-owners of the Chicago Cubs baseball team, who have combined to give $5.5 million.

Trusted Leadership PAC's two largest donors have each given the group $1 million. They are Illinois businessman Richard Uihlein and the Herzog Contracting Corp., a Missouri-based construction company founded by Stan Herzog.

More than 64,000 ads have now attacked Trump since the 2016 presidential election began, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of Kantar Media/CMAG data.

Already, some political groups have begun attacking Trump on the TV airwaves in Oregon, which holds its primary later this month, and California, where voters will head to the polls on June 7.

Meanwhile, Indiana’s Democratic primary is also a critical contest for underdog Bernie Sanders. The senator from Vermont badly trails front-runner Hillary Clinton in the delegate race — even as he has essentially matched her in campaign fundraising.

Clinton has not spent a dime on paid television or radio advertising in Indiana, according to The Tracking Firm, while Sanders has spent more than $1.7 million. Both candidates also have field operations in the state and have rallied supporters there in recent days.

According to Kantar Media/CMAG, Sanders’ spending spree translated into about 4,200 TV ads targeting Indiana voters — about one ad every 5 minutes, on average, since April 18.

Meanwhile, Clinton’s supportive super PACs have also mostly stayed idle. The largest pro-Clinton super PAC, Priorities USA Action, told the Federal Election Commission it planned to spend a mere $2,500 on anti-Trump digital ads in Indiana.

Sanders campaign spokesman Michael Briggs told the Center for Public Integrity that spending “considerable amounts on television advertising” has allowed Sanders to “overcome the built-in political advantages [Clinton] has from being the establishment candidate.”

In Indiana, where most polls show Clinton leading, Briggs nevertheless argued that “things are looking pretty good,” adding, “this could be the beginning of another good streak for our campaign.”

Clinton campaign spokesman Jesse Ferguson declined to comment.

“We don’t comment on our ad strategy,” Ferguson said.

In a landmark ruling nearly a decade ago, a federal judge ordered tobacco companies to stop lying.

After listening to 84 witnesses and perusing tens of thousands of exhibits, U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler of the District of Columbia took a year to write a 1,652-page opinion detailing the companies’ elaborate strategy to deny the harmful effects of smoking.

“In short, [the companies] have marketed and sold their lethal product with zeal, with deception, with a single-minded focus on their financial success, and without regard for the human tragedy or social costs that success exacted,” Kessler wrote in United States of America v. Philip Morris USA.

Kessler noted that the Justice Department, in a racketeering lawsuit, had presented “overwhelming evidence” of a conspiracy to defraud the public. She ordered the companies to take a number of actions, including ceasing to claim there was such a thing as a low-tar cigarette that reduced the risk of disease. The evidence showed this simply was not true.

Yet in about a dozen pending lawsuits, Philip Morris continues to do just that. It routinely argues that the nation’s top-selling cigarette, once known as Marlboro Lights and now called Marlboro Gold, reduces the risk of cancer.

To find scientists willing to make this claim, Philip Morris turned to consultants for the chemical industry. The experts Philip Morris hired work for firms whose scientists regularly contend in medical journals, courtrooms, and regulatory arenas that their clients’ chemical products pose little or no health risks to the public. The firms have been instrumental in delaying new regulations by criticizing the work of other scientists, and emphasizing the doubt inherent in health science. The resultant uncertainty has helped delay attempts by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to crack down on ubiquitous chemicals with known dangers, such as formaldehyde, arsenic, and hexavalent chromium.

The irony in this arrangement is that the tobacco industry pioneered such tactics. “The tobacco industry wrote the playbook for the rest of the industries,” said Matt Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. “Whether it’s the chemical industry, whether its climate change … you see it in industry after industry.” Now, it’s hiring consultants who took its techniques and pushed them further in other industries, relying on their experience to contest the scientific consensus on the dangers of low-tar cigarettes.

The industry’s tactics continue to have catastrophic consequences. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention attribute 480,000 deaths each year to smoking, equal to one in every five deaths. Since 1964, when the U.S. Surgeon General warned that smoking caused cancer, the government estimates that tobacco has killed more than 20 million Americans. That is 15 times the number of Americans who have perished in all wars combined.

Although millions have quit, smoking continues to be the most preventable cause of death in the United States today.

Redesigned cigarettes

At the turn of the 20th century, cigarette smoking was not yet in vogue. Lung cancer was so rare that some doctors had never seen a case. But scenes of everyone lighting up in Mad Men are no exaggeration. By 1955, two-thirds of men and almost one-third of women in the United States smoked cigarettes. Eventually, lung cancer became the leading killer among cancers in the United States.

Medical researchers noticed the parallel rise. In December 1952, a brief article in Readers Digest sent shock waves by summing up research linking smoking to an epidemic of lung cancer. A year later Time reported that mice painted with tobacco tar developed tumors. A medical researcher told the magazine that it was now “beyond any doubt” that cigarettes cause cancer.

Panic ensued at the tobacco companies. On December 14, 1953, the CEOs of the six largest cigarette makers met secretly at New York’s Plaza Hotel to discuss a strategy for countering the bad publicity. What developed over time, as Kessler’s opinion details, was a joint strategy to twist science and mislead the public about the dangers of smoking.

The industry announced that it was forming a research committee to look into the matter. It hired independent scientists such as cancer researcher Clarence Cook Little to do interviews, insisting that there was no proof that cigarettes cause cancer.

In reality, scientific evidence that cigarettes cause cancer was becoming overwhelming. In 1964, the Surgeon General seemed to put an end to any controversy when he released the report of an independent advisory committee that had considered more than 7,000 published articles.

The Surgeon General’s warning had a profound effect on the public, prompting many smokers to quit. But the tobacco companies and their scientists would continue to deny that cigarettes cause cancer for another 35 years.

To discourage smokers from quitting, companies redesigned their cigarettes to seem safer. First, they added filters. Then they introduced “low-tar” cigarettes. Within a few years, these cigarettes dominated the market. Marlboro Lights, which debuted in 1971, became the nation’s best-selling cigarette.

Tobacco companies knew from extensive internal research that smokers were addicted to nicotine and needed a certain amount of it every day to satisfy their habit. Given a “low-tar” cigarette, they would change the way they smoked to get their fix.

With the passage of a new law, the Federal Trade Commission in 1967 began testing all cigarette brands on special smoking machines that measured the amount of tar inhaled. Cigarettes were reformulated, not so much to reduce tar but to fool the machines, according to a National Cancer Institute report. Tiny holes were cut in the cigarette paper to vent tar when a cigarette was smoked by a machine. Those holes, however, didn’t reduce the tar inhaled by smokers.

“If you reduce the amount of nicotine coming through, the person changes a pattern of it. They take bigger puffs, they take deeper puffs, they take longer puffs, they smoke more cigarettes per day to get the amount of nicotine they are seeking to satisfy their addiction,” said Dr. David Burns, a retired medical professor at the University of California, San Diego, who edited some of the Surgeon General’s reports on smoking.

Burns was testifying for the plaintiffs in a recent St. Louis class-action trial.

Also testifying was William Farone, the research director at Philip Morris from 1977 to 1984. He said studies done at the company even before he was hired showed that smokers who switched to light cigarettes would take deeper puffs to get the same amount of nicotine they’d received from regular ones. Farone said other than those tiny holes in the paper, the differences between a Marlboro Red and a Marlboro Light were small.

Public-health scientists would not figure this out for several more years. A study by the American Cancer Society published in 1995 found that the rate of lung cancer deaths among 200,000 smokers actually went up after light cigarettes began dominating sales. Experts believe that the low-burning temperature of a low-tar cigarette and deeper puffs by smokers allow more carcinogens to go deeper into the lungs.

‘Corrective statements’ ordered

The rewards for disputing the scientific consensus are high while the risks are low. The Justice Department’s racketeering lawsuit had sought to have the tobacco industry repay illegal profits of $480 billion. But an appellate court ruled that federal racketeering laws didn’t allow for fines for past behavior.

Judge Kessler’s only power was to order cigarette makers to stop engaging in illegal behavior. Companies appealed her order to quit making claims about low-tar cigarettes, arguing it violated their First Amendment rights. But Kessler’s ruling was upheld.

Nonetheless, Philip Morris hired scientists from the consulting firms Gradient Corp. and Ramboll Environ to testify in lawsuits that so-called low-tar cigarettes are safer than regular ones.

Sharon Eubanks, the former Justice Department attorney who led the lawsuit, believes Philip Morris is violating Kessler’s order. The order forbids public statements declaring that low-tar cigarettes have health benefits, even if such statements come from a Philip Morris consultant.

To enforce the order, the Justice Department would have to file a motion with Kessler. A department spokesman would not comment on the case. Calls to Philip Morris seeking comment were not returned.

After the case wound through appeals, Kessler issued a revised opinion and order in February reiterating that tobacco companies must make the following “corrective statements” on their websites and in advertising:

• Many smokers switch to low-tar and light cigarettes rather than quitting because they think low-tar and light cigarettes are less harmful. They are not.
• “Low tar” and “light” cigarette smokers inhale essentially the same amount of tar and nicotine as they would from regular cigarettes.
• All cigarettes cause cancer, lung disease, heart attacks, and premature death — lights, low tar, ultra lights, and naturals. There is no safe cigarette.

A decade after the original order, and five years after Kessler first issued these statements, tobacco companies are still appealing her ruling. None has printed the statements.

Congress agreed with Kessler’s original findings, and in 2009 passed a law also forbidding the tobacco companies from calling cigarettes “light” or “low-tar” without the approval of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. But Philip Morris says research done since Kessler’s 2006 order justifies the company’s claims that such cigarettes are safer than regular ones.

‘Very unusual position’

Peter Valberg of Gradient Corp. was Philip Morris’s star witness in a Boston class-action lawsuit that went to trial last October after dragging on for 17 years. He has impressive credentials, having been a faculty member at the Harvard School of Public Health for 24 years and served as a consultant to the EPA and the Justice Department. Valberg has testified that he had help with his research from another principal scientist at Gradient, Julie Goodman.

Valberg presented a slide show with data showing that Marlboro Lights delivered less tar to smokers. It made sense, he concluded, that the cigarettes also reduced the risk of disease.

Some of Valberg’s findings were based on his own unpublished analysis of public data. But the most persuasive evidence came from a study underwritten by Philip Morris.

Published two years after Kessler’s decision, the 24-week study analyzed urine samples of about 70 smokers who switched from full-flavored Marlboro Reds to Marlboro Lights. The test revealed that their average nicotine levels dropped significantly within six months.

There was another aspect of the study that Valberg did not mention. Researchers also tracked nicotine levels of Marlboro Red smokers who did not switch. Known as the “control group,” these smokers were akin to patients given sugar pills, or placebos, in a drug trial. In a clinical trial, a control group allows researchers to see if a new drug is any better than a placebo. In this experiment, it enabled researchers to see if switching to Marlboro Lights was any better than not switching.

In fact, switching was no better. Nicotine levels fell for all smokers. The researchers said in the published study that being in a controlled environment might have influenced how people smoked.

Asked about the control group in cross-examination, Valberg seemed flustered. He argued that the goal of the study was to look at what happened to smokers who switched, not to compare them to those who did not.

Dr. Peter Shields, a tobacco expert at Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center who analyzed Valberg’s findings for lawyers suing Philip Morris, said the study actually supports other research showing light cigarettes have no health benefits.

“Dr. Valberg is taking a very unusual position in tobacco class-action suit cases claiming that light cigarettes result in a 25-percent reduction in lung cancer risk in contrast to a scientific consensus that they increase lung cancer risk,” Shields said.

Valberg’s testimony contradicts the findings of the Surgeon General, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Cancer Institute.

In 2001, a panel of experts wrote a 236-page report for the National Cancer Institute, saying, “In fact, the use of these cigarettes may be partly responsible for the increase in lung cancer for long-term smokers who have switched to the low-tar/low-nicotine brands.”

Another consultant for Philip Morris and the chemical industry, Kenneth Mundt of Ramboll Environ, has attacked the NCI report. Mundt did not testify at the Boston trial but has written expert reports in other lawsuits saying that the conclusions of some of the nation’s leading tobacco experts, including the authors of the NCI report, “fail to address the totality of relevant evidence and largely remain unsubstantiated.”

Dr. Jonathan Samet, a professor at the University of Southern California’s medical school who was asked by the NCI to be one of the reviewers of its report, said the findings went through rigorous peer review. Samet himself chaired a panel of 25 experts who met for 10 days in 2002 to hash out a report on smoking for the International Agency for Research on Cancer, an arm of the World Health Organization.

Samet said the clear consensus was that low-tar cigarettes do not reduce the risk of disease.

Stanton Glantz, director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco, was blunter about Mundt’s attack on the NCI report. “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “Those things are put through the peer-review grinder. If anything, they are too cautious.” Valberg and Mundt did not respond to interview requests.

The Philip Morris study was also peer-reviewed, appearing in the journal Regulatory Toxicology and Pharmocology, which has a record of publishing research paid for by the chemical industry.

The journal’s editor, Gio B. Gori, has a controversial history, first as a NCI deputy director and later as a tobacco industry consultant. In 1976, while at the NCI, Gori made national news when he claimed people could smoke as many as two packs of low-tar cigarettes a day with minimum risk of cancer.

Later, Gori was paid by Brown & Williamson to write several letters to scientific journals attacking other researchers’ work. He also penned a manuscript in 1987 that started with this claim: “During the last decade and especially in the last few years scientific evidence has been gradually emerging, and now indicates that smoking may in fact provide a net contribution in the prevention of certain diseases and in extending life expectancy.”

After reviewing the manuscript, another paid consultant, Peter Lee, wrote a confidential letter to a corporate officer at British American Tobacco, saying, “I think the paper is pretty valueless, partly as it is completely unbalanced, partly as the (many) wild claims made are not substantiated by detailed evidence.”

A critique by a BAT attorney suggests that the company closely monitored the work of its consultants: “It obviously needs to be honed into a first-class scientific paper. There seems to be a fairly widespread opinion that that will be difficult to do.”

Gori did not respond to phone messages.

In February, Superior Court Judge Edward Leibensperger ruled in favor of the plaintiffs in the Boston class-action lawsuit and ordered Philip Morris to pay $4.9 million in damages. The judge wrote:

“Dr. Valberg's analysis of the data provided by the published studies was shown to be inconsistent and contrary to the consensus of the scientific community. Dr. Valberg's analysis has never been published or subjected to peer review. I find that the testimony of Dr. Shields was far more persuasive and credible than the testimony of Dr. Valberg.”

It’s not the first time Valberg’s work has come under attack. In 2008, Valberg agreed to try to publish scientific articles based on an asbestos defense lawyer’s theory that smoking causes mesothelioma, a rare cancer virtually always linked to asbestos exposure. The articles could have helped the lawyer win lawsuits, but peer reviewers attacked the manuscript and recommended its rejection.

‘That’s not science’

Philip Morris’ latest claims in court that low-tar cigarettes are safer fail to account for the industry’s own internal research. Still, the company has proven extremely effective at defending itself against legal claims brought by smokers. According to Philip Morris, of the 149 smoker lawsuits that have gone to trial since 1999, verdicts have gone in the company’s favor 77 times. The company says it has paid out about $467 million in judgments and interest. Its efforts to fund research to support its claims, and to hire experts willing to testify in support of them, may be one reason for its success in persuading juries not to hold it liable more often.

Dr. Neal Benowitz, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, who did early research on low-tar cigarettes, said testifying that light cigarettes are safer is so at odds with the scientific consensus that it would likely damage the reputation of a tobacco researcher. But Philip Morris doesn’t hire scientists who’ve devoted their careers to studying tobacco. “Valberg is not someone who’s known in the tobacco research area,” Benowitz said. “I presume it’s not affecting his reputation.”

“These people are not scientists,” said Glantz, of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education. “They are public-relations people who happen to have degrees in science. These are people who make their living producing results that their clients want. And that’s not science.”

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz and his super PAC allies spent more than $10 per vote on advertising ahead of Indiana's primary Tuesday.

And Donald Trump— whose campaign spent about $1.50 per vote — clobbered him anyway.

In all, Cruz and two supportive super PACs — the Club for Growth, an anti-tax organization that endorsed him, and Trusted Leadership PAC, a big-money vehicle designed to boost the U.S. senator from Texas — spent more than $4 million on television and radio advertising in Indiana, according to data provided to the Center for Public Integrity by The Tracking Firm, a nonpartisan media tracking company headquartered in Washington, D.C.

Despite the spending spree, Cruz won only about 405,000 votes, finishing in a distant second behind Trump, the front-runner who ultimately won about 590,000 votes.

Trump's campaign spent about $870,000 on TV and radio advertising in Indiana, according to The Tracking Firm. These figures don't include costs associated with online ads, direct mail, field staff, salaries, events or other expenditures.

During his victory speech Tuesday night, Trump praised his own campaign's thriftiness.

"That's something that makes me feel really, really very good," Trump said.

"There have been 60,000 negative ads [against me]," Trump continued. "The people are so smart. They don't buy it. They get it."

In fact, more than 64,000 TV ads have attacked Trump in some fashion as of Monday, including about 8,000 from Democratic Party front-runner Hillary Clinton, according to a Center for Public Integrity review of data provided by Kantar Media/CMAG, a firm that monitors advertising on broadcast television and national — but not local — cable.

After his loss to Trump in Indiana, Cruz quit of the presidential race. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who did not actively campaign in Indiana, is expected to end his campaign today as well.

An anti-Trump super PAC called Our Principles PAC— which did not endorse either Cruz or Kasich — spent an additional $1.2 million on ads in Indiana.

According to the Associated Press, Trump is now fewer than 200 delegates away from the magic number of 1,237 needed to officially clinch the GOP presidential nomination without a contested convention.

In Indiana's Democratic primary, Bernie Sanders scored an upset victory, defeating Clinton by about 30,000 votes, or 5 percentage points.

Clinton did not spend a dime on TV or radio advertising in Indiana, while Sanders spent about $1.7 million— or about $5.20 per vote.

"It's been clear all along that she's the establishment candidate," Sanders campaign spokesman Michael Briggs said of Clinton. "Advertising on television is one way we have to compete with that."

Briggs said that Sanders, who badly trails Clinton in the delegate race, would press on to give voters in the remaining contests "the same kind of choice that people in other states have already gotten."

Additionally, Briggs stressed, we "like our chances in a lot of those states."

Clinton, however, remains poised to win the Democratic nomination thanks to her nearly insurmountable delegate lead. Clinton campaign spokesman Jesse Ferguson said the campaign — which, like Trump's, is fewer than 200 delegates away from officially clinching the nomination — doesn't "comment on our ad strategy."

Overall, more than $1 billion has been spent in the 2016 presidential race, including about $640 million by candidates who are no longer in the races — and the outside groups, such as super PACs, that supported them.

Roughly one-fifth of that sum was spent by former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and his supportive super PAC, Right to Rise USA.

Many campaign reformers have decried the 2016 election as a cesspool of special interests, where wealthy people and corporate entities have played outsized roles in how campaigns are waged.

Others disagree.

"The mantra about money buying elections has been demonstrated to be so 100 percent false," Republican attorney Jim Bopp, one of Indiana's 57 delegates, told the Center for Public Integrity. "Money buys speech, not influence, and certainly not elections."

This story was co-published with NBC News.

Like Donald Trump himself, the Trump campaign’s new national finance chairman has a long history of contributing to Democrats — including Hillary Clinton.

Private investor Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s new campaign fundraising guru, has contributed more than $120,000 to a mix of Democrats, Republicans and bipartisan political groups since 1995, a Center for Public Integrity analysis of Federal Election Commission and Center for Responsive Politics data indicates.

Over the years, more than half of Mnuchin’s federal-level political contributions have benefited Democrats, including President Barack Obama and Clinton, Trump’s all-but-certain general election rival.

About one-third of Mnuchin’s giving has benefited Republicans. The rest has gone to nonpartisan political action committees such as the PAC of Goldman Sachs, where Mnuchin worked for 17 years.

Each election cycle, Mnuchin — also a bankroller of blockbuster movies such as “American Sniper,” “Gravity” and “Avatar” — has frequently donated to the campaigns of presidential contenders.

During the 2000 presidential election, Mnuchin donated to Democrats Al Gore and Bill Bradley and Republican Steve Forbes.

During the 2004 presidential race, he donated to two Democratic candidates: John Kerry and John Edwards.

And ahead of the 2008 presidential election, Mnuchin donated not only to Obama, Clinton and Edwards, but also to Democrats Chris Dodd and Bill Richardson. Republicans Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney also received contributions from Mnuchin.

During the 2012 presidential race, Mnuchin donated to both Romney and fellow Republican Tim Pawlenty.

Mnuchin’s contributions to Democrats extend to the current cycle.

For instance, he donated $2,000 in February to the U.S. Senate campaign of California Attorney General Kamala Harris, a Democrat. Last year, Harris described Trump, who had personally contributed money in 2013 to Harris’ political committee, as “someone who clearly cannot be a leader.”

Mnuchin and the Trump campaign could not immediately be reached for comment on Mnuchin’s political contributions.

Mnuchin, a former Goldman Sachs partner, is the chairman and chief executive officer of private investment company Dune Capital LP.

Mnuchin also has professional ties to George Soros, the billionaire financier who’s contributed tens of millions of dollars to Democratic political causes over the years, including $7 million this election cycle to Priorities USA Action, a pro-Clinton super PAC.

From 2003 to 2004, Mnuchin worked as chief executive of SFM Capital Management, which the Wall Street Journal reports is backed by Soros. He also worked for Soros Fund Management LLC, according to Bloomberg.

(The Center for Public Integrity receives funding from the Open Society Foundations, which Soros funds. A complete list of Center for Public Integrity funders is found here.)

Trump himself has been forced to defend his past campaign contributions to Democrats this cycle, arguing that there are few alternatives to Democrats in New York.

“Am I going to contribute to a Republican for my whole life when they get, they run against some Democrat?” he said. “And the most they can get is one percent of the vote.”

In the wake of the public firestorm sparked by the Panama Papers scandal, the Obama administration unveiled a series of new proposals today that would crack down on offshore secrecy and illicit financial transactions.

In a news conference this afternoon, administration officials announced that the U.S. Treasury Department would send proposed legislation to Congress that would require companies set up in the United States to report their real owners to the agency’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. This would for the first time create a national registry that could be used by law enforcement authorities to ferret out the real people behind anonymous companies used in money laundering and other wrongdoing.

The proposal acknowledges the reality that the U.S. itself is a key player in the system of offshore secrecy, through such states as Delaware, Nevada and Wyoming that allow the creation of shell companies that hide their owners’ identities and activities.

Wally Adeyemo, the U.S. deputy national security advisor for international economics, said the Obama administration has been working hard for years to address the issue of offshore-fueled misconduct but that the Panama Papers disclosures “highlight the fact that more needs to be done” to fight money laundering, terrorism financing and tax evasion. 

 “Our financial system should not provide the rich, the powerful and the corrupt with the opportunity to shield their assets and avoid paying their fair share or with the opportunity to hide any illicit activity,” Adeyemo said. “Nobody should be able to hide in shadows from their legal obligations and nobody should be able to play by a different set of rules.”

Adeyemo noted that U.S. investigations have prompted 80 Swiss banks to admit to “engaging in tax evasion and related criminal conduct” and forced them to pay more than $1.3 billion in penalties. In addition, he said, the U.S. tax amnesty program has prompted more than 54,000 taxpayers “to do the right thing and resolve their past non-compliance,” and has collected more than more than $8 billion in the process.

Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew sent a letter today to U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan urging Congress to pass the legislation creating a central ownership registry for shell companies. 

Lew also asked Senate leaders to take action to approve eight tax treaties that the U.S. has negotiated with other countries, agreements that would allow better sharing of information with other governments about Americans holding assets overseas. He noted that American tax treaties with two well-known tax havens, Switzerland and Luxembourg, have been waiting for Senate approval for more than five years.

The U.S. Justice Department said in a new release today that it will submit proposals to Congress in an effort to improve enforcement of laws targeting the illegal proceeds of transnational corruption. The proposals would make it easier for U.S. law enforcement authorities to file charges against corrupt foreign officials and subpoena records in money laundering investigations.

In pushing these new measures, U.S. officials are joining others from around the world who have announced investigations and policy reforms in reaction to reporting on the Panama Papers by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and more than 100 other media partners.

On April 5, two days after the Panama Papers investigation first broke, Germany's justice minister called for the creation of a national “transparency register” that would document the real owners of shell companies sent up within his country. U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, meanwhile, is expected to propose a new global anti-corruption agency that would investigative money laundering and tax dodging.

The anonymous whistleblower behind the Panama Papers has conditionally offered to make the documents available to government authorities.

In a statement issued to the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the so-called “John Doe” behind the biggest information leak in history cites the need for better whistleblower protection and has hinted at even more revelations to come.

Titled “The Revolution Will Be Digitized” the 1800-word statement gives justification for the leak, saying that “income inequality is one of the defining issues of our time” and says that government authorities need to do more to address it.

Süddeutsche Zeitung has authenticated that the statement came from the Panama Papers source.

Head over to Panamapapers.icij.org to read the statement in full.

Dear Colleagues,

The Panama Papers story has gained fresh impetus this with a remarkable manifesto from the person who leaked the information, explaining the motives behind the world’s largest leak and the reasons it was given to German newspapers Suddeutsche Zeitung and our own International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ).

In an eloquent statement given to and verified by the German newspaper, the leaker — identified only as “John Doe” as he or she has been throughout a year-long relationship with journalists at Suddeutsche Zeitung — blames politicians, lawyers, academics and the news media for “failing to address the metastasizing tax havens spotting Earth’s surface” and contributing to inequality.

“Doe" directly praises the work of the ICIJ — the international arm of the Center for Public Integrity – in taking on a leak other media organizations rejected and notes "serious investigative journalists lack funding”. It may seem self-serving but this note is not the news report of Doe’s statement, rather it is a personal note to readers from me and of course the ICIJ is part of a non-profit reliant on the donations of philanthropists and individuals.

The full statement from Doe is published on the ICIJ site dedicated to the Panama Papers.

Tackling conspiracy theories that an intelligence agency was behind the leak of 11.5 million documents from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, “Doe" writes: "For the record, I do not work for any government or intelligence agency, directly or as a contractor, and I never have. My viewpoint is entirely my own, as was my decision to share the documents with Suddeutsche Zeitung and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), not for any specific political purpose, but simply because I understood enough about their contents to realize the scale of the injustices they described.”

“Doe” accuses Mossack Fonseca of exploiting a global system of tax havens which permits “massive, pervasive corruption” and of using its influence to “write and bend laws worldwide to favour the interests of criminals…” The leaker welcomes the “new global debate” that the Panama Papers (a term coined by the ICIJ and SZ, not the leaker) has generated. “Doe" offers to cooperate with authorities but condemns the prosecution or harassing whistleblowers, including Edward Snowden and those involved in what became the base for another ICIJ investigation “Lux Leaks”.

"Legitimate whistleblowers who expose unquestionable wrongdoing, whether insiders or outsiders, deserve immunity from government retribution, full stop,” Doe’s manifesto says, adding that in the absence of that protection whistleblowers have to rely on the reach of media organizations like the ICIJ.

In a swipe at the money-in-politics circuit in the United States which led to the establishment of the Center for Public Integrity 27 years ago, “Doe” condemns the collusion between U.S politicians and their paymasters: "Tax evasion cannot possibly be fixed while elected officials are pleading for money from the very elites who have the strongest incentives to avoid taxes relative to any other segment of the population.”

Yet it is a politician from a much less powerful country — my own home country — who is singled out. “John Doe” accuses New Zealand Prime Minister John Key, embroiled in a controversy over the Panama Papers revelations at home already, of enabling a “financial fraud Mecca” in the nearby Cook Islands.

The whole affair has been rendered even more extraordinary by “Doe” intervention.

On Monday, the ICIJ will take the story a step further with the scheduled publication of a searchable database through which all the companies and all the individual “officers” identified in the Mossack Fonseca records can be seen as a spider-web which stretches across the world.

The entire effort is a huge credit to the work and staff of the ICIJ, led by Director Gerard Ryle and Deputy Director Marina Guevara Walker. They have harnessed the work of a tiny ICIJ staff team and combined it with more than 370 reporters from more than 100 organizations worldwide to coordinate the analysis and release of these documents.

“Doe” makes clear the story was offered to other media organizations and to Wikileaks before Suddeutsche Zeitung and the ICIJ recognized the value of what was offered. Doe takes a swipe at the rest of the media: "Many news networks are cartoonish parodies of their former selves, individual billionaires appear to have taken up newspaper ownership as a hobby, limiting coverage of serious matters concerning the wealthy, and serious investigative journalists lack funding.”

And, ending the note, “Doe” says: "the next revolution will be digitized…Or perhaps it has already begun.”

Peter Bale
CEO, The Center for Public Integrity
@peterbale

Don McGahn’s picture is conspicuously missing from the wall of former commissioners at the Federal Election Commission, and it’s nowhere on the agency’s website.

The former FEC chairman’s presence, though, is still felt, nearly three years after he resigned from the commission. Former colleagues and fellow lawyers describe him as a disruptor who proudly upended enforcement policies and contributed to the FEC’s current gridlocked state.

“I came here to work, to change the way the place thinks. I was proven right time and time again by court cases,” McGahn told the Center for Public Integrity shortly after stepping down.

McGahn is now a key player for the presidential campaign machine of an even more disruptive Donald — presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump— who’s rocketing toward a likely general election showdown with Democrat Hillary Clinton.

But the two Donalds are most curious partners.

Their working relationship’s tangled roots reach back decades to Atlantic City, where McGahn’s powerful uncle represented Trump’s business interests — until the alliance cracked in a bitter feud over money.

And the younger McGahn and Trump are hardly ideological soulmates. Trump has repeatedlyrailed against what he considers the poison of special-interest money in politics, while McGahn is best known for helping special interests play politics with as few restrictions as possible. 

Perhaps it’s a marriage of convenience between a brash billionaire and one of the savviest campaign lawyers his money can buy. Regardless, McGahn is one of a small group of insiders who have been standing at Trump’s side since the mogul launched his unlikely, odds-defying bid last June.

McGahn has up to now operated mostly in the background — neither he nor the Trump organization would comment. But as the Trump campaign prepares its general election battle plan, McGahn, as campaign counsel, will inevitably serve as a powerful weapon in Trump’s quest for the Oval Office.

'Like a sledgehammer'

If Trump wins? Previous campaign lawyers to White House contenders have later molded administration policy in important respects. This means one of the nation’s most polarizing election lawyers could return to center stage — and not just thanks to the classic rock cover band he plays guitar with on weekends.

McGahn was “perhaps the most consequential member of the FEC in its history” said Jan Witold Baran, a well-regarded Republican election lawyer and co-chairman of the election law and government ethics practice at law firm Wiley Rein. Baran said McGahn checked the authority of the agency’s staff and general counsel and used his experience as a lawyer representing clients to win rights for political committees under the FEC’s jurisdiction, including those the commission is investigating.

FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, a Democratic appointee, who frequently clashed with McGahn while both were on the commission, sees it differently.

“He was consequential like a sledgehammer was consequential,” she said, adding, “he did his best to undermine the law.”

Boardwalk to Beltway

McGahn, 47, grew up in Atlantic City, New Jersey, a place for people who aren’t afraid to roll the dice.

He graduated from the University of Notre Dame and received his law degree at Widener University in 1994. He worked on campaign and election law at then-Washington powerhouse Patton Boggs and was for a time an in-house lawyer for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the Republican campaign arm for the U.S. House of Representatives.

He has also represented the campaign of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas, who faced a series of investigations in connection with his handling of political contributions. McGahn’s wife, Shannon McGahn, now staff director for the House Financial Services Committee, is a former spokeswoman for DeLay, and the former lawmaker attended their 2011 wedding. The couple has two young sons.

McGahn developed a reputation as an iconoclast: a Republican election lawyer who for a long time wore his shaggy hair long and played a mean Les Paul guitar for Scott’s New Band, hitting power chords on everything from Whitesnake to AC/DC. 

“A beast on stage” with “skills as sharp as a samurai sword,” his band bio boasts.

When President George W. Bush nominated him to the FEC in 2008, some observerscriticized McGahn as too partisan, even for an agency whose commissioners were expected to be associated with a party.

Now, of course, McGahn is working for Trump — a candidate whose rise has prompted countless pundits to posit the imminent destruction of the same Republican Party with which McGahn is so closely identified.

One parlor game in legal circles is guessing how Trump and McGahn connected in the first place.

A key clue is pedigree: Don McGahn is just the latest McGahn Trump has turned to for legal help.

Back in the day

In the early 1980s, when Trump was getting into the Atlantic City casino business, projects hinged on navigating the local regulatory process.

Patrick “Paddy” McGahn, New Jersey’s most highly decorated Korean War hero, was a political power broker. “Probably the resort’s best known and most powerful lawyer, his fees reportedly were the highest in town” — $300 an hour — according to the book "Trumped!," by John R. O’Donnell, a former president of the Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino in Atlantic City.

In 1982, when Trump needed potentially valuable air rights for a casino project, Paddy McGahn pushed approval through in “lightning speed” and at a minimal price — $100, according to Nelson Johnson’s book “Boardwalk Empire."

“McGahn was the one who was able to work the crowd and get whatever Trump wanted done,” said Don Targan, a personal injury lawyer in Atlantic City who was close friends with Paddy McGahn for decades, until Paddy McGahn’s death in 2000.

Trump and Paddy McGahn were at one point so close, O’Donnell wrote, that Trump named a cocktail lounge in the grand Trump Taj Mahal casino “Paddy’s Saloon.”

In the early 1990s, however, Trump’s casino empire began to fall apart.

Trump Plaza’s lawyers, amidst the bankruptcy of their hotel/casino, challenged in federal court both Paddy McGahn’s bills and the effectiveness of his work.

With hundreds of thousands of dollars and his reputation at stake, Paddy McGahn fought back. Both Targan and McGahn’s lawyer in the case, Arthur J. Abramowitz, said the late war hero took the case personally.

“There was a falling out with a lot of animosity,” Abramowitz said. “[Paddy McGahn] had a lot of pride in what he did, and when somebody says that you do something not up to standards, I think it’s more than just denial of a debt.”

Abramowitz, who said he also represented other creditors in connection with the Trump bankruptcies, said it is unusual for a debtor to level allegations against a lawyer such as the ones leveled against Paddy McGahn — and McGahn was hit hard by it.

The two sides eventually filed documents with the court saying they had settled the case. The exact terms weren’t immediately available, but the order approving the settlement said Paddy McGahn was entitled to go back to court if Trump Plaza Associates failed to pay the money owed under the agreement. Both Abramowitz and Targan recall that Paddy McGahn collected a significant settlement from Trump Plaza Associates, though they don’t recollect a precise amount.

As for Paddy McGahn’s nephew’s current representation of Trump, Targan said, it “is amazing to me, and it just happened to be a freak of nature.”

Paddy McGahn, Targan added, is “probably turning over in his grave.”

Odd couple

Most every lawyer says it’s unfair to assume an attorney shares his or her clients’ views.

Even so, the disconnect between public stances taken by Trump and those taken by Don McGahn is striking.

McGahn has often cited free speech grounds in opposing restrictions on campaign spending, and he’s pushed back against federal enforcement cases, arguing that they could chill political speech.

“When elected officials are able to handicap and silence their electoral opponents, they will rarely refrain from doing so,” McGahn wrote last year, in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece on Clinton’s campaign finance reform proposals.

McGahn is also known as a strong proponent of political parties.

Trump, in contrast, has called for revamping libel laws to make lawsuits easier to bring, something that makes most free speech proponents look askance. He has also repeatedlycriticized the role the Republican National Committee has played in the primary process. He has yet to lay out specific proposals for overhauling the current system for regulating money in politics, but has repeatedly said the status quo breeds corruption.

“The system is broken,” he said during a Republican debate in March. “And frankly, I know the system better than anybody else, and I'm the only one up here that's going to be able to fix that system because that system is wrong.”

Trump’s assertion is steeped in hyperbole: There’s no way he knows the system as well as McGahn.

From 1999 until 2008, when McGahn was a lawyer for the National Republican Congressional Committee, he was an insider’s insider.

McGahn — together with fellow Republican FEC appointees Caroline Hunter and Matthew Petersen, currently chairman of the commission —  then formed a powerful, united voting block from 2008 until he left the FEC to return to private practice at Patton Boggs in 2013. (He’s since jumped to another firm, Jones Day).

McGahn’s FEC tenure coincided with a series of federal court rulings, including the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling in Citizens United v. FEC, which increasingly deregulated how campaign cash may be raised and spent. On a parallel track, McGahn and his allies drove changes in the way the commission did business, especially concerning how they punished — or didn’t punish — political actors suspected of violating federal rules and regulations.

“Whether you agreed with him or not he was a force to reckon with,” said Petersen, who was appointed to the agency at the same time as McGahn and allied with him throughout his tenure.

A force? Yes. A positive force? No, says former FEC general counsel Lawrence M. Noble, who is now general counsel for the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group that was often at odds with McGahn.

“His impact on the agency was to continue moving the agency down the road to where it is today, which is a non-enforcement agency,” Noble said, adding that McGahn was continually questioning “long-standing interpretations of the law and saying he would not go along with it.”

But Michael Toner, a former FEC chairman who is now co-chair of the election law practice at Wiley Rein, praised McGahn as a “forceful advocate” who “really was a driving force in shaping” the FEC’s post-Citizens United form. 

“He served at a time when there were a lot of changes in the judicial landscape … and the FEC had to grapple with how to proceed, to be blunt," Toner said. 

The FEC today, three years after McGahn’s departure, is known as a reluctant enforcer. The six commissioners, three backed by each political party, are frequently gridlocked and often at each other’s throats, and the agency is fighting low staff morale. Fines assessed by the agency fell from a high of $6.71 million in fiscal year 2006 to less than $1 million in 2015.

Just like his high-profile client, Trump, McGahn is an iconoclastic lightning rod, not known for backing away from a brawl or breaking bread with opponents afterwards.

“I would never have characterized him as a go-along, get-along guy,” said Ken Jones, a friend and former colleague of McGahn’s at the law firm Patton Boggs and a former lawyer for both the Republican National Committee and the Bush-Cheney presidential campaign in 2000.

During McGahn’s tenure at the FEC, he was a frequent target for watchdog groups who said he was crippling the FEC’s ability to enforce the law and destroying morale among the agency’s staff through his reluctance to proceed with enforcement cases. Noble once described him as a commissioner who “did his best to make the FEC dysfunctional.”

Doubling down

The Trump campaign’s filings with the FEC show it has made more than $833,000 in payments to McGahn’s firm, Jones Day, since the campaign started.

March brought the firm’s highest bills yet — nearly $162,000. Last month, the Trump  campaign brought on a second Jones Day partner, William McGinley, a colleague of McGahn’s in the political law practice, to help with its delegate operation.

McGahn’s portfolio with the Trump campaign clearly goes beyond basic advice on campaign finance.

McGahn beat back an attempt to strip Trump’s name from the critical New Hampshire ballot late last year, then stood behind the candidate on a stage in Manchester in February as Trump delivered his first victory speech of the campaign.

He raised concerns with the Nevada Republican Party after Trump’s then-rival for the nomination, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, suggested supporters record “anything that looks suspicious” when entering caucus sites in Nevada. 

In a letter, McGahn said the Cruz campaign’s recommendation was “especially troubling given Senator Cruz and his campaign’s track record of election shenanigans,” and then went on to a series of bullet points highlighting accusations of dishonesty by the Cruz campaign.

McGahn’s letter asked the Nevada Republican Party to clarify whether the taping is permissible “and make clear that voter intimidation tactics will not be tolerated.”

McGahn has also writtenletters demanding that outside groups, including super PACs, stop raising money using Trump’s name and likeness.

In March, McGahn helped organize a meeting between Trump and Republicans, including U.S. Reps. Scott DesJarlais, R-Tenn.; Chris Collins, R-N.Y.; and Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., as well as former Rep. Bob Livingston, R-La., at the Washington, D.C., offices of Jones Day.

Jones Day is, by some reports, the largest law firm in the country, with nearly 1,700 lawyers. This number includes roughly 250 lawyers in a D.C. office boasting sweeping views of the Capitol. It’s endured a series of reports about whether the attention Trump has drawn to the firm would prompt Jones Day to drop Trump as a client.

Not only has that not happened, the ties between the two appear to be solidifying, with McGinley also representing the billionaire businessman. The two lawyers traveled to Florida in April as part of a group representing Trump at a Republican National Committee meeting there.

In the end, though, no one knows exactly what advice McGahn is giving Trump — or whether his client is listening to it.

Former colleague Jones, while stressing that he isn’t familiar with the details of McGahn’s representation of Trump, said part of McGahn’s job is obviously dealing with the intricacies of arcane campaign finance law.

In addition, “part of Don’s job is to educate the candidate and the campaign as to what is a good position to take as the Republican front-runner” on money and politics, Jones said.

“Sometimes, the popular answer may not be the right answer. There’s a difference between making a sound bite about money and politics and truly understanding the interaction between money and politics and the federal government,” Jones added.

Brad Smith, a former FEC chairman who now leads the Center for Competitive Politics, a nonprofit that advocates for less campaign finance regulation, said: “Lawyers have to represent the interest of your client, but I think good lawyers also try to take on the old term of counselor and counsel their clients as to true long-term interest.”

McGahn has never been one to worry about the popular answer.

Whether he’ll be more willing to have his photograph associated with the Trump campaign than he was with the FEC remains to be seen.

This story was co-published with the Huffington Post and Newsweek.

Leonard Gotshalk, an Atlanta Falcons football player turned Oregon businessman, had a history of legal issues by the time he went looking to buy an offshore company in 2010. Lawsuits and criminal filings had accused the former NFL offensive lineman of fraud and racketeering.

Mossack Fonseca, a Panama-based law firm that specializes in selling offshore companies, initially told Gotshalk it couldn’t do business with him, because of “negative information” that its compliance unit had found. Gotshalk persuaded the law firm to reconsider, noting in an email that he’d “held offshore accounts in the past in Europe and Bahamas and Belize” without problems.

Three months later – on May 21, 2010 – federal prosecutors in Philadelphia unsealed an indictment charging that Gotshalk was a key player in a scheme that used kickbacks and other tactics to inflate the prices of tech company stocks.

Three days later – on May 24 – Mossack Fonseca recorded a $3,055 wire transfer from Gotshalk, the firm’s internal records show. The money paid for a British Virgin Islands company called Irishmyst Consultants Limited.

Gotshalk isn’t the only American with a suspect past who has used Mossack Fonseca’s services. A review of the law firm’s internal files by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and other media partners has identified companies tied to at least 36 Americans accused of fraud or other serious financial misconduct.

ICIJ and its media partners found the details of Gotshalk’s offshore company – and other companies linked to Americans accused of financial mischief – within the Panama Papers, a trove of leaked documents that expose the business practices of Mossack Fonseca, one of the world’s largest marketers of offshore secrecy.

Some have been convicted of fraud or other crimes. They include Martin Frankel, a Connecticut financier who pleaded guilty in 2002 to 20 counts of wire fraud as well as counts of securities fraud and racketeering conspiracy, and Andrew Wiederhorn, an Oregon corporate executive who pleaded guilty to two felonies in a case tied to one of the biggest corporate scandals in Oregon history.

Others have been sued in civil cases launched by securities regulators or private plaintiffs. Among them are six Americans who were accused in a lawsuit in federal court in Washington state of using an offshore company set up through Mossack Fonseca, Dressel Investment Ltd., to run a Ponzi scheme that cost thousands of middle-class Indonesians nearly $100 million.

The lawsuit claims two of the players in the Dressel scheme pitched themselves to investors as financial experts but were in fact “a former appliance salesman for Sears” and “a disbarred attorney who had been reduced to driving a bus for people in Utah to gamble at casinos located on the Nevada border.”

Experts on Ponzi schemes and other kinds of financial chicanery say offshore entities often play a role in fraudulent enterprises. “Fraudsters like offshore because of the the lack of transparency,” said Ellen Zimiles, a former federal prosecutor in New York who now leads Navigant Consulting’s investigations and compliance practice. When offshore structures are put together skillfully, “it takes a lot of time for investigators to get the ultimate beneficiary.”

Mossack Fonseca’s working relationships with dozens of Americans tied to financial misconduct raises questions about how well the firm keeps its commitment to following international standards for preventing money laundering and keeping offshore companies out of the hands of criminal elements.

A Mossack Fonseca spokesperson did not reply to questions for this story. In previous statements, the firm said it has “operated beyond reproach in our home country and in other jurisdictions where we have operations. Our firm has never been accused or charged in connection with criminal wrongdoing.”

The firm said that it works to make sure “that the companies we incorporate are not being used for tax evasion, money-laundering, terrorist finance or other illicit purposes.” It said it turns away clients who have been convicted of crimes or involved in other conduct that raises “red flags.”

“Our due diligence procedures require us to update the information that we have on clients and to periodically verify that no negative results exist in regards to the companies we incorporate and the individuals behind them,” the firm said.

Gotshalk and Frankel could not be reached for comment. Wiederhorn, the Oregon corporate executive, said the offshore company linked to him in Mossack Fonseca’s files was used for routine real estate transactions in the United Kingdom.

High volume

It wouldn’t have taken Mossack Fonseca’s compliance team much Internet surfing to determine that former pro football player Leonard Gotshalk was likely to be a risky client.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission sued Gotshalk in 1994, accusing him and others of providing investors with “false and misleading information” about a company involved in oil and gas investments. In 1995, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., issued a permanent injunction forbidding Gotshalk from violating the antifraud provisions of U.S. securities laws.

In 2004, an Oregon court convicted Gotshalk of felony theft and ordered him to pay restitution and serve 20 days in jail in a case involving allegations he took out large loans with no intention of paying them back. Information about the conviction was available on the Internet in a story posted by the Medford, Oregon, Mail Tribune, which quoted a police detective who said he’d interviewed a dozen people in multiple states who claimed Gotshalk defrauded them.

There’s no indication in the Panama Papers that Mossack Fonseca took notice of Gotshalk’s more recent legal issues, which include the securities fraud indictment in Pennsylvania and a new lawsuit filed by the SEC.

A sentencing hearing has been scheduled for Gotshalk in the criminal case for May 19. A judge has ordered a document titled "Plea Document as to Leonard Gotshalk" sealed, but other court records don't indicate whether he has been convicted in the case. The SEC's lawsuit has been put on hold until the criminal matter is finished.

Gotshalk’s attorney did not reply to requests for comment about his client’s legal problems or Gotshalk’s purchase of an offshore company through Mossack Fonseca.

It is not illegal to own an offshore company. But financial crime experts say that profit concerns can discourage offshore middlemen from thoroughly checking out their clients, allowing unscrupulous individuals to gain control of offshore companies and use them to open hard-to-trace bank accounts.

An article about banks’ struggles with enforcing anti-money-laundering rules in Navigant Consulting’s Risk & Regulation journal noted that a “widely recurring theme throughout multiple enforcement actions has been the decision of management to place revenue considerations” above money-laundering risks. Once a decision is made to compromise money laundering controls for the sake of revenue, the article said, “the decision becomes easier to repeat and harder to reverse.”

The leaked records in the Panama Papers suggest that Mossack Fonseca’s high-volume business model made it difficult for it to keep track of its clients’ backgrounds and activities. Between 2005 and 2015, Mossack Fonseca incorporated more than 100,000 offshore entities, such as trusts and shell companies. In many instances, the firm offloaded responsibility for checking out potential customers to the banks and outside law firms that fed it business. In its earlier response to questions from ICIJ and other media partners, the firm said it was “legally and practically limited in our ability to regulate the use of companies we incorporate.”

‘Unofficial’ representative

In an interview with the Associated Press, firm co-founder Ramón

Fonseca said that “as a policy we prefer not to have American clients.”

The Panama Papers show that at least some of that hesitation involved fear of U.S. law enforcement authorities.

In 2000, the leaked documents indicate, the Federal Bureau of Investigation contacted Michael B. Edge, a U.S.-based representative for the law firm, and threatened to subpoena him in an effort to get information from Mossack Fonseca about an offshore company that had been involved in “an apparent banking fraud.”

Edge, who has acted as the intermediary for hundreds of companies registered by Mossack Fonseca in the Bahamas and other offshore havens, recalled in a 2008 email that the firm decided that due to the threat from the Feds, he should become “an ‘unofficial’ Representative... Since that time, I have scrupulously avoided receipt of client documents, unless absolutely unavoidable, to my U.S. address; especially since the FBI knows of my existence in a ‘negative’ context.”

He said he continued working “exclusively” with Mossack Fonseca but was careful not to leave “any discernable (direct) link to Mossfon.”

In a 2014 email, Edge explained that Mossack Fonseca had relatively few American clients because it wanted to “avoid further attempts by American authorities to attack the Partnership.” He said that with the consent of one of the firm’s managing partners, Jürgen Mossack, “American clients were purged, no more have been sought, no marketing in the U.S. takes place; and I have conducted Mossfon business in my own name.”

The records show, however, that some customers brought to Mossack Fonseca through Edge have been caught up in fraud cases in the United States.

In 2003, U.S. securities regulators accused one of Edge’s customers , Florida-based Mary Patten, of helping perpetrate a $6-million investment fraud using a company incorporated through Mossack Fonseca on the island of Jersey.   After the allegations against her came to light, Edge told the law firm he had been “duped into believing” that Patten needed help because she was the victim of a “malicious lawsuit.”

In 2005, a federal judge ruled that she’d played a “crucial role” in the scam and ordered her and another defendant to pay more than $5 million in restitution, fines and interest.

Another Edge client was Harvey Milam, a Mississippi businessman and the son of the late J.W. Milam, one of the killers of Emmett Till, whose grisly murder helped spark America’s modern Civil Rights movement. Creditors of a failed insurance company based in the Caribbean island of Nevis claimed that Harvey Milam and other defendants cheated investors by fraudulently transferring the insurer’s assets to other companies. Milam and other defendants settled the case in 2012 without admitting any wrongdoing.

Patten and Milam could not be reached for comment for this story. Milam’s attorney declined comment. Edge did not reply to repeated emails and faxes seeking comment.

‘She lost everything’

Everything seemed in order when Rebel Holiday showed up at Mossack Fonseca’s Panama headquarters in May 2009.

She lived in Virginia  and presented herself as a successful entrepreneur with a plan to sell “collectibles” containing small amounts of gold. The company she wanted to register in Panama would be “committed to the democratization of gold and precious metals that have only been available to the affluent in recent years,” according to a business plan found in the law firm’s files.

Mossack Fonseca later claimed it had done an Internet search on Holiday and found nothing negative. The firm’s staffers registered the company, Mises Technologies, and took her to Tower Bank in Panama City to open three accounts.

At the same time, back in Virginia, the state securities regulators were pursuing action against Holiday and multiple companies she had created, accusing her and the companies of misleading investors and selling unlicensed securities. The state’s allegations mostly focused on a company Holiday created to sell fashion consultations over the Internet.

One of the investors who testified against her in the state’s administrative hearings was Amanda Susan Piola. She was 26 and just starting out in the fashion world when she first met Holiday. Piola testified that Holiday complimented her on being more advanced than others her age working in the industry, and offered to let her invest in one of Holiday’s ventures.

Piola testified that she gave Holiday her life savings of $10,000 and that Holiday promised that the money would be returned a year later if Piola needed it back. Holiday never gave her a stock certificate and never gave her the money back, Piola said.  

“I told her that I felt like she stole $10,000 from me,” Piola told a hearing officer. In response, Piola said, Holiday “gave me a sob story about how she lost everything” and that “I needed to feel bad for her.”

Holiday disputes that account. She said everyone received a stock certificate. The money Piola invested came from her father, who was a sophisticated investor, Holiday claimed.

“The business died,” Holiday told ICIJ. “Nobody got their money back, including me.”

Almost a year after Mossack Fonseca registered the Panama-based company, Tower Bank notified the law firm it was closing the accounts for Mises Technologies. It had discovered a website dedicated to collecting fraud complaints that had singled out Holiday’s business practices. Mossack Fonseca did a new search and discovered some of the legal filings in the Virginia securities case.

Mises Technologies was “struck off” the register of Panamanian companies in July 2013. It is unclear from Mossack Fonseca's internal files whether the law firm dropped Holiday and her company because of the Virginia allegations. Holiday said the collectibles business didn’t work out and she herself let the company lapse.

In November 2013, the State Corporation Commission of Virginia fined Holiday $110,000 and banned her from selling securities in the state.

Holiday insists that she was innocent and that the state railroaded her. “It was like the Red Queen’s Court in Alice in Wonderland,” she said.

Desperately waiting

Other legal cases targeting Mossack Fonseca’s U.S. clients have accused them of defrauding hundreds or even thousands of investors. Two of these cases involved links between Indonesia and the Pacific Northwest.

A lawsuit filed in 2009 in U.S. District Court in Washington state claimed that Dressel Investments Ltd., a company incorporated in the British Virgin Islands by Mossack Fonseca, fleeced more than 3,400 Indonesian investors who put their money into what turned out to be, the suit alleged, “a classic Ponzi scheme.” The men and women who exercised control over Dressel Investments or related companies included six Americans living in Utah and Alaska, according to the lawsuit.

The suit was eventually thrown out of federal court when a judge ruled the allegations couldn’t sustain a federal racketeering claim. An investors group representing the alleged victims is now pursuing their claims in state court in Alaska.

Some defendants in the case have settled under undisclosed terms. Others have fought on, denying wrongdoing and in some cases pointing blame at others they said were responsible for any fraud. Some defendants weren’t included in the Alaska case as the litigation moved from federal to state court.

After the collapse of Dressel in early 2007, investors in Indonesia pleaded directly with Mossack Fonseca for help in getting their money back. One investor’s email was titled: “still confused and sad about our saving.” Another investor wrote: “We are still desperately waiting.”

One investor forwarded Mossack Fonseca a letter from the British Virgin Island’s financial investigation agency that said: “It is clear that this is and always was an investment scam.”

Mossack Fonseca resigned as Dressel’s registered agent after getting hit with the initial wave of complaints. While it did not reply to many of the missives from Dressel investors, the firm did recommend to some that they find lawyers, and provided others with contact information for Dressel management.

In the case of another alleged Ponzi scheme with ties to Indonesia, Mossack Fonseca set up two offshore companies linked to Robert Miracle, one of the fraud’s architects. Miracle was a Seattle businessman who told investors he’d worked at NASA and Disney and that his companies were already producing oil and gas in Indonesia. He eventually pleaded guilty to tax evasion and mail fraud in the case in exchange for a 13-year prison sentence.

The Panama Papers show that Mossack Fonseca registered MCube Petroleum Ltd. for Miracle in March 2007 — three months after the State of Washington accused him and a similarly named company registered in Washington state, MCube Petroleum Inc., of violating securities laws.

MCube Petroleum Inc. and associated companies were part of an enterprise that defrauded hundreds of American investors, federal authorities found.

In late 2007, federal agents served search warrants on Miracle’s home and on MCube Petroleum Inc.’s Seattle offices, seizing computers and 80 boxes of documents. The Seattle Times reported that court records indicated Miracle was being investigated for conspiracy, mail fraud, wire fraud, money laundering, securities fraud and tax evasion.

In July 2008 – months after media reports revealed the investigation into Miracle’s shell games – Mossack Fonseca registered a company called Fivex Trading Ltd. in the British Virgin Islands. Two of the shareholders were listed as Mukhtar Bin Syed Kechik and Fahimi Bin Faisal, two Malaysian fugitives alleged by the FBI to have been Miracle’s partners in the Ponzi scheme.

Another Fivex shareholder listed in Mossack Fonseca’s files is Veronica Naomi Miracle, Robert Miracle’s daughter. She had just graduated high school when she was named as a shareholder in the company.

Veronica Miracle and Robert Miracle declined to comment.

The Panama Papers show that Mossack Fonseca didn’t learn about Robert Miracle’s crimes until 2012, when a database search turned up a record of his conviction. By then, the trail in the hunt for Miracle’s assets had gone cold. Court filings indicated that investors’ losses were likely to top $20 million. 

Contributors to this story: Marisa Taylor and Kevin G. Hall of McClatchy Newspapers, Matthew Kish of the Portland Business Journal and Alice Brennan, Alcione Gonzalez and Laura Juncadella of Fusion Investigates

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists publishes today a searchable database that strips away the secrecy of nearly 214,000 offshore entities created in 21 jurisdictions, from Nevada to Hong Kong and the British Virgin Islands.

The data, part of the Panama Papers investigation, is the largest ever release of information about offshore companies and the people behind them. This includes, when available, the names of the real owners of those opaque structures.

The database also displays information about more than 100,000 additional offshore entities ICIJ had already disclosed in its 2013 Offshore Leaks investigation.

ICIJ is publishing the information in the public interest.

The new data that ICIJ is now making public represents a fraction of the Panama Papers, a trove of more than 11.5 million leaked files from the Panama-based law firm Mossack Fonseca, one of the world’s top creators of hard-to-trace companies, trusts and foundations.

ICIJ is not publishing the totality of the leak, and it is not disclosing raw documents or personal information en masse. The database contains a great deal of information about company owners, proxies and intermediaries in secrecy jurisdictions, but it doesn’t disclose bank accounts, email exchanges and financial transactions contained in the documents.

In all, the interactive application reveals more than 360,000 names of people and companies behind secret offshore structures. As the data are from leaked sources and not a standardized registry, there may be some duplication of names.

The data was originally obtained from an anonymous source by reporters at the German newspaper Süeddeustche Zeitung, who asked ICIJ to organize a global reporting collaboration to analyze the files.

More than 370 reporters in nearly 80 countries probed the files for a year. Their investigations uncovered the secret offshore holdings of 12 world leaders, more than 128 other politicians and scores of fraudsters, drug traffickers and other criminals whose companies had been blacklisted in the US and elsewhere. 

Their status as outlaws or public officials didn’t prevent them from obtaining shell companies in locales where secrecy laws often make it impossible for prosecutors and other investigators to trace their assets.

The files revealed, for example, that associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin secretly shuffled as much as $2 billion through banks and shadow companies.

The reaction to the Panama Papers was immediate and viral.

Outraged citizens took to the streets in Reykjavik, Malta and London while the hashtag #panamapapers trended on Twitter for days after the story broke on April 3. The prime minister of Iceland resigned over the British Virgin Islands company he co-owned with his wife, while other world leaders scrambled to explain their secret holdings. It took UK’s Prime Minister David Cameron three days to publicly acknowledge he had profited from an investment fund, created by his father, that was incorporated in Panama and managed in the Bahamas. In Spain a minister resigned after being caught in a series of lies about his connections to offshore, and in Uruguay police arrested five individuals suspected of laundering money for a powerful Mexican drug cartel.

The Panama Papers underscore the fundamental injustices and inequalities created by the offshore system, media commentators and political leaders say.

“When taxes are evaded, when state assets are taken and put into these havens, all of these things can have a tremendous negative effect on our mission to end poverty and boost prosperity,” Jim Yong Kim, the president of the World Bank, said as he opened the spring meetings of the World Bank and IMF in Washington soon after ICIJ and more than 100 other news organizations began revealing the results of the media collaboration’s investigation.

President Barack Obama, meanwhile, pointed out that the biggest problem was that many of the schemes revealed by the Panama Papers were legal. “It’s not that they’re breaking the laws, it’s that the laws are so poorly designed,” he said.

The revelations reignited the debate about the need for public registries in which information about who ultimately controls a company be accessible to all. The UK has made disclosure of beneficial owner data mandatory and public, but British overseas territories such the British Virgin Islands and the Cayman Islands, some the busiest offshore havens, have agreed to share that information only when it is requested by law enforcement.

Citing the Panama Papers, the US government also announced Thursday that it has sent legislation to Congress to create a centralized federal registry of the actual owners of any newly created company. The registry would help law enforcement authorities ferret out the real people behind anonymous companies used in money laundering and other wrongdoing.

The governments of Australia and Germany have said that they too intend to create public registries of company owners.

On Friday, the anonymous leaker of the Panama Papers, known only as “John Doe,” spoke publicly for the first time in a written statement and called out for concrete steps to combat tax havens. “In the European Union, every member state’s corporate register should be freely accessible, with detailed data plainly available on ultimate beneficial owners,” the source wrote. Doe added that the US “can clearly no longer trust its fifty states to make sound decisions about their own corporate data.”

The searchable database that ICIJ publishes today allows users to explore the networks of companies and people that used — and sometimes abused — the secrecy of offshore locales with the help of Mossack Fonseca and other intermediaries. The leaked data covers nearly 40 years, from 1977 through the end of 2015.

The data, which includes postal addresses, displays links to more than 200 countries and territories, from China to Chile. Users can filter the information by country and by offshore jurisdiction. They can also explore the role of banks, law firms and other gatekeepers of the financial system in facilitating the creation of offshore companies for high net worth individuals. For the first time, they can see details about shadowy Panamanian private foundations, including when available information about who controls them.

While the interactive application opens up a world that has never been shown in this much detail, not every owner of a company that appears in the Panama Papers shows up in the public database. This is because ownership information is often buried in emails, power-of-attorney letters and internal notes of Mossack Fonseca employees and cannot easily be extracted in a systematic manner. In addition, Mossack Fonseca often failed to collect the necessary information about the ultimate owners of companies, relying instead on banks and other intermediaries to keep track of that essential data.

Still, it is expected that Panama Papers revelations will continue to surface as regulators and ordinary citizens from around the globe probe the newly available data and find new connections that may have escaped reporters. Concerned citizens are encouraged to share tips with ICIJ and the Panama Papers journalists who continue to investigate the documents. The full dataset is also available for download.

“Transparency is not going to move backward,” Kim said in his World Bank spring meetings remarks, warning that those trying to avoid taxes or steal money from public treasuries should be “very careful” because they will eventually be tracked down. “The world is only going to become more and more transparent as we move forward.”